Autobiographical Essays on My Life

I decided to compile some essays I wrote in college Creative Writing Classes on my life. I took the ones I like the best and put them here online. Since they were written at different times some aspects of my life will repeat themselves in various ways. However, each essay is written on a different aspect of my life and each are addressing different subjects in general. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did on reading them for the first time in several years. I have been wanting to do something like this for some time but things didn't come together for it to happen until now. Please enjoy!

Preface to all the Essays

What I am publishing here online is not only a partial history of my present life as Fred Hartzell but also a history of my spiritual life and evolution during this lifetime. It is written and compiled in the hope that it will help make your lives and spiritual quests more survivable and helpful and that you too can evolve past wanting to take your own life when life gets too unbearable to even consider living another day! There is so much joy in life if we can just make it through the miserable parts. Take your life in your own hands and Create a life you can stand to live. Co-Create with God a life than contains as much joy and life as possible.

A New Lifetime-1948

written in 2000 AD put online May 31st 2005

In order to properly start with 1948 and my birth I need to begin with my conception in summer 1947. After having been married a little over a year to my father, my mother wanted a child. My father was 31 and wasn't sure about being a father. So my mother tricked him into having me by telling him she was already pregnant even though she knew full well she wasn't.

I think at some time during my life she told him the truth but I'm not clear exactly when that happened. However, when she confided in me this incident I was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old and she seemed to take great glee in sharing this with me like it had been a burden to keep this secret. Maybe this was because she knew if she hadn't done this she never would have become a mother. Mom identified very much with Mary, the mother of Jesus so for her having me was for her like having Jesus. However, this way of thinking is a lot to lay on any child.

On April 28th, I was born a little after midnight in the first few minutes of the new day. I was 24 inches long and the tallest baby ever born at Waldo Memorial Hospital in Seattle.

My mother speaks to me of going to her church in Seattle. It was a very unusual religion for that time and era. It was very similar to Christian Science and Church of Religious Science and Unity. She and my father believed that people followed in the footsteps of Christ to become like him through perserverance and reincarnation.

In this religion affirmations and what they called decrees were given in unison invoking what they wished from God. They were less asking for things and were more seeing themselves as the sons and daughters of God and as Co-creators with God. A part of this religion was demanding their rights as Sons and Daughters of God to become physically manifest and spiritually manifest here on Earth.

From my present vantage point of 52 I look back upon all this in an entirely different light than I was taught as a child. I have experienced first hand just how good and how bad these types of dynamic invocations can be. It is my personal experience that when a compassionate right mindful and wise person issues these dynamic prayers that they can do great good for all. However, when unbalanced immature souls issue these same types of degrees they can create great havoc in people's lives and all they touch. Compassion towards all life in the universe, as well as wisdom and maturity are absolutely necessary for good results ongoing!

My mother later told me that she thought all these decrees affected me in the womb before birth as well as after birth she hoped in a positive way. It could be said that I was trained in "higher consciousness" even before birth as well as after birth.

My mother was always a very special person. I always admired my mother's singing voice and compassionate speaking voice and a general common sense and levelheadedness that I found absent from most women in the 1950's. It wasn't that most women weren't capable it was just that they didn't seem to be encouraged in their true capabilities by society in the 1950's. Because of the compassion, love and wisdom that I was always given by my mother and my grandmother who lived with us I have always revered women.

Mother prayed to a being her religion called the Elohim Hercules. He was one of Seven Elohim who supposedly built the Solar System. It was believed that a seven fold flame existed in spirit on the forehead of every human symbolic of each human soul being like a child of the Elohim.

While on the Cross Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic, "Eloi! Eloi! Lama Sabacthani" There are at least two translations or more. The best translation direct to English is, "My God, My God, how thou hast glorified me!" In this statement by Jesus "Eloi" is a plural noun for God that in English has become now Elohim.

My mother later believed that her prayers to the Elohim Hercules, Lord of the Blue Ray and spiritual Strength with the Solar System caused me to be very tall and strong as a child and adult. I personally believe my spiritual strength was invoked during my gestation period.

Later in life I watched so many people lose hope in their spirits whereas each time my life became difficult it only seemed to make me grow spiritually stronger in the long run. This doesn't mean I haven't been severely tested over and over again. It just means that no matter how bad I was crushed or destroyed I always seemed to be able to rebound unlike many people I have known.

I believe I owe my spiritual strength to God, and to my spiritual teachers which include my parents, relatives and friends.

