I began work as an engineer at IBM in the mid-1950s, in what was then the rural, southern edge of San Jose. IBM had purchased twenty acres of farmland and pasture to develop facilities for the latest in manufacturing, engineering, and research in business computing. It turns out we were at the forefront of a major regional transition. Ten years later, the transformation of Santa Clara Valley from the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” to “Silicon Valley” was in full swing. Orchards and farmlands were being replaced by high-tech office buildings and factories, along with the freeways, shopping centers, and homes necessary to support this growing center of creativity, commerce, and the quest for knowledge. This change from a simpler, slow-paced life has now been taking place for decades, not just in Silicon Valley, but also in New York, Seattle, Phoenix, Portland, Charleston, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas.
It was during this time of transition from farm to factory that I discovered Zen Buddhism. I’d grown up on the west side of midtown Manhattan, found my way to what was to become Silicon Valley, and got a great job with IBM, but the side of life we call spiritual was not in the equation. Then on a Friday evening in 1961 at a cocktail party, I spotted The Way of Zen by Alan Watts on my hostess’s bookshelf. It caught my attention, and I asked if I could borrow it over the weekend.
At the time, my wife, Mary, and I lived in a two-room cottage on a pear ranch off Skyline Boulevard, near Los Gatos. It was autumn, and the days were chilly and damp. That Saturday morning, I lit a fire, and for the next two days I sat immersed in Alan Watts’s magical descriptions of the history and practice of Zen. I was fascinated to discover a dimension of living, an approach to life I hadn’t thought about before. When I closed the book, I knew that my technically-oriented workaday life was incomplete. I needed reflection too, a way to connect with and explore my self and the life of spirit. Watts’s description felt profoundly authentic, pointing to depth I’d been seeking without even realizing it.
A few years later, I discovered a group of like-minded individuals—businesspeople, parents, stay-at-home moms, engineers, schoolteachers, and grad students—who met regularly for meditation in Los Altos, and I started Zen practice with them. “It’s astonishing so few can create such beauty,” one of the members commented. Shunryu Suzuki, known by the honorific title roshi, meaning “old teacher,” had arrived in San Francisco from Japan in the late 1950s, establishing the San Francisco Zen Center and later Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. In the mid-1960s, Suzuki offered to host a weekly meditation group on the peninsula that grew into “Haiku Zendo,” a seventeen-seat converted garage in the home of Marian Derby in Los Altos—seventeen corresponding to the number of syllables in a haiku poem, and “zendo” being the Japanese term for “meditation hall.” We met one evening and one morning every week for meditation and a short talk by Suzuki-roshi.
At first, the meditation practices and the rituals (chanting, bowing, offering incense) felt strange, but in just a few months, I started to recognize the universal nature of what we were doing. Although the practices were specific and had cultural resonance, Suzuki-roshi had not journeyed to the United States to bring us something foreign. The essence of Zen practice speaks both to universal truths as well as to the specific challenges, difficulties, and doubts we face today.
Four years before I discovered “Haiku Zendo,” I had been involved in circuit design and development of new IBM data processing machines. One morning, my manager handed out large three-ring binders describing a new technology. “We are changing the way we do things,” he said. “Transistors are being phased out, printed circuits are the new way. You’ll find all you need in this manual.”
The fat, heavy, IBM-blue notebook contained hundreds of pages of rules for designing circuits. It was obvious that we would be occupied for weeks or months absorbing these rules, followed by years applying them. I also knew this would not be the last major change in the technology, that we would likely be adapting to a new one sometime in the next five years, and again five years after that.
I could see my work and life becoming absorbed in learning and implementing ever-new technologies developed to make machines more productive, less costly, and more reliable. The vision gave me an uncomfortable feeling, not because the goals were inherently wrong; they had potential to create economic and social value. But at this moment I knew that I was no longer satisfied with exploring individual elements of technology, that I was unwittingly following a script crafted by society, family, and school teachers, as well as my own youthful excitement that had diminished over the years without my awareness.
Over the next several days, I thought about what kind of work I would find engaging and useful. What emerged was the recognition of my fascination with the relationships of worldly things, how they fit as well as where they failed to fit. I felt most absorbed arranging component parts of a system to work well together, to resolve impediments to the flow of information, ideas, feelings, and understanding. I wanted to engage in helping the multi-dimensioned world of things—human, technical, and natural—exist together in harmony.
I asked my manager if I could transfer to marketing, explaining that I would like to work with a wider range of people in a more varied environment, solving “real-world” everyday problems, comprised of many parts. He looked at me briefly, stood up, and said, “Wait here.” He walked out of his office and headed down a long corridor toward his own boss’s office. He returned in twenty minutes and said, “OK, you will start an eighteen-month sales training program next week. Bring the other guys up-to-date on your projects.” The following Monday, I started a new career—with a new orientation—as a trainee in the IBM San Jose sales office.
My encounter with the technology manuals was a wake-up call, an encounter with myself. The experience revealed how I had been unaware of what held meaning for me, of my vision of life. It was upsetting to learn that I had been sleepwalking. Years later I learned that everyone is at risk of not knowing who they are at the most fundamental level.
That experience and the question I had over fifty years ago are today occurring with increasing frequency in the tech world. Intelligent and dedicated men and women are feeling burdened, devoting an overwhelming percentage of their time, energies, and minds to technology. They sense that their other dimensions have been unengaged and overlooked. They are turning to spiritual practice to discover who they are, beyond profession, personality, ambition, and pursuit of a successful career.
A Sense of Something Greater is based on the premise that humans are fundamentally spiritual. In every culture and society, from ancient, prehistoric tribes and small communities to worldwide religious institutions today, we create rituals and ceremonies that point to something larger than ourselves and our material lives. Instinctively, we seek to embrace and be embraced by spirit, by breath, by dancing, singing, and rites of passage, by nature, and archetypes. We sense unseen dimensions we want to incorporate into our lives.
This book is based on fifty years of Zen practice as an expression of spirituality, as well as its practical application in the everyday world of family and work. In Zen, being fully present with body and mind, in quiet contemplation and in everyday activities, is called practice. The book includes teachings, along with interviews with Silicon Valley seekers who are learning to express their spiritual practice in the pressure cooker of twenty-first-century life. These practitioners are trying their best to incorporate spiritual practice in their relationships, work, creativity, childcare, safety, driving, financial stability, preparing for retirement, and every facet of life.
Through focused awareness, patience, and generosity, Zen practice reveals our inherent spiritual wisdom, helping us respond creatively to the uncertainties and complexities of our times. My hope is to demonstrate the relevance of Zen to our lives and illustrate how the spiritual and the ordinary continuously converge.