The Countdown V - The Latest Years (Minus a Few)

My Life and Times
V - The Latest Years
(Minus a Few)


The ‘70s began relatively quiet, for me and the world. Well; from an American’s perspective. There was the Viertnam War still going on, and anti-war protestors still off the front pages, doing their occasional thing on the periphery of events, the big ship of life’s smooth cutting through the waves; but Nixon had come into office with the intention - he said, and which was part of his being elected - to start closing it down, so he was being given the benefit of the doubt. At the beginning. Which was largely why things got so noisy later on. (Child to its parent: ‘You said!” “C'mon. We had to bomb the Cambodian sanctuary.” “But you said!” “Oh, grow up.” “Okay. Dig this, then: Fuck you and the war you rode in on. I ain’t marching anymore.”)

I hear you asking: What did I think of the Vietnam War.

Actually, I was of two minds about it. Space-time mind and time-space mind, as it were. On one side of the matter, from a purely political perspective, I saw the reasoning behind it. America was part of SEATO - the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, created through the auspices of the UN to counter moves by the Soviet Union to support communist revolution in that part of the world. (Same as NATO in its.) It wasn’t a popular position with liberals/leftwingers, but they seemed to be rather naive about communist intentions. To them, it appeared, Mao Tse-Tung was just “an agrarian reformer” ; and the same with Castro. (When he came out later - after his success - and admitted, nay, crowed, that he was in fact a big-c Communist: dead silence from the liberal press. What do you say now, New York Times? Hello? Hello??) I had begun waking up to the fact that a large part of the Left really did want a communist success in the world. I didn’t. I detested totalitarianism, from whichever side of the political aisle. It took away Man’s free will, invested decision-making in the hands of the state. (Which was totally contrary to the whole point of the exercise.) Thanks, no thanks.

On the other hand, I was against war, period. It was part of our childhood, as a race of beings; acting out kindergarten playground stuff. It was time to grow up. So: what to do. Given the moment in time that we were at - with things having gone too far to avert, and apply the principle of prevention - I supported it in principle. Even to the point where, at a particularly bad time in the affair, from a South Vietnam/SEATO nations point of view, and the clamor from the anti-war movement growing louder stateside (with some uncomfortable links with the Vietcong involved there; and even with their controllers, the North Vietnamese. Hi Jane! Over here! To your right!), I volunteered to go over as a non-combatant medic.1

It was around this time that I began finding out, via such authors as Antony Sutton (great research) and publications as the John Birch Society’s, about the appalling treason going on by the ‘capitalists’ (New World Orders, actually; roping in simple free-enterprise capitalists as accessories to the fact; and thereby proving Lenin’s dictum about them and the selling of ropes) who were selling the wherewithal to the Soviet Union to wage war by proxy on its own troops. What a grotesque state of affairs this was turning out to be, at its heart. (Truly, the Heart of Darkness.)2

And then there was the slow leaking of the truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident; a set-up in order to make war...there was, in short, something decidedly wrong with - nay; monstrous about - this picture. I made a strong mental note of it, for the future. If I was ever in a position to have anything to say about such matters. To do, about such matters.

All in good time. To say: in God’s time.

***

During this time the middle of my nephews died. it was heartbreaking. The parents (my former sister-in-law had remarried by this time) had gone out for the evening, and the older kids - my eldest nephew and his three new half-brothers; plus my two nieces, and the baby (named after his father/my brother, and me) - were otherwise occupied when litle Rustin, apparently wanting to be like his older brothers, went into a tunnel they had manufactured in the backyard out of wood and cardboard. It was off-limits to him normally, since he was ‘too young’. Quite a pull, for a little kid...They had a candle in there, to see by, and apparently...

Sad stuff. Sad, sad stuff. As I say, it was heartbreaking, for us all.

***


And then the government came back into the picture again, to bite me in the bum, and cause me to pay closer attention to what all was going on, in my/our world, slowly, slowly...It was a pincer movement. On the one hand, the federal government was up to its old tricks again - actually, just continuing; taking its time, was all - with renewed efforts to control the public’s access to alternative health products (this time it was vitamin E in the news, targeted for dosage control; so that people couldn’t access it for therapeutic purposes, would have to go through their pharmaceutical front-men, the allopathic medical profession, whose education hardly covered the likes of nutrition, so they weren’t even trained to use the competition’s products); and on the other, there were new health and safety regulations for businesses being handed down by a new federal agency called OSHA, for Occupational Safety and Health Administration. By then I had worked my way up - nothing really to do with me; more like having been worked up - from ‘the back room’ in a small furniture manufacturing company, receiving and distributing the fabrics for a line of home and office furniture, to Assistant Manager; and it was falling to me to implement new federal regulations on ‘health and safety’ being imposed on all manner of businesses.

No matter that that was properly the business of (a) any unions involved, and/or (b) state regulations regarding same, to my simplistic, American, constitutional-republic way of thinking.3

I saw red. To say, as well, Red.

As in socialism, and its Big Brother. As in so organizing things that the capitalist and the socialist systems could be merged, in the very words of the head at one point of the Ford Foundation; one of many such persons put into their positions of power by the likes of the CFR, and its controlling clique, of New World Order advocates of global government.

Global government their way.

No way.

That was the way of people control. Government from the top down, of the pyramid. And it could be called either socialism, or fascism; but it was the same thing:

Totalitarianism.

What the U.S. and its allies had fought a war against.

So I quit.

And didn’t just quit.

I made a statement.

Letting the Oakland Herald Tribune know ahead of time what I was going to do (by then I had become one of the regulars on their Letters column; on all manner of subjects dear to my heart), I went one Saturday morning (a holy day, in some religions) to what the phone book had said was the local office of the FDA - the administrator-to-be of the new, proposed more draconian regulations on alternative health products - to throw a brick through its window, in protest.

In the event, (a) I was greeted by some policemen, and (b) was informed by them that the FDA had moved, and I should too, son; on.

So I did. I moved on to what I somehow found out was their updated location; and did my good deed for the day there.4

And got arrested for it. (Which I was already for; having cleaned up my flat and moved out, carrying just a few possessions in my small hip bag.)5 And spent the night in jail over in San Francisco for my pains. And was prevented from having my day in court by being released the next day.

So there.


***

After subsequently spending a short whiie living with my former sister-in-law and her new extended family (it does pay to have ‘family’, I can well attest to), and earning my keep there by becoming a Fuller Brush Man (in Oakland and then further east in Dublin, where she and her new husband were living by then with their two broods), I got a chance letter from a former acquaintance in Hollywood (yes, there it was again, on my timeline; was this going to be IT??), who invited me to join him in trying to get some film properties off the ground. He had known that I had been working on a screenplay whllst living in the area those some years before, and had some ideas of his own; could we collaborate?

