Originally written as Part 2 of my introduction to my new Substack blog, but easily reads as a standalone post so am publishing here as well. For additional background and context, feel free to check out Part 1, where I cover my birth and rise as a dissident writer. Otherwise, please enjoy the read!
A Truth Seeker is Born
From as young an age as I can remember, I was that kid who questioned practically everything with an open mind, and refused to accept the hollow-sounding answers I was given that neither resonated with my heart, nor served to quench my soul's ceaseless thirst for deeper truth and knowledge. Growing up in a devout fundamentalist Christian environment, this tenacity of mine didn't always bode well with the religious authorities, but neither did it prevent me – at least in my younger years – from sensing the deep compassion of and truth in the life and teachings of the central character of the religion – the great spiritual Master and faith healer known best in the West as Jesus, or Yeshua in his native tongue, and Issa in Islam and throughout the East. It was during these earliest years of childhood memory in which I can clearly recall the day I made the decision to 'accept Jesus into my heart', and officially 'became a Christian'.
At that age, I was still seeing some picture of the man Jesus who walked this earth 2,000 years ago, his selfless ministry of healing, and his simple yet radical message of unconditional love expressed through compassion and forgiveness; more or less free from the religious doctrines and dogmas built upon – but not necessarily reflective of – those great teachings of timeless truth that only a true Master can impart as simply and as eloquently as did that one called The Nazarene. That slowly changed, however, as I continued to grow older and in the process underwent the sort of fear-based societal and religious mental programming that most of us born into this world are subject to in some form or other throughout our childhood years - being indoctrinated into a less-than-empowering worldview, just as most of us here on earth are.
Surely more on the unusual side of my childhood, I actually spent the majority of my years of childhood memory - from age 12 and up - growing up in East Africa, where I also attended several years at an American Christian boarding school and graduated high school, before moving back to the States to strike off on my own.
By the time I turned 18, I had already made up my mind that I had no interest in following the societal path set out for me by spending the next four years of my life attending college, racking up a pile of student loan debt in order to receive a so-called higher education in preparation for a career path of which I had no idea what it was or should or would be. My unorthodox decision seemed to come as quite the shock to most of the adults around me at the time, and despite the loving support of my parents in that firm decision of mine, I was nevertheless certainly beginning to feel just a bit like a societal dissident and outcast. Indeed, that is just what I was becoming, I just didn't quite realize it yet. My lifelong refusal to consciously go into debt, particularly bank/system debt – as I see usury (charging interest on debt/loans) as both highly immoral and oppressive – only added to that feeling of being (or at least being deemed) a societal outcast and a dissident. I would quickly learn that in a debt-based society, refusing to put oneself into debt is both a revolutionary act and one that would raise the eyebrows of just about everyone I shared this aspect of my life path with during my early adulthood.
For my first two years out on my own in 'the real world' as an adult, I worked as a construction laborer on a small framing crew in Bozeman, Montana, where I decided to settle down for what would end up being over a decade. Given my entrepreneurial spirit – by this time I had already successfully ran two small business ventures in my childhood and teenage years – I suppose it was practically inevitable that I would eventually start my own business soon after striking off on my own. Sure enough, after only one more year of working a 'real' job at a local pizza place following my framing job, I inadvertently found myself so busy and successful 'working for myself' as a handyman/construction laborer/yard cleanup guy that summer into the fall, that by the time the work began to slow down, it was already winter and I had no job lined up and no idea how I was going to make it through the winter! I had no interest in applying for a 'real' job at this point, so instead I started accumulating my very first snow removal clients, began shoveling sidewalks and driveways for folks when it snowed; and from that day on I stayed plenty busy building and growing the lawncare/landscaping/snow removal business I would then be successfully operating for the next decade, until the next major phase of my life journey would begin. And ever since I walked out of those doors of that pizza place, I have still to this day never worked a 'real job' in my life since, and I doubt I ever will.
Being a truth-seeker from before I was even familiar with the term, it didn't take long for me to become accustomed to having many questions about the deeper meaning of life but finding few answers my soul could accept. As I got older and continued to question everything I didn't understand, I fast learned that being a dedicated seeker of truth over tradition in this world quickly makes a religious heretic, a political dissident, and societal outcast out of an honest man. Strangely, nothing was able to suppress that inner drive for deeper truth, not even the threat of being thrown into a fiery hell to be consciously tormented for eternity – a concept I did still believe in at that time, despite discovering that I was incapable of tolerating several other distasteful religious doctrines that had been instilled to me from my childhood, and which I was informed were 'essential' Christian doctrines, or those beliefs which one must believe in order to be 'saved' according to the institutionalized Church. Given my disposition, I suppose it was inevitable that this line of questioning ultimately leading me to a state of constant wrestling with certain uncomfortable religious doctrines of the Church would eventually lead me to abandon those same religious beliefs I had once held so dear.