Next Essay

Early Memories of Seattle and Mt. Shasta

These memories begin with seeing Arcangel Michael and his Band when I was two sitting on my Scottish Grandmother's lap while she sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing". I saw Arcangel Michael and his band appear in jeweled armor and smile at me as if I was one of them. The feeling I got from them was that they were holy soldiers for God. I also felt like I was one of them and that I too was a protector of the human race. This and other visitations by angels and masters set the tone of my whole life on into adulthood.

I can remember playing outside the duplex that sat next to my grandfather's house on his 2 1/2 acres of land covered with apple and cherry trees and rasberries and blackberries. It was near Seattle where my mother and father grew up. My Mom from very young and my Dad from 12 to 15 years old when his Dad bought his acreage there.

Random Memories of early childhood

I'm 2 or 3 Mommy is singing along with Mario Lanza on the record player. The music and the power and quality of my mother's voice amazed me and brought me to tears. Very little made me feel as peace or as inspired as when my mother sang---

I was interested in an expensive clock sitting on a mantle so I grabbed the electric cord and pulled it off. It broke and everyone was mad at me. I just wanted to see how it worked and to take it apart. I was 2 or 3.---

I want to go outside. They put my blue snowsuit on. I can barely stand up in it. I'm two or three. It's very cold and windy outside and the snow is blowing---

I'm 4 years old in Seattle. I'm riding my toy car up and down the cement driveway with my cousin Billy and my cousin Janice. Billy's 5 years older and Janice 7 years older---

My little girlfriend next door who is my age doesn't give me a toy so I push her down the cement stairs. Granpa knows just what to do. He beats my butt so I don't do it again!(consequences)

I'm 4. I walk several acres down a hill to Margaret's house but on the way I stir up a hornet's nest. They sting me many times so I run home screaming. Granpa knows just what to do. I show him the hornet's nest. He pours gasoline on it and lights it. No more hornets. I think that moment I knew I loved my Grandpa and appreciated him more than any other time---

I'm 4. My big cousin Billy takes me to a frog pond and show me frogs eggs. My concept of the galaxy and even the whole universe by holding hundreds of gelatanous frogs eggs in my hands that day. I felt all the life in my hands. I felt like God as I put the eggs back in the pond to become frogs---

I'm 4. That same summer we take the train to San Diego. We stay in California after that. I only saw Grandpa a few times in my life after that. He liked me because I'm a lot like him by nature. We both naturally love and worship nature. My Dad and his sister look the most like him in real life---

California 1952

On the train ride down I wore formal clothes. My mother bought me a trench coat and a briefcase like a little businessman and gentleman. If people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up my answer was, "I want to be a gentleman when I grow up." I looked the part even though inside my briefcase was a raggedy Ann an d Andy doll and comic books. I was 4 so the trip with my Mom and Grandma to San Diego by train was a long one and not as fun as Mom had expected. I guess travelling on a train even with one's own sleeper compartment was as fun as she thought it would be because she had a 4 year old to occupy. I don't think Mom was really prepared to be the mother of a boy child. All the better to figure ways to get what I wanted while I was still young.

Even then I knew I was smarter than Mom or Nana(her mother). I loved them but I had them both wrapped around my little finger. But don't get me wrong. I worshipped them both and would do anything to help or protect them. After all, at 4 I was almost grown up according to 1952 standards of male behavior. Seattle had strong English and Canadian influences in the local culture whereas San Diego had an entirely different flavor of Mexican named streets and towns and laid back attitudes that were culturally completely different than Seattle and Canada. Soon I was a Californian and enamored with all the craziness and what I now call Controlled Chaos that Southern California excels in. Unless one lives in southern California for several years one does not get just how deep this experimentalism goes. But it is not a naive experimentalism, it is a practical and efficient experimentalism that lives in California.

Bicycles and Beyond

When I was 5 for my birthday(this would be april 1953) I was given a 24 inch bike(which was actually too big for me). So I was given a foot tall log or board to step on so I could actually step on to ride the bike. The other thing I was given was a jackknife. Back then every boy had to have one. So I promptly tested to see if it was sharp on my right thumb. I still have a scar across my right thumbprint from that experiment. My mother didn't believe in stitches unless you were going to bleed to death or something so butterfly bandages sealed the wound and kept me from bleeding to death out my right thumb.

Later I tried to jump the bike off a three foot tall dirt cliff and failed and wound up in the middle of the street with all my eyelashes and right eyebrow ground off from the macadam road. I always took things to the edge but always survived somehow.

