A month before this happened, I had been arrested. I was in the 12th grade at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Springs, Maryland. There was a war going on in Vietnam and the United States seemed to be the cause and propagator of it. The whole idea of this war seemed wrong to me. I could not really figure out what it was all about, but, I was very disturbed by the terrible violence being done to people. I could see it on TV- Vietnam was the first televised war.

Our student grapevine had brought news of an International Student Strike against the Vietnam war to be held at schools and Universities around the world. I was thrilled at the chance to participate. One of our teachers had discussed the protest in a Social Studies course and had asked the class our thoughts and feelings on the subject. Without any planning, I voiced an idea that would change the course of my life- I said that I was going to Napalm a dog in front of the school on the International Strike Day.

People love dogs. I loved dogs. I experienced dogs as noble, intelligent, emotionally sensitive and helpful friends. I knew that people would get upset about the dog-burning, that was the point.

I was trying to bring attention to the horrible use of napalm on the people of Vietnam. I felt that the harming of so many innocent people was wrong, I felt that the Vietnam war was wrong and that I wanted to do something to stop it. I believed that if I threatened to do this, there would be a hue and cry from everybody who heard of it. My words took off like a wildfire, the voicing of my idea was the spark. It was an idea whose time had come and .

There was an immediate uproar in my own classroom and everybody took sides. The long-hair, liberal types who were not vegetarians sided with me while the greaser-redneck kids made it clear that my life was seriously in danger if I ever tried anything like that. The liberal, animal loving vegetarians were in a dilemma and voiced their concern for the dog. The bell sounded, only barely audible over the loud and passionate voices in the room.

       The next day, the rumor of the dog-burning was all over the school. Before the first class, a group of redneck kids threatened me with bodily harm. I was supported by my closest friends and an argument ensued. In the middle of the morning, a message came to my teacher from the principal, asking me to report to his office. When I did so, he asked me if this whole idea of 'burning a dog' was true. I replied that it was. He asked me if I knew what I was doing and I replied that I felt it was an important statement to make against the war. He told me that he was going to suspend me and anybody else involved in the matter from school. He said that he would call my parents and asked me to leave the school immediately.

At home that evening, I basked in the support of my Father and the worry of my Jewish Mother, (although she also supported me). My parents were very involved with humanitarian causes from civil rights to the environment and had been very involved in protesting the war. For instance, my father had refused to pay that portion of his taxes he figured that would go towards the Vietnam war. The IRS had posted a sign on our lawn saying that our property had been seized. My Father then put his own sign next to it, the Washington Post had photographed the two signs side by side and published it. A day later the IRS came and took their sign away. My parents were people who lived the life of people who cared and who acted on their feelings. They wanted to make the world a better place. They walked the walk of social activists and I was lucky to have them for support. Over the next few days, we received several threatening phone calls from unknown sources. A police car was parked 24hours a day outside our house for our protection. I was unable to contact the kids who I knew were sympathetic with me as their parents would not allow it and guarded the phones. My Father was relaxed, proud and supportive, my Mother became more and more worried.

By the end of the week, several people had written letters to the Washington Post, protesting what I had proposed to do. Even the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals spoke out. All this was what I had hoped for. On the morning of the International Student Strike Day, in spite of expulsion from school and the 24hr round the clock police watch for my house, I showed up at my high school. I was dressed all in black and carrying a placard that read, “NAPALM A DOG? IT IS BEING DONE TO PEOPLE EVERY DAY!” Hundreds of people had turned out to see the ‘burning of the dog’.  I had been driven to school by my Mother, followed by two police cars. We stopped a block away and I told her not to worry and stepped out of our car. As I proceeded to walk towards the school grounds, the way was cleared for me by police through the thickening crowd of people. As soon as I stepped onto school property, I was immediately arrested, handcuffed, thrown into a patrol car and taken to a police station where I was subsequently charged with inciting a riot (some rowdiness did erupt on the part of others), trespassing and breach of peace. Nothing ever became of the charges and I never went back to high school again. I later learned that my FBI file had started from that time.

New York City (1968-1969)

Without school to take up my time, I stayed at home and read voraciously. In this way, I read Siddhartha and by that seeming slip of fate 'awoke' to myself. I plunged into the river of Life that was flowing by and was carried away quickly.

When I left home that evening and began to walk down the early morning streets, I was filled with great happiness and an enthusiastic anticipation of what was to come. I had cut loose from everything I knew. I felt utterly free and full of adventure. I waved to the few people driving about at that hour in their cars. Very few waved back. I noticed this lack of response and felt that people were distracted and depressed by unhappiness in their own life. It seemed to me that they had forgotten to notice the wonder in which we were all appearing, the vast and infinite sky of stars over their heads- their hearts and feelings were oppressed- How could it be otherwise? They were not wondering or wandering. It made me feel more strongly that what I was doing was right and necessary. No one else had any answers. What else was there for me to do now but wander and explore, to find out on my own whatever it was.

After about an hour of walking in that chill early morning, I got my first ride from a long-haired hippie who was driving all the way to New York City. We were both glad for each others company on the long ride. I was thrilled, being with an adult , as an 'adult' myself. About eight hours later, in the early evening, he dropped me off at Washington Square in Greenwich Village. It was like arriving in a different world altogether. New York City was fascinating to me. There was the exuberant abundance of wildly different cultures and peoples in the city. There were hippies on the streets, just like I had seen in magazines and the news. There were kids my age in the parks. 'Things' and 'scenes' were happening. Everything was full of potential. In the midst of it all I could do whatever I wanted, stay out as late as I cared. I did not even know where I would sleep but within a few hours had been offered a place to crash. Over the next few days, I hung out on the streets, met people, went to poetry readings, parties, art shows, lectures and eccentrics. I was no longer tethered to the anchor of my parents. I slept on the sofas and floors of newly found friends, often in incredibly small rooms. I found I could get the leftover bottom rice from the Paradox, a Macrobiotic restaurant after they closed for the evening. Rice and vegetables became the mainstay of my diet. The food was good for me. I was healthy and not worried about anything.

The city was dirty and had many rough edges and hard people. But, my young friends and I were enthused with youth itself and open to whatever would come. Sex was in the air, most of my friends were hunting it, smelling it, talking about it and engaged in it, but, somehow that strong storm which touched almost every young person, blew over me during this time. I was shy around girls and remained a virgin, distracted by other adventures and things. Many years later I made up for this.

Based on my own limited experiences, like all of my peers, I had very little expectations at this stage of my life. It was a time for trying things, for adventure. I had not fallen into irony. Perhaps I was only expectations, but, I was open to whatever came. I had no daily responsibilities and everyday life beckoned to me with the seductive sense of the unknown. I found Weisers Bookstore, an occult or religious bookstore with its tall stacks of books that held so much recorded tales and wisdom from people beyond my time and experience. The bookstore was like a grand and mysterious church. I would go there in the late morning and spend hours and hours reading stories from the religious traditions of the world, about the God-men, saints and siddhas who had experienced these things for themselves. I discovered Rumi, the Conference of the Birds, Hinduism, Yoga, Bhakti, Advaita, Vedanta, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Buddha and Sankara. I read about Edgar Cayce, astrology, fasting and prayer. For a few weeks, I chanted daily with the Hare Krishna people. I recognized and loved their music and found their free food extremely delicious. Their devotional love of God and surrender struck a deep chord in me and gave me a taste of the India and another life.

I had my first girlfriend, a beautiful, tall, slender black girl who was living with older friends and I gave and received my first deep kiss. It was exciting and stirred many things from a life beyond this one. But, I was shy and never allowed myself to press for anything more than I was given and she was shy and a girl and did not offer what was not taken. She went on to another young man who knew what he wanted. During that time, I often felt that people who kissed in public were doing something selfish, like they were shutting themselves off from others, enclosing themselves in a small cocoon of selfishness, just those two and no one else. My own first deep and passionate kiss showed me how powerful a feeling for a girl could be, how drunk one could get and I was both thrilled and disturbed by my intoxication, I saw how I had much in common with those I had previously found offensive. After several months in the city, I began to hear stories about California, the west coast and the Colorado Rocky mountains and the wide open deserts. As I listened, a great yearning for these places awoke in me. I found a friend who wanted to travel and we left that crowded shipwreck of cultures and headed west, hitchhiking and train hopping across America.

