Gary Zukav - Life

Life

Zukav spent his early childhood in San Antonio, and Houston, Texas. His family moved to Pittsburg, Kansas, while he was in fourth grade and he graduated from Pittsburg Senior High School as valedictorian in 1960. 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. His father, Morris Louis Zukav, owned a jewelry store and his mother, Lorene Zukav, was a housewife who raised him and his younger sister.

In 1959, he received a scholarship to Harvard and matriculated in 1960. In his junior year he left Harvard to motorcycle in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East before returning the following year. In 1964, he was deeply moved by the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael 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 and enlisted in the U.S. Army. That same year he entered U.S. Army Infantry Officer Candidate School and was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant in 1966. He volunteered for the U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets), completed Parachute Training (Fort Benning, Georgia); U.S. Army Special Warfare School (Fort Bragg, North Carolina), and served as an 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 U.S. Army in 1968 as 1st Lieutenant.

Zukav returned to the U.S. in 1970 and moved to San Francisco, California, that same year. He recounts this period as an emotionally volatile time of sexual addiction, motorcycles, anger, and experimentation with drugs until 1975 when an unexpected introduction to quantum physics at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory initiated changes in his experience that led to his first book, Dancing Wu Li Masters. He later described this book as his "first gift to Life". In 1987 he moved to Mount Shasta, California, where he lived in a cabin as a self-described "secular monk" and spent extensive time in the surrounding wilderness. In 1993 he met Linda Francis. They co-founded the Seat of the Soul Institute in 1998 and moved to Ashland, Oregon, in 2000.