The Countdown

Continuing to do my homework, in keeping up with what's going on in the world, particularly here in the West, I am, finally, I find, having enough. I'm not here to 'fix' anything, just to see how good of a job that humanity - people; individuals - can do, to pull a rabbit out of a very dark-hole hat. To say: Things are looking rather bleak. Humanity's leaders in the Western world have so far lost the plot that they are actually threatening now to use nuclear weapons, in this case, on Iran. That is going too far. That would entail an uncontrollable chain reaction - the very real chance of one. We really need to look, clearly, at where we're at. This Turning Point time. Either we go up. Or we go down.

I'm not happy with the leadership that we're getting in our day and age. The Economic Elite running the show have even the temerity to co-opt cynically the valuable historical imagery of the Roundtable, labeling it, in their incarnation of that spirit, the Business Roundtable. It's time for We, the People to take back our responsibility in the matter. The matter of the future of humanity on planet Earth. It should not fall so easily to this current 'elite', who are demonstrating, every day, and more and more, that they are not up to the job. Are up, rather, to mischief. Damnable mischief. Which has gone far enough.

To try to make some sense of it all, looking at the context, of where we're at, from my experience and perspective - having lived at a time spanning a crucial and important period; including from one major global Depression to another one pending - I'm going to start posting here my autobiography, in instalments, as an indication of where I'm coming from. Of where I have come from. And where I, for one, am going.

And it's not down that dark hole, that the Powers That Be are offering humanity, at this time. It's to a far, far better outcome than the one we're stumbling towards at the moment in the prevailing darkness, to all intents and purposes having lost our way. So: a look back, to look forward, to see more clearly our way out. And in.


***


Potheads, light your bongs. All others, hang on. We’re about to go on a trip; down memory lane - down, and up, and around, and through (you’ll soon see why I warned you to hold on) in as much of a facsimile of 3D as I can manage on a flat piece of paper; with stretches in monochrome, but others in glorious technicolor (at least as much of that stuff as I can muster as well, given the limits of my style). And so - away we go.

Somebody grab that hat! Alice??....



My Life and Times
I - The Early Years


I slipped into incarnation, relatively unnoticed (the attending physician certainly did: he had induced my mother to produce me at his convenience. A fishing trip or some such took precedence over my readiness for this adventure, and its humiliating beginning), in the precise middle of the night (the process starting just before midnight and finishing just after They must have had a really early start planned for their trip. I wonder if he said to my mom: “Pan size”, before scooting for a chance at landing the real desired squirming squishy thing in his life) near the depth of the trough of The Great Depression (you will have heard of that one; it’s the one your grandparents keep going on about. And what do they know about not being able to afford the latest accessory from Apple??. This one is dire, man. Like, you’re a Nobody man without an iPod. Oops. Telescoped a couple of generations there. Well; that sort of thing will happen in this narrative. Because we are all once and future beings. Hey, look - we’re coming back to where we left off! Kinda cool -), in the middle of 1934 (the year of a homegrown fascist attempt to overthrow the duly elected president, FDR, and his New Deal, to put it even further in context. Not that that little historical footnote intruded on our reality then. We had enough on our plate as it was. To say: hardly anything) in a small town in the middle of the mid-West-like state of Utah. (As Middle America as you could get, in other words.) My parents were ‘Mormons’, as was pretty much the thing in that area of the world; but something happened early on in the marriage - around the very time I was born, in fact; and possibly because of my birth, in some sense - and my mother divorced my father, even going so far as to make it a ‘temple divorce’, which meant, in the doctrines of the Mormon Church (actually, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS to the initiated), that she wouldn’t be ‘sealed’ to him ‘for time and eternity’. A major statement, then.

