Nothing on My Mind: Berkeley, LSD, Two Zen Masters, and a Life on the Dharma Trail - Softcover

Storlie, Erik Fraser

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1570621837 ISBN 13: 9781570621833

Publisher: Shambhala, 1996

Synopsis

This frank account by a longtime Zen student looks back over a journey that began in Berkeley in the heady sixties when the author experimented with psychedelics and started to study with Suzuki Roshi, who encouraged his students to find a genuine way of practicing Zen.

About this title

About the Author:

Erik Fraser Storlie has been a student of Zen for almost thirty years and was one of the founders of the Minnesota Zen Mediation Center in Minneapolis. He teaches English and humanities at Minneapolis Community College.

From Publishers Weekly:

Author Storlie begins this book of the inner mind seated in the full lotus position. He doesn't get much farther. Recounting a tale that is not quite fiction, not quite fact (he has combined characters and dredged up quotes from 30 years of memories, he tells us in the preface), he leads us through a life spent in the quest of knowledge and bliss-the pursuit of Zen. He starts in Minnesota, journeys out to San Francisco at the peak of Haight-Ashbury and studies under two Zen masters as the years progress, all in an effort to satisfy his thirsty soul. Yet this memoir reads like a Less Than Zero for hippie burnouts. Too much of it is devoted to acid trips, beery nights out in the Bay Area wilderness, a few dabblings with heroin. It dwells on mind games and pointless journeys in the forest, a Walden without a reason for being written. While Storlie says he seeks spiritual attainment, he never tells us why. Cheering him on as his 1960s hippie friends turn his life into an outtake from Trainspotting (complete with a visit while stoned to Timothy Leary), as he struggles to complete an academic degree, any academic degree, and as he marries and divorces, becomes difficult.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Shambhala
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 1570621837
• ISBN 13: 9781570621833
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240