Copyright © 2015 by Michael A. Singer
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.crownpublishing.com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a
trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. The Surrender Experiment™ is a trademark of Shanti Publications, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon
request. ISBN 9780804141109
eBook ISBN 9780804141116
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Amanda Dewey
Cover design by Fort & Jess Morphew
Cover illustration by Shutterstock/David M. Schrader
v4.1
aTo the MastersC o n t e n t s
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Section I
W a k i n g  U p
The Premise
1. Not with a Shout—But with a Whisper
2. Getting to Know Me
3. The Pillars of Zen
4. Absolute Silence
5. From Absolute Peace to Absolute Turmoil
6. South of the Border
7. Disconnecting the Panic Button
8. Unexpected Inspiration
9. The Promised Land
10. Building a Sacred Hut
11. Get Thee to a Monastery
12. When the Disciple Is Ready, the Master Appears
Section II
T h e  G r e a t  E x p e r i m e n t  B e g i n s
13. The Experiment of a Lifetime
14. Life Takes Charge
15. The Prince and the Pauper
16. Following the Invisible into the Unknown
17. My First Job Interview
18. Letting Go of the Rope
19. Acceptance, Acceptance, and More Acceptance
20. The Most Important Thing I Was Ever Asked to DoSection III
F r o m  S o l i t u d e  t o  S e r v i c e
21. The Call of a Living Master
22. Shaktipat
23. Gainesville Hosts a Guru
24. The Temple Is Built
25. Opening the Heart Chakra
26. Get Thee to an Ashram
Section IV
T h e  B u s i n e s s  o f  S u r r e n d e r
27. A Company Is Born
28. The Master Builder
29. Community Banking
30. The Ever-Expanding Temple of the Universe
31. Metamorphosis of a Creature
Section V
S o m e t h i n g  P r i c e l e s s  I s  B o r n
32. From the Personal Self to the Personal Computer
33. The Birth of The Medical Manager
34. The Early Programmers
35. Preparing for Launch
Section VI
T h e  F o r c e s  o f  N a t u r a l  G r o w t h
36. The Foundations of a Successful Business
37. The Industry Knocks on Our Door
38. The Temple Keeps Growing
Section VII
W h e n  D a r k  C l o u d s  B e c o m e  R a i n b o w s
39. A Touch of Magic
40. The Scary Messenger of Change
41. The Foundation Is Built for the Future
42. Meanwhile—Back at the Ranch
Section VIII
E m b r a c i n g  E x p l o s i v e  E x p a n s i o n
43. The Medical Manager Sprouts Wings
44. Medical Manager Corporation—MMGR
45. Becoming CEO
46. The Internet and Health Care
47. Merging—But Not with the Universe
48. Building Rome in a Day
49. Hanging Out in Washington
Section IX
T o t a l  S u r r e n d e r
50. The Raid
51. Attorneys, Attorneys, and More Attorneys
52. United States of America v. Michael A. Singer
53. Preparing a Defense
54. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights
55. Divine Intervention
56. Returning to the Beginning
About the Author
More by the AuthorA c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
In t ruth, life is  really the aut hor of this book. She is the
one who manifested the flo w of events that were so
powerful and fascinating they demanded narration. But
life need ed me  to put pen to p aper if her greatness was to
be mem orialized. To that end, she sent exactly the right
people at exactly the right time to bring The Surrender
Experiment  into fruition. It is  with hum ility and heartfelt thanks that I tell you
of the phenomenal job that my product manager, Karen
Entner, did on this book. Her tireless and selfless service
has inst illed this work with a sense of commitment and
perfection rarely found in this world. I w ould  also like to take this opportunity to thank my
editor, Gary Jansen, from Crown Publishing, for all the
hard work and great suggestions he contributed. As
would be expected, life prov ided the absolutely perfect
editor to assist me in giving this testimony to her
greatness. This bo ok had many early readers, all of whom deserve
thanks. I would like to single out James O’Dea, Ursula
Harlos, and Stephanie Davis, who contributed detailed
suggestions on  draft after dra ft during the early stages of
writing. I n ow get to a cknowledge yo u, the reader, for having
the interest and taking the time to read about this
phenomenal experiment. May we all learn to appreciate
our live s in this amazing universe—a little bit more each
day.S e c t i o n  I
Waking UpT h e  P r e m i s e
Sitting alone in a six-seater private jet at forty
thousand feet is a very peaceful place. I fell into
meditation and my mind became very still. When I opened my eyes, I absorbed the
tremendous difference in my environment
from w hen I had first moved out to the woods
to b e al one and  meditate. Though I still lived in
those s ame woods, my place of solitude had
grown into a t hriving yoga community, and I
had bec ome CEO of the publi c corporation that
life had somehow magically manifested
around me. It was now perfectly clear to me
that all of these life experiences, including
running a business at this level, were doing as
much to free me spiritually as my years of
solitary medit ation. Just as Hercules used the
flow of rivers to clean out the Augean stables,
so the powerful flow of life was cleaning out
whatever was  left of me. I j ust kept letting go
and practicing  nonresistance, whether I liked
what was happening or not. It was in this
frame o f mind that I was flying off to Texas to
discuss the billion-dollar merger offer for my
company from a powerful CEO whom I had
never even met. My Reflections, May 1999
L ife rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we
stop an d think  about it, tha t makes perfect sense. The
scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not
actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The uni verse h as been around for 13.8 bil lion yea rs, and
the processes that determine the flow of life around usdid not begin w hen we were born, nor will they end when
we die. What manifests in front of us at any given
moment is actually something truly extraordinary—it is
the end result of all the force s that have been interacting
together for billions of years. We are not responsible for
even the tiniest fraction of what is manifesting around
us. Nonetheles s, we walk a round constantly trying to
control and determine what will happen in our lives. No
wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each
of u s actually b elieves that things should be the way we
want them, instead of being the natural result of all the
forces of creation. Every day, we give precedence to our mind’s thoughts
over the reality unfolding before us. We regularly say
things l ike, “It  better not ra in today because I’m going
camping” or “I better get that raise because I really need
the money.” Notice that these bold claims about what
should and shouldn’t be happening are not based on
scientific evid ence; they’re based solely on personal
preferences made up in our minds. Without realizing it,
we do this with  everything in our lives—it’s as though we
actually believe  that the world around us is supposed to
manifest in accordance to our  own likes and dislikes. If it
doesn’t, surely something is very wrong. This is an
extremely diffi cult way to live, and it is the reason we feel
that we are always struggling with life. Nonetheless, it  is also true that we are not powerless in
the face  of the events unfoldin g around us. We have been
gifted with the power of will . From deep inside, we can
determine how we want something to be and apply the
power of our minds, hearts, and bodies in an attempt to
make th e outside world conform. But this puts us in a
constant battle of our way versus the way it would be
without our intervention. This battle between individual
will and  the reality of life unfolding around us ends up
consuming ou r lives. When we win the battle, we are
happy a nd relaxed; when we don’t, we are disturbed andstressed. Since  most of us only feel good when things are
going our way, we are constantly attempting to control
everything in our lives. The que stion is , does it have to be this way? There is so
much evidence that life does quite well on its own. The
planets stay in orbit, tiny se eds grow into giant trees,
weather patterns have kept forests across the globe
watered for millions of years, and a single fertilized cell
grows into a b eautiful baby. We are not doing any of
these th ings as conscious acts of will; they are all being
done by the incomprehensible perfection of life itself. All
these a mazing events, and countless more, are being
carried out by forces of life that have been around for
billions of years—the very same forces of life that we are
consciously pit ting our will against on a daily basis. If the
natural unfolding of the process of life can create and
take care of the  entire universe, is it really reasonable for
us t o assume that nothing g ood will happen unless we
force it  to? It is to the exp loration of this intriguing
question that this book is devoted. How can there possibly be a more important question? If li fe can manifest the DNA molecule on its own, not to
mention create  the human brain, how is it that we feel
that we have t o control everything on our own? There
must b e another, more sane way to approach life. For
example, what would happen  if we respected the flow of
life and  used  our free wil l to participate in what’s
unfolding, instead of fighting it? What would be the
quality of the life that unfolds? Would it just be random
events with no order or meaning, or would the same
perfection of order and meaning that manifests in the
rest of the universe manifest in the everyday life around
us? What we have here is the  basis for an amazing
experiment. At  the heart of the experiment is a simple
question: Am I better off making up an alternate reality
in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it bemy way, or am  I better off letting go of what I want and
serving the same forces of reality that managed to create
the entire perfection of the universe around me? This
experiment would not be about dropping out of life; it
would b e about leaping into life to live in a place where
we are no longer controlled  by our personal fears and
desires. For lack of a better n ame, I have called this “the
surrender expe riment,” and to the best of my ability, I
have devoted the last forty years of my life to seeing
where the flow of life’s event s would naturally take me. What happene d over the course of these four decades is
nothing short of phenomenal. Not only did things not fall
apart, quite the opposite happened. As one thing
naturally followed the other, the flow of life’s events led
me on a journey that wou ld have been beyond my
comprehension. This book shares that journey with you
so that you can experience what happened when
someone dared to let go and trust the flow of life. Let it be clear right from the  start, however, that this
type of surren der does not mean living life without the
assertion of will. My story of  these forty years is simply
the stor y of what happened when the assertion of will
was guided by what life wa s doing instead of what I
wanted it to be doing. My personal experience is that
aligning one’s will with the natural forces unfolding
around us leads to some surprisingly powerful results. The onl y effective way to shar e the results of this great
experiment is to allow you to see how I got pulled into
living this way and then al low you to experience the
journey as I did. In what follows, you are about to
encounter a set of life experi ences that are bound to be
very different from your own. I share these with you only
because as human beings w e have the extraordinary
ability to learn from one another’s experiences. You don’t
have to live a s I did in order to be affected by what
happened to me. The unexpected events that unfolded
before me not only changed my life, they changed myentire view of life and left me with a sense of deep inner
peace. Hopefully, sharing my surrender experiment with
you will encourage you to find a more peaceful and
harmonious wa y to live your life and to better appreciate
the amazing perfection that unfolds around us.1 . N o t  w i t h  a  S h o u t — B u t  w i t h  a  W h i s p e r
M y giv en name i s Michael Alan Singer. From as far back
as I can remem ber, everyone has called me Mickey. I was
born M ay 6, 1947, and lived a fairly ordinary life until the
winter of 1970. Then something happened to me that
was so profoun d that it forev er changed the direction of
my life. Life-changing events can be very dramatic and, by
their very nature, disruptive. Your whole being is headed
in o ne direction physically, emotionally, and mentally;
and that direction has all th e momentum of your past
and all the dreams of your future. Then suddenly, there’s
a major earthquake, a terrible sickness, or a chance
encounter that totally sweep s you off your feet. If the
event is powerful enough to  change the focus of your
heart and mind, the rest of your life will change in due
course. You are literally not the same person on both
sides o f a truly life-chang ing event. Your interests
change, your goals change , in fact, the underlying
purpose of your life change s. It usually takes a very
powerful event to turn your head around so far that you
never look back. But not always. In the winter o f 1970, no suc h event happened to me. What happene d was so sub tle, so faint, that it could
easily have passed by without being noticed. It was not
with a shout but with a whisp er that my life was thrown
into utter turmoil and transformation. It has been more
than forty years now since that life-changing moment,
but I remember it as if it were yesterday.I was sitting on the living room couch in my home in
Gainesville, Florida. I was twenty-two years old and
married at the time to a beautiful soul named Shelly. We
were both students at the Un iversity of Florida where I
was doi ng my graduate work in economics. I was a very
astute student, and I was being groomed by the
chairman of the economics department to become a
college professor. Shelly had a brother, Ronnie, who was
a very successful attorney in Chicago. Ronnie and I
became close friends even though we were from totally
different world s. He was a powerful, wealth-driven, big-
city at torney, and I was a ’60s-groomed, college-
intellectual hi ppie. It is worth mentioning just how
analytically oriented I was at the time. I had never even
taken a philosophy, psychology, or religion course while
in college. My electives at school were symbolic logic,
advanced calculus, and theoretical statistics. This makes
what happened to me all the more amazing. Ronnie would come down once in a while to visit, and
we would often just hang out together. As it turns out,
Ronnie was sitting on that co uch with me on that fateful
day in 1970. I  don’t remember exactly what we were
talking about, but there had been a lull in our leisurely
conversation. I noticed I was uncomfortable with the
silence and found myself thin king of what to say next. I
had been in similar situations many times before, but
something wa s quite different about this experience. Instead of simply being uncomfortable and trying to find
something to say, I noticed  t ha t I was uncomfortable and
trying to find s omething to say. For the first time in my
life, my mind and emotions were something I was
watching instead of being. I know that it is difficult to put into words, but there
was a complete sense of separation between my anxious
mind, which was spewing out possible topics to talk
about, a nd me, the one who  was simply aware that my
mind was doing this. It was like I was suddenly able toremain above my mind and quietly watch the thoughts
being c reated. Believe it or n ot, that subtle shift in my
seat of awareness became a tornado that rearranged my
entire life. For a few mom ents, I just sat there inwardly watching
myself t ry to “fix” the awkward silence. But I was not the
one trying to f ix it; I was the one quietly watching the
activity of my mind trying t o fix it. At first there were
only a few deg rees of separation between me and what I
was watching. But every second the separation seemed to
become greate r and greater. I was not doing anything to
cause this shift. I was just the re noticing that my sense of
me  no longer included the neurotic thought patterns that
were passing in front of me. This e ntire process of “becoming aware” was
practically instantaneous. It was like when you stare at
one of those posters that has a hidden picture inside. At
first it appears to be just a cir cle with line patterns. Then,
suddenly, you see an entire 3-D image emerge from what
originally looked like chaos. Once you see it, you can’t
imagine how you hadn’t seen it before. It was right there! Such was the s hift that happened inside of me. It was so
obvious—I wa s in there w atching my thoughts and
emotions. I had always been in there watching, but I had
been too unaware to notice. It was as though I had been
so invo lved in their details that I never saw them as just
thoughts and emotions. Within seconds, what previously seemed like
important solu tions for how to break the uncomfortable
silence was now sounding like a neurotic voice talking
inside my head. I watched as that voice tried out things
to say:
The weather’s been awesome, hasn’t it? Did you hear what Nixon did the other day? Do you want to get something to eat?When I finally did open my mouth to say something,
what I said was:
“Have y ou ever noticed that there’s this voice
talking inside your head?”