The Day I Left the Institutionalized Church
Unlike some who leave the Church for similar reasons, I 'threw the baby out with the bathwater' as it were, leaving not just the religious doctrines that were troubling me behind, but the whole religion including God and even Jesus. In the years that followed I came about as close to identifying as an atheist as possible without ever quite being able to honestly say I didn't believe in some sort of Creator, some Higher Power, some divine Source of all life.
I can still remember the day I sent that lengthy email off to my parents attempting to explain why I was, at the time, making the decision to officially leave both the church and Christianity as I knew it behind. The reasons for this decision were numerous, but at the core, that which 'pushed me over the edge' was the largely unquestioned support of and seemingly blind allegiance to both Israel along with its systematic oppression of the Palestinian People and the US-engineered foreign war(s) being waged for global domination in the name of God, Jesus and true religion throughout the ranks of the Evangelical Church. At this particular time in history, this pro-war ideology played out specifically as support for and allegiance to the war in Iraq, first through invasion and then the subsequent, still ongoing to this day a whopping two decades later, occupation of the war-torn nation.
While I was still attending a local church there in Bozeman, Montana, I can recall the mental agony of enduring the sermon I listened to that Sunday morning, which would immediately trigger my subsequent departure from Christianity altogether. It was one of the countless 'war sermons' preached throughout the American Evangelical Church back in those years, and my spirit was no longer willing to endure the hypocrisy of a religion that was purportedly worshiping the 'Prince of Peace' every Sunday while simultaneously supporting politically-motivated, imperialist foreign wars of aggression - wars-for-oil-and-israel-and-global-domination. One time too many had I heard the religious call to blindly support what was to my mind clearly an unjust, wrongly motivated, and highly destructive foreign war being waged; based entirely upon an intricate web of blatant deception.
I could no longer abide this open crucifixion of the Prince of Peace in the name of all that is holy, in order to perpetuate all that which is most unholy upon this earth – all of the gruesome sacrifice and horrific atrocities carried out on the battlefield in the name of some elusive 'higher good'. So I left my religion behind, and with it my love and devotion for the Peacemaker Yeshua as well – for a number of years there anyhow, until I was finally ready to begin looking at divine Truth in a whole new light, free of the religious dogma I was at this time running as far away from as I could get.
A Spiritually Transformative Experience and an agnostic no longer – The day I first heard 'the voice of God'
After officially and permanently leaving the Church in my earliest adult years during/following my initial awakening (described in detail in Part 1 of this introduction), I then spent years seeking truth in this world while 'running from God', only to have my first – and quite sudden at that – powerful spiritually transformative experience that led me right back to the very same teachings of Jesus I had by now long abandoned when I left the church; only now to be seen in an entirely new and different light, as beautiful teachings of truth that had simply been shrouded by flawed religious traditions for so many years.
This experience occurred in February of 2015, so I would have been in my mid-20s at the time, but that is a complete story in and of itself for another time, deserving of its own post. Suffice it to say that I heard a voice that I knew wasn't mine; what it said immediately got my attention; and what it either did or foreknew, so as to bring about in short order the very thing it had spoken of (a near-impossibility by my reckoning), convinced me what I already intuitively knew – that I had just heard the 'voice of God', which was now very clearly calling me out of the world of darkness and confusion I had been living in and back to the path which was to be my destiny to walk.
This 'voice', as far as I was concerned, was clearly emanating from a divine Power that knew my inner workings even better than I did, and had either orchestrated a near-impossibility in order to prove itself to me or had intimate foreknowledge of my imminent future, as well as the ability to subtly influence me in a way so as to manifest this soon-to-come 'sign' as I saw it – for I had to make one unlikely decision in order for this future event to unfold within my life. Unaware of it at the time, I was being intuitively guided to 'do my part' in the beautiful orchestration of this monumental signpost along my journey that would forever change how I viewed the world, myself, and especially God. Upon receiving my sign from the universe confirming the veracity of the mysterious 'voice' I had heard, I could no longer continue running from what I had previously become convinced was a far-off and distant Creator which had entirely withdrawn itself from its Creation.
I had finally heard the voice of truth within myself, and this time I could go on ignoring it no longer. So it immediately began to gently guide me straight back to the teachings of Jesus I had once had such an affinity for; and there again in the 'red letters' of the Bible I heard that voice of truth and felt it resonate deep within my soul, and this time there would be no more running away from it in the name of truth. This time I would also have to undertake the long and arduous task of sifting the chaff from the wheat, the real from the counterfeit, and the truths from the lies. This process would continue for years, the process of untangling all of the fear-based religious dogmas, traditions and church doctrines from those otherwise precious teachings of pure spiritual truth; eventually freeing the Christ from the cross of ignorance he had been nailed to within my consciousness ever since my teenage years when the steady stream of fear-based religious programming I underwent had begun to overshadow and displace the pure and unconditional love of that great Teacher/Healer I had once touched in the innocence of my young and pure child's mind.
