No one cou ld have guessed that all that
had transpired during those early stages of my surrender
experiment was just the launching of a multistaged
rocket headed for the stars.3 1 . M e t a m o r p h o s i s  o f  a  C r e a t u r e
B efore moving on to the tremendous growth of the
1980s, I should share anothe r aspect of my life that was
teaching me a great deal about surrender—my prison
work. N o matt er how busy I got, every other Saturday
morning I spent my time i n the prison. Once Radha
finished school, she began joining me on these visits. Radha also took care of the  increasing correspondence
with the inmates and brou ght in spiritually oriented
books they requested. If I had to, I would have
rearranged my life to not miss any one of those visits. It is difficult to  explain how sincere those men locked
up in a maximum-security prison became about their
inner freedom. The walls could hold their bodies, but
nothing could  imprison their souls—except their own
minds. They saw this at a very deep level. I taught them
meditation and how to do a little yoga. But mostly what
we discussed was letting go of oneself. They learned to
watch t hat voice in their hea d, and they learned how to
not listen to a ll the garbage it says. After my talk, we
would have group sharing sessions. Sometimes one of
the men would relate an incident that had happened
during the week where that  voice had told him to do
something stupid. He spoke about that brief moment of
awareness wherein he got to choose whether to listen or
just let it go. Invariably, while telling the story the inmate
would start laughing about how in the past he would
have just immediately expressed that destructive
behavior. This time, he just let it go. My heart would melt
listening to them share with one another how to do this—
how to let go of yourself. No words can express howhonored and grateful I was that life had serendipitously
put me in those sessions. Most of my g roup were in for life, but periodically
some of them would get shipped off to another
institution. Th e ones who stayed at Union Correctional
Institution for a long time formed deep bonds and
encouraged one another in the spiritual life. Often one
person in the group got the teachings so deeply that he
became a leader for the others. I will recount the story of
one such unlikely person because of the insights into
surrender that the story portrays. It w as back in 1975 when I first met David. My group
was meeting upstairs in the chapel at Union Correctional
Institution wh en a very large  man walked up front and
sat d own close to me. He was  the size of an NFL football
player, not fat, just big. After my talk, he came up to me
and said, “Hey, my name’s Cr eature, and I’m an Outlaw.”
I had heard of the Outlaws; they were a motorcycle gang
like the  Hells Angels. I got up, stuck out my hand, and
said, “H i, I’m Mickey.” That was my first encounter with
a guy named Creature. The name on Creature’s shi rt read: DAVID CLARK . He
came to  every one of my classes from that day forward. Most of my group was eith er black or Hispanic, and
David stood out as a white so utherner. It intrigued me as
to w hat would keep a perso n with his history in this
group. Little by little, I saw that he was very sincere in
wanting to improve himself and grow spiritually. He
started to ask for a number  of books. He began with
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. A few visits later,
I noticed that Creature was carrying a picture of
Yogananda aro und with him. I didn’t know what to make
of this very sincere and intelligent person who was
serving multiple life sentenc es for what he had done as
one of the lead ers of one of the most violent motorcycle
gangs in the co untry. I will te ll you that I felt tremendouslove for him and was deeply honored that life had
brought us together at this important stage of his growth. David would generally approach me after class and ask
some very deep qu estions indicative of someone who had
been m editating a lot. In f act, I could tell from his
interaction with others in the group that David had been
organizing meditation sessions for the men in his cell
block. This went on for years. David became a leader who
was obviously friends with, and respected by, the rest of
the group. One day, David approached  me and said something
had happened that was going to affect his ability to come
to the group. A uthorities had  apparently uncovered the
bodies of some rival gang members from many years
earlier, and David and a few other Outlaws were going to
be char ged. He didn’t seem disturbed by this turn of
events. In fact, he told me that he saw it as a way of
working off some of his past karma. He had done bad
things in the past, and he wanted the opportunity to
work them through. I was humbled by how completely
surrendered and at peace David was with the situation. While a waiting trial, David was placed in confinement
in the high-security lockup c ells of a building called the
Rock. T he Rock housed the original cell blocks at UCI,
which d ated ba ck to 1925. Th e living conditions were so
atrocious in the Rock that i t was finally torn down in
1999 under court order. I wa s not allowed to see David
while h e was in lockup, but h e wrote and told me that he
had been spending hours a day in meditation and
chanting. Once when Amrit was schedu led to come down for one
of his annual retreats, David wrote us about how much it
would mean to him to meet a great yogi like Amrit. David
knew that given his condition, it would never happen. But you  could  feel the since rity of his devotion radiate
from the letter. I sent the letter to Amrit and asked if he
was willing to visit David if I could arrange it. Amrit hadnever been in a prison before, but he was very moved by
the letter and David’s whole story. Amrit’s simple
response was, “How could I not?”
I used every c onnection I had at the prison. I had
become very close with the c haplain over the years, and
the warden was familiar with me because of donations
we had made. Each year after the start of Built with Love,
we would donate thousands of dollars to enhance the
chapel and help the chapla in serve the needs of the
inmates. Ultimately, I received permission for a visit between
Amrit and David. The conditions were very strict. David
could not come out; Amrit a nd I would have to go into
the lock up area of the Rock to meet him. I will never
forget that day. Amrit wore a saintly off-white gown that
flowed when he walked. When we made it through the
main gates into the prison, we remained silent because
Amrit wanted to feel what it was like to live in there. I
could never succeed in describing what it was like to
walk in to the Rock. Each win g we walked by was just a
solid row of barred cells on one side facing a stone wall
on t he other. T here was not one drop of color anywhere. But we were not going to one  of those cells. We were led
right past those wings to a da rk area where there were no
windows. This was the lockup area of the Rock. We were
led to a diml y lit cell that must have been used for
meetings. It was a one-man cell with a filthy toilet sitting
bare in  the middle of the room. There was a small,
broken table with three chairs and nothing else. Amrit
and I took our seats at the w obbly table while a number
of guards stood around. After a short while, David wa s led into the cell. He was
shackled hands and feet, but he looked beautiful to me. I
was so glad to see him a gain. We hugged, and I
introduced him to Amrit. We all took our seats at the
table with David sitting oppo site Amrit. We sat there for
a long time with David’s head facing downward. Theenergy in the room felt like the Temple after Amrit had
finished chanting mantras. It was so strong that you
could hardly think. Not a wo rd was spoken until Amrit
asked David what he was feeling. David lifted his head to
speak, and that was the firs t time I could see his face. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, and his face was
aglow w ith a gentle light. In a  whisper of a voice he said,
“I gues s I’m feeling how m uch love you have for me,
because I’m completely overwhelmed with love.” Those
were the only words spoken that day. We sat in silence
for a while lon ger, and the guards took David back to
confinement. A mrit and I we re escorted out of that dark
hole, past the wings of cell b locks, and out of the Rock. We were left to find our own way back to the front gates. As my eyes acc limated to the sunlight, I was overcome
by a single thought. On this earth, the re are many
different places where people live. Some are high places
and some are low places. T hat hole where David was
living in solitary lockup, a veritable prison within a
prison, had to be one of the lowest places on earth for a
human being to end up. You couldn’t go much lower. Yet
the sincerity of his spiritual practices had just attracted
one of the hig her beings on the planet into that dark
hole. I n ever got to a sk David what he experienced that day,
but he was glo wing when he left. I remembered what I
had exp erienced the night Amrit put his hand on my
forehead. A deep peace came over me as I realized that
my dear friend David would get to keep that
overwhelming experience of love for the rest of his life.2
2  For those interested, at trial David threw himself at the mercy of the
court. Based upon his prison behavior record, he was sentenced to time to
be served concurrent with his existing sentence. In essence, David got to
work out his past without one day added to his sentence. David was
transferred from UCI shortly after this ordeal. I got word that he hadearned a “trusted-inmate” status at his new facility and was working in the
chapel. I lost touch with David after that.S e c t i o n  V
Something Priceless Is Born3 2 . F r o m  t h e  P e r s o n a l  S e l f  t o  t h e  P e r s o n a l
C o m p u t e r
I t was in the fall of 1978 when, without a clue, an event
took place that changed eve rything once again. It is so
inspiring to look back and see  how a handful of moments
in your life define your destiny. What if life had not
presented those moments to you, or if you had interacted
with th em differently? Over time, everything would be
different. I thought I knew what was being asked of me by then:
run Bui lt with Love to the be st of my ability, and use the
funds to support the beautiful work being done through
the Temple. As usual, I was w rong, very wrong. What life
had in store for me was muc h grander in both size and
scope. How could I ever have  imagined that I would end
up run ning a $300-million -a-year computer software
company, with  twenty-three hundred people reporting to
me, all without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting
aside m y spiritual pursuits? How could the flow of life’s
events pull that off, especia lly since I had never even
touched a computer in my l ife and was totally content
with my  financ es? As I sit here today, if I were forced to
answer that question, I would utter the word surrender. My experiment with surrender had taught me to always
be pres ent in the current moment and do my best to not
allow my personal preferences to make decisions for me. Instead, I allowed the reality of life to determine where I
was goi ng. It had certainly le d me on a fantastic journey
up to that point, and it was about to do something
phenomenal with the next thirty years of my life. If youwould like to know how these phenomenal events
unfolded in a p erfectly choreographed sequence, I would
be very honored to share the story with you. It all began one uneventful day when I walked into a
neighborhood Radio Shack store to pick up something
for Built with Love. On my  way out, I noticed what
appeared to be a plastic typewriter keyboard attached to
a tw elve-inch TV screen. Th e two items had a TRS - 80
COMPUTER  sign displayed above them. As fate would have
it, I  had just encountered one of the first personal
computers on the market. Being a curious person, I
walked up to th e display and punched a few keys. As if by
magic, the keys I touched appeared on the monitor
above. I had never experienced that in my life. I had only
taken an introduction to computers course in college,
and everything we did was on punch cards. We were
never allowed to go near the workstations that were
actually connected to the computer itself. I was absolutely fascinated by this Radio Shack device. It opened something inside  of me that can only be
described as love at first sigh t. I stood there playing with
the ma chine for a long tim e. I marveled at typing in
simple and complex math co mputations and seeing the
results pop up. I finally to re myself away from the
display, but I knew I’d be back. From the first time I
touched that machine, there was an inner calling from
the dee pest rec esses of my b eing. I had no choice but to
surrender to that calling. Wh en I returned to the Radio
Shack store a few days later to lay out $600 for their best
computer, I really had no id ea what I was going to do
with the thing when I got i t home. I just knew I was
meant to have it. My first  computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I
with just 16k o f memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a
standard cassette recorder for storage. That was all that
was ava ilable at the time. It  came with a simple user’smanual for the BASIC progr amming language, and that
was about it—you were pretty much on your own. When I got th e computer home, I buried myself in
learning the programming commands and seeing what
they co uld do. For some reason, everything was so
natural to me. It wasn’t like I was learning something
new; it was like I was remembering something I had
always known. My mind became very quiet the moment I
sat d own at th e machine. It was very much like entering
meditation. T he energy would rise up and focus
beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a
peace would come over me. Apparently, I was meant to
be working with this computer. I didn’t question it—I
just continued to surrender to what was happening. Before the computer showed up, I already had two
full-time jobs: Temple of the Universe and Built with
Love. T o find time for my new computer, I began to go
back to work a fter evening services. I would often work
into the wee h ours of the morning, getting only three or
four hours of s leep before rising for morning services. I
was so  passionately inspired while working with the
computer that I didn’t get tir ed. It was clear to me even
then that something very special was going on. I played  around writing some programs just to get a
feel for what t he thing could do. Within a few weeks I
decided that I was ready to  write a real program. The
first ta sk I gave myself was to write a computerized
accounting system for Built with Love. I had to teach
myself everything. The salespeople at the Radio Shack
store knew nothing about p rogramming, and I didn’t
know an yone e lse to talk to. I just used trial and error as
my teacher. Once I had co mpleted Built  with Love’s accounting
system, things progressed very rapidly with my
programming. I had made friends with the manager of
the Radio Shack store, and w henever I went in I would
show him printouts of the work I had done. He wasimpressed with what I had go tten the machine to do and
began asking if he could refer some clients to me. To my
surprise, he ended up sending me people who wanted
programs writt en. All of a sudden, I had a new business. As unbelievable as it seems, this humble beginning was
the bi rth of what was to become Personalized
Programming, a nationwide, multimillion-dollar
software company. As with everything else in my life since I decided to
follow the flow, Personalized P rogramming j ust started
itself. There were no mee tings, business plans, or
venture capitalists. Just as with the Temple of the
Universe and Built with Love, I simply accepted the
challenge of serving the en ergy that came my way. I
never left the w oods; all of this came to me unasked for
and unwanted. Fortunately, I really loved helping people. I d idn’t  care if they were com ing to me to learn how to
still tha t voice in their head, to build them a house, or to
write them a program—it w as all the same to me. I
passionately loved programming, and I loved getting to