I'm climbing the apricot tree in the backyard at our rented house with a big yard in El Cajon, California. I'm picking and eating apricots with my best friend across the street, Danny Barsocks. We also ride bicycles together. One day his dog got excited and bit me in my stomache and left teeth marks and made me cry. I also started watching superman on TV at Danny's house there in El Cajon. We didn't get a TV until 1954. El Cajon was 1953 and I was 5. Dad bought property near Escondido, California from a development owned by some health guy named Pretorius. He bought 2 1/2 acres. He cleared the land with a bull dozer and killed several rattlesnakes with a dirt shovel. One was 3 inches wide and 7 feet long. because he didn't want it to bite me or him. When I was 20 I had to pull out my pistol and shoot a rattlesnake too because it was too near humans and someone was going to get bit. It was a Mojave green sidewinder that are small but 9 times as poisonous as a diamond back rattler. Most people who were bitten by green mojave sidewinder rattlers died back then because they take much more antitoxin for people to survive their bite than a diamondback rattler.

While I was 5 and eating the ripe apricots while sitting in a tree with my best friend Danny Barsocks little did I know that we were going to move again soon to Tujunga, California near the mountains in Los Angeles County. There I met another Danny who became my friend even though he shot me with his BB gun in the leg. Luckily I had jeans on so it only made a black and blue mark the size of a 50 cent piece. But it hurt a lot.

I was in first and second grade in Tujunga. One day a boy banged DAnny's and my head together on the way home. This hurt a lot so we decided not to walk by that boys house again as he was older and we knew we couldn't win a fight with a boy that old. We were 6. So we took another route home that was more physically dangerous but we were less afraid of running accross a busy four lane highway with traffic than getting hurt again by that boy. As we ran across the highway many cars almost hit us and honked and people screamed at us but we didn't care because we weren't hurt. A teacher from our school stopped and asked us why we were doing this and we told her about the boy that had banged our heads together. She asked us to point out the boy later in school. We did so and never saw him again.

I rode my bike one day barefoot but my jeans pantleg got caught in the pedal spokes which caused me to crash my bike and my toes got hurt in the bike spokes. After that I decided to always wear shoes while riding a bike.

I got into a silly fight while fighting over a toy in a friends backyard. We grabbed each others faces and squeezed so both of us were getting hurt. His mother sent me home even though my friend had started the fight. I decided fighting was really stupid and it hurt a lot and nothing was ever gained so I decided not to fight if I could survive without it. I never started any physical fights after that. I was 6. Luckily, I was usually one of the biggest kids in each of my classes so people knew if they made me mad enough I might seriously hurt them because I was always very strong. So I learned that bluffing and attitude could go a long way and usually prevent major fights.

When I was 12 I grew from 5 foot 2 to 5 foot 10. Since I was almost 6 feet tall and very strong my father set me down and said to me, "Freddie, if you ever get really mad you might kill someone. If you get really mad no one will be able to stop you until someone is dead. You have to be disciplined enough not to get goaded into fights because you will kill someone if they make you mad and you lose control." I took what my Dad said very seriously because I knew he was right and I didn't want to kill someone by accident if they made me angry enough. I learned through will power how to handle any situation. I found that I was usually more intelligent than people who goaded me. I stayed alive and so did they.

When I was 8 we moved again to Glendale, California to be nearer to the church my parents were in charge of. Mom mostly worked at the church while Dad worked as an Electrician until I was 12 and then started his own Electrical Contracting Business. They gave up being in charge of the church because my mother's father died and she had a mini nervous breakdown and then my Dad started his Electrical Contracting Business. I Started working for him summers. I found I like working with my Dad. I could make money and see who my Dad was around men. I found he was totally different on the job than when he was with Mom. I found I liked being around the Man's man that my Dad was. People who worked in Construction swore a lot and teased and made fun of each other. I liked that one always knew where they stood. If you insulted a construction worker you could expect a fight or worse. It was like a battleground if one wasn't careful how one dealt with them. I learned to respect my father because most of these men thought that Dad was a great guy because he told funny stories and always made the men laugh. Dad didn't swear around MOm or Nana or me at home but boy did he swear with the men on the job and laugh. Everyone was always laughing when Dad was there. And yet he was a workaholic and worked harder than anyone. Once when my Dad worked in San Diego the company laid off 300 electricians and kept him because he outworked them all. That was Dad, a joke telling workaholic who was proud of his abilities as an electrician.

His Dad wouldn't let him go to college and become an electrical engineer like Dad had wanted to. But recently I realized that during the Great depression of the 1930's most Electrical Engineers were starving without jobs. However, Electricians and tradesmen were always needed and working. Grandpa understood something Dad and his brother Bob didn't.

