I WAS BORN AND RAISED in southern California, back in the gentle '50s. My family's roots in Christian Science went back several generations to the 1880s. I attended Sunday School in the San Fernando Valley until I was about sixteen and became a member of The Mother Church a few years later. But sometime during my twenties, Christian Science stopped being a major part of my life.
Looking back, I'm not sure why that happened. Somehow I got confused about things in my life, and this ended up making me turn away from a religion that I knew and loved. In the '80s, then in my midthirties, I felt that it was hypocritical for me to remain a church member, so I dropped my membership.
BUT RELIGIOUS STUDY soon became important to me again. For the next 15 years, I studied the religions of the world, actively practicing many of them. Like many of my generation, I first sought spiritual enlightenment in various Eastern religions. None of them satisfied me, so my religious restlessness brought me to the ancient and hedonistic spiritual theologies of Europe and America, plus other forms of Christianity. But these didn't satisfy my desire for the truth either; instead, they left me with feelings of nothingness, emptiness. Not deterred, I continued to study other increasingly esoteric religions.