We could try. Which we did. And though we got nowhere with our mutual ideas,6 it got me back in my old stamping grounds, of Southern California, where I felt most at home. And enjoyed the vibe for a few years - and the continued lifelong habit of reading - until I got called elsewhere. Which came about by my finally getting around to reading a book that I had bought some years previously, and never gotten around to getting into; for whatever reason, having to do with this funny thing we call ‘chance’, or ‘timing’.

The book was entitled ‘The Secret Life of Plants’ (is; although it is undoubtedly out of print by now. But well worth a look), by a couple of Brits who compiled some very intriguing stories about plant life, and energies connected with that realm. I think this was the first public introduction of Cleve Backster’s work to the world (“a polygraph expert best known for his controversial experiments with biocommunication in plant and animal cells”, I see that Google and Wikipedia let us know. A great tool, this, for communication. Well done, folks. It allows mankind a next step). But what interested me most in it was the information, in the last chapter, about a community in the north of Scotland where they ‘talked with their plants’ - that the founders called and primarily designated as a spiritual community, but with their roots deeply embedded in nature.

I sat up, as it were. Tell me more.

‘The universe’ did just that only a few short weeks later, when, on one of my regular haunts of the Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard (and maybe that was all that the Hollywood ‘connection’ in my lifeline was all about, I had begun to consider), I came across the hard copy of a book just out called ‘The Magic of Findhorn’. It was by a young American who had lived at this very community for some months, and wrote of his experiences, and of the founders, and their philosophy. (Paul Hawken - who has gone on to great environmental things - was his name; Peter and Eileen Caddy - an English couple -and their Canadian friend, Dorothy MacLean, and another young American, David Spangler, were theirs. With a character - who reportedly made contact with nature spirits - named ROC, for R. Ogillvie Crombie, thrown in for good measure. And why not.)

This was worth paying attention to.

A bit of background is appropriate at this point. When I had come back to the States from my service stint in Korea, lo those nearly twenty years previously (17, in actual fact; this was now late ‘75), I knew two things: (1) I had to develop my inner listening; to try to recapture that transformative moment back at college that had launched me on my life path, and hopefully could see me through the journey; and (2) I had to connect with some like-minded people, to try to keep sane and supported, through all the potential vicissitudes of the life experience. To the latter end, I began researching communities in the States - or anywhere, for that matter. The closest I was able to come to any sense of compatability in my search was a community in India, called Auroville; and in point of fact had recently joined the East-West Society in L.A. to look into it further. It was close enough of a ‘fit’ (I was impressed with the teachings/writings both of its founder, an East - to my American orientation - Indian educated in the West named Sri Aurobindo, and his main chela, a Frenchwoman known by then as The Mother) that I started planning to visit it, with the possibility of staying on, when a family matter came up, and I had to release the idea.7

And now here was something that spoke to me. On that note: I read in Hawken’s book that Eileen had had published a book called ‘God Spoke To Me’. I didn’t know about that sort of thing, but I was willing to look into it. (It was, after all, close to what I had experienced, in my mind-opening.)8 Just as the book talked about ROC’s purported connection with nature spirits. And Dorothy’s connection with what she called the Devas. It was all Greek to me. But the spirit of what they were about, I could understand, relate to.

And then ‘coincidence’ kicked in again, when Peter and Eileen were quite soon going to be on tour through Southern California, on their way to Australia, and would be speaking at a big week-long New Age event in Santa Monica.

To which I came. I saw. They conquered.

Within a few short weeks I had made the transition to life in the north of Scotland.

It was nice, actually, to get back to living in seasons. The real thing. I felt I had been out of my element for years, of searching.

And now I was home.

***


‘Home’ consisted of an international community of about 150 members, of all ages, and actually all religious beliefs (or at least a number of them, at any given time); but with a common denominator of wanting to live in harmony with the Earth, and create a better world.

And there was that theme again, for me. As strong in the later stages of my lifeline as the theme to the Dragnet TV show of my earlier days. Dum da-dum dum. Curiously satisfying. Says it all, actually.

And - guess what: Eileen’s daily guidance (which the community, and the founders’s spiritual lives together, was built on) as well refers to “the building of a city”.

And not just any old city.

But a City of Light.

And a “vast” City of Light at that.

Which could - get this - also refer to a virtual city. An aspect of ‘light’ not uncovered, or understood yet, at the time of her - and my - intuitive flashes.

To say: a virtual city, as on the Internet.

A ‘city’ of likeminded souls.

Of which you are all potentially a part.

Join the club.



P.S. Oh. Almost forgot. My ‘spiritual experience’, that kicked off this whole thing, in its active phase. (But all in good timing...)

During the winter of ‘54-’55, at the end of the first quarter of my Junior year at Stanford, I applied for and received acceptance into its Medical School, starting in the following school year. (I was in an accelerated program, getting all my pre-med requirements in by the end of my Junior year, thus saving a year in my education.) That major goal accomplished, I relaxed a little in my studies, and, strictly for my own enjoyment, instead of all my study time taken up with my pre-med prerequisites, took a short-story writing course the next quarter. What started out, at one point, as a short-story exercise, began to take on a life of its own; and I took my ballooning Novella, Actually to my instructor - a professional short-story writer in her own right - and asked her to tell me what she thought of it: should I rein back on this piece of inspiration (no qualitative judgment intended; just the facts, ma’am) and return to the specific purpose of the course? She kindly read it, and returned it to me with a notation that said, in effect: Go for it.

So I did. To the point where I began cutting Embryology Lab classes to work on it. In my little airless basement cubicle in my men’s dorm (Stern Hall, it was named. Not sure if it’s still there or not. It certainly suited me fine, in my day and age there);9 which began filling dangerously up with the smoke of the too-many cigarettes that I began consuming, in my feverish Creative phase. (The cigarette smoking having started innocently enough by my carrying a pack potentially chivalrously for the occasional dates I managed in my Serious Study phase of life at university, and one thing leading to another. Not, fortunately or not, to Sexual Encounters of the Torrid Kind; meaning, rather, of the beginning of a hated habit , that I only managed to kick many years laler. But that’s another story. Part of.

See - I can control my urges. Insert smiley face here, for the little joke, based on a fotnote leading up to this moment on the main body of this text.

If you’re leaving them out, you don’t know what you’re missing. Well. Duh.)

One night I was restless. The writing wasn’t going well; whatever. I would get up and walk around a bit, swinging my arms, and then try to get back to it. No use. (I won’t go into the plot; it’s not germane to this memoir, except to say that it was about a young doctor who was going through a life-changing experience, without even totally knowing it. Life imitating art, and vice versa, and all that.) So I decided to go out for a walk, get settled down, come back to it fresh.

