What do we do with our rare and precious human life?

Like many spiritual seekers in the 1960s, I sought release and relief from family and cultural conflicts and pressures, dead end wars and fears of nuclear annihilation. I read widely in my early teens, confined to bed and home by asthma and a solitary bicycle accident when I was twelve. By high school graduation in 1963 I sought to transcend the ego, I mused, with the company of avant-garde intellectuals years older, and younger social rebels on the streets of Greenwich Village. I tried drugs, free sex and a spontaneous lifestyle, seeking to go beyond the conformist, mundane “square” world. I went “on the road” by myself with little money, no contacts, no maps, no plans and no thought for the future but to find love. Hitchhiking and riding freight trains, I was taken in by strangers, ate peyote, smoked grass, opened to the Tao, was escorted out of Dallas by police on the way to San Francisco. In the maelstrom of later years, I found Zen, Haight Ashbury, Hare Krishna, mystic dancing of Sufi Sam, singing Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the austere Chinese Ch’an Master Hsuan Hua, poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, Tibetan gurus Tarthang Tulku and Chogyam Trungpa. Years of study, travel, people, people, all passing ephemera. Wherever you go, whomever you meet, whatever you do, there you are, dream-like in joy and suffering. Love is all that matters.