My memoir begins with the story of my Olympic experience in Tokyo in 1964. I won my race, the 400 Individual Medley (in swimming), after refusing emergency surgery for an appendix attack—that refusal and victory gained me world-wide recognition. I grew up living an American Dream childhood and young adulthood on the San Francisco Peninsula, attending Stanford on a swimming scholarship—everything that could go right did. But after finding few lasting rewards in that life, I became involved in the hippie movement of the 1960’s, taking LSD and smoking cannabis like everyone else. To get away from the drug scene, I moved to a small isolated cabin near Jackson, Wyoming in 1967 where I started getting serious about a 'spiritual life’. As a result, I ended up joining a drug-free hippie commune at the end of the Sixties in Santa Barbara, CA. My memoir describes the communal style of life at the time with its ups and downs. When our commune bought a half-million acre cattle ranch in northeastern Nevada, I moved there, and, after a couple of years, became the Ranch Manager. The book elucidates my ten-year long cowboy life on the ‘big outfit’, an unusual and fascinating story in itself. The memoir concludes with the ultimate emptiness and fulfillment of my lifelong pursuit of self-realization.