My Disclosure Day
The reawakening of a dormant consciousness capability
Disclosure Day arrived in theaters this weekend.
The film’s title refers to an anticipated global event - hypothetical at this moment - in which the existence of alien life and non-human intelligence visiting or living on Earth is revealed and confirmed by governmental authorities.1
The release of Disclosure Day marks the return to science fiction of director Steven Spielberg - known for classic movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. - after more than twenty years (a little less if we count 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
I saw the movie on opening day with my son, but don’t worry, I won’t disclose any details beyond what the initial trailer reveals.
In one prominent, bone-chilling scene from the trailer, actress Emily Blunt’s Kansas City weather reporter character is on live TV, about to deliver the day’s forecast. But she freezes. She starts breathing heavily. She stutters. Something is happening to her that she’s trying to hold back.
Blunt starts speaking an alien language best described by the accompanying subtitles:
[muttering indistinctly, clicking tongue]
She is terrified.
People on the packed subway train watching the replay are disturbed too.
A group of nuns clutch their rosaries.
And what was my first reaction as I watched Blunt’s character utter this unintelligible language?
I thought: That’s what I do too.
A Season of Seeking
Just past midnight on November 24, 2002 after dropping off my fiancé-now-wife Cherie, I returned home and felt a strong urge to… pray. A bit of a strange way to end a night of drinks and dancing, perhaps, but I was in the midst of a season of intense spiritual seeking.
Earlier that year, during a semester abroad in Spain, I had a formative mystical experience. While sitting on a park bench in Sevilla, a quiet voice within me said,
I made you to be a leader.
But where are you leading people?
Lead people in my way.
Sure, the voice could have been the result of the unpleasant cocktail of chemicals that made up my hangover. Or maybe, in the wake of the previous night’s bottomless pitchers of Sangria I drank with my friends and the spliff I smoked with a couple of French girls that ended in vomiting off a balcony (and led to said hangover), it was a heavy dose of Christian guilt. But whatever it was, I heard it, I received it as the voice of Jesus, and it altered the course of my life.
This experience shifted the nature of my semester abroad experience, bringing a new spiritual depth (no, I didn’t give up the discotecas). It set up my post-college path of pursuing a Master of Divinity degree. Most significantly, this taste of the transcendent left me with a spiritual hunger that I carried with me into my senior year of college. I wasn’t satisfied with reading about God and studying theology, which I had in spades at the Christian liberal arts college I attended. I craved direct, unmediated experience of the divine - mystical experience. I wanted to encounter the Holy Spirit.
So when I got home that November night, I was thirsty. I was seeking. That’s why, instead of going directly to sleep, I sat up in my bed and began to pray.
I’m not sure exactly what I prayed, but it was probably combination of praise and thanksgiving followed by something like:
Are you here?
I’m open.
Show me you are real.
Almost immediately the air felt thick. I noticed a surge of warm energy filling my throat.
Is this the Holy Spirit? I wondered.
Am I being prompted to… speak in tongues?
Speaking in Tongues
Speaking in tongues - glossolalia in Greek - is a phenomenon that appears in the Bible most prominently on the day of Pentecost, which, as the story goes, is fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and ten days after his ascension into heaven. After Jesus’ ascension the disciples return to Jerusalem where they gather in an upper room, praying and waiting to receive the promised Holy Spirit as Jesus instructed them. According to the biblical book of Acts:
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
I grew up hearing this story, which plays a prominent role in the founding of the church. But, until a few weeks before that midnight moment, I had never heard anyone actually speak in tongues. Because while the Pentecostal and charismatic streams of Christianity prioritized speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts (the Greek word charisma means “gift of grace”), such as healing, guidance, prophecy, and words of knowledge, mentioned by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians,2 the Reformed tradition in which I grew up largely ignored these phenomena. There were different reasons for this - an intellectualism dismissive of experience, fear of these spiritual capabilities being abused, or a “cessationist” perspective that held that these spiritual gifts were only available to Jesus’ early followers in order to jumpstart the fledgling church.