This was February of the year, as I recall, so it was chilly enough for me to put on my windbreaker, but not uncomfortable. I found myself walking towards the amphitheater on campus, or to say off to one side of the main campus. It would be dark in there - this was about 10:30 at night or so, and it was not a lighted space - but I knew it generally enough to make my way inside. I was needing space, and silence, and nature; that would serve me well...In I went, through the screen of trees - it was totally surrunded by them - and later I was to realize that the feeling was that I was entering into another reality. The lights of the campus buildings disappeared; any movement, of cars or students on their way back to their living quarters, ceased, and I found myself in total silence. I couldn’t see anything, either, until my eyes adjusted; but I could sense about where I was, and sat down on a grassy step, about halfway down to the stage area (the Stanford Amphitheater can hold, I would say, between 7 and 10,000 people; it was/is good-sized).

Silence.

What was I doing here. What was going on. - What was I doing here; as in life??

I looked around, into the total darkness around me (later in life I was to realize that it was like being in a sensory deprivation chamber), and then up, at the sky. And it was bowled-overingly lit up. Wall-to-wall stars; not a cloud. No moon. Nothing, but me and the universe.

And then three things happened to me. The first was that I remember thinking, at that moment: Gee.10 How small and insignificant we are, in the grand scheme of things. (To me, at that moment, it was like being at the bottom of a deep well, cut off from anything remotely resembling life.) The second was that I had some sort of existential crisis thingy. It felt as though something very large from this vastness of space came whooshing at and into me (when I have described this experience these years later to select others, my hands almost involuntarily show ‘it’ as coming into my heart chakra area, and landing with a ‘whoomf’), that knocked me onto my back, spreadeagled on the earth, and starting to sob uncontrollably, from the energy I felt coursing through my entire body. (Maybe it was just the chakra system, I subsequently learned about; and maybe it was something like ‘the kundalini rising’. I wouldn’t know. It hadn’t happened to me before; it hasn‘t happened to me since. Fair dues. Once was enough.)

I don’t know how long I was like that. I would guess about a quarter of an hour. And then ‘it’ passed; and I sat back up, and my pre-med, science-minded brain kicked back in, and I remember thinking immediately, very rationally, and systematically: Okay. Now what was that all about??

As if in reply; the third thing happened to me. It was as though I felt - perceived somehow - a voice, telling me, gently but clearly, that: The universe has purpose, and that purpose is Good.

Ri-i-ight...

Walking back to my dorm, I recall thinking, gently but clearly, that everything had changed; my game plan, as much as I actually had any, was out the window; and I needed to go find capital-T Truth. And my rational brain then said to me: Right. So where’s the largest library in the western world??

Up ‘til then in my life, that was how I had discovered - one discovers - things. Books were where it would all be.

I would find later on that that was not actually true.

Some things you found out from the inside.

Like my ‘spiritual experience’.

But it was all still a search. A process.

Nobody promised us a rose garden.,


P.P.S. Just to mention a curious thing about my instructor’s ‘authorization’ to bend the rules of the course, and its aftermath. When I had decided to leave school and go pursuing windmills, I dropped her a note, telling her of my decision, and thanking her for her role in my getting in touch with what I felt were important parts of myself. Her response was to leave me a simple statement; to wit: “And now your work begins.”

As the psychoanalyst thought after exchanging the pleasantries of the day - what would have seemed the pleasantries of the day to any bystander - with another psychoanalyst: I wonder what she meant by that?...To say, in this context - the context of my particular life: What all she meant by that??

(This is an allusion as well to other incidents in my life, leading up to that time. But all in good time.)



The End...and
the Beginning




Duane ‘Stan’ Stanfield has lived in the Findhorn Foundation community, off and on, since the beginning of ‘76. (That’s 1976. Some folks around here may differ.) He returned to the States in the fall of 1981 to work for an NGO called Planetary Citizens, which had become the secretariat for an international educational and activist project called The Planetary Initiative (the full monty: The Planetary Initiative For the World We Choose), which in turn in some respects was the kick-start of the environmental movement.11 The idea was to help individuals ground in their own communities the recently-mooted theme of ‘Thinking Globally - Acting Locally’. They were linked to each other (in those pre-, just-beginning computer days) through a newspaper that Planetary Citizens developed, called The Initiator. Ultimately the project culminated in an international People’s Congress held in the summer of 1983 in Toronto, addressed by such New Age luminaries as Ram Dass.

Stan had returned to the Findhorn community by then, where he continued to be involved mostly in their educational activities. He left again in early ‘94 to explore a relationship with an Australian citizen - originally Sri Lankan - where they lived in a suburb of Sydney, called Palm Beach. That phase of his life continued until the fall of 2001, when he felt drawn to return to the community, to get back to his primary work; which was, and continues to be - altogether now: to help bring about a better world.

Dum da-dum dum.

Not so incidentally: Some strong-feelinged Christians (I hesitate to call them fundamentalist, because that is a term that some of them don’t identify with, for its negative connotations; they feel quite normal, thank you very much) had made out Planetary Citizens to have been ‘in league with the devil’.12 Not true. Unless you believe that knowledge is of the devil, and want to keep people chained in a particular matrix of belief. Those long-standing edifices are beginning to crumble on their own merits, from not being able to withstand the increasing intensity of Light. And not as in the bearer of Light, Lucifer, he of the cast-down caste; but as in the bringer of Wisdom, Sophia. As in the Statue of Liberty. Liberating us from the Dark, as in mis-identification with the Separation, ie, with our personalities. We are, essentially, sparks of divinity - ‘spiritual beings having a human experience’, as the current cliche has it - and it is that identification that we are being called upon to acknowledge, now; draw closer to, in communion with; and leave the drama (or at least the major role-paying part of it) behind, that has consumed us and our efforts for so long, in a narrative that is beginning to come to an end. It’s time, then, and that is to say, for Ascension; to a higher level of our being.

Everything in its own good time. Or as the Bible puts it...

(And speaking of: to mention that the title of my film was ‘When Seasons Come’. For whatever entire reason.)



The Findhorn Foundation has been referred to, perhaps most notably by Sir George Trevelyn (considered by some as the ‘father’ of adult education in Great Britain; itself considered by some as Brith-ain, ie, the Land of The Covenant; see also B’ney BRIT, ie, the Children of the Covenant. See also Saxons, as in Isaac’s sons; the tribes beginnng to come back together again, after the long sojourn in the wilderness), as the Essene Community of the New Age.

He who has ears to hear...




The Real End Now
(after The False One)
of
The Latest Years
Minus a Few




Footnotes

1 I was turned down, because of my age (I was 37 or -8 at the time), with the suggestion that I could otherwise ‘serve my country’ by volunteering for the domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps at the time. It wasn’t the same thing.



