“By the time I was a teenager my default state, waking or dreaming, was angst: a five-percent flight or fight contraction that dared not hit the off-switch, always fearfully alert, like a soldier behind enemy lines: did I, should I, why didn’t I, why shouldn’t I, what will they think of me….

Screwing the contraction even tighter was a constant fear of being found out, for I held the illusion I was the only boy on the planet who was thusly messed up. I should have asked someone, “But….you’re just pretending too, aren’t you?” No way. I confided in no one my hang-ups. Not my brothers and sisters, not my friends, not my teachers, and certainly not my parents. I lived alone, in Trauma Purgatory.

Then I got lucky. In my mid-teens, when I was hot at war with my latest angst—the guilty friction of peer-pressure conversion from altar-boy to party boy—I began a series of adventures that transformed my teenage world of status, cars, and girls into the abstract universe of my mind. I got into the what’s-it-all-about game.

That game became the Story of a Generation: the transformation of the world-view of the west to the wisdom of the east.”