"Cliff Isberg" is a story that was born in 1935 and raised in Fairbanks Alaska, then an isolated frontier town that became increasingly dominated by the military and defense construction industries during and after World War II. Now that I am an old man, realizing innumerable influences wrote this story, I am particularly grateful to my extended family, as well as to dharma siblings, friends, colleagues, and neighbors.
I suffered throughout my life from anxiety, loneliness, and insecurity, possibly just growing pains, e.g., seventh grade stories). I became increasingly social in high school but lost close peer relationships during college; in part because, after high school, unattached females were not available in Fairbanks and males became increasingly irrelevant. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Alaska in 1957, I married Ann Maloney, an attractive nurse who worked briefly in Anchorage after receiving her RN. We moved to California's Bay area and thereafter had five wonderful children, Theresa, Peter, Mary, Wes, and Erin; they still live in the Bay area except Peter, who lives in Pennsylvania, and Erin, in Sacramento.
Despite my wonderful family, I was still immature and insecure while working from 1960 through 1970 in Los Gatos, and also completing my Stanford PhD on an IBM fellowship. I worked for IBM's Advanced Systems Development Division, a precursor to Silicon Valley, that did research and development of technologies that could support new business applications centering on computers.
Changing social values in the late 1960s and my painful divorce in 1970 were followed by years of study, psychological experimentation and soul-searching that eventually led me to Zen Buddhism. After leaving IBM in 1970 and after several subsequent failing business ventures I joined SRI International in Menlo Park in 1972, where my professional life was a competitive struggle to promote projects and maintain "sold time".
I married Caroline Bliss in 1982. In addition to helping raise her two daughters, at Caroline's initiative we briefly owned first a Cambridge Diet franchise, and then the Institute for Information Management. After selling the near-bankrupt Institute we moved to our home in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1988. From 1989 until her retirement in 2006 Caroline served as Director for the Cabrillo College Stroke Center in Santa Cruz. We bred three generations of Leonberger dogs, and Caroline subsequently wrote a book about the breed and its genetic influences.
By the time I retired from SRI in 1995 I had led over 50 SRI research and/or consulting projects for corporate clients. Many projects, conducted for major computer manufacturers or international banks, focussed on development of computers technologies and applications in business. I avoided working on defense department sponsored projects that during that period financed the bulk of the research done at SRI. I was a research engineer, consultant, and project leader who did not understand, appreciate or respect the competitive and political aspects of leadership.
In retrospect my intellectual work life, particularly at IBM and Stanford was rich in computer research and development, starting before computer science but after the first commercially produced computers. After retirement I worked on my property and also studied and wrote about Zen Mind and Meditation. I was ordained as a zen monk at Jikoji, a non-profit zen retreat center, in 2010, and received Dharma Transmission in 2015 from my teacher Shoho Michael Newhall, Jikoji's Resident Teacher. Please help support Jikoji
Afterthoughts:
I pray that all beings may be satisfied and live joyfully in freedom and safety; also that those of us who are afflicted and suffering can find meaning, purpose, virtue and even happiness in living through and with our suffering and affliction. Meaning is primary, sometimes taking ones lifetime to discover. Purpose, and practice, dawn slowly but gracefully.
Despite living in the freedom and safety of retirement in these wonderful Santa Cruz mountains for decades now, with sufferings increasing due to old age's afflictions, disabilities, and failing faculties, the prospect of the end, even with its occasional terrors, feels mostly joyful.
Professional Resume from 1960-1995.
Family Roots, from the 1900s.
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