99% of the Catholic mass is pure bullshit. Sitting, standing, kneeling: it's an hour's worth of low-impact aerobics, cute stories, and the tasteless Necco wafers of Christ's body, culminating in a relieved dash to the parking lot with the final guitar-led "Blessed Be the Lord." If not for the Our Father, that remaining 1% of actual substance, the Pope's world-spanning empire would have collapsed long ago.

Growing up in a subdivision gives one little taste of the sanctity of daily life. My brothers and I were dragged from our Sega Genesis, M.C .Hammer tapes, and jumbo boxes of Honeycomb cereal to sit in the pews every Sunday morning, and we resented each minute of it. Little Jonathan and I would crack ourselves up in the front row comparing the Holy Tabernacle to a microwave, waiting breathless for the timer to ring and a patron to step forward to claim his convenience store burrito.

But my face took on a sober expression with the recitation of the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer. Though often spoken to the floor with palms folded in front, once in a while the pastor invited us all to hold hands and sing, and when the congregation hit that last "for thine is the King-dom / and the pow-er / and the GLORRR-EEE!", my lower back tingled.

Few people realize how terrifying the Our Father is. Commonly known by the Latin pater noster up until the twentieth century, the O.F. is supposedly the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples, and contains within it all the promise of Western culture: the coming of God's kingdom here on Earth, "as it is in Heaven." To a comic book kid spending most of his time in the back seat of a mini-van circulating through strip malls and flattened forests filled with litter, this was gold to me, a vision of the true potential we all had to fix this stupid planet and make everything seem, well, sacred.

But that 1% wasn't enough to keep me coming back to church after graduating from high school and being given free will by my parents. I went outside, looking for stronger hits of Our Father-ness in some very non-Catholic places.

In college, I turned to anarchism, splitting my time between classes, track practice, and roaming the grape fields in and around Fredonia, NY, dreaming of the collapse of civilization and the coming of the Kingdom of wild nature and unrestricted love. Heaven was in the eyes of the deer I encountered by the creek, in the way the streetlights lit up the sidewalks on the way home from the bars, in the desperate kiss of the over-under dance club with Labatt's Blue in my belly and Candlebox on the juke.

It wasn't until after receiving my diploma, at my first job, that I discovered mysticism.

Ken Wilber, a contemporary philosopher I discovered on the Internet during an extended lunch break, writes:

This too was gold, and from that point forward I took to meditation.

My first experience with sitting practice was at the famed Rochester Zen Center, established by Three Pillars of Zen author Roshi Philip Kapleau in 1966. I was impressed with the military-like discipline with which the zendo was run, the austerity of staring at a blank wall for hours on end, the innovation of kinhin walking meditation (done hourly to loosen up stiff legs) or the little sticks the Roshi's students struck our shoulders with to keep us energized. Beginners start with the breathe, counting each inhale in an attempt to still the mind so that it may soon focus on what's more important in life, in this case, Nothing (as the Buddhists view as the source of all manifestation).

Upon moving to Buffalo, a large blue-collar city too poor to own a Zen center, I found a group practicing A Course in Miracles, a pro-love New Age doctrine "channeled" by medical psychologists Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, all of which freaked the fuck out of me. Meeting every Tuesday in the back room of an incense-burning inspirational book store, the group consisted of 15-20 individuals, mostly middle age, who gathered to share themselves and hear the calming words of group leader Brett, a smiling, shining long-hair who worked days as a counselor.

After hugging each other hello, a three-hour ACIM session began with a silent gazing into the eyes of every person in the room, often to the point of laughter. Next, a candle was passed, and we were invited to speak our minds. I became a popular orator during this section for my reckless honesty about my then-girlfriend, while others told tales of career choice heartbreak, old injuries which refused to heal, new loves keeping them alive, or, in the case of one large Afro-American male nurse, their experiences with UFOs and out-of-body travel.

At that point we paired off to develop an even deeper connection with a total stranger, which, needless to say, some of the men in the room had a hard time dealing with (in one such exploration, meant to reveal "the one moment you felt the most love in your life," a roofing contractor and I discovered our mutual love of big tits).

Then, the whole circle held hands, and Brett led us through an elaborate, eyes-closed imagination game involving light falling from the ceiling, suffering minions finding pleasure in our glowing chests, and great balls of energy filling the bookstore.

