I went to Franklin elementary school, Warren junior high school, and Newton high school. Newton, Massachusetts was even written up in Time or Life Magazines as one of the “great suburban schools”. You know, the best anywhere. But because there were so many other things up for me school hardly made any sense at all. I’m sure they taught me more than reading, writing, and arithmetic but that’s about all I remember. I remember being forced to learn facts about history. But I was thinking about a lot of other things and school didn’t make much sense to me.

Probably my happiest school days were during elementary school. Junior high school was extraordinarily painful. High school somewhat less as I began to find people that I had more in common with.

You probably remember the Beatles coming on the Ed Sullivan show. Then the Beatles grew their hair long. Newton, Massachusetts was right outside of Boston next to Cambridge. It’s a progressive, pretty liberal place. On top of everything else I was dealing with, the Vietnam War was going on. Then came the psychedelic 60's. My cousin Stephen used to go over to Timothy Leary’s house. Timothy Leary lived in Newton as well. At the time I didn’t know too much about this, but there were just lots of things going on. Robert Kennedy once came to our school and gave a talk. Afterwards the students went on a major moratorium strike and our school closed down. Teachers left and never came back. All of this added to the feeling that I just wanted to get out of there.

My only goal in school was to get out. I didn’t know what was next. I was a confused young guy. I began to experiment a little bit with drugs at that point. I had a very difficult period with what I thought was marijuana but I now believe it was laced with PCP or other strong psychedelic. I had a very dis associate if experience that led me to think I was going to die or go crazy. I ended up seeing a psychiatrist for six months. But overall it was a very cathartic experience that helped me to see. It brought up a lot of old wounds that were very beneficial for me. But it was quite a process of confusion and despair.

I finally graduated high school. I didn’t even think about college because I just wanted to get out of school. All of a sudden I realized that a lot of my friends were going to college and it dawned on me: “what am I going to do?”

A friend of mine was going to have very strict prep school in Cambridge right outside of Harvard square. It was called New Prep, and it was run by a former submarine Admiral. Kids who went there had to wear a tie and suit coat. I didn’t know what else to do so I thought that since my friend was going there I would go also. My intention was to go there for a year and get good enough marks that I would be accepted into a college. I had a low self esteem at that point because I had fairly low grades in school. I didn’t even know whether I would be able to get in, but I went there for a year. During this time I got into downhill skiing Up in Vermont and New Hampshire. So I decided to go to school somewhere up there so I could go skiing a lot of the time. I got accepted to Linden State College, which is part of the state college system in Vermont. It’s located in Lindenville, Vermont in the “northeast kingdom” of Vermont. I went there and continued to flounder and be confused. I went skiing, got high, and got drunk and was a pretty unhappy guy trying to find his way in life.

Finally after my freshman year I flunked out. I was re-admitted on a warning. I remember having a conversation with my mother. Suddenly I felt like I wanted to learn. But I wanted to do it my way and see what interested me.

In the early seventies Vermont was quite an interesting place. There were a lot of communes and people doing spiritual practices. There were alternative back-to-the-woods lifestyles. I was intrigued with Vermont. I love the snow and I was close to a big mountain for skiing.

So there was a class being offered called “Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism and Zen,” and I had never heard of any of these things. But something attracted me in the class description; I don’t even quite know why. This was during my sophomore year.

So I took this course. The teacher was named Bill Jackson, and he was an incredible guy, an incredible practitioner of meditation. He later got a scholarship to go to Harvard and get a Ph.D. He is a brilliant man.

The first thing we read was the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. There is one particular epigram… I forget the number… but it says: “there is no need to look outside your window. Everything you need to know is inside you.”

I looked at that epigram and couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that someone had thought about life in that way. I began reading more about the Tao Te Ching and it just resonated so deeply inside me! I couldn’t believe that people also felt like this. I think I had been thinking in these ways for several years but I never knew anyone else who felt like this. I never knew that this would even be valued or understood or talked about.

I was like a fish that had entered into a profound ocean. I couldn’t believe it. I began reading more of the Tao Te Ching and it just made so much sense to me. I began to address some of the deeper struggles that I’d had earlier in my life about life and death. This was my introduction into eastern wisdom and I began to just consume it.

It was just about this time that Ram Dass’s book “Be Here Now” came out. It came to me and I read that, and I became aware that there were other westerners thinking about this stuff. My eyes began to open. There were other people who were looking deeply into their lives. That’s when I began to get involved in meditation practice and spirituality.

I ended up graduating with high honors majoring in philosophy and religion, and I’ve been on this path ever since.

Coming out of college I lived in the deep woods of Vermont. This was a time of many intense spiritual experiences. Vermont is an incredibly beautiful place and I really got into the land and woods of Vermont. It’s so vibrant in those woods and the seasons are so incredible.

I spent a lot of time and solitude. I also got deeply involved in psychedelic drugs, particularly with hallucinogenics, particularly marijuana. There was a period where I was using it quite often and meditating and just being, self out in the woods. There was a period when I was deeply into meditation but involve using psychedelics from time to time. It was a period of many Revelations and deep insights into life. I wasn’t sure where I was going to go with it, but I was just opening up to this vast universe that I had never experienced before. It was finding myself, my path.

There were times when I was living by myself and other times I had met a woman and was living with her as well. At one point we were going to get married but I realized that she wasn’t the right partner for me. But she was the one who brought me to California. We left Vermont she was in search of finishing her undergraduate work. I was in search of finishing my graduate work. We did a cross-country trip looking at schools; we also went up into Canada. I looked at a school that had a humanistic/transpersonal psychology perspective that would honor the mind/body/spirit approach to education. There were a few alternatives graduate schools such as the Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, or the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto.

We eventually landed in San Francisco. She was going to go to New College and I was going to apply either to Institute of Integral Studies or to Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Who was during this transition that we found a place and went back to the East Coast to gather up our stuff and began to move out to California. We were also planning a wedding. It was then that I realize that she wasn’t the right partner for me. She was a really beautiful person but I just wasn’t ready.

We got out to California and she was out here for about a week. We had finally broken up and she had decided to go back to the East Coast. I decided to stay.