Ronnie looked  at me a little w eird, and then a spark lit
in his eyes. He said, “Yes, I see what you’re talking about
—mine never shuts up!” I distinctly remember making a
joke ou t of it b y asking him what it would be like if he
heard someone else’s voice talking in there. We laughed,
and life went on. But not my  life. My life didn’t just “go on.” In my life,
nothing would ever be the s ame again. I didn’t have to
try to maintain this awareness. It was who I was now. I
was the being who was watc hing the incessant flow of
thoughts pass through the mind. From the same seat of
awareness, I watched the  ever-shifting current of
emotions pass through the heart. When I showered, I
saw what that voice had to s ay while I was supposed to
be washing my body. If I was talking to someone, I
watched as that voice figured out what to say next—
instead of listening to what t he other person was saying. If I went to class, I watched my mind play the game of
trying to think ahead of the professor to see if it could
figure o ut where he was going with the lecture. Needless
to say, it did n ot take long be fore this newly found voice
inside m y head really started to annoy me. It was like
sitting next to someone in a movie theater who never,
ever stops talking. As I observed that voice, something deep inside my
being ju st wanted it to shut up. What would it be like if it
stopped? I began to long for silence inside. Within days
of that first experience, my life’s patterns began to
change. When friends came over to socialize, I no longer
enjoyed the scene. I wanted t o quiet my mind, and social
activities didn’t help. I began to excuse myself and go out
to t he woods near our hous e. I would sit down on theground amid the trees and tell that voice to shut up. Of
course, it didn’t work. Nothin g seemed to work. I found
that I could change the topic  it talked about, but I could
not get it to just stop talking for any length of time. My
yearning for inner silence bec ame a passion. I knew what
it w as li ke to watch the voice. What I didn’t know is what
it would  be like if the voice totally stopped. And what I
never co uld have imagined was the life-changing journey
on which I was about to embark.2 . G e t t i n g  t o  K n o w  M e
E ven in my yo uth, I loved t o figure out how things
worked. So it was inevitable that my analytical mind
would become fascinated by  trying to understand my
relationship to  the voice inside my head. Before I could
enjoy this intellectual fascination, however, I had to get
over the fact that the personal mind was driving me
crazy. E very tim e I saw somet hing, that voice made some
comment about it: I like it… ; I do n’t like it… ; I’m not
comfortable with this… ; This reminds me of …As I
became more and more accustomed to watching all this,
a few question s naturally arose. First, why is this voice
talking all the time? If I see something, I’m instantly
aware of seeing it. Why doe s the voice have to tell me
that I see it and how I feel about it? Here comes Mary. I don’t feel like seeing her
today. I hope she doesn’t see me. I know what I see and I know what I feel. After all, I’m
the one in here seeing and feeling. Why does it have to
get vocalized in my mind? Another questi on that arose was who am I who keeps
noticing all this mental activity? Who am I who can just
watch thoughts come up with a complete sense of
detachment? I now had two driving forces awaken inside regarding
this new ly foun d voice in my head. One was the desire to
shut it up and the other was the pure fascination and
yearning to understand what  that voice was and where it
came from.I me ntioned that prior to this  inner awakening, my life
was pretty ordinary. I only say that in comparison to
what m y life became. I became a driven human being. I
wanted to know about the vo ice I had discovered, and I
wanted to know who I was—the one inside experiencing
all o f th is. I began to spend h ours on end in the graduate
school l ibrary. But I was not in the economics section; I
was in the psy chology section. There was no way that
others had not noticed this vo ice talking inside. It was so
prevalent that you couldn’t miss it. I scanned through
Freud trying to find the answers to my questions. I read
book after book, but I found  no direct reference to the
voice talking inside—not to mention any reference to the
one who is aware that the voice is talking. In thos e days, I would talk about the voice to anyone
who would listen. They all must have thought I was
crazy. I remember one encounter with my very reserved,
highly c ultured Spanish professor. I ran into him one day
between classes and excitedl y told him that I had come
to u nderstand what it meant to be fluent in a language. I
explained to him that there was this voice inside your
head th at talks  to you about virtually everything—what
you like  and dislike, what you’re supposed to be doing
right now, and what you’ve done wrong in the past. If
that inner voice could speak in Spanish and you
immediately understood what it was saying, then you
were fluent in Spanish. If, however, the Spanish words
made no sense to you until you did the mental work of
translating them so that the voice would repeat them in
English, then you were not fluent in Spanish. It made
perfect sense—to me. I told him that if I were majoring in
language studies, I would do my doctoral dissertation on
that premise. Needless to say, my Spanish professor gave
me a very odd look, said something very polite, and went
on his way. I d idn’t  care what he thought . I was on an exploration,
a journey of learning beyond anything I could haveimagined. Every day I was learning so much about
myself. I couldn’t believe the amount of self-
consciousness and fear bein g expressed through that
voice. I t was so obvious that  the person I was watching
inside c ared a great deal about what people thought of
him. This was especially true  of people I knew well. The
voice told me what to say  and what not to say. It
complained inc essantly when  something was not the way
it wanted. If a conversation w ith a friend en ded with the
slightest discord or disagreement, the conversation
would k eep going on inside m y head. I would watch the
voice wishfully  imagine how t he conversation could have
ended on a dif ferent note. I could see how much fear of
rejection and nonacceptance were being expressed
through that mental dialogu e. It was overwhelming at
times, b ut I never lost the perspective of watching a voice
talking inside. It was obvi ous it wasn’t me; it was
something I was watching. Imagine if you woke up one  day and a cacophony of
noise was all a round you. You wanted it to stop, but you
had no idea how to stop it. That is the effect the voice
was hav ing on me. One thing was perfectly clear: that
voice had always talked befor e. But I had been so lost in
it th at I  never noticed it as se parate from me. It was like
a fish not know ing it is in water until it gets out. One leap
into the  air and the fish instantly realizes, “There’s a
body of  water down there, an d that is where I’ve always
been. But now I see that I can get out.”
I did n’t like the voice of the m ind talking all the time. It was just like an irritating n oise that I really wanted to
stop. Bu t it didn’t. For now I w as stuck with it. As it turns
out, however, I had not yet begun to fight.3 . T h e  P i l l a r s  o f  Z e n
M onths w ent by and I was still on my own with my inner
exploration. L ittle did I know that help was about to
arrive unexpectedly. I had a classma te in my doctoral program named Mark
Waldman. He  was a bright  young man and an avid
reader on a broad range of subjects. Like everyone else,
Mark had heard me talking about my interest in the
voice. O ne day he brought m e a book he thought might
help. The book was entitled  Three Pillars of Zen,  by
Philip Kapleau. I knew absolutely nothing about Zen Buddhism. I was
an intellectual who didn’t give religious matters a second
thought. I was brought up Je wish, but not very much so. By the time I r eached college , religion played no part in
my life. If yo u had asked me if I was an atheist, I
probably would  have given you a blank stare. I had never
even thought about it. I s tarted  leafing through the pages of the book on Zen,
and within minutes it became evident: this book was
about that voice. My heart practically stopped. I had
trouble breathing. This book was clearly about how to
stop that voice from talking. Passage after passage spoke
about quieting the mind. It used terms like the True Self
behind the mind. There was  no doubt that I had found
what I’d been looking for. I knew there had to be others
who had gained the perspecti ve of watching that voice of
the mind instead of identify ing with it. Not only was
there an entire legacy of kno wledge spanning thousands
of y ears that d ealt with the voice, but this book clearlydiscussed “getting out.” It talked about freeing yourself
from the hold of the mind. It talked about going beyond. Needless to say, I was in awe. I felt a reverence for this
book th at I had never felt fo r anything in my life. I had
been forced to read and study  so many books in school. I
now ha d in my hands a book that answered some real
questions for me, like who a m I that watches that voice
talk. These were questions that I passionately wanted to
know the answers to. Truth is , it was way beyond want. I
needed  to know these answers—tha t voice was driving
me crazy! What Three P illars o f Zen  had to say was very clear
and unequivocal. It said to stop reading, talking, and
thinking about your mind, and just do the work
necessary to quiet it down. The required work was
equally unambiguous—meditate. Before I even knew about meditation, I had tried
sitting alone in order to make  the voice stop talking. But
that ha d never worked for me. With this book, I was
presented a tried-and-true method that had worked for
thousands of others. Simply  sit down in a quiet spot,
watch your breath go in and o ut, and mentally repeat the
sound Mu. That’s it. Now do that for an ever-increasing
length of time each day. In  Zen, the real work was
generally done in a group setting called a sessin. In
traditional sett ings, a trained person would walk around
with a kyosaku  stick. If you st arted to sleep or lost focus
in a nother manner, you would get a smack on your
shoulders with the stick. Zen was strict; there was no
playing around. This form of Zen was serious work. I didn’t have a group or a teacher. All I had was the
book an d a very sincere yearn ing to see if these practices
would t ake me  where I want ed to go. So I started to do
Zen me ditation on my own. At least it was my best
understanding of what Zen meditation is. At first I sat for
fifteen or twenty minutes eac h day. Within a week I built
that to half an hour, twice a day. There were no fireworksor deep experiences. But concentrating on my breath and
the mantra was definitely di verting my awareness from
the incessant chatter of the v oice. If I made the mental
voice say Mu,  it couldn’t say all the crazy personal things
it usually said. I quickly bega n to like the practice. I
looked forward  to the times I had put aside during the
day for meditation. I w as no more  than a few weeks into my experiment
with Zen meditation when Sh elly and I decided to go on
a ca mping trip. We were joined by four friends, and
together we drove our vans into Ocala National Forest
for the weekend. I had a VW  camper, so weekend trips
were an easy affair. But this trip wouldn’t turn out to be
just another camping trip—this trip was destined to have
a profound impact on the rest of my life. We found a sec luded spot in the woods that opened up
to a pristine wetland area. Once we situated our vans, we
were overcome by the quiet and beauty of the place. It
dawned on me that this wo uld be a good place to do
some m editation. I was just a novice, but I was very
serious about doing the practices and finding out what it
would be like i f the voice actually stopped. I asked Shelly
and our friends if I could spend some time by myself. No
one objected, so I meandered down by the grassy lake
and found a nice spot to sit. The whole notion of
meditating was  so meaningful to me that from the start it
was like a sacred experience. I picked a tree to sit under,
just like the Buddha. Then, very dramatically, I told
myself, I’m not getting up unt il I’ve reached
enlightenment. What happened under that tree that day was so
powerful that even now my body shivers and my eyes
begin to tear just to think about it.4 . A b s o l u t e  S i l e n c e
I  crossed my legs in a full-lotus position. I knew I wasn’t
proficient enou gh to hold that posture for long, but I
thought I might as well start with the official meditation
position. I straightened my back and neck, and I began to
concentrate on  my breath expanding and contracting in
my abd omen. The Zen book instructed me to make the
Mu  sou nd way do wn in my belly, below the belly button. I watched my breath go in and out from way down there. I wa s intending to sit for muc h longer than I had done
previously, so I used my will to concentrate with extra
intensity and sincerity. It must have made a difference
because I went deeper insi de than I had ever gone
before. It seemed that concentrating on the movement of
the breath in my belly created a force that linked the
outflow of breath from my nostrils with the inner
movement of my abdomen. Every time I breathed slowly
out my nose, I felt a warm, inviting sensation throughout
the area below my belly. The sensation was so nice that
my attention naturally centered there. For a period of
time, I simply lost myself in the beauty of the experience. Some ti me later, the length o f which I had no way of
telling, the mental voice began talking about how
beautiful the experience was  and how this must be real
meditation. Since my awar eness was drawn to that
mental voice, it was drawn away from concentrating on
the breath. The meditation experience seemed to have
run its natural  course, and I began to come down to my
normal mental state.But this meditation session was supposed to be
different. I had told myself I w asn’t getting up until I had
broken through . So I willfully began concentrating anew
on the movem ent of the breath in my belly and on the
sound of Mu. I lost myself once again in the warm
flowing force that tied my ex halations to the warmth in
my abdomen. The force became much stronger as I
concentrated more deeply. E ventually, all consciousness
of my body an d my surroundings was gone. I was only
aware of the effortless flow  of warm energy that was
building and expanding at the core of my belly. I was not
there; only the flow was there. From time to time, for brie f moments, my sense of
self-awareness would drift b ack into focus. The instant
that sta rted to happen, I would willfully focus on the
feeling of the exhaled breath  and the movement of my
belly—and, in stantly, I was no longer there. This
experience of drifting in and  out of the deep state went
on for a prolonged period of time, perhaps hours. At s ome point, I must have  lost the will to refocus
during one of those mom ents when self-awareness
returned. I had been far gone in a very deep and peaceful
place, but I started to come back. I don’t know how long I
had actually been sitting, but the first thing I became
aware o f was the pain in my legs. They hurt a great deal
from sitting in a full-lotus po sition for so long. The voice
of th e m ind ha d not started b ack up yet. I was just there,
kind of dazed, but very peaceful and deeply mesmerized
by the experie nce. I suppose I would have continued to
come down, but an amazing thing happened. From back
behind where my sense of awareness had been centering
came a booming voice. It said  very sternly: “DO YOU OR
DO YOU NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS BEYOND
YOU?”