2 While living in the East Bay Area I went to a talk by one Gary Allen, who was the author of a number of books on the New World Order crowd; particularly at that time, I believe, one titled The Rockefeller File. I went up afterwards to ask him some question or other, and it turned out that he had been at Stanford when I had been there; I think the year behind me. He had been challenged by some acquaintance to read up on the claims of the JBS about a powerful cabal of influential people who had a decidedly non-democratic vision for the future on the planet. Not believing the premise, he had an open-enough mind to check the matter out; and that was the beginning of his career, of turning out important source books on the subject. A classic example of the value of a ‘liberal’ education; read, the stimulation of an enquiring mind. R.I.P., Gary. You done good with your life.



3 I have probably said something like this somewhere in this chronicle before. But I’ll say it again. It bears repeating. (Grrr...) There is a perennial question, in the American constitutional republic, about where the line lies between federal power/aulthority and state power/authority. But it shouldn’t be all that difficult to determine. According to the Constitution, the federal government is a government of limited and delegated powers; all powers not so defined remain under the purview of the states. One of the delegated powers to the federal government has to do with ‘regulating interstate commerce’. Centralists see this as a foot in the door, to take over more and more power for themselves, by extending the definition, to do with all manner of matters not directly related to the ‘interstating’ of the commerce. Interstate duties would be one thing; the safety of a product itself, traveling interstate, the same. Saying that the safety factors in a business, like ladders and goggles and hard-toed shoes and lighting and such, ‘affect’ their product and so come under the controlling hand - or fist - of the federal government, is quite another. (It makes of the Constitution something to wrap fish in. As in very fishy.) Hence a constant battle in America, between ‘states’ righters’ and centralists. And especially at a time of major concern about the Powers That Be wanting, and taking more and more steps toward, total control over ‘the people’, I side with ‘the people’. Every time, in point of fact. Because it goes to the very point of the life experience, of self-determination, and -responsibility.
A word here about the third branch of the federal government in the American system, in case anyone is thinking that the states are trumped.
I know that some people feel that the Constitution is totally subject to the interpretation power of the Supreme Court. But that is in itself an erroneous interpretation of the matter. If it were so, the U.S. system would not be one of three federal ‘separate but equal’ branches. No one branch can trump any other. That’s the beauty of the instrument, crafted by artisans in the political arena who knew that people are not angels. (If they were, they wouldn’t need such devices of social order as “to be tied down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution,” in Jefferson’s words - presciently seeing specifically the Supreme Court as potentially becoming what it in fact has, ie, a law unto itself.) The Constitution is not just “a damn piece of paper”, as George Dubya characterized it. It is a contract; entered into in good faith by the states that agreed to it amongst themselves. It can’t be changed except by mutual agreement of the parties to it. The Supreme Court in recent decades has gotten too big for its closely tailored britches; as has the executive branch Answer? Not just the legislative branch. It’s a part of the federal government. Asking any branch of the federal government to rein in the federal government - ie, part of itself - is a big ask. That’s like asking the medical industry to rein in the pharmaceutical industry, or their placemen in government not to vote in their interests. No. The answer lies in the other party to the contract.
I agree totally with those States that are starting to rein in the imbalanced power of both the judiciary and the executive, and reaffirming their role in the compact, by standing up for the explicit wording of the 10th Amendment. Which made it crystal clear, for all generations to come, so that there would be no misunderstandings about the matter, if the Founders of the nation could help it, that the federal government is a creature of the States, not the other way around; that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. That the federal government had only those powers specifically ceded to it ; specifically enumerated. “Few and defined,” in the clarifying words of the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, in the Federalist Papers. So the recent claim by the executive branch of a ‘supremacy clause’ trump card falls at the first hurdle. It is claiming powers that the States did not concede.
But a civil war was fought over this sort of thing?
The Civil War resulted in an amendment to the Constitution - the 14th - that does not alter the basics of the contract, just tells the States that they can’t treat their citizens - now also citizens of the United States - arbitrarily: that they cannot be deprived of their life, liberty, or property, “without due process of law”. (And furthermore, that said dual citizens cannot be deprived of “the equal protection of the laws”. That was to say, in the particular instance, and in effect, that the law had to be color blind: that there could not be one law for blacks and one law for whites. It took awhile for that one to be sorted out. And I happen to agree with the Warren Court on that one. The spirit of the law had been flouted all that time; just the letter of it - “separate but equal” - was being ‘upheld’, in a manner of speaking. So yes, even an activist court gets it right, sometimes.)3a
So, bottom line: Butt out, Washington. D.C. that is. Founding Fathers: thanks. And stick around, energetically.
(And perhaps even literally, that. Since reincarnation is at work in the world - is how ‘it’ works. And we know, eg, of a reincarnation of Edgar Cayce in our current time; to help us with our progress from this point. There’s every good reason to believe that the Foundng Fathers could be ‘back ‘as well, to help see us through this important moment, in the life of this country, and the world. To make it through the portal into a higher-realmed future. Not the one that lesser souls have intended for us, and are trying to herd us towards, with their lack of clearer vision.
But I digress. Although not far. It’s all still connected to de jaw bone.
Meaning? I think I mean that though it’s all germane, in my mind, to the telling of this story, I accept that everything in a supermarket is germane, too, to the subject of eating; but I’ve tried to bring things in here to this particular meal that I feel are germane to the preparation of this particular menu.
Germane. That’s a particular herb, that I use a lot (you will have noticed). And I grant that any herb or other seasoning can be used beyond its palatability. But if you’re still reading this - as you demonstrably are - you must have found it used not overly so.
But you still might want to take a pinch of salt with this meal, or particular portions thereof. Fair enough. Don’t take my ‘take’ for any of it. But be prepared: it’s not as simple as it looks on TV. Any, of it. If you get what I’m laying down.)3b

3a This modern interpretation of constitutional law - that “words mean what I say they mean,” in the arrogant words of Humpty Dumpty - is on a par with the post-modern ‘movement’ in general, where journalists, eg, make up stories and pass them off as fact; apparently figuring that they are giving voice to something, some ‘reality’, that at heart has as much value as, if not more than, the actual facts of the matter. It’s their choice to think so. And it’s the choice of others to want, and to stick with, a true rendition of the facts of the matter, whether it’s not as ‘arty’ as an individual’s interpretation or not. Such a subjective attitude really has no legitimate role in journalism, or non-fiction reports of events. (Otherwise we can’t trust anything to be the objective truth of the situation.) And it certainly has no legitimate role in the proper functioning of a constitutional republic - in the realm of law. Either law is founded on facts, or it is an ass - a farce, like Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I know what I would rather live by, and under.
For how close is this ‘creative’ attitude about the law to the likes of Hitler’s declaration, “I am the law”? If the law is essentially meaningless - just whatever fits the eye of the beholder - a Hitler’s interpretation of it is as good as anyone else’s. Me, I’d prefer to just stick with the facts, ma’am.
Dumb da dumb dumb.