The implication for me? These spiritual gifts remained beyond the bounds of my faith, which was mostly centered around practices like prayer, reading Scripture, and acts of service.
But this all changed a few weeks earlier when, deep in my season of seeking at a weekly prayer gathering my friends and I had started, I witnessed someone speaking in tongues for the first time. Hearing a strange, unintelligible language spoken by my friend, I was mesmerized. It felt holy. It stirred something deep within me.
But I wasn’t just moved by it. Encountering this thing that I had only read about in Bible stories sparked a new desire: I want to be able to speak in tongues too.
In the following weeks, I studied what the Bible had to say about the phenomenon. I dove into theological books exploring various Christian perspectives on the matter. And when I sought guidance from a couple of mentors who came from a charismatic background, they encouraged me to take the most important step: Ask for it.
Which is exactly what I did.
That night, sitting on my bed in the upper room of my college house, I sensed the arrival of the moment I had been hoping for. My heart racing, my throat full, I dismissed any lingering doubts, I opened my mouth and started speaking.
A foreign phrase flowed forth. And then another. And another.
No force or strain was involved. My entire vocal apparatus effortlessly produced an arrangement of sounds I had never spoken, never heard, and didn’t understand.
As I listened to the language coming out of me, it sounded Middle Eastern. It sounded ancient. I detected the repetition of words and phrases. I noticed patterns. Rhythms. I realized I could start and stop at will, like turning the faucet on and off.
But more than any of these technical details, I sensed the nearness of a loving, powerful Presence.
After the Upper Room
According to the Christian tradition in which I was fully and exclusively immersed at the time, I was experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit, one of the three persons of the Triune God, or Trinity, along with God the Father and Jesus Christ. My understanding was that the gift of speaking in tongues was uniquely available to Christians. It would take more than twenty years for me to discover, however, that this phenomenon exists in other contexts.
I emerged from my midnight upper room experience spiritually “on fire,” my faith more alive than ever. I had experienced God in a new way. It was thrilling.
In the weeks and months that followed, I told a few close friends about my experience. I practiced whenever I could. At some point, I even felt prompted to speak in tongues once or twice in our weekly prayer group. But mostly - because I was afraid of skeptics, worried about what people might think of me now that I did this weird thing, and carried denominationally-induced fear of misusing this gift - I considered it a private prayer language that nourished my soul.
After college, when I was pursuing my Master of Divinity degree, the topic of speaking in tongues occasionally came up in conversations with curious seminary classmates. I would tell them my story, explain the various theological perspectives, and then, if they were interested, encourage them to do exactly what my mentors told me: Ask for it. Invariably, on at least a half dozen occasions, a day or two later they would return to me wide-eyed, reporting that they had received the gift of speaking in tongues.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this dynamic, but it encouraged me to continue emphasizing and exploring speaking in tongues and other “extraordinary” gifts on my spiritual path. When I completed seminary and began discerning a calling to start a church, I envisioned a faith community that resembled the early church, which included “many wonders and signs” - the 1 Corinthians stuff, the charismatic stuff, the direct-unmediated-experience-of-the-divine stuff - as described in the book of Acts:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common.
Within a few years of actually starting the church, however, my attention to speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts faded into the background. The kind of charismatic spirituality I craved never materialized in our church. Because there were matters to tend to that felt more urgent - neighbors who needed a warm meal or a roof over their head, who wanted to get sober or escape sex work. Sermons needed to be written. Money to support all of this work needed to be raised. And I was a young pastor with a lot to learn about myself and how to lead an eclectic mix of humans with varied preferences, capabilities, theologies, and traumas.
Studying Glossolalia
This past March I was sharing the details of my speaking in tongues experience on a call with Dr. Siri Zemel, a researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. IONS conducts leading edge research in the areas of consciousness, inner experience, and psychic phenomena, including intuition, channeling, and energy healing.
