“He who sees the many, the diverse and not the one, the unified, wanders on from death to death.” (Katha Upanishad, Part 4.)

Maybe God is like a jigsaw puzzle and someone knocked over the puzzle table during a quarrel, scattering the pieces into far corners of the room, bits of insight, revelation, and philosophic understanding cast far and wide. Some were dropped in Iran or India, others strayed into China or Persia, or became lodged in the mud of the Mississippi Bible Belt. I’d like to see it put back into a whole coherent picture again.

So many gurus, new age visionaries, revelations, and spiritual groups have proliferated in California, like the famed salad bars that were once everywhere. Someone even invented the term “salad bar spirituality,” to describe those who take what they want and leave the rest. I was being introduced to a lot of new thinking -- Gurdjieff, A Course in Miracles, Seth Speaks (Jane Roberts), the Perfect Master AKA Guru Maharaji, The Urantia Book, (The UB), The Essene Gospel of Peace, and other lesser knowns. There were odd churches all over the place, unlike any I’d grown up with, all promulgating their message, some adding themselves to the list of older revelations made by Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Joseph Smith, just to name a few.

I’ve found it advisable to add a testing system with operating instructions to the Truth Seeker Guidebook, one to verify claims made by all these competing truths and revelations. If facts, logic and spiritual intuition aren’t used to check our experiences, we may fall into a swoon of enchantment over an idea that turns out to be someone’s mistaken fantasy.

“Never … can either science or religion, in and of themselves, standing alone, hope to gain an adequate understanding of universal truths and relationships without the guidance of human philosophy and the illumination of divine revelation.” (103:6.5)

“Science is man’s attempted study of his physical environment … religion is man’s experience with the cosmos of spirit values; philosophy has been developed by man's mind effort to organize and correlate the findings of these widely separated concepts into something like a reasonable and unified attitude toward the cosmos.” (103:6.9)

Of course, one can play it safe and avoid all unconventional religious movements. Certainly many did, but that was not to be my modus operandi. I was seriously looking for truth, willing to check out everything. Thus I became seriously entangled in a cult once, yet managed to get out of it with my sanity and life intact, and most of my money.

I didn’t decide I needed to write the story of my spiritual journey until there was an unusual meeting in the 1990s. Truth seekers who’d traveled to California from Lithuania and Estonia were staying with friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. They came by to meet us because one of the women was a singer and we were musicians. I was skeptical about how they were proceeding with their spiritual search. Too much mysticism, crystals, star charts, and magic rocks for my liking. That’s what I told my wife but she pointed out how wrong it was for a comfortable Protestant American like me to judge their experience harshly from a place of supposed superiority. The Truth Seeker Guidebook would instruct us to never do that.

Regarding the mystery-cult leaders of Rome, “this was his [Jesus] method of instruction: Never once did he attack their errors or even mention the flaws in their teachings.” (130:0.4)

Shortly after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, dormant nationalisms were rekindled. Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia (1991). The Eastern European region was in the midst of the death and chaos of the Bosnian Civil War, a time when every tombstone in the Bosnian graveyard had the year 1993 etched on it, as someone said once.

There were religious repercussions to the restructuring of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). People living in the Soviets under Communist rule had received no religious training or spiritual instruction for several generations. After the collapse of the USSR, the number of those identifying as Orthodox Christian more than doubled. However, Eastern Europeans were still hungry for knowledge and truth from any source whatever. They investigated everything just as I had done. Part of my wife’s wise advice was to recall that the same profligate sampling characterized our spiritual searches just a couple of decades before.

The Russian and Eastern European situation inspired me to put my own spiritual journey into words, thus I created a chronicle of my wanderings. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a physical event, easier to see, but we had a wall that came down too, the invisible wall of protection built by Western cultural traditions. The effects were not so recognizable to everyone at first. After I disassociated myself from the traditional church of my youth, I began exploring spiritual reality without the benefit of experienced religious authorities.

Most of the time finding my own spiritual center was a slow process, a gradual gleaning of insights with a few personal revelations thrown in, whatever might jump-start a stalled car. Eventually, I did experience a “suddenly” as described in the UB’s evolutionary history, an all-at-once kind of revelatory experience. It was followed by my introduction to The Urantia Book two years later by the woman I later married.

If someone were to sew a patchwork quilt of my journey, there would be patches representing the Christian, the yogi, the philosopher, the Buddhist and mystic. Rejecting nothing that might have value, I pause even to examine what has been discarded, for something may still be found there in the windblown, forlorn, heretical, unwanted scraps...