This wa s not the voice of th e mind I was so used to
struggling with. Ever since I first noticed that chattering
voice, it was t alking in front of and below where I satinside. This new invocation came from behind and above
where m y sens e of awareness was now situated. In any
event, i ts stern challenge shook me to the depths of my
being. I didn’t feel the need to answer the question,
because every drop of me yearned to go deeper. So I took
a br eath in, then deeply pu shed myself into the out-
breath, and I was gone. When my sense of self-awareness began to coagulate
again, my experience of being was very different from
anything I had ever experien ced before. I felt pain in my
legs, bu t they were very far  away and the pain had a
warmth and beauty to it. As I regained some awareness
of my body, I tried to lean my head a tiny bit forward. Nothing moved. It was as though my forehead was
pressed again st a wall. Something very solid was
resisting even the slightest movement of my head
forward. I immediately realized that the sheer intensity
of my concentration had created a well-defined force that
flowed outward from my forehead and curved back to the
point in my lower abdomen where I had been
concentrating. I know this must sound strange, but it felt
like a magneti c field that wa s so strong I simply could
not move against it. This was not the only powerful energy I was
experiencing. I had been sitting in a full-lotus posture
with my hands resting on my crossed feet. In that
position the whole of my hands, arms, and shoulders
formed a closed circle. Now that complete circle had
become another one of these force fields. I could neither
move forward nor sideways—I was locked in what I can
only describe as perpendicular energy flows. Whenever I
breathed out, the flows be came more tangible and
intense. The entire exper ience was so completely
enthralling that I did not actually regain awareness of my
surroundings. I only came down far enough to see that
my body was overcome by these energy flows. Then, onceagain, I heard: “DO YOU OR  DO YOU NOT WANT TO
KNOW WHAT IS BEYOND YOU?”
I im mediately took a deep breath in and with great
intention slowly exhaled through my nostrils. It was as
though the outgoing breath pushing against the magnetic
force fields created upward lift. That upward and inward
propulsion beg an to drive m e to an even deeper place,
beyond any sense of self-awareness. One more breath in
and out, and I was completely gone. Perhaps you would like to ask where I went. That’s
reasonable, but I’m unable to answer that question. I
only kn ow tha t each time I came back, I was in a more
elevated state than when I left. When I came back from
nowhere the next time, everything was very different. There was no subtle resistance to having returned. There
was no sense o f urgency to hold on to the elevated state. There was only peace—deep, deep peace. And there was
absolute silence, a silence that nothing could possibly
disturb. It was so still that pe rhaps there had never ever
been any sound here for all eternity. It was like outer
space where there is no atmosphere, so there can be no
sound. Sound requires a me dium in which to travel. In
the place I returned to, there was no such medium. I was
truly experiencing the sound of silence. Most important, there was no voice. There was not
even the memory of what it would be like to have chatter
in th at sacred place. It was gone. All gone. All that was
left was awareness of being. I simply existed, nothing
more. This time no stern bec koning entreated me to go
beyond. It was time to come back. The first thing I noticed as I became aware of my
surroundings was that the external energy flows I
experienced earlier had drawn inward. I now felt a very
beautiful flow of energy up my spine to the middle of my
forehead. I had never experienced this before, and
almost all my awareness was drawn to that point. Meanwhile, there was still great pain in my legs, but thatwasn’t a problem. It was ju st the quiet experience of
pain. No complaints, no mental dialogue about what to
do about it. There was simply awareness, completely at
peace with what it was aware of. I manag ed to move my arms enough to unfold my legs
from th e lotus position. They were like dead weight, so I
lay on my side for a while until they came back to life. It
was so peacefu l, so comfortable lying there. In time, I
opened my eyes. What eased in through those openings
was like  nothing I had ever seen or dreamed of before. The wetland area before me appeared like a Japanese
rice paper painting. It exude d gentleness and stillness. The tall grasses swayed in the gentle breeze, but their
movement had a stillness about it. Everything was so
quiet, so serene. The trees w ere quiet, the clouds were
quiet, the water was quiet. There was absolute stillness in
the mid st of the movement of  nature. My body was quiet,
and there were no thoughts at all. I could have lain there
forever melting into the peace that surrounded my sense
of presence. When I finally got up, the movement of my body was
unfamiliar to me. I had never been a graceful person. I
was definitely not the dancing type. But now every
movement of my body was like a ballet. There was a
graceful flow when my arms moved, and I really saw the
difference when I began to w alk. With each step I could
feel eve ry tiny movement of the muscles in my feet. I
flowed from one step to the next, and the movement
itself was intoxicating. The amazing part is that th is state lasted for weeks. When I rejoined my friends  that day, the state didn’t
change. I felt no need to explain or describe what had
happened to me during the  two to three hours I was
gone. I could hardly talk. Everything was so beautiful
and tranquil. The silence, the absolute silence, even
sounds outside did not disturb that stillness. The sounds
were out there, but they seemed so far away from where Iwas seated inside. A moat of thick peace allowed nothing
to reach the citadel of my elevated state.5 . F r o m  A b s o l u t e  P e a c e  t o  A b s o l u t e
T u r m o i l
S helly and I retu rned home from the weekend trip, but I
could not relate to the life I was coming back to. I had
changed completely in a matter of hours. My normal
inner state had been transfor med into a state of absolute
clarity. Neither desire nor fear could touch me in those
early days. Even thoughts faded away before reaching my
seat of awareness. All I remember experiencing at that
time was a powerful, unwavering sense of one pointed
intention— I will never leave this state. No matter what,
I will never allow anything to take me from this place. No voice of my  mind had to say that to me; it was who I
was. I was no longer Mickey  Singer. I was the one who
would never betray that peace or allow anything to
disturb that transcendent stillness. I w as like a ch ild having to learn everything all over
again. I  had to learn to eat in a way that was consistent
with th at pea ce. I used t o smoke pot; I stopped
completely. My  state was cry stal clear, and I didn’t want
to dull it one io ta. I had to learn to go to classes and take
tests while remaining perfectly centered. I was in a
doctoral program, on full fellowship. I had to learn to use
my intellectual mind without disturbing the peace that I
now loved more than life itself. During those next few week s, I felt like I had been
born anew. I found myself y earning to go back beyond. In f act, every t ime I sat down to meditate I was drawn
back into an elevated state. Some veil had been torn
aside inside of me, and it was  now totally natural to passback through it. I started w aking up at three in the
morning to be able to d o prolonged meditations. Throughout the day, I would sit whenever and wherever
I had the opportunity. Only a small part of my life was
about my outer existence. What I was really about was
learning to stay deep inside while my outer life passed
before me, leaving me at peace. I wa sn’t able to stay that detached for long, however. After two to three weeks, the unassailable inner peace
began to develop cracks. These cracks allowed the voice
of my persona l mind to leak  back into my sanctuary of
silence. I struggled to get it b ack. Oh, did I struggle. But
the stru ggling itself was inconsistent with the absolute
stillness. There  was nothing I  could do. I had to just sit in
here helplessly watching as the Land Beyond My Dreams
gave wa y to my noisy inner st ate. It never dawned on me
that I could tr y leaving my outer existence in order to
maintain the inner stillness. That effort would come a
little bit later. Though my deep inner peace had begun to fade, I
never fully returned to my normal state. Even when the
personal mind and emotions started back up, I was much
further behind them than I used to be. There was also
another majo r change: I was now experiencing a
constant flow of energy risin g up within me to the point
between my eyebrows. It formed a vortex of pressure
that forced my attention to t hat point. For example, if I
was looking at something, it felt like I was concentrating
my gaze  throu gh my brow ra ther than through my eyes. This didn’t affect my ability to see; it just kept me closer
to th e meditative state at all t imes. Note that focusing on
the energy flow was not som ething I was doing; it was
something that was happening by itself. I was just aware
that the  flow had never been there before, and now it was
always there. The pull of my attention to the point between my
eyebrows became both my teacher and my friend. Whenmy mental voice had something to say, I now had a
choice—pay attention to the voice or keep focusing on
the inn er flow of energy. I eventually realized that if I
didn’t w ant to listen to the m ental chatter, all I had to do
was slightly increase my concentration on the energy
flow to my bro w. The thoughts would then pass right by
without disturbing me. Letting the thoughts go became a
game to me. A ll of life was a lighter experience than
before. My personal melodrama would still come up, but
it co uld not pu ll me down in to it. I had been gifted with
this inner flow of energy to help me work my way out of
myself. More important, I now knew what it would be
like to get awa y from my personal self. My intention was
firm and resolute—no matter  what it took, or how long it
took—I was going to find my way back beyond. It didn’t take long, however, before outer changes
began in my l ife that rivaled the inner changes I was
going th rough. It started with Shelly. One day she told
me that  it was time to move on. That really threw me for
a loop. Though  we had only been married a year and a
half, th e found ation of my p ersonal life had been built
around her for years. I tried in vain to hold on to her, but
at s ome point I saw somethi ng I had never been able to
see before: the sheer strength of my personality and
intellect had not given her the room she needed to
breathe. If I tr uly loved her, I had to let her go. Right at
that tim e, I had a friend who needed someone to house-
sit whil e he was away. I moved into that house and began
the process of nursing a broken heart. The sud den change in my outer life had a profound
effect on my in ner work. I was already totally committed
to my regular meditations. Exploring the inner state of
deep peace had become the purpose of my life. Now I
had another very powerful source of inspiration: I was
watching a human being in almost unbearable pain. My
heart ex uded pain all the time , and my mind was literally
broken. It was as though the foundation of my self-concept had been removed, a nd my personal self was in
free fall. I didn ’t know how to put it together again, nor
did I even want to. If I concentrated very deeply during meditation, all the
turmoil melted away. There was silence and peace. The
silence was not as thick as it had been before, but it
provided me a place of repos e. When I came back from
meditation, tur moil and pain was what I returned to. So
my dail y experience was now either heaven or hell. There
was nothing in between anymore . My “normal” way of
being was gone. In one fell sw oop, who I had been—was
no more. More and more I chose med itation. It was not just a
way of escaping the pain; meditation gave meaning to my
life. I was committed to going beyond—permanently—
and the  change s in my life were helping me get rid of an
entire part of my being that was holding me back. The
personality exp ressing itself through that mental voice
was no longer so sure of him self. In fact, he no longer
knew which way was up. These outer changes had
humbled him. He had thought he had it all figured out—
well, he  was wrong. It was definitely easier to let go of
him when he was in pieces. During that stage of my growth, I watched very closely
as the self-concept attempted to redefine itself. In place
of a married man with a defined career path, my
thoughts started to envision myself as a meditator who
was see king a deeper truth. But even in those early days I
didn’t want to regain strength based on another mental
concept of myself. Wheneve r I noticed thoughts being
stitched together to create a new “me,” I knocked the
chair out from under them. It  was very painful, but I was
willing to let it all go if it freed me to explore beyond. My friend came back to his house, so I moved out. I
didn’t care where I lived; I just needed to be alone. My
life was pretty simple. I was meditating, doing some
yoga, and periodically I wo uld go to class. I had nopossessions ex cept my schoolbooks, some clothes, and
my VW van. I used to take lo ng drives in the countryside
surrounding Gainesville. I had once found a beautiful
spot in the wo ods near a neighboring town where there
was a small, ab andoned lime  pit. The pit was filled with
crystal-clear, b lue water and was surrounded by nothing
but a vast area of scrub oaks and pines. I drove out there,
and that is where I lived. I w as becoming more and more of a hermit. It was not
so m uch that I was running away from something—I was
running into myself. My inte ntion was very clear at all
times: I wanted to go bac k deep inside myself. My
problem was that I had no  idea what to do with my
personal self—a.k.a. “Mickey.” His very existence was
holding me back from where I yearned to go. If I didn’t
work at it, the focus of my attention would keep getting
drawn into his personal melodrama. That was clearly the
opposite direction from where I wanted to go. “Mickey”
was down and out; I  wanted to go in and up. In those
days I was cert ain of one thing: he was the problem, and
he had to go. I had become dead serious about getting rid
of him. But I had no idea how.6 . S o u t h  o f  t h e  B o r d e r
T he sum mer of 1971 was approaching, and I would soon
be free from classes. I was in my second year of graduate
school, and though my attendance had not been that
regular, I still managed to maintain my high grades. I
was stu dying just enough to do really well on my final
exams and written papers. There was no question about
what I was going to do with my summer—more
meditation and yoga. The only question was, where
would I do it? That w as probably the first time in my life that I
consciously began to notice a distinct, recurring theme in
the events unfolding outside of me. It began when, out of
the blue , a classmate asked me if I had ever been down to
Mexico. He said it was an interesting place to spend
some time. Shortly thereafte r, I was in a bookstore and
practically tripped over a book about touring Mexico that
someone had left on the floor. This started me thinking
that ma ybe I should get aw ay for a while, and maybe
Mexico would be a good idea. The final straw was when I
went to  a gas station to fill up, and someone had left a
map of  Mexico on top of the pump I was using. Those
