I was a seeker for 30 years. Even when I was a child, I was looking for a reason. There just had to be a reason for life, for the world— and I was going to search until I found it.

I’ve always read a lot of books. In my first year at high school I read a philosophy book, The Meaning of Existence. After hundreds of pages the author concluded that there is no universal, over-arching meaning to existence. The meaning of life is  what YOU make it to be. What a cop-out! I couldn’t believe that in a universe as big as this, with as many people as have lived throughout human history, that there wasn’t a common-denominator purpose to existence, one that fit us all. After all, the universe was here before I was born— it wasn’t waiting for me to come to give it a purpose. That was the purpose I was looking for— the reason why the universe existed.

Since those years in High School I’ve read every kind of philosophy book, read Siddhartha, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, books on Buddhism, Hinduism, fringe stuff like Carlos Casteneda’s A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, etc, all of Carl Sagan’s materials… all I can say is that everything I ever read led me further and further away from the object of my quest.

In May of 1980 I walked into a blacksmith’s shop in Painswick, Ontario, expecting to get an item welded for a project I was building. He asked me a strange question. “If you died today, do you know for sure you would go to heaven?”

“Nobody could know that for sure, ” I said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you couldn’t keep that a secret!” I replied. And I surely meant that, because I’d just spent the first 30 years of my life looking for the answers to life’s most pressing questions.

“If I could show you from the Bible how you could know for sure that when you die you could go to heaven, would you listen?”

“Yes.”

Well, he did show me. He gave me an incredibly simple but profound argument that I had never heard before in my life, an argument directly from the Bible book of Romans. And it was such a complete, air-tight argument that I could do nothing but agree, and in the end I did exactly what the Bible told me to do— and I got what I was looking for, the answer to my life-long quest.

The problem is, as I see it, that the ANSWER may be right in front of us. But how do we know it’s the answer?  The only way we can know is to have spent a great deal of time looking for the secret, searching everywhere, and finding nothing. The ANSWER is in the final place we look for it. When we have the answer, the quest is over. (quest comes from question, you go on a quest by asking questions)

I could give you the answer right now, but you probably wouldn’t believe it. Giving you the answer is not going to help you. You’ve GOT to want the answer for yourself. (“The question is what drives, us, Neo”) You’ve probably heard the answer a dozen times. It’s been right in front of your face. It’s been “HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT” (the title of the book I’ll be posting chapter-by-chapter on this site.) The answer will be there when you finally, really want to hear it, and you’ll only want to hear it if you’ve struggled long enough searching for it everywhere but never finding it.

My essays are really only designed to get you to WANT to hear the answer. Every essay ends with a clear invitation to discover the answer for yourself.