It was interesting to have both very a conservative and very liberal parent, because we deal with both these elements in the world and we have both elements within ourselves.
When I was very, very young - four, five, six - I could see inside people, their motives, their dreams, their apprehension of reality.
While I had many friends as a child I aslo kept a great deal to myself. I noticed that adults were drawn to me. They would talk to me for hours at my parents' parties. Strange to find yourself at seven, dressed in pagamas with feet, listening to adults tell you their deepest secrets.
I never considered myself to be essentially different from anyone else. Although I knew I was.
At an early age I found the world a very natural place to be. I was always in a meditative consciousness as a child, which children are.
School was a strange place where they tried to make you into something.
They presented a description of the world to all of us which was very limited and narrow.
I had been pretty well made a prisoner by school, by society. I had been given this description of the world that I couldn't accept.
I really didn't want to be a part of the world because I found that the world was filled with unkindness. People didn't love each other.
In every home in America, in the world, there was cruelty, anger and hatred - things I didn't feel.
I found that the breakthroughs for me, as I went through school, came through sexuality, explorations of consciousness, reading, loving, friends, time in nature, and through psychedelic experiences.
I've been very fortunate because many of the teachers I had were exceptional. But I didn't realize that at the time that all teachers were not alike.
With the use of psychedelics, it was all based around the Tibetan Book of the Dead, using them to experience enlightenment.
I learned about the benefits and the vast limitations of such types of exploration, as did all my generation.
I started to meditate formally at about 18. I would sit on a mountaintop in Southern California around twilight and focus on my third eye. Everything would become still and rings of light would appear, and I'd go through them. I would be beyond time and space.
My travels to the Far East occurred primarily during the 1960's. Naturally, I have returned many times since. Of course, there was concern from my family that I was traveling to far distant lands to accomplish snowboarding activities that no one had tried yet.
Originally, I was interested in athletic pursuits like snowboarding, martial arts and surfing. When I went to the Himalayas and met a number of Buddhist monks I was introduced to a new way of looking at life.
I was initiated as a Buddhist monk at the age of 19, but I think that initiation is simply a starting point.
I meditated on my own for some time, read spiritual books, became a vegetarian and had incredible experiences every day, every meditation, where I was just thrown into the infinite - never realizing that other people didn't necessarily have those experiences in meditation that quickly.
I never considered myself to be special. If anything, I considered myself to be awkward, and still do sometimes.
I entered a spiritual community when I was 20, which I was in for 11 year, with very strict meditative practices, with an Eastern teacher. It was very much like a religious order.
The training was rigorous, hundreds and thousands of hours of meditation, self-giving. But it was easy. I loved it. I would merge again and again with the superconscious in meditation.
At the same time, I went through college, received a Ph.D. and started to teach. I wrote books.
I was drawn to the arts because I sensed that I was by nature Bohemian, and yet very conservative.
In poetry, and in my study in graduate school, I was drawn to a particular poet, Theodore Roethke. I did a dissertation on "The Evolution of Matter and Spirit in the Poetry of Theodore Roethke" for my Ph.D.