were enough signs for me. I decided to go off to Mexico. I d idn’t  know where I was g oing—Mexico is a pretty
big plac e. But in my state of mind, it really made no
difference. I would just go an d let it unfold. My friends
and family were not all that e xcited about me going off to
Mexico alone with no agend a. I got a lot of warnings
about b anditos and cautions about avoiding strangers. I
spoke some classroom Spanish, just enough to get introuble. With little more th an that, I headed off to
Mexico. My trip  took me along the Gulf Coast states and down
through Texas. While driving, I would focus on my
breath and utter Mu  in my belly. The last thing in the
world I wanted to do was listen to that voice in my head
chatter all day. Each night I  would find a place to pull
over in  the woods, meditate, and go to sleep. At that
pace, it took a few days to drive down to north-central
Mexico, which was where I ended up. One eve ning, deep in rural Mexico, I couldn’t find any
woods to pull i nto for the night. I didn’t feel comfortable
just pul ling ove r on the side of the road, so I didn’t know
what to do. I ended up driving off-road and climbing one
of the more gr adual foothills until I reached a glorious
vista on the crest of a grassy pasture. There were no
fences or houses in sight, so  that is where I spent the
night. The next morning was brea thtaking. A mist floated
above the fields, and I could see all the colors of the
sunrise. It was so beautifu l that I did my morning
meditation and yoga postures outside. I went very deep,
and an echo o f the peace I was seeking overcame my
being. I stayed on that grassy hill for many weeks
without ever leaving. Each day I increased my periods of
meditation and yoga. My mind was quieting down, and
my heart was starting to breathe again. One morning I was startled by a tapping on the side
door of my van. I became very scared. Had the banditos
finally found me, or was the owner of the land going to
throw me off at gunpoint? Upon opening the door, I
found a young boy about eigh t years old standing outside
with a container in his hands. “Esta leche es de mi mama para el Americano
en la colina.”I str uggled to translate, “This milk is from my mother
for the American on the hill.” I was so moved, and I
thanked him so much. Here I had thought the worst, as
usual, a nd it turned out to b e an act of kindness in the
middle of nowhere in Mexico. I wa s gradually learning that  life was not as fragile as
that voice in m y head would have me believe. There were
experiences to be had, but only if you were willing to
have th em. Most important, that was the first time I can
remember crediting life for the flow of events that had
unfolded. After all, I hadn’t arranged for the perfect place
to pull over an d spend a few  weeks in meditation and
solitude, not to mention to h ave that kind visit from the
boy. Life had provided those things to me; I had just
followed the flow. I was beginning to see all these
experiences as a gift from life.7 . D i s c o n n e c t i n g  t h e  P a n i c  B u t t o n
M exico had been good for me , but it was now time to
start my journey home. I head ed back to the north and at
day’s end found a small lake off a dirt road where I could
spend the night. It was so p eaceful that I stayed there
after my morning practices enjoying the water. Time
came for my afternoon meditation session, so I hiked up
a hill and found a secluded spot to start my yoga
postures. About halfway through my routine, I began to hear
some voices in the distance. I started to get
uncomfortable, but I was not about to give in to that
scared p erson inside. I just r elaxed more deeply into my
yoga posture, and the anxiety subsided. The next sound that startled me was that of a snorting
horse a  lot closer than th e voices had been. I was
convinced that these were the banditos. I soon heard
both the voices and the horses a stone’s throw from me. Relaxed was not exactly the word that came to mind. Scared, vulnerable, and terribly self-conscious was a
much more accurate description of my state. Everything in me wanted to end my yoga session
immediately and open my eyes to see what danger I had
gotten m yself into. Well, everything except for the core of
self-discipline I had developed for ridding myself of that
scared person inside of me. T he command of steel came
from behind my fears: no way was I going to miss the
opportunity to  transcend all this inner commotion. I
closed my eyes tighter as an act of defiance and took adeep breath. I demanded a state of relaxation in the
midst of the drama. When my usual set of yoga postures was complete, I
normally sat for a half-hour meditation. I watched that
voice pl eading for permission  to skip that step. After all,
the horses had not gone any where. I could clearly hear
their breathing  right in front of me interspersed with the
periodic whispering of their riders. There really was no
decision to be made. I had clearly seen that it was this
scared person inside of me who was holding me back
from wh ere I so desperately wanted to go. I needed to be
free of him. So I took a deep breath and flowed into a
full-lotus position. I began the Mu  sound inside my belly
in a  vain attem pt to drown out what the voice was trying
to sa y. T o me it was like an act of commitment: Which do
you care about, outside or inside? When I finally opened my ey es, I saw two horses right
in front of me. They couldn’t have been more than ten
feet away. On top of the ho rses were two riders who
looked more like ranch hands than banditos. They were
smoking cigar ettes, and one of them was sitting
sidesaddle facing the other rider. When they saw that I
was ba ck in their world, they began to talk to me in
Spanish. I was somewhat  surprised that I could
understand most of what they were saying—and the very
fact that they were talking t o me was definitely a good
thing. I  began to feel relieve d, and the series of events
that transpired next left an indelible impression on my
mind to stop letting that scared person run my life. At some point in our interaction, the ranch hands
asked if it wa s my van parked down by the lake. My
mental voice immediately told me to be careful because
they could rob me. I ignored that interlude and willingly
reached my hand up when o ne of the riders offered to
pull me onto his horse and ride me back to my van. I was
a city boy; riding double on the back of a horse with a
Mexican stran ger while in my bathing suit was not aneveryday occur rence for me. As I rode down the hill, a
peace came over me from h ead to toe. This experience
was so beautiful, and I wou ld have missed it if I had
listened to my scared self. When we reached my van, the cowboy began telling
me that he and others worked this land for a rich
landowner. He  said they were all very poor, and the
landowner did not even allow them to fish in the lake. He
pointed the way to where th ey lived and invited me to
stop by before I left the nex t day. We said good-bye as
though we had been friends for years, and they turned
their horses and rode off. I fe lt so open,  so connected to the experience I was
having. Though I was going through some very deep
changes, I remember thankin g life that night for such a
special day. The pain and turmoil within me were
beginning to subside, but the yearning for the absolute
peace and silence continued to burn in my heart. The next morning after my practices, I packed up to
continue my journey northward. Before leaving, I
decided to drive farther down the dirt road to see if I
could find where the ranch h ands lived. I came upon an
area wh ere the re were fifteen to twenty adobe huts with
thatched roofs . I had read about such things, but I had
never a ctually seen a mud hu t with a roof made of straw. Before I  could decide if I wan ted to go any farther, one of
my new friends from the day before ran out to greet me. I pa rked my va n and followed the excited cowboy as he
introduced his new American friend to the villagers. I
was stunned by how primitive everything was. The huts
were dirt floored and had nothing but square openings
for win dows. There were no doors in the door openings
or windows in the window openings. Many of the people
I met stared a t me as though they had never seen an
American before. I soon found out that many of them
had not. I don’ t think the pes tering voice in my head said
one word for t he hours I was there. It was all so new tome. It was so natural, so down to earth. I sat in a hut
with women breast-feeding their babies. I had never seen
that before. I noticed I actu ally felt ashamed that my
culture had so distorted nature that natural things were
no longer natural. Once w e were back outside, we continued our tour of
the small village. When we approached my friend’s hut,
he aske d me if I knew how t o ride a horse. I told him it
had been years, but that I had ridden before. What I
didn’t tell him was that the last time I rode I was twelve,
and it was at s ummer camp with an English saddle. He
then di d the most unexpected thing. He handed me the
reins to his ho rse and pointed to an open field. This was
no time or place to be timid. I stuck my sandal into the
stirrup and swung myself int o the saddle, just as though
I kn ew what I was doing. I had always thought it would
be wild to gallop a horse across an open field. Somehow
that dr eam was about to be  realized in the middle of
Mexico where I knew absolutely nobody. I got used to
the hor se while some of the villagers gathered to watch,
and then I rod e like the wind across an expansive field. I
was really flying high, very exhilarated compared to the
strict Zen discipline to which I had been holding myself. I s pent a few more hours discussing American life with
some very inquisitive villagers and then began to bid
them farewell. I was invited to stay for dinner, but it was
time for my evening practices. I remembered that my
friend h ad told me that the y were not allowed to fish
even th ough they were struggling for food. I went to my
van and pulled out the large  supply of brown rice and
dried b eans I had stored under the backseat. I handed
them all over to the women preparing the food. The
women were so appreciative that it almost made me cry. This stuff meant nothing to me and so much to them. This was another one of life’s  lessons I never forgot: the
joy of helping people.Before I drove off, they all surrounded my van to say
good-bye. I had lived in sil ence and solitude with no
human contact for almost a month—now I was a
celebrity. How  did this hap pen? To me there was no
doubt a bout how it happened—I had let go of myself and
something very  special had followed. I was willing to face
loneliness and fear and not gr ab for relief. Yet something
happened on its own, withou t my doing it or even asking
for it. The seeds of a gre at experiment were being
planted. Was it possible that life had more to give us
than we could ever take for ourselves?8 . U n e x p e c t e d  I n s p i r a t i o n
I  had grown a lot through my experiences in Mexico. Learning to embrace life as it unfolded around me was
new to me, and  the results had been very freeing. By the
time I returned to Gainesvil le my heart and my mind
were m uch mo re at peace. Pr oblem was—I had no place
to live. My last residence had been in the woods by the
lime pit east of town, so I returned to that secluded
setting and lived there in my van. All I needed in my life
was solitude, the discipline of my ever-increasing
practices, and a minimal amount of food. I realized that the probability of finishing my doctoral
degree was rapidly decreasing. I only had a few courses
left, but  then there were the qualifying exams as well as
the dissertatio n. Nothing was left in me that wanted to
be an economics professor. I wanted to explore inside,
deep inside. The depths of my meditations were all I
cared about. The chairman of the Department of Economics, Dr.
Goffman, was like a father to  me. I loved and respected
him a great d eal, and he encouraged me to finish my
degree. He thought I was jus t going through a phase in
my you th, and  I would come  out of it soon. He kept me
on my fellows hip and pushed me to at least finish my
coursework. Out of respect for him, I would drive into
town periodically and go to class—but not very often. I would eventually learn that everything in life has
something to teach you and that it is all for your growth. But I was not ready to see that yet. To me, there was my
meditation, and then there was everything else. Though Idefinitely wasn ’t seeing my sc hoolwork as relevant to my
inner growth, I had a very illuminating experience
associated with one of my courses. The professor of the course was a respected economist
and not  at all the liberal typ e. I missed a lot of classes,
and wh en I did show up, I was barefooted and in jeans. I
doubt t hat I was his favorite  student. One day he asked
me if I actually expected to receive a good grade in the
course. He explained that I  had put out just enough
effort to  do well on the exams, but my absences and lack
of p articipation  in class did not provide the basis for a
high gra de. I knew we had a f inal paper left to write, so I
told him  I would put extra effort into that paper, and I’d
appreciate it if he would ba se my grade solely on my
exams and the quality of tha t paper. He said he would
take it into consideration. The tim e came  to write the final paper for the course. I
knew m y mental state was no t conducive to going to the
library and trying to learn en ough to write a great paper. I ha d been meditating a lot, and my mind was very still. No way was I going to spend days researching and
thinking about the topic. I would have to find a different
method if I was going to write this paper. One evening, I gathered up a bunch of writing pads
and a few pens. After med itation, I lit the kerosene
lantern and sat at the fold-out table in my van. I began
by t elling myself that I really didn’t care what grade I got
in the class sin ce I probably wouldn’t finish my degree
anyway. This removed any mental or emotional pressure. I t hen told mys elf to just start  writing whatever I thought
about the topic. I had no b ooks to refer to, just the
natural logic of a clear, unp ressured mind. I began to
write an d thoughts began to flow. I did not worry about
what I was wri ting or second-guess my thoughts. It was
very mu ch like meditation. I kept my personal self out of
it completely and just let unbridled inspiration flow.At s ome point in the process, a flash of inspiration
welled u p insid e of me. I went from not knowing what I
was going to do with the paper to knowing exactly what I
was going to w rite. It was as  though a cloud of knowing
instantly form ed back behind the quiet mind. It
happened as fast and pow erful as a flash of lightning. At
first, no thoughts were involved. It was more of a feeling,
just a definitive knowing that I now knew where the
paper was going and how to get there. Then the thoughts
began to form. They came slowly at first, then they
poured into my mind. I still  had to pull them together
into a logical flow, but the seeds were all there. It was an
amazing process to watch. I wrote and I wrote. Notepad after notepad became
filled with a totally logical pre sentation that began with a
premise, laid out its argument, and ended with a
conclusion. Along the way, there were graphs to present
logical relationships, and there were references to facts I
had previously read or heard in class. These facts would
need to be polished and footnoted later, so I simply left
space fo r them and kept on writing what was created in
my mind. I sto pped for nothing. There was no worrying
or judgment of good or bad; I  just allowed the process to
unfold.
