Hopefully you've tasted some tidbits and hunger for more but before we head off into The Land of Always and Forever let me fill you in a little on where I've come from. When I was in my twenties (a million years ago) I embarked on a spiritual journey, a "soul - search", seeking to find out just who I was, what I was, why I was here on this planet - the usual questions which occur to every person at one time or another, (mostly fleetingly as they pursue the all - consuming goal of self - preservation in an increasingly predatory environment). As for me the experience was not at all fleeting. It was an obsession.
                I devoured every book and pamphlet I could find on "enlightenment" related topics. On winter evenings, whilst snow fell silently outside my window, I sat by my cozy coal fire, but I was really sitting with Paul Brunton in a snug cave high in the Tibetan mountains listening enthralled to a holy man expound on the illusions of life. On other evenings and nights I traveled with D.T.Suzuki and Paul Reps to hear a Zen master tell me I didn't exist, or kick me and ask me what that was and when I tried to answer he'd wonder aloud who was making all that racket. For years I stood on my head and sat in weirdly contorted positions, totally oblivious to everything, . There were days when I walked around with no head, courtesy of Douglas Harding. I dipped eagerly into The Lazy Man. I checked out the stars and the lines on my hands.
              I studied the lives and writings of great philosophers, of great leaders and great heroes, of churchmen and holy men of different cultures and wondered what "great" actually meant.  I collated and compared. I categorized and criticized. I coveted, cried, cringed and challenged. I was like the knight who rushed out of the castle, jumped on his horse and rode frantically in all directions . . .and always, wherever I looked, I caught glimpses of Paradise.
                 I regarded all I saw around me, my own life, my family, society, other peoples, wars, disease, poverty, crime, so much suffering, so much prosperity, so much disparity, and I knew there had to be an answer to all I observed. It wasn't good enough to consider everything "illusion", or to advise one to simply wish himself / herself into another world or existence, or to "see through" the terrible situation immediately present. Tell that to the child who has just been raped or to the old man set upon by thugs and lying in a hospital with his skull broken. It's a cop-out to say one can merely step away in one's head to a blissful experience, that suffering is somehow the free choice of whosoever wishes it, that if you love the pain it will go away.
               Searching, questioning, listening, testing . . . I studied the writings of major world religions; of the Upanishads, the Vedas, the Koran, Buddhism, Christianity. I stood by the Ganges as devotees washed their sins away in its waters. I sat under the Bo tree with Buddha and walked with him between worlds, along the path of nonresistance. Finally, on the dusty roads of Galilee, I watched and listened as Jesus spoke of love and mercy and compassion like no other man did, as he cried out, "Be free" and power flowed from him and healed all who came to him. And I cried out to him, "Lord. . . have mercy on me. . . heal me. . .free me . .," and he did.
             At last I had found the True Way - the only way to eternal happiness. Jesus is that True Way. He is, literally, the Way, the Truth and the Life (1). No wonder my searchings and investigations in the multitude of other ways had proven futile. The way - the only way - to true happiness was, and still is, a person. I had come full circle, so to speak.  The search isn't really a search at all. I found that the rainbow's end was actually its beginning, that I had to go out in order to come in, to go forward enough to find myself starting to come back, as when a ship traveling far enough westward finds itself going on toward where it had originally begun its journey . . . that somehow I had to truly die before I could begin to truly live. So much of what I had read and seen in the lives and experiences of others had encouraged me but never actually satisfied me. On a country road in a far-off land I met the God-man Jesus and he changed me forever. I walked through the Door named Jesus and as I did I died to the old me and rose again to a new me - to a new, "born - again" me - to a new life that had always been right in front of me, in plain sight, but could only be seen through new eyes. What you will find as you continue to explore these writings is "as seed that is sown", food for your hunger, pearls I have picked up from the ground of True Living in TheLandofAlways andForever. Eat and enjoy.
1: John 14: 6 (The Bible).  Yours in Truth,                 Charles Vandornn.
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