I wanted that experience of love again. It seemed natural, the way it was supposed to be. Somehow it was clear to me that the love I had felt was always there even if I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew that the experience was somewhere inside me and available to all of us. Somehow I knew, without a doubt, that love was the only thing that really mattered. I decided I was going to have that love in my life. I decided I would find out how, and when I did I would share it with everyone who was willing to listen.

I studied psychology mostly. I started noticing remarkable correlations between science, eastern religions, physics, and parapsychology. After decades of reading, studying, workshops, seminars, psychics, mediums, egomaniacs, quacks, worse than quacks (quacks with followings), diets, vitamins, pyramids, ghosts, garlic, juices, ginseng, ions, isolation tanks, running, jumping, hanging upside down, breathing in strange and unusual ways, innumerable meditations, psychotherapies and spiritual schools, I finally reached my goal. I understood what the hell was going on. The basics, anyway. No big deal really. Turns out wiser guys then me had figured it out long ago. Anyone can if they want to. All the information is there. It may not all be in one place, but it’s there.

Crazy? Maybe, but I don’t think so. In fact, I think I’m going sane.

I want to share with you the essence of what I’ve learned. It’s pretty simple, really. The truth usually is. The only problem is that a lot of people have a hard time accepting the truth. Our brains like to complicate things, and sometimes things are not as they appear to be. That’s why most spiritual masters seldomly come right out and tell you the plain truth. No one would believe them. We’d laugh in their faces. “What do you mean physical reality is an illusion? I asked you about the nature of reality and you tell me it’s a holographic dream? Are you trying to be funny?”

It’s not hard to imagine why gurus became cryptic with their, “You figure it out” kind of answers.

The concept of god as a suped-up Santa with a white beard who knows when you’ve been bad and good never made sense to me. Logic, plus my unpleasant catholic associations with god as a cosmic-thought policeman ready to pulverize me for every adolescent male fantasy, created a negative knee-jerk reaction to the word “god.” The idea of hell—a place where you fry like bacon for eternity for a few measly sins (some of which were about as natural as breathing) didn’t appeal to me either. It didn’t fit the idea of an all-loving all-forgiving, omnipotent type guy.

Having decided god did not exist, I was determined to find out what did, if anything. Evolving from fish and monkeys seemed plausible. But what of all these inexplicable phenomenon: the Bermuda triangle, ESP, PSI, pyramids, precognitive dreams, astral projection, near death experiences, Edgar Cayce, and tofu hotdogs? What had caused those? Some seemed to have reasonable explanations while others did not. I hadn’t believed all of what I had read but some evidence was hard to deny. There were too many inexplicable events reported by rational people, including reputable scientists and researchers. There was so much evidence that a rational person couldn’t deny that something extraordinary was going on, something that traditional science cannot explain.

Like I said, life is funny.