Buddha At The Gas Pump

I was born on March 24, 1957 in Providence, Rhode Island on a Sunday at 2:40 p.m. My mother said that my birth was easy, with little pain, and that I was “completely grown up,” even as a child. In my youth, I was not prone to easy laughter or the common jokes that circulated among human beings. I lived in a world all by myself, thinking, feeling and being led innocently toward a life of relentless spiritual evolution. It would be many years before my spiritual sadhana, or spiritual practices, would reveal the memory of my inherent oneness with the Divine. My parents did not hesitate to inform me that my destiny was to attend “college,” a word they spoke with joy and enthusiasm, emotions that stood out starkly in my young attention, since those emotions were so deeply absent in almost every other part of my childhood. My mother grew up in a poor household and dropped out of school at a young age. My father was a high school graduate. We struggled as a lower-class Italian-American family in a minorities ghet