This is the first of a set of posts about my life and how PeopleCount came to be.

There are many different ways to thinking of oneself. In this one, I’ll tell about the background of the first 30 years that led me to take the course which later prompted the creation of PeopleCount. In the next one, I’ll cover the next 20 years, up to the time I took that course. The third will be about what happened next, the situation in which I created PeopleCount.org.

The beginning

When I was a kid, I felt unwanted. My best guess is that it started when I was four. I was the younger of two boys and the unthinkable happened. My mother gave birth to a younger brother! I don’t remember, but I’ll bet one day she was busy with him and I decided I wasn’t wanted.

My earliest memories are of preschool. There, and in elementary school, I lived atop a secret embarrassment. I didn’t know what it was or why. I watched other kids, but it was too painful. I wanted to play with them, but couldn’t. So I paid attention to what was being taught. It was easy and I did well. It was so easy, I always finished the homework during class, and had plenty of time to think. So I grew up thinking and got good grades.

High school and college

I began to have friends in 9th grade and finally became a bit social in 11th. I finally had a real friend, real conversations, in 12th when a precocious girl took a liking to me. Still, socializing was difficult. My brain would go blank around anyone I wasn’t close with.

I went to the University of Washington for two years, but felt like I didn’t fit in. A friend from high school spoke well of Stanford. So I transferred.

Stanford was better. I met more interesting and open people.In conversations I became aware of my difficulty in socializing as a problem that should be fixed. But I didn’t know how. I had difficulty finding a major. During a year off, a friend told me about a major in applied math that I could finish. During that, I stumbled into a masters program in the new field of computer science. I applied and was accepted.

In the working world, overcoming shyness in a course

Two years after college, in 1984, a guy at work told me about an amazing course which could help people improve their lives. It was called The Forum.

I took it mainly to get over my shyness. It was fascinating. We looked at how we put together our worldview as children, and how that view warps how life appears. I saw that I was afraid of rejection, so I was afraid of interacting with people. When the fear hit, I froze and had nothing to say- a typical fight/flight/freeze reaction. Seeing that it was all due to my view, and not a strange substance called “shyness”, and that there was no real danger, my mind was no longer so paralyzed. I saw new ways of talking with people and began practicing not being shy.

It wasn’t till the next course that it fully hit me that all through my childhood I felt I wasn’t wanted! I sifted through my experience and my thoughts about myself and saw how completely the “not wanted” view had warped my life. I began to see it as a fiction that I could overcome, rather than just “how I was” that could not be altered.

The notion of being unwanted kept me apart from other kids while I was growing up, so I was lonely. I saw how that was still effecting me. For instance, when I was interacting with a girlfriend, things were fine. But after a few minutes of being apart, I was lonely! Before the courses, I thought that meant she wasn’t enough for me, she wasn’t the right one. After, I realized it was just a feeling that came over me out of habit, and didn’t mean anything about the woman.

One of things I learned in the Forum was the difference between “what happened” and “what it meant to me.” For instance, the feelings of loneliness had meant “she’s not the one”, or “I’m not wanted.” They also had meant, “I’m miserable.” Knowing the difference, I could see the feelings really just meant that I was having feelings. With this insight, I saw I had dated some women who would have been good to marry, but the mindset had made marriage impossible.

Siddha Yoga

Around the same time, a friend introduced me to Siddha Yoga. In Hatha Yoga they do stretching. In Siddha Yoga there was chanting, meditation and talks. The talks were okay, but the chanting seemed to do little for me and I wasn’t meditating much. Then I signed up for their correspondence course, It consisted of ninety six 10-page lessons about attachment, ego and self. My part was to read 2 lessons over and over each week for 4 years.

I read a few pages a day and was often sent into a meditative reverie. It was weird, and the material was fascinating. Over the 4 years of the course, I achieved enlightenment, the realization that identity is artificial and malleable. It was an even stronger lesson that “the way life is” is an illusion. And firm grounding in not taking “myself” seriously.

In the next article, I’ll cover the next 20 years, still background to creating PeopleCount.