Hi everybody, it's 2013, and it's been a long time since I recorded a video, and this is just my time to get back.
This time I want to talk about my spiritual journey, how I got onto the spiritual path that I'm on right now.
So I'm not sure if you remember, sometime in 2011, there was this whole situation with a guy named Harold Camping, and he was talking about the world coming to an end on May 21st, 2011. Well, guess who got suckered in?
I totally and completely believed the guy, and I got ready to say goodbye to the world. Listen, I was a Christian. I subscribed to the Pentecostal religion, I mean the Christian religion, and I was born again, and I believed in the Bible.
I was really hardcore, gung-ho, Bible-toting Christian, and I would never have imagined for one minute that I would be in this position that I'm in right now.
I was really the prayer warrior, the Holy Spirit filled, the Bible believing, let's go to church, guys.
I was the kind of person who would rally my whole family, gather all my friends together, and just make sure we were in church when we needed to be in church. That was me.
So anyway, by some synchronicity, that's what I call it, I had a dream, and in that dream I saw the world coming to an end. There was a huge earthquake and the world came to an end.
So shortly after, I think it was two days later, I was on the internet and I happened to see an ad that was talking about the world coming to an end on May 21st, 2011.
It was this group of Christians who apparently had read the Bible and, in their attempt to break it down, they had come to the conclusion that they knew when the world would end.
Whatever happened, the thing is, I believed the guy, and I got ready to say my goodbyes to the world, and I guess I was really tired. I was really tired of life. Maybe that's what it was.
Maybe I had got to a point where I just was ready to go.
So anyway, come May 21st, don't even ask. It's very hard to figure out how someone like me would have been suckered in. I think about it myself, but I was suckered in, and I believed it.
Anyway, come May 21st, I was in my apartment waiting for the big bang to happen. It was a beautiful day. The day went by, nothing happened. Nothing.
I remember feeling very fearful for my life before then, just thinking that the world was going to end, and this is a person who completely believed it. I believed that it was going to end.
So I was in intense fear for my life, although I was kind of ready, because if God wants to destroy the world, or if the world is supposed to end, what are you going to do?
So I tried to calm myself down as much as possible and just wait for things to go down, but they didn't go down. I looked out the window. It was sunny. It was a spring day.
People were walking out, taking a jog, cycling, walking their dogs, and I was sitting in my apartment thinking about dying. I waited till evening. There was no earthquake, nothing. I can't even describe the kind of feelings that I had.
And then of course came the phone calls. Everyone was calling me, at least the people who knew that I had believed that May 21st, 2011 was the end of the world began to call me and laugh at me.
I mean, it was really, really embarrassing.
Every phone call that would come in after that date was from a person who was sarcastically inquiring about my status, and they wanted to know whether I was in heaven or whether I was still on planet Earth. It was just a big joke.
So anyway, the long and short of it was, from that moment I came to a conclusion that I needed to find something that I believed in. It's not that I don't believe in Christianity, I do.
And the basic and fundamental teachings of the Bible are primarily what steers my life.
But that day just something happened inside me that made me think that I wanted to know more, because I realized that living as a Christian, as great as it was, I was constantly in fear.
I can't even begin to tell you the kind of fear that I felt. I was constantly feeling guilty about everything.
I was just filled with so much tension in my body, just thinking about how perfect I needed to be to be able to live in this world.
I had completely forgotten what it was to live freely and to be free and to just enjoy life. I had become this rigid, uptight, tense person, and it was really kind of weird.
So anyway, I decided to begin to think for myself and to find something that kind of made sense to me, and see whether I would be peaceful or a much more loving person.
And by that I mean loving in the true sense of the word, not just loving in the sense that so many other people that I know say they love.
I started on a journey, and in that journey I learned a lot about different kinds of spiritual beliefs. I don't subscribe to any particular religion per se, but I am a spiritual person, as it were.
So what I'm trying to say in this video is that I'm kind of very thankful for Harold Camping, who was the guy who spearheaded the whole May 21st, 2011 was the end of the world thing.
I'm very thankful for him, because if I had not believed that message, I would never have come to this point in my life, which I feel and believe is the beginning of a new path for me, and it's the beginning of me being true to myself and making decisions for myself and choices for myself that are better for me, and making me become a much more alive and joyful individual.
So my journey began on that day. It was the end of a belief system that I had held for so many years and that I did not understand fully. I know that now.
And the beginning of a journey that I just feel so happy about. I mean, it's just been wonderful, and I think the future is going to be amazing. So that was the beginning of my journey into the future.
So thank you very much for watching, and I will be sharing more. Thank you.