At an extremely young age, I determined that nothing lasted forever.  Any toy, any experience would always end.  If my parents bought me an ice cream bar, it too would melt.  This did not make for the most fulfilling childhood.   

You see, my parents engaged in a deliberate experiment when they had my brother and I.  We were brought up with only English and the prevailing culture of the mob around us.  No religion, no stories, no myth, nothing.  We were taught to reason and then left to find our center. 

When asked about this venture, I claimed it a success.  Someone as close to me as humanly possible begged to differ.  This person said that the test was a failure.  My brother wanders aimlessly on the streets of some unnamed town, while I straddle the line between reality and something else. 

Nonetheless, what placed us on the path, was that my brother and I discovered two incontrovertible facts about the nature of reality.  At age eight, he determined that anything beyond our consciousness could not be proven.  In other words, everything is a figment of our imagination. 

Though two years younger, I determined the other key thing.  Anything in the reality I experienced was transient.  In other words, nothing lasted forever.  So between the two of us, we knew that nothing was real, and of what we experienced, nothing persisted. 

Sunjeev concluded that if nothing was real, he might as well be happy all the time, creating his own perspective of reality.  I on the other hand, I sought something REAL.  I knew deep in my heart, that something somewhere existed.  Unfortunately everything posited to me sounded like sheer fantasy. 

Yeah right, some God figure created the world in six days.  All of science disputed this.  Furthermore, in other religious books there were irreconcilable contradictions.  The scriptures stated that God created the world and that God was good.  Yet evil abounded. 

How could a good and just God create evil.  According to the sources available to me, there was no way to reconcile these apparent discrepancies.  Thus I was left floundering with only my intellect and my heart to guide me. 

For me, life was just one painful moment to the next.  Separated by what I knew to be only temporary reprieves.  For me I felt that maybe pain was the only thing that was ensured.  It was all that I ever experienced consistently. 

So for much of my life, I resigned to accept that pain was the fate of man.  Every moment to me seemed to last forever.  When I reached my teen years I found escape through drugs and alcohol.  And by fifteen I had made my first suicide attempt. 

I am not sure that I ought to call it an attempt as my mom found me and could not revive me.  The ambulance, a doctor and numerous tubes and chemicals later and I awoke.  Damn, was my first thought-I screwed up again. 

Yet substances taught me more than just escapism, they actually gave me glimpses of the REAL.  At thirteen I discovered something that lasted forever.  The moment.  This moment showed me how the true reality felt.  It is something I can only show in person, words will only confuse the issue for all but those that already know. 

It suffices to say, that what is, IS. 

What took so long in my life was the proof.  Having only my reason and my heart as guides, I could not accept one and not the other.  My heart told me that reality was this moment of bliss and openness, now my reason had to prove it.  This proof took me about twenty years. 

Again, words do not capture these twenty years.  As all seekers do, I had to endure endless alienation and loneliness.  Everyone always asked why I could not just do what I was told.  Others said that my question had no answer. 

Those were the worst days, the ones where there was no answer. 

On those days, substance became an escape.  Ironically, all journeys lead back to the same place.  “What IS?”  There was no escaping the question.  Whenever I awoke, the same thing reverberated in my head and heart.  Thus my life consists of three key phases. 

Phase I formed hypotheses.  Phase II tested them.  Phase III forms ways of living.  In Phase I, I determined possible answers as to the question of “What IS.”  Phase II tested these answers until the best one could be formulated from their ashes.  Phase III illustrates the principles in action. 

1.     What is?  These two things:  Pain or Pleasure.2.     Justice is what is, Pain and Pleasure in balance.3.     Live the proof. 

Once I answered the question, it was left for me to live it.  The years of testing had taken its toll though.  My body and mind had many scars and wounds to heal. 

Now that I knew what existed, I had to clear up all the scars I earned while proving it.  The proof nearly destroyed me.  Like the twelve steps state, it lead to jails, institutions, and death.  But when I emerged, I was tempered. 

Although, It took me several years to recover.  Ask those close to me; I actually got sicker as I approached the truth and it almost killed me.  Fevers, ulcers, bleeding, lunacy, you name it.  All hit me at the summit. 

Yet somehow this story has a happy ending.  Or maybe I should say, a happy beginning.  Because my life was only a nightmare until I felt my proof completed.  Then the real story began.  Once I possessed the proof, I felt that what I did with it would measure my understanding. 

Welcome to living the proof.