I remember the first time I traveled to California, how the countryside changed so dramatically once we crossed the Mississippi River and drove out into Missouri and onto the vast flat plains of Kansas, where we drove on and on for over a day and then began to rise up gradually, passing through Denver and on into the high mountains and snowy passes of Colorado. I looked for the first time in my life at snow-capped mountains stretching to the horizon in all directions. Then we descended down onto the western slope of high desert and canyon lands, down past the huge rock outcroppings and dramatic rock monument desert of the the four corners area. This was big country, filled with vast space and emptiness. These were vistas and visions unlike those on the east coast. The American west was grand and awe inspiring. It felt like I had walked out into a nature that dwarfed human beings. We passed South through Arizona onto Route 40 and then across the California desert and onto Route 15 as evening fell and the blistering heat of the day cooled off into a pleasantly warm dry night. We had gotten a ride in the back of a pick-up truck and then, as we came up over a mountain pass and looked out, we saw the whole Los Angeles basin, glittering and sparkling in the clear night, looking like someone had dumped a bunch of jewels and stars into a huge bowl. I had never seen so many lights, such a big panorama and so much mystery. What could all these people possibly be doing? When we got into the city that night, the first man we met, an old bum, told us how lucky we were to have each other, referring to my friend and I, "You gotta have somebody to watch your back" , he said.

We spent that night on the beach in Santa Monica and woke up and took our first swim in the Pacific Ocean. I was thrilled to have reached the Pacific and with the enlivening cold water of the ocean. We sat on the beach to watch the day grow light and ran the clean white sand of the beaches through our hands. I spent some time wandering through the various parts of that city, but I did not like LA very much. It was lacking in wide openness and silence, qualities I was already beginning to identify and desire. There were no neighborhoods like I knew on the east coast. It seemed like a huge suburb and the distances were huge. You needed a car to go anywhere. The people in the city were jazzed and stressed and the level of emotions felt like high school all over again. IT was not an intellectual scene. But, there was a great sense of indulgence that washed the streets like rain.

It was a time when I knew we had a ride, if the car coming was a Volkswagen. They were always driven by a hippy or longhair and they almost always picked me up. It was not until a few years later on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles that I experienced people driving a Volkswagen who were mean spirited and selfish, even though they had long hair. That was a real wake-up call for me as I realized that long hair meant not a whole lot and that what I was looking for and valuing had nothing to do with hair styles. I never put much stock in long hair as a statement after that.

Costa Rica

After another year of traveling the country, I eventually found my way to a Gurdjieff-Ouspensky commune in the mountains of Costa Rica with Bob Hicks, a teacher from my high school and his family. Unbeknownst to me, he had quit his job over the 'Napalm a Dog' incident and was taking his family to live in a 'religious' community on the central plateau of that beautiful country near the volcano, Irazu. I traveled to Costa Rica with them and became the goatherd for their small community, living by myself in a small wood shack with a corrugated metal roof in a lush remote upper valley. I would milk the goats daily and bring their milk and cheese down a jungle path that frequently crossed a small river.

There were very large snakes, armadillos and wild animals that lived there. The jungle was filled with the sounds of birds and at night, the sky was filled to overflowing with stars. I could tell that the sky was different living so close to the equator. The all-pervasive living green of our valley was dotted with bright red and yellow tropical flowers and I could always hear the rushing small river that poured through it over large smooth boulders. Often,the 5 mile road that led up to our farm would wash out and had to be repaired. There were two families that lived on the farm. In exchange for free rent, the oldest men, Albero and Ernesto would work for the Americans almost every day. I loved to work with them and learned much about the jungle from them.

The smell of the earth was intoxicating. Every afternoon, like clockwork, a rainstorm swept powerfully up our mountain valley from the lowlands and then, usually after about 15 minutes of torrential downpour, the sky would clear and the sun come out and quickly set in a glory of colors. It was like a wondrous magical movie, exciting and romantic. But, in the midst of all this beauty I was lonely. I thought this loneliness was the 'price' I had to pay for a spiritual life. This was the first time I had actually thought it, but, I had come to believe that renunciation was a necessity for realizing 'God' and I thought I wanted to realize God. Who or what God is I had only ideas, like I still do to this day, but my deisre then was to be completely fulfilled, gratified, enlightened. It was something that would happen to 'me'. At that time of my life, I thought that 'I' had to be disciplined and a renunciate to attain to my idealized state. I believe I had picked up all these ideas through the many 'spiritual' books I had read and the great number of unspoken assumptions 'everybody' had. I had drunk deeply as an adolescent of the 'urban legends' of religion that circulated in our culture. I had lived amongst people who really did not know very much but thought they did. As an adolescent, I had not had enough experience, not made enough mistakes, not seen others mistakes and was profoundly naive.

I lived in this community for a year. Costa Rica became, (after my very brief experience with the Hare Krishna movement), my first confrontation with a group of people devoted to practicing a 'religious' life. Over time, I saw amongst my elders not only beauty, wisdom and compassion but also duplicity, deceit, deception and hypocrisy up close and personal. This all stood out more because they had outwardly and formally dedicated themselves to a 'religious' life. Up until that time, I had been a sophomore, part sophos or wisdom and part moron or idiot. Now, in reaction to the faults I saw in others and myself, I became idealistic. I had become a true adolescent, naively and acutely aware of dilemma, paradox and desire. I saw failure and suffering in others and began to fight against that very thing in myself. I suppressed my desires and tried to present an idealized version of myself to the world.

( For more about what happened in Costa Rica read: Let Me Tell You A Story)

(1969-1970)

Conundrum Creek, Colorado

After little more than a year in Costa Rica, I left and returned to the United States. When I came back, I once again began to travel. I read Dharma Bums and On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. I was inspired to hop freight trains and hitchhike, to visit the magical areas above the treeline, the wilderness areas of our country, to wander the highways and mountains of America and to live out of the pack I carried on my back. Japhy Rider (Gary Snyder) was my hero in Kerouac's books. He was a practitioner and scholar of Buddhism and the Japanese mountain poets. He had gone to the far East and lived at a Zendo. He was not just a philosopher but a practitioner. He sat zazen. He had been impressed with the ancient wisdom enough to want to eat it and become it. He loved women, sexuality, 'mountains and rivers without end' and religion. Snyder was my first taste of someone who was both 'religious' and fully expressive of desire and sexuality. He was not a renunciate in the cutting it all away mode. He was a renunciate in that he embraced a life that our society did not. My youthful romantic ideals and my strongly felt paradoxes of desire fit him well.

I traveled to Aspen, Colorado in the late summer. Someone had suggested that I hike up Conundrum Creek just outside of town, to the beautiful Conumdrum hot springs that sit at an elevation of 11,000ft, well above the tree line. As I hiked my way up the creek, I thought I was in Paradise. Everywhere I looked nature was outrageously glorious. The very air was glorious. The mountain valley was filled with aspens with their whitish bark and delicate green two shaded leaves that rustled so sweetly, a symphony of leaves in the winds. There was the wonderful silence of the high mountains. There were green meadows sprinkled with yellow columbine flowers. Rising up steeply on both side of the valley were dark gray black rock falls leading up to the brilliant white snow covered peaks beyond. These high mountains shared life with me on a grander scale that I ever experienced before.

Twice a day, I bathed in the creek. It was very cold and took the breath out of my lungs when I immersed myself in it. The water tasted sweet and thrilled my body when I drank from it. The high mountain air was fine, delicate and bracing, a joy to inhale. As I hiked up the valley, the trail crossed Conundrum creek several times. I would have to take off my boots to go across and my feet would go numb almost immediately in the water. As I tried to wade the creek in the late afternoon on the first day, the water was so powerful and swollen from a day of melting snowfields higher up the mountain, that I could not get across safely. It seemed too dangerous and I thought I might be swept downstream if I tried it. I turned back, to camp for the night in a nearby meadow and wait for the next morning. After the snow had frozen again during the night, there would be less height, flow and intensity to the creek below. As I went to sleep, I could hear the creek rushing, gurgling and laughing. I woke up in the middle of the night to go out and take a piss. I looked at the clear sky and it was filled to the edges with myriads of stars that seemed very close and intimate. The creek was singing. The sky was brilliant. I was in a immense cathedral that had no end.

The next day, I crossed the creek twice in the morning and followed a steep trail that took me up the ever narrowing valley and up above the tree line. When I finally arrived at the hot springs, there were eight young people, men and women, all naked, sitting around the rough stone pools of Conundrum Hot Springs. I realized that I would need to get undressed to go into the waters and that there simply was no other way to do it. If I didn't take off all my clothes, I would simply draw attention to myself, as everyone else was naked. But, I had never been without any clothes on amongst a group of people including the opposite sex. I felt a wave of embarrassment sweep over me. Then, as I realized that no one was paying any particular attention to this 'problem' in me or to the naked state of their own bodies, I began to 'casually' take off my clothes as if it was the most natural thing in the world, folding them on top of my boots, realizing through my own 'experience', this is exactly what everyone else must had gone through before me and the others before them. It was no big deal. In this small event, I discovered a 'technique' for many of the obstacles I would subsequently face- Observe the fear I was experiencing, notice all the reasons that held me back and then do the thing, whatever it is, anyway. I had discovered, that unless I made it so, fear was not a obstacle.

I walked up barefoot and naked to the natural stone springs, nodded to all the guys and girls and got in. The water was perfectly hot and in less than 15 seconds my own body was forgotten as I dissolved blissfully into the naked beauty of the high country of the Rocky mountains, snow covered peaks and vast space of happiness.