All I knew about that time for a long time came from my paternal grandmother, who told me one summer1 that our (my older brother and I; if you chose not to take the link embedded just there, and don’t know what the other, more exploratory-type ones on this trip know. Your choice. As it is in real life) mother had left us, when I was still a baby, and gone off to southern California, to try to make it in the movies. What?? Yes, indeed. She had been told, by one or other of the men who used to pitch up at the little cafe connected to a small gas station that our mother used to work at, in her little country-bumpkin town (Provo. Sorry about that, folks; but this is 1934ish, remember), that she looked like ‘one of those Hollywood stars; what’s her name; Olivia De Havilland, yeah, that’s it’ (not that they would have pronounced it with two ll’s. Or the break between - oh, do get on with it, I hear from the back. Ha. You’ll get yours, coming up. See, I’ve been on this ride, and know all the - whoops!), and that seemed to be all it took for her to up sticks and try her luck in the big time. This was deep in the middle of The Depression, I remind; and my mother had ambitions, to do more in her life than just work for, and be dependent on, men. (She had been raised on a farm, where she cooked - was “made” to - for a number of farmhands, However, each cloud has a silver lining, as she used to say, amongst other homespun truisms: she always appreciated that, ever since that unhappy time in her life, she had been able to prepare a meal for many with no sweat. Such is life, and its challenges, and choices. (And note how I’m emphasizing the matter of ‘choice’. There are no coincidences in life. Only opportunities. Including to keep up, or not. Getting off here? Your choice...:-) )

Years later - when I had just dropped out of university, and a potential career as a doctor (well; I had been admitted to medical school, at the university I had been an undergraduate at - Stanford, in the south San Francisco Bay Area - but it was a bit of a quixotic thing: I didn’t have the money to be able to afford it, had just been blindly on a track that seemed the right thing to do, at the time), because of ‘a spiritual experience’, that had left me feeling I had other fish to fry in life, as it were; and was about to take off for New York City, to spend as much time as I could in what I considered to be ‘the largest library in the western world’, looking for answers to life - I had a conversation with my mother, who was disgusted with my behavior (‘You’re just like your father, with your head in the clouds” ), and somehow the heart-to-heart (as much as we could or did ever manage) got around to my asking her why she had left my dad. Some bitterness crept into her voice - there all those years later - as she told me that he had wanted her to work - “made” her work - while he went to BYU (Brigham Young University, the mainly Mormon university in Utah; right there in my little birthing town of Provo. So it had some class, then. To say, classes).

But he just wanted to better himself in life, so that he could provide better for you and his family, I commented, reasonably, I thought.

She wouldn’t have it. I wasn’t acknowledging, I realized later, all that she had tried to do with her life, and how she had raised me in comfortable surroundings. (I say ‘me’: She had kicked my brother out a half-dozen years previously when, as a highschool student, and a bit of a hellraiser - nothing serious, especially in light of what has happened to society since those relatively halcyon days, of the ‘50s era - he had begun to become too difficult for her to handle, and off he was shipped upstate to live with our father. It was just me and her, then; and her boss ‘boyfriend’. And some other men along the way; two of whom became full-blown husbands, one of whom was her ticket to get back to southern California/the Hollywood area, from our home, by then, in a small town in hicksville Idaho.) I was not being appreciative enough. I was also not realizing that I was her insurance, against whatever life might deal to her, as she tried to make her way in a man’s world. All of this insight only came to me later on; how important, and prestigious, I could have been to her, as a doctor. A doctor son. But certainly not as my father’s son.

And then she added a comment that I found strangely echoed in the film East of Eden, recently out, where the mother, who had struck out on HER own in life, says to her likewise wayward son, of his father: “He tried to hold me.”

But he loved you, I found myself saying to my mom, in my real, not reel, life. (Well; there’s some question about all that. But later.)

That wasn’t a wise comment to make, I’ve realized, as I became, in that moment, to her, a traitor, or betrayer; something like that. It came out as a “son of a bitch”. But she meant, I understand, the former.

Not pretty. But I had to do what I had to do, too, in life. So I was being more like HER than she, and I, realized at the time.