Those months were nuts, riding the bus as I did every day with stupid bliss on my face beaming at every unemployed ghetto resident riding downtown. It was so bad I almost moved to the ghetto myself, where I would be sustained by Pure Love and act as a sort of mini-Brett / street gang liaison intent on the upliftment of the working poor.

A year later I took a class at the local Himalayan Center, a soccer-mom yoga hellhole run by a tight-lipped clinical psychologist and her elusive vegan husband. If A Course in Miracles was a powerful means of training the self to reach outward to build the Kingdom of Heaven, this was a laser-like turning inward, based on the ancient yogic practice of mantra. Our beginning mantra was "soham," repeated again and again as we breathed from our bellies and relaxed our spines. I practiced this every day before dinner, sitting in my closet for twenty minutes at a time while my roommates blasted the TV and called my name to answer the phone. What I found, while nothing of Our Father-level profundity, was a still point in the mantra, a sure antidote to the hectic life of an alcoholic web-designer living in a city at the brink of chaos.

But it was not enough.

While they each had a tool to offer my contemplative Batman utility belt, what A Course in Miracles, Zen, and yogic meditation lacked was entertainment value. Enter Tibetan vajrayana.

During the coldest February on upstate New York record, I trudged every Sunday afternoon to a dance studio deep within the hip Allentown district to absorb the teachings of a representative from Rochester's Amitabha Foundation, a non-profit cultural preservation and refugee assistance organization with deep roots in the Nyingma school, the eldest of Tibet's four main Buddhist sects.

Where once video games and comic books clashed with my relationship to the Divine, in vajrayana they found their most profound union. Vajrayana, translated from Sanskrit as "The Adamantine Vehicle", features an elaborate, multi-tiered system of mantras, visualizations, breathing exercise, chanting, prayers, text study, and deity worship, all of it hell-bent on transforming every practitioner into a spiritual superhero, or bodhisattva, devoted to aiding all beings in their quest for the supreme liberation of nirvana (a realm of ultimate bliss suspiciously similar to our Heaven, but available immediately).

After an hour-long discourse on this ridiculous maze of Olympic training for the soul, Frank from Amitabha would guide us through an exercise more complicated than even the highest levels of Sonic The Hedgehog 3. We were to picture Vajrasattva, the great pale-faced purification deity dressed in the finest silks and jewels, floating on a many-petaled lotus a foot over our heads, his chest aglow with a rotating wheel of the hundred-syllable mantra we were to read out loud from Amitabha's blue prayer books. The light from his chest would drip from his toes into our heads, and in three passes would push the black tar of negative thoughts, the pus and bile of physical sickness, and the frogs, centipedes, and serpents of demonic spirits through our bodies and into the mouths of our "Karmic debtors" gaping below us.

Thus purified, Vajrasattva would descend and we would visualize ourselves as him, with all the pride and spiritual cockiness that suggests. The syllables continued rotating around the glow of our own chests before sending colored rays surmounted by female deities bearing gifts to the other deities up in the Pure Land. This spectacle then dissolved into a speck "fifty times smaller than a single hair on a horse's head," the mantra ceased, and we rested in "pure awareness."

Strangely, it took such a baroque ritual to get us into the state of "pure awareness," and after one session I was addicted, practicing every day to burnout my mind with multi-colored deity worship before plunging into the calm center of Nothingness. Walking through the streets of Buffalo, every frigid citizen was Vajrasattva himself, every honking car horn or blare of a Krispy Kreme commercial the purest, most sacred mantra, and I was the calm mirror reflecting it all.

Yet for all of its transformative promise, to go much further within The Adamantine Vehicle requires quite a bit work, including language study, the memorization of an array of even more complex mantras, and acquiring a guru of one's own. Now, a year later, while I still sit twenty minutes a day, Vajrasattva has been replaced by, of all things, the Our Father.

It started with a Saul Williams performance a few months ago here in Boulder, which included a modified version of the Lord's Prayer dedicated to the master poet's late father, a Baptist minister. Here was my hero, himself raised on comic books and video games, embracing the hated traditions of my youth, transforming each phrase into a gasp and a standing ovation.

Having taken a recent acting workshop which focused on the importance of "feeling into" every single word of a script during the memorization process, my search for the Kingdom of Heaven has come full circle. Where once I stood on the church carpet following the cue of a priest, I now face the wall, follow my breathe, visualize a suffering world, and caress each syllable of my childhood mantra like a sacred bomb: