The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello to the second talk about my darma life and how I came into it and began.

So my interest in Buddhism began in college, but it was more, I would say, an intellectual interest, at least the extent of which I engaged in it.

But a few things happened then.

At the end of college, I did take,

got interested in meditation,

not the end of college, or end of my second year.

And I took a class on a class I took, I was initiated into T.M. Transcendental meditation

and received a mantra and began meditating 20 minutes a day.

And I did that for two or three months

and I felt quite calm with it.

It was really nice.

And then come the end of the school year I decided to drop out of college. I was happy enough being there, but I didn't find

after two years of being there a passion for any particular subject to study. And I thought, well, this is too important to get a college degree to go to

study in college I should only do it if I had a passion for something and since I

didn't I dropped out of college and that was relatively common back then

dropping out was a kind of expression dropping out of society and

And so I dropped out of college and that summer I had the opportunity to crew on a sailboat across the Atlantic.

And I spent probably six weeks or seven weeks on the boat.

And it was an amazing experience

to be away from society, away from the busyness and doings of school and college and everything,

and to spend long hours at the helm of the boat.

...