The Story of My Life, Part 2

SEEKING

I had rejected my Catholic rearing years before college and was actively entranced with the big questions of life.  I was fundamentally an atheist and a materialist so science seemed to be the answer to it all and physics was in my opinion the science of all science.

I never did find the answers in physics. I realized half way through my senior year that although the study of physics was all about discovering answers to the question “why are things the way they are?” you do in fact always, no matter which direction you move into, seem to come to one “why” too many. One “Why is this like this?” that can only be answered by “Because it is.” I graduated anyway.

What do you do when you graduate with an undergraduate degree in Physics? You go to graduate school, you teach physics in high school, or you become an engineer. I became an engineer. I worked as an associate engineer for a semi-conductor laser manufacturer on the route 128 high-tech belt around Boston. I worked for a team of outrageously intelligent PhD’s who would come up with laser designs to exacting specifications and I would figure out how to actually build them and then turn them into product lines.

When I woke up one morning and found myself working on a laser design that was going to be used in a micro camera mounted on a military missile so that it could be flow via TV screen into some dictator’s bathroom, I started to have doubts about the ultimate value of my chosen profession. I quit.

By this time I was married and I took some time off, went back to school and got a master’s degree in education. Yes, I was going to switch to curtain number 2 and teach physics in high school. I got a job in a small school for incarcerated teens and I became the director of the school after my first year of working there. In the end I stayed for four more years, touching a few young lives deeply, but always troubled when we would send them back into the same situation that had made them dysfunctional in the first place.

During this whole time I was still trying to find the big answers. I studied cognitive psychology at the Harvard extension school, read every book that caught my eye with my taste gradually running more and more in the direction of the overtly spiritual. In the end I decided that I was way too rational and started to see a new age teacher once a week. We did crystal healings, past life regressions, I even went along when she said she was in contact with beings from other planets, but when she told me about the little people (3 feet high) who live under the earth’s crust and only emerge out of a whole located in the Antarctic, that was that. I had more than my fill of the new age for this life time.

I started going to a Buddhist meditation center in Boston and meditating regularly. I started seeing some of the spiritual teachers that would come to town too. That is when I met Andrew Cohen.
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