Although somewhat introverted and reclusive by nature, I've always felt that my search for meaning, as well as my on-going attempts to express my discoveries, received a major push from my Vietnam experience (circa 1970). This because my involvement in an emergency bail out in June of that year resulted in some rather unusual states of preceptual awareness. These fell into the following four distinct categories: 

 

(1) At some point in the emergency, I had the definite sense that everything was happening in slow motion. A phenomena I have recently been told is called "temporal distortion"-- although I would now suggest that our normal mode of perception is the one that's distorted. 

 

(2) Later on, I had a definite sense of "me watching me". Not an out-of-body experience or anything, and not particularly mystical, just a very real and concrete sense of myself as someone other than the part of me with which I normally identified. 

 

(3) Upon reaching the back of the aircraft and contemplating jumping, I experienced total recall of every moment of my life. This was akin to having my life flash before my eyes, only in my case it it didn't flash. Rather, it was as if I had stepped back from a close-up view of my life and expanded the breadth of my vision sufficiently to see my life as a whole. 

 

(4) After entering the water, going into shock and beginning to shake uncontrollably, I experience an extreme sense of panic and fear. Up to that point in life I had always entertained a macho mentality towards death and now I was faced with making a conscious choice to live or die -- to put up or shut-up, as it were. Immediately upon choosing life, the shaking and panic stopped.

 

Needless to say this experience, both as a result of its extreme nature, as well as it world-view altering properties, had a rather profound effect on me. Here I was back in the middle of a miserable war, a war that made no sense whatsoever (I subsequently realized none do) -- a classic case of collective insanity-- with the intellectual side of me screaming "There's something terribly wrong with this picture?" Was the world crazy or was I? Was it me or was my vision of the world faulty?

 

These questions expanded rapidly into those old standards "Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? Those, in turn, evolved into more philosophical and abstract forms, such as "What is the meaning of Life?" and "What is Truth?" All questions normally entertained in middle age, with life more then half over, if at all, and here I was only 24 and pushed 20 years ahead of schedule because of the extremity of my experience. Still I was excited by the prospect. The only question was where would I begin? Was the world as I saw it, as crazy as it seemed, a valid starting point; or should I seek the truth as invisible, as the unseen good, lying within and behind the seeming craziness? 

 

Given the obvious intelligence of nature (and man in his more reasonable moments), I assumed an intellectual premise that the world was basically sane, intelligent and good and, therefore, that it must be the way we were conditioned to see it that was insane, unintelligent and bad. That we were really looking through the mental equivalent of a cracked and distorted pair of glasses that projected its own distortions into being through the medium of a perfectly plastic reality. In this regard, I guess you might say I chose strategy number 21 on your stress management list to re-establish my mental equilibrium.

 

With this in mind, and after returning from Vietnam, I proceeded to explored alternate ways of seeing and so relating to reality. This I did through a massive literary search in which I sought truth as a common thread. This by attempting to correlate points of coincidence within the world's great philosophies and religions -- reasoning that each is but a reflection of one truth seen from vastly different cultural and historical backgrounds; and, further, that what each held in common must be the whole truth.

 

Well, after nearly 10 years and some 200 books, I eventually found the common thread I sought. Even now, more than 10 years and 300 books letter, I have yet to read or see anything contradictory to that original insight. At this point, I can honestly say that I have absolutely not doubt that the basic truth of what I realized is sufficiently universal to embrace all and exclude nothing. The only "kicker" is that an existential "leap in faith" is required to bridge the gap between abstract knowledge (knowing reality) and existential being (being real). Though invariably true in principle, its application requires a price few are willing to pay.

 

What, you may ask, is this truth that I sought for so long, found and have yet to manifest? Why the most obvious truth of all. Oneness! Not only of my own being, but of All Being. Why have I yet to witness my intellectual faith in action? Simply because it has yet to be existentially grounded. My essential sense of being remains one of separation. As yet I have been unwilling to re-unify my own mental house -- a house divided by a dual, relative, ego-centric state of mind (i.e. a knowledge of good and evil, carnal mind, etc.) that adulterates the original unity of my consciousness. 

 

Quite simply I am held prisoner by a circumscribe, alienated sense of mind which, even now, causes me to lose sight and sense of my own innate oneness, and with it all sense of oneness with the ground of my own being (God) and all else too. For if God is One (Absolute), it necessarily follows that God must be All, and All must be One! But why, when this is so obvious, have I been unable to actualize my realization? Simply because the one who would be whole (healed) -- my ego, my personality, my egocentric sense of being -- is the root cause of all mental self-division, delusion and suffering in the first place. 

 

When I discussed these things with my wife she always said, "Show me, and I'll believe!", never once realizing that the visible proof she demanded witnessed her fundamental belief in relativity -- in what she could see, taste, feel, touch or see, -- and so effectively left her closed to the "Absolute State" from which all such relative states necessarily arise. In my own defense, I responded that thinking and saying were prerequisites to becoming; that conceptualization was a pre-condition to manifestation. Good excuses, perhaps, but little more than a cop-out, for I was no more ready to die to my innate selfishness (relative, dual, ego-centric mind state) then she was. 

 

To be honest, only in recent days have I felt any compulsion to surrender my ego-centric proclivities. This, perhaps, because it finally dawned on me that an abstract or intellectual knowledge of Reality, Truth or God, is a bit like knowing a piece of "pastry" through a plate glass window -- it looks great, but remains only a mental image until it's experienced directly; until you've tasted it, ingested it, digested it and finally made it part of your being. 

 

You can't eat an idea, and that's exactly what I had been trying to do for more than 10 years. Truth as I had come to know it was beautiful to look at, but hazardous to the ego if ingested (acted upon and lived). I was quite content to play with this wondrous mental food called truth, but scared to death of actually eating it. Though I alleged frustration with the fact that my knowledge was not translating into action, in truth, my mental plate glass window was exactly where I wanted it -- right there between me and truth, right where I as a separate sense of existence and identity wanted it. 

 

Note: None of this is to say that an "ego" is necessarily bad. Far from it. An ego is a very useful means of relative self-definition and revelation. Sort of like looking into a mental mirror and forming a composite image of what we as a state of mind and consciousness might look like. It's really quite an effective a way of cultivating awareness of ourselves as centers of conscious being. In a way, the self-image (personality, ego, conscious self or lower self) so constructed is the psychological equivalent of the walls that we use to define the rooms we live in. We can't see or relate to the open field or space that the walls serve to define, but we can relate to the walls, and thus know the field in relation to them. In much the same way do we have difficulty experiencing mind or consciousness directly due to its field-like nature. So do we use the mental images that come to occupy the field of our awareness to fabricate composite self-images, and through these come to know ourselves reflectively. The only danger in so doing, of course, lies in our exclusive self-identification with these reflected and partial mental images of ourselves, and an attendant denial of the boundless field of consciousness in which they float, the far more essential aspect of our being -- that in us that is formless, non-relative and essential; that which some have called Spirit and others our True Self.