Blog Details

I first met Jack in 1979 when I entered his class on Religions of India at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

He was gifted at explaining complex topics.  He told us stories of Dipa Ma, Munindra-ji, Ajahn Chah, and Ajahn Buddhadassa showing us why they were loved and regarded as great meditation masters. When students asked him questions, he responded to the human being underneath the question.

I was riveted, sitting on the edge of my chair, soaking up what he was saying, letting my worldview re-organize itself around what I was hearing and what he was modeling. After a week of being in that class, I knew that spiritual life would be the cornerstone of my world. After a month, I had a vision of being a nun and ended up spending 28 years living as a monastic.  I had never known anyone with Jack’s combination of brilliance, humility, wisdom, and kindness. It didn’t matter if I could verify in my own direct experience much of what he talked about. I wanted to be like him.

On March 12, 2023, Jack passed away peacefully with his immediate family at his side. Jack radically shifted the course of my life. I know this is true for many others. I take this time to honor him and celebrate his life.

Jack was a renowned meditation teacher and clinical psychologist. He is known for studying the self from both psychological and Buddhist perspectives and creating a bridge between psychoanalysis and Theravada Buddhist practice. The groundbreaking book, Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, co-authored with Ken Wilber and Dan Brown, affirmed the importance of both psychological development and profound spiritual insights. Jack’s famous line: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody,” distills these truths.

Born in Boston, on June 19, 1939, Jack’s spiritual journey began with his Catholic upbringing. At age 16, he read Thomas Merton’s autobiography as a Trappist monk, The Seven Storey Mountain, kindling Jack’s interest in a life dedicated to contemplation and service. As a student at the University of Notre Dame, he visited Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani, and by the time he graduated, he decided to become a monk. Eventually, he went to Gethsemani, where he practiced under the guidance of Thomas Merton for a brief time.

His academic interests took him back to Europe to pursue graduate work in Munich and England, where he went to Oxford for a doctorate in theology.

It was while he was at the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in clinical psychology, that Jack’s search took a life-changing turn after an unplanned stop at a bookstore. He found a copy of The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, by the Theravada scholar and monk, Nyanaponika Thera. “I got about thirty pages into it,” he recalled, “and I knew that I had found what I had been looking for all my life.”

In 1975, he received a Fulbright scholarship that took him to India to study how the self constellates in a meditation master’s mind. Jack told mesmerizing stories about his experiences spending extended time with Dipa Ma and Munidraji. One of these stories lit me up.

“Munindra-ji was speaking about the textual reference that said you had to be a man to be a Buddha. Dipa Ma was in the back of the room and looked like she was dozing, like she was asleep – but she sat bolt upright and said ‘I can do anything a man can do.’” When I heard this, I was determined to meet her. Nine years later, I did.

When Jack returned to the U.S. from India, he wrote scholarly articles and co-authored books on psychotherapy and meditation, including Transformations of Consciousness, The Consumer’s Guide to Psychotherapy, and was invited by the Dalai Lama join him as a panelist summarized in Worlds in Harmony: Dialogues on Compassionate Action. Returning from India, Jack became a board of director for both the Insight Meditation Society and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, where he served for many years.

Jack’s time in India was transformative. “I had finally seen not only my own suffering but everybody else’s,” he said. He devoted the last 25 years of his career to private practice in Cambridge, MA. He continued with a post-doctoral-studies at the Menninger Foundation where he met his wife, Renee DeYoe. He also taught and supervised psychotherapy in the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

in 1985, Jack came to Insight Meditation Society at the end of the 3-month retreat that I was on. I was excited to share my insights. He looked at me with very loving eyes and said, “Ah yes there are many big and small insights on the path.” It was a very gentle way to help me normalize what was happening and feel more rooted.

Several times I met Jack at his office in Cambridge. When I shared some of my own stories meeting Dipa Ma and experiences of her after she died.  He lit up, “Ma, is always with me.” Hearing Jack describe his love for horses and how alive he felt around them; the communication he shared with them; I could see his love for authentic connection.

He laughed when he recounted how Thomas Merton told him he wasn’t suited to being a monk. Yet, whenever he talked about his family, he beamed with pride, joy and deep satisfaction.

Jack was a magnificent human. He leaves a big empty place in our world. I miss him as I know his family and many of his colleagues, friends, students, and patients do too. And yet, I recognize Jack’s legacy is living. What he clarified, built, taught and the myriad ways he loved, carries on.