3b The latter comment will come clearer if and when your own personal search for Truth takes you to the website of a couple of ‘forensic economists’ doing major work in uncovering the truth - the whole truth - of 9/11. It’s called hawkscafe. But be prepared: it’s not for the squeamish. Or the easily offended. On many levels. You’ll see what I mean. If you give it a shot. And I’m not going to say anymore about it than that. Just to say: Be prepared for oysters on the menu. For the starter course. With the meal. With the dessert - part of, the dessert. With the coffee afterwards. And in the car on the way home. And just inside the front door...capeche?



4 The fact that I had in fact been in the Boy Scouts for a short time in my young life is actually relevant to my story. But I can’t, in the moment, think of how it can be construed, without too great a twisting and turning of the matter, as being directly relevant to this particular telling of my story. So I’ll pass, on that episode in my life. I’m sure youll be glad to hear. Unless you’ve been smoking dope, and find these constant links in the body of the text to sub-textual material charming.
Which comment also reminds me of the time that I too smoked the stuff. The one and only time. Taking one drag, and being knocked out for a week. Not as in stoned. As in the most horrendous head cold of my life, before and since. But that episode is probably not directly germane to this particular telling either. So I’ll leave the subject at that.
Except to note the exquisite detail of releasing both that episode, and comment on my days as a Boy Scout, at the very same time; in the very same bauble, as it were. Cool.



5 The small bag, previous-incarnation gas mask holder, that I had walked across the country with, lo those 13-some years previously. Not that I had kept it for just such a ‘statement’ purpose again. It was, simply, handy to take out on my occasional forays into mountain country, there living then in northern California, and still feeling a strong pull to Nature. My inner, and Its outer.



6 Do you want to hear what my film script idea was about? Thanks for asking. I’m such a humble soul, I wouldn’t think of imposing it on you without your real, unsolicited interest. (Take another drag. This will take some time. Although, of course, that’s relative...)