Hobos and Sadhus

I loved the life of wandering and knew that I was tasting something very different from the life my parents or their parents had lived, or that of most of the people I knew. I had become a vagrant, a wanderer, a hitchhiker, a sojourner, someone who loved the wide open deserts, the high country and the areas above the tree line that were still preserved in the national parks of America. It seemed to me that these untouched creeks and rivers, mountains, valleys, lakes and meadows held a great secret blessing, one that I always delighted to partake of. Living this way, with the wilderness as my secret wealth and source of sustenance, I found I needed very little to provide for myself. I had no template for this way of life in America, outside of my reading of Dharma Bums and observing the life of the hobos.They were the only culture that had established itself in America, living a life like mine, at least one that I could identify with. Of course, like any culture or group, there are a wide variety of people that make it up and not every one of them is doing the same thing or living the same life. Over time, I found my own 'tradition' amongst the many people who were wandering the country in the 60's. I realized that my fascination for the wandering 'hobo' life was of a more 'ancient' variety. I realized it was because the hobos reminded me of the wandering 'sadhus' of India. It was the track and taste of the sadhus that I was following.

The sadhus of India are a large and tremendously varied group who have renounced the world and dedicated their life to the relationship to and/or realization of God. They have given up the responsibilities of everyday life, family and marriage. They wander the countryside and cities of India, always traveling, usually on their way to some holy site or river. They usually dress in orange robes or sometimes even go naked and almost always with long uncut hair and carrying only a little 'baba bag' with their sum total of worldly possessions. The sadhus rely on the generosity of people to feed them and the village people of India consider it a blessing to give to them. These wandering renunciates take only what they need for the moment or the day and store up no wealth or possessions, trusting in God to provide for them and sharing any surplus they are given with others. I was sympathetic with this style of living and took to it naturally, in an American style. I was always reading religious texts. I read about the Russian Holy men, the staretz. I read about the life of Rumi and Kabir. I thrilled to the stories of Mt Kailash, Kinnaram and Ramana Maharshi. I read when hitchiking if the road was little traveled and I was waiting for a ride. I read by the campfire at night. I read by flashlight before I went to bed and I read on the freight trains. So many people had lived and adventured before me and I drank at the springs of their lives.

Riding the Freight Trains and a Night in Jail

After staying for the summer at a commune in the mountains of Colorado up above Boulder, I left with a group of 3 guys and 4 girls for the west coast. We decided to hop the freight trains as we knew it would be very difficult to hitchhike with such a large group of people. We decided to hop the freight trains out of Grand Junction, Colorado, a small city on the western edge of the Rockies. We walked into the freight yards to see if we could find a train to California. I went alone and spoke to the yardman there and he was friendly and very helpful. He told us that to get out to San Francisco we would have to go through Salt Lake City and then across Nevada, over the Sierras and down to the coast and into the Oakland, California yards. From there, San Francisco was just across the bay. He told us there was a fast, 'hot shot' train, with six heavy 'road engines' that would be pulling out real soon. (Road engines are the heavy locomotives that are used to pull freight on the long distance runs). They would take us to Salt Lake and then the whole train would be broken up. We would have to catch another train from there and he told us to ask around in the yards. He pointed our train out to us, gave us a Bible for the salvation of our souls and wished us all well. It seemed like a great beginning.

Riding the freight trains was a fantastic way to travel. We would all sit in the open door of the boxcar, hanging our feet above the ground and watch the countryside fly by or lay out on our mats and sheets of cardboard (what the hobos call 'thousand mile paper') and rest as the train sped along the iron rails. The train always had moving, swaying rhythms going on- rhythms of the wheels on the steel tracks, the clicking and clacking as the wheels passed over the breaks in the tracks and the bouncing of the boxcars with their sliding doors jumbling around as the heavy steel boxes flew along.

It took all day and into the evening to arrive in Salt Lake City. Then, our train was put 'over the hump' and broken up in the yard. We had to find another one to ride on west. In the late morning, with the help of another yardman we found a new train pulling out and headed on further towards the coast.

It was a warm sunny day as we pulled out across the salt flats west of Salt Lake. The tracks paralleled the main road for quite a while and someone got the novel idea that we take off all our clothes and dance in the open boxcar door in full view of the tourists. Personally, I just loved the idea of seeing the girls naked, forgetting how difficult it had been for me at Conundrum Creek. But, after much daring, teasing and laughing, between and amongst the sexes, we all disrobed and then waved and frolicked in plain view of the Winnebagos, tourists and cowboys, safe on our moving stage. After a while the tracks veered away from the road and we put our clothes back on again. It was a hot summer day and the heat became unbearable in the boxcar. We had to get out of the hot dry air blowing in the open door of the boxcar scorching the back end of our boxcar. We all moved to the leading end of the car where we rocked our way on through the day, sleepy with the heat and drinking all our water before the sun had set. After the sun went down and it became dark, somewhere, out in the middle of Nevada, we felt the train slowing down to stop.

We had become terribly thirsty in the dry hot air. As we looked ahead out the open door of our slowing boxcar, we saw what looked like a small 'Tastee Freeze', ice cream place by the side of a road about 200yds off through a dark flat field. Me and another guy decided to take all the water bottles for our group and as soon as the train stopped, to make a run for the place, fill all our bottles and then hightail it back before the train pulled off again. Just before the train came to a complete halt, we jumped out and took off running.

We hadn't gone 20 yards before the whole area lit up with car lights and flood lights, all pointed at us. There were men with guns, silhouetted in front of the lights and cars and the guns were pointed at us. "Stop! Police! Put your hands in the air and kneel down on the ground!", they shouted out. As we began to obey and looked around us at the now illuminated scene, we saw the whole train had been surrounded. Many police were coming from the other side of the train and everybody seemed to have guns and lights. They took the whole group of us off the train and after some discussion between them, which we were not privy to, took us into town where they booked us all into jail. We thought that we had been stopped for riding naked outside of Salt Lake, an incident that had occurred many hours before. The police told us it was because they had got word of some escaped convicts riding that train. We didn't believe them.

All the guys were put in one cell in the jail and all the girls in another part of the jail. We had not been given any food but there was plenty of water in the cell, coming from a small sink with push-buttons for handles. We used it regularly to drink and then one of the buttons stuck in the 'on' position. This caused a constant rush of water which splashed out a little onto the floor. We tried to make the stuck button come out by pushing and hitting hard on both buttons, but, after a few tries, the second one stuck as well and now there was a lot of water splashing out onto the floor. We called out for our jailers to help us, but, they just shouted at us to 'Shut up and get some sleep." We gave up soon after that, got up onto our bunks and tried to get some sleep.

Very soon, the sink would not drain and it filled up and began to overflow. Water began pouring down over the edge of the sink-basin onto the floor. Again we shouted to our jailers and again we were told to "Shut and go to sleep." Then, to complete this comedy of non-functioning plumbing, we noticed that the drains in our cell were not working either. A few hours later, after the water had begun to flow down the hallway and out into the outer room where the guard was, we heard a loud shout of 'Jesus Christ!', the door being opened and our guard came sploshing towards us through the water, pissed off and angry, cursing all the way.

When he remembered that we had been shouting at him and telling him about this for hours, he started laughing and moved us all out of that cell and into another dry one. In the morning they brought in a big box of eggs and fried potatoes, toast and coffee and then after giving us some time to eat, let us go, saying that we had to hitchhike out of town. We spent over 4 hours waiting for a ride and even built up a little pile of things that people had thrown at us, before we all got a ride in a horse trailer. It took us to Winnemucca, Nevada where we again hopped a freight train that took us on to California.

Many years later, when driving across the Nevada desert with my girlfriend in a truck with a broken taillight. I was stopped by a Nevada State policeman who gave me a warning for the defective light. While he was checking us out, we talked and I mentioned my previous experience in Battle Mountain. He laughed and told me that he had been there that night and remembered the whole event vividly. I asked him what was the real reason the train had been stopped. He said that they really were looking for convicts who were riding the rails and that they had found them a few nights later.

California was like the promised land to me. I loved the great and diverse natural beauty of the land, its deserts and oceans, redwoods and mountains. I loved how the mountains came down to the sea at Big Sur and the Japanese garden pristine beauty of the high Sierras. I slept outside of the cities in parks and on the beaches. I had an excellent pack and a good sleeping bag and pad. I had a butane stove for cooking brown rice, miso and vegetables. I was living as Thoreau once said, 'with the license of a higher order of being'.

Staying in the City 

Once, when travelling up north into Oregon, I spent the night in a Christian Homeless Shelter amongst the hobos, bums and vagrants. To spend the night in warm room when it was raining in the Northwest and we had been living outside was a great treat. The 'price' for it all, was a Christian service and an hour of being preached to.

