Here goes:
Two things happened almost simultaneously. First, I was listening to Howard Stern's show and he was talking about the importance that Transcendental Meditation (TM) has played in his life. (If this surprises you, I'd suggest getting to know the more genteel aspects of Howard's character.) He described how meditation has improved his situtation as a family man, his career, and countless other areas of his life. Based on Howard's testimony, I started to research transcendental meditation and quickly learned that I couldn't afford to get involved. I did a little more research and found many recommendations for a book that covered much of the same information at a fraction of the cost of getting in involved in TM. I read The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson and started doing a simple practice that basically amounts to Mantra. I did this for a few weeks and started realizing a number of benefits--better sleep, more focus and a true sense of enjoyment of little twenty minute escapes from day-to-day life. Meditation had always been a part of my yoga practice and this new type of meditation quickly became a natural extension of my yoga practice. At this point, I still was considering all of these new activities very secular and completely unrelated to the spiritual wandering that I had been doing for the previous year or two. (See "Introduction")
About the same time Howard Stern turned me on to meditation the second thing that triggered a monumental change in my spiritual life occurred. A book called If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person, by Phil Gulley and Jim Mullholland, was recommended to me by a friend. Phil is a best selling author and Quaker Pastor and is also a great guy that I see at our local Dairy Queen from time to time. To greatly simplify the premise of Phil and Jim's book it goes something like this: If God really loves us and made us to enjoy this earth, then why would he even create a situation in which we would suffer eternal torment? It just doesn't make sense.
This book not only rang completely true with me, but it also, for the first time that I can recall, made me doubt some of the core teachings that I had held onto since childhood. It led me to understand that, at least for me, it is completely acceptable to challenge the teachings of the church. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not a feeble minded dimwit. I knew that it was OK, and even encouraged, to question your faith. That is, so long as you eventually come back to believing what the church teaches!
So, with a vague notion that meditation was at the heart of Buddhism, nearly five years of yoga practice under my belt, a rude shock jock's wholehearted endorsement of Maharishi Yogi's meditative practice and a Quaker-inspired new license to question my faith, I made a HUGE decision. You might want to sit down for this--I walked into Barnes and Noble and bought the following book: Buddhism for Dummies by Jonathan Landlaw and Stephen Bodian.
Next time... Am I a dummy and if so, which kind?
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