It was about this young American gal, just starting into her adulthood, who visits her father down in a small out-of-the-way village in Mexico before taking off for Europe and a look-around Life Experience there before starting her college studies and lifeline in earnest. There she meets a group of art students, taking painting lessons from a strong, Anna Magnani-type Mexican woman, who has a mysterious helper; a youngish American man (‘Get me a Jack Lord type!’) whom she is drawn to begin to flirt with. We’re getting intimations here of a young, Innocent America, somewhat spoiled, about to be seduced by world-weary, jaded old Europe, but still curious about ‘her’ mystery-religion roots, and where is this going to go?? Anyway, that was the idea. It turns out that her father - symbolizing the corruption of the older American generation, wouldn’t you know - is not there just for a holiday with some business mates, but they are actually Up To No Good, in the form of something to do with price-fixing between supposed competitors (those nasty monopoly capitalists, up to their corrupt tricks). And some of the art students aren’t what they would appear to be, either; are up to something fishy themselves. Read: proto-Zapatistas. Oh, but that’s not the half of it.
More?
Girl meets boy. Boy doesn’t want to have anything to do with Girl, at least not at the beginning. So, of course, this piques her curiosity; to the point of her slipping into his room one night., when she has ascertained that he is away (doesn’t spend any time in the local watering-hole cantina, with the students themselves; takes long walks by himself along the beach). And where she discovers that he has painted himself into a universe of his own making. One wall is a dense wall of jungle forest, where a lone leopard is seen trying to get back in . One is a searing desert scene, with bleached bones, including those of a Jeep. (Hint hint.) Another is of - is, in its impact on the senses - a roaring seascape, with the hint of a dolphin riding the wave into the beach. A beach. Wherever, in the universe. Or in another..You get the idea.
Boy surprises her, in flagrante delicto. “Oh! You startled me!” (Hearbeat time.) The best defence being a good offense, she tries to talk her way out of her indiscretion, of intruding into his private domain. Or of introducing something of The Virgin/Female Principle into it. Or whatever...
You get the idea.
Oh - okay. But just a little more.
Instead of getting mad at her, he tells her that he wants to paint her. Oh - well; that’s... okay. Sure. But there’s a look about him, of, like: Are you SURE you want to go there???
So he starts painting her. Sketches at first. Just to get the feel of his subject. In the meantime, life goes on in this little hologram of the world. There’s an old drunken American shipwreck of a man, who does odd jobs, like collecting used bottles for the cantina, in exchange for the filled version. A symbol of the America to come; who is looked down on by everybody, including the Three Wise Guys plotting their capitalist shenanigans, which are going to lead TO the likes of the town drunk?? Who lurks in the background, watching the brown-race students in their happy, self-assured enjoyment of life. The wave of the future; leaving Flotsam in their wake, and brooding menacingly about it...
...and at one point accusing our Boy of hobnobbing with “blacks”...
Our Virgin Americana plays beach volleyball with the students; games that can get very hairy, with all the pent-up energy behind these young developing-country symbols. She finds out that ‘they’ used to play a similar game, in earnest, though a little more like basketball, where the losing team was killed. In earnest indeed. To say: for keeps. No more ‘game’, then...
...and Dad - in between him and his buddy’s going out to sea for deep-sea fishing, and coming back to hole up in their private-space room in their rented villa, doing their mystery thing - begins to worry about his little princess, hanging out with brown guys who might want to make it with innocent little white girl, open to experiencing all that life has to offer, without understanding fully that other people can have agendas...
Sequence speedup: Joyce (for that is her name; Ray is his, whom the Anna Magnani character calls Raymundo; obviously for script reasons. And there is a potential here, of Ray-Joyce; geddit??) arrives for a sitting, and is told, by a more-than-normally quiet Ray, that he doesn’t feel like it. Consternation. Anger. Disappointment. Sexual tension. “What do you mean, you don’t feel like it. What about me. What about when I don’t feel like it?! Where do I fit into all this?! What about my feelings?!”
This can’t end well. It doesn’t. There is a leopard loose in the area, lurking on the edges of the village, and it becomes a symbol of loosed emotions, which end up with the Americana killed by a jealous brown-skinned girl, who had her eye on Ray all this time, and was growing despondent over what she perceived, or assumed, was happening to him because of his connection, still, with his norte Americano roots - that he was not really becoming one of them. One with them.
Dad is devastated. What hath he wrought. If it hadn‘t been for him, going there, as hideaway for his illegal activities...his corruption...Virgin Americana - excuse me; Joyce, with an indivuated personality - would still be alive. Etc. (There’s also a little thing about his wife, Joyce’s mother, having committed suicide; presumably because of his actions in life. Letting the Goddess down; and his potential for Good...) For his part, Ray is wrenched by it all. He had business with this woman. If he had just hidden himself away better - ‘O cursed spite! That ever I was born/ to set it right!’ - none of this would have happened. He could have created an alternate reality; at least for himself. Neutered; but safe. And others would be safe, too. But he was smoked out, by the beauteous promise - the best - of America. And now what.
Oh - okay. But just a little more. (Actually, there’s only a little more left anyway. But seeing’s as how it’s never going to see the light of day, outside of these pages...)
The Three Wise Guys leave, solemnly, with Joyce’s coffin strapped to the top of their SUV; having been interrupted in their plottings by her sacrifice. (Unwitting or not. Who’s to say what choices we have made in life. Perhaps this stands for the positive-potential best of America being thrown, or on some level throwing herself, into the gears of the life machine, to help it ‘change’ gears, so to speak, and come out with a better outcome than the one it is all too dangerously heading for. Something needing to change, that will involve sacrifice. Like, say, smaller carbon footprints?...) Ray starts drinking, in the cantina, with the students looking on, unsettled by it all; uncertain what to do, where to go, from the experience. Deeper into their Art, as a response?? One student in particular (“Get me a young Mexican George Clooney!’), who, when Joyce had arrived on the scene, had seen an Opportunity - which seems to have something to do with Ray having been in the way of his, and a few of the others, in their Zapatista-like plans (Ray commanding too much reverence, or at least respect, still, for ’the American way’) - and schemed, Iago-like, deadly-stealthily, but with a likeable surface, to set her up with Ray, in order hopefully to bring him down a peg or two, looks on with something approaching existential guilt, for what he has wrought; or at least helped in. And doesn’t like what he sees before him, and feels within himself. Ray being, really, a better man than he, and he knows it, in his gut...
And then there’s ‘Anna’, who despairs at what she is seeing happening to Ray; all because of that damn gringa...and evidencing a bit of jealousy about the matter herself; although presuming to be above such things in her life at this stage of it, dedicated wholly to Art.as she is...She finally tries a direct assault, flaring at him to snap out of it, stop hiding his light under a bushel, “and get back to work”. (What does she mean by that? To say: What do the fillmmakers mean by that??...)
Ray, then, apparently goaded into action by hers, makes plans to leave, too. Passes all his paintings over to ‘Anna’. Who appears, to him, glad to see the back of him, or at the least, indifferent; but when he turns to leave; says, to us, in her own agony: “No. Don’t leave...”
But leave he must. He has been ejected out of his Eden, and needs to ‘get back to work’, in the world. (He is Raymundo, afer all, recall.) And as he walks away from the sleepy little Mexican village, with his easel slung on his back (definitely not like an AK47, except in sublimation; and definitely somewhat like a cross), Al - our erstwhile subcomandante Marcos - makes a decision, and, gesturing a shrugging goodbye to his revolutionary mates, joins this gringo, who’s not like many - most? - of them. A seeming Fade Out. But wait - there’s more. (Can’t leave the audience too teased up by now; have to give them some meat, rather than just philosophical food for thought, like a French film-school exercise in ambiguity. Rather, an American-type, brash, hit-’em-over-the-head, spell-it-out, what-the-hell-is-this-all-about ANYWAY?! ending. More - satisfying. Hopefuly.)
On a cliff in the hills above the seaside village, separating it from the ‘outer’ world; this drama having been played out in the narrow band of reality and generation between sea and land (shades of the author’s regenerative time at a key stage of his lifeline, when he was being healed from the conflicting parts of his being having come together and creating an interference pattern, leaving him to wonder: where do I go from here; am I particle or wave; or do I even have to choose in order to be present but still beyond??), Ray and Al stop for a break. Sharing the same canteen, Al asks him what he plans to do. There is a reflective pause, and then Ray says, and I quote: “I’d like to be in on the building of a city...”
Before Al can - possibly - ask him, ‘What kind of city?’, there is a commotion of some sort off camera. Al looks, and, horrified, has only time to pronounce Ray’s name before involuntarily jumping into action, sheltering Ray from -
what we now see as a charge by Flotsam, with a large stone held over his head, very like Charlton Heston with the Stone Tablets, about to crash it onto the despised Ray, for not being a fellow American in the Brown Sea of the Enemy, read heathens, read whatever; for making him feel worthless. Whatever all. Take your pick of possible meanings. (Including just a plot device. This is just a film, remember. Nothing special. Well. Could be...)
Over the edge Al and Flotsam go. Down, down. Into a river, to the sea that has spawned them. Splash.
Ray slumps in despair.
It has started...

Time has passed. Anna (I think I named her Madame Rojas, No particular meaning there intended, although I had since realized that ‘rojas’ in Spanish means red. I think. Close enough, to good symbology: a bit of a maverick, revolutionary, not enticed in life by the Yankee dollar in & for itself only, simply to be treated as the means to an end that it was supposed to be, until the Smart Guys took over; whatever) is exhibiting Ray’s work, with that of other of her students, in a gallery in Mexico City. (We come to understand, through comments here, that this is how she raises the bulk of her money to run her school: from wealthy patrons who then get the benefit of - first crack at - her students’ work.) She circulates, listening unobtrusively in to the comments of the potential buyers, for their homes, or wherever. Oh, look; that one is nice. The colors would go with...
Ray’s work is good. It’s obvious that he had talent. And the piece de resistance - after a series of paintings of Joyce, cast in a more and more native state - as she had darkened in the Mexican sun - and in more explorative styles; one looking a lot like an early Picasso, combining her with a bull, and a toreador’s cape prominently displayed, and a single Eye featured, right in the middle of her forehead - was one of ‘her’ as what can be called a Rosy Cross. A solid, brown cross with black shadowing (Joyce was dark-haired) and with a rose entwined - with thorns - at the crux of it all.
If this isn’t of the school of Symbolism I don’t know what is. Anyway. Voila.
Anna listens in to an obviously wealthy couple, regarding this crowning piece of the exhibition. And it’s, like: “Oh. That’s - interesting.” He: “A little religious.” She: “Do you think so? Not necessarily. You just don’t know how to look at these things, dear.” And they pass on, to graze further in the display.
Anna bites her tongue...
During a champagne break, there is talk of rumors of some crazy people building a city out in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the country. We CUT TO find that it is no mere rumor. Many young people are engaged in the building of a city. White, brown, black, yellow, red. It is well on in construction. And then something is up, when we see them being called to something. Could it be to daily prayers?...No. At least not this time. What it is, is something going on outside of the city; in a clear space, where they gather from their side of the frame, to watch - a ritual of some sort?
Sort of. As we see, when the CAMERA PANS (OVERHEAD SHOT) to allow us to see -
a small delegation from their city, with one figure out in front of the rest (it’s Ray, but it’s hard to tell; it could be any of us, in essence, who unfold their Christ consciousness), walking over to meet a smaller delegation, with one figure out in front of the rest, from a large flying saucer.
And we are reminded of one of Ray’s paintings, which looked like a stylized Winged Disc, from ancient times; Sumeria, and Egypt, and such (briefly OVERLAiD ON this shot; as if the painting had been premonitory, or at the least, part of his psyche, rather than just from the history of art on the planet).
We are also reminded of an image we had seen back at the beginning of the film, during a Prologue, where we had seen Ray, in military uniform, ‘one amongst many’ - one of a line of American troops about to board a Landing Craft, only this time to take them out to a waiting ship (their uniforms make it as to the Korean War era);6a when the shot then switched to an OVERHEAD SHOT OF the men crammed into the landing craft, as it bobs in the sea; their figures somewhat like chromosomes; as if looking to be split, in order to duplicate; and then the SHOT GOES OUT OF FOCUS AS SOUND OF like a bee, buzzing. As if about to do its thing, in the pollination process. And then SOUND CUTS OFF as if the bee has landed on its mark. Whereupon the SHOT COMES INTO FOCUS ON a rickety bus, in what looks like Mexico; the peasantry jammed in to it, with chicken crates slung alongside, and the SOUND TRANSFORMS INTO THAT OFa fly, and then A MULTITUDE OF flies, obviously associated with the bus and its animal contents. On which we then see Joyce, in the back seat, hemmed in, to her obvious discomfort, forced to be so ‘engaged’ with these people up close, ugh, but trying to do her best. This is Innocent America, remember. No judgment, personally.
Anyway, back to the closing scene; wherein the two figures meet in the middle of the space between their respective ‘camps’. And then merge at
CUT TO BLACK.

