A Step Away from Paradise
The True Story of a Tibetan Lama's
Journey to a Land of Immortality
Penguin, 2011
City Lion Press, 2017
Writings & Photography
Into the Hands of the Unknown
an Indian Sojourn with a Harvard Renunciant
Escape Media Publishers, 2003
Pilgrim Publishers, 2006
City Lion Press, 2019
“I THINK YOU SHOULD COME WITH ME TO INDIA”
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Thus begins Into the Hands of the Unknown, which picks up my story as a young man when I happened to sit next to Ed Spencer, a brilliant seventy-year-old ex-Harvard professor, turned wandering holy man, who makes this offer within an hour of our meeting on a Greek ferry.
Though unsure whether the old man is some kind of a bum or a realized being or both, I agree to go with this enigmatic stranger whose credo is, “Take the money out of your pocket and put yourself in the hands of the Unknown.”
When we arrive in Greece and Ed passes the money exchange with hardly a glance, I begin to understand the gulf that separates the old man from the rest of humanity.
The ensuing journey, recounted in the pages of Into the Hands of the Unknown, takes us on an epic trip by foot into the heart of South India and then to the Himalayas where I made my first contact with the Tibetan people.
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Into the Hands of the Unknown has been revised and has a new Postscript describing my subsequent encounters with the Ed Spencer. The book was originally published as Part II of Windblown Clouds.