use that talent to help people. At first the jobs were small, and I had no idea what to
charge for them. I wrote a grading program for a
University of Florida profess or for $300. I was such a
perfectionist that I just kept making it better and better
before I was willing to give it to him. From the very
beginning of my program ming career, my heart
demanded tha t every line of code had to be the absolute
best I could do. It didn’t ma tter what I was being paid;
everything had to be perfect. During 1979, I began spending more and more time
sitting in a room programming by myself. When the
manager at Radio Shack as ked if he could refer his
customers to me, I had no idea what to expect. I started
getting calls from Radio Shack stores all around
Gainesville and from stores as far away as Jacksonville. Soon I was getting more requests than I could handle.Being schooled in economics  and understanding the law
of supp ly and demand, I began raising my prices. It
didn’t help; the jobs just ke pt on coming. Around that
time, I began noticing that every job seemed perfectly
sequenced to advance me to the next level in my
programming career. Though I was sitting in the woods
working alone, let there be no doubt about it, life was
turning me into a professional programmer. It di dn’t take lo ng for me to realize that writing custom
software took a lot of time, and I was better off selling
available softw are to satisfy my client’s needs. I became a
dealer of one of the top accounting software packages
sold by a company called Sy stems Plus in California. I
don’t recall how I selected that particular software, but as
I look back now, it must have been an inspired decision—
I ended up having some serious destiny with that
company. By late 1979, I was doing more and more work selling
the accounting  package and the related hardware and
support. I took such good care of my clients that even
Systems Plus began referring  customers to me. Just as I
had learned all my programming skills through the jobs
that came to m e, so these new jobs were teaching me
how to analyze, implement, and support the
computerization of various-sized businesses. Word spread like wildfire, and the demand for my
products and  services kept increasing. Between
references from Systems Plus, Radio Shack, and my
existing clients, I started  getting requests from
businesses sca ttered across the state. But I was only one
person, and I was very committed to attending morning
and evening services at the Temple. To avoid overnight
business trips,  I just let those opportunities go and fully
surrendered to putting my spiritual practices first. I
would have gone on like that, but then James showed up. James Pierson was a very sin cere seeker who had just
moved into one of the houses on Temple property. Asperfection wou ld have it, James had a pilot’s license. One
day he overhea rd me discussing my inability to take on
out-of-town cli ents, and he o ffered to fly me around. If
we rented a small, single-engine plane for the trips,
James’s rates were more than reasonable. We began to
do day trips to the out-of-town clients who were willing
to p ay a prem ium for my services. These tended to be
upscale businesses, like a client in West Palm who
brokered private jets. With life as my teacher, little by
little th is non-suit-wearing hippie from the woods of
Alachua was learning to deal professionally with
successful businesspeople. My formula for success was
very sim ple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all
your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the  work as though it were given to you by the
universe itself—because it was. Personalized Programming was always an exciting
business. Now I got to fly abo ve the clouds in a tiny two-
seater p lane. I would often look out over the expansive
sky and  wonde r, How did I get here? I ha d m oved out to
the woo ds to drop out and devote my life to my spiritual
practices. I never left the woods, and I never for a
moment took my life back. N ow a boutique business in
West Pa lm, one of the most affluent cities in the United
States, had hired me to fly down and computerize the
business. It was all beyond my comprehension. I was
never even trained in any of this. I was just living in a
fairy tale.3 3 . T h e  B i r t h  o f  T h e  M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r
P ersonalized Pro gramming ha d grown into a successful,
one-man company. In 1980, my brother-in-law, Harvey,
suggested that I incorporate the business for liability
purposes. I remember how unnecessary it seemed to
incorporate yet another bus iness. Still, I accepted his
advice and registered Perso nalized Programming with
the State of Florida. The State sent me a stock certificate
for the business, which I stuck in my safety deposit box
at the bank. The certificate had a beautiful official-
looking seal on it, but it had no real value to anyone but
me. Nonetheless, Personalized Programming, Inc. was
now a legal corporation in the State of Florida. I r eally loved t he work I was doing with Personalized
Programming. If anything, my passion for computers
had grown stronger since that first day in Radio Shack. Each co mputer I installed was like a dear friend I left
behind to serve my clients. I may have looked like a one-
man co mpany, but in reality I had left my workers at
every one of my clients’ sites. They worked for free day
and night, and they never complained. Once I  starte d selling and supporting full system
solutions for my clients, P ersonalized Programming
began generating more than a hundred thousand dollars
a year. That was a far cry from the five thousand I was
earning at Santa Fe just a few years earlier. In addition,
Built wi th Love  was still earn ing a decent living. Through
all t his, I had hardly changed my lifestyle. The money the
businesses were earning got donated to the Temple to
support land purchases and the expenses incurredserving the community. The perfection of how everything
was unfolding was enough to silence the personal mind. It was around that time when I noticed that my mental
concepts separating worldly  and spiritual  had finally
dissolved. Ever ything began to appear as the miraculous
perfection of the flow of life. If I’ d had my way, I would h ave continued my life in
that direction. But somehow it seems that in my
experiment with surrender—I never have my way. So it
was in early 1980 when I received two phone calls on the
same d ay that would end up  initiating the next stage of
my phenomen al journey. The calls seemed innocent
enough; they were from people looking for a medical
billing system. What they w anted was the ability to do
patient and insurance billing using a personal computer. I didn’t have a system that could do that, but I told them
I would look around and get back to them. After some searching, I found a system through a
contact I had in Miami. I t was supposed to be a
nationally distributed software package with successful
installations. I  should have checked references. I got
literature and pricing on the system and got back to my
prospective cli ents with a bid. I had no idea what I was
getting into. Once I started testing the software, it didn’t
take long to realize that the package was absolute
garbage. There was no way I was going to represent that
software. When I called my clients to give them the bad news,
they each had the same res ponse. They said they had
heard t hat I was a very reliable programmer who had
written custom  software for numerous businesses. Why
couldn’t I write software for their medical practice
business? I re member I was sitting o n the floor of my small
office. The little voice in my  head was going on about
how it took s o long to write software versus selling
someone else’s . Writing a patient and insurance billingsystem would be a much larger project than anything I
had eve r done. I told my clients that it could take as
much as two years to finish such a system. Unfortunately, they both said they were willing to wait if
they could give input along the way. I definitely didn’t
want to get int o a programming project of that size. But
though there was no definitive agreement with these
clients, there was my agreement to honor life’s flow. My
mind be came s till as I realize d that I really had no choice
but to surrend er to the situa tion life had put me in. It
was jus t like all the other ti mes I let go when I didn’t
want to . I took a deep breath  and told both clients that I
would try my best to write a billing system for their
medical practices. The moment I hung up from these phone calls, I
reached over and picked up the standard insurance claim
form th at was lying on the  floor next to me. I had
obtained it earlier to see what an insurance bill looked
like. I began th inking about how I was going to structure
a program that would collect  and store the diverse data
necessary to fill out this fo rm. Little did I know that
those first thoughts were the start of a journey into the
computerization of the medic al industry that would span
almost three decades. People have often asked me how
back in  1980 I had the fore sight to focus Personalized
Programming on the medical industry. Now you see that
the answer is simple: I didn’t do a thing except serve with
all m y heart a nd soul what life brought before me. But
the scope of the task I had been given this time was way
beyond anything I had ever faced. There were no meetings, or budgets, or project plans. There w as just me. I immediately started to code the
software that would come to be called The Medical
Manager—a product that would end up revolutionizing
the U.S . medic al practice management industry. I know
it is difficult fo r people to un derstand, but to me writing
code was the sa me as having a conversation with anotherhuman being. I didn’t have to  think about what I wanted
to s ay or how  to say it. There was just a natural flow
directly from the stream of my thoughts into the
machine. When I was writing a program, the voice in my
head wo uld speak in the computer language I was using. I didn’ t think  in English and then convert to the
language; my primary thoughts were in the computer
language to begin with. Because of this, I could just sit
down at the c omputer and  write perfectly structured
code. We are back to our earlier discussions of
inspiration and where it comes from. Beethoven heard
music a nd he wrote it down. Artists have creative visions
and they manifest them. I never saw The Medical
Manager all at once in some grand vision. Nonetheless,
every d ay the constant flow of inspiration let me know
exactly where the program n eeded to go. I simply sat at
the computer and wrote down the spontaneous stream of
inspired thoughts in the form of code. I w rote  and wrote with a fervor and passion that was
almost frightening, first the patient record, then the
medical procedures that needed to be billed. Everything I
did, I did to the absolute best of my ability. I was not only
writing a program for these two clients; I was writing the
best pro gram I possibly could as my gift to the universe. The flow of ins piration was such that I was not allowed
to cut a single corner. This c ommitment to detail would
end up distingu ishing The Medical Manager from almost
all competitive medical billing systems on the market. In
short, t his thing wanted to be as close to perfect as
possible regardless of how long it took or how
unreasonable it appeared from a business perspective. The fact is, there never really was a business
perspective. I figured I could probably sell the program
to s ome other doctors in tow n, but I never once thought
about b roader distribution. I was able to cover the cost of
program development out of my own pocket because of
the per fection of how events had unfolded. And I don’tuse the  term perfection lightly. During the time I was
writing the medical billing system, a subdivision opened
up in the wo ods just one mile down the road from
Temple property. Built with Love landed a number of
contracts for custom houses  in that subdivision, which
meant I didn’t have to go any where to handle the jobs. In
addition, Personalized Programming had its existing
clients. I hired a young man part-time to help me do
some of the small custom programming jobs for those
clients. I trained him on the old programs I had written,
and I reviewed and tested hi s code. Without realizing it,
while I thought I was training him, it was really me who
was getting trained on how to manage programmers. That was a sk ill I would definitely need in the near
future. Turns out, I was destined to manage hundreds of
highly skilled software developers.3 4 . T h e  E a r l y  P r o g r a m m e r s
N o p erso n in their right mind would think that they were
going t o sit down and write an entire medical billing
system on their own. I, how ever, was not in my right
mind. I  had accepted the project as the next task given to
me by the flow  of life. That was a very holy thing to me. My entire spiritual path was focused around my
experiment with surrender. In order to keep my distance
from the inner chatter, I still maintained my regular
meditation schedule and c ontinued my moment-to-
moment practice of centering myself. Every time I sat
down at the co mputer to work on the program, I took a
breath and remembered that  I was writing this as a gift
to the universe . I was sitting  on a tiny planet spinning
through outer space, and this  was the task that had been
given to me. I t never even occurred to me to ask for
assistance. The program was about half complete when my
guardian angel sent me unasked for, but much needed,
assistance. Some moments in our lives are marked by
destiny. Such was the brief moment in time that
occurred one fall day in 1980. I was navigating through
the Sun day morning crowd on the Temple porch when a
young l ady app roached me. I did not recognize her, and
she spoke so softly that I could hardly hear her above the
crowd. As a way of introducin g herself, she said that she
had just graduated from the University of Florida where
she had  taken a few programming classes. She had heard
that I had been programmin g and wanted to work with
me, even if it meant no salary to begin with. Her name
was Barbara Duncan.I certainly needed help, but I couldn’t imagine how
anyone could help me. I had been writing the program
directly from my mind into the computer. There were no
hook points where someone e lse could tie in. In addition,
I di dn’t know this person, and she seemed very shy. Fortunately, I  was well trained in watching these
thoughts pass  through my mind, rather than blindly
listening to them. I simply st opped for a moment, took a
breath, and recognized all this negativity as my mind’s
initial resistance to change. I immediately let go and
surrendered to the reality of the situation: this person
had sincerely offered her services, and I was certainly in
need o f help. I told her that because I was used to
working alone, I couldn’t make any promises. However, I
was willing to give it a try. We set up for a meeting in a
few day s, and I told her that she should think about a
reasonable starting salary because I wanted to
compensate her. The level of talent and competence that was hidden
inside this person who just happened to show up at the
Temple is beyond my com prehension. Barbara was
definitely very scared and shy in the beginning. Then for
the next twenty years she kept stepping forward to accept
and excel at whatever was asked of her. She also started
coming to all t he Temple’s daily services and moved in
shortly after starting to work  for me. Barbara was really
Personalized Programming’s first full-time employee,
and she became a foundation block of both the company
and the  Temple community. It turns out that this shy
young l ady I met on the Temple porch that day had a
brilliant mind and the heart of a warrior. When Barbara started working for me, I was already
halfway done with the program. I had never actually
verbalized my thoughts to anyone, so sharing my vision
for the overall system with another person helped
tremendously. We made a wonderful team, and it was
clear that Barbara was perfectly capable of taking myvision and running with it. This became essential once
the number of programmers began to grow. In short,