I can’t remember when I first encountered IONS, but it came back on my radar in late 2025 while reading super-bestselling author Dan Brown’s (remember The Da Vinci Code?) most recent book, The Secret of Secrets. The narrative of this #1 New York Times bestseller, which merges theoretical quantum physics and mysticism, and is set against the backdrop of the resistance of the scientific materialist paradigm (consciousness as a product of the brain; matter is fundamental) to the growing field of noetic science (consciousness is fundamental), features the research of IONS.
My reacquaintance with IONS was right on time because Dr. Zemel, along with Dr. Helané Wahbeh, was conducting a first-of-its-kind study on glossolalia, the aforementioned Greek term for speaking in tongues that is also used in scientific research. Specifically, the IONS study was focused on non-religious glossolalia, or light language, as it is called in New Age settings - indecipherable speech, utterances, or sound patterns spoken during prayer, meditation, trance, or other altered states of consciousness. According to the IONS research announcement:
Many people have heard the term “speaking in tongues”—the scientific term is glossolalia—and this most often occurs in the charismatic Christian church environment during visits of the Holy Spirit. However, within the New Age movement, a similar phenomenon occurs outside of the religious setting and is typically referred to as light language (although it is also known as angelic language, the tongues of angels, or tonguespeak). There are numerous studies on speaking in tongues—including from psychological, neurological, biological, and linguist perspectives—but despite its rising visibility, non-religious glossolalia remains largely unexplored in the scientific literature.
In my interview with Dr. Zemel, the second phase of the two-part study which began with an in-depth survey, I talked about my religious background, the prayer group, my midnight upper room experience, the sharing of the gift in seminary, and the charismatic vision I had for the church I started. I talked about how I could speak in tongues anywhere, anytime. And about how even though I was in a Christian religious context when I first started, my experience had always been independent of a charismatic church setting.
I also told her about what my glossolalia experience looked like in the fifteen years that followed. How my engagement with the gift diminished, but always stayed with me. Even after I left the church - not just the church I started, but the church in general - because my spirituality had evolved beyond that container.
How the practice nourished me during a five year season of inner work and soul searching - experiences to which I made veiled references in my book The Way Home:
Next I am driving on a winding road between the canyon walls, spontaneously singing songs of hope.
…
I felt drawn into the great conversation that takes place in that canyon day after day between the stream and the rock walls, the birds and the trees. I banged the small hand drum I brought. I sang at the top of my lungs. I whispered. I spoke in rhyme.
…
After our final dinner together, we gathered for one last ceremony… When it was my turn… I sang and spoke and uttered indiscernible sounds. I moved my hands delicately through the air and communicated a story of dead things coming back to life.
As the research interview continued, I also shared reflections with Dr. Zemel about how my inner experience of speaking in tongues compared to other states of consciousness that I had been exploring, noting the similarities and differences with the transcending style of meditation I had fervently practiced for the previous six years, as well as describing an LSD experience I had in the Arizona desert in which, as energy surged through me, I had a distant thought: This energy is exactly what I communicate when I speak in tongues.
Finally, I told her about all that had transpired in the year leading up to our conversation. My interaction with the gift had been reignited. I had learned that there were people beyond the church who did the same thing and called it light language. To my surprise, I had even started using my light language with others, in my coaching and beyond - to clear energy blockages, enhance intuitive capabilities, and even facilitate healing.
And it all started with the Telepathy Tapes.
Let There Be Light Language
The Telepathy Tapes podcast, hosted by Ky Dickens, explores the extraordinary consciousness capabilities of non-speakers with autism, such as non-verbal telepathic communication, precognitive awareness, nonlocal consciousness, and access to transpersonal insights and knowledge. In other words, with autism as its entry point, the Telepathy Tapes investigates the same psychic phenomena that IONS researches.
Without the Telepathy Tapes, it’s unlikely that I would have ended up reflecting on my glossolalic journey on the research call with IONS. Because I wouldn’t have even known about the broader, beyond-Christianity world of light language. And I wouldn’t have reactivated the speaking in tongues gift I had quietly held for almost twenty-five years either.