---


In 1955,2 at the majority-age of 21 - on the very day of my birthday, in interesting (at least to me, at the time) point of fact - I, as I have already alluded to above, dropped out of university, at the beginning of a life-long journey searching for Truth. What was life really all about, I was led to wonder, seriously, after an experience earlier that year. (Not needing to be gone into in detail at this point in time in this narrative; suffice it to say, it was life-changing. From potential Doctor Kildare to charity case.) There at the end of that quarter of school, while all my classmates were deep in study during our - now their - Finals Week, I took the train from Palo Alto - home to my university (Stanford; subsequently the fertile training ground for the guys behind Google; previous to my time there, that of John Steinbeck. Illustrious company, I was sandwiched between, and in the same 'line', as it were) - down to L.A., where i rented a car at the station and headed instinctively for the beach, to spend some healing and regenerating time before returning home, to face the music there, for my decision to take the road less traveled - to leave school and head into the great unknown, of my adulthood. I had started working on a novel at school (part of the process of unfolding going on, I realized), and worked on it a bit during that downtime;3 but mostly I drove down to the beach at Santa Monica, every day for two weeks, and lay in the sun, and walked up and down on the narrow strip of sand between land and sea. Both, sites for exploration, and adventure...4

And then, when I felt ready, I went home.

It didn’t go as badly as I had thought it might.

What was I doing, giving away my future; what was I going to do?

“I can do anything. That’s not the point.”

My description of reality didn’t go down well. But at least I wasn’t kicked out immediately. I had time to find a job, at a hospital in Hollywood (there was that common draw again, in our lives, interestingly enough), to earn some money before heading off across the country to New York City, and intended hours in the public library there. Which is what, in fact, happened, towards the end of that year, and deep into the next.

But before turning to that stage in my life, perhaps a word or two is in order about the preceding years; setting the stage for this radical departure of mine from the status quo aspect of life in America in the mid-’50s. Which time period also saw - occasioned? - the rise of ‘the Beat Generation’ - Kerouac’s novel ‘On the Road’ and Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and all that - in some reaction to the same small-town thinking of Americana at the time; the influences on life there depicted so well in the paintings for the cover of the popular monthly The Saturday Evening Post by Norman Rockwell. Something new there was that was trying to be born.

It would obviously take different forms.

***

It had been an interesting journey to that point. The salient points, as I recall them:

* apparently being more interested in ‘the bigger picture’ than the kids around me of my age. It was as though I was born with a questing spirit, to climb out of a cut-off condition, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, of the world around me. What was going on here? was the - my - feeling. ‘From the git-go’ - it was as though, as that little boy swinging as high as he could in the play pit of my childhood, I was trying to get high enough to see further away; beyond the buldings and scene immediately around me, to the rest of the world.
What did it look like?
I loved the image of Earth from space, brought back by our country’s exploration to the Moon, only a couple of decades later. It satisfied my soul, in an inchoate way. It was very easy - natural - for me, some years later, to join an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization, associated with the UN) called Planetary Citizens; helping people to see and feel the Earth whole. With the intentioned theme of: One Planet - One Humanity - One Destiny.
Yes, I was an American. Yes, I am an American; to my roots.
But I was, and am, more.

* people seeming to expect ‘big things’ of me. Somehow I ended up being set smack in the front row middle of my 2nd Grade class picture, all of us behind a homemade mockup of the national flag. What did others see in me that I didn’t see myself? It was as though I was so intent on learning about everything outside of me that I didn’t pay any attention to myself.
In my mind, I was just a little kid. (And have been for most of my life; to say, in a way: observing. Looking up to others. Expecting - what. Goodness, in a word. Direction, in another. Fulfilment, in a third.) As exemplified, in a way, from that same 2nd grade experience, when it turned out that, all surprisingly to me, I had read more books by the end of the school year than anybody else in the class.
My reward for which was a copy of one of the ‘Old Mother West Wind’ books; which I remember taking with me in our move that summer to southern California, although many other of my possessions had to be left behind.
Including, as I have indicated, my sled. An attachment to which, in my way, was similar to that of the Wiliam Randolph Hearst character’s attachment to HIS childhood sled, in the classic Orson Welles movie ‘Citizen Kane’. I could sympathize wilth his longing for the ‘Rosebud’ of his childhood; when life was no more complicated than getting to the bottom of the hill without being tossed overboard. (Or going under a parked car, as my brother accidentally managed once, in the street outside our home, on the outskirts of the little town of Payette. Before we headed for the Big Time. Or whatever, for us kids, just along for the ride.)

