It's about 5:30 in the afternoon, sometime in June of 2018. I'm in the back of an Uber on the way to the airport in Portland. It's been a loooong day full of intense "discussion" with a challenging engineering client. I left the house around 4am, and I won't get home until well past dark.

 

Traffic was at a crawl at best. And my driver was really taking “stop and go” literally. He’d accelerate up to 15 mph or so, then slam on the brakes when the car in front of us magically got very close. Then do it again. I was looking at 45 minutes of this torture and I was not a happy camper. Truth be told, I wasn't a happy camper in life in general.

 

But just when I sat up to make a snarky comment to ask him to drive better, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. It was something shiny and blue under the steering wheel. I couldn’t figure it out so I asked him about it.

 

He said “I have polio. My legs don’t work. I was adopted from India when I was 5 years old. This device lets me legally drive a car with only my hands. And you can buy it on Amazon for $300.”

 

I was really glad I hadn’t mouthed off about his “lack” of driving skills.

 

It turned out that what I thought was real and what was actually real were two completely different things. And nothing has been the same for me ever since.

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My name is Max. I help people liberate themselves from suffering. I do this by helping them permanently change the beliefs, programming, and conditioning underpinning their unwanted behaviors and emotions. I’ve dedicated my life to learning the most effective ways to make real and lasting change.

 

Oh, and the driver? We spent the rest of the ride having a great conversation about life and learning. Months later, I went to look him up in my trip history. His name is Om. Om, that sacred syllable said to represent the essence of the supreme Absolute, consciousness, the divine. If I hadn’t gotten it yet, I’d like to think I would have at that moment.