I don't know if I have always been what I have become, but I have always been driven by an open mind and a deep curiosity towards the mysteries of people and culture. This has led to a quest for personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal truth, with an appetite for anthropological forays into numerous sub-cultures, which pulled me out of the comfort zone, up and down into other levels entirely. My family background pre-disposed me to value knowledge and personal growth  over status and material acquisition. Throughout, my spirit companions have been outsider art, literature, and music that deconstruct and reconstruct the limited world of  conventional norms 

I look back to the time when the darkness of childhood began to slowly trickle downstream and my adult life dawned. In January, 1966, while still in high school, I was fortunate to have stumbled into the Trips Festival in San Francisco, the seminal event in which the torched was passed from  Kerouac and the Beats to Kesey and the Pranksters. The explosion of counter-culture scene was still a year or so away, but gathering steam. The summer of 1966 arrived, and inspired by the essences unfurling around me, I set out as a 17 year-old on a transformative solo hitchhiking adventure through England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, down the Yugoslavian coast, through the North Albanian and Macedonian mountains to Athens, to the islands of Skyros and Mykonos, and back through Italy. By the time I arrived at my university in the fall of 1966, my life had gone from black & white to color and I was ready! Spending every week-end in San Francisco provided me with a musical and cultural education courtesy of Bill Graham and Chet Helms and their events at the Fillmore Auditoriums, the Family Dog, and, of course, the many tribal music gatherings in Golden Gate Park.

I was able to undertake a second major hitchhiking adventure in the summer of 1968. Now as a 19-year-old, accompanied by my wonderful first love, I spent another 2 months hitchhiking through the south of France, Spain, Monaco, and north through Germany, Denmark, Holland, Copenhagen,  and finally across a couple of channels to England and Ireland. 

A few years later, in 1970, after living in Portland, I undertook the American version of these high-risk, low-cost road trip where you never knew who you meet, what would you eat and where would you sleep. where you would sleep.  This time it was 5000 miles of uncertainty  hitchhiking across a crazy fractured America caught up in the fear and loathing of the times. Traveling solo, I moved through Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Ohio, Maryland, Washington, Pennsylvania, and finally to New York. The way back took me through Illinois, nameless nowhere-towns in North Dakota, across the border into Canada at Winnipeg, and eventually back west on the Trans-Canada Highway on a memorable 24-hour high speed drive to Vancouver and Seattle. 

For a young man coming of age, these were remarkable, heady times, and my remaining memories are mostly good ones. Many people had a lasting influence including John Chowning, Robb Crist, Robert Rosen, Ernie Milburn, Vic Lovell, David Harris, Ira Sandperl, Husain Sam-Tio Chung, Pat Morrison and the Gyre, John Cisco, Dan Silva, Kit Withers, Richard X, the peripatetic German, and the entire community around Kepler’s Bookstore and the Mid-Peninsula Free University. Some are still here, and some are long gone. Some I knew well and some just barely. But all live on inside me in ways that contribute to the depth and richness of my life.

In 1967, my consciousness-raising activities of all kinds had been kicked into high gear by Robb Crist (1929-1975), the mystic and psychedelic adventurer whose groups introduced me to the alternate ways of life possible in the hero’s journey as we studied, explored, and discussed The Hero with a Thousand Faces in his now long-gone rustic cottage just off Valparaiso Ave  in Menlo Park.

Throughout the years from 1966 to 1980, I continued my quest for meaning and purpose in the wake of  the deconstruction of social reality in 1960’s counterculture. My influences and practices included Suzuki Roshi, Alan Watts, Zen Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, native-American peyote ceremonies, Subud, Martin Buber, Gurdjieff, the controversial Erhard Seminars Trainings, and a brush with the Seth Material, the Carlos Castenada Don Juan chronicles, and other forms of new age creationism.

My first experiences with psychotherapy were back in the 60’s in Palo Alto with Vic Lovell’s encounter groups and Husain Chung’s  Marathon Gestalt Groups. Later 0n, I had a very positive experience  in series of engagements between 1974 and 1982 with a wonderful old-school psychiatrist who sat behind a large desk on the 16 floor  of the 450 Sutter medical building  dispensing wisdom I was sorely in need of.  I came to psychoanalysis last, and, in two 4x per week times analyses  on the couch between 1987 and 1996., experienced

I was once told by a zen teacher that there were two ways to move toward  wisdom. The first was to withdraw from everyday life to a monastery for intensive practice with a guru or mentor.  The second alternative  was to fully throw oneself  into the hurly-burly of everyday life and love,  and to make every mistake and bad decision possible until there was nothing left to experience but the ‘Aha” moment.  to say it another way, I’ve been down the right roads, and I’ve been down most of the wrong ones too. Having crawled from the wreckage more than once, I have been able slowly integrate the entirety of my experience,  developing a practice of addressing personal challenges, as well making forays which sometimes can break on through to the other side. The vista that opened  for me on the latter path is better described as existential  than religious or spiritual, since  I gravitated toward a Weltanschaung characterized by awe, mystery and gratitude without  teleological meaning or purpose.

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