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A Photo Essay on a Personal Spiritual Journey
Being raised in San Francisco in the '60s means that I was in the thick of the movements that took us Flower Children into experimentation with Eastern Mysticism, so-called New Age philosophy (which isn't "new" at all), as well as other drug-induced altered states of consciousness.
At one point I was a computer techie making more money than I knew what to do with, living on the twenty-third floor in a high-rise overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, and frightfully unhappy. The one area of mystical experience which I had totally overlooked was the one which was right under my nose--Western Mysticism, as in monasticism.
When I discovered monastic life, I left my world of ones and zeros and Boolean logic, and found my mind blown--naturally (for a change). Now I am below the poverty line, and happier than I ever have been in my life. You see, the government's poverty measurement is a measurement of our real God--money-- and it doesn't measure the most important indicator of all, poverty of spirit. Mother Teresa once said of America that we are the poorest country in the world. By her understanding of poverty, she was right." And so, depending upon how you look at it, I am now even more counter cultural than I was in the '60s when I wore flowers in my hair, sang protest songs, and sought escape from the phenomenological world through expensive, designer drugs.
It all depends upon your point of view.
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