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:

        Copyright © 2015 by Michael A. Singer
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www. crownpublishing. com
Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a
trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. The Surrender Experiment™ is a trademark of Shanti Publications, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon
request. ISBN 9780804141109
eBook ISBN 9780804141116
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Amanda Dewey
Cover design by Fort & Jess Morphew
Cover illustration by Shutterstock/David M. Schrader
v4. 1
aTo the MastersC o n t e n t s
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Section I
W a k i n g  U p
The Premise
1. Not with a Shout—But with a Whisper
2. Getting to Know Me
3. The Pillars of Zen
4. Absolute Silence
5. From Absolute Peace to Absolute Turmoil
6. South of the Border
7. Disconnecting the Panic Button
8. Unexpected Inspiration
9. The Promised Land
10. Building a Sacred Hut
11. Get Thee to a Monastery
12. When the Disciple Is Ready, the Master Appears
Section II
T h e  G r e a t  E x p e r i m e n t  B e g i n s
13. The Experiment of a Lifetime
14. Life Takes Charge
15. The Prince and the Pauper
16. Following the Invisible into the Unknown
17. My First Job Interview
18. Letting Go of the Rope
19. Acceptance, Acceptance, and More Acceptance
20. The Most Important Thing I Was Ever Asked to DoSection III
F r o m  S o l i t u d e  t o  S e r v i c e
21. The Call of a Living Master
22. Shaktipat
23. Gainesville Hosts a Guru
24. The Temple Is Built
25. Opening the Heart Chakra
26. Get Thee to an Ashram
Section IV
T h e  B u s i n e s s  o f  S u r r e n d e r
27. A Company Is Born
28. The Master Builder
29. Community Banking
30. The Ever-Expanding Temple of the Universe
31. Metamorphosis of a Creature
Section V
S o m e t h i n g  P r i c e l e s s  I s  B o r n
32. From the Personal Self to the Personal Computer
33. The Birth of The Medical Manager
34. The Early Programmers
35. Preparing for Launch
Section VI
T h e  F o r c e s  o f  N a t u r a l  G r o w t h
36. The Foundations of a Successful Business
37. The Industry Knocks on Our Door
38. The Temple Keeps Growing
Section VII
W h e n  D a r k  C l o u d s  B e c o m e  R a i n b o w s
39. A Touch of Magic
40. The Scary Messenger of Change
41. The Foundation Is Built for the Future
42. Meanwhile—Back at the Ranch
Section VIII
E m b r a c i n g  E x p l o s i v e  E x p a n s i o n
43. The Medical Manager Sprouts Wings
44. Medical Manager Corporation—MMGR
45. Becoming CEO
46. The Internet and Health Care
47. Merging—But Not with the Universe
48. Building Rome in a Day
49. Hanging Out in Washington
Section IX
T o t a l  S u r r e n d e r
50. The Raid
51. Attorneys, Attorneys, and More Attorneys
52. United States of America v. Michael A. Singer
53. Preparing a Defense
54. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights
55. Divine Intervention
56. Returning to the Beginning
About the Author
More by the AuthorA c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
In t ruth, life is  really the aut hor of this book. She is the
one who manifested the flo w of events that were so
powerful and fascinating they demanded narration. But
life need ed me  to put pen to p aper if her greatness was to
be mem orialized. To that end, she sent exactly the right
people at exactly the right time to bring The Surrender
Experiment  into fruition. It is  with hum ility and heartfelt thanks that I tell you
of the phenomenal job that my product manager, Karen
Entner, did on this book. Her tireless and selfless service
has inst illed this work with a sense of commitment and
perfection rarely found in this world. I w ould  also like to take this opportunity to thank my
editor, Gary Jansen, from Crown Publishing, for all the
hard work and great suggestions he contributed. As
would be expected, life prov ided the absolutely perfect
editor to assist me in giving this testimony to her
greatness. This bo ok had many early readers, all of whom deserve
thanks. I would like to single out James O’Dea, Ursula
Harlos, and Stephanie Davis, who contributed detailed
suggestions on  draft after dra ft during the early stages of
writing. I n ow get to a cknowledge yo u, the reader, for having
the interest and taking the time to read about this
phenomenal experiment. May we all learn to appreciate
our live s in this amazing universe—a little bit more each
day. S e c t i o n  I
Waking UpT h e  P r e m i s e
Sitting alone in a six-seater private jet at forty
thousand feet is a very peaceful place. I fell into
meditation and my mind became very still. When I opened my eyes, I absorbed the
tremendous difference in my environment
from w hen I had first moved out to the woods
to b e al one and  meditate. Though I still lived in
those s ame woods, my place of solitude had
grown into a t hriving yoga community, and I
had bec ome CEO of the publi c corporation that
life had somehow magically manifested
around me. It was now perfectly clear to me
that all of these life experiences, including
running a business at this level, were doing as
much to free me spiritually as my years of
solitary medit ation. Just as Hercules used the
flow of rivers to clean out the Augean stables,
so the powerful flow of life was cleaning out
whatever was  left of me. I j ust kept letting go
and practicing  nonresistance, whether I liked
what was happening or not. It was in this
frame o f mind that I was flying off to Texas to
discuss the billion-dollar merger offer for my
company from a powerful CEO whom I had
never even met. My Reflections, May 1999
L ife rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we
stop an d think  about it, tha t makes perfect sense. The
scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not
actually in control of life’s events should be self-evident. The uni verse h as been around for 13. 8 bil lion yea rs, and
the processes that determine the flow of life around usdid not begin w hen we were born, nor will they end when
we die. What manifests in front of us at any given
moment is actually something truly extraordinary—it is
the end result of all the force s that have been interacting
together for billions of years. We are not responsible for
even the tiniest fraction of what is manifesting around
us. Nonetheles s, we walk a round constantly trying to
control and determine what will happen in our lives. No
wonder there’s so much tension, anxiety, and fear. Each
of u s actually b elieves that things should be the way we
want them, instead of being the natural result of all the
forces of creation. Every day, we give precedence to our mind’s thoughts
over the reality unfolding before us. We regularly say
things l ike, “It  better not ra in today because I’m going
camping” or “I better get that raise because I really need
the money. ” Notice that these bold claims about what
should and shouldn’t be happening are not based on
scientific evid ence; they’re based solely on personal
preferences made up in our minds. Without realizing it,
we do this with  everything in our lives—it’s as though we
actually believe  that the world around us is supposed to
manifest in accordance to our  own likes and dislikes. If it
doesn’t, surely something is very wrong. This is an
extremely diffi cult way to live, and it is the reason we feel
that we are always struggling with life. Nonetheless, it  is also true that we are not powerless in
the face  of the events unfoldin g around us. We have been
gifted with the power of will. From deep inside, we can
determine how we want something to be and apply the
power of our minds, hearts, and bodies in an attempt to
make th e outside world conform. But this puts us in a
constant battle of our way versus the way it would be
without our intervention. This battle between individual
will and  the reality of life unfolding around us ends up
consuming ou r lives. When we win the battle, we are
happy a nd relaxed; when we don’t, we are disturbed andstressed. Since  most of us only feel good when things are
going our way, we are constantly attempting to control
everything in our lives. The que stion is, does it have to be this way. There is so
much evidence that life does quite well on its own. The
planets stay in orbit, tiny se eds grow into giant trees,
weather patterns have kept forests across the globe
watered for millions of years, and a single fertilized cell
grows into a b eautiful baby. We are not doing any of
these th ings as conscious acts of will; they are all being
done by the incomprehensible perfection of life itself. All
these a mazing events, and countless more, are being
carried out by forces of life that have been around for
billions of years—the very same forces of life that we are
consciously pit ting our will against on a daily basis. If the
natural unfolding of the process of life can create and
take care of the  entire universe, is it really reasonable for
us t o assume that nothing g ood will happen unless we
force it  to. It is to the exp loration of this intriguing
question that this book is devoted. How can there possibly be a more important question. If li fe can manifest the DNA molecule on its own, not to
mention create  the human brain, how is it that we feel
that we have t o control everything on our own. There
must b e another, more sane way to approach life. For
example, what would happen  if we respected the flow of
life and  used  our free wil l to participate in what’s
unfolding, instead of fighting it. What would be the
quality of the life that unfolds. Would it just be random
events with no order or meaning, or would the same
perfection of order and meaning that manifests in the
rest of the universe manifest in the everyday life around
us. What we have here is the  basis for an amazing
experiment. At  the heart of the experiment is a simple
question: Am I better off making up an alternate reality
in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it bemy way, or am  I better off letting go of what I want and
serving the same forces of reality that managed to create
the entire perfection of the universe around me. This
experiment would not be about dropping out of life; it
would b e about leaping into life to live in a place where
we are no longer controlled  by our personal fears and
desires. For lack of a better n ame, I have called this “the
surrender expe riment,” and to the best of my ability, I
have devoted the last forty years of my life to seeing
where the flow of life’s event s would naturally take me. What happene d over the course of these four decades is
nothing short of phenomenal. Not only did things not fall
apart, quite the opposite happened. As one thing
naturally followed the other, the flow of life’s events led
me on a journey that wou ld have been beyond my
comprehension. This book shares that journey with you
so that you can experience what happened when
someone dared to let go and trust the flow of life. Let it be clear right from the  start, however, that this
type of surren der does not mean living life without the
assertion of will. My story of  these forty years is simply
the stor y of what happened when the assertion of will
was guided by what life wa s doing instead of what I
wanted it to be doing. My personal experience is that
aligning one’s will with the natural forces unfolding
around us leads to some surprisingly powerful results. The onl y effective way to shar e the results of this great
experiment is to allow you to see how I got pulled into
living this way and then al low you to experience the
journey as I did. In what follows, you are about to
encounter a set of life experi ences that are bound to be
very different from your own. I share these with you only
because as human beings w e have the extraordinary
ability to learn from one another’s experiences. You don’t
have to live a s I did in order to be affected by what
happened to me. The unexpected events that unfolded
before me not only changed my life, they changed myentire view of life and left me with a sense of deep inner
peace. Hopefully, sharing my surrender experiment with
you will encourage you to find a more peaceful and
harmonious wa y to live your life and to better appreciate
the amazing perfection that unfolds around us. 1. N o t  w i t h  a  S h o u t — B u t  w i t h  a  W h i s p e r
M y giv en name i s Michael Alan Singer. From as far back
as I can remem ber, everyone has called me Mickey. I was
born M ay 6, 1947, and lived a fairly ordinary life until the
winter of 1970. Then something happened to me that
was so profoun d that it forev er changed the direction of
my life. Life-changing events can be very dramatic and, by
their very nature, disruptive. Your whole being is headed
in o ne direction physically, emotionally, and mentally;
and that direction has all th e momentum of your past
and all the dreams of your future. Then suddenly, there’s
a major earthquake, a terrible sickness, or a chance
encounter that totally sweep s you off your feet. If the
event is powerful enough to  change the focus of your
heart and mind, the rest of your life will change in due
course. You are literally not the same person on both
sides o f a truly life-chang ing event. Your interests
change, your goals change, in fact, the underlying
purpose of your life change s. It usually takes a very
powerful event to turn your head around so far that you
never look back. But not always. In the winter o f 1970, no suc h event happened to me. What happene d was so sub tle, so faint, that it could
easily have passed by without being noticed. It was not
with a shout but with a whisp er that my life was thrown
into utter turmoil and transformation. It has been more
than forty years now since that life-changing moment,
but I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was sitting on the living room couch in my home in
Gainesville, Florida. I was twenty-two years old and
married at the time to a beautiful soul named Shelly. We
were both students at the Un iversity of Florida where I
was doi ng my graduate work in economics. I was a very
astute student, and I was being groomed by the
chairman of the economics department to become a
college professor. Shelly had a brother, Ronnie, who was
a very successful attorney in Chicago. Ronnie and I
became close friends even though we were from totally
different world s. He was a powerful, wealth-driven, big-
city at torney, and I was a ’60s-groomed, college-
intellectual hi ppie. It is worth mentioning just how
analytically oriented I was at the time. I had never even
taken a philosophy, psychology, or religion course while
in college. My electives at school were symbolic logic,
advanced calculus, and theoretical statistics. This makes
what happened to me all the more amazing. Ronnie would come down once in a while to visit, and
we would often just hang out together. As it turns out,
Ronnie was sitting on that co uch with me on that fateful
day in 1970. I  don’t remember exactly what we were
talking about, but there had been a lull in our leisurely
conversation. I noticed I was uncomfortable with the
silence and found myself thin king of what to say next. I
had been in similar situations many times before, but
something wa s quite different about this experience. Instead of simply being uncomfortable and trying to find
something to say, I noticed  t ha t I was uncomfortable and
trying to find s omething to say. For the first time in my
life, my mind and emotions were something I was
watching instead of being. I know that it is difficult to put into words, but there
was a complete sense of separation between my anxious
mind, which was spewing out possible topics to talk
about, a nd me, the one who  was simply aware that my
mind was doing this. It was like I was suddenly able toremain above my mind and quietly watch the thoughts
being c reated. Believe it or n ot, that subtle shift in my
seat of awareness became a tornado that rearranged my
entire life. For a few mom ents, I just sat there inwardly watching
myself t ry to “fix” the awkward silence. But I was not the
one trying to f ix it; I was the one quietly watching the
activity of my mind trying t o fix it. At first there were
only a few deg rees of separation between me and what I
was watching. But every second the separation seemed to
become greate r and greater. I was not doing anything to
cause this shift. I was just the re noticing that my sense of
me  no longer included the neurotic thought patterns that
were passing in front of me. This e ntire process of “becoming aware” was
practically instantaneous. It was like when you stare at
one of those posters that has a hidden picture inside. At
first it appears to be just a cir cle with line patterns. Then,
suddenly, you see an entire 3-D image emerge from what