Barbara was a gift from God. She showed up exactly
when I needed her, at a time I was not even wise enough
to know that I  needed her. I never looked for her; she
just appeared. In truth , it was the same with Radha. From day one
she took responsibility for all the accounting and office
management functions of the businesses and the
Temple. Thirty  years later she is still living at the Temple
and managing its affairs. It w as as though these people
were ha ndpicked for the disciplined spiritual lifestyle of
the Temple and were also pe rfectly suited for the highly
skilled jobs that were being created. I saw this happen
again and again as the busine sses expanded. It felt like I
was dancing with the perfection of the universe. I didn’t
fully re alize it at the time, but witnessing the results of
my surr ender experiment was doing more to get rid of
the bur densome sense of “me” than my hours of spiritual
practices. I was well aware t hat I was not causing these
events t o unfold so perfectly, but I was deeply honored to
watch the perfection of life unfold before my eyes. We brought on a couple of additional programmers
over th e next year. By the time we were done with the
first ve rsion of the software, there were four of us
working full-time. We needed the additional help coding
mostly because  the designs Barb and I were turning out
were never the simplest way to get things done—they
were sim ply the best way. Fo r example, one of the most
interesting and important modules we wrote was the one
that printed the insurance claim forms. I remember the
days I spent with my clients going over their insurance
billing needs. You basically h ad to be a rocket scientist to
understand all  the minute dif ferences between how these
practices were  filling out th e supposedly standardized
forms. But they insisted that each of these differenceswas ess ential in order to get properly paid by different
insurance companies. Barb and I managed to develop a very sophisticated,
template-driven system that would allow the practices
themselves to specify how they wanted to fill out the
forms for any particular insurance company. We were
committed to developing a s ystem that would perfectly
handle a practice’s insurance billing needs, and this
became one of the main reaso ns for the rapid acceptance
of th e software. In a very sh ort period of time, Medical
Manager practices would be defining hundreds of
different templates needed to handle the nation’s
insurance companies. This pr ovides a glimpse of t he level we went to with
The Medical Manager, even with the very first version. We kept bearing down and doing everything to the best
of our ability. I had never in my life been involved in
anything that demanded the level of perfection of that
program. It was like a polish ed diamond by the time it
was done. To me it was a  living entity, and I felt
tremendous respect every tim e I touched it. Just look at
the amazing flow of life’s events that created this
program. I felt like it had a life of its own, and we were
just here to serve it. It was the beginning of 1982, and after two years of
intense development, we started installing the program
for my origina l two clients. Given that none of us had
ever written such a comprehensive program before, the
installations m oved along very smoothly. I never once
thought about what would happen after those sites were
installed. We were completely focused on writing and
delivering the absolutely bes t system we could because
that was the ta sk life had given us. The program’s destiny
after th e init ial installations would have to unfold
completely on its own—exactly as had happened every
step of the way so far.3 5 . P r e p a r i n g  f o r  L a u n c h
A long wi th the great strides the program was making, I
was pleased to see events unfolding that benefited those
around me, especially Barb, who was working really
hard. Around this time my neighbor Bob Tilchin decided
to move, and the Temple purchased his property. Barb
got to move into that house , and she also got a well-
deserved new office when Personalized Programming
relocated its five employees into a new building on
Temple grounds. I got a nic er office as well, and some
very important events were destined to take place there—
none more important than a destiny-filled phone call I
took while sitting at my computer one day. We had just finished our first installation of The
Medical Manager, and I was finishing up the manual for
the pro gram w hen the phone rang. It was Systems Plus,
the distributo r of the acco unting program we were
selling. I was a very small dealer of theirs, and they didn’t
generally call me. I had placed a call a few days earlier to
report problems with a new piece of software they were
releasing. The customer representative at Systems Plus
introduced herself as Lorelei. She was very apologetic for
the problems they were hav ing. At some point in her
apologies and assurances, she told me that I should
remain recepti ve to their new software releases because
they planned on being the leading company for small
business softw are. She said they were expanding beyond
general accounting and were currently looking for a topreal estate package, legal package, and medical billing
package. When I heard her say medical billing package, she
caught me by surprise. At first I was too embarrassed to
say anything. Systems Plus was this big, Silicon Valley
computer com pany, and I was a guy in the woods who
had taught himself to program . Sure, I had spent the last
two years writing our medical billing program, but it had
only be en installed in one sm all doctor’s office for a few
weeks. Though the voice in my head was assuring me
that Systems Plus would ha ve no interest in my little
software program, I took a breath, surrendered to the
moment, and informed Lorel ei that I had just finished a
medical billing package. She started to say something
and the n stopped. After a br ief pause she said, “Wait a
minute, my boss just walk ed by; let me see if he’s
interested.” I had absolutely no idea what to think. When Lorelei returned to the  call, she told me her boss
was very interested in reviewing any software that could
do a medical practice’s billing. She encouraged me to
send in the sy stem along with the manual I was just
completing. We got off the phone, and I was stunned. What had just happened? I had never even thought
about finding a software distributor. Then one of the
industry’s top business software distributors calls me in
the mid dle of the woods in Alachua, Florida, and ends up
asking to see my system. I found out later that when
Lorelei mentioned her boss, she was referring to the
president of the company, Rick Mehrlich, who had just
happened to walk by her desk at that exact moment. Perhaps now you can see why I have learned to so deeply
honor the flow of life. It to ok me a week or two to pull everything together
and ship it off to Systems Plus headquarters. There was
something very surreal as I stood there offering the
finished package up to the universe. I had simply been
following the flow. I hadn’t had any expectations, hopes,or d reams about anything. For many years now, I had
just been putting one foot in front of the other serving
whatever was put before me to the best of my ability. To
me, I was not  a computer programmer; I was a yogi
living in  the middle of the wo ods. I had bought a tiny toy
computer for $600 some years earlier, and I had played
around with it. I got tricked into spending two years of
my life writing a medical bil ling package after my mind
had alre ady de cided that writing software was too time-
consuming. No w, without my making a single call, I was
about to send something I h ad programmed off to the
president of a successful software company out in
California. How does such a thing happen—even in a
fairy tale? A few weeks later, I got a call from Systems Plus
informing me that the company president wanted to fly
out to Alachua  to meet me face-to-face. I agreed, and in
no t ime at all Rick Mehrlich was sitting on the couch in
my office telling me that h e wanted to distribute my
software. He said it was about the best he had ever seen,
and he  could do a great job representing it in the
marketplace. I enjoyed bo th his frankness and his
positive praise, and I immediately felt comfortable
working with him. It is impor tant to understand that the
way I viewed the unfolding events was that this man
sitting before me had been handpicked by the Universal
Force to take my child out into the world. Just as Barb
had sho wn up out of nowher e and turned out to be the
absolutely perf ect person to help me, so this man might
as well have m anifested out of thin air and told me he
had been sent to distribute the software package. I n either contacted another d istributor nor viewed any
other options. I surrendered t o the perfection of the flow. As R ick and I shook hands on our intent to enter into a
distribution arrangement, we couldn’t possibly have
known that for the next few  decades of our lives we
would be involved in a fantastic voyage together. Itshould come as no surprise that Rick and Systems Plus
turned out to be the absolutely perfect distributor for
The Medical Manager product. Life had worked its magic
once again. Systems Plus informed me in September that the
company was going to launch The Medical Manager in
November at the upcoming 1982 Computer Dealers’
Exhibition (COMDEX). Held in Las Vegas each year,
COMDEX was the largest computer trade show in the
country and the second largest in the world. Systems
Plus was planning to featur e the product in its huge
booth, so the pressure was on to get the distribution
agreement sign ed and to ship the finished version of the
software out to California. It turn s out that the Temple had a large retreat
scheduled for first of Octobe r that year for Ram Dass. That wa s exact ly the deadline Systems Plus had given me
to s end them t he finished version. Since I didn’t get the
software shipped before lea ving for the retreat, Ram
Dass ended up with it on his  lap the entire drive down. At one point he asked me in his very no-nonsense way of
speaking, “Is it any good?” I answered him by saying that
I h ad no idea; it could be worth nothing or it could be
worth a  million dollars. Turns out I was off by a few
zeros. I  always  had tremendous respect for Ram Dass, as
do all of us who grew up under his aura of absolute
honesty with one’s self. The perfection of circumstances
that had him h olding that piece of software just before it
launched into the world was amazing to me. Who knows
how these things work? I cer tainly don’t claim to know a
thing. I  watche d how this sof tware was conceived, and I
saw it attract exactly what it needed to not only get
written but to be a leader ri ght out of the gate. It then
magically attra cted its own first-rate distributor and was
now sitting on the lap of one  of the most-respected New
Age spi ritual teachers in the world. This program had a
destiny of its o wn, and it was about to take us all on ajourney, the likes of which we never could have
imagined.S e c t i o n  V I
The Forces of Natural
Growth3 6 . T h e  F o u n d a t i o n s  o f  a  S u c c e s s f u l
B u s i n e s s
T he l aunch of T he Medical Manager at the Las Vegas
trade s how was a sight to behold. I flew out to see
Systems Plus at work and to meet the company’s people. I ha d never be en to anything like that show in my life. Remember, I had been living  in the woods for years. At
Systems Plus’s booth, THE MEDICAL MANAGER  banners were
plastered all over the place. I t’s one thing to see your kid
grow up  for eighteen years and then watch her honored
at her high school graduation. It’s quite another thing
when y our kid was just born a few months ago and was
now center stage of a very p rofessional production at a
show the size o f COMDEX. Systems Plus had one of the
larger b ooths at the show, and everyone did a wonderful
job presenting the product. The market was ripe for
medical billin g software, and there was tremendous
interest at the b ooth. I marveled at seeing all the Systems
Plus sa lespeople demonstrate the product. The Medical
Manager had no warm-up period. It went from the quiet
woods of Alachua to the big-time lights of Vegas without
a single step in between. There was no t ime to rest on our laurels. Systems Plus
immediately started signing up dealers and selling the
product. What followed was an avalanche of requests for
new p roduct features an d customizations. Every
specialty want ed something  specific, and the staff of
almost every practice wanted the program to do things
exactly as they were used to doing them on paper. On top
of all this, within a month or two of la unch, Systems Plusinformed me that in addition to the wonderful billing
system we had written, the dealers would need
appointment scheduling and other practice management
features in order to continue successfully selling the
product. How were we going to do all this? None of us had any
formal t raining or experience in medical software design. We had to figu re it all out for ourselves—and we did. If
you ask ed me how, I would tell you that my experience
with meditation had shown me that there were two very
distinct aspect s of what we  call mind. Th ere was the
logical, thought-driven mind that links together what we
already know into complex patterns of thought in order
to com e up with logical solutions. Then there was the
intuitive, insp iration-driven mind that can look at a
problem and instantly see a creative solution. As it
turned out, the years of spi ritual work I had done to
quiet that voice in my head  had opened the door for
almost constant inspiration. It seemed that the quieter
the mind, the more that sol utions became self-evident. This was also t rue for Barb. Somehow she had the ability
to almost instantly tune in to  the same creative solutions
I ha d se en and  then help me  work out the logic. That is
how Th e Medical Manager was designed, and it is a
tribute to this process that we led the industry for many
years. O ur ability to rapidly design software became
legendary. In the meantim e, the interest in the product was so
phenomenal th at we could hardly keep up. It seemed like
we wer e being  pushed to ou r limits in every direction. Take the example of our dealer training seminars. We
held our first annual Medical Manager dealer seminar in
a sm all guest suite at the Gainesville Hilton in spring
1983. T hat one room was ple nty large to hold the fifteen
or twen ty people in attendance. Just a few years later, we
were r enting the entire Gainesville Hilton Hotel,
including all of its two hundred rooms, conferencefacilities, and dining rooms. By the early 1990s, we had
outgrown the Gainesville Hilton and the guest rooms of
all t he surrounding hotels. To  find a hotel big enough to
accommodate us, we had to move the dealer seminar
down to Orlando. The spiritual growth that came from keeping up with
Personalized P rogramming w as very deep. The diversity
of tasks  that now made up my daily life ranged from
running the Temple and giving spiritual talks three times
a week, to lecturing hundreds of dealer personnel on
medical practice management. Despite all these outer
changes, I did not become a traditional businessman. I
remained a person whose spiritual path was
surrendering to the flow of life and putting his entire
heart a nd soul into what life was giving him to do. My
twice-daily me ditation sessio ns certainly helped to keep
it all in perspective. The yea r 1985 would turn ou t to be a landmark year. In only two yea rs, Systems Plus had signed up more than
a hund red dea lers, and we w ere averaging more than a
hundred and fifty new Med ical Manager installations
every month. Our template design for insurance billing
became a huge success, and we were able to do billing to
pretty m uch al l insurance companies across the country. But bef ore I could catch my breath, the industry was
about to go th rough a tremendous transformation. As
more and more practices computerized, it suddenly
became possible to replace paper billing with electronic
billing. The advantages would prove to be so enormous
that an industrywide push was about to take place. As
successful as we had been wi th our paper billing, we had
no choice but to surrender to the fact that the entire