The sermon often included singing and testimonies from young ladies from a suburban church group, (to hold the men's attention), young businessmen (how the Lord helps them in business and he can help you too), and reformed Hobos (who now sort of had it together). Often the men in the room could not hold back there sarcasm at the tales of so many holier than thou self satisfied people. Once, when a man was telling the story of his own conversion, he repeatedly used the phrase, "He touched me", referring of course to Jesus. For the rest of that evening, the cries and laughter of a room of vagrants resounded to sudden outbursts of "He touched me", referring in this case to the next seated person. There was so much laughter in the room that even some of the people up in front of the room who were preaching seemed to be holding back laughter. After the sermon there would be dinner.

I met some friends and stayed in Portland over a period of two weeks, living at the homeless shelter. Almost every night, the dinners we were served at the Mission were left over hamburgers (from some fast food place) and a watery "supposed" split-pea soup which the bums called "water bewitched". Because I was a vegetarian, I would announce from my table that I would trade a hamburger for anybody's buns or bread. I was immediately taken up on my offer by an incredulous bunch of guys who all thought I was crazy. Being vegetarian was not well known amongst this crowd and no one understood such a thing or thought it was in any way healthy.

On every table there was butter of various colors. . . blue, red, orange, everything except yellow. I never found out the reason for this, I always thought that it was because the Salvation Army or or whoever it was serving the meal, didn't want us to take too much butter, and, I must say, red butter is rather unappetizing.

After dinner, we all went upstairs where we undressed, put our clothes in a basket which we gave to a locker room man at a window, who in turn gave us an elastic band with a number of our basket affixed. He then gave us a set of pajamas and a towel. Then we all took hot showers, which was such a treat. We threw our wet towels in a pile, put on the well washed pajamas and went into the sleeping hall. This was a huge room like a small basketball court, with triple-decker bunk-beds all over. This is where we would sleep, with the unlucky men getting the top bunk . . . Unlucky, because every time someone on the lower two beds coughed or rolled over the topmost bunk shook like heck and you could be thrown out of the bed. This was a very real cause of anxiety as the people sleeping in that hall weren't very good sleepers and mostly everyone had been smoking cigarettes. I always took the top bunk out of respect for these men being my elders.

At 4:30 am. in the morning we were awakened, and amidst the tremendous amount of hacking and coughing of a roomful of elderly smokers without a chance at a cigarette until they got outside, we went and retrieved our clothes. It was scenes like this that convinced me to give up smoking at an early age. Then we all went out on the streets until 5;30am, when breakfast was served several blocks away at the Blanchet House of Hospitality. It was usually raining in the morning, and we all lined up around the block, standing under the eaves of buildings with our back sides dry and the rain wetting our front sides. I remember the sad state of emotional hopelessness that seemed to flood the wet streets at that hour. I was young and amused with it, but looking back, I remember the faces of those older men who stood cold and damp without a home or someone to care for them. These were men who were not on a great adventure like myself. They were down and out. Eventually, we were allowed in for a good meal of steaming hot oatmeal with all the cookies you wanted, the guy handing out the cookies saying,"Take all you want boys. Stuff your pockets!" The men usually didn't take much as they didn't like sugar and cookies having had so much of both. With them, everyone was starved for protein.

After breakfast it was out on the streets to look for work. A lot of the men worked in the fields on the large farms that surrounded the area. Buses would pick us up downtown in the early morning and take us out to the fields. I remember picking cucumbers, bent over all day, taking our bags to the large wooden boxes set out in the fields covered with doweled slats that would prevent any cucumbers bigger than a certain size from going into the box, when a bag was emptied out on top of the slats. There was a guy there whose only job was to rake the discarded cucumbers out onto the ground where they built up in mounds and were trampled on. Most of the crop was wasted in this way. But all crops were not the same. Some paid more than others. The general consensus amongst the men was that fruits like apple and pears would pay the best and provide the best living conditions. Talking to the elderly men, they all praised the life of a migrant fruit picker. I decided to find out what they were talking about.

Following the Fruit Harvests

Not wanting to stay at the Salvation Army, or work in the bottom lands around the large cities and pick cucumbers or lettuce or tomatoes and not wanting some 9 to 5 job in the city, I followed the fruit harvests up the West coast. Over the course of several years I would begin the year with Avocados in Southern California and go on to Pears and Apples in the late summer and fall. I usually began in Fallbrook, a small town known for its avocados in southern California. the men I worked with were mostly Mexican and I found it amusing and ironic that they all hated the taste of avocados. It was hot work and not very enjoyable in the flat orchards of endless trees. As the year progressed into the late spring, I picked stone fruit, cherries, peaches, apricots and fruit and more fruit as the days grew longer and hotter into summer. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, it seemed the weather began to cool off at night and then even the days began to grow colder as the sun rode lower in the sky and the fall season progressed. I moved always north. I passed through the inland valleys of California, Oregon, Washington and even on up into the Okanagan Valley of Southern Canada. As the fall began, apples and pears were the fruit of the northern valleys of Oregon and Washington, I lived out in the fields and orchards, in 'pickers cabins', small, one room simply built sheds with hard beds and a wood stove, provided to migrant laborers by the owners of the orchards. All day, from early morning to dusk, we went up and down the three-legged picking ladders in trees full of fruit, placing the harvest in our pickers canvas bags and pouring the fruits like jewels into large wooden boxes placed out in the orchards. We could see the slopes and snow covered peaks of the volcanic mountains like Mt. St Helens or Mt. Rainier. The volcanic peaks seemed like intrusions of dinosaurs into a modern day city. They were volcano's! They caused us to reflect on how small and insignificant our loves were and how grand the events that had once swept across a land now full of orchards and trees.

Because my friend Bobby and I were amongst the youngest of the fruit pickers, we were often given the most difficult of the trees, those on steeper hillsides or those which did not have so much low hanging fruits. We didn't care. We were having fun. We had plenty of energy and we saw that by taking the more difficult trees we helped out the older pickers, some of whom were doing this with their families, giving to them the low-hanging fruit. We were outside in fresh air all day, basking in sunshine, looking at beautiful mountains and we made our own dinner at night of rice and vegetables in our cabin. We read books after dinner and discussed what we read as we sat out on the steps in front of our cabin and then as it got colder we moved inside in front of a fire where our conversations got deeper and more immediate as it got chilly and dark. We slept well on cheap beds and woke up early, refreshed. We made what I thought was good money, about $50 per large box and we always filled at least two a day. We had no bills or credit cards, no mortgages or rents, no dependents, no car, no insurance. We were adrift on a marvelous sea of life.

At the end of the picking season, we hitchhiked and hopped freight trains to southern California to winter in Laguna Beach. It was a delightful place and the people there seemed soft and charming. It was an indulgent climate and we would lay on the beaches all day, watch girls in bikinis, meet people, talk and cook and sleep on more remote beaches at night. I would read book after book and the heat of the sun and warmth felt balancing after the chill fall air of the orchards.

(For more Read: Babushka -My Traveling Companion)

I camped along the Big Sur coast, living close to the ocean. always setting my tent where a river would pour into the sea. That way, I always had water to bathe in and to drink. I meditated, prayed, fasted and adventured, soaking up the magical scenery, dipping daily in the ocean. I would hitchhike 20 miles up to the Safeway in Carmel and go through their dumpster, reveling in the amazing harvest of food to be had for free. If a certain date had come up o the food it was thrown away. I found vegetables and fruit with only small blemishes. Cheese or yogurts that had expired only that day. I would fill my knapsack and several other bags with the food and return to my campsite down the coast like a conquering king where I would share my bounty with others.

Tassajara Zen Center

With my friend Bobby, I hiked back to Tassajara Zen Center from Big Sur. It was a beautiful, hard walk, up steep mountains and down, through the Ventana wilderness, a hike that took us several days. After we cleared the first coastal range, we hiked into forests of huge redwoods. The trail would come around the side of the mountain and begin a traverse, running back along the side of the mountain, cutting sideways on the very steep hillside. As we looked out level from the trail, we saw huge trees towering above us, their tops soaring up to the sky. Then as we looked down over the outside edge of the trail, we could see the trunks of those very same trees extending far down to the ground. I had never before seen such huge living things. We saw almost no one and the area was a wilderness. I had never been so far away from everything. At night, we were definitely small, unprotected and vulnerable in very remote campsites. I reveled in it.

Finally, we began to approach the Tassajara hot springs and the collection of buildings that form the Zendo there. As we came down a small canyon trail, late in the afternoon, we saw about 10 Buddhist monks all in black flowing robes, coming out of their meditation caves along the cliffs above a creek and smiling broadly at us. It seemed like an ancient dream and I felt a little awed at the romantic vision of it all. Then their dog started barking at us and they yelled at him to “Shut the fuck up”. Their shout of 'reality' broke the intoxicating reverie of my romantic vision and restored me to balance, simultaneously giving me a deeper and more realistic faith in both Buddhism and Buddhist religious practitioners. With this shout of reality, I saw and felt in the monks a genuine expression of life and religion, an expression which did not try to put on any airs or false pretenses. It seemed to be a religion based on reality, not idealism.

