With this release of the Down the Rabbit Hole – Quantum Edition the final installment of What the BLEEP is complete. For this celebration issue, Herald editor Cate Montana asked me to look back and tell the story of how it all came to be.

There were many steps along the way, that’s for sure. First there was an early interest in movie-making, which occupied me and my friends through high school and college. College was full of physics and math (and rock n’ roll). Post-college was spent delving into metaphysics and eventually finding a spiritual teacher and studying meditation and the mystical arts.

This lead to the first major bump in the road that was to become What the BLEEP. My teacher, Rama (a.k.a. Frederick Lenz), encouraged his metaphysical students to train in computer science as a means of strengthening mental clarity and focus. I did, which eventually lead me to the task of writing software, and then to building a company around that. My meditation practices were if-ee, but software I could write! The System Management product called AutoSys I sold off to Platinum technology in 1995 for millions. They, in turn, got bought by Computer Associates some years later.

It turned out I sold the goose that laid the golden egg. By now AutoSys has generated close to a billion dollars in revenue, of which I saw a small, small fractional sliver. After two years of watching the grass grow and stewing over my previous business decision, I decided to start another company, this time writing a product based on AutoSys.

Meanwhile, a friend had written a play about a Tibetan Rimpoche coming to America, and I was helping produce it off-Broadway in New York City. I flew out to NY for the opening, as well as to meet potential customers and get a sense of their interest for my new software product. The opening went well, the play “ Tibet does Not Exist” was well received, and all in all it was a very neat experience.

The next morning I woke up and heard that Ted Turner had just decided to donate one billion dollars to the UN. I had a one o’clock meeting with Merrill Lynch at the World Financial Center, and decided I would walk from my hotel in Soho to the meeting. As I walked I started thinking. It was great that Ted was doing this, but I felt that fundamentally it wouldn’t do a whole lot of good to pour money into the existing power structures. What was needed was a different worldview, a different approach altogether, and it didn’t seem to me that it would come from the current business/political sector. Rather it would come from a spiritual perspective that was inclusive of the “new thought” and different from the current mindset of society.