originally looked like chaos. Once you see it, you can’t
imagine how you hadn’t seen it before. It was right there. Such was the s hift that happened inside of me. It was so
obvious—I wa s in there w atching my thoughts and
emotions. I had always been in there watching, but I had
been too unaware to notice. It was as though I had been
so invo lved in their details that I never saw them as just
thoughts and emotions. Within seconds, what previously seemed like
important solu tions for how to break the uncomfortable
silence was now sounding like a neurotic voice talking
inside my head. I watched as that voice tried out things
to say:
The weather’s been awesome, hasn’t it. Did you hear what Nixon did the other day. Do you want to get something to eat. When I finally did open my mouth to say something,
what I said was:
“Have y ou ever noticed that there’s this voice
talking inside your head. ”
Ronnie looked  at me a little w eird, and then a spark lit
in his eyes. He said, “Yes, I see what you’re talking about
—mine never shuts up. ” I distinctly remember making a
joke ou t of it b y asking him what it would be like if he
heard someone else’s voice talking in there. We laughed,
and life went on. But not my  life. My life didn’t just “go on. ” In my life,
nothing would ever be the s ame again. I didn’t have to
try to maintain this awareness. It was who I was now. I
was the being who was watc hing the incessant flow of
thoughts pass through the mind. From the same seat of
awareness, I watched the  ever-shifting current of
emotions pass through the heart. When I showered, I
saw what that voice had to s ay while I was supposed to
be washing my body. If I was talking to someone, I
watched as that voice figured out what to say next—
instead of listening to what t he other person was saying. If I went to class, I watched my mind play the game of
trying to think ahead of the professor to see if it could
figure o ut where he was going with the lecture. Needless
to say, it did n ot take long be fore this newly found voice
inside m y head really started to annoy me. It was like
sitting next to someone in a movie theater who never,
ever stops talking. As I observed that voice, something deep inside my
being ju st wanted it to shut up. What would it be like if it
stopped. I began to long for silence inside. Within days
of that first experience, my life’s patterns began to
change. When friends came over to socialize, I no longer
enjoyed the scene. I wanted t o quiet my mind, and social
activities didn’t help. I began to excuse myself and go out
to t he woods near our hous e. I would sit down on theground amid the trees and tell that voice to shut up. Of
course, it didn’t work. Nothin g seemed to work. I found
that I could change the topic  it talked about, but I could
not get it to just stop talking for any length of time. My
yearning for inner silence bec ame a passion. I knew what
it w as li ke to watch the voice. What I didn’t know is what
it would  be like if the voice totally stopped. And what I
never co uld have imagined was the life-changing journey
on which I was about to embark. 2. G e t t i n g  t o  K n o w  M e
E ven in my yo uth, I loved t o figure out how things
worked. So it was inevitable that my analytical mind
would become fascinated by  trying to understand my
relationship to  the voice inside my head. Before I could
enjoy this intellectual fascination, however, I had to get
over the fact that the personal mind was driving me
crazy. E very tim e I saw somet hing, that voice made some
comment about it: I like it… ; I do n’t like it… ; I’m not
comfortable with this… ; This reminds me of …As I
became more and more accustomed to watching all this,
a few question s naturally arose. First, why is this voice
talking all the time. If I see something, I’m instantly
aware of seeing it. Why doe s the voice have to tell me
that I see it and how I feel about it. Here comes Mary. I don’t feel like seeing her
today. I hope she doesn’t see me. I know what I see and I know what I feel. After all, I’m
the one in here seeing and feeling. Why does it have to
get vocalized in my mind. Another questi on that arose was who am I who keeps
noticing all this mental activity. Who am I who can just
watch thoughts come up with a complete sense of
detachment. I now had two driving forces awaken inside regarding
this new ly foun d voice in my head. One was the desire to
shut it up and the other was the pure fascination and
yearning to understand what  that voice was and where it
came from. I me ntioned that prior to this  inner awakening, my life
was pretty ordinary. I only say that in comparison to
what m y life became. I became a driven human being. I
wanted to know about the vo ice I had discovered, and I
wanted to know who I was—the one inside experiencing
all o f th is. I began to spend h ours on end in the graduate
school l ibrary. But I was not in the economics section; I
was in the psy chology section. There was no way that
others had not noticed this vo ice talking inside. It was so
prevalent that you couldn’t miss it. I scanned through
Freud trying to find the answers to my questions. I read
book after book, but I found  no direct reference to the
voice talking inside—not to mention any reference to the
one who is aware that the voice is talking. In thos e days, I would talk about the voice to anyone
who would listen. They all must have thought I was
crazy. I remember one encounter with my very reserved,
highly c ultured Spanish professor. I ran into him one day
between classes and excitedl y told him that I had come
to u nderstand what it meant to be fluent in a language. I
explained to him that there was this voice inside your
head th at talks  to you about virtually everything—what
you like  and dislike, what you’re supposed to be doing
right now, and what you’ve done wrong in the past. If
that inner voice could speak in Spanish and you
immediately understood what it was saying, then you
were fluent in Spanish. If, however, the Spanish words
made no sense to you until you did the mental work of
translating them so that the voice would repeat them in
English, then you were not fluent in Spanish. It made
perfect sense—to me. I told him that if I were majoring in
language studies, I would do my doctoral dissertation on
that premise. Needless to say, my Spanish professor gave
me a very odd look, said something very polite, and went
on his way. I d idn’t  care what he thought. I was on an exploration,
a journey of learning beyond anything I could haveimagined. Every day I was learning so much about
myself. I couldn’t believe the amount of self-
consciousness and fear bein g expressed through that
voice. I t was so obvious that  the person I was watching
inside c ared a great deal about what people thought of
him. This was especially true  of people I knew well. The
voice told me what to say  and what not to say. It
complained inc essantly when  something was not the way
it wanted. If a conversation w ith a friend en ded with the
slightest discord or disagreement, the conversation
would k eep going on inside m y head. I would watch the
voice wishfully  imagine how t he conversation could have
ended on a dif ferent note. I could see how much fear of
rejection and nonacceptance were being expressed
through that mental dialogu e. It was overwhelming at
times, b ut I never lost the perspective of watching a voice
talking inside. It was obvi ous it wasn’t me; it was
something I was watching. Imagine if you woke up one  day and a cacophony of
noise was all a round you. You wanted it to stop, but you
had no idea how to stop it. That is the effect the voice
was hav ing on me. One thing was perfectly clear: that
voice had always talked befor e. But I had been so lost in
it th at I  never noticed it as se parate from me. It was like
a fish not know ing it is in water until it gets out. One leap
into the  air and the fish instantly realizes, “There’s a
body of  water down there, an d that is where I’ve always
been. But now I see that I can get out. ”
I did n’t like the voice of the m ind talking all the time. It was just like an irritating n oise that I really wanted to
stop. Bu t it didn’t. For now I w as stuck with it. As it turns
out, however, I had not yet begun to fight. 3. T h e  P i l l a r s  o f  Z e n
M onths w ent by and I was still on my own with my inner
exploration. L ittle did I know that help was about to
arrive unexpectedly. I had a classma te in my doctoral program named Mark
Waldman. He  was a bright  young man and an avid
reader on a broad range of subjects. Like everyone else,
Mark had heard me talking about my interest in the
voice. O ne day he brought m e a book he thought might
help. The book was entitled  Three Pillars of Zen,  by
Philip Kapleau. I knew absolutely nothing about Zen Buddhism. I was
an intellectual who didn’t give religious matters a second
thought. I was brought up Je wish, but not very much so. By the time I r eached college, religion played no part in
my life. If yo u had asked me if I was an atheist, I
probably would  have given you a blank stare. I had never
even thought about it. I s tarted  leafing through the pages of the book on Zen,
and within minutes it became evident: this book was
about that voice. My heart practically stopped. I had
trouble breathing. This book was clearly about how to
stop that voice from talking. Passage after passage spoke
about quieting the mind. It used terms like the True Self
behind the mind. There was  no doubt that I had found
what I’d been looking for. I knew there had to be others
who had gained the perspecti ve of watching that voice of
the mind instead of identify ing with it. Not only was
there an entire legacy of kno wledge spanning thousands
of y ears that d ealt with the voice, but this book clearlydiscussed “getting out. ” It talked about freeing yourself
from the hold of the mind. It talked about going beyond. Needless to say, I was in awe. I felt a reverence for this
book th at I had never felt fo r anything in my life. I had
been forced to read and study  so many books in school. I
now ha d in my hands a book that answered some real
questions for me, like who a m I that watches that voice
talk. These were questions that I passionately wanted to
know the answers to. Truth is, it was way beyond want. I
needed  to know these answers—tha t voice was driving
me crazy. What Three P illars o f Zen  had to say was very clear
and unequivocal. It said to stop reading, talking, and
thinking about your mind, and just do the work
necessary to quiet it down. The required work was
equally unambiguous—meditate. Before I even knew about meditation, I had tried
sitting alone in order to make  the voice stop talking. But
that ha d never worked for me. With this book, I was
presented a tried-and-true method that had worked for
thousands of others. Simply  sit down in a quiet spot,
watch your breath go in and o ut, and mentally repeat the
sound Mu. That’s it. Now do that for an ever-increasing
length of time each day. In  Zen, the real work was
generally done in a group setting called a sessin. In
traditional sett ings, a trained person would walk around
with a kyosaku  stick. If you st arted to sleep or lost focus
in a nother manner, you would get a smack on your
shoulders with the stick. Zen was strict; there was no
playing around. This form of Zen was serious work. I didn’t have a group or a teacher. All I had was the
book an d a very sincere yearn ing to see if these practices
would t ake me  where I want ed to go. So I started to do
Zen me ditation on my own. At least it was my best
understanding of what Zen meditation is. At first I sat for
fifteen or twenty minutes eac h day. Within a week I built
that to half an hour, twice a day. There were no fireworksor deep experiences. But concentrating on my breath and
the mantra was definitely di verting my awareness from
the incessant chatter of the v oice. If I made the mental
voice say Mu,  it couldn’t say all the crazy personal things
it usually said. I quickly bega n to like the practice. I
looked forward  to the times I had put aside during the
day for meditation. I w as no more  than a few weeks into my experiment
with Zen meditation when Sh elly and I decided to go on
a ca mping trip. We were joined by four friends, and
together we drove our vans into Ocala National Forest
for the weekend. I had a VW  camper, so weekend trips
were an easy affair. But this trip wouldn’t turn out to be
just another camping trip—this trip was destined to have
a profound impact on the rest of my life. We found a sec luded spot in the woods that opened up
to a pristine wetland area. Once we situated our vans, we
were overcome by the quiet and beauty of the place. It
dawned on me that this wo uld be a good place to do
some m editation. I was just a novice, but I was very
serious about doing the practices and finding out what it
would be like i f the voice actually stopped. I asked Shelly
and our friends if I could spend some time by myself. No
one objected, so I meandered down by the grassy lake
and found a nice spot to sit. The whole notion of
meditating was  so meaningful to me that from the start it
was like a sacred experience. I picked a tree to sit under,
just like the Buddha. Then, very dramatically, I told
myself, I’m not getting up unt il I’ve reached
enlightenment. What happened under that tree that day was so
powerful that even now my body shivers and my eyes
begin to tear just to think about it. 4. A b s o l u t e  S i l e n c e
I  crossed my legs in a full-lotus position. I knew I wasn’t
proficient enou gh to hold that posture for long, but I
thought I might as well start with the official meditation
position. I straightened my back and neck, and I began to
concentrate on  my breath expanding and contracting in
my abd omen. The Zen book instructed me to make the
Mu  sou nd way do wn in my belly, below the belly button. I watched my breath go in and out from way down there. I wa s intending to sit for muc h longer than I had done
previously, so I used my will to concentrate with extra
intensity and sincerity. It must have made a difference
because I went deeper insi de than I had ever gone
before. It seemed that concentrating on the movement of
the breath in my belly created a force that linked the
outflow of breath from my nostrils with the inner
movement of my abdomen. Every time I breathed slowly
out my nose, I felt a warm, inviting sensation throughout
the area below my belly. The sensation was so nice that
my attention naturally centered there. For a period of
time, I simply lost myself in the beauty of the experience. Some ti me later, the length o f which I had no way of
telling, the mental voice began talking about how
beautiful the experience was  and how this must be real
meditation. Since my awar eness was drawn to that
mental voice, it was drawn away from concentrating on
the breath. The meditation experience seemed to have
run its natural  course, and I began to come down to my
normal mental state. But this meditation session was supposed to be
different. I had told myself I w asn’t getting up until I had
broken through. So I willfully began concentrating anew
on the movem ent of the breath in my belly and on the
sound of Mu. I lost myself once again in the warm
flowing force that tied my ex halations to the warmth in
my abdomen. The force became much stronger as I
concentrated more deeply. E ventually, all consciousness
of my body an d my surroundings was gone. I was only
aware of the effortless flow  of warm energy that was
building and expanding at the core of my belly. I was not
there; only the flow was there. From time to time, for brie f moments, my sense of
self-awareness would drift b ack into focus. The instant
that sta rted to happen, I would willfully focus on the
feeling of the exhaled breath  and the movement of my
belly—and, in stantly, I was no longer there. This
experience of drifting in and  out of the deep state went
on for a prolonged period of time, perhaps hours. At s ome point, I must have  lost the will to refocus
during one of those mom ents when self-awareness
returned. I had been far gone in a very deep and peaceful
place, but I started to come back. I don’t know how long I
had actually been sitting, but the first thing I became
aware o f was the pain in my legs. They hurt a great deal
from sitting in a full-lotus po sition for so long. The voice
of th e m ind ha d not started b ack up yet. I was just there,
kind of dazed, but very peaceful and deeply mesmerized
by the experie nce. I suppose I would have continued to
come down, but an amazing thing happened. From back
behind where my sense of awareness had been centering
came a booming voice. It said  very sternly: “DO YOU OR
DO YOU NOT WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS BEYOND
YOU. ”
This wa s not the voice of th e mind I was so used to