* I studied hard, and got my grades, to help me qualify hopefully for a scholarship to university. ‘We’ didn’t have that sort of money. My mother was by then working as the bookkeeper for an oil rigging supply company. (Long Beach, my home town for my most formative years, was - besides a retirement town, where people from land-locked states like Iowa and Ohio would come to spend their last days in incarnation in the sun - an ‘oil’ town, with a section called Signal Hill, near where I lived, liberally festooned with both oil derricks and bare pumps, the latter like horse’s heads, continually dipping for drinks from the earth. Night and day they did their thing. It was a constant refrain running behind my growing up. Suck up as much as you can. Keep drinking. There’s more where that came from. You have to keep at it, or you’ll fall behind.) I did odd jobs for spending money - cleaning my mom’s company’s offices, mowing lawns, being a stock boy for a bespoke suitmaker - until I had to get more serious work for more serious pay for college. The summer before I went off to Stanford (in fact winning a good, four-year scholarship) I worked at Douglas Aircraft, one of our town’s biggest providers of employment; the next summer I and a few of my friends found work at Bethlehem Shipyard, a ship repair company, down on the docks (Long Beach is part of a major port facility; now taken over by the Chinese, as I understand, though only dimly. Can they slip things into our country in those containers that we don’t know about, like arms, or drugs, or whatever??); the summer after that I managed to get work again at Douglas. It was always a bit touch and go whether I was going to be able to afford going back to school each year. My mom helped as she could; but I always wanted to make it on my own anyway. It was my beginning of standing on my own two feet in life. No more little kid, looking up to others, but beginning to claim my space.
I still expected important things of others. But I was beginning not to rely on it. Disturbing things were beginning to take place, in my education about life. It was around this time, for example, that I discovered, through the pages of a book called Witness, that there were more things under heaven and earth than was dreamt of in my current philosophy. The book (I forget how I happened to read it; perhaps it was on the recommendation of one of my buddies, who was, for our group, uncharacteristically into political things - and who ended up working for staunch conservative Senator Barry Goldwater, before a rewarding career as a banker) was the autobiography of one Whittaker Chambers, who had been a communist in the ‘30s and ‘40s, acting as a conduit between the federal government likes of one Alger Hiss - a high official in the State Department, who had had a major role to play in the founding of the United Nations, and before that as an adviser to FDR at Yalta (where, rightwingers subsequently said, the president and Churchill sold out Europe to Stalin, occasioning what became known, shortly after the end of WWII, as the Iron Curtain) - and his Soviet handlers. The federal government, it turned out, was riddled with communists, and ‘fellow travelers’ - liberals who, although not members of The Party per se, supported its goals.
What was all this all about?
I started keeping my eyes open, more and more, to the larger picture of things. Slowly, slowly, I was being pulled out of my conditioned, small-town mentality, way of looking at life.

