On the surface, Turak is a successful businessman who runs several 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 spent five years living and working with a Zen teacher in West Virginia. Later he was a protégé to Louis Mobley, the founder of the renowned IBM Executive School and a pioneer in developing experiential learning programs for managers. A powerful storyteller, Turak has lectured extensively about his experiences, encouraging people to pursue an introspective life. He is also Executive Director of The Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation, a dynamic forum where professionals, students, life-long seekers and first-time inquirers can gather, discuss, experiment and Discover.

"When I was in my twenties, I was laying carpet for a living," begins one of Turak's stories. "I met a former contractor who told me that he had once fallen ten stories from a building. Almost died. Before I knew it, I blurted out, 'What did you think about on the way down?' He replied, 'That I had wasted my life.' I asked, 'Did you change your life?' His reply was a whisper: 'No.' My boss almost fired me—'Don't ever talk to a customer like that again!' "

"Augie Turak is more than a story-teller," says Kenny Felder, founder of One Tree Software and former Microsoft group manager. "He isn't a second hand expert. Everything in Walking the Razor's Edge comes from his own life 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?"

Turak speaks mostly in stories, framed by philosophical insights. "We all wonder if we're wasting our lives. But for most of us, it isn't enough to sit in the armchair and think 'Am I really getting the most out of every day?' It takes some kind of crisis to provoke real thought at that level. My mentor, Richard Rose, taught that Zen is a system designed to artificially induce that crisis without actually having to push you off a ten-story building."

And, like his mentor, Turak leaves his audience looking at their own lives in a new—and often uncomfortable—way. "Like the buffalo slaughtered on the Great Plains, we live with our fellows dying all around us, yet we keep on grazing. Intellectually, we know we're not immortal, but we act like we have all the time in the world. A life on the spiritual path is a life of urgency, a life of finding out what's important while we still have time."

Turak has lectured extensively throughout the country in churches, universities, and business forums. Dr. William E. Willimon, the Dean of the Duke Chapel, best-selling author of The Search for Meaning, and ranked by Newsweek as one of the world's top ten preachers, says, "Turak is a modern-day Socrates…and his revolution, the Self Knowledge Symposium, is the hottest thing happening in higher education today."

At the forefront of the national interest in spirituality, the Self Knowledge Symposium's Collisions with the Infinite series features powerful speakers who tackle the question of meaning head on, telling stories audiences won't soon forget. Raves Alyssa Henley, Duke Medical Center: "Wow, I was blown away…I feel like this has been a life-altering moment….[The SKS is] building upon a foundation I've been working on for years. How exciting to find others with such similar views."

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The Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation (SKSF) is an 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 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 Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation 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.

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, the syndicated column WorkWise, VAR Business, Success, Selling, as well as numerous local radio and newspaper interviews. Mr. Turak lives in Raleigh.