health-care industry was being pushed into the age of
computer-to-computer communications. Unfortunately,
that was a topic we knew nothing about. The story of how
we ended up leading the in dustry in that area is just
another tribute to the perfection of life’s flow.I remem ber our first design meeting for electronic
claims. We realized immediately that the optimal
solution would  be to use templates, as we had done for
paper billing. But doing this for electronic claims was
way be yond the capabilities of our existing template
design. As far as we knew, n obody had even attempted
such a solution before. The general attitude of my
programming team was that it probably could not be
done, a nd they wouldn’t even know where to begin since
all the different insurance companies could require very
different electronic claim files. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to give up. That very same
week, another one of life’s miracles took place. On
Sunday after services, a man introduced himself to me as
a former resident at Amrit’s yoga community. He wanted
to know if I might have some work for him if he settled in
the area. His name was Larry Horwitz, and I vaguely
remembered that some people at Amrit’s had told me
how bright he was. I assessed his background and
talents, and it dawned on me that, once again, life may
have se nt us the perfect pers on to tackle the problem at
hand. Though Larry had absolutely no background in
insurance billing, he got really interested in our
innovative app roach to electronic claims. I decided I
might a s well give him a try. After only a broad overview
of the project, I left him pre tty much on his own to see
what he could come up with. By himself, Larry studied every one of the 250
specification books from the nation’s insurance
companies and mapped out exactly what we would need
in order to us e templates to handle the entire country
with one program. We implemented these changes, and
The Medical Manager now  had an electronic billing
program with designed technology that far surpassed
others in the industry. The response was phenomenal. Larry became so busy creating the templates that we had
to build an entire department around him. The insurancecompanies end ed up changing their specifications on a
regular basis, and twenty-five years later, Larry Horwitz
was stil l in charge of electronic claims for the company. How do es such a person just  show up by himself exactly
when needed? The Me dical Manager led the industry in electronic
claims. Our ability to submit  claims directly to the Blue
Cross Blue Shield and Med icare insurers nationwide
drove t he success of the pro duct. By 1987 we were the
first practice management system in the country that was
able to submit  claims electronically in all fifty states. In
2000, The Medical Manag er was recognized for its
accomplishments in computerizing the medical industry
by being installed in the permanent archives of the
Smithsonian Institution. The tremendous work we did in
successfully co nverting tens of thousands of practices to
electronic transactions has been preserved for
generations to come. I saw all this as just another one of
life’s miracles.3 7 . T h e  I n d u s t r y  K n o c k s  o n  O u r  D o o r
P ersonalized Pr ogramming w as truly an anomaly. We
were located in the middle of the woods in a small
building on Temple property. None of us were
sophisticated businesspeople or experienced professional
programmers. We were just people who had been
brought together by the energy to do a task. Normally,
successful bus inesses have to plan their growth by
developing bus iness plans and financial budgets. In our
case, our only business plan was to try to keep up with
life’s powerful wave that was carrying us forward. Our
only budget was to hire who ever showed up who could
help us. But no  matter how h ard we tried, it seemed that
life just kept stepping things up to another level. A perfect example of how our miraculous growth took
place organically can be seen by some unexpected phone
calls I received in the mid-1980s. The first was in the
spring of 1985 from a woman  who introduced herself as
a vice president of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. Empire handled New York City and was one of the
largest Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance providers in the
country. Part of its efforts to convert medical practices in
the area to ele ctronic claims was to sell the doctors a
practice management system. The company had been
developing its own software but didn’t feel it was
competitive w ith The Medical Manager. I was very
honored when  she told me that Empire wanted to drop
its system and market The Medical Manager under a
private label. You certainly couldn’t beat having Blue
Cross Blue Shield marketing your p roduct to its doctors. Before I could catch my brea th, I was contacted by BlueCross Blue Shield of New Jersey with the same request. Then came South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Hawaii,
Mississippi, Colorado, and a few others. All those Blue
Cross Blue Shields ended up marketing The Medical
Manager to the doctors in t heir states. I saw this as a
living le sson in the power of  surrender. For years I had
been willing to let go of my personal preferences and
focus on doing the absolute best I could with what life
presented me. I hadn’t expected anything in return, and I
was very humbled to see what was unfolding. By the 1986– 88 period, Personalized Programming
had about a dozen employees, most of whom were
programmers. We were a tiny company, yet we were
earning millions of dollars a year in royalties alone. Systems Plus had very quickly realized the enormous
potential of the medical marketplace and dropped all its
other products to focus exclusively on The Medical
Manager. As head of Personalized Programming, it was
now my job to do business with all these large
corporations. I had never worked at that level before. But
just as life had  given me on-the-job training to become a
builder and a programmer, s he was now training me to
be a corporate  executive. I had already seen too much,
however, to be a convent ional executive. Even in
business, I intended to continue trusting the flow of life
as my ultimate adviser. One thing I sa w again and again on this ride with life
was tha t the right person would show up at just the right
time. I literally banked on that perfection, and it is
amazing how it kept happening. Even our corporate
attorney, Rick Karl, was into yoga and meditation. It
seemed that life was surrounding me with spiritually
oriented people, not only at the Temple, but also in my
business. How life managed to do this is perhaps epitomized by
the foll owing p erfectly orche strated sequence of events. It began when Systems Plus asked us to host arepresentative from a laboratory equipment company
who wa nted to  meet the Medical Manager development
team. It  was rare that System s Plus sent prospects out to
the woods in Alachua, but in this case there was no
choice. Systems Plus staff practically begged me to wear
a j acket, laced-up shoes, and have everyone on their best
professional b ehavior. Paul Dobbins was our visitor’s
name, a nd he had an extensive background as a senior
technical analyst and product manager. I sent Rick Kar l, our very presentable attorney, to pick
up the gentleman from the Gainesville airport. When he
returned, Rick stuck his head in my office with a grin on
his face the size of the Cheshire cat’s. Then, in walks our
important gues t. The first thing I noticed was that he had
a particular piece of jewelry wrapped around his upper
arm. It looked remarkably similar to the special bangle
that Yoganand a used to wear. As it turned out, it was. Paul Dobbins was a follower of Yogananda, had taken the
lessons, and had been doing Kriya yoga for many years. You can  be sure I was shocke d, but imagine how he felt. He flies  in from St. Louis on this important business trip
to m eet the pre sident of the company that wrote the top-
rated m edical practice ma nagement system in the
country. He walks into the president’s office and sees
pictures of Yogananda all over the place. At first,  there were no words  between us. Paul just sat
down on the couch and t ook in the beauty of the
moment. The energy in that room was befitting the
presence of a master. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and
Paul was visibly overcome. A fter sitting in silence for a
while, I  asked him if he would  like to see the Temple. We
walked down the tree-lined road, onto the rustic dirt
path, an d into that holy place adorned with the pictures
of grea t masters. Needless to say, this was not Paul’s
usual business trip. Paul ex tended his visit through the weekend and
stayed in a small ten-by-ten-foot guest room on Templeproperty. Come Sunday, he didn’t want to leave. Paul
had apparently gotten into meditation on his own, and
he didn’t have many people around him who were into
yoga. H e was overwhelmed by what was going on at the
Temple and the strength of the Gainesville spiritual
community. He came to me after Sunday services with
the inev itable question: “May  I stay and work for you?” I
felt dee p in my heart that Pau l belonged here and that he
really wanted to be p art of the Temple and the business. But I didn’t feel right about him just leaving the company
that had sent him here, so I told him let’s wait and see
how things unfold. Some months later, I received a rather panicky call
from Paul. He told me that his company had suddenly
been sold, and his boss and many other employees were
bailing out. Paul was turning in his resignation but
wanted to continue working with The Medical Manager
in some  manner. Life’s message was perfectly clear—it
was time to offer Paul a job. Paul ar rived in less than a  week with some of his
belongings. We  allowed him to stay in that same ten-by-
ten-foot guest room until he  found a place of his own. Five yea rs late r, Paul was sti ll living in that tiny room. I
have no idea w hat he did with his belongings, but I do
know that he came to morning and evening services at
the Temple like clockwork. Paul wa s a tremendous asset  to the company, and he
showed up exactly when he w as needed the most. Shortly
after he  joined the team, we began getting contacted by
the major national laboratories. They all wanted us to
interface The Medical Manag er to their labs. Paul was an
expert i n the field, and we were one of the first practice
management systems to implement electronic
connectivity with the major  lab companies. We could
never have succeeded as we  did without Paul on our
team. W hen I reflect back on how he came to us, it looks
like a gift from  the universe. T wenty years later, Paul stillworked for the company and,  to this day, lives in a home
with his wife and family bordering Temple property. It
appears that some things are just meant to be.3 8 . T h e  T e m p l e  K e e p s  G r o w i n g
M orning meditations took on a whole new meaning as
the software company got larger and larger. Not only
were meditation and yoga essential for continuing my
inward journey, but they were essential for keeping the
mind s ane. So much is demanded of you when you’re
running an organization on which so many people rely
for thei r livelihood. The mind needs time to quiet down
and keep everything in perspective. Leaving Temp le services on a winter morning after
sunrise, we often find the field covered in a mist of dew. Giant oaks, pines, and hickory trees embrace the field on
three si des, and the north sid e opens up to that beautiful
rolling pasture that slopes down to the tree-lined stream. Just standing out there with  a quiet mind is heaven on
Earth. It wasn’t that way one misty morning in early
December 1988. When we walked out of the quietude of
the Tem ple onto the interior field, we heard the roar of
large machinery coming from the north. To our utter
surprise, we saw giant bulldo zers and other land-clearing
equipment on our neighbor ’s rolling field. We didn’t
know w hat to make of it, so we walked up the hill to my
original house that bordered the pasture. We located
some of  the workers and ask ed what was going on. They
told us that they had purchased lumber rights to all the
trees on our neighbor’s property. Our neighbor to the
north was a thousand-plus-acre farm owned by a couple
named Wilbur and Juliet. They were wonderful people
whose house was on the far thest side of their propertyfrom the Temple. The land ha d been in their family for a
long tim e, and they had great respect for the property. We didn’t understand what was going on, so we gave
them a call. When I was finally able to reach Wilbur, he explained
that they were clearing what was left of their native forest
and planting slash pines. That would provide a cash crop
some fifteen to twenty years in the future. I told him I
would l ike to talk to him abou t it, and I asked if he would
be willing to h old off clearing the land bordering our
property until we met. He was hesitant but told me to tell
the fore man to  give him a call. In truth, I had no idea
what I would say to Wilbur when we met, but I felt a
deep obligation to do what I could to protect the
beautiful woods on that land. As I drove over to Wilbur’s,  I focused on remaining
open an d receptive to the ex perience at hand so that I
could se e wher e life was taki ng it. As I look back now, I
am so grateful that surrender  had taught me to willingly
participate in life’s dance with a quiet mind and an open
heart. When I arrived at Wilbur’s, there wasn’t any openness
to selling us t he thirty-five acres that lay between our
property and the stream. I explained to him that the
trees on that property were b eautiful, and they should be
spared. He agreed with the beautiful part, but he was
running a farm, and slash pines were what they had
decided to plant on the entire property. Our efforts
seemed futile until I offered to lease the property at
whatever price would assure that he earned more than
the pines would yield him. Wilbur was an astute
businessman, and that caugh t his attention. There was
risk in any cr op, but no ris k in a secured, long-term
lease. Wilbur named a price that was significantly higher
than a ny farmer would pay to lease unimproved
property. Nonetheless, it was still worth it from our
perspective of protecting the trees and pasture of thatbeautiful piece of land. In the  end, we signed a long-term
lease with Wilbur that allowed us to preserve, protect,
and hav e use of the property to our north—the property
that I had once called the Elysian Fields. This experience only served to reinforce what I was
learning from my experiment with surrender. Something
that started out looking totally disastrous had ended up
with a positive result. Time a nd again I was seeing that if
I co uld handle the winds of the current storm, they
would e nd up blowing in som e great gift. I was beginning
to view these storms as a harbinger to transformation. Perhaps change only takes place when there is sufficient
reason to overcome the inertia of everyday life. Challenging si tuations create  the force needed to bring
about c hange. The problem is that we generally use all
the stirred-up energy intended to bring about change, to
resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of
the howling winds and wait to see what constructive
action was being asked of me. If t hat were the end of the story regarding that
property, I would still label it a gift from the universe. But it was far from the end. Just one week after signing
that lease, another piece of land came up for sale that
bordered the core of our community. Remarkably, once
we made that purchase, the land we had just leased
ended up running along the e ntire northern border of all
our property, thus tying everything together. It left me breathless to see a ll this unfold the way it
did. I was playing a game with life, and every time life
made its move, a part of my  noisy mind fell away. Why
was I needed? Everything was unfolding on its own
much better than anything I could ever imagine—let
alone d o. I had said I would purchase adjoining property
if it were pres ented to me and if we had the necessary
cash. The Temple was now up to eighty-five acres,
including the leased land.
