Odyssey Of A Truthseeker

I have been reading about the matter of a woman, a psychology professor from Stanford University in the Bay Area of California, driving across the country to the East Coast - in her case, out of a fear of flying - to make her case on a matter of Truth.  

It all rang a bit of a bell for me.

So come with me, if you will, on an odyssey into the truth of a different matter, of some import.

in my Junior year of my pre-Med studies at Stanford - that university chosen (albeit as well for getting a substantial scholarship to it) for its being considered as ‘the Harvard of the West’ - and in further fact, shortly after having received word of my acceptance into Stanford Medical School starting the following school year, I - in short - had a ‘spiritual experience,’ that caused me to drop out of my formal studies, and think to go ’find the biggest public Library in the Western world,’ to discover what I could about the truth of Christianity in particular and ‘life’ in general.  I returned to my home in Southern California, to face my mother about my dropout decision and figure out my next steps; and as to the latter subject, I got a job in a hospital in L.A. for a short time, to earn some money for whatever my next steps were going to turn out to be.  What they turned out to be was that I found, in the Want Ads of my hometown paper, a chance to drive a woman’s car across the country at least to Chicago (she wanted rather to fly back there; a bit of a ‘wrinkle’ to the above story).  Which I proceeded to do, and from there I caught a bus to Detroit, from where I had heard you could sometimes arrange to drive a car for delivery elsewhere in the country.  I managed to find such a ‘ride,’ to somewhere in Pennsylvania - it was Pittsburg, as I recall (this was sixty-some years ago, now; cut me some slack, here) - and I caught a bus from there on into New York City, my intended destination; having figured that must be the location of said ‘largest public library in the Western world’.

And so it was that I spent the next year of my Seeker’s life living in a cheap hotel room in mid-Manhattan, just off Times Square, near said Main Public Library, and spending many daily - and well into the evening - hours there, reading all I could about things of a roughly ‘spiritual’ nature.1  I started with books on the origins of Christianity (I was looking to read the original texts, that I assumed were in Aramaic; but quickly discovered that that was not the case, that they were in Greek.  Which was a troubling ‘find’ in the first place),2 and quickly found appalling aspects as to that matter.  It turned out - turns out - that (according to scholarly works by in particular German researchers) such ‘god men’ was a common theme of the time, as people tried to make some sense of the likes of the return of life in the Spring, and the perennial ’birth’ of the Sun at the winter Solstice, and so forth, with such ‘outcomes’ as what have been called vegetation gods (Tammuz, etc. etc.).  It was all turning out to be a mess of a story.3  

And at the same time I researched deeper into the origins of ‘civilization’ than my course on Western Civ in my Freshman year at college had gone.  It seems that the earliest civilization was born - almost 'overnight,' historically speaking - in the Middle East, in an area and country called Sumeria.  But why there?  And why were their ‘great gods’ depicted, on their clay tablets, with a star over their heads??4

Questions…which took me into various ‘highways’ and byways, like Spiritualism, and ‘the Perennial Philosophy,’ and the mind-blowing cosmology of Theosophy, and ESP, and even UFOs (the latter of which subjects was beginning to, er, take off at that time).  It all began to turn into mush by the time that Uncle Sam wrote to me letting me know that I needed to give two years of my life to Him.  Which I did, in the form of being - by then - a conscientious objector.  I had found enough during my sojourn in Manhattan to set me off on a lifelong continued search for Truth; knowing - understanding - that I would have to cultivate the quality, and virtue, of Patience.

Which has brought to me to this day.  Late in my life.  

And still a Seeker.  Of Truth. 

And an adamant foe of Untruth.

Wherever it rears its ugly head.

So, Come, boys and girls.   

We can do better than this. 

Just waiting for us.

to get to

that point.

In time.

And Time.

—

footnotes:

1  It started out all day to their closing time, at 10pm in the evenings, until my savings ran out and I had to get a job during my daytime hours.  

   (First I got a job at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, as an Operating Room Orderly, and then, when that was proving to be a downer - it was a cancer hospital, and I got overwhelmed by the grossness of the job, doing things like taking the amputated leg of an old lady down to Pathology, wrapped in paper like a side of (desiccated) beef (what did this approach have to do with an intelligent approach to ‘cancer treatment'???) - I quit and got a job in the Accounts department of a play-publishing company.  Much more to my liking, and actual interest in life.  But that is all another story.)   

2 Meaning, as it did, that scholarly people intruded into the matter, and could have had their own agendas.  Which I was to find out many years later - in fact, very recently - was, indeed, the case.

(See, in particular: ‘Cesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’ by Joseph Atwill.)

3 I of course read in all the religions.  Both the Old Testament and the Koran gave me a ’hard time’.  Much too much violence to my taste.  Something was decidedly wrong - not of the highest - in both instances.  Hinduism seemed rather too fanciful.  Buddhism came the closest to my ‘liking’.  I could relate very well to Prince Gautama’s search. 

   So where o where was my bodhi tree???…

   Edgar Cayce (‘There Is A River’) and reincarnation rang a good, solid bell.  And my birth religion of ‘Mormonism’ was disappearing along with the whole Christian story even before I came across there Fawn Brody’s ‘No Man Knows My History’.  (I was to have an ongoing flirtation with my religion of birth over the years, but I finally finished with it completely during research into its origins in Salt Lake City many years later.)   

4 I was to find the answers to both questions many years later, in the works of Zecharia Sitchin.  But to continue with this story at its time.  (This is the 1955-56 time period.)