Three things followed in the wake of encountering the Telepathy Tapes at the beginning of 2025.
First, the day I finished listening to season one of the Telepathy Tapes, a new consciousness capability came online for me (which I wrote about previously here). I began to engage in a receptive writing practice. I embraced it. I questioned it. I practiced it daily.
Second, this practice - the kind of direct, unmediated experience of the divine that I had been pursuing since that hungover mystical moment on the park bench in Sevilla - increased my interest in the consciousness phenomena that IONS researches and the Telepathy Tapes investigates. As summer ended, I started noticing channeling, mediumship, and energy healing all over the place. Previously, I was curious but skeptical about these phenomena, likely because of an impulse inherited from Christianity. At best, they were dismissed (That’s just New Age mumbo jumbo.3), and at worst, they were demeaned (That’s demonic stuff.).
But I could not ignore it any longer. My attention was being attracted to all of it:
I read about an online workshop exploring channeling in a daily email I subscribed to but rarely opened.
A copy of a book by psychic medium Laura Lynn Jackson practically fell off the dusty shelf at a local used bookstore.
While attending an entrepreneurship summit, I had a deep conversation with a woman who is an intuitive healer.
The concept of light language came into my field of awareness for the first time too (Strangely, I didn’t think much about it).4
Third - and most significantly - I started working with a coach who channels a council of wise guides in her work.5
I discovered her in a podcast that I had been listening to. In the conversation, she talked about how many years into a spiritual journey that had been triggered by a near death experience, she developed channeling capabilities. Intrigued, I reached out.
Her integrity, care, and wisdom were immediately apparent, so I began working with her as my coach to further develop my intuitive capabilities. Experiencing her channeling gift in our virtual sessions was transformative. It brought forth clarifying insights, wise guidance, and powerful love. Our work together opened the door to another season of profound inner expansion, accompanied by outer shifts in my life, work, and relationships. But the biggest thing was yet to come…
After a few sessions, I felt prompted to mention my background of speaking in tongues. Maybe it would be relevant to our work, I thought. But I had no idea how important it was… In response, she asked if I was comfortable sharing it. I paused, closed my eyes, and let the language flow.
A few minutes later, when I opened my eyes, she was staring back at me excitedly. “It’s stunning,” she said. She told me I was transmitting powerful energy and shared how speaking in tongues was not just important for my own healing and transformation, but it was also significant for how I would support others in my work.
And then she told me that this… light language… was my particular form of channeling.
At that moment, something clicked. I recalled that in my exploration of psychic phenomena, I had come across both the term and the practice of light language, but I had totally missed that it was something I already did. Something I had been doing for almost twenty-five years. Something I was equipped with that had played a powerful role in my spiritual development - and that could play a powerful role in my own life and the lives of others going forward, if I would only let it.
It was as if I had partitioned off this part of myself, unsure of how to integrate a gift I received in an exclusively Christian context into the more expansive world to which my spiritual journey had brought me.
But now, what was dormant had been reawakened:
I speak in light language.
The Tongues of Angels
Since this revelatory session with my coach, sharing my light language has become a regular aspect of our work together. But it hasn’t just stayed there. This spiritual gift has come back online in full force.
Of course, I have much to say about all of this…
What light language is.
That I actually speak light languages, featuring different sounds, cadences, and rhythms.
How, as I’ve been practicing, it has revealing its purpose to me - clearing, hearing, healing, and activating.
About starting to use light language in sessions with clients and on calls with other friends - and strangers.
I imagine that at some point in the near future (I think it’s inevitable), I’ll probably even share it here via recordings of light language meditations.
But for now, let me end with a word about where it comes from - who or what am I channeling?
This, in part, brings us full circle back to where I began this article.
Emerging from the coaching session that created the glossolalic bridge for me from speaking in tongues to light language, I began to study the phenomena more intensely (That’s how I came across the research IONS was conducting) and discovered that the source of glossolalia is of variously attributed origin.