When we arrived in Tassajara, I met Suzuki Roshi. A woman monk, who seemed to be in in charge of the 'greeting' aspect of the Zen center had met us as we walked in and told us that we could not use the hot springs. Just then, the Roshi walked up and asked us how we had come to be there. He was a very bright, happy and serious man. When we told him we had come up Pine Ridge and hiked over from the coast, he seemed very pleased with this and told us we were welcome to use the baths, thus instructing the woman monk to allow us to do so. We gratefully soaked our weary bodies in those beautiful hot springs, rare true treasures of exquisite healing, surrounded by miles and miles of wilderness.

During these years, after working late into the falI in Washington State of Canada, I wintered in Southern California on the beaches. It felt so wonderful to lay out in the sun on the warm white sands and then to body surf for hours in the sparkling ocean. I was amazed at the abundance of beautiful blonde-haired girls in Bikinis. I luxuriated in the noticing of so much female flesh and the easy air of sensuality I felt all around me in these southern climes. Although I was highly desirous of what girls seemed to offer and would of easily of gone off on another path in life, had any one of these charming women ever chosen me for her lover, such was not to be at this time. I was 'allowed' by fate my idealistic orientation to something 'else' and instead of settling down in Santa Barbara or Laguna Beach to a life of very attractive pressurizing, I went off to hike and camp in the high country wilderness areas of our national parks, spending time alone and living off of rice and vegetables.

I would often walk into the high wilderness country, wandering amongst the pristine clear lakes of the Sierra back country, knowing that it would take me about 3 or 4 days to miss the food and company of the lower elevations. Then, when I finally had enough of the isolation, I would want to end it immediately, but, of course, it would take me another 3-4 days to hike out. I had to deal with myself and my desires for company and distraction during that 3-4 day hike out. I had to slow down and 'take it', there was no other way. It was a good practice for me and brought me up against myself. I was always strong and determined for the first few days and then some strong force would seem to grab me, turning my thoughts and intentions from the vast and impersonal wilderness to the attractions of people, conversations and the complex cities.

Once, deep in the back country, I saw a a strange scene in which a small snake had wrapped itself around a bird several times and had its fangs sunk into the breast of the bird. One of the wings of the bird was free and every once in a while the bird would struggle strongly, trying to to escape, as they both thrashed around on the ground. I watched the scene for quite a while and then felt a compassion for the bird. I took a stick and began to unwind the tail of the snake from around the bird as they both watched me with their eyes. All of a sudden the snake released its fangs from the breast of the bird and struck out at me. At the same time the bird flew off. I wondered for a long time if I had done the 'right' thing. I noticed that my idealism had reached a dead end in a paradox: Certainly the snake deserved his meal. Certainly the bird deserved his life.

(I wrote a story about this years later: Set Me as a Seal Upon thy Heart)

I had my first real girlfriend, one with who I lived and 'slept'. We lived in a yellow school bus by a lake on a three-thousand acre maple sugar farm in north central Pennsylvania. We cut wood all year and prepared everything for the sugar run in the spring when in a burst of activity we worked round the clock collecting and boiling maple sap and making maple sugar. We had a white German shepherd named Shiva and made maple sugar as we lived out the fantasy of living off the land.

I tasted a vanishing slice of America. I moved amongst migrant laborers and hobos, hippies and students, religious idealists and practical back to the landers, meditators and druggies. I noticed that it did not matter so much what a person did or how they dressed or looked- Amongst all of them, I found both 'good' and 'bad' in people and things.

(For more about this period listen to: Train out of Cicero)

                 Registering for the Draft and Running from the FBI (1970-1971)                    

I turned 18 in 1970 and became eligible for the draft. The Vietnam War was in full swing. I did not register, naively and idealistically believing that “If they gave a war and no one came, there could be no war”. I was stopped for hitchhiking with my girlfriend in upper New York State and taken into a police station. She looked young and they contacted her parents to make sure she was of an age to be without a guardian. There just happened to be an FBI agent in the station. He asked me, “Where is your draft card?” I told him that I had registered, but had lost the card. Since there were many draft dodgers fleeing to Canada at that time, he decided to investigate, but, due to what I remember as a 'computer malfunction', was unable to confirm or deny my story at that time.

We were let go and soon after that, the FBI agent must of found out that the draft board had no record of my name, that I had been involved with the antiwar movement, had been arrested for the ‘napalm a dog’ incident, had friends amongst the Weather Underground (a violent anti-war movement), and was therefore highly suspect as a draft dodger. After this run-in with the law and from then on, I needed to avoid the police. I rode the freight trains when I would travel around the US and spent more time in the high mountains of California and Colorado, delighting in nature. It gave me a wonderful taste of wilderness and the realization that nature, although overwhelmingly beautiful and possessed of 'wisdom', did not care about me in particular or any individual form of life. It was like a secret that I found that to be refreshing and humbling. Meanwhile, the FBI pursued me on the East coast, going to my home, relatives and friends over the next few years.

   The Bhagavad-Gita and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

As I matured and entered my 20’s, I became more and more discouraged with politics as a way of remaking the world. I had met too many people who had wonderful and noble political ideas, beliefs and causes, but, were unhappy themselves and even emotionally aggressive or violent. Some of the 'famous' among of them had stayed at my house in Takoma Park when I lived there with my parents. I noticed how they acted when they were not on 'stage'. I often thought that if these famous 'peaceful' people were left on an island to fend for themselves, after a while they would be at war with each other. Steering my own life off this information, I felt I had to change the individual instead of 'the world' and I had to do so beginning with myself.

Up until this point, I had long hair and lived the life of what I conceived of as a renunciate- free of most of the obligations of our society. I never really hung out in the hippy scene, but I shared much of their idealism. I took life as it came to me, not trying to make it happen. I felt that desire for things and the obligations of full-time jobs and committed relationships seemed to lead most people into a complex morass of everyday life- a morass in which most of the people I saw around me were suffering. If it did not seem like suffering at any particular moment, I saw that you only needed to 'give it or them a while'. I knew very few older people who I saw or felt could be called 'happy' or truly wise.

One day, I ran into an older German man in Santa Barbara. He had been with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and he took an interest in me.

“What are you doing with your life?” he asked.

“I am just going with the river, wherever it takes me”, I replied.

“You need not only float down the river" , he answered. "You need not hit every rock and rapid on the way. You can take the rudder on the boat of your life and steer”.

He was right. There was another way of living and considering this life. His answer became a turning point for me and I saw very clearly that I should and could take a greater responsibility for my life and adventures. It was the awakening of my will and a recognition of the need to apply it. This man became a mentor for me.

A Deeper Understanding of 'Renunciation'

He went on to tell me about Transcendental Meditation and gave me Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita. I read it and before I had finished the first chapter, it became the second book to change my life (after Siddhartha). In the introduction to his commentary, Maharishi pointed out that the 'renunciation' spoken of in the Bhagavad-Gita and many other Indian scriptures, was the description of a person who had realized God, not a prescription of the way to do so. Although Maharishi was a formal renunciate and he recognized this as a valid lifestyle, he said that the lifestyle of a monk was just a lifestyle and that it was not a necessary one to realize God. Maharishi wrote of how the path to God had been closed for centuries to those who were not monks based on the confusion of a description of realization with a certain lifestyle, that of a renunciate. A wrong and improper interpretation of the the message of the Bhagavad-Gita as well as other great Teachers has been the result. Even amongst those who attempted the path of renunciation, Maharishi said that most were still putting the cart before the horse, imitating the state of renunciation by giving up the world to find God. True renunciation was the result of God-realization not its cause. However dramatic, renunciation does not cause God-realization. This was very big news to me. All my life I had struggled with what I thought was 'renunciation', with trying to give it up, lay it down and let it go. I had failed in all of it. I was drawn to Maharishi to be with him and to drink in his radical wisdom.

Maharishi pointed out that one who had realized God was spontaneously a true renunciate. He made the analogy of a poor person losing a thousand dollars. How difficult that would be for him, how disturbing to his life. Then, Maharishi contrasted that poor mans' experience to a person who had a billion dollars. The billionaire would be unaffected by the same experience, by the loss of thousand dollars. In the terms of the analogy, the billionaire was spontaneously a renunciate. Just so, a man who had realized the Divine, the source and fullness of happiness( in this analogy the billion dollars) was unaffected by the gains and losses of the world. Renunciation was the result of Realization, not the cause. Maharishi claimed to offer a way to attain realization in this lifetime. My German mentor said that I could meet, learn and sit at the feet of this great teacher.

