My Story

In 1966, that open road to anywhere led to the psychedelic movement in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district. Our insights and experiences in bohemia transformed my materialistic teenage world into the abstract universe of my mind: I got into the What’s It All About game.  

Those philosophical quests led to learning about consciousness, learning to meditate, and in 1970, on the ancient banks of the River Ganges in northern India, learning to teach meditation.

In 1974, I sold all my possessions, burned my bridges, and moved to a mountain-side facility above Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, where I joined the international staff of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation.

Over the next 17 years I worked in 90+ countries across five continents in countless roles, from teaching, to farming, to running a TV station. Maharishi was like a philosopher-king, with atomic energy, idealism, and creativity in his quest to develop everyone’s full potential and create world peace. More adventures happened around him in a week than in a dynamic lifetime. I became a citizen of the world and wanted to turn it to gold.

I was a post-WW2 child, from Vancouver, Canada, who had a long and lucky life that transformed through a dozen incarnations. Born into a religious family of eight children, I became an earnest adolescent altar-boy. But in my typical teens, I was peer-pressure converted to beach & party boy: the early 60’s American Graffiti world of status, cars, and girls.

We read Catcher In The Rye and got attitude. We read Jack Kerouac, discovered the open road, and began hitchhiking to California. I’ve never stopped moving since: so much fun shooting your movie on different sets—one day the cold, white mountaintop; next day the lush, green valley; drama in a palace, quiet in a hut…

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Then the epic ended. My orbiting rocket floated back to Canada in the 1990’s, and I reinvented myself as a businessman. Which wasn’t my calling, and in the mid-2000’s, I mid-life-crisis-moved to an island and became a commercial writer for the solar industry: www.electricsun.com.  

I’m retired now, but do volunteer work for the TM organization and write. After Finding Out, I will publish the first of a trilogy of memoirs, chronicling the quests in my different lives. The trilogy will be called Satsang Junkie: The Adventures of a Baby Boomer; the title of part 1 is Bohemian U.  

Today, I write from my home on the idyllic Salt Spring Island, gazing east over the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf Islands, and the distant mountains behind Vancouver where my life began.