* I also had my share of fun. Growing up in southern California (we thought of it as Southern California: a state, a mindset of its own) in the ‘40s and ‘50s was an endless beach: that space between the serious aspects of ‘land’ and ‘sea’. Which was one of the reasons why I headed there upon dropping out of school, and before starting out seriously on my search, for answers to life Not just life in my time. But life itself. Before I really got into ‘it’ - my majority; no more kids’ stuff - I needed some serious space. To say: some healing downtime.
The beach. In my life it in fact included an area on it, at Long Beach, called The Pike. An amusement park, of all manner of rides and snack food and silliness. (And hence, I’m sure, to some exent, the roller coaster effect - affectation? - of my chosen style of writing. Trying to capture some of the excitement of the process; the potential aliveness of even words on paper.) And an outdoor stage called, fittingly, The Shell, where a municipal band would often hold sway. My buddies would have laughed at me, but I didn’t care: I used to enjoy standing there, eating and slurping a sno-cone (crushed ice with flavorings), listening to them. John Phillips Sousa. Great stuff.
I had had an exposure to music fairly early, when in about the fifth grade I was summoned to the nascent band at our elementary school of a session and asked by the female director what instrument I would like to learn to play. What? What was this all about? Only later did I realize that my mother was up to her tricks again. She wouldn’t deal with me directly in things; but often, things would just happen, wilth An Unseen Hand at work. I had returned home from school one day - I think it was the year before - and apparently indicated some dissatisfaction with my new class; next thing I knew, I was transferred to another one. It turned out that she knew the principal of our school. Voila. Anyway, I ended up learning to play the clarinet. And thereby hangs a tale, of the embarrassment, and chances, of expectations unmet.
Briefly: My mom had obviously pulled strings and got me enrolled in the classes of a man who was being paid by the City to provide music lessons for kids whose parents couldn’t afford them privately. The first piece I learned to play, I recall, was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. From such small beginnings...Once a week I would catch a city bus to some other school where a group of us students, learning to play different instruments, would have a class with him. Fred Ohlendorf was his name. How can I forget it. It - that whole episode in my life - is etched in my brain, with a fiery imprint of shame and embarrassment.
One day he asked some of us if we would like to play a piece at some get-together of some kind. (Maybe he used the word ’performance’. I don’t recall. That part of the story is not etched so strongly in my memory.) I shrugged my acquiescence. Why not. Why not, indeed...I practiced a piece of music called 'La Paloma'. (The Dove. Not to be a peaceful one for me, alas...) As the time grew nearer - the week before this shadowy event, in point of fact - and as I played it for him, for him to see how I was getting on with it, he mentioned that it would be nice if I could play it by heart. Could I do that? It didn’t seem to be a big deal, so I said sure. My last meeting with him before the performance would be a couple of nights before, at his house, in the evening; where I played it, but still with music, as I hadn’t committed it fully to heart yet. But I assured him that I would have it on the day.
What I hadn’t counted on was how grownups could by misleading. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what presented itself to me, at and in the event; which was a school auditorium full of adults. A large auditorium. Full.
And other of his students getting up, and playing their pieces, by heart. One by one...
And then it was my turn.
And I’m just this little kid... - no, let’s let that go. Yes, I was just this little kid, with no or little understanding of what all was going on in the world of adults (in this case, obviously he was showcasing his best pupils, to let the good citizens of Long Beach know that their hard-earned council tax money was going for a worthy cause), and how they could be misleading, or just confusing, at times. But still, I COULD have learned that damn thing better.
Anyway. I didn’t.
What I did do, was freeze.
Solid.
What the heck was the first note? If I can just get started...
But it didn’t grow out of the upturned faces of a thousand or more (It could’ve been five thousand, for all I knew, at that inglorious moment) of the good citizens of Long Beach. So I retired in ignominy.
La Paloma. The Dove. Peace.
Don’t believe it.
Or at least, not every time.

The experience didn’t totally wreck my budding career as a musician. I in fact recovered sufficiently from it ultimately to become first clarinet, in junior high school, first in the band and then in the orchestra. But that stage ended on a similar note, too.
I don’t feel like going into that here. Life has its ups, and its downs, and I’d rather end this episode - seeming, at the time, whole endless chapter of my life on an up note.
And as soon as I can think of one, I’ll let you know.

Hey - got it. Sort of. I was almost valedictorian of my graduating high school class.
But unfortunately, that memory brings up another bummer.
I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
Sort of.

(Sound familiar? Life can be like that.
Trust me.)


***

New York City

What did I learn there? I learned that not all is at it seems. Case in point: Christianity.

Even at that time (1955-6) there was considerable research (it seemed to be mostly by German researchers, with a fairish - sufficient? - amount of it translated) uncovering the fact that the story that has been handed down to us over the centuries has been distorted, flawed - a whole range of adjectives, only some of which was supportive of the biblical story itself (and depending on which translation of it). There was no actual evidence for such an historical personage as portrayed in those pages. There had been all manner of such god figures at the time, virgin births, three days in the ‘tomb’, regenerative in the spring; etc etc etc. What had been going on? This wasn’t history. This was fable.

Many people were living their lives on the basis of a myth. Of an untruth.

