I’d like this site to be an experience most people can relate to. For that reason I am encouraging anyone to describe their own experiences in the forum.

We all have peak experiences in life, the kind that are indelibly impressed on our consciousness and can never be forgotten. I had one such experience while I was in college. I took a quarter off from school and traveled around Europe. I went with a friend, visited 9 countries, spent some time in youth hostels, did some mind altering drugs and generally had a good time. We were hippies back then.

One day I decided I wanted to climb a mountain. Now I had never seen a mountain as high as the Alps before this trip. So off I went. When you began to climb you can just walk right up, you can’t even see the top. It was winter so I went through a forested area and came into a snow field. As I continued to climb I came out above the tree line and just kept going. Now I had to climb around boulders and it became icy, yet still I climbed. It finally reached a point where I thought it was too dangerous to go on but when I looked behind me it seemed even more dangerous to try and go back. I knew there was a mountain gondola somewhere at the top so that became my goal. 

At one point I was aware that I was in a very dangerous position no matter which way I went. Here is where I prayed. You have seen it before. The guy gets into a dangerous situation, prays to God for help and promises to dedicate his life to him when rescued. That was me. Usually when that happens in movies the promises are forgotten and the person returns to their normal way of being. Not me. I finally made it to the top, found the cable car and begged for money to get down but I had been changed.

You see, on my trip up I looked at all that was happening in my life at that time and none of it mattered. A favorite quote came ringing in my ears which said that, “the greatest use of life is to live it doing something that will outlast it”. I wondered what that would be and on arriving back at college I took my first course on world religions. The first book assigned to us was Autobiography of a Yogi. To say that blew my mind was an understatement but that is another story…