struggling with. Ever since I first noticed that chattering
voice, it was t alking in front of and below where I satinside. This new invocation came from behind and above
where m y sens e of awareness was now situated. In any
event, i ts stern challenge shook me to the depths of my
being. I didn’t feel the need to answer the question,
because every drop of me yearned to go deeper. So I took
a br eath in, then deeply pu shed myself into the out-
breath, and I was gone. When my sense of self-awareness began to coagulate
again, my experience of being was very different from
anything I had ever experien ced before. I felt pain in my
legs, bu t they were very far  away and the pain had a
warmth and beauty to it. As I regained some awareness
of my body, I tried to lean my head a tiny bit forward. Nothing moved. It was as though my forehead was
pressed again st a wall. Something very solid was
resisting even the slightest movement of my head
forward. I immediately realized that the sheer intensity
of my concentration had created a well-defined force that
flowed outward from my forehead and curved back to the
point in my lower abdomen where I had been
concentrating. I know this must sound strange, but it felt
like a magneti c field that wa s so strong I simply could
not move against it. This was not the only powerful energy I was
experiencing. I had been sitting in a full-lotus posture
with my hands resting on my crossed feet. In that
position the whole of my hands, arms, and shoulders
formed a closed circle. Now that complete circle had
become another one of these force fields. I could neither
move forward nor sideways—I was locked in what I can
only describe as perpendicular energy flows. Whenever I
breathed out, the flows be came more tangible and
intense. The entire exper ience was so completely
enthralling that I did not actually regain awareness of my
surroundings. I only came down far enough to see that
my body was overcome by these energy flows. Then, onceagain, I heard: “DO YOU OR  DO YOU NOT WANT TO
KNOW WHAT IS BEYOND YOU. ”
I im mediately took a deep breath in and with great
intention slowly exhaled through my nostrils. It was as
though the outgoing breath pushing against the magnetic
force fields created upward lift. That upward and inward
propulsion beg an to drive m e to an even deeper place,
beyond any sense of self-awareness. One more breath in
and out, and I was completely gone. Perhaps you would like to ask where I went. That’s
reasonable, but I’m unable to answer that question. I
only kn ow tha t each time I came back, I was in a more
elevated state than when I left. When I came back from
nowhere the next time, everything was very different. There was no subtle resistance to having returned. There
was no sense o f urgency to hold on to the elevated state. There was only peace—deep, deep peace. And there was
absolute silence, a silence that nothing could possibly
disturb. It was so still that pe rhaps there had never ever
been any sound here for all eternity. It was like outer
space where there is no atmosphere, so there can be no
sound. Sound requires a me dium in which to travel. In
the place I returned to, there was no such medium. I was
truly experiencing the sound of silence. Most important, there was no voice. There was not
even the memory of what it would be like to have chatter
in th at sacred place. It was gone. All gone. All that was
left was awareness of being. I simply existed, nothing
more. This time no stern bec koning entreated me to go
beyond. It was time to come back. The first thing I noticed as I became aware of my
surroundings was that the external energy flows I
experienced earlier had drawn inward. I now felt a very
beautiful flow of energy up my spine to the middle of my
forehead. I had never experienced this before, and
almost all my awareness was drawn to that point. Meanwhile, there was still great pain in my legs, but thatwasn’t a problem. It was ju st the quiet experience of
pain. No complaints, no mental dialogue about what to
do about it. There was simply awareness, completely at
peace with what it was aware of. I manag ed to move my arms enough to unfold my legs
from th e lotus position. They were like dead weight, so I
lay on my side for a while until they came back to life. It
was so peacefu l, so comfortable lying there. In time, I
opened my eyes. What eased in through those openings
was like  nothing I had ever seen or dreamed of before. The wetland area before me appeared like a Japanese
rice paper painting. It exude d gentleness and stillness. The tall grasses swayed in the gentle breeze, but their
movement had a stillness about it. Everything was so
quiet, so serene. The trees w ere quiet, the clouds were
quiet, the water was quiet. There was absolute stillness in
the mid st of the movement of  nature. My body was quiet,
and there were no thoughts at all. I could have lain there
forever melting into the peace that surrounded my sense
of presence. When I finally got up, the movement of my body was
unfamiliar to me. I had never been a graceful person. I
was definitely not the dancing type. But now every
movement of my body was like a ballet. There was a
graceful flow when my arms moved, and I really saw the
difference when I began to w alk. With each step I could
feel eve ry tiny movement of the muscles in my feet. I
flowed from one step to the next, and the movement
itself was intoxicating. The amazing part is that th is state lasted for weeks. When I rejoined my friends  that day, the state didn’t
change. I felt no need to explain or describe what had
happened to me during the  two to three hours I was
gone. I could hardly talk. Everything was so beautiful
and tranquil. The silence, the absolute silence, even
sounds outside did not disturb that stillness. The sounds
were out there, but they seemed so far away from where Iwas seated inside. A moat of thick peace allowed nothing
to reach the citadel of my elevated state. 5. F r o m  A b s o l u t e  P e a c e  t o  A b s o l u t e
T u r m o i l
S helly and I retu rned home from the weekend trip, but I
could not relate to the life I was coming back to. I had
changed completely in a matter of hours. My normal
inner state had been transfor med into a state of absolute
clarity. Neither desire nor fear could touch me in those
early days. Even thoughts faded away before reaching my
seat of awareness. All I remember experiencing at that
time was a powerful, unwavering sense of one pointed
intention— I will never leave this state. No matter what,
I will never allow anything to take me from this place. No voice of my  mind had to say that to me; it was who I
was. I was no longer Mickey  Singer. I was the one who
would never betray that peace or allow anything to
disturb that transcendent stillness. I w as like a ch ild having to learn everything all over
again. I  had to learn to eat in a way that was consistent
with th at pea ce. I used t o smoke pot; I stopped
completely. My  state was cry stal clear, and I didn’t want
to dull it one io ta. I had to learn to go to classes and take
tests while remaining perfectly centered. I was in a
doctoral program, on full fellowship. I had to learn to use
my intellectual mind without disturbing the peace that I
now loved more than life itself. During those next few week s, I felt like I had been
born anew. I found myself y earning to go back beyond. In f act, every t ime I sat down to meditate I was drawn
back into an elevated state. Some veil had been torn
aside inside of me, and it was  now totally natural to passback through it. I started w aking up at three in the
morning to be able to d o prolonged meditations. Throughout the day, I would sit whenever and wherever
I had the opportunity. Only a small part of my life was
about my outer existence. What I was really about was
learning to stay deep inside while my outer life passed
before me, leaving me at peace. I wa sn’t able to stay that detached for long, however. After two to three weeks, the unassailable inner peace
began to develop cracks. These cracks allowed the voice
of my persona l mind to leak  back into my sanctuary of
silence. I struggled to get it b ack. Oh, did I struggle. But
the stru ggling itself was inconsistent with the absolute
stillness. There  was nothing I  could do. I had to just sit in
here helplessly watching as the Land Beyond My Dreams
gave wa y to my noisy inner st ate. It never dawned on me
that I could tr y leaving my outer existence in order to
maintain the inner stillness. That effort would come a
little bit later. Though my deep inner peace had begun to fade, I
never fully returned to my normal state. Even when the
personal mind and emotions started back up, I was much
further behind them than I used to be. There was also
another majo r change: I was now experiencing a
constant flow of energy risin g up within me to the point
between my eyebrows. It formed a vortex of pressure
that forced my attention to t hat point. For example, if I
was looking at something, it felt like I was concentrating
my gaze  throu gh my brow ra ther than through my eyes. This didn’t affect my ability to see; it just kept me closer
to th e meditative state at all t imes. Note that focusing on
the energy flow was not som ething I was doing; it was
something that was happening by itself. I was just aware
that the  flow had never been there before, and now it was
always there. The pull of my attention to the point between my
eyebrows became both my teacher and my friend. Whenmy mental voice had something to say, I now had a
choice—pay attention to the voice or keep focusing on
the inn er flow of energy. I eventually realized that if I
didn’t w ant to listen to the m ental chatter, all I had to do
was slightly increase my concentration on the energy
flow to my bro w. The thoughts would then pass right by
without disturbing me. Letting the thoughts go became a
game to me. A ll of life was a lighter experience than
before. My personal melodrama would still come up, but
it co uld not pu ll me down in to it. I had been gifted with
this inner flow of energy to help me work my way out of
myself. More important, I now knew what it would be
like to get awa y from my personal self. My intention was
firm and resolute—no matter  what it took, or how long it
took—I was going to find my way back beyond. It didn’t take long, however, before outer changes
began in my l ife that rivaled the inner changes I was
going th rough. It started with Shelly. One day she told
me that  it was time to move on. That really threw me for
a loop. Though  we had only been married a year and a
half, th e found ation of my p ersonal life had been built
around her for years. I tried in vain to hold on to her, but
at s ome point I saw somethi ng I had never been able to
see before: the sheer strength of my personality and
intellect had not given her the room she needed to
breathe. If I tr uly loved her, I had to let her go. Right at
that tim e, I had a friend who needed someone to house-
sit whil e he was away. I moved into that house and began
the process of nursing a broken heart. The sud den change in my outer life had a profound
effect on my in ner work. I was already totally committed
to my regular meditations. Exploring the inner state of
deep peace had become the purpose of my life. Now I
had another very powerful source of inspiration: I was
watching a human being in almost unbearable pain. My
heart ex uded pain all the time, and my mind was literally
broken. It was as though the foundation of my self-concept had been removed, a nd my personal self was in
free fall. I didn ’t know how to put it together again, nor
did I even want to. If I concentrated very deeply during meditation, all the
turmoil melted away. There was silence and peace. The
silence was not as thick as it had been before, but it
provided me a place of repos e. When I came back from
meditation, tur moil and pain was what I returned to. So
my dail y experience was now either heaven or hell. There
was nothing in between anymore. My “normal” way of
being was gone. In one fell sw oop, who I had been—was
no more. More and more I chose med itation. It was not just a
way of escaping the pain; meditation gave meaning to my
life. I was committed to going beyond—permanently—
and the  change s in my life were helping me get rid of an
entire part of my being that was holding me back. The
personality exp ressing itself through that mental voice
was no longer so sure of him self. In fact, he no longer
knew which way was up. These outer changes had
humbled him. He had thought he had it all figured out—
well, he  was wrong. It was definitely easier to let go of
him when he was in pieces. During that stage of my growth, I watched very closely
as the self-concept attempted to redefine itself. In place
of a married man with a defined career path, my
thoughts started to envision myself as a meditator who
was see king a deeper truth. But even in those early days I
didn’t want to regain strength based on another mental
concept of myself. Wheneve r I noticed thoughts being
stitched together to create a new “me,” I knocked the
chair out from under them. It  was very painful, but I was
willing to let it all go if it freed me to explore beyond. My friend came back to his house, so I moved out. I
didn’t care where I lived; I just needed to be alone. My
life was pretty simple. I was meditating, doing some
yoga, and periodically I wo uld go to class. I had nopossessions ex cept my schoolbooks, some clothes, and
my VW van. I used to take lo ng drives in the countryside
surrounding Gainesville. I had once found a beautiful
spot in the wo ods near a neighboring town where there
was a small, ab andoned lime  pit. The pit was filled with
crystal-clear, b lue water and was surrounded by nothing
but a vast area of scrub oaks and pines. I drove out there,
and that is where I lived. I w as becoming more and more of a hermit. It was not
so m uch that I was running away from something—I was
running into myself. My inte ntion was very clear at all
times: I wanted to go bac k deep inside myself. My
problem was that I had no  idea what to do with my
personal self—a. k. a. “Mickey. ” His very existence was
holding me back from where I yearned to go. If I didn’t
work at it, the focus of my attention would keep getting
drawn into his personal melodrama. That was clearly the
opposite direction from where I wanted to go. “Mickey”
was down and out; I  wanted to go in and up. In those
days I was cert ain of one thing: he was the problem, and
he had to go. I had become dead serious about getting rid
of him. But I had no idea how. 6. S o u t h  o f  t h e  B o r d e r
T he sum mer of 1971 was approaching, and I would soon
be free from classes. I was in my second year of graduate
school, and though my attendance had not been that
regular, I still managed to maintain my high grades. I
was stu dying just enough to do really well on my final
exams and written papers. There was no question about
what I was going to do with my summer—more
meditation and yoga. The only question was, where
would I do it. That w as probably the first time in my life that I
consciously began to notice a distinct, recurring theme in
the events unfolding outside of me. It began when, out of
the blue, a classmate asked me if I had ever been down to
Mexico. He said it was an interesting place to spend
some time. Shortly thereafte r, I was in a bookstore and
practically tripped over a book about touring Mexico that
someone had left on the floor. This started me thinking
that ma ybe I should get aw ay for a while, and maybe
Mexico would be a good idea. The final straw was when I
went to  a gas station to fill up, and someone had left a
map of  Mexico on top of the pump I was using. Those
were enough signs for me. I decided to go off to Mexico. I d idn’t  know where I was g oing—Mexico is a pretty
big plac e. But in my state of mind, it really made no
difference. I would just go an d let it unfold. My friends
and family were not all that e xcited about me going off to
Mexico alone with no agend a. I got a lot of warnings
about b anditos and cautions about avoiding strangers. I
spoke some classroom Spanish, just enough to get introuble. With little more th an that, I headed off to
Mexico. My trip  took me along the Gulf Coast states and down
through Texas. While driving, I would focus on my
breath and utter Mu  in my belly. The last thing in the
world I wanted to do was listen to that voice in my head
chatter all day. Each night I  would find a place to pull
over in  the woods, meditate, and go to sleep. At that
pace, it took a few days to drive down to north-central
Mexico, which was where I ended up. One eve ning, deep in rural Mexico, I couldn’t find any
woods to pull i nto for the night. I didn’t feel comfortable
just pul ling ove r on the side of the road, so I didn’t know
