God Is Real✨
When The Heart Can Finally Take In The Truth Without Flinching...
“The present moment is always full of infinite treasure. It contains more than you have capacity to hold.” — Jean-Pierre de Caussade
When I was a teenager, after I was baptized into the Mennonite church, I desperately wanted proof that God actually existed. They told me that God was real, but I never experienced a direct connection. I was simply expected to believe whatever they told me.
My parents forced me to attend church every Sunday for eighteen years, followed by Bible studies in the basement, where they presented the Bible as the ultimate authority for knowing God and understanding His will. They spoke about God as a male figure and taught me that only through devotion, faith, and service could I become a “good holy boy” and one day meet Him in Heaven.
As a result, I grew up believing that God existed outside of me, in a place far away, and I could only find Him through one book and inside a holy church.
When we drove back home, I always felt like nothing was sacred anymore, and I was outside the spiritual realm and unworthy of encountering His holy Presence.
A mentor later told me that he met God through prayer, and this was the most direct path to experience God. So I tried it and found my mind constantly wondering if I was heard or just talking to myself inside my head.
So I decided to devote my life to secretly exploring what other religions believed about God, wondering if anyone out there could actually prove His existence or had experienced God directly.
This quest to prove God was real stayed with me into my mid-twenties because it came from such a deep, innocent, yet persistent childlike curiosity. There was also a rebellious part of me that knew if something as all-powerful and omniscient as God were real, there had to be a way to meet this being, no matter where I was or who I was with.
So I traveled the world and searched everywhere for people living on the edge of what the Christians in my church believed. I discovered these incredible spiritual books, explored Eastern religious philosophies, listened to people’s near death experiences, and yearned for any kind of grounded story to piece together some kind of certainty.
Yet it seemed that no matter how much amazing information I gathered, it never quenched my thirst to know what a direct experience of God was like. I always felt like I was circling the periphery of the “God Zone,” trying to understand the Divine from a great distance.
I couldn’t seem to escape from my Christian belief system thinking God was an entity who lived somewhere up there rather than inside the here and now.
Most people looked up to the stars when they referred to God, and never looked down at the earth or inside their own bodies when they mentioned God. Perhaps because their conviction was so strong, I naturally believed they knew what they were talking about.
"Stop looking for God, and you will see Him everywhere." — Angelus Silesius
After my father committed suicide when I was twenty-three years old, I was so distraught and devastated by the event that I found my spiritual search pulling me to the deepest recesses of my being to find God.
So I studied and practiced meditation daily and started attending satsang gatherings, where the goal was to lay down your ego and sit at the feet of the Divine within.
I began having very strong moments of intense clarity and knowing an undeniable truth. Eventually, my Norwegian wife suggested that I quench my spiritual hunger and we travel to meet a genuine spiritual master in India. I was very curious what it was like to meet a fully self-realized human being who had spiritually awakened by devoted their entire life to meeting God and realizing the Truth.
We arrived in India in February 1995, just before my 25th birthday. This first trip to India became one of the most important decisions of my entire life. What I discovered on this epic journey was worth every year of questioning, doubting, searching, and striving for answers.
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