I think that my writing is at its best when I address, as directly as possible, what is alive in me, which includes where I struggle. My writing becomes a way of publicly reflecting on things. Knowing that you would read this incentivized me to make it as clear and truthful as possible. In the process of producing this article, I have read it many times. That process has helped me to make more sense of my story. I hope for a beneficial byproduct: that it may help you too.
In the summer of 2001, finding myself with what many would consider an ideal life, I realized that material success had not quenched my suffering in the way I had assumed it would. This started a search for something that I called “enlightenment,” something that I construed as an end to personal suffering. I was particularly interested in ridding myself of what I had labeled “anxiety.”
This was not my first push for the truth. When I was roughly eight years old, I picked up a book on meditation and started reading it. Immediately, it was recognized that “this is way too complicated. It’s much simpler than that!” Around that time, I also had a very strong conviction that if I could build a device that enabled one eye to look directly into the other eye, then a state of ecstatic bliss would be entered. Somehow, even then, I seem to have known what I would consciously discover nineteen years later.
In my early 20s, after graduating from university and starting to work, the focus of my attention turned from developing my professional skills back to searching for deeper meaning. I read the whole bible from cover to cover, and I also read a very thick book about Tibetan Buddhism. I forced myself to read those books and I found them to be immensely boring, arbitrarily complicated, and essentially devoid of any meaning.
At the end of the summer of 2001, at age 27, in my perfect but unsatisfying life, I found myself in a class where I was taught a very basic form of meditation. Over the next four months, I sat to meditate every day for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening.
In December of 2001, while meditating, the fundamental nature of reality was revealed. This is what has been called the Absolute, Tao, Oneness, Non-Duality, God, Ground of Being, or Brahman. It’s not…