( For more about Maharishi, renunciation and the 'cart before the horse': Let Me Tell You A Story)

This seemed to be the path I had been seeking. I began TM and with regular meditation and yoga asana my life became more healthy and balanced. After only a few months, I decided to become a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. The teacher training course that year was being held in Majorca, Spain and to go there, I needed a passport. That meant I had to register for the draft. To do that would probably get me arrested by the FBI and I would have to go to jail. I decided to register and pass through whatever I had to endure. I was called in to an FBI office and found out that they would not press charges- The draft board in my area where I was supposed to have registered had been broken into and the records burned.

      Teacher of Transcendental Meditation (1972)   

My way was free and I went on to spend 8 months in Europe, with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I was tremendously excited to go and I flew to Europe. When I arrived in Calle Antenna, Mallorca. I had a great desire to see Maharishi after practicing the meditation he taught, reading his books and hearing about him from others. We were told we would see him our very first evening in the small ballroom of a hotel right on the ocean. I was given a room in another hotel about a half mile from there. After most people had settled into their rooms, they all went to dinner, but, I meditated in my room, thrilled with what was about to occur, I was going to see Maharishi. I planned to arrive just before the appointed time at the hall.

I set out to walk the half mile along the deserted road between my hotel and the one in which we were to see Maharishi. The night was dark and strange smells of another country filled the air. I could hear the ocean far away. The sky was poured with stars and the road was shrouded in darkness, broken only by a streetlight every hundred yards or so. There were no trees or bushes along the way. I could see a long way down the road as it rose and fell like waves on the ocean stretching off into the distance. Several hundred yards away I saw a small group of people walking towards me as they passed under a light and descended down into a dip in the road. I kept walking and as I approached a rise on the road where a streetlight stood, I saw coming from the other direction a group of men, many of them dressed in robes. In an instant, I knew it was Maharishi. I stopped and spontaneously brought my hands up to my chest in the Indian greeting of Namaskar. The group was about 20 yards off. As they approached the top of the hill, Maharishi noticed me and stopped. He brought up his hands in namaskar to me as the group surrounded him on either side. At that moment I felt a huge descent of nectar-like energy that literally brought me to my knees as I continued to gaze at him. Then, Maharishi walked towards me, at the same time that a car came from the direction of his hotel, its lights illuminating the scene. He uttered the words 'Jai Guru Dev' and patted me on the head. The car pulled up and he got into it. As I followed him with my eyes, I was crying with joy. He smiled at me out the window, nammaskared again and the car drove off. I was filled with overwhelming happiness.

That night I heard him speak for the first time and I fell in love with him. The way he came into the room, moving very veryslowly accepting the gifts of a flower from each of us, looking us each in the eyes, always saying Jai Guru Dev, Glory to the Divine Guru. The way he moved, the way he spoke, the way he sat before he spoke to us, the way he took a flower from the many that had been given to him and held and gestured with it whie he spoke with us. His wisdom of the religious path of ancient India, a wisdom that he embodied. That feeling continued over the six months I spent there in Mallorca, sitting with him daily every evening while he spoke to us and answered questions for several hours.

During that time we engaged in what was called 'rounding' or the alternation of meditation, yoga and pranayama for 12-15 hours a day. The initial part of this time was in Mallorca, Spain and the last several months took place in Fiuggi Fonte, Italy. Through Maharishi, I was exposed to the most ancient way of religious practice, that of living and meditating in the company a realized guru. I believed Maharishi to be a Realizer, one who knew and had experienced what the scriptures talked about. He had been an intimate devotee and disciple of the great Sankaracharya of Jyotir Math, Brahmananda Saraswati. Maharishi had learned everything at the feet of his Master and according to that same living tradition. Maharishi was sharing with us experientially and philosophically the ancient Vedic culture of India.

During my time on the course, I spent my days in silence or mouna and had several classical experiences of a yogic variety. None of them changed my life but I believe they gave me a subtle or perhaps not so subtle ego of accomplishment and pride. One night I told Maharishi about my oft-had experience of being the witness to may thoughts, feelings and actions. This state was described in several yogic texts and I seemed to be duplicating it in my own daily experience. Maharishi asked me several questions about this 'experience'. He asked me if this was my constant experience. I replied that on the meditation course it seemed to be nearly constant. He then asked me if I lost consciousness in deep sleep. I replied that I did lose consciousness and this 'seeming' witness state in deep sleep. Maharishi then proceeded to explain what I was experiencing; He said that the true state of the witness, is a state of consciousness that underlies the other three states of waking, dream and deep sleep and that when someone has attained to 'witness consciousness', truly, he does not lose that witness in waking, dreaming or deep sleep. What I was experiencing was the fixing of the attention on a subtle state of the mind that only seemed to be the witness, but was not. Although this experience showed some purification of the mind and attention, it was not that state of consciousness known as the 'witness'.

When I returned to the United States, I began to give lectures to the public on TM and to initiate people into the practice. During the 1970’s, I presented TM to both the Army and the Strategic Air Command. I had asked Maharishi how I should speak about 'God' or the Divine when speaking to people in the armed services. Maharishi replied that, "We need not use these words. What is important is the 'experience' of the Divine, the 'experience' of God, not the words or descriptions we could give to it". Maharishi was suggesting that teaching Transcendental Meditation would give people a way to experience God for themselves. As I traveled around the country giving talks, it was eye-opening for me to serve the armed services, the specific organizations that dealt with war. I had come to oppose war except in extreme circumstances, after all I had been kicked out of school for threatening to napalm a dog in protest of the war in Vietnam, but I never felt animosity towards soldiers or servicemen. In every place I visited, all on invitation, my experience was one of being welcomed and I found a common feeling and gracious humanity alive wherever I went. It was a great joy to help people irregardless of what they believed and what they did and I found the lives the people who flew these bombers fascinating and different.

Once, after giving a presentation on TM at Loring Air Force Base in Aroostook County Maine, I was talking privately with one of the SAC airmen who was thinking of starting meditation. He told me that he did not believe in Transcendental Meditation and therefore, he did not see how it could work. I replied that he did not have to believe that the sun would rise, but that had nothing to do with whether it did or not. The laws of nature do not need our belief to function and TM was based on the laws of nature. I would repeatedly find that those who were the most outer directed and doubtful that meditation would ever work for them, had the most striking and powerful first-time experiences when they began meditation. I believe it was due to the contrast between their 'normal' state of mind and the one they experienced with TM when their mind for the first time ceased to be outwardly directed and turned within.

43 day fast on Water (1973)

During my time with Maharishi in Europe, I became sick with Nephritis- kidney disease. Along with this, I developed every vitamin deficiency in the book. After many tests and consultations, the western medical doctors who were working at the course, told me I had serious nephritis and would need to have my kidneys removed, after which I would need to go on dialysis and finally, wait for a kidney transplant. I was greatly disturbed. Here I was at a meditation course with a great Rishi, trying to be free and commune with God and my body was sick and pulling me down. This seemed to be the opposite of any sort of grace.

Day by day, I became sicker and sicker. One night, I had a dream in which a beautiful woman appeared to me and said, "You are not hungry. Do not eat". Confused about what to do, after all, I did have every vitamin deficiency in the book, I went to Maharishi and asked him how to proceed. I gained an audience with him very late in the evening. After talking about my experiences and the nature of the sickness, Maharishi asked me "What would your Mother say to do?" I replied that she would encourage me to fast. My Mother was a Natural Hygienic practitioner and a follower of Dr Herbert Shelton. Maharishi then suggested I follow my Mothers advice.

The teacher training course was about to move en masse to Fiuggi Fonte, Italy and everybody had been reducing the length of their meditation for the trip. Maharishi had repeatedly told us all that it was very important not to come out of 14 hours a day of meditation to 2 in just a few days. He said it was important to come down slowly, no more than an hour a day, over several weeks. He told us that the deep state of relaxation and meditation we had been engaging had stirred up a lot of 'unstressing' both physiological and psychological, to come down to quickly could be a shock to our system. Soon after the time I spoke to Maharishi about my health, the course began to move out of Mallorca to fly to Italy. Then, two days after everyone had left our hotel to fly to Italy, I went to the airport and flew to England where my Mother had given me the name of a Natural Hygienic doctor who could supervise a fast for me. I flew to Heathrow airport and after passing through customs, went to a phone booth where I hoped to find the doctor's number to call him and ask if I could come to his place and fast. I made my way to the phone booth with many pauses for rest. I was very weak from several days of fasting already as well the flight and being sick.

Just as I had parked my bags and was about to enter the phone box a man approached me and asked, "Can I help you?" I told him I was just looking for a number for a doctor in England. I was sick and was hoping to see him. "Perhaps I can help you" , he replied. "Who are you looking for?" I gave him the name of Dr. Sidwha. As soon as I gave the name the man exclaimed, "O Keki (his full name was Keki Sidwha), you've come to fast!"

I was amazed. "How do you know him?", I asked.

"I have a vegetarian rest home in the same town, Frinton on Sea. Come with me", he said. "I can take you across town and then we will take a train to Keki's place". We got a taxi and as we drove across London I saw a 'metaphysical' bookstore and asked him if we could stop so that I could purchase a book for what I felt might be a long ordeal. He agreed and I went in. There I found a book that I read again and again throughout my fast. It was the full version of The Gospel of Sri Ramkrishna by Mahendranath Gupta or M.