What was going on around me? How could people - these adults, that I was just beginning to be a part of - live without knowing what The Truth was, about life? There were belief systems; and I was acquainting myself with those, in depth; but - was Truth so hard to uncover? And why? And why didn’t people CARE more, about it? I would observe people in the mean streets of Manhattan, and see them walking around with their heads down, dutifully following imaginary paths in their daily lives, and wonder: how did they do it??

It got worse. My research, in books in the stacks of the New York Public Library and on the Current shelves, somehow got me stumbling over the fact that the medical Establishment seemed to have been responsible for squelching promising alternative treatments for cancer.5

And on. And on. And on.

I was soon coming to the conclusion that much of what we took for the truth, wasn’t. Or at least, wasn’t fully.

And worse: that we were intentionally being lied to.

Or at least, that the Powers That Be were being economical with the truth...

It was all of a piece.

Grownups couldn’t be trusted.

Something happened in the process, of growing up on the planet, that stunted, filtered, astigmatised Truth.

It seemed to be in the nature of the accumulation of power. The power of the status quo. The power of Authority.

Copernicus. Galileo...

One had to press hard to get one’s truth - to get Truth - through the established order.

This wasn’t going to be easy, I realized, early on in the search, and whatever consequences it would help bring about.6

***

It hasn‘t been.

But I keep at it.

Because I must.

And so must you. If you are ever to get to the solid, rock bottom of your core of being - beneath the personaliy level, of any given incarnation of your soul, and down to the bedrock. In the Source of your being. And Being Itself.

Which is what is being asked of us today.

To leave the drama behind - the drama stage of our soul’s journey in separation - and get to the real thing.

As closely as we can access - interface with - that reality, in bringing more of it into our daily lives.

And redeeming our earth - Gaia; this living part of the Whole - in the process.



End Part One



Footnotes

1 Our mom used to ship my older brother and me up to our paternal grandparents - then living in the East Bay area of San Francisco (Richmond); from where we were living by then in the L.A. area with our mother (Long Beach) - for the summers. (When she would then do whatever. It was always something of a mystery; she didn’t talk much about that part of her life. She didn’t talk much about herself, period, for that matter. Only later did I find out that she liked - tried? - to hobnob with Hollywood types. Dreams don’t die easily...see below.) Until the summer that we were shipped up there to stay with our father, then living in the same town, with his new wife, and their baby daughter, and who then proceeded to brainwash us (actually, more my brother than me; I was just a little kid, just along for the ride) into staying on with him. Which occasioned a sheriff to appear at the door of our house at the end of one school day, with our mom sitting inside his police car, and we were quickly bundled inside it; to take the long trip home, in a car driven by our mother (I don’t think her boss boyfriend was there at that time; I could be mistaken on this point of fact), in an uncomfortable silence. Grownups’ stuff; it was all a bit of a mystery to me. I was, then, as I say, just along for the ride (I was 11 or 12 at the time). But I get ahead of myself., in this chronicle, of my time, and our time, in our mutual history, on this lovely planet called Earth; where the ride is getting a little more complex for us all.



2 I’m also leaving out the part where, thwarted in her attempt to ‘make it’ in Hollywood, she returned home and, now divorced, moved us two kids up to Boise, Idaho ‘with’ her, while she went to secretarial school. I set off in quotes the ‘with’ because we grew up in a home with an elderly couple who took in kids for a living.
And then, while there, there was a curious episode where some man took me and my brother to live with him somewhere far away - near ‘the longest bridge in the world’ (the Golden Gate bridge, I was to learn later, about this kidnaping episode in our lives); and then, after some few weeks, as I recall, dimly, somehow we ended up back where we had started; with the elderly couple, on the edge of a large park, that I would spend many pre-school hours playing in; collecting acorn kernels, and splashing in the water of the summertime irrigations of it in my bare feet and apricot-colored swimming outfit, and swinging on the swing set as high as I could, before bailing out bravely into the far reaches of the sand pit (mimicking my older brother), and returning home for lunchtime sandwiches, of peanut butter and jelly (a lifelong enjoyment and treat, in part by association, in part by nature), cut neatly into four squares by ‘Grandma Coble’.
They were the only ‘parents’ I ever knew, in my earliest days. There was a woman, living nearby, whom my brother and I would go see sometimes; but I never really figured out what her role was in our lives. (“C’mon, we’re going to Mom’s for Christmas presents.” What’s a mom? I wondered.) Until one day we were dressed up and taken to her ‘wedding’, and subsequently went to live with her and the man she had ‘married’, in a smaller town in Idaho. Some sort of progress going on...and then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and she talked her ‘husband’ into moving to southern California (for good work in the shipyards or aircraft plant, he told us later; after she had divorced him, hopefully for a better, to say richer, man), where we moved during the summer before my third grade in school.
The main memory I have of this time in the small town in the northern state of Idaho is that I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t going to be needing our sleds where we were going. Why didn’t they have winters there?? Confusing stuff, this grown-ups stuff.



