The Divine Compulsion is a yearning for completion that stops at no boundary, like a hurdle jumper at a track meet. For me it was a heart felt desire to be free of suffering, this sense of being separated from my own experience, of being outside of myself looking in myself through a frosty window. I became intensely curious about my own mind, how the mind worked and what consciousness was. This curiosity is a quest that is like an underground stream beneath an arid land, and here and there you find a well spring to quench your thirst, but every spring dries up so you continue to the next oasis. You cannot stay at any one place and settle down. Some mysterious urge pushes you to keep going. What am I?

The search (or pilgrimage if you will) leads from the external to the internal, from the horizontal of the known to the vertical of the unknown. You dig a well. Instead of looking for outbreaks of the underground river in time across the horizon, you stop and pick up a shovel, vowing to not leave this spot until you strike permanent water.

You think there is a path or a Way you must find, and there are many paths to be explored, to be sure, but all come to the same dead end like stream that dries up in the dirt. When your well digging strikes the water of life itself, you become your own path. Whatever you do is the Way or the Path. Instead of a follower or seeker, you become the creator of yourself…and you are ok no matter what.

The Divine Compulsion starts out with you on the trail of something unknown, a Bigfoot maybe—all our obsessions with mysteries are by external metaphors—but the odyssey takes a dramatic turn when you stop going horizontal chasing rainbows and begin digging for the pot of gold where you are standing. We are all standing at rainbows end.