This is a loaded question - but I think is the crux of the issue I've been dealing with for over 15 years now. At that time in my life (about age 19), I was coming into the realization that the world was not what I thought it was - or maybe better, not what I hoped it would be. For me the realization took the form of seeing that - just maybe - no one else really knew what they were doing any more than I had so far in my confused, discombobulated existence. I had thought for a long time that I was just really...uninitiated into the secrets of existence. That there was something that everyone else knew or understood that I just hadn't been taught yet - and that once it was revealed to me (perhaps as I became an adult), that everything that seemed so strange about the world and how it functioned would all suddenly make perfect sense.
This is not what happened though. As I started actually looking at the world around me and not seeing it as some sort of in-joke among every other human being on the planet, I realized that there may not be a great secret. Many of the new people I met in that first foray into the larger world seemed - in their more unguarded moments - to be be just as lost and adrift as I has always felt myself to be. And that scared me - a lot. The idea that this same unfettered and unknown state was going to persist for the rest of my life was appalling - horrifying. I took what I had experienced and essentially retreated back to my "known", small town existence - trying to come to grips with this discovery that I had made.
At that time my father's girlfriend then told me that she had worked with a named Anurag Shantam for a time when moving through her divorce, and asked if I would like to go see him. From the first, I knew that this was a version of what I had really been looking for. He said yes - there is something fundamentally wrong with the accepted view of the world - and yes, there was a way to overcome it. He spoke of a life without pain - without fear - without anger - and with peace and serenity. He spoke of knowing. And I think that was what I was really searching for - the ability to know, without a shadow of a doubt, what the truth was and what I should do. And Anurag offered to me that this was possible. From that time to now, my "mission" in life has been to explore this issue and see if this really could be a way of life. It has condensed into this mission - living without ego.
This blog for me is like a coming out. I am a fairly normal person who holds a fairly normal job, living a fairly normal life - but I have this "secret" in a way that I have not yet shared with the larger world. This blog is my attempt to share what I have learned so far on my journey with others - and maybe be of some help along the way. My journey is also not completed, so this will help me as well - as I move into this more "public" forum for this part of my life I am sure there will be a lot of remaining ego to be uncovered, exorcised, and purged. But mostly, I just want to say to other people who may be feeling what I was at 19 that yes - there is another way. Yes, the world is full of pain and ignorance and anger and fear, but it does not have to be that way. It can be different - at least for me and you and us it can. All it takes is the dedication to that idea - that it shouldn't be this way - and the truth is uncovered automatically. I'll be posting more info on pages about the specific semantics of how I understand the whole, but everything - language, ritual, specifics - is really just arbitrary. It is all secondary to the desire to know, no matter what the answer. As long as we have that, the universe will call to us, and it will get us home. :)
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