The-Surrender-Experiment-by-Michael-a-Singer.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        No one cou ld have guessed that all that
had transpired during those early stages of my surrender
experiment was just the launching of a multistaged
rocket headed for the stars. 3 1. M e t a m o r p h o s i s  o f  a  C r e a t u r e
B efore moving on to the tremendous growth of the
1980s, I should share anothe r aspect of my life that was
teaching me a great deal about surrender—my prison
work. N o matt er how busy I got, every other Saturday
morning I spent my time i n the prison. Once Radha
finished school, she began joining me on these visits. Radha also took care of the  increasing correspondence
with the inmates and brou ght in spiritually oriented
books they requested. If I had to, I would have
rearranged my life to not miss any one of those visits. It is difficult to  explain how sincere those men locked
up in a maximum-security prison became about their
inner freedom. The walls could hold their bodies, but
nothing could  imprison their souls—except their own
minds. They saw this at a very deep level. I taught them
meditation and how to do a little yoga. But mostly what
we discussed was letting go of oneself. They learned to
watch t hat voice in their hea d, and they learned how to
not listen to a ll the garbage it says. After my talk, we
would have group sharing sessions. Sometimes one of
the men would relate an incident that had happened
during the week where that  voice had told him to do
something stupid. He spoke about that brief moment of
awareness wherein he got to choose whether to listen or
just let it go. Invariably, while telling the story the inmate
would start laughing about how in the past he would
have just immediately expressed that destructive
behavior. This time, he just let it go. My heart would melt
listening to them share with one another how to do this—
how to let go of yourself. No words can express howhonored and grateful I was that life had serendipitously
put me in those sessions. Most of my g roup were in for life, but periodically
some of them would get shipped off to another
institution. Th e ones who stayed at Union Correctional
Institution for a long time formed deep bonds and
encouraged one another in the spiritual life. Often one
person in the group got the teachings so deeply that he
became a leader for the others. I will recount the story of
one such unlikely person because of the insights into
surrender that the story portrays. It w as back in 1975 when I first met David. My group
was meeting upstairs in the chapel at Union Correctional
Institution wh en a very large  man walked up front and
sat d own close to me. He was  the size of an NFL football
player, not fat, just big. After my talk, he came up to me
and said, “Hey, my name’s Cr eature, and I’m an Outlaw. ”
I had heard of the Outlaws; they were a motorcycle gang
like the  Hells Angels. I got up, stuck out my hand, and
said, “H i, I’m Mickey. ” That was my first encounter with
a guy named Creature. The name on Creature’s shi rt read: DAVID CLARK. He
came to  every one of my classes from that day forward. Most of my group was eith er black or Hispanic, and
David stood out as a white so utherner. It intrigued me as
to w hat would keep a perso n with his history in this
group. Little by little, I saw that he was very sincere in
wanting to improve himself and grow spiritually. He
started to ask for a number  of books. He began with
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. A few visits later,
I noticed that Creature was carrying a picture of
Yogananda aro und with him. I didn’t know what to make
of this very sincere and intelligent person who was
serving multiple life sentenc es for what he had done as
one of the lead ers of one of the most violent motorcycle
gangs in the co untry. I will te ll you that I felt tremendouslove for him and was deeply honored that life had
brought us together at this important stage of his growth. David would generally approach me after class and ask
some very deep qu estions indicative of someone who had
been m editating a lot. In f act, I could tell from his
interaction with others in the group that David had been
organizing meditation sessions for the men in his cell
block. This went on for years. David became a leader who
was obviously friends with, and respected by, the rest of
the group. One day, David approached  me and said something
had happened that was going to affect his ability to come
to the group. A uthorities had  apparently uncovered the
bodies of some rival gang members from many years
earlier, and David and a few other Outlaws were going to
be char ged. He didn’t seem disturbed by this turn of
events. In fact, he told me that he saw it as a way of
working off some of his past karma. He had done bad
things in the past, and he wanted the opportunity to
work them through. I was humbled by how completely
surrendered and at peace David was with the situation. While a waiting trial, David was placed in confinement
in the high-security lockup c ells of a building called the
Rock. T he Rock housed the original cell blocks at UCI,
which d ated ba ck to 1925. Th e living conditions were so
atrocious in the Rock that i t was finally torn down in
1999 under court order. I wa s not allowed to see David
while h e was in lockup, but h e wrote and told me that he
had been spending hours a day in meditation and
chanting. Once when Amrit was schedu led to come down for one
of his annual retreats, David wrote us about how much it
would mean to him to meet a great yogi like Amrit. David
knew that given his condition, it would never happen. But you  could  feel the since rity of his devotion radiate
from the letter. I sent the letter to Amrit and asked if he
was willing to visit David if I could arrange it. Amrit hadnever been in a prison before, but he was very moved by
the letter and David’s whole story. Amrit’s simple
response was, “How could I not. ”
I used every c onnection I had at the prison. I had
become very close with the c haplain over the years, and
the warden was familiar with me because of donations
we had made. Each year after the start of Built with Love,
we would donate thousands of dollars to enhance the
chapel and help the chapla in serve the needs of the
inmates. Ultimately, I received permission for a visit between
Amrit and David. The conditions were very strict. David
could not come out; Amrit a nd I would have to go into
the lock up area of the Rock to meet him. I will never
forget that day. Amrit wore a saintly off-white gown that
flowed when he walked. When we made it through the
main gates into the prison, we remained silent because
Amrit wanted to feel what it was like to live in there. I
could never succeed in describing what it was like to
walk in to the Rock. Each win g we walked by was just a
solid row of barred cells on one side facing a stone wall
on t he other. T here was not one drop of color anywhere. But we were not going to one  of those cells. We were led
right past those wings to a da rk area where there were no
windows. This was the lockup area of the Rock. We were
led to a diml y lit cell that must have been used for
meetings. It was a one-man cell with a filthy toilet sitting
bare in  the middle of the room. There was a small,
broken table with three chairs and nothing else. Amrit
and I took our seats at the w obbly table while a number
of guards stood around. After a short while, David wa s led into the cell. He was
shackled hands and feet, but he looked beautiful to me. I
was so glad to see him a gain. We hugged, and I
introduced him to Amrit. We all took our seats at the
table with David sitting oppo site Amrit. We sat there for
a long time with David’s head facing downward. Theenergy in the room felt like the Temple after Amrit had
finished chanting mantras. It was so strong that you
could hardly think. Not a wo rd was spoken until Amrit
asked David what he was feeling. David lifted his head to
speak, and that was the firs t time I could see his face. Tears were pouring down his cheeks, and his face was
aglow w ith a gentle light. In a  whisper of a voice he said,
“I gues s I’m feeling how m uch love you have for me,
because I’m completely overwhelmed with love. ” Those
were the only words spoken that day. We sat in silence
for a while lon ger, and the guards took David back to
confinement. A mrit and I we re escorted out of that dark
hole, past the wings of cell b locks, and out of the Rock. We were left to find our own way back to the front gates. As my eyes acc limated to the sunlight, I was overcome
by a single thought. On this earth, the re are many
different places where people live. Some are high places
and some are low places. T hat hole where David was
living in solitary lockup, a veritable prison within a
prison, had to be one of the lowest places on earth for a
human being to end up. You couldn’t go much lower. Yet
the sincerity of his spiritual practices had just attracted
one of the hig her beings on the planet into that dark
hole. I n ever got to a sk David what he experienced that day,
but he was glo wing when he left. I remembered what I
had exp erienced the night Amrit put his hand on my
forehead. A deep peace came over me as I realized that
my dear friend David would get to keep that
overwhelming experience of love for the rest of his life. 2
2  For those interested, at trial David threw himself at the mercy of the
court. Based upon his prison behavior record, he was sentenced to time to
be served concurrent with his existing sentence. In essence, David got to
work out his past without one day added to his sentence. David was
transferred from UCI shortly after this ordeal. I got word that he hadearned a “trusted-inmate” status at his new facility and was working in the
chapel. I lost touch with David after that. S e c t i o n  V
Something Priceless Is Born3 2. F r o m  t h e  P e r s o n a l  S e l f  t o  t h e  P e r s o n a l
C o m p u t e r
I t was in the fall of 1978 when, without a clue, an event
took place that changed eve rything once again. It is so
inspiring to look back and see  how a handful of moments
in your life define your destiny. What if life had not
presented those moments to you, or if you had interacted
with th em differently. Over time, everything would be
different. I thought I knew what was being asked of me by then:
run Bui lt with Love to the be st of my ability, and use the
funds to support the beautiful work being done through
the Temple. As usual, I was w rong, very wrong. What life
had in store for me was muc h grander in both size and
scope. How could I ever have  imagined that I would end
up run ning a $300-million -a-year computer software
company, with  twenty-three hundred people reporting to
me, all without leaving the woods of Alachua or putting
aside m y spiritual pursuits. How could the flow of life’s
events pull that off, especia lly since I had never even
touched a computer in my l ife and was totally content
with my  financ es. As I sit here today, if I were forced to
answer that question, I would utter the word surrender. My experiment with surrender had taught me to always
be pres ent in the current moment and do my best to not
allow my personal preferences to make decisions for me. Instead, I allowed the reality of life to determine where I
was goi ng. It had certainly le d me on a fantastic journey
up to that point, and it was about to do something
phenomenal with the next thirty years of my life. If youwould like to know how these phenomenal events
unfolded in a p erfectly choreographed sequence, I would
be very honored to share the story with you. It all began one uneventful day when I walked into a
neighborhood Radio Shack store to pick up something
for Built with Love. On my  way out, I noticed what
appeared to be a plastic typewriter keyboard attached to
a tw elve-inch TV screen. Th e two items had a TRS - 80
COMPUTER  sign displayed above them. As fate would have
it, I  had just encountered one of the first personal
computers on the market. Being a curious person, I
walked up to th e display and punched a few keys. As if by
magic, the keys I touched appeared on the monitor
above. I had never experienced that in my life. I had only
taken an introduction to computers course in college,
and everything we did was on punch cards. We were
never allowed to go near the workstations that were
actually connected to the computer itself. I was absolutely fascinated by this Radio Shack device. It opened something inside  of me that can only be
described as love at first sigh t. I stood there playing with
the ma chine for a long tim e. I marveled at typing in
simple and complex math co mputations and seeing the
results pop up. I finally to re myself away from the
display, but I knew I’d be back. From the first time I
touched that machine, there was an inner calling from
the dee pest rec esses of my b eing. I had no choice but to
surrender to that calling. Wh en I returned to the Radio
Shack store a few days later to lay out $600 for their best
computer, I really had no id ea what I was going to do
with the thing when I got i t home. I just knew I was
meant to have it. My first  computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I
with just 16k o f memory, a twelve-inch monitor, and a
standard cassette recorder for storage. That was all that
was ava ilable at the time. It  came with a simple user’smanual for the BASIC progr amming language, and that
was about it—you were pretty much on your own. When I got th e computer home, I buried myself in
learning the programming commands and seeing what
they co uld do. For some reason, everything was so
natural to me. It wasn’t like I was learning something
new; it was like I was remembering something I had
always known. My mind became very quiet the moment I
sat d own at th e machine. It was very much like entering
meditation. T he energy would rise up and focus
beautifully at the point between my eyebrows, and a
peace would come over me. Apparently, I was meant to
be working with this computer. I didn’t question it—I
just continued to surrender to what was happening. Before the computer showed up, I already had two
full-time jobs: Temple of the Universe and Built with
Love. T o find time for my new computer, I began to go
back to work a fter evening services. I would often work
into the wee h ours of the morning, getting only three or
four hours of s leep before rising for morning services. I
was so  passionately inspired while working with the
computer that I didn’t get tir ed. It was clear to me even
then that something very special was going on. I played  around writing some programs just to get a
feel for what t he thing could do. Within a few weeks I
decided that I was ready to  write a real program. The
first ta sk I gave myself was to write a computerized
accounting system for Built with Love. I had to teach
myself everything. The salespeople at the Radio Shack
store knew nothing about p rogramming, and I didn’t
know an yone e lse to talk to. I just used trial and error as
my teacher. Once I had co mpleted Built  with Love’s accounting
system, things progressed very rapidly with my
programming. I had made friends with the manager of
the Radio Shack store, and w henever I went in I would
show him printouts of the work I had done. He wasimpressed with what I had go tten the machine to do and
began asking if he could refer some clients to me. To my
surprise, he ended up sending me people who wanted
programs writt en. All of a sudden, I had a new business. As unbelievable as it seems, this humble beginning was
the bi rth of what was to become Personalized
Programming, a nationwide, multimillion-dollar
software company. As with everything else in my life since I decided to
follow the flow, Personalized P rogramming j ust started
itself. There were no mee tings, business plans, or
venture capitalists. Just as with the Temple of the
Universe and Built with Love, I simply accepted the
challenge of serving the en ergy that came my way. I
never left the w oods; all of this came to me unasked for
and unwanted. Fortunately, I really loved helping people. I d idn’t  care if they were com ing to me to learn how to
still tha t voice in their head, to build them a house, or to
write them a program—it w as all the same to me. I
passionately loved programming, and I loved getting to
use that talent to help people. At first the jobs were small, and I had no idea what to
charge for them. I wrote a grading program for a
University of Florida profess or for $300. I was such a
perfectionist that I just kept making it better and better
before I was willing to give it to him. From the very
beginning of my program ming career, my heart
demanded tha t every line of code had to be the absolute
best I could do. It didn’t ma tter what I was being paid;
everything had to be perfect. During 1979, I began spending more and more time
sitting in a room programming by myself. When the