The day in Tujunga when Danny and I almost got hit by four lanes of traffic my Mom's Mom who lived with us, "Nana" broke her ankle. She came up to meet me the new way across the Eucalyptus forest and broke her ankle. She was 66 years old and lived with us.

She had taken care of me since she was 60 years old when she had a stroke when her husband left and was in a coma for one month. Mom said she was a different person when she emerged from the coma. She was less stressed and more mellow. Mom thought that God sent someone to care for me in her new Mom.

Nana lived with us after Mom and Dad married in 1946 and mostly stayed with us until I was 21 except for a short time when I was 12 to 14. During that time she was so upset to be living away from us that she over medicated herself and almost died so Mom eventually had her live with us again.

When we lived in Poway, California. Nana turned 80 in 1968 so when she was 82 in 1970 she went to live with Mom's 2 sisters in Seattle. She passed away in 1978 when she was 90. Mom's two sisters both passed away at age 90 also in Seattle.

The 60's and Beyond

A month after I turned 16 I bought myself a 1956 Ford Station wagon. I called it my surf wagon and reversed the rear shackles so it was on a rake. In other words the rear end of the car was higher than the front which made it not only look "cool' but was very interesting if you had to turn fast. Your rear tires might slide in the direction of the turn. One day Mike and I and 2 other friends cut school and went to Malibu in my surf wagon with 10 foot surfboards hanging out the back to surf. One of the guys stole a plastic squeeze bottle of mustard from a burger joint and was drinking mustard on the 1 hour drive back home. I didn�t realize he was jealous of my owning my own car. Unbeknownst to me he sprayed mustard down the back of my car during the drive. It had discolored the paint by the time I found out. He never drove anywhere with me again.

There were two beautiful identical twin girls that lived down the street from me. I asked Sharon, the twin I knew best to go to Malibu beach with me. She had long brown hair and a great personality and figure and green eyes you could easily fall into. However, neither she nor I were comfortable dating anyone yet. I felt very strange with her on the beach. We kissed a couple of times but the communication just wasn't there between us. Neither of us felt the magic I guess even though the beach was beautiful. Later I met Gayle and asked her out. She was a blonde haired blue eyed girl from Anchorage, Alaska. I think I liked her beauty her freshness and her out in the country vibe. She liked to go to movies and to Ice Skate so we did both frequently. However, something was still missing for me. I asked a girl from church who was 21 to go to a political rally with me. She said, "Yes." And so we went. However, we wound up at a drive in theatre instead. She was very surprised at her feelings for me as she was 21 and I was only 16. We went steady for about 1 year. We would go to Mulholland Drive and kiss and make out until 4 am sometimes on weekends. Sometimes I miss those days terribly before going all the way. Of just making out and sweet talk and the innocent trivial things that lovers can do like listening to music and watching the stars and all the city lights from high up.

We used to have really great philosophical conversations like what we were going to do with our lives? Where would we travel to? Would we ever marry? What would the future bring? Once real sex came into a relationship it was always stressful. We both usually knew that if we didn't stay together we probably couldn't be friends. Sex kills good friendships usually unless you keep dating. That was a sad truth I hadn't really experienced up close yet in my relative innocence.

Whether it was with a girlfriend I was dating or just climbing mountains or surfing with male friends I think I enjoyed most the philosophical conversations we had of wondering if there was a God and what life was really about? What did we love? What did we hate? What could we tolerate? And most of all "What was the point of it all anyway?" When I look back at those times I was always happiest when trying to figure it out. I don't think anyone ever completely figures it out. I think at some point you just have to pretend you have it together so you don't frighten your kids with the truth. Which is "Kids, No one really knows everything or really has it completely together. It's all a bluff. And the biggest and best bluff wins. "Look! I've got a great Bluff. I live in an affluent house in an affluent neighborhood about 1 mile from the beach and within 2 hours of the San Francisco Bay. But am I really happy. NO! I'm not. I'm content. I don't think I've ever been happy for more than a few months or years in my entire life. Now isn't that a scary thought?

At age 17 I started going out with Bonnie. She was 18 at the time. She went to LA State University and I was a junior in High School. She was a very intelligent and very beautiful blonde blue eyed amazing woman, a real handful. I had fantasies of marrying her. But I was a little too young. When she was 22 she married a Texas millionaire and moved to Austin, Texas to live there with him. I remember one time I rented a motorcycle to take a ride with Bonnie. Back then you didn't need a special license to ride a motorcycle or to wear helmets so motorcycle deaths were pretty common on freeways and around town in L.A.,California.