An intense period of deconstruction and the conscious beginnings of a spiritual journey
So began my long deconstruction process of Christian fundamentalism, and this was also the beginning of the spiritual path I would be traveling to discover my own unique personal and experiential understanding of the meaning of life, God, and ultimate Truth. From that day on, I have consciously been on my own unique spiritual journey – predominantly guided by the teachings of Jesus that have survived to our time, my intuition, my ceaseless quest for truth and the knowledge I've picked up along that quest; and that still, small voice of truth within. As anyone who has gone through such a deconstruction process knows, it was a difficult path to walk; with my beliefs and understandings about myself, God, the world, and spiritual matters changing and morphing and evolving so rapidly in the months and years immediately following this experience that at times even I really had no idea what I actually believed! But I was finally beginning to find real answers to all of those deep philosophical questions I had been asking all my life, one small step at a time.
The first major step along this new journey involved a complete and total acceptance of Jesus' teachings of resistance through nonviolence as the only path to true and lasting peace and equality on earth; and while I quickly embraced this new and revolutionary understanding of the nature of peace and violence which radically transformed my worldview very quickly all on its own, many of the other necessary lessons along my path would take me many months and even years to truly learn and begin positively integrating into my life.
But the spiritual awakening process had begun, and my quest for truth began to shift more and more away from the outer world of politics and external events, as it began to transform into a dedicated search for more spiritual knowledge as I became increasingly ever more interested in my own personal inner journey and my new quest for the ultimate truth of reality – which I was now consciously aware was very much, in some way at least, a divine, sacred and spiritual truth that transcended the known 'facts' of this material world.
A large part of this stage in my journey would include the discovering of my gift of writing, which occurred throughout 2016, quickly followed by the discovery that I also had a gift for expressing my voice through speaking. This particular discovery came as I began to explore my talent for video creation in a series of fast-moving events that would quickly usher in my short-lived rise to and subsequent fall from YouTube stardom, thanks to an intense social media censorship campaign in 2017 responsible for the deletion of my original YouTube channel and the end of my fast rise among the ranks of successful YouTube content creators about three short weeks into the saga. But nothing could silence my voice at this point, for I now knew that it was both greatly appreciated and in high demand – in certain alternative circles at least – and so began my blogging 'career' as I know it up to this point, as I began to write as full-time as I could on a wide range of subjects of interest to me, from then on all the way through 2022, when my writing would come to a standstill for about the next 15 months - until now...
Transition to a Vegetarian Diet
Apart from uniformly rejecting all forms of human violence as necessary 'solutions' to the 'human problem' within my own consciousness, as well as realizing and stepping into my gift as a writer, one of the biggest key lifestyle changes this initial spiritual experience eventually led to was my choice to embrace a vegetarian diet. The reasons behind this major lifestyle change of mine are probably best laid out in a short post I wrote on the subject many months later - As Long as There are Slaughterhouses, There Will be Battlefields | Tolstoy, Pythagoras, and the Philosophy of Vegetarianism – in which I made the moral and philosophical case that ceasing from the needless mass slaughter of animals for human consumption is likely just as important an ingredient in the recipe for true and lasting peace on earth as is the recognition that human violence cannot and will never solve the problem of human violence; for only peace and love can do that.
In my case, the decision to transition to a vegetarian diet ultimately came about due to my inherent love for animals that had been with me since the youngest of my childhood years, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was building up within me over this issue, as I had also been an avid meat-eater my entire life. This inner shift also came about in response to my newly inherited but increasingly strong conviction that Jesus had in fact been an outspoken critic of the priestly cult of bloody animal sacrifice that was at the heart of the Jewish Temple worship of his day; and that the true God, who is Love, never desired nor demanded the sacrifice of innocent animals in order to forgive humanity for her many errors – as much of institutionalized western religion actually teaches.
Perhaps that is why this phase of my spiritual journey – literally just days before setting off on the trip that would ultimately serve to usher in the next major phase of my journey – came to a close with the interesting piece I wrote at the time; both in response and staunch opposition to the Zionist Israeli religious far right faction relentlessly pushing for a reconstruction of the ancient Jewish Temple, and with it a re-establishment of the perpetual bloody animal sacrifice ritual in the name of God that had once stained the 'holy' city of Jerusalem red with the blood of the innocent for centuries. Only this time it would stand for all eternity. All of this apparent obsession with bloodshed coming from the misguided desire to rebuild “the