I Dunno?

Where does the Light come from?

Who or What is our creator?

What is the ultimate reality?

Though on the inside I feel much younger, a glance in a mirror tells me I am a middle aged man. I picked up my first yoga book at seventeen and a lot of water has flowed under my bridge since then. Thirty years I have put into pathwork and yet I am delighted and amazed at how little I know. My first important teacher told me, "When you realize that you don't know anything is when you start to know something." She also said, "Those who know, don't tell. Those who tell, don't know." The first saying I understood but the second I grapple with to this day--although it may well be that they both mean the same thing.

I am sometimes asked why the name of my monthly column is "My Current Opinion." In my early twenties, I was convinced that there is a Way That It Is. Reason seemed to tell me that someone, somewhere, had to know The Truth. I sat in church as a young boy and thought, "Now wait a minute. All the people in this room are going to heaven and all the people out of this room are going to burn in Hell forever? That can't be right." Because it was the religion of my family, I tried to believe but found that I could not. I mean no disrespect, most of your fundamentalist Christians are salt of the earth, shirt off of their backs kind of people but their version of the universe was wrong to me even as a child.

As my horizons widened, I became more aware of the other great religions in the world. From the yogis I learned, but alas didn't practice, how to be healthy. Yoga teaches many profound practices, not limited to Hatha, that enhance life immensely. It is a great source of light but not the source. From the Buddhists I learned, among other very important things, impermanence. A brief time with Islam led to the Sufis, and Mullah Nasrudin remains an influence. While I would never call myself a Kabbalist, a superficial understanding of the Tree of Life taught me a lot about the connections between astrology, numerology and the Tarot. Judaism is perhaps the oldest of the major world religions coming from the age of Aries while the others are of Pisces -- but Genesis turns out to be a collection of stories older than the Bible.

Exoterically, the religions end up to be more about the social control of populations and esoterically, they point to the Light--but none can explain the source of the Light. None of them are any more right than the others.

My path has led through many other teachings. From Lao Tzu I learned to bend so as not to break. My time with the Hermetics was perhaps the most influential in terms of the version of the universe that I use as my personal framework of understanding. The New Thought Christian churches brought the teachings of my childhood home to me in a very useful way. Pop psychology taught me that you and I are both OK and about some of the games people play. But none of them was It.

A great breakthrough was when I realized that the universe is large enough to accommodate any version of it. "In my father's house," and all of that. Any model of the universe is just that, a model, and no one can prove their version to anyone else. What we are left with is opinion. All one can ever really have is a current opinion. And that, of course, is just my humble opinion.

I do know that I feel better and more in tune with the universe when I am working to increase the Light. I know that I must be willing to give up my most cherished belief as higher reality presents itself. I believe that it does not matter if we were bio-engineered by aliens or begot by slumming Nefilim or if Adam and Eve ate that damned apple or if it's all just some sort of practical joke born of Chaos. I believe that we all need to move to the Light.

It is said that you will enter the Light but you will never touch the flame. I don't know if that is true or not. I know next to nothing. Thirty years on the path has taught me that. If there are those who know, really know, I've never met them and they don't seem to be telling. But the Light remains, and as I move further into it, everything gets brighter. Where it originates and where it leads, may we all one day arrive.