what to do. I ended up driving off-road and climbing one
of the more gr adual foothills until I reached a glorious
vista on the crest of a grassy pasture. There were no
fences or houses in sight, so  that is where I spent the
night. The next morning was brea thtaking. A mist floated
above the fields, and I could see all the colors of the
sunrise. It was so beautifu l that I did my morning
meditation and yoga postures outside. I went very deep,
and an echo o f the peace I was seeking overcame my
being. I stayed on that grassy hill for many weeks
without ever leaving. Each day I increased my periods of
meditation and yoga. My mind was quieting down, and
my heart was starting to breathe again. One morning I was startled by a tapping on the side
door of my van. I became very scared. Had the banditos
finally found me, or was the owner of the land going to
throw me off at gunpoint. Upon opening the door, I
found a young boy about eigh t years old standing outside
with a container in his hands. “Esta leche es de mi mama para el Americano
en la colina. ”I str uggled to translate, “This milk is from my mother
for the American on the hill. ” I was so moved, and I
thanked him so much. Here I had thought the worst, as
usual, a nd it turned out to b e an act of kindness in the
middle of nowhere in Mexico. I wa s gradually learning that  life was not as fragile as
that voice in m y head would have me believe. There were
experiences to be had, but only if you were willing to
have th em. Most important, that was the first time I can
remember crediting life for the flow of events that had
unfolded. After all, I hadn’t arranged for the perfect place
to pull over an d spend a few  weeks in meditation and
solitude, not to mention to h ave that kind visit from the
boy. Life had provided those things to me; I had just
followed the flow. I was beginning to see all these
experiences as a gift from life. 7. D i s c o n n e c t i n g  t h e  P a n i c  B u t t o n
M exico had been good for me, but it was now time to
start my journey home. I head ed back to the north and at
day’s end found a small lake off a dirt road where I could
spend the night. It was so p eaceful that I stayed there
after my morning practices enjoying the water. Time
came for my afternoon meditation session, so I hiked up
a hill and found a secluded spot to start my yoga
postures. About halfway through my routine, I began to hear
some voices in the distance. I started to get
uncomfortable, but I was not about to give in to that
scared p erson inside. I just r elaxed more deeply into my
yoga posture, and the anxiety subsided. The next sound that startled me was that of a snorting
horse a  lot closer than th e voices had been. I was
convinced that these were the banditos. I soon heard
both the voices and the horses a stone’s throw from me. Relaxed was not exactly the word that came to mind. Scared, vulnerable, and terribly self-conscious was a
much more accurate description of my state. Everything in me wanted to end my yoga session
immediately and open my eyes to see what danger I had
gotten m yself into. Well, everything except for the core of
self-discipline I had developed for ridding myself of that
scared person inside of me. T he command of steel came
from behind my fears: no way was I going to miss the
opportunity to  transcend all this inner commotion. I
closed my eyes tighter as an act of defiance and took adeep breath. I demanded a state of relaxation in the
midst of the drama. When my usual set of yoga postures was complete, I
normally sat for a half-hour meditation. I watched that
voice pl eading for permission  to skip that step. After all,
the horses had not gone any where. I could clearly hear
their breathing  right in front of me interspersed with the
periodic whispering of their riders. There really was no
decision to be made. I had clearly seen that it was this
scared person inside of me who was holding me back
from wh ere I so desperately wanted to go. I needed to be
free of him. So I took a deep breath and flowed into a
full-lotus position. I began the Mu  sound inside my belly
in a  vain attem pt to drown out what the voice was trying
to sa y. T o me it was like an act of commitment: Which do
you care about, outside or inside. When I finally opened my ey es, I saw two horses right
in front of me. They couldn’t have been more than ten
feet away. On top of the ho rses were two riders who
looked more like ranch hands than banditos. They were
smoking cigar ettes, and one of them was sitting
sidesaddle facing the other rider. When they saw that I
was ba ck in their world, they began to talk to me in
Spanish. I was somewhat  surprised that I could
understand most of what they were saying—and the very
fact that they were talking t o me was definitely a good
thing. I  began to feel relieve d, and the series of events
that transpired next left an indelible impression on my
mind to stop letting that scared person run my life. At some point in our interaction, the ranch hands
asked if it wa s my van parked down by the lake. My
mental voice immediately told me to be careful because
they could rob me. I ignored that interlude and willingly
reached my hand up when o ne of the riders offered to
pull me onto his horse and ride me back to my van. I was
a city boy; riding double on the back of a horse with a
Mexican stran ger while in my bathing suit was not aneveryday occur rence for me. As I rode down the hill, a
peace came over me from h ead to toe. This experience
was so beautiful, and I wou ld have missed it if I had
listened to my scared self. When we reached my van, the cowboy began telling
me that he and others worked this land for a rich
landowner. He  said they were all very poor, and the
landowner did not even allow them to fish in the lake. He
pointed the way to where th ey lived and invited me to
stop by before I left the nex t day. We said good-bye as
though we had been friends for years, and they turned
their horses and rode off. I fe lt so open,  so connected to the experience I was
having. Though I was going through some very deep
changes, I remember thankin g life that night for such a
special day. The pain and turmoil within me were
beginning to subside, but the yearning for the absolute
peace and silence continued to burn in my heart. The next morning after my practices, I packed up to
continue my journey northward. Before leaving, I
decided to drive farther down the dirt road to see if I
could find where the ranch h ands lived. I came upon an
area wh ere the re were fifteen to twenty adobe huts with
thatched roofs. I had read about such things, but I had
never a ctually seen a mud hu t with a roof made of straw. Before I  could decide if I wan ted to go any farther, one of
my new friends from the day before ran out to greet me. I pa rked my va n and followed the excited cowboy as he
introduced his new American friend to the villagers. I
was stunned by how primitive everything was. The huts
were dirt floored and had nothing but square openings
for win dows. There were no doors in the door openings
or windows in the window openings. Many of the people
I met stared a t me as though they had never seen an
American before. I soon found out that many of them
had not. I don’ t think the pes tering voice in my head said
one word for t he hours I was there. It was all so new tome. It was so natural, so down to earth. I sat in a hut
with women breast-feeding their babies. I had never seen
that before. I noticed I actu ally felt ashamed that my
culture had so distorted nature that natural things were
no longer natural. Once w e were back outside, we continued our tour of
the small village. When we approached my friend’s hut,
he aske d me if I knew how t o ride a horse. I told him it
had been years, but that I had ridden before. What I
didn’t tell him was that the last time I rode I was twelve,
and it was at s ummer camp with an English saddle. He
then di d the most unexpected thing. He handed me the
reins to his ho rse and pointed to an open field. This was
no time or place to be timid. I stuck my sandal into the
stirrup and swung myself int o the saddle, just as though
I kn ew what I was doing. I had always thought it would
be wild to gallop a horse across an open field. Somehow
that dr eam was about to be  realized in the middle of
Mexico where I knew absolutely nobody. I got used to
the hor se while some of the villagers gathered to watch,
and then I rod e like the wind across an expansive field. I
was really flying high, very exhilarated compared to the
strict Zen discipline to which I had been holding myself. I s pent a few more hours discussing American life with
some very inquisitive villagers and then began to bid
them farewell. I was invited to stay for dinner, but it was
time for my evening practices. I remembered that my
friend h ad told me that the y were not allowed to fish
even th ough they were struggling for food. I went to my
van and pulled out the large  supply of brown rice and
dried b eans I had stored under the backseat. I handed
them all over to the women preparing the food. The
women were so appreciative that it almost made me cry. This stuff meant nothing to me and so much to them. This was another one of life’s  lessons I never forgot: the
joy of helping people. Before I drove off, they all surrounded my van to say
good-bye. I had lived in sil ence and solitude with no
human contact for almost a month—now I was a
celebrity. How  did this hap pen. To me there was no
doubt a bout how it happened—I had let go of myself and
something very  special had followed. I was willing to face
loneliness and fear and not gr ab for relief. Yet something
happened on its own, withou t my doing it or even asking
for it. The seeds of a gre at experiment were being
planted. Was it possible that life had more to give us
than we could ever take for ourselves. 8. U n e x p e c t e d  I n s p i r a t i o n
I  had grown a lot through my experiences in Mexico. Learning to embrace life as it unfolded around me was
new to me, and  the results had been very freeing. By the
time I returned to Gainesvil le my heart and my mind
were m uch mo re at peace. Pr oblem was—I had no place
to live. My last residence had been in the woods by the
lime pit east of town, so I returned to that secluded
setting and lived there in my van. All I needed in my life
was solitude, the discipline of my ever-increasing
practices, and a minimal amount of food. I realized that the probability of finishing my doctoral
degree was rapidly decreasing. I only had a few courses
left, but  then there were the qualifying exams as well as
the dissertatio n. Nothing was left in me that wanted to
be an economics professor. I wanted to explore inside,
deep inside. The depths of my meditations were all I
cared about. The chairman of the Department of Economics, Dr. Goffman, was like a father to  me. I loved and respected
him a great d eal, and he encouraged me to finish my
degree. He thought I was jus t going through a phase in
my you th, and  I would come  out of it soon. He kept me
on my fellows hip and pushed me to at least finish my
coursework. Out of respect for him, I would drive into
town periodically and go to class—but not very often. I would eventually learn that everything in life has
something to teach you and that it is all for your growth. But I was not ready to see that yet. To me, there was my
meditation, and then there was everything else. Though Idefinitely wasn ’t seeing my sc hoolwork as relevant to my
inner growth, I had a very illuminating experience
associated with one of my courses. The professor of the course was a respected economist
and not  at all the liberal typ e. I missed a lot of classes,
and wh en I did show up, I was barefooted and in jeans. I
doubt t hat I was his favorite  student. One day he asked
me if I actually expected to receive a good grade in the
course. He explained that I  had put out just enough
effort to  do well on the exams, but my absences and lack
of p articipation  in class did not provide the basis for a
high gra de. I knew we had a f inal paper left to write, so I
told him  I would put extra effort into that paper, and I’d
appreciate it if he would ba se my grade solely on my
exams and the quality of tha t paper. He said he would
take it into consideration. The tim e came  to write the final paper for the course. I
knew m y mental state was no t conducive to going to the
library and trying to learn en ough to write a great paper. I ha d been meditating a lot, and my mind was very still. No way was I going to spend days researching and
thinking about the topic. I would have to find a different
method if I was going to write this paper. One evening, I gathered up a bunch of writing pads
and a few pens. After med itation, I lit the kerosene
lantern and sat at the fold-out table in my van. I began
by t elling myself that I really didn’t care what grade I got
in the class sin ce I probably wouldn’t finish my degree
anyway. This removed any mental or emotional pressure. I t hen told mys elf to just start  writing whatever I thought
about the topic. I had no b ooks to refer to, just the
natural logic of a clear, unp ressured mind. I began to
write an d thoughts began to flow. I did not worry about
what I was wri ting or second-guess my thoughts. It was
very mu ch like meditation. I kept my personal self out of
it completely and just let unbridled inspiration flow. At s ome point in the process, a flash of inspiration
welled u p insid e of me. I went from not knowing what I
was going to do with the paper to knowing exactly what I
was going to w rite. It was as  though a cloud of knowing
instantly form ed back behind the quiet mind. It
happened as fast and pow erful as a flash of lightning. At
first, no thoughts were involved. It was more of a feeling,
just a definitive knowing that I now knew where the
paper was going and how to get there. Then the thoughts
began to form. They came slowly at first, then they
poured into my mind. I still  had to pull them together
into a logical flow, but the seeds were all there. It was an
amazing process to watch. I wrote and I wrote. Notepad after notepad became
filled with a totally logical pre sentation that began with a
premise, laid out its argument, and ended with a
conclusion. Along the way, there were graphs to present
logical relationships, and there were references to facts I
had previously read or heard in class. These facts would
need to be polished and footnoted later, so I simply left
space fo r them and kept on writing what was created in
my mind. I sto pped for nothing. There was no worrying
or judgment of good or bad; I  just allowed the process to
unfold. Section summary: 

(Please ensure accuracy, brevity, and clarity)

Please summarize Sections (sections) [I] -[VIII]. Provide concise descriptions

(Word count limit)
•   **Do** summariz. ```python
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Here's the response:


Summary Report


Sections Summary



[I]
Introduction/Preconditions – An overview of author/speaker introduction, dedication acknowledgements. [WAKING UP]

* Discussion begins exploring spiritual quest/self-discovery/journey toward enlightenment/Self-Awarenes. * Introduced 'Shelli' marriage/major role





[VII-WHEN DARK Clouds Become Rainbows]

*. Sharing inspiring stories/experience, emphasizing importance/worthiness/responsibility. For further clarification/questions please inform. Let me clarify,

You're expecting summarized versions of sections `[I]-[IX],` correct. If yes, kindly proceed. Otherwise, consider providing guidance/instructions specifically tailored towards requesting summaries. \

Best regards. Note: `word_count_limit =. `
Is missing. Kindly specify desired Word Count Limit (`max_words`) so I may adjust responses according to requirements. ).
The author's name is Michael Alan Singer, and he prefers to be called Mickey.
Who is the author of this book?
The text does not provide a detailed description of Michael's life before the events described in the book. However, it is mentioned that he was a student at the University of Florida, married to Shelly, and was on track to become a college professor.
What was Michael's life like before the events of the book?
The turning point was when he had a profound experience of inner silence, which led to a series of life-changing events. He became the CEO of a corporation, his life changed dramatically, and he began to explore the concept of surrender.
What was the turning point for Michael's life, and what happened next?
The book was about quieting the mind and finding inner peace.
What was the book "Three Pillars of Zen" about?
At this point, Michael's daily life was centered around his meditation and yoga practices, and he was no longer concerned with his outer life.
What was the purpose of Michael's daily life at this point?