I think I realized it when watching a movie that made me very happy and also when I was places like Yosemite National Park or Mt. Shasta. This is when I most had hope for the world. I also knew about how often intelligent people would go hide in the mountains while everyone where they lived was being massacred. And when the massacre was over often these mountain ascetics would return and teach enlightenment to the survivors if their PTSD wasn't too bad from seeing all their relatives killed in the massacre.
This is sort of the way culture got it's start more than once by the enlightened who found a way to survive when everyone else died came back to teach them their contemplations or meditations.
Life was always pretty horrific even when I grew up in the 1950s. For example, I remember driving along listening to the radio in my family's car on a long trip and listening to thousands of people being hacked to death with rakes and scythes in India when the Hindus drove the Muslims out of India into West and East Pakistan they were called then. East Pakistan eventually became Bangladesh and West Pakistan eventually just became Pakistan.
So, the point is I realized that personal enlightenment was possible by the time I was 10 to 20 years of age. I knew you could teach this to people also but I also knew how difficult life was here in the U.S. and around the world especially in the 1950s and I was horrified by how hard life really was even here in the U.S.
So, when I went to India and Nepal in 1985 and 1986 with my family it completely changed how I saw everything by seeing thousands of people without jobs begging every day. After that I tried whenever it was safe to give something to every beggar I saw even here in the U.S. and also when I was in India. It was a way to give hope to people who had none. and a quarter or a dollar or something might allow them to eat for one more day on the streets of wherever I was then.
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