Dr Sidwha's fasting institute was called 'Shalimar'. He told me that it meant 'Garden of Love' and it was named after the famous gardens created for the Mughal emperor in Kashmir of which he is said to have exclaimed upon viewing them for the first time, "If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this".

I subsequently went on a 43-day water only fast, waiting until hunger returned to break it. After breaking the fast I went on seven days of vegetable and fruit juices.

In the process, I experienced a complete healing of my illness as well as a radiant health in my body and mind. For a brief while I became clairaudient and clairvoyant. Upon my return to the US, I gave several public talks on fasting and health.

Going Back to School

Over the next several years I returned to Europe several times to be with Maharishi. During a winter Teachers course on the cloudy, wet coast of Oostende, Belgium, I asked Maharishi what I should do with my life. At that time in my life, I wanted to become a monk and devote my life to religious practice. Maharishi told me that I was already 'udhvaretas', that my energy already flowed upwards and that it was not for me to become a monk at this time. He told me to get a degree in Vedic Studies. I decided to attend the excellent Religious studies department at the University of California Santa Barbara, primarily because a man by the name of Raimundo Panikar taught there and the department was strong in Indian/Sanskrit studies.

Scholarship with Buckminster Fuller (1976)

In 1976 I wrote a paper on the ‘History of Industrialization’ and was awarded a one-month scholarship to be with Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was a most brilliant and original thinker, poet, and inventor. He did many different things in his life and made a great point out of claiming to be a 'comprehensivist' as opposed to a specialist. I identified with this quality. He thought that the increasing trend of education towards specialization was creating a world of people out of touch with actual principles of how the world worked. He thought that specialization was making people and societies stupid and the world a mess. Unlike the back to the land ideal that flourished in the 60's, Fuller held that technology, by accomplishing more and using less raw materials, would allow many more people to live better lives. Of course it could also be used for great destruction and ruin. He wrote a book called "Utopia or Oblivion" on this subject. Fuller held that in the early part of the 20th century, for the first time in history, there was enough food and resources for living to be distributed completely around the world; All this, he said, was because of technology. Prior to this time there was not enough to go around and this led to the control of weaker cultures by the more aggressive, armed and therefore stronger ones. The reasoning behind their aggression was that it was either 'us' or 'them' and therefore it better be 'us'.

Fuller said that for hundreds of years the great powers of the world had based their operating philosophies on the Malthusian doctrine. Malthus was an English economist who lived at the beginning of the 19th century. That was the age when the sun never set on the English empire, they were literally all around the world. Because of the unique vantage point provided by being a highly informed Englishman and taking in economic data from all around the world for the first time in history, Malthus saw important and troubling numbers relevant to population and food supply. Malthus saw and wrote that "while population increases in an geometric ratio, food supply increases in an arithmetical ratio". In simpler terms, there would not be enough to go around as the population of the world increased. It was, either 'us or them'. Fuller said that the great civilizations of the world responded to this 'fact' in different ways. For instance, the English sought through imperialism to dominate the world and its goods. In Russia, Karl Marx reacted to the long history of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes exploiting and taking from the workers and the proletariat by seeking to do away with the exploitive class structure and replacing it with communism. Marx sought that what there was to be equally and judiciously distributed.

Fuller held that the Malthusian doctrine was wrong. It was a theory based on limited information. It was a theory that did not take into account the effect of industrialization. Industrialization changed the way the world worked. It enabled man to accomplish much more than ever before in history, using less and less material- Take for example the first computer which filled a whole room that had less computing power than a modern day laptop or the millions of tons of cable laid in the transatlantic crossing now replaced by a ten pound satellite and wireless communication. Industrialization moved increasingly in the direction of what he called ephemeralization- something less and less material or permanent. What this meant in terms of the Malthhusian doctrine is that there was enough to go around, with technology, for the first time in history, there was more than enough to go around. The implications of this were huge. It greatly changed the way I considered the world and I wrote my paper on its powerful implications.

Fullers radical thinking caused me to pay closer attention to him and through the mentoring and tutoring of my teacher at this time, a man called Merv Lane, I eventually gained access to his company in a scholarship to take part in the World Game to be held at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was a one month seminar to be led by Fuller on how to make the world work.

During that time, I was somehow invited attend a small private dinner with Fuller and just a few other people. It was the night of July 4, 1976, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While the nations first capital and the people of the United States loudly celebrated their bicentennial in the streets, our small group of six people drank in the gift of ancient wisdom from this amazing and brilliant man.

That night, Bucky spoke to us of the world of sailing and the world as seen by a man at sea. Indeed, much of Fullers terminology, the very words he used and the principles they represented, came from the nautical world. He spent much time sailing as a younger man off the coast of Maine and had been in the navy during WWII. Think of the famous term he coined- 'Spaceship Earth'. He came to this term because he thought of man as a sailor and the world as a ship. Furthermore, he pointed out that a ship is a closed and limited environment, not an unlimited one and always in motion. He told us how important it was to grasp and understand this:

He told us of many years ago he had spoken to a group of architects in New York City and had asked the assembled group if any of them knew how much the huge, many storied building they were sitting in weighed. None of them had any idea. Fuller found this to be a major oversight and a serious lack on their part. How could they maximize the potential that could come from building materials and structures if they were not thinking 'ecologically', if they did not know what the building weighed? How could they build something in accord with the operating principles of life, of spaceship earth?

Fuller, who had captained many a boat, said that 'On a ship, one always had to know how much weight was to be carried. It was important to know this if the ship was to be able to perform well on the water. It was this 'closed' or limited environment, (similar to the nature of the world as a space-ship), that gave rise to the very concept of ecology. The word 'ecos' comes from the Greek word for house or home. Ecology', he said, 'begins with the recognition of the closed or limited environment of the world. It is born of the realization that you cannot just dump your trash or waste into a river or an ocean and that it will just be washed away. We are on a ship, closed enviroment, and absolutely everything needs to be recycled. We need to know how much things 'weigh' and how they 'work'.

He spoke about 'cybernetics' which Bucky defined as the 'science of self-regulating mechanisms'. (Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the 'cyborg' or the self regulating organism. Think of 'cyberspace' as self regulating space). Bucky said that the word, cybernos, comes from the Greek word for the 'helmsman' of a boat. Bucky then made a startling statement, "A drunk cybernos makes less mistakes than a sober cybernos". I asked him how that could be . . . I didn't want to be in a boat or a car driven or steered by a drunk. He shook his head in agreement. I felt completely lost. Then he made his point, "Unless you make a mistake, you do not correct your course. Because a drunk does not make so many mistakes, he does less correction of his course and so his course is mistaken, he weaves his way down the road, or he hits something with deadly results. A sober man is constantly correcting his many little mistakes before they get big and his course is thereby true"

He spoke of 'synergetics', what Fuller called the behavior of a whole system not predicated on the behavior of its parts. He told us of chrome-nickel steel and how its strength is over 50% greater than the sum of the strength of its component metals. He spoke of gravity and how there was nothing in all the stuff of the universe that would predict it would be mutually attracted to another thing.

He spoke of the principle of 'precession'. Bucky told us how precession is the relationship that occurs between objects that are in motion. 'Imagine a top', he said. 'When it is set spinning, if you push it, it will go at right angles to the direction of your push. This is the same as the earth spinning around the sun. The suns greater gravitational attraction would pull the earth directly into itself, but since the earth is spinning it goes in a great elliptical circle around the sun'. Fuller said that the principle of precession is how life 'works'- A honeybee goes to a flower in pursuit of honey. The bee only wants the honey, but at right angles to the intention or drive of the bee, flowers are pollinated. The honeybee is not concerned with pollinating flowers. Bucky proposed that 'life happens at right angles or in a precessional manner to the 180degree straight ahead intentions of the bee'. He went on to say that it was exactly the same with a human seeking money or sex or pleasure or power. Life is happening at right angles to our desires. By recognition of this, he said, we can begin to design our lives to take into account precession and thus work with the nature of nature.

Finally, I remember that Bucky spoke of the word 'trimtab', what it was and what it represented. Fuller told us of how a large boat like the Queen Mary has a very large, many tonned rudder at the the very back of the ship. At the back end of that very large rudder is a very small rudder. When the captain wants to turn the huge main rudder in one direction, he turns the small rudder in the opposite direction. This creates a difference of water pressure or lower pressure vacuum on one side of the large rudder and the main rudder can now be moved with almost no effort; It is literally 'drawn' in that direction. Bucky said this represented the power of the individual to change the direction of the 'ship of state', doing what government and corporations cannot, by applying design science, by doing the 'right' intelligent action. Further, he pointed out how the action of the trimtab is applied when the bulk of the ship has passed, when it seems to have gone past the point of any change. Fuller died in 1983 and the epitaph carved on his tombstone says: "Call me Trimtab"

Fuller was a seminal font of ideas and principles. He left me with much more wonder at life than when I first met him. I did not understand much of his mathematical musings and my own interest with him focused mainly on his principles, philosophy, poetry and life history. He did not represent any traditional religious path but I found him to be a deeply religious man with a scientific vocabulary who had thrown himself into life as an experiment. Out of his complete submission to what is, born of many deep failures, a unique revelation and grace had come to him. To me, he was one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. By his own terms, he was a comprehensivist, not a specialist. After I came back to Santa Barbara, I shared my experiences with him in a series of public lectures.