For Christians, it is the Holy Spirit. In shamanic traditions, the speech flows into the material world from the spirit realm. According to neuroscience, anatomically speaking, the source is the limbic area of the brain.6
In New Age spaces, meanwhile, light language channeling can be angelic, ancestral, and - wait for it - alien in nature. Some light language speakers claim they speak Pleiadian, originating from a star cluster almost 500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. Others speak Arcturian from the giant red star Arcturus, the fourth-brightest star in the night sky. There are the languages of Orion, Andromedan, and others too.
Learning all of this, I wondered if fully re-embracing this practice meant I had to believe all of the alien stuff too.7 As if speaking an unintelligible language wasn’t already weird enough! This added some additional hesitation in disclosing to anyone that I speak light language (Not to mention, publishing this article!).
A couple of months ago, hoping for some resolution, I brought up the matter in a session with another powerful channel that my coach had introduced me to.
“How do I know who I’m channeling in my light language?” I asked the older Englishman.8
He didn’t hesitate.
“By their fruits shall you know them,” he answered with his gentle, soothing voice, echoing the words of Jesus9 (apropos for someone who channels Christ Consciousness10).
Then he added, “You can feel the beauty of the fruit, and through experiencing that beauty you come to know who the being or the consciousness is.”
He went on to say that, at some point, a name (or names) may be revealed to me. Or maybe I’ll come up with my own for convenience. But I won’t need one. Because, ultimately, what’s most important is the fruit that it produces - Does it lead to joy and peace, kindness and goodness, connection and healing?
In sum, Does it lead to love?
This is the fundamental question. Not just for my own journey. It is the question that ought to guide all exploration and expression of these consciousness capabilities, whether we refer to them as spiritual gifts like speaking in tongues, prophecy, or visions; or call them psychic phenomena like light language, telepathic communication, precognitive awareness.
The preeminence of love is precisely what Paul the Apostle so beautifully articulated in a letter to a young spiritual community two thousand years ago as they were figuring out how to wield their spiritual powers - words that light my way forward as I continue on this journey that I’ve been on for a long, long time; a journey that I’m just beginning:
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
The declassification of information related to UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), the less-stigmatized name for what was formerly known as UFOs (Unidentified Flying Object), has already begun. See Jeff Williams “Can the Mystics Help Us Understand UFOs?” for a brief overview and reflections on what all this might mean for spirituality.
For those who are wondering, that’s First Corinthians, not One Corinthians.
Has anyone ever actually spoken the phrase “mumbo jumbo”? I dare you to try it.
Okay, this isn’t entirely true. But this was the first time my encounter with the term light language was serious. I had seen clips of light language influencers a few times on the hilarious Healing from Healing Instagram account, whose profile reads: “Ethnographic documentation of Healing and Transformation Culture through the Spectacle of social media. 🔥 Love & gaslight 🔥”).
According to The Science of Channeling by the light language study’s co-researcher Dr. Helané Wahbeh (thanks, IONS), “Channeling is the process of revealing information and energy not limited by our conventional notions of space and time that can appear receptive or expressive.”
A 2003 study involving brain scans of Pentecostal practitioners revealed that speaking in tongues is accompanied by reduced frontal lobe activity, which leads to greater activity in the limbic areas of the brain. How God Changes Your Brain by Dr. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman
I’m not saying I don’t believe it… My favorite show growing up was Unsolved Mysteries, so the all the information being revealed to the public about The Aerial Phenomena Formerly Known As UFOs has been scratching an itch I’ve had for a long time.
Science shows that channels are much more trustworthy if they have any kind of British accent. I kid.
From Matthew 7.15-20: “Watch out for false prophets… By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.”
Yes, this term is probably worthy of its very own article in the future.
You don’t mention that the icaros, the songs sung by the shamans during ayahuasca ceremonies, were taught to them by the plants themselves. Another source of inspirational language!
Necessary bravery. Excited for what you have ahead.