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, popular authors such as Joseph Campbell are just to name a few. 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.

On the surface, Turak is a successful businessman who runs several award-winning Triangle software companies. 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. In his twenties Turak quit college and studied with West Virginia Zen Master Richard Rose for the next five years. A powerful storyteller and frequent lecturer alongside such luminaries as Huston Smith (author of the best-selling The World's Religions), Turak seeks to inspire people to find deeper meaning. He is also Executive Director of the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation.

"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?" When Turak met Rose, he began to explore these questions not just in books, but in the most critical laboratory of all—his life.

"Augie Turak is more than a story-teller," says Kenny Felder, UNC alum, founder of One Tree Software and former Microsoft group manager. "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?"

Manisha Verma, UNC '99 agrees. "Augie is one of the most powerful speakers that I have come across. When I attended his 'What is Zen' lecture, I was not only captured by his incredible sincerity, but transformed by his intense presence. I felt as if he had carried me through an eye-opening, real moment of clarity. I left in that intense mood for the following few days….I am really grateful that I had the opportunity to meet a person as incredible as [Turak] in my life."

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August Turak enjoyed a highly successful career in the telecommunications industry before he became an entrepreneur. He has been an executive with MTV, The Arts and Entertainment Network, United Press International, and Adelphia Communications, among others. In 1993 he started his own software publishing company, Raleigh Group International, which was recently recognized by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick as the eighth-fastest growing company in the Triangle area. He has been featured in national publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, Universal Press' syndicated column WorkWise, Entrepreneur Magazine, VAR Business, Success, Selling, as well as numerous local radio and newspaper interviews. Mr. Turak lives in Raleigh.

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The Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation (SKSF) is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging people to consciously develop their own personal, moral and spiritual values and to live according to them. The SKSF has been praised as "the hottest thing happening in higher education today" by Dr. William Willimon, Dean of Duke University Chapel, ranked by Newsweek as one of the top ten preachers in the English-speaking world, and author of The Search for Meaning. At the forefront of the national interest in spirituality, the SKSF creates experiential learning programs and social contexts within which people can explore the deeper questions in life, developing intellectual understanding and personal character in a quest for the life worth living. The SKSF advises the SKS campus groups, sponsors a non-student discussion group, and co-sponsors meetings, lectures, retreats and The Symposium spiritual journal. For more information, visit www.selfknowledge.org.