![]() I wanted to find peace myself, to embody peace and bring peace into the world. I had been part of the peace movement, demonstrating for peace in Washington and things like that and I started to feel disillusioned with radical politics and fighting for peace. She was 19 and that turned my head around. One of my best friends was killed at Kent State when the National Guard shot the students protesting the secret bombings in Cambodia in 1970. I had a few visits back with my family, and one year in Japan studying Zen and teaching English to make a living. Buddhist and other Hindu and Yogi teachers. I stayed with my teachers for a long time. I met the Tibetan lamas in the countries around Tibet. I didn't want to study at graduate school, I wanted to trace the source of it. ![]() When I graduated in 1971 I went to India. I studied philosophy and psychology and those things in college. I was in college and I tried to learn to meditate. In college I met Buddhism, and I met the first American Zen master at the Rochester Zen Center in New York. ![]() Nobody could answer my questions so I didn't pursue that. I grew up in New York on Long Island, and I was bar mitzvahed and all that, but I wasn't really very interested in those things in those days. I'm Jewish on my parent's side, as I like to say. I was in college in New York at the University of Buffalo. And then you have to do a three year, three month, three day meditation retreat. I've had ten or 15 years of monastic training and study and meditation practice. I'm sort of the one with the biggest profile right now because I'm writing the big books and giving the keynotes, and it's kind of my personality to be out there. Lama Surya Das: I wouldn't really say that. Linda Richards: Are you the only North American Lama? I'm just a regular guy." Though this particular regular guy continues to travel the world with his message and - every so often - he cranks out another bestselling book to help us all on the road to the shiny forever. "I'm not really trying to be a regular guy. He professes a continuing passion for sports as well as peace. Fit and peaceful, there is every trace of his New York state boyhood in his voice, though not his mien. Now 48, Lama Surya Das seems almost like a poster boy for spiritual enlightenment. Had he known that the path would span three decades, maybe he would have reconsidered, even then. Wearing the requisite beard and ponytail, he started on what he felt was a path towards real peace and enlightenment. When a dear friend was killed during the Kent State riots, young Jeffrey began to question everything in his world.Īfter graduation, the questioning found him in India. But it was the time of the youth revolution and the world was in confusion. Maybe the 2.5 kids, the house in the suburbs and all of the laurels that go with American jockdom. If it had been any other time, this story might have gone quite differently. In high school, he earned letters in basketball, baseball and soccer and then trundled off to the University of Buffalo to work towards the degree that his background demanded of him. Born in 1950, the lama-to-be was "Jewish on my parent's side," as well as a good student and sterling athlete. In the competitive market of higher consciousness, Lama Surya Das seems made to order for the western world, though on meeting with him and hearing his story and the journey he's taken to the bestseller lists, no one would accuse him of anything so crass.īorn Jeffrey Miller, he was raised in Valley Stream on Long Island in New York. At the very least, it sells a lot of books. In an age filled with confusion and uncertainty, spirituality has gotten to be big business. We have to recognize that we're all interconnected, we're all a part of this shrinking world." Just humanity and human rights, ecological values. So what I connect with is what I think of as the essential sacredness of spirituality in life. "Now is a time that people are reassessing things and looking for something that really connects.
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