Two streams, coming back together. For work to do.
Facilitated by ‘the building of a city’.
A City of Light.
Which I am just about to make reference to in the main body of this story.

Thanks for hanging in there.
I hope it was helpful, to get an idea of what I was trying to do in and with my life.
Oh. One more thing, about the film, and life. A little subplotting had a young boy from the village, named Manuel (Joyce, in her inartful innocence, once referred to him kiddingly as ‘Manuel Labor’), besotted with Ray, who befriends him easily. At one point - towards the end - Ray shows him a demonstration of physics: he has mounted about half-a-dozen large ball bearing weights on wires in a swing-like apparatus, like a swing set (curiously enough like the swing set of my childhood...), where they can each be swung independently of each other. He starts them swinging one at a time; Manuel looks at them, in their seemingly chaotic activity, then up at him, questioningly, then ‘gets it’ to look back at the experiment, when all of a sudden they all swing in unison.
Patience is a virtue.

6a But it could be any war, any time, when individuals break through into Christ consciousness (or are on the verge of doing so), and don’t look back, as it were. Except in wonder, as to how we could ever not have seen our essential Oneness. On a path. Experiencing duality momentarily; in order to grow our Oneness further.



7 My half-sister - whom I had gotten to know later in our lives, from our first meeting at our dad’s when she was still a baby and my brother and I visited - were sent up - one summer. The summer before the fateful summer when Mom had to come up with the sheriff and...you know that story. Or at least, I’ve told it - had just gone through a divorce, and I was glad to commit to help her somewhat financially until she could get on her feet. That may sound a little like deja vu; and it was, to a certain extent, being a reply of my role in my sister-in-law’s circumstances, just a few years earlier. All of which I was glad to engage in. ‘Family’ had certainly helped me out a lot, in life. In this case, it stopped me from trotting off to India; and after discovering Findhorn, as I was about to, I know why.



8 Of which, patience. It doesn’t feel like the right time yet, to go into it. For whatever reason. God knows. (Actually, it’s not that far in the future, here...)



9 This Recollection is opening up fond memories, not only of time in this dorm, where I spent my Sophomore and Junior years, but of the great, raucous, throbbing, billowing beast of a dorm of my Freshman year called Encina Hall. Years and years of Stanford Roughs had called it home in the beginnings of their university days, and where they had left their marks, sometimes even physically, such as burn marks on the study tables in The Lounge which were made with holes for non-existent (by our day) ashtrays; the ashes descending in neat little piles underneath, where who knew what sort of beings would gather them up overnight and turn them into magical disappearing purses, or whatever. Ah, Encina Hall; home of a myriad of memories and hopes and dreams. Where one poor fellow in my class (of ‘56) was reported, by his Wing mates, as having received, at the end of the quarter, five cinch (Failure) notices and a letter from his girlfriend telling him that she was pregnant. His response was to (1) go out and get drunk, and (2) quit school and join the Army. And this was while the Korean War was still going on, too. Desperation incarnate. I’ve often wondered whatever happened to him...
But I digress. But just to finish my memorial, into a eulogy: A terrible thing happened to males deciding to go to Stanford come my (non-inhabited) Senior year: ‘They’ closed it down. Or rather changed its use, from a male freshmen dorm to offices on the ground floor. Besides brooding about how, often, good things come to an end, I have wondered if the employees in those offices have ever, over the years since this desecration, this building of a modern edifice over (as it were) a graveyard, felt the presence of ghosts, inhabiting the space above them . Very noisy ghosts. Sometimes doing the most shocking things to each other...
Enough.
But you get the drift. Inspiration can come in even the most curious, and seemingly sacrilegious, of settings. Consider John Steinbeck; a fellow Stanford rough, and alumnus of the halcyon days of Encina Hall, in the generation before mine there.9a
A toast!
For the day you may be toast.
Will, be.
And may be gathered up, from your little pile, and made into a magical purse, say, from your matter being transmogrified by little imaginary beings whose job it is to re-form what is, after all is said and done, consciousness, into other forms, is all.
So - a toast! To life! And its moments of delight! Including the time your Wing won the Freshman intramural basketball league championship. And you made this amazing move...


9a I’ve often wondered if his description, in his novel Cannery Row, of the cannery buildings at their height of productive life was based at least in part on his experiences of/at Encina. Check it out. Great stuff. Very evocative. The mark of a good writer.
I don’t know about you, in your sublime moments of bibliophilia, but I’ll never forget Steinbeck’s oriental character, in the novel noted above, making his way down to the beach early every morning. Doing something or other. Name escapes me at the moment. But it’s cool.
And obviously a little untranslatable.



