From outside the box

In 1968 my Uncle Ed gave me a book titled "How To Grow Rich With Peace Of Mind" by Napoleon Hill. When I started reading that book, I couldn't put it down. What a stark contrast this book was from my catholic teachings, and yet the philosophy resonated with me on every level. Thru my catholic teachings, I believed that suffering was a good thing and we shouldn't strive to be more than our lot in life allowed for us to be. Then here comes this guy telling me that it's ok to make money, it's ok to be successful, it's ok to be happy, and it's ok not to feel guilty! All I knew was that I wanted to know more.

This book started me on a life long journey of self awareness. Soon after, I was reading Alan Watts and Kahlil Gabrahn. Watts was saying things like "Think of the brain as a meat computer", and Gibrahn talked of the body as being a house for the soul. These new concepts made sense. Instead of taking things (that made no sense) on faith, like the church asked me to do, I was now being introduced to a way of thinking that explained why things might happen the way they do. There was no turning back.

The hardest part in leaving the church was the "fear factor". What if I was wrong? Would I go to hell? Soon I started thinking that I'd rather be in hell with people who thought like me than in Heaven with people who thought like the catholic church. My fear became balanced with anger. I was angry over being instilled with so many lies during my impressionable childhood. The anger propelled me forward, however, I carried it well into middle age because it would take me at least that long to begin to undue the damage the church had done on my psyche.

So here I was at twenty years old, with the catholic church in my rear view mirror, entering a world of new thought's, new ideas, and endless possibilities. I was starving for truth. I wanted to understand everything. I wanted to know why we were here, where did we come from, and where were we going. I wanted to know why bad things happened to good people and good things happened to bad people. I wanted to know how other religions besides Christianity viewed God. I wanted to know who I was and what my purpose in life was. I saw life as a gigantic puzzle and I wanted to fit all the pieces together.

I went down a few dead end roads along the way, I still do that. At first I was looking for the right religion, thinking that one of them might have the truth. After 20 years of experimenting with religions and masters and gurus, I decided that was not where the truth was, at least not for me. I remember thinking in my early thirties that by the time I was in my forties, I would have enough knowledge to write a book about life. The older I got, the smaller that book got. By the time I was in my middle forties, I realized that I didn't know a thing. I did not have any of the answers I had been searching for. All I had learned about truth was....what wasn't true. So I gave up. And that's where the journey truly begins.

Once I quit the game of searching, it occurred to me that maybe I wasn't asking the right questions. They say that when the student is ready, the master appears. The master is a metaphor for anything that comes to us that we are ready for, that new idea that will open the next door on our journey. I began to see truth as a carrot on a stick in front of the donkey. The search for God, the search for truth, the quest for self awareness, none of these things are "out" there. The harder you try to find them, the more they will elude you.

By my early fifties, I realized that everything I had been looking for all these years was right inside of me. We are the truth. Truth was not something to be found but rather something to be explored. God, life, universal consciousness, truth, reality, soul....these are all words that point to the same thing....the reality of being. I did not need a book or a church or a teacher. I didn't need anything! Nobody does, unless of course, they think they do. The mind plays this game with us. It goes by this rule that says, "If you think you need something, then you do". We spend our whole lives doing things that we only need to do because we think we need to do them.

My life has been a journey of self realization, as everybody's life is. And it seems that the more I learn, the less I know. I always feel like the journey is just beginning, like I've learned just enough to start asking the right questions. I suspect that I will feel this way until the day I die, and that's ok.
I don't know what other people know, I try not to measure myself to them. It's not about that anymore. It's about realizing my connection to the universe and all of life and then living my life in accordance with that "truth". Somewhere in the moment of beingness, between before and after, in the silent space between thoughts, I find that connection. And in that connection I find myself, laughing at myself. Laughing at me for taking so long to go nowhere.