3 during which I remember hearing, on the radio, in my motel room, Ike - Pres. Eisenhower - give a speech on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations; an occasion that I had been present for, in San Francisco - where I was for the day, while our dad was checking out the possibility of joining a team of chiropractors at their main street/Telegraph Road practice - and watched from the sidewalk (more accurately, sitting on the curb) as the leaders of the world’s nations paraded by in their convertibles. Little did I know then that I would be challenging them, one day...
If I had known, would it have made any difference?? Interesting questions, about our time lines of incarnation, and the concept of free will, and so forth. Which type of thing I was, in that present time, about to explore, in depth.
As deep as it took, to find out the answers to life; and all that jazz.



4 Later - after I had accepted to go into the military, in those days of the draft; though only as a conscientious objector - when I was serving my two years of military service, stationed in Korea, my mom mentioned in a letter that she had gone to a psychic woman during my footloose year in New York City, before ’the draft’ caught up with me, who had told her, among other things, that she had seen me crossing a large body of water. Well, that described the Pacific, all right...it was also a subject that I had started to explore in my search for answers to life. Psychic powers, or the lack thereof; the roots behind all the world religions; spiritualism, reincarnation, meditation, the origins of civilization on the planet, who was really running things, and for what purposes; UFOs - it was all up for exploration, and the adventures of the mind.
I was never attracted to physical adventure per se. Not enough time. All those books to read...



5 It was Krebiozen in those days; and the Gerson Diet/Therapy; and the Hoxsey Treatment. And there have been many since. Laetrile. The Royal Raymond Rife microscope. Dr. Otto Warburg’s findings about the oxygen (respiration vs. fermentation) factor. Dr. Virginia Livingston-Wheeler and her autogenous vaccines, and pleomorphic thesis of the cancer microbe.. Treatments researched by the Health Sciences Institute, a holistic medical association, including HZ. The list goes on.
Are all of these treatments the ‘quackery’ that they have been labeled? Maybe some of them. But the likes of Wikepedia are not very wise in their estimations about such things, considering the vested interests involved. The allopathic medical establishment - really, the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex - has proven, over and over again, that it is not above resorting to chicanery to keep its hands, and sometimes very fists, tightly on the reins of power. Which corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.
As we well know, by now, in our checquered history on this planet; of a race that has lost its way, for having lost its vision, of what life is really all about, beneath the personality level, and into the soul level of the experience.



6 This theme is reminding me that in my New York City 'Blue Period' I also came across the writings of J.D. Salinger; who has - as I write this - just died, at the ripe old age of 91.
I hope a treasure trove of his work over ‘the lost years’ is found, and published. And I announce herewith that I don’t care what the critics think of it. I care. Because he had a unique, and authentic, voice, that I, and many others, could resonate with.
His theme of wanting to get beyond the ‘phoniness’ of life, and people, is certainly one I can relate to; as this memoir surely indicates. He, in his way, was striving for the same thing I was, and am, searching for.
Truth. Capital T.
Here was a writer after my own heart. Even if I couldn’t, and still can’t, quote him BY heart.

And really, where DO the ducks go, in the winter, when the ponds freeze over??

I think, if I ever find out, that I’ll find my childhood sled there, too.