"This talk was the most intense two hours of my life." --Rob Nikander, Duke '99, Computer Science Major "Turak is a modern-day Socrates, and his revolution, the Self Knowledge Symposium, is the hottest thing happening in higher education today. I feel like I should be following behind him writing down the things he says." --Dr. William Willimon, Dean of the Duke Chapel and author of the best-selling The Search for Meaning "Most informative...enlightening." --Durham Herald-Sun

When Augie Turak dropped out of college to study under Zen master Richard Rose, he had no idea what he was getting into. "I thought I would check him out, judge him and his path," he says. "I didn't realize that by the time I was really into it, the 'me' checking it out would be a completely different person."

Five years later, Turak left Rose's farm and entered the business world. He studied under Lou Mobley, founder of the IBM Executive School. He was one of the early founders of a new company called MTV. But his experience with Rose remained "the most profound and important in my life," he explains. "I knew I had to return to spiritual work." It was that drive that led Turak to found the Self Knowledge Symposium in 1988.

But in this talk, Turak takes the audience back to the beginning: to his first meeting with Richard Rose. "I saw a short, stocky man standing on the curb outside the building, and knew it was him immediately," says Turak. "The thing I'll never forget is his intense blue eyes—they looked straight into mine, through the back of my head, and two thousand light years into the universe behind me." Five Years with a Zen Master focuses on the first intense, difficult, and incredibly rewarding summer Turak spent with Rose.

"At that time in my life, there was one problem primarily on my mind: death." says Turak. "The question I was asking myself was, 'how does a person live a meaningful life, when no matter what you do, you still die?'" Before he met Richard Rose, Turak pursued his question in the libraries, digging through Nietzsche, Plato, Shakespeare, Alan Watts—any author who he thought might have an answer. "I agreed with all of them," Turak says of these authors, "But none of them agreed with each other. What was I supposed to do?"

While Rose supported the pursuit of intellectual knowledge, his main message was a call to action. As Turak recalls, "The first thing Rose said was, 'Some people think Zen is about finding peace. There's plenty of peace in the cemetery. I'm not here to give you peace—I'm here to wake you up.' I walked out of that lecture with my head spinning."

The rest of Turak's story unfolds from that initial encounter at the Theosophical Society. Turak's tale is sometimes humorous, sometimes intense, sometimes tender, and always riveting.

Turak has given his Five Years with a Zen Master for five consecutive years at Duke University, UNC, NC State, and other venues—and has sold out every time. Fr. Christian Carr, OCSO Mepkin Abbey, describes his good friend by saying "Augie sheds light, a symbol of practical wisdom...That is, as I see it, what Augie Turak is all about, calling to those with ears to hear: 'The glory of God; the glory of man and woman, is to be fully human.'"

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