My formal training was in electronics engineering, a field I abandoned after a spontaneous “spiritual awakening” experience led me to an intense, 30-year study of human potential development.

I researched comparative religion, philosophy, and psychology with Eastern and Western teachers, gurus, and mystics worldwide, and learned that what I’d discovered and directly experienced, was the Law of Detachment — which I later understood is the Law of Meditation.

It happened in 1976, quite accidentally and dramatically. I was a young electronics prodigy working at Lab for Electronics in Natick, Massachusetts, on a secret, aircraft navigation system for the U.S. Air Force. My job was to design an integrated circuit through which high frequency radio waves could pass with minimal resistance.

I succeeded in designing a perfectly “balanced” circuit in which the friction or resistance was virtually immeasurable. The circuit was, in effect, invisible, allowing radio waves to flow at maximum efficiency.

I then saw a correlation between this phenomenon and how the mind works: In a balanced circuit there’s no resistance; in a balanced mind there must also be no resistance, no blockage, no limitation. Mind, body, and spirit must connect, unify, integrate.

With this revelation, my awareness spontaneously “detached” from the thoughts, feelings, and activities that I was aware of. I drew back to a position of being neutral or centered – between my personal self and my aware or “spiritual” self. This backward movement extricated my awareness from its entanglement with the personal faculties of thought, emotion, sensation, and physical activity.

I became both a witness to life and a participant at the same time. I was at once on the outside looking in and on the inside looking out. I could see people, places, situations in their wholeness and completeness instead of with a personal or self-centered bias. I could see who people really are, personally and spiritually.

I experienced the definition of reality to be – that which exists before we personalize it. In other words, I saw that the whole secret of life is to not experience anything from a personal perspective, and is achieved by “keeping a distance” from all internal and external experience. This is how to live from a universal perspective.

This unprecedented ability to see from a distance was a virtual heaven-on-earth experience – too wonderful for words to describe. So joyful, enlightening and empowering, that all the rest of my life became worthless in comparison, and I’ve devoted my life to the continued study, practice, and teaching of it.