BA with honors from University of California Santa Barbara/ Religious Studies  (1978-1982)

At UCSB, I studied with Raimundo Panikar, a great Vedic scholar, Catholic priest and real 'philosopher' in the original sense of the term- a lover of wisdom. Because of my developed knowledge of and passion for the Vedic tradition, I became friends with Pannikar and was allowed to participate in his exciting graduate courses.  We studied Indian Hermeneutics and the philosophy of language. He was a wonderful teacher. Like Fuller, Pannikar was passionate and engaged with ideas and their application in everyday life and living. Knowledge meant something to him, it was important to the very quality of a persons life, not just their job or financial future. With Pannikar, there was something at stake with learning. He saw it as part of a religious life.

I graduated with a BA at the top of the Religious Studies department and, was awarded scholarships to the graduate schools of Harvard, Chicago and the University of Hawaii in Religious Studies. I visited the schools and met with the professors in the relevant departments. I was particularly and decidedly un-impressed with the teachers as none of them seemed to be 'practitioners' of the religious traditions they were teaching, none of them had sought out a true Guru or 'realizer' and lived a religious life of practice with them and none of them had any realization or religious experience to speak of in their own life. Nor did they seem really interested in getting any experience. Their knowledge seemed all in their heads, it had not come down into their their lives. I decided not to go into what I felt was a sterile ‘ivory tower of learning’. Instead, I decided to go down into the 'body', to go out into the world, to work with my hands in a craft. It was not something that I had been attracted to in my life. In fact, it was the opposite of what I seemed to be gifted in. That was why I chose it. I later found out that doing what you are not attracted to has some precedence in the Tantric paths.

"To build character, do something for no other reason than its difficulty"

-William James

At the time, I thought working with my hands would bring 'balance' to my life. Through serendipity, I got work in a cabinet shop and a few months later, found a job doing architectural woodworking for Gene Hackman, the actor, at his estate in Montecito. I had been asked if I could build a spiral staircase on a deck in back of his house. I said that I could even though I had never done such a thing, but, I knew or felt that I could find someone who knew how to do it and he or she could tell me. Although the stairway was overbuilt, I built it well. It was the beginning of many years of designing and building. A skill that has served me well in the world allowing me to make money and support myself and others.

Owner and Founder of Malakoff and Associates (1983-1999)

Over time, I found more and more high-end exotic woodworking jobs and eventually developed a full-fledged company-Malakoff and Associates, an Architectural Woodworking Firm that employed 14 people in Sausalito, Ca. We designed and built the interiors of the houses and boats of the very rich and famous, including a Gothic Cathedral- The Cathedral of the Madeline in Salt Lake City, for the Catholic Church and the interior of a 125ft classical motor yacht for Werner Erhard. Several of my creations were featured in the Fine Woodworking. We did exquisite work and had lots of it. Nonetheless, I found the necessity to always deal with money and difficult clients very stressful and disturbing. It had been another thing altogether when only I was involved. Now I had the feeling and responsibility for the lives of others, and, their actions also affected me. I could not just walk away when somebody else made a mistake. I was responsible for all of it. There were legal contracts, liens to make and meetings with accountants.

As we became larger and more successful, I found myself in cash-flow problems that reached a crisis, when a very rich client, who I still do not know if he was 'crazy' or criminal, did not pay us the last $65K for a large library we had done to perfection. I had to go bankrupt. It was one of the most difficult times of my life. I was unable to honor many commitments and had the unsettling experience that most of the people around me did not care what the explanation or cause was, they only wanted their money.

Many people acted extremely selfishly. I had gone to all our creditors and told them that if they would hold off on their demand for immediate payments and not shut down the lines of credit they had extended, that our company could pull itself out of this hole. We had lots of work and an excellent reputation. But, word of our difficulty was out, indeed, I had put it out myself, by naively sharing with others what our situation was.

Everyone was worried that they would be last in line, after the other guy, and thus they might not be paid at all. So, all our creditors came at our company for their money in full, filing for judgments in courts. In the end, the bankruptcy courts hashed it all out and no one got anything. I had to close the business in the midst of what for years had seemed a fantastic 'success'.

Heart Attack and Ayurveda

Although I had eaten what I thought was very good diet and had been mostly a vegetarian for most of my life, I had, in 2001, what seemed to be a heart attack. I was taken to the hospital where they could not find the 'cause' of the heart attack or what to do about it. The doctors suggested a variety of tests including one in which they would thread something into my heart from my groin to take a look around. This did not seem like a very good idea to me and I declined their suggestions and went home to rest. I had seen too many people fall into the hands of the medical practitioners and it very, very rarely came out for the good.

A friend of mine asked me if I had been to an Ayurvedic doctor. 'After all', she said, 'You have studied the Vedic tradition'. Indeed, Vedic medicine or Ayurveda was an aspect of that ancient tradition, but, it was an aspect that I had never explored.

Subsequently, I went to an Ayurvedic doctor who diagnosed my condition as excessive 'Pitta' or too much of the fire element and changed my diet considerably. The main things that I ate on a regular basis were shown to be the direct and specific causes of my 'dis' eased state. The dietary changes and herbs I took made a huge and successful difference. My heart 'problem' as well as many other symptoms I thought were un-related, went away. I became fascinated with Ayurveda and wanted to help others apply its beautiful, rational and effective wisdom in their own lives. I felt I had found a way to understand and 'manipulate' the law of karma as it applied to health and disease.

Ayurveda Degree Kalidas Sanskrit University - Nagpur India (2002-2004)

So, I went back into Vedic studies with a focus on the Indian Medical tradition. In 2002 I began a course of study in Ayurveda and subsequently went to India where I received a degree in the subject from Kalidas Sanskrit University, the very first Ayurvedic degree program from an Indian University, presented specifically for Western students. I studied under Dr. Sunil Joshi, a living legend in the field.

                              BENARAS                      

After receiving my degree, I traveled around India for three months. I went to Benaras and lived on the Ganges from one full moon to another. I found the ancient cremation grounds of Manikarnika Ghat extremely attractive. Part of every day I was in Benaras, I went to the cremation grounds. To see so many bodies burning day after day was the perfect antidote to my cultural exposure to Disneyland and Hollywood. It gave me the balancing vision of death as a part of life. Something rarely experienced in the west. The cremation grounds sobered me and brought me to ground. Over time I became friends with one of the doms, the caste that carries out the cremations. I was invited to eat at his 'house' in Benaras and I learned much about the cremation rituals and what was going on around me. Although I had observed the cremation grounds every day, without someone pointing out to me all the events and rituals of what was happening, I would of passed over much of it. I was given the opportunity to photograph right in the cremation grounds for one day and the pictures offer an intimate vision of the burning grounds of Manikarnika ghat.

(To read more about Benaras and see Pictures)

(To see Pictures Only of the Manikarnika Ghat- Cremation Grounds)

Benaras is the oldest city in the world and full of everything, every taste and all the pairs of opposites in abundance. It was a city that seemed like a living myth, overflowing with stories and history. There was not a place in the old part of the city, that one could not find a temple of some sort.

(To view Slide show/ Movie on Benaras)

Being in India was like traveling back to the origin of our world, not just in time and ages, but to the source of every thing and idea that we live amongst today, even in the West. In philosophy and religion, in architecture and science, in astronomy and astrology, in medicine and yoga, if you follow the roots, they all go deep, deep, down into the Vedic culture of India.

Tsunami, Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, India (2004)   

In the winter of 2004, I was living on the coast of Tamil Nadu on the southeast coast of India in a town called Mamallapuram.

On the 26th of December, the day of the full moon, early in the morning, I felt a strong and distant earthquake, larger and longer than I have ever felt before. A few hours later, a tidal surge of 15ft came in, killing thousands of people up and down the coast where I was living. 

Most of the fishermen and their families lived directly on the ocean.

Their houses were destroyed, their boats swept out to sea, their young and oldest among them killed.

(For Story and Pictures: Tsunami)

(For Pictures Only of The Tsunami in Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu)

I was staying on the second floor of a stone beachfront cottage and had a first hand view and experience of the whole thing.

I escaped only by ‘luck’ or ‘fate’

To read more about Fate or luck: (Tragedy, Fate and Nemesis) or another story: (Character and Fate)

There is an old saying in India:

The bird of Wisdom has two wings