14 years ago, I was living a rather unexceptional life, for sure.

I was working in advertising third generation advertising

second generation Buddhist. I had a fairly decent job as an art director at one of the world's most well-known advertising agencies and I was sober and had a good meditation practice, a member of a Songa.

And so I was pretty optimistic that I had much of the ducks in a row as they say, to find happiness in life.

And then one morning when I got out of the subway

and the way to work. I had heard a commotion and I looked and there were the twin

towers right in front, a blaze, smoke billowing out.

And from that single image which is burned into my brain, very quickly my life started to unravel at that time.

It was a radical cessation experience of sorts

in some forms of Buddhist practice they talk about events where you see all in a

shot the instability unreliability the lack of guarantees that we all live with.

And sometimes it can be the sudden death of a loved one or a near death experience with an automobile accident or a serious illness.

But of course, intellectually we all walk around being human beings living in the existential

shadow of mortality. We all, as the existentialists say, live towards death in terms of the great meaning

of life is to find out how our lives makes sense given this.

But that's an intellectual exercise,

and there's an entirely different somatic

gut emotional experience that comes from actually having the rug pulled out from under us.

And so I basically had a nervous breakdown.

I looked at my life and suddenly I realized

that a huge portion of it made no sense to me whatsoever.

The working in that awful job, 21st century open area office nightmare. area, office, nightmare, was imparting absolutely no sense of purpose or meaning in my life.

...