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For all of you keeping up, thanks.

I returned home this week and will not be posting for awhile. I may post once more and attach the powerpoint presentation I am currently working on. To finalize my Howes grant from DePauw, I will be doing a public presentation on campus in the coming weeks. I will be reviewing everything I got to witness this summer, and presenting some of the themes I saw.

To retrace my steps. I began with a generous grant from my school in Greencastle, IN for my proposed project entitled, "New American Inquiries into the Nature of Consciousness", went home to Kansas City, and then headed toward:

1. BOULDER, CO. I visited Naropa University, spoke with students, faculty, and administrators; toured the grounds; and read literature about their graduate schools. I was personally interested in the Religious Studies programs and the Contemplative Psychotherapy and Transpersonal Psychology programs and how they took an alternative approach to studying consciousness. After Boulder, my friend Olivia and I drove to . . .

2. CRESTONE, CO. There we camped and stayed at various houses and hot springs. We spent most of our time visiting the plethora of spiritual centers there: Buddhist and Catholic monasteries, Hindu ashrams, and secular groups. Crestone is a unique place in the United States because it hosts around a dozen spiritual centers all within the vicinity of one small Colorado town. The centers started springing up there when a the family of a wealthy developer began funding their construction. The mountains are/were considered sacred by the various Native American groups who live there, and are admired for their spiritual power by traditions from all over the world. After Crestone, we drove to

3. TUSCON, AZ. I attended the bi-annual IONS conference for five days. I stayed with friends and Olivia flew on to California. The IONS conference hosted a diverse mix of workshops from alternative healers to spiritual gurus, long-time professors to fringe consciousness researchers, mainstream environmental geopolitics to myriad variations of new age ideology. I was exposed to the variety of research being done on the mind to investigate everything from altered states of consciousness and mystical experiences to whether or not we can obtain information from the dead. After TUSCON, I headed for

4. CARMEL VALLEY, CA. I stayed three days at Tassajara Retreat Center. The first and longest standing Zen Buddhist monastery in the U.S. During the Fall, Winter, and Spring months, Tassajara is a training monastery in the Soto Zen tradition where students follow the formal disciplines of ethical conduct, meditation, work practice, and frequent silent retreat. During the summer months, while I was there, the focus becomes work practice and many students visit to work and sit zazen. Most of the work is oriented toward maintaining the grounds and hosting guests who come to visit the hot springs and enjoy Tassajara's infamous cuisine. After learning more about their practice from students and teachers, I headed less than a hundred miles to the California coast to visit

5. BIG SUR, CA. I did a weekend retreat at Esalen Institute, a long-standing retreat center that has hosted workshops, concerts, and forums of all kinds of countercultural breed. The workshop I attended was entitled "When the Past is Present: Healing the Wounds of Past Relationships", hosted by David Richo who had recently published a book by the same title. The workshop was surprisingly potent for such a short period of time, and I learned a lot about myself. I was most interested, however, in how group therapy works and got to learn from Richo, a master at facilitating large groups. The sessions were a seamless flow of his own lectures, poems, readings, and answers to the groups questions, comments, and insights. I also researched how Esalen has structured itself as an educational institution and how it facilitates communities of learning through its unique and dense workshop schedule. After Big Sur, I drove into

6. SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Right in time for the gay pride parade! After an overwhelming introduction to the city of love, I stayed at a hostel, and met the next morning with a counselor from CIIS, California Institute of Integral Studies. My exposure to CIIS was brief, but I got to tour the facilities and ask questions about the school, specifically the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness (PCC) and East-West Psychology programs. I also met multiple people along my journey who had studied in the PCC program and picked their brains about what to expect at CIIS. After CIIS, my final leg of the trip was to

7. OREGON. I first stayed with friends in Portland then headed to Clatskanie, OR where I would stay at Great Vow Monastery for almost a month and a half. Great Vow is a Soto/Rinzai Zen Monastery run under the instruction of Co-Abbots Chozen and Hogen Bays. This was intended to be the "in-depth" portion of my research, and it certainly turned out to be a rich investigation of another way to investigate, study, and transform one's own mind. My experience at Great Vow was so rich and varied, it's very difficult to adequately summarize it. I didn't have enough time to post very much about my experience while I was there because words seemed so inadequate at the time. They still do, but as my presentation approaches, I will muster up some inadequate expression and hopefully post it. I began this project and entered Great Vow with the hope that there were effective and meaningful approaches to understanding one's own consciousness outside traditional academic life. Needless to say, that hope was answered.

Now, as I begin to summarize my summer experience, I realize there are conclusions to draw on multiple levels. On one level, the American university is in good company in its traditional search to understand life and its meaningfulness. On another, I have been exposed to future opportunities for myself - monastic, academic, and otherwise - as I graduate from college next Spring. On another level, I found this research extremely helpful in my attempt to assist others on their own paths. I have already met at least a dozen people seriously interested in the institutions I've visited and have been able to answer at least some of their questions.

A lot of what I learned about these places still remains pretty superficial, however. Not even a month gets me anywhere close to adequately appreciating a place and what it does for people. Leaving DePauw, I can still think of so many corners of its campus about which I know nothing. On the flip side, however, its amazing how just a morsel of information about a place can completely re-orient our impression. All and all, this summer did a lot to give me hope for the U.S. in its own spiritual quest. It also exposed me to how much I'll never know about this place.

Thanks again for reading. I appreciate any feedback about the blog or comments about how I can improve it on my next trip.