Gary Zukav (born October 17, 1942) is an American spiritual teacher and the author of four consecutive New York Times Best Sellers. 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. His first book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979), won a U.S. National Book Award.
Life
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. His family moved to Pittsburg, Kansas in 1952, while he was in fourth grade. 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 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 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". 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. In 1993 he met and later married Linda Francis. They co-founded the Seat of the Soul Institute in 1998 and moved to Ashland, Oregon, in 2000.
Writing career
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."