Steve and I met when we were freshmen at
college
Steve was a in the same dormitory as
another guy I met. He said: Oh, you
should come to my dormitory and meet
this guy Steve, he's interesting. I had
found this book "Be here now" at the
bookstore and it was a spiritual book of
a type I had never seen before in my
life.
So I was carrying it around and I must
have run into Steve and he was
interested in it also
and that was the beginning of
our friendship.
What was the most interesting aspect of this book that
connected you both? 
Because it
was about this spiritual teacher Neem
Karoli Baba, that was the first of many
books that we read. The next one was
"Autobiography of a yogi" which is also
fascinating. And then the one after that
was "Ramakrishna and his disciples".
"Be here now" is the book that brought you to India, right?
It was the book that sparked our interest in Hindu
spirituality. 
And then over that year we found out
that Robert Friedland, who was the student body president for Reed College,
he had been to the same place that was
in the book. He was a devotee also of
Neem Karoli and when he told us we
should go to India, that was kind of the
seed of the idea.
