At eight years I received an electronics experimenter's kit which included transistors. By my early teens, which was in the 1960's, I built a single-ended tube amplifier, followed by a sterio single-ended tube amplifier. These were followed by a number of pushpull tube and transistor amplifiers. I used various home-built speakers with these amplifiers, employing both alnico magnets and electromagnets. I became self-taught in the basic principles of the art of electronics.
My introduction to conceptual beauty seemed to arrive with the study of mathematics and physics, although I had always liked things like watching a butterfly unfold its wings for the first time. I was awarded the Governor General's Bronze Medal in 1973 after writing scholarship examinations in physics and mathematics. After completing a university degree in physics, I worked in ocean physics and in traffic volume studies, where I developed innovative techniques of digital filtering. After that, I worked as an assistant Medical Physicist at a community hospital. In addition to medical physics, I also was system manager and network manager of a prototype medical imaging communications system that was advanced technology at the time, but has since been eclipsed by the Internet.
In 1991, I took a six month trip to the South Pacific, visiting Fiji, New Zealand, Australia and Tahiti. I met a friend in Perth, Western Australia, and we bought a van and went touring. We travelled in the outback from the Indian Ocean, across the Northern Territory, and through Queensland. We camped everywhere, and hiked and swam in beautiful waterholes, a couple of times with crocodiles. During this time of living without the stresses of modern life, I experienced a steady and noticable healing of my nervous system, including my brain. I got to the point where I became unaware of the physical presence of my brain. This was akin to initially having a painful injury, and eventually healing so that attention is no longer paid to the once injured part.
One day, after about three months of a steady diet of red dust, I surveyed the landscape of spinefex, termite mounds, red earth and red hills. As I did this, I experienced the sensation that I no longer existed as a physical entity, but only as a spirit. I sensed that I had become something akin to a breath of wind, existing silently upon the landscape. A friend later referred to this experience as "having the consciousness of the dingo". This was my closest experience to the Buddha state of mind, which could also be characterised as being "fully healed". I had achieved a mental state that is pretty rare in Western culture, that is, the ability to see even a small part of reality. As the days slowly rolled by in the outback, I lost all interest in doing work that was lacking in inspiration and creativity. My exposure to beauty, for an extended period of time, greatly increased my appreciation for beauty. As time passed, my priorities merged with the concept of following the good but often hard path in life.
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