10 That was the first three-letter word starting with a G that came to me that night.



11 A brief word dangling from this reference, about ‘the environmental movement’, and the current push for ‘decreasing your carbon footprint,’ and such; just to clarify my position on it all. There is nothing wrong with learning to live/waking up to a life of consciousness, of the effects of our actions (on others; and on ourselves, too, for that matter). What is wrong is when some people attach an agenda to aspects of that attitude and process, and manipulate others - and ‘information’ - to their ends.11a Usually nefarious ends, or they would be more willing to be more open about them.
Case in point: the AGW ‘movement’. (Religion, actually.) I’m not going to go into this matter in detail, here. Suffice it to say for now - and as a vital part of this memoir, at least - that some very powerful people (at the moment) have an agenda to (a) control the world, and (b) cull the populace. They think there are too many of us, for the carrying capacity of the Earth, and for them to control, in a top-down form of government. (One side of the pyramid is composed of those who want socialism; another side of the pyramid is composed of those who want fascism; the third side is made up of those who are supporting the pyramid, whether they realize it or not; and the fourth side is made up of name-your-favourite. At the top is the same bunch of statists, manipulating the process.) So they have hit on the idea of ‘man-made global warming’ to use as the Opportunity to achieve their ends. To get there, they need/want to destroy nation-states as they are, and replace them with more easily controlled regions. They also need/want to destroy the current currency system, and replace it with a system - called a carbon currency - that paints a nice big bull’s-eye on each of us. Because we contribute in a number of ways to the carbon ‘problem’; one of which is exhaling the stuff. The fewer of us, the more the ‘system’ will be able to make money, since it is based on carbon credits. The more carbon credits your country has, the ‘richer’ it is. So, eg, in this system, a steel plant, say, in the UK, say, will be a ‘problem’ because of the CO2 it is creating; so close it down (throwing some more ‘useless eaters’ out of gainful employment, and thus onto the tender or not mercies of the state) and transfer its workings to a developing country - India, say, where it is an upgrade to their production of steel; and they can afford its presence in their country because they have carbon credits to spare. And so forth.
It is, in a word, a scam. It may be a noble scam, in the eyes of some - some - of its promoters. But it is a scam nevertheless.
Go to such ‘denialist’ sites as green-agenda.com and get the lowdown. And while I’m passing out healthy credits, I’d like to credit Lord Monckton, too, for his studious efforts to bring this scam to light.
It is one thing to have good intentions. It is quite another to use them to entice people into paving the way into their own gulag. At best.
But you do realize how much CO2 we humans breathe out, don’t you...so - besides because of our behavior - we are ‘the enemy’, in the words of the Club of Rome. (“The common enemy of humanity is man...The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”) Thus, with that attitude, how long do you think that ‘they’ - our keepers - are going to keep ‘us’ breathing??
I’m sure they have better things to do, than play guard.
And they know it, too.

And none of this, let me be crystal clear, is to denigrate the excellent work being done by so many people and organizations to clean up our act here on our Mother Earth. That includes people like Paul Hawken - who as I have indicated has gone on to be a sterling example in the world of a highly together person (I salute you for being such a shining alumnus of Findhorn, Paul) - and another individual particularly worthy of singling out, one Fred Burk. Go to his website wanttoknow.com and you will find out what I mean.


11a To the appalling, outrageous and arrogant point of airburshing out of their graphs (and computer models based on them) an entire period of history; the so-called Medieval Warming Period (lasting from about 800 to 1300 A.D.). When this was discovered, their fall-back position was to say that Oh, that was just a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon; get back in your cages, folks, it’s all under control. It has turned out, in particular from cave formations in New Zealand, that it was not.
New Zealand? You...do know where New Zealand is; don’t you? On the map?? That thing, that you think you can manipulate to your will???
We may well be able to do that sort of thing in the future. (And not in the very distant future.) But not your way, friend. Your way is not very people friendly.
To say the least.



12 There was one such woman in particular who seemed to have made it something of a crusade to demonize PC. My response: There is more under heaven and earth, Ma’am, than is dreamt of in your philosophy, or encased in amber in your belief system. Read Ralph Ellis, and/or Tony Bushby, for a start, of being released from its eye-smoke.
PC is now defunct.anyway. Served its time and place, and purpose. Time moves on. And sometimes, things roll along with it; experiencing change in the process, within new sets of circumstances.
Most things change. Some things stay the same. The incorruptible verities of life, for example. Everything else is up for grabs.
Or as intimated in the philosophical thought of some South American writer/poet whom my Freshman English instructor quoted to me, upon my letting him know, at the end of my Junior year, what I was about to embark on in life, ie, a search for Truth: “Of all sure things, the surest is to doubt.” Don’t take any wooden nickels, then, in life, was the advice, as I understood it. Check them out. They may not be what they look like, on the surface.
Fair enough advice. Better than Polonius’s to Laertes, I reckon.12a

(As to the reference to my Freshman English instructor being someone I was still in touch with two years later, in my sojourn at Stanford, if it struck an even minor curious note for you: It wasn’t as though we had continued contact in a social context. He had just taken a shine to me, to say my writing, in his class; at the end of which he had given me a book - inscribed to me, “from his English instructor” and the date (this was June, 1953) - of John Donne’s meditations and sonnets and such. I was touched. And many years later still had that particular book, after having gone through many a personal library, as I would pick up sticks and jettison everything overboard (I hope you understand that I jest here, mixing metaphors and such in the context of talking about my college English instructor; I’m not being too subtle for you, am I? Losing the detail? Have another drag) and set off load-lightened on the next chapter of my journey in life.
It held one particular attraction for me, besides that of being a special memento; and besides the obvious, of his For WhomThe Bell Tolls meditation. A favorite thought, indeed, that; but I was also and extremely attracted to his musing leading up to it, where he shared (something like; I finally had to leave behind even that favorite possession in my move to Australia):

‘The bell doth toll for him that thinkes it doth; and though it intermit againe, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought him, hee is united to God.”

For me, it spoke to me of that night in the Stanford amphitheater, when I felt that I had made contact with the Power, and the Glory, behind the universe - behind all universes. Behind the totality of Creation.
And I’ve wanted to get back to it ever since. The feeling; and the place.)


12a “A father’s advice to his son how to conduct himself in the world.” (The Home of Inspiration, White Dove Books.) And I’m definitely glad that I didn’t take that advice, when starting out; either in life, or in my way of communicating:

‘’Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act..”

Glad I didn’t read this, and take it to heart, before starting this narrative. I couldn’t have made it past the first line And how much less rich would your life be, if I had ended it before I began? (And doesn’t your mind work like this? Associations just tumble out, like clowns out of a mini-car?...How have we trod the strictly linear path for so long??) - But hey - he however did go on:

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

So maybe I would have pushed on through anyway; to the end of that advice, and to the outcome of my personal story.

Choices...(as I say)