"Augie Turak is more than a story-teller. He isn't a second hand expert. Everything in 'What is Zen' comes from his own life, his own experiences. He makes you wonder: why don't all these incredible things happen to me? Or maybe they do, and I just don't notice them?" --Kenny Felder, UNC alum, WUNC commentator "When I attended his 'What is Zen' lecture, I was not only captured by his incredible sincerity, but transformed by his intense presence. I left in that intense mood for the following few days...I am really grateful that I had the opportunity." --Manisha Verma, UNC '99 "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

Zen has a fascination for people of all backgrounds, spiritual seekers and skeptics alike. Trappist author Thomas Merton, psychologists and authors Erich Fromm and Carl Jung, and popular authors such as Joseph Campbell are just a few examples. What is the nature of this attraction? And what does Zen have to teach us in our lives today?

Businessman and lifetime spiritual seeker August Turak has 30 years of experience explaining Zen in layman's terms. Turak contends that the heart of Zen isn't in the robes or meditation postures—it's the fact that Zen is the most direct path to spiritual insight he's ever seen. A process of spiritual seeking useful for anyone, rather than the content of a particular religious approach.

"As a college student in 1972, there was one problem primarily on my mind: death," says Turak. "The question I was asking myself was, 'How can I live a meaningful life, when no matter what I do, no matter how successful I become, I still die?'" Turak pursued his question in the libraries, digging through Nietzsche, Plato, Shakespeare, Alan Watts—any author who might have an answer. "I agreed with all of them, but none of them agreed with each other. What was I supposed to do?"

Turak decided the answers he was seeking were not to be found in books—or in college. So he dropped out, and spent five years studying with West Virginia Zen Master Richard Rose. After he left Rose, he continued his studies on his own.

People meeting Turak today see a successful businessman who worked with the team that founded MTV, and later started and sold his own software company. But Turak's real passion throughout his life has been what he calls "spiritual seeking"—struggling to answer age-old questions about life and death. Thousands of students have come to hear his lectures and attend his classes. Some describe him as a teacher, who brings together diverse ideas from ancient Zen to modern psychology in a way that makes sense. Some describe him as an example of a life lived day by day, year by year faithfully according to principal. Turak insists that "What I found was much bigger, and much more beautiful, than I first imagined. But in many ways, I'm still that college student. I still read incessantly, and I'm still learning."

Invite Augie Turak to speak at your organization