Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
WIZARD: I'm curious as to what authors, or mentors, or folks of
radical understanding that influenced you to take that deeper look
inside.
RICHARD YOUNG: Well, I'm glad you asked that questions,
John, because the first book that I recall I really mark this book as
the end of my religious journey and the beginning of spiritual
journey. And it was a book I picked up one day in a bookstore by
Thomas Merton; it was called No Man Is an Island. And I looked
through the bio a little bit, and this guy was a Catholic Monk, and
here I was a very conservative Protestant boy. So that was a leap
right there for me to even consider reading a book by somebody
who wasn't in the approved reading list of my tradition. And that
book lit me up, I don't know, I couldn't even tell you what it was
about that, but of course Merton was a mystic, and very aware of
the inner landscape, and it came through in his writing.
And as I read that book, and became just curious and then it
progressed to on fire to know more about what this man was
pointing at. I basically went through and bought every book he
ever wrote, and that was I read his entire corpus one summer, that
was no small feat, let me tell you, because he wrote something like
60 books. But as I was reading through Merton I came to trust
him as a teacher and as a mentor figure. And so when he started
talking about Eastern traditions, because towards the end of his
life he became interested in Buddhism and other Eastern
traditions, then it gave me the permission to become interested in
those traditions.
So the next author that really had profound effect on me was Alan
Watts, and I started reading everything I could get my hands on
with Watts, because he was more or less contemporary with
Merton, and Merton mentions him in a couple of different places.
So then I read Watts, and that put me even closer to being in the
Eastern tradition. And so then I picked up DT Suzuki, and some
of the other authors in that tradition, and started reading a lot
about Zen Buddhism. And that just I think opened me up even
more and introduced me to the idea of meditation and other
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