manager at Radio Shack as ked if he could refer his
customers to me, I had no idea what to expect. I started
getting calls from Radio Shack stores all around
Gainesville and from stores as far away as Jacksonville. Soon I was getting more requests than I could handle. Being schooled in economics  and understanding the law
of supp ly and demand, I began raising my prices. It
didn’t help; the jobs just ke pt on coming. Around that
time, I began noticing that every job seemed perfectly
sequenced to advance me to the next level in my
programming career. Though I was sitting in the woods
working alone, let there be no doubt about it, life was
turning me into a professional programmer. It di dn’t take lo ng for me to realize that writing custom
software took a lot of time, and I was better off selling
available softw are to satisfy my client’s needs. I became a
dealer of one of the top accounting software packages
sold by a company called Sy stems Plus in California. I
don’t recall how I selected that particular software, but as
I look back now, it must have been an inspired decision—
I ended up having some serious destiny with that
company. By late 1979, I was doing more and more work selling
the accounting  package and the related hardware and
support. I took such good care of my clients that even
Systems Plus began referring  customers to me. Just as I
had learned all my programming skills through the jobs
that came to m e, so these new jobs were teaching me
how to analyze, implement, and support the
computerization of various-sized businesses. Word spread like wildfire, and the demand for my
products and  services kept increasing. Between
references from Systems Plus, Radio Shack, and my
existing clients, I started  getting requests from
businesses sca ttered across the state. But I was only one
person, and I was very committed to attending morning
and evening services at the Temple. To avoid overnight
business trips,  I just let those opportunities go and fully
surrendered to putting my spiritual practices first. I
would have gone on like that, but then James showed up. James Pierson was a very sin cere seeker who had just
moved into one of the houses on Temple property. Asperfection wou ld have it, James had a pilot’s license. One
day he overhea rd me discussing my inability to take on
out-of-town cli ents, and he o ffered to fly me around. If
we rented a small, single-engine plane for the trips,
James’s rates were more than reasonable. We began to
do day trips to the out-of-town clients who were willing
to p ay a prem ium for my services. These tended to be
upscale businesses, like a client in West Palm who
brokered private jets. With life as my teacher, little by
little th is non-suit-wearing hippie from the woods of
Alachua was learning to deal professionally with
successful businesspeople. My formula for success was
very sim ple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all
your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the  work as though it were given to you by the
universe itself—because it was. Personalized Programming was always an exciting
business. Now I got to fly abo ve the clouds in a tiny two-
seater p lane. I would often look out over the expansive
sky and  wonde r, How did I get here. I ha d m oved out to
the woo ds to drop out and devote my life to my spiritual
practices. I never left the woods, and I never for a
moment took my life back. N ow a boutique business in
West Pa lm, one of the most affluent cities in the United
States, had hired me to fly down and computerize the
business. It was all beyond my comprehension. I was
never even trained in any of this. I was just living in a
fairy tale. 3 3. T h e  B i r t h  o f  T h e  M e d i c a l  M a n a g e r
P ersonalized Pro gramming ha d grown into a successful,
one-man company. In 1980, my brother-in-law, Harvey,
suggested that I incorporate the business for liability
purposes. I remember how unnecessary it seemed to
incorporate yet another bus iness. Still, I accepted his
advice and registered Perso nalized Programming with
the State of Florida. The State sent me a stock certificate
for the business, which I stuck in my safety deposit box
at the bank. The certificate had a beautiful official-
looking seal on it, but it had no real value to anyone but
me. Nonetheless, Personalized Programming, Inc. was
now a legal corporation in the State of Florida. I r eally loved t he work I was doing with Personalized
Programming. If anything, my passion for computers
had grown stronger since that first day in Radio Shack. Each co mputer I installed was like a dear friend I left
behind to serve my clients. I may have looked like a one-
man co mpany, but in reality I had left my workers at
every one of my clients’ sites. They worked for free day
and night, and they never complained. Once I  starte d selling and supporting full system
solutions for my clients, P ersonalized Programming
began generating more than a hundred thousand dollars
a year. That was a far cry from the five thousand I was
earning at Santa Fe just a few years earlier. In addition,
Built wi th Love  was still earn ing a decent living. Through
all t his, I had hardly changed my lifestyle. The money the
businesses were earning got donated to the Temple to
support land purchases and the expenses incurredserving the community. The perfection of how everything
was unfolding was enough to silence the personal mind. It was around that time when I noticed that my mental
concepts separating worldly  and spiritual  had finally
dissolved. Ever ything began to appear as the miraculous
perfection of the flow of life. If I’ d had my way, I would h ave continued my life in
that direction. But somehow it seems that in my
experiment with surrender—I never have my way. So it
was in early 1980 when I received two phone calls on the
same d ay that would end up  initiating the next stage of
my phenomen al journey. The calls seemed innocent
enough; they were from people looking for a medical
billing system. What they w anted was the ability to do
patient and insurance billing using a personal computer. I didn’t have a system that could do that, but I told them
I would look around and get back to them. After some searching, I found a system through a
contact I had in Miami. I t was supposed to be a
nationally distributed software package with successful
installations. I  should have checked references. I got
literature and pricing on the system and got back to my
prospective cli ents with a bid. I had no idea what I was
getting into. Once I started testing the software, it didn’t
take long to realize that the package was absolute
garbage. There was no way I was going to represent that
software. When I called my clients to give them the bad news,
they each had the same res ponse. They said they had
heard t hat I was a very reliable programmer who had
written custom  software for numerous businesses. Why
couldn’t I write software for their medical practice
business. I re member I was sitting o n the floor of my small
office. The little voice in my  head was going on about
how it took s o long to write software versus selling
someone else’s. Writing a patient and insurance billingsystem would be a much larger project than anything I
had eve r done. I told my clients that it could take as
much as two years to finish such a system. Unfortunately, they both said they were willing to wait if
they could give input along the way. I definitely didn’t
want to get int o a programming project of that size. But
though there was no definitive agreement with these
clients, there was my agreement to honor life’s flow. My
mind be came s till as I realize d that I really had no choice
but to surrend er to the situa tion life had put me in. It
was jus t like all the other ti mes I let go when I didn’t
want to. I took a deep breath  and told both clients that I
would try my best to write a billing system for their
medical practices. The moment I hung up from these phone calls, I
reached over and picked up the standard insurance claim
form th at was lying on the  floor next to me. I had
obtained it earlier to see what an insurance bill looked
like. I began th inking about how I was going to structure
a program that would collect  and store the diverse data
necessary to fill out this fo rm. Little did I know that
those first thoughts were the start of a journey into the
computerization of the medic al industry that would span
almost three decades. People have often asked me how
back in  1980 I had the fore sight to focus Personalized
Programming on the medical industry. Now you see that
the answer is simple: I didn’t do a thing except serve with
all m y heart a nd soul what life brought before me. But
the scope of the task I had been given this time was way
beyond anything I had ever faced. There were no meetings, or budgets, or project plans. There w as just me. I immediately started to code the
software that would come to be called The Medical
Manager—a product that would end up revolutionizing
the U. S. medic al practice management industry. I know
it is difficult fo r people to un derstand, but to me writing
code was the sa me as having a conversation with anotherhuman being. I didn’t have to  think about what I wanted
to s ay or how  to say it. There was just a natural flow
directly from the stream of my thoughts into the
machine. When I was writing a program, the voice in my
head wo uld speak in the computer language I was using. I didn’ t think  in English and then convert to the
language; my primary thoughts were in the computer
language to begin with. Because of this, I could just sit
down at the c omputer and  write perfectly structured
code. We are back to our earlier discussions of
inspiration and where it comes from. Beethoven heard
music a nd he wrote it down. Artists have creative visions
and they manifest them. I never saw The Medical
Manager all at once in some grand vision. Nonetheless,
every d ay the constant flow of inspiration let me know
exactly where the program n eeded to go. I simply sat at
the computer and wrote down the spontaneous stream of
inspired thoughts in the form of code. I w rote  and wrote with a fervor and passion that was
almost frightening, first the patient record, then the
medical procedures that needed to be billed. Everything I
did, I did to the absolute best of my ability. I was not only
writing a program for these two clients; I was writing the
best pro gram I possibly could as my gift to the universe. The flow of ins piration was such that I was not allowed
to cut a single corner. This c ommitment to detail would
end up distingu ishing The Medical Manager from almost
all competitive medical billing systems on the market. In
short, t his thing wanted to be as close to perfect as
possible regardless of how long it took or how
unreasonable it appeared from a business perspective. The fact is, there never really was a business
perspective. I figured I could probably sell the program
to s ome other doctors in tow n, but I never once thought
about b roader distribution. I was able to cover the cost of
program development out of my own pocket because of
the per fection of how events had unfolded. And I don’tuse the  term perfection lightly. During the time I was
writing the medical billing system, a subdivision opened
up in the wo ods just one mile down the road from
Temple property. Built with Love landed a number of
contracts for custom houses  in that subdivision, which
meant I didn’t have to go any where to handle the jobs. In
addition, Personalized Programming had its existing
clients. I hired a young man part-time to help me do
some of the small custom programming jobs for those
clients. I trained him on the old programs I had written,
and I reviewed and tested hi s code. Without realizing it,
while I thought I was training him, it was really me who
was getting trained on how to manage programmers. That was a sk ill I would definitely need in the near
future. Turns out, I was destined to manage hundreds of
highly skilled software developers. 3 4. T h e  E a r l y  P r o g r a m m e r s
N o p erso n in their right mind would think that they were
going t o sit down and write an entire medical billing
system on their own. I, how ever, was not in my right
mind. I  had accepted the project as the next task given to
me by the flow  of life. That was a very holy thing to me. My entire spiritual path was focused around my
experiment with surrender. In order to keep my distance
from the inner chatter, I still maintained my regular
meditation schedule and c ontinued my moment-to-
moment practice of centering myself. Every time I sat
down at the co mputer to work on the program, I took a
breath and remembered that  I was writing this as a gift
to the universe. I was sitting  on a tiny planet spinning
through outer space, and this  was the task that had been
given to me. I t never even occurred to me to ask for
assistance. The program was about half complete when my
guardian angel sent me unasked for, but much needed,
assistance. Some moments in our lives are marked by
destiny. Such was the brief moment in time that
occurred one fall day in 1980. I was navigating through
the Sun day morning crowd on the Temple porch when a
young l ady app roached me. I did not recognize her, and
she spoke so softly that I could hardly hear her above the
crowd. As a way of introducin g herself, she said that she
had just graduated from the University of Florida where
she had  taken a few programming classes. She had heard
that I had been programmin g and wanted to work with
me, even if it meant no salary to begin with. Her name
was Barbara Duncan. I certainly needed help, but I couldn’t imagine how
anyone could help me. I had been writing the program
directly from my mind into the computer. There were no
hook points where someone e lse could tie in. In addition,
I di dn’t know this person, and she seemed very shy. Fortunately, I  was well trained in watching these
thoughts pass  through my mind, rather than blindly
listening to them. I simply st opped for a moment, took a
breath, and recognized all this negativity as my mind’s
initial resistance to change. I immediately let go and
surrendered to the reality of the situation: this person
had sincerely offered her services, and I was certainly in
need o f help. I told her that because I was used to
working alone, I couldn’t make any promises. However, I
was willing to give it a try. We set up for a meeting in a
few day s, and I told her that she should think about a
reasonable starting salary because I wanted to
compensate her. The level of talent and competence that was hidden
inside this person who just happened to show up at the
Temple is beyond my com prehension. Barbara was
definitely very scared and shy in the beginning. Then for
the next twenty years she kept stepping forward to accept
and excel at whatever was asked of her. She also started
coming to all t he Temple’s daily services and moved in
shortly after starting to work  for me. Barbara was really
Personalized Programming’s first full-time employee,
and she became a foundation block of both the company
and the  Temple community. It turns out that this shy
young l ady I met on the Temple porch that day had a
brilliant mind and the heart of a warrior. When Barbara started working for me, I was already
halfway done with the program. I had never actually
verbalized my thoughts to anyone, so sharing my vision
for the overall system with another person helped
tremendously. We made a wonderful team, and it was
clear that Barbara was perfectly capable of taking myvision and running with it. This became essential once
the number of programmers began to grow. In short,
Barbara was a gift from God. She showed up exactly
when I needed her, at a time I was not even wise enough
to know that I  needed her. I never looked for her; she
just appeared. In truth, it was the same with Radha. From day one
she took responsibility for all the accounting and office
management functions of the businesses and the
Temple. Thirty  years later she is still living at the Temple
and managing its affairs. It w as as though these people
were ha ndpicked for the disciplined spiritual lifestyle of
the Temple and were also pe rfectly suited for the highly
skilled jobs that were being created. I saw this happen
again and again as the busine sses expanded. It felt like I
was dancing with the perfection of the universe. I didn’t
fully re alize it at the time, but witnessing the results of
my surr ender experiment was doing more to get rid of
the bur densome sense of “me” than my hours of spiritual
practices. I was well aware t hat I was not causing these
events t o unfold so perfectly, but I was deeply honored to
watch the perfection of life unfold before my eyes. We brought on a couple of additional programmers
over th e next year. By the time we were done with the
first ve rsion of the software, there were four of us
working full-time. We needed the additional help coding
