EP#253 Not Less Than Everything One Mans Search For Spiritual Enlightenment

Revealing his new book Not Less Than Everything: One Man’s Quest for Spiritual Enlightenment, published by Clovercroft Published September 26, 2023), August Turak reveals his stories as a member of the original team that launched MTV: Music Television and a successful hi-tech entrepreneur, Turak had what most people consider to be "the life." But he was not happy. This is the inspirational true story of how Turak overcame crippling depression and despair through a daring quest for life’s ultimate meaning and purpose -- a search for transcendence.  

Although his stories are wildly entertaining and often comical, Turak wishes to address the individual and collective absence of higher meaning and purpose afflicting Western civilization. He hopes this book acts, in some small way, as an antidote to that.

AUGUST TURAK is a successful corporate executive, entrepreneur, award-winning author, speaker, and consultant. He is the founder of the educational nonprofit the Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation. Turak has lived and worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey as a frequent monastic guest since 1996.

As a troubled young college student in 1971, Turak was seized by the idea that the mystical experience that various religious traditions call Enlightenment, Satori, Nirvana, Samadhi, the Unio Mystica, or Cosmic Consciousness not only exists but might be attainable by him. 

This sparked a life-altering quest, as Turak became the first student of a rough-hewn, hillbilly Zen master; the protégé of the founder of the IBM Executive School; the client of a mystical psychologist doing government-funded research with LSD; a member of the original team that launched MTV: Music Television; a successful hi-tech entrepreneur and even a longtime, part-time Trappist monk. This same spiritual roller coaster dropped him off twenty-five years later in a tiny room of a rundown motel in Baltimore, Maryland, deeply depressed, fearing for his sanity, and with nowhere to turn. Or, so it seemed. 

After a corporate career with companies like MTV, Turak founded two highly successful software businesses. He has published many popular leadership articles for Forbes and featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Selling Magazine, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek.

His book, Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks, uses 1000 years of Trappist business success and his own entrepreneurial experience to demonstrate that the monks are not successful businessmen despite adhering to only the highest ethical values, but because they do. 

Turak's inspirational true story, Brother John: A Monk, a Pilgrim, and the Purpose of Life, combines his $100,000 Templeton Prize-winning story with original oil paintings from award-winning artist Glenn Harrington. 

August Turak lives on a seventy-five-acre cattle farm outside Raleigh, NC. For more information, visit: www.AugustTurak.com.