My next guest’s life has been filled with struggles between the material world and his deeper insights into reality. His remarkable experience from speaking with the dead, to seeing the future, to building a multi-million-dollar business, is all offered in his collection of miraculous encounters that can help you understand truths deeper than our material reality.

Welcome to the Author Hour podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty. My next guest is Mark Kenzer, here to talk about his newest book, My Miserable Search for Enlightenment. Let’s get into it.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Author Hour show. I’m here with my friend, Mark Kenzer. Super excited to have you on the show and celebrate your new book, Mark. Thank you for coming on.

Mark Shelley Kenzer: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, absolutely. You’re an Oregonian. I used to be an Oregonian. I love that we were talking about that before the mics turned on. I’m really excited to have you on the show and talk about this journey that you’ve been on of enlightenment and your book. Before I get into all that, I really love to talk about you, your personal background, perhaps where you grew up, where you ended up, and maybe one person that inspired you to be on the path that you’re on now before we get into the messaging of the book and all that good stuff. If you don’t mind, please start us off, perhaps your high school days and what that was like for you. Then jumping into the reality of the world.

Mark Shelley Kenzer: I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. At the time when I was growing up, we were referred to as Valley boys. It was a cultural phenomenon at that time, because a lot of our parents came from the East Coast, moved west, and had a different lifestyle. My high school days, I was pretty much asleep. I didn’t have much interest in it. I was pretty excited before that, but when high school came around, I was ready to move on.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: What happened after high school? You said you grew up in San Fernando, but then you ended up moving to Oregon. Is that correct?

Mark Shelley Kenzer: Yeah, yeah. At the time, I was growing up in San Fernando Valley. There was leaded gas at the time. The San Fernando Valley is a very small, very polluted place. I wanted to move to greener pastures, and I did. I had a friend who moved here. I moved up to Oregon, probably around the age of twenty.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Very cool. When you made that move, where did the search start? Right? You talk a lot about the search for enlightenment throughout your book, but it wasn’t an easy feat, right? As we get into these journeys, making this move now to a different place. Luckily, you did, because being aware of your health and what you don’t want to be around is actually incredible, incredible awareness and making that choice. Sometimes it’s not voluntary, of course, sometimes, it’s like we force ourselves to do those things. What happens next? What happens in your early twenties, late twenties? What did you get into, and perhaps, somebody that inspired you to get on a path that I guess awakened to you?

Mark Shelley Kenzer: To answer that, we’ve got to go back, because since my early childhood, I knew I was going to be on this path. I used to dream about it and imagine it when I was younger, all I ever wanted to be was a Swami. I really didn’t even know what the Swami meant. I would actually, when I’d go to sleep, I would practice astral projecting, or trying to leave my body. The place I thought about going was usually India, which I don’t know why. I knew nothing about India. I thought I was going to go to India, and I knew I wanted to be a Swami or the other word that came to my mind was Fakir, but again, it was another word I didn’t know. I just knew that I was into mysticism, but at the time, I called it ESP because it was a common term while I was growing up, which is extrasensory perception.

It wasn’t as far as who inspired me, or what inspired me. Probably it was my dreams, going into other dimensions and other lifetimes. Having these experiences during dreams and dreaming about the future and seeing future events while I was lying in bed in the morning like in trance, that’s probably what started. As far as people, I was probably reading Autobiography of a Yogi, which is probably the biggest bestseller along these lines by Paramhansa Yogananda. Then later, I was reading Bhagavad Gita, reading the New Testament. Actually, when I was younger, I picked up a copy of a book about Zoroastrianism, and that really moved me, along with the Tao Te Ching, which is surprising, because I was probably about ten years old when I brought it home and showed it to my parents and said, “You got to read this.” They just would tell me like, “Where is it coming from?”

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Wow, that’s so powerful. What an interesting draw to something. I’m sure at the time, for you seemed perhaps foreign and just different because you’ve grown up in the West, where you’re attracted to things that are far East and especially ideologies, and just a culture of thinking that way. Where does this lead you? What happens next?

Mark Shelley Kenzer: Well, after I gave up the idea of being a rock star, I realized I have an income; I actually met my wife at the time, when I was about twenty-five, twenty-six. I got motivated to start a business. That’s where it led me, but before that, which I should add, is that I did take a trip about the age of nineteen, or twenty, and ran into a real demonic woman, which really rattled my cage. That really showed me the dark side of everything. Before that, everything was always going to be like, “Oh, my life was going to be like Jesus’s or something.” Then I got to see a part of it that I had no idea existed because I didn’t grow up with any. Well, I grew up with very little religion in my life. I certainly didn’t grow up with any satanic thing in my consciousness. I was actually raised Jewish. I wasn’t raised Christian. In Judaism, there really is no devil.

Enlightening Experiences

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yes, so interesting, very powerful. So getting into your book a little bit, what do you think inspired you to write a book specifically about this topic and who you are? How you came in? Like, who are you trying to reach with your message, which you say?

Mark Shelley Kenzer: Well, I would like to reach anybody whose suffering, but not only suffering, people who are suffering who have been on a path, because being on a path, path of awakening, or path of God consciousness is extremely difficult in the material world. The material world is the opposite. Like I said, meeting, this demonic person really woke me up to that. I realized we’re all influenced by material forces. We’re spiritual beings. When I met this person, I didn’t think I was going to make it back. I met her in Canada. I was afraid I was going to die. I didn’t think I was going to make it, the force was so strong, but when I got back here, I noticed it really changed me. I really had to get serious about my spiritual practice.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: So powerful. You mentioned in the content that you’ve had many miraculous encounters throughout your life. Can you tell me a little bit about these experiences and how they affected your understanding of the world, moving forward?

Mark Shelley Kenzer: I’m mainly talking about the ones in the book. I mean, of course, there are a lot of them, but probably the first powerful one is having Jesus come to me. Then after that, it was Yogananda, Paramahansa Yogananda whom I accepted as my spiritual master at the time. He came to me with his guru and appeared to me. Anybody has had this type of experience, it totally transformed your life. It’s like Jesus appearing to Paul on the road to Damascus. You can tell it really changed his life. Whether or not he was able to take on that potency of Jesus, we don’t know, but anybody who’s had this type of association knows it’s a very powerful thing, and there’s nothing else like it, to describe it.

Later on when I met my wife, who was a Hare Krishna devotee, I started reading the works of Bhaktivedanta Swami, his translations, and his commentaries on Vedic writings. I had very divine experience with someone named Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu appeared in India about 500 years ago. He’s actually the originator of the Hare Krishna movement, as we know it, that has spread all over the world. Bhaktivedanta Swami brought it here on the order his spiritual master. He came here probably in the sixties to spread Krishna Consciousness, which just means God consciousness. Krishna means they all attract it.

The message he actually was bringing was from Lord Chaitanya, who appeared in India 500 years ago. Lord Chaitanya, when he was in India, predicted this would be spread all over the world, which is with Bhaktivedanta Swami did. From reading his books, I had an awakening where Lord Chaitanya appeared to me, and I never expected it. I didn’t – my wife brought on the book of it, and I started reading it. I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t even know that I was fully understanding it. I had t