mostly because  the designs Barb and I were turning out
were never the simplest way to get things done—they
were sim ply the best way. Fo r example, one of the most
interesting and important modules we wrote was the one
that printed the insurance claim forms. I remember the
days I spent with my clients going over their insurance
billing needs. You basically h ad to be a rocket scientist to
understand all  the minute dif ferences between how these
practices were  filling out th e supposedly standardized
forms. But they insisted that each of these differenceswas ess ential in order to get properly paid by different
insurance companies. Barb and I managed to develop a very sophisticated,
template-driven system that would allow the practices
themselves to specify how they wanted to fill out the
forms for any particular insurance company. We were
committed to developing a s ystem that would perfectly
handle a practice’s insurance billing needs, and this
became one of the main reaso ns for the rapid acceptance
of th e software. In a very sh ort period of time, Medical
Manager practices would be defining hundreds of
different templates needed to handle the nation’s
insurance companies. This pr ovides a glimpse of t he level we went to with
The Medical Manager, even with the very first version. We kept bearing down and doing everything to the best
of our ability. I had never in my life been involved in
anything that demanded the level of perfection of that
program. It was like a polish ed diamond by the time it
was done. To me it was a  living entity, and I felt
tremendous respect every tim e I touched it. Just look at
the amazing flow of life’s events that created this
program. I felt like it had a life of its own, and we were
just here to serve it. It was the beginning of 1982, and after two years of
intense development, we started installing the program
for my origina l two clients. Given that none of us had
ever written such a comprehensive program before, the
installations m oved along very smoothly. I never once
thought about what would happen after those sites were
installed. We were completely focused on writing and
delivering the absolutely bes t system we could because
that was the ta sk life had given us. The program’s destiny
after th e init ial installations would have to unfold
completely on its own—exactly as had happened every
step of the way so far. 3 5. P r e p a r i n g  f o r  L a u n c h
A long wi th the great strides the program was making, I
was pleased to see events unfolding that benefited those
around me, especially Barb, who was working really
hard. Around this time my neighbor Bob Tilchin decided
to move, and the Temple purchased his property. Barb
got to move into that house, and she also got a well-
deserved new office when Personalized Programming
relocated its five employees into a new building on
Temple grounds. I got a nic er office as well, and some
very important events were destined to take place there—
none more important than a destiny-filled phone call I
took while sitting at my computer one day. We had just finished our first installation of The
Medical Manager, and I was finishing up the manual for
the pro gram w hen the phone rang. It was Systems Plus,
the distributo r of the acco unting program we were
selling. I was a very small dealer of theirs, and they didn’t
generally call me. I had placed a call a few days earlier to
report problems with a new piece of software they were
releasing. The customer representative at Systems Plus
introduced herself as Lorelei. She was very apologetic for
the problems they were hav ing. At some point in her
apologies and assurances, she told me that I should
remain recepti ve to their new software releases because
they planned on being the leading company for small
business softw are. She said they were expanding beyond
general accounting and were currently looking for a topreal estate package, legal package, and medical billing
package. When I heard her say medical billing package, she
caught me by surprise. At first I was too embarrassed to
say anything. Systems Plus was this big, Silicon Valley
computer com pany, and I was a guy in the woods who
had taught himself to program. Sure, I had spent the last
two years writing our medical billing program, but it had
only be en installed in one sm all doctor’s office for a few
weeks. Though the voice in my head was assuring me
that Systems Plus would ha ve no interest in my little
software program, I took a breath, surrendered to the
moment, and informed Lorel ei that I had just finished a
medical billing package. She started to say something
and the n stopped. After a br ief pause she said, “Wait a
minute, my boss just walk ed by; let me see if he’s
interested. ” I had absolutely no idea what to think. When Lorelei returned to the  call, she told me her boss
was very interested in reviewing any software that could
do a medical practice’s billing. She encouraged me to
send in the sy stem along with the manual I was just
completing. We got off the phone, and I was stunned. What had just happened. I had never even thought
about finding a software distributor. Then one of the
industry’s top business software distributors calls me in
the mid dle of the woods in Alachua, Florida, and ends up
asking to see my system. I found out later that when
Lorelei mentioned her boss, she was referring to the
president of the company, Rick Mehrlich, who had just
happened to walk by her desk at that exact moment. Perhaps now you can see why I have learned to so deeply
honor the flow of life. It to ok me a week or two to pull everything together
and ship it off to Systems Plus headquarters. There was
something very surreal as I stood there offering the
finished package up to the universe. I had simply been
following the flow. I hadn’t had any expectations, hopes,or d reams about anything. For many years now, I had
just been putting one foot in front of the other serving
whatever was put before me to the best of my ability. To
me, I was not  a computer programmer; I was a yogi
living in  the middle of the wo ods. I had bought a tiny toy
computer for $600 some years earlier, and I had played
around with it. I got tricked into spending two years of
my life writing a medical bil ling package after my mind
had alre ady de cided that writing software was too time-
consuming. No w, without my making a single call, I was
about to send something I h ad programmed off to the
president of a successful software company out in
California. How does such a thing happen—even in a
fairy tale. A few weeks later, I got a call from Systems Plus
informing me that the company president wanted to fly
out to Alachua  to meet me face-to-face. I agreed, and in
no t ime at all Rick Mehrlich was sitting on the couch in
my office telling me that h e wanted to distribute my
software. He said it was about the best he had ever seen,
and he  could do a great job representing it in the
marketplace. I enjoyed bo th his frankness and his
positive praise, and I immediately felt comfortable
working with him. It is impor tant to understand that the
way I viewed the unfolding events was that this man
sitting before me had been handpicked by the Universal
Force to take my child out into the world. Just as Barb
had sho wn up out of nowher e and turned out to be the
absolutely perf ect person to help me, so this man might
as well have m anifested out of thin air and told me he
had been sent to distribute the software package. I n either contacted another d istributor nor viewed any
other options. I surrendered t o the perfection of the flow. As R ick and I shook hands on our intent to enter into a
distribution arrangement, we couldn’t possibly have
known that for the next few  decades of our lives we
would be involved in a fantastic voyage together. Itshould come as no surprise that Rick and Systems Plus
turned out to be the absolutely perfect distributor for
The Medical Manager product. Life had worked its magic
once again. Systems Plus informed me in September that the
company was going to launch The Medical Manager in
November at the upcoming 1982 Computer Dealers’
Exhibition (COMDEX). Held in Las Vegas each year,
COMDEX was the largest computer trade show in the
country and the second largest in the world. Systems
Plus was planning to featur e the product in its huge
booth, so the pressure was on to get the distribution
agreement sign ed and to ship the finished version of the
software out to California. It turn s out that the Temple had a large retreat
scheduled for first of Octobe r that year for Ram Dass. That wa s exact ly the deadline Systems Plus had given me
to s end them t he finished version. Since I didn’t get the
software shipped before lea ving for the retreat, Ram
Dass ended up with it on his  lap the entire drive down. At one point he asked me in his very no-nonsense way of
speaking, “Is it any good. ” I answered him by saying that
I h ad no idea; it could be worth nothing or it could be
worth a  million dollars. Turns out I was off by a few
zeros. I  always  had tremendous respect for Ram Dass, as
do all of us who grew up under his aura of absolute
honesty with one’s self. The perfection of circumstances
that had him h olding that piece of software just before it
launched into the world was amazing to me. Who knows
how these things work. I cer tainly don’t claim to know a
thing. I  watche d how this sof tware was conceived, and I
saw it attract exactly what it needed to not only get
written but to be a leader ri ght out of the gate. It then
magically attra cted its own first-rate distributor and was
now sitting on the lap of one  of the most-respected New
Age spi ritual teachers in the world. This program had a
destiny of its o wn, and it was about to take us all on ajourney, the likes of which we never could have
imagined. S e c t i o n  V I
The Forces of Natural
Growth3 6. T h e  F o u n d a t i o n s  o f  a  S u c c e s s f u l
B u s i n e s s
T he l aunch of T he Medical Manager at the Las Vegas
trade s how was a sight to behold. I flew out to see
Systems Plus at work and to meet the company’s people. I ha d never be en to anything like that show in my life. Remember, I had been living  in the woods for years. At
Systems Plus’s booth, THE MEDICAL MANAGER  banners were
plastered all over the place. I t’s one thing to see your kid
grow up  for eighteen years and then watch her honored
at her high school graduation. It’s quite another thing
when y our kid was just born a few months ago and was
now center stage of a very p rofessional production at a
show the size o f COMDEX. Systems Plus had one of the
larger b ooths at the show, and everyone did a wonderful
job presenting the product. The market was ripe for
medical billin g software, and there was tremendous
interest at the b ooth. I marveled at seeing all the Systems
Plus sa lespeople demonstrate the product. The Medical
Manager had no warm-up period. It went from the quiet
woods of Alachua to the big-time lights of Vegas without
a single step in between. There was no t ime to rest on our laurels. Systems Plus
immediately started signing up dealers and selling the
product. What followed was an avalanche of requests for
new p roduct features an d customizations. Every
specialty want ed something  specific, and the staff of
almost every practice wanted the program to do things
exactly as they were used to doing them on paper. On top
of all this, within a month or two of la unch, Systems Plusinformed me that in addition to the wonderful billing
system we had written, the dealers would need
appointment scheduling and other practice management
features in order to continue successfully selling the
product. How were we going to do all this. None of us had any
formal t raining or experience in medical software design. We had to figu re it all out for ourselves—and we did. If
you ask ed me how, I would tell you that my experience
with meditation had shown me that there were two very
distinct aspect s of what we  call mind. Th ere was the
logical, thought-driven mind that links together what we
already know into complex patterns of thought in order
to com e up with logical solutions. Then there was the
intuitive, insp iration-driven mind that can look at a
problem and instantly see a creative solution. As it
turned out, the years of spi ritual work I had done to
quiet that voice in my head  had opened the door for
almost constant inspiration. It seemed that the quieter
the mind, the more that sol utions became self-evident. This was also t rue for Barb. Somehow she had the ability
to almost instantly tune in to  the same creative solutions
I ha d se en and  then help me  work out the logic. That is
how Th e Medical Manager was designed, and it is a
tribute to this process that we led the industry for many
years. O ur ability to rapidly design software became
legendary. In the meantim e, the interest in the product was so
phenomenal th at we could hardly keep up. It seemed like
we wer e being  pushed to ou r limits in every direction. Take the example of our dealer training seminars. We
held our first annual Medical Manager dealer seminar in
a sm all guest suite at the Gainesville Hilton in spring
1983. T hat one room was ple nty large to hold the fifteen
or twen ty people in attendance. Just a few years later, we
were r enting the entire Gainesville Hilton Hotel,
including all of its two hundred rooms, conferencefacilities, and dining rooms. By the early 1990s, we had
outgrown the Gainesville Hilton and the guest rooms of
all t he surrounding hotels. To  find a hotel big enough to
accommodate us, we had to move the dealer seminar
down to Orlando. The spiritual growth that came from keeping up with
Personalized P rogramming w as very deep. The diversity
of tasks  that now made up my daily life ranged from
running the Temple and giving spiritual talks three times
a week, to lecturing hundreds of dealer personnel on
medical practice management. Despite all these outer
changes, I did not become a traditional businessman. I
remained a person whose spiritual path was
surrendering to the flow of life and putting his entire
heart a nd soul into what life was giving him to do. My
twice-daily me ditation sessio ns certainly helped to keep
it all in perspective. The yea r 1985 would turn ou t to be a landmark year. In only two yea rs, Systems Plus had signed up more than
a hund red dea lers, and we w ere averaging more than a
hundred and fifty new Med ical Manager installations
every month. Our template design for insurance billing
became a huge success, and we were able to do billing to
pretty m uch al l insurance companies across the country. But bef ore I could catch my breath, the industry was
about to go th rough a tremendous transformation. As
more and more practices computerized, it suddenly
became possible to replace paper billing with electronic
billing. The advantages would prove to be so enormous
that an industrywide push was about to take place. As
successful as we had been wi th our paper billing, we had
no choice but to surrender to the fact that the entire
health-care industry was being pushed into the age of
computer-to-computer communications. Unfortunately,
that was a topic we knew nothing about. The story of how
we ended up leading the in dustry in that area is just
another tribute to the perfection of life’s flow. I remem ber our first design meeting for electronic
claims. We realized immediately that the optimal
solution would  be to use templates, as we had done for
paper billing. But doing this for electronic claims was
way be yond the capabilities of our existing template
design. As far as we knew, n obody had even attempted
such a solution before. The general attitude of my
programming team was that it probably could not be
done, a nd they wouldn’t even know where to begin since
all the different insurance companies could require very
different electronic claim files. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to give up. That very same
week, another one of life’s miracles took place. On
Sunday after services, a man introduced himself to me as
a former resident at Amrit’s yoga community. He wanted
to know if I might have some work for him if he settled in
the area. His name was Larry Horwitz, and I vaguely
remembered that some people at Amrit’s had told me
how bright he was. I assessed his background and
talents, and it dawned on me that, once again, life may
have se nt us the perfect pers on to tackle the problem at
hand. Though Larry had absolutely no background in
insurance billing, he got really interested in our
innovative app roach to electronic claims. I decided I
might a s well give him a try. After only a broad overview
of the project, I left him pre tty much on his own to see
what he could come up with. By himself, Larry studied every one of the 250
specification books from the nation’s insurance
companies and mapped out exactly what we would need
