Gary Zukav

Gary Zukav (born October 17, 1942) is an American spiritual teacher and the author of four consecutive New York Times Best Sellers.

His family moved to Pittsburg, Kansas in 1952, while he was in fourth grade.

In 1959, Gary received a scholarship to Harvard and matriculated high school in 1960.

In his junior year at Harvard he left to motorcycle in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East before returning the following year.

In 1960, he graduated from Pittsburg High School as valedictorian.

During that time he became an Eagle Scout, Governor of Kansas Boy's State, President of the Student Council, and Kansas State Debate championship team member twice.

In 1964, he was deeply moved by the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and worked as a summer volunteer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Jackson, Mississippi, under the direction of Charles Evers, brother of the slain Medgar Evers.

In 1965, he graduated from Harvard.

That same year he enlisted in the U.S. Army and entered U.S. Army Infantry Officer Candidate School.

He was made a second lieutenant in 1966.

He volunteered for the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), completed parachute training (Fort Benning, Georgia), and U.S. Army Special Warfare School (Fort Bragg, North Carolina), then served as a detachment executive officer in Okinawa and Vietnam, participating in top secret operations in Vietnam and Laos.

He left Vietnam after the Tet Offensive of January 1968 and was discharged from the army in 1968 as a first lieutenant.

Zukav returned to the U.S. in 1970 and moved to San Francisco, California.

He recounts this period as an emotionally volatile time of sexual addiction, motorcycles, anger and drug-abuse.

This continued until 1975 when his roommate, Jack Sarfatti, took him to visit the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory where Zukav became intrigued by quantum physics.

He began writing his first book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, written with extensive help from Jack Sarfatti and other physicists he met through Sarfatti, as described in David Kaiser's book How the Hippies Saved Physics.

He later described this book as his "first gift to Life".

His first book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), won a U.S. National Book Award.

Gary Zukav was born in Port Arthur, Texas, the elder of two children of Morris Luis "Morey" and Lorene (née Weinberg) Zukav.

His father owned a jewelry store in Pittsburg, Kansas, and his mother was a housewife who raised him and his younger sister.

Gary spent his early childhood in San Antonio and Houston.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed The Dancing Wu Li Masters in The New York Times March 28, 1979.

He called it "a book that manages to explain relativity and a lot more without resorting to a single bit of mathematics (except for asking you to grasp the not-too-onerous concept that the velocity of light, a constant 186,000 miles per second, is a product of its frequency and wavelength). After all, Mr. Zukav writes, 'The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the tool of physics, stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment.'"

The review also acclaimed Zukav as "one of those rare gifted teachers who makes you feel as if you're ahead of the lesson, jumping happily to conclusions he hasn't yet seen (though of course he has). And when he does arrive at those conclusions, he often states them in the words of their original discoverers, which suddenly seem as simple as 'Pat the Bunny' and flatter you into thinking you could have understood them in their original context on your own. The drama built into Mr. Zukav's presentation is considerable. It begins with his introduction of an Oriental dimension. The Chinese name for 'physics', 'wu li', also means (depending upon how it is pronounced) 'patterns of organic energy', 'my way', 'nonsense', 'I clutch my ideas' and 'enlightenment'. These six meanings, not only become the title of the book's six sections – for instance, 'Nonsense' is the heading of the one on Einstein's ideas, which is divided into chapters called 'Beginner's Mind', 'Special Nonsense', and 'General Nonsense' – they also serve to shape the leitmotif of Mr. Zukav's discussion that relates modern physics to Oriental religion."

Dancing Wu Li Masters was also reviewed by the scientific community.

Robert H. March, Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in Physics Today in August 1979, "Dealing with general relativity [Zukav] manages to convey the profound mental shift required to reduce physics to geometry. This is a neat trick, considering that he addresses an audience familiar with neither physics nor non-Euclidian geometry."

Martin Gardner, mathematician and science writer for Scientific American, wrote in a book review: "Zukav is such a skillful expositor, with such an amiable style, that it is hard to imagine a layman who would not find this book enjoyable and informative."

David Bohm, renowned quantum physicist, wrote a personal endorsement provided to the book's publisher Harper Collins: "Recommended highly for those who want to understand the essential significance of modern physics, and for those who are concerned with its implications for possible transformation of human consciousness."

In 1987 he moved to Mount Shasta, California, where he lived in a cabin as a self-described "secular monk" and spent time in the surrounding wilderness.

Zukav's next book, The Seat of the Soul, published in 1989, was a No. 1 New York Times Best Seller for 31 weeks and remained on the list for three years.

In an interview by Jeffrey Mishlove, for the popular Public Television series Thinking Allowed, Zukav summarized the concepts presented in The Seat of the Soul.

My objective was not to make the soul legitimate in terms of science.

The soul is legitimate, period.

It doesn't need validation.

At least that was my perception and so I wrote The Seat of the Soul to share the things that were most important to me.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters was designed to open the mind and The Seat of the Soul, is a book designed to open the heart.

And this is often the sequence that many people encounter as they move into an expanded awareness of who they are and why they are here.

In 1993 he met and later married Linda Francis.

Beginning in 1998, he appeared more than 30 times on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss transformation in human consciousness concepts presented in his book The Seat of the Soul.

They co-founded the Seat of the Soul Institute in 1998 and moved to Ashland, Oregon, in 2000.