About Richard

Intellectual restlessness and a resolute demand to know the truth have been the cornerstones of Richard’s life.

Curiosity arose early in his boyhood. As he quietly observed the world around him, he felt an increasing need to understand its ways. At first this manifested as a fascination with nature and science.

However, by about age 11 that inquisitiveness began turning to the more serious questions: What is life all about? Does it have an ultimate purpose? Is there a supreme being who oversees it all? What is the method to authentically come upon these answers?

His undying life passion had been found.

He was born and raised in a middle-class, Christian home. Yet, he quickly grasped that blind belief in books and teachers, regardless of who or how many people believe them, was clearly not an acceptable approach to Truth. Instead, he demanded to know the truth, and to know it with real certainty - unshadowed by doubt.

For some time in those very early years, he hungered to establish the existence of a personal God with the use of reason. He deeply studied and mulled the alleged “proofs” of God’s existence. Yet for every “proof” there was a legitimate rebuttal.

Not long thereafter, he turned his attention to the possibility of knowing Truth or God via mysticism – through both Western and Eastern approaches. It was an alleged means to actually perceive God directly – going beyond mere sense observation and conventional knowing.

By then, his hunger for Truth became a life obsession. At age 16 he sought out the association of a prominent Eastern teacher for personal instruction in these mystical disciplines. For many years he was dogged in his application of this discipline and practice of meditation. He stayed patient hoping and waiting for Truth to reveal Itself.

But he was increasingly seeing through the cracks in this mystical approach to Truth, and he concluded that it was, in fact, not a valid path. He sensed that the legitimate approach to perceiving ultimate Truth lay elsewhere. In time, at about age 25, he recognized that the intuitive, mystical approach was yet one more dead end.

So what was he left with? Blind belief and quick answers from organized religion were long ago discarded. Mystical understanding, although lofty-sounding, was another subtle snare. Was a person’s true nature and his relationship to existence forever to remain out of reach and unknowable?

Eventually he turned his inquiry objectively and deeply inward to observe the workings of the human mind. He began examining the nature of this “self” inside and indeed its very reality.

What was to be directly observed is Buddha’s most overlooked, misunderstood, and ignored insight. Yet, this teaching was his most fundamental – that of anatta – that the inner “I” within each of us is, in fact, an illusion. It simply has no reality. It was both astonishing and deeply liberating.

It is upon this understanding that the very bedrock of enlightenment is anchored.

For a spiritual seeker, the implications of this insight are total and all-encompassing because within it lies Final Understanding. It is through this inner observation that the most fundamental illusion of human existence is pierced.

Thereafter, the ultimate and deepest understanding of Oneness is born.