in order to us e templates to handle the entire country
with one program. We implemented these changes, and
The Medical Manager now  had an electronic billing
program with designed technology that far surpassed
others in the industry. The response was phenomenal. Larry became so busy creating the templates that we had
to build an entire department around him. The insurancecompanies end ed up changing their specifications on a
regular basis, and twenty-five years later, Larry Horwitz
was stil l in charge of electronic claims for the company. How do es such a person just  show up by himself exactly
when needed. The Me dical Manager led the industry in electronic
claims. Our ability to submit  claims directly to the Blue
Cross Blue Shield and Med icare insurers nationwide
drove t he success of the pro duct. By 1987 we were the
first practice management system in the country that was
able to submit  claims electronically in all fifty states. In
2000, The Medical Manag er was recognized for its
accomplishments in computerizing the medical industry
by being installed in the permanent archives of the
Smithsonian Institution. The tremendous work we did in
successfully co nverting tens of thousands of practices to
electronic transactions has been preserved for
generations to come. I saw all this as just another one of
life’s miracles. 3 7. T h e  I n d u s t r y  K n o c k s  o n  O u r  D o o r
P ersonalized Pr ogramming w as truly an anomaly. We
were located in the middle of the woods in a small
building on Temple property. None of us were
sophisticated businesspeople or experienced professional
programmers. We were just people who had been
brought together by the energy to do a task. Normally,
successful bus inesses have to plan their growth by
developing bus iness plans and financial budgets. In our
case, our only business plan was to try to keep up with
life’s powerful wave that was carrying us forward. Our
only budget was to hire who ever showed up who could
help us. But no  matter how h ard we tried, it seemed that
life just kept stepping things up to another level. A perfect example of how our miraculous growth took
place organically can be seen by some unexpected phone
calls I received in the mid-1980s. The first was in the
spring of 1985 from a woman  who introduced herself as
a vice president of Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield. Empire handled New York City and was one of the
largest Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance providers in the
country. Part of its efforts to convert medical practices in
the area to ele ctronic claims was to sell the doctors a
practice management system. The company had been
developing its own software but didn’t feel it was
competitive w ith The Medical Manager. I was very
honored when  she told me that Empire wanted to drop
its system and market The Medical Manager under a
private label. You certainly couldn’t beat having Blue
Cross Blue Shield marketing your p roduct to its doctors. Before I could catch my brea th, I was contacted by BlueCross Blue Shield of New Jersey with the same request. Then came South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Hawaii,
Mississippi, Colorado, and a few others. All those Blue
Cross Blue Shields ended up marketing The Medical
Manager to the doctors in t heir states. I saw this as a
living le sson in the power of  surrender. For years I had
been willing to let go of my personal preferences and
focus on doing the absolute best I could with what life
presented me. I hadn’t expected anything in return, and I
was very humbled to see what was unfolding. By the 1986– 88 period, Personalized Programming
had about a dozen employees, most of whom were
programmers. We were a tiny company, yet we were
earning millions of dollars a year in royalties alone. Systems Plus had very quickly realized the enormous
potential of the medical marketplace and dropped all its
other products to focus exclusively on The Medical
Manager. As head of Personalized Programming, it was
now my job to do business with all these large
corporations. I had never worked at that level before. But
just as life had  given me on-the-job training to become a
builder and a programmer, s he was now training me to
be a corporate  executive. I had already seen too much,
however, to be a convent ional executive. Even in
business, I intended to continue trusting the flow of life
as my ultimate adviser. One thing I sa w again and again on this ride with life
was tha t the right person would show up at just the right
time. I literally banked on that perfection, and it is
amazing how it kept happening. Even our corporate
attorney, Rick Karl, was into yoga and meditation. It
seemed that life was surrounding me with spiritually
oriented people, not only at the Temple, but also in my
business. How life managed to do this is perhaps epitomized by
the foll owing p erfectly orche strated sequence of events. It began when Systems Plus asked us to host arepresentative from a laboratory equipment company
who wa nted to  meet the Medical Manager development
team. It  was rare that System s Plus sent prospects out to
the woods in Alachua, but in this case there was no
choice. Systems Plus staff practically begged me to wear
a j acket, laced-up shoes, and have everyone on their best
professional b ehavior. Paul Dobbins was our visitor’s
name, a nd he had an extensive background as a senior
technical analyst and product manager. I sent Rick Kar l, our very presentable attorney, to pick
up the gentleman from the Gainesville airport. When he
returned, Rick stuck his head in my office with a grin on
his face the size of the Cheshire cat’s. Then, in walks our
important gues t. The first thing I noticed was that he had
a particular piece of jewelry wrapped around his upper
arm. It looked remarkably similar to the special bangle
that Yoganand a used to wear. As it turned out, it was. Paul Dobbins was a follower of Yogananda, had taken the
lessons, and had been doing Kriya yoga for many years. You can  be sure I was shocke d, but imagine how he felt. He flies  in from St. Louis on this important business trip
to m eet the pre sident of the company that wrote the top-
rated m edical practice ma nagement system in the
country. He walks into the president’s office and sees
pictures of Yogananda all over the place. At first,  there were no words  between us. Paul just sat
down on the couch and t ook in the beauty of the
moment. The energy in that room was befitting the
presence of a master. I couldn’t keep my eyes open, and
Paul was visibly overcome. A fter sitting in silence for a
while, I  asked him if he would  like to see the Temple. We
walked down the tree-lined road, onto the rustic dirt
path, an d into that holy place adorned with the pictures
of grea t masters. Needless to say, this was not Paul’s
usual business trip. Paul ex tended his visit through the weekend and
stayed in a small ten-by-ten-foot guest room on Templeproperty. Come Sunday, he didn’t want to leave. Paul
had apparently gotten into meditation on his own, and
he didn’t have many people around him who were into
yoga. H e was overwhelmed by what was going on at the
Temple and the strength of the Gainesville spiritual
community. He came to me after Sunday services with
the inev itable question: “May  I stay and work for you. ” I
felt dee p in my heart that Pau l belonged here and that he
really wanted to be p art of the Temple and the business. But I didn’t feel right about him just leaving the company
that had sent him here, so I told him let’s wait and see
how things unfold. Some months later, I received a rather panicky call
from Paul. He told me that his company had suddenly
been sold, and his boss and many other employees were
bailing out. Paul was turning in his resignation but
wanted to continue working with The Medical Manager
in some  manner. Life’s message was perfectly clear—it
was time to offer Paul a job. Paul ar rived in less than a  week with some of his
belongings. We  allowed him to stay in that same ten-by-
ten-foot guest room until he  found a place of his own. Five yea rs late r, Paul was sti ll living in that tiny room. I
have no idea w hat he did with his belongings, but I do
know that he came to morning and evening services at
the Temple like clockwork. Paul wa s a tremendous asset  to the company, and he
showed up exactly when he w as needed the most. Shortly
after he  joined the team, we began getting contacted by
the major national laboratories. They all wanted us to
interface The Medical Manag er to their labs. Paul was an
expert i n the field, and we were one of the first practice
management systems to implement electronic
connectivity with the major  lab companies. We could
never have succeeded as we  did without Paul on our
team. W hen I reflect back on how he came to us, it looks
like a gift from  the universe. T wenty years later, Paul stillworked for the company and,  to this day, lives in a home
with his wife and family bordering Temple property. It
appears that some things are just meant to be. 3 8. T h e  T e m p l e  K e e p s  G r o w i n g
M orning meditations took on a whole new meaning as
the software company got larger and larger. Not only
were meditation and yoga essential for continuing my
inward journey, but they were essential for keeping the
mind s ane. So much is demanded of you when you’re
running an organization on which so many people rely
for thei r livelihood. The mind needs time to quiet down
and keep everything in perspective. Leaving Temp le services on a winter morning after
sunrise, we often find the field covered in a mist of dew. Giant oaks, pines, and hickory trees embrace the field on
three si des, and the north sid e opens up to that beautiful
rolling pasture that slopes down to the tree-lined stream. Just standing out there with  a quiet mind is heaven on
Earth. It wasn’t that way one misty morning in early
December 1988. When we walked out of the quietude of
the Tem ple onto the interior field, we heard the roar of
large machinery coming from the north. To our utter
surprise, we saw giant bulldo zers and other land-clearing
equipment on our neighbor ’s rolling field. We didn’t
know w hat to make of it, so we walked up the hill to my
original house that bordered the pasture. We located
some of  the workers and ask ed what was going on. They
told us that they had purchased lumber rights to all the
trees on our neighbor’s property. Our neighbor to the
north was a thousand-plus-acre farm owned by a couple
named Wilbur and Juliet. They were wonderful people
whose house was on the far thest side of their propertyfrom the Temple. The land ha d been in their family for a
long tim e, and they had great respect for the property. We didn’t understand what was going on, so we gave
them a call. When I was finally able to reach Wilbur, he explained
that they were clearing what was left of their native forest
and planting slash pines. That would provide a cash crop
some fifteen to twenty years in the future. I told him I
would l ike to talk to him abou t it, and I asked if he would
be willing to h old off clearing the land bordering our
property until we met. He was hesitant but told me to tell
the fore man to  give him a call. In truth, I had no idea
what I would say to Wilbur when we met, but I felt a
deep obligation to do what I could to protect the
beautiful woods on that land. As I drove over to Wilbur’s,  I focused on remaining
open an d receptive to the ex perience at hand so that I
could se e wher e life was taki ng it. As I look back now, I
am so grateful that surrender  had taught me to willingly
participate in life’s dance with a quiet mind and an open
heart. When I arrived at Wilbur’s, there wasn’t any openness
to selling us t he thirty-five acres that lay between our
property and the stream. I explained to him that the
trees on that property were b eautiful, and they should be
spared. He agreed with the beautiful part, but he was
running a farm, and slash pines were what they had
decided to plant on the entire property. Our efforts
seemed futile until I offered to lease the property at
whatever price would assure that he earned more than
the pines would yield him. Wilbur was an astute
businessman, and that caugh t his attention. There was
risk in any cr op, but no ris k in a secured, long-term
lease. Wilbur named a price that was significantly higher
than a ny farmer would pay to lease unimproved
property. Nonetheless, it was still worth it from our
perspective of protecting the trees and pasture of thatbeautiful piece of land. In the  end, we signed a long-term
lease with Wilbur that allowed us to preserve, protect,
and hav e use of the property to our north—the property
that I had once called the Elysian Fields. This experience only served to reinforce what I was
learning from my experiment with surrender. Something
that started out looking totally disastrous had ended up
with a positive result. Time a nd again I was seeing that if
I co uld handle the winds of the current storm, they
would e nd up blowing in som e great gift. I was beginning
to view these storms as a harbinger to transformation. Perhaps change only takes place when there is sufficient
reason to overcome the inertia of everyday life. Challenging si tuations create  the force needed to bring
about c hange. The problem is that we generally use all
the stirred-up energy intended to bring about change, to
resist change. I was learning to sit quietly in the midst of
the howling winds and wait to see what constructive
action was being asked of me. If t hat were the end of the story regarding that
property, I would still label it a gift from the universe. But it was far from the end. Just one week after signing
that lease, another piece of land came up for sale that
bordered the core of our community. Remarkably, once
we made that purchase, the land we had just leased
ended up running along the e ntire northern border of all
our property, thus tying everything together. It left me breathless to see a ll this unfold the way it
did. I was playing a game with life, and every time life
made its move, a part of my  noisy mind fell away. Why
was I needed. Everything was unfolding on its own
much better than anything I could ever imagine—let
alone d o. I had said I would purchase adjoining property
if it were pres ented to me and if we had the necessary
cash. The Temple was now up to eighty-five acres,
including the leased land. Section summary: 

(accurate & concise)
Please summarize the author's account of significant experiences occurring due to maintaining commitment towards spirituality-based values. (Note : please maintain precise accuracy)

Here'. ```
**Summary**:  
This passage describes several key episodes illustrating **personal transformations**, particularly focusing on themes associated with "total" surrender, trust (**faith**) in universal forces guiding human actions instead of egoic desires/expectations. These transformative instances involve interactions involving prisoners [specific individuals] transformed via internal processes, demonstrating willingness to adapt/make conscious choices based solely on external guidance/instructions (`radicals`). Key incidents include `Radha`, prisoner-turned-yogastudent David Clark ('Creature') interacting closely with guru-like figure 'My Guru', revealing profound effects, ultimately transforming character traits; similarly, mentorship dynamics occur among characters. Continue reading below. **
Let me assist further. Have questions. What aspects specifically caught Your Attention. Would You Like assistance summarising certain parts separately. Please clarify Any doubts/specific queries. (Pardon me) Typographical errors exist throughout – minor corrections welcome. ).
He was a large, sincere, and intelligent person who had a deep understanding of his past actions and was seeking spiritual growth.
What was the author's initial impression of David, the Outlaw, when they first met?
The author was willing to give it a try and saw it as an opportunity to serve, rather than trying to control the outcome.
What was the author's attitude towards the opportunity to work with Barbara, the young lady who approached him at the Temple?
The author felt stunned and overwhelmed, but he surrendered to the situation and focused on doing his best to work with the company.
How did the author feel about the phone call from Systems Plus, asking to install their software?
The author learned to remain open and receptive to the situation, and he trusted that the universe would guide him. He did not try to control the outcome or resist the change.
What was the author's approach to dealing with the challenges and changes in his life?
The author felt a deep sense of obligation to protect the land and the community, and he negotiated a long-term lease with Wilbur, even though it was a higher price than he had initially expected.
How did the author react when Wilbur, the neighbor, offered him a lease on the property?