Anyway, Bonnie and I took off on a motorcycle up the Angeles Crest Hiway up into the Ponderosa pines that grow above 4000 to 5000 feet in the Angeles National Forest. We had fun while riding up. We drove as far as Mt. Wilson Observatory which is about 6000 feet in elevation and looks directly down on LA. Back then there were relay towers for all the television stations as cable tv wasn't common like it is now and almost everyone in LA had roof aerials to receive the then 12 stations available in LA. On our way down the mountain I got behind a slowpoke and decided to pass on a blind curve. Anyway, someone was coming the other direction. There was only a one or two inch clearance from each handlebar as the two cars passed each other on the one lane each direction mountain road with me and Bonnie in the middle. I white knuckled it and thought that we were both dead. I decided not to tell Bonnie we had almost been killed as she was behind hanging dearly on to me not understanding fully the situation. I was still pretty shook up inside when we returned the motorcycle to the rental agency and drove her home in my car. However, I hid my feelings as it was bad enough that I alone knew that we had come within an inch or two of dying at about 70 mph on a mountain road.

After a wonderful summer with Bonnie in 1965 I started my senior year at Glendale High School again. I had grown up so much the last few years that I found it impossible to go back to high school. It just felt so dumb and immature to be back in high school learning the same things in a different form that I had basically learned by 4th grade. I decided to drop out of High School and go to work. Dropping out of high school and getting ones own place was a pretty common thing those days. Girls I knew were getting pregnant at 15 and married at 16. I remember how confused I felt when I accidentally met friends in a drug store. They were 16, one was carrying a baby and they were both my age. They told me they had gotten married and had had this baby. I felt so confused by this I thought I was going to throw up. I just couldn�t imagine getting someone pregnant and getting married at 16. However, by 17 I could imagine going to work, dropping out of school and doing whatever I wanted.

Luckily for me my parents interceded. My mother and father sat me down and said, "Why don't you go to our church�s private school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Remember your friend Victor? Didn't he ask you to please come to Santa Fe and go to the church school so you could hang out and ski and explore the area? I thought seriously about this. If I went to Santa Fe I wouldn't have to work full time and I could have fun and not have to deal with my parents for 6 or 7 months. I agreed.

So in the middle of October 1965 in my senior year of high school I went to the train station in Pasadena nearby. Bonnie went with us. She was crying. She was very in love with me and hated to see me go. Though I loved her to I was young and arrogant and fickle and immature. Many times I wish I could have been mature enough to stay in L.A. and possibly eventually marry Bonnie. However, that was not to be. Remember I was only 17. What do you expect?

So I kissed Bonnie goodbye and hugged my parents. As I climbed up on the Santa Fe bound El Capitan train I wondered if I was making a mistake. I met many interesting people the next 18 hours or so on board the train. It was the first time I had ever traveled away from my parents this distance in my life. I went through many changes the next 18 to 20 hours. I also met many people from all over the US. The easiest to talk to were the men in uniform about my age returning from Viet Nam. I was struck by their strangeness. Even though they were within 2 years of my age all their youth had been sucked out of them. They were men in all the full awfulness of the word men. I vowed then to find a way not to get sucked into Viet Nam. However, without my father I believe I would have been drafted and gone within one year of turning 18.

After graduating from a private High School In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the next thing I had to worry about was the draft. Many 18 year olds like myself were getting drafted and going off to Viet Nam to get mentally messed up or killed. It always seemed to be one of the other or just getting physically and mentally maimed for life. Though I wasn't looking forward to this. I was very patriotic as that was how I was raised. I felt a duty to go if asked. In Santa Fe on my 18th birthday my father had called and told me to go to the Post Office to register for the draft. He told me to let them know that I might need a medical deferment. I didn't know what he had in mind at the time but I did know I had had sunstroke which meant I didn't do well in continual heat and that I had had Childhood epilepsy which meant I would have a seizure at night about once every 6 months while dreaming and worrying about a school test or something between ages 10 and 15. When I returned home he took me to my LA doctor, and got me a 4F. I was very surprised.

My father was a very intense person. I was 18 and was not going to get killed or maimed physically or mentally like my friends. I felt a little guilty. I felt even more guilty when a roommate of mine turned out to secretly be an army deserter and had to go to jail for 5 years when he went home to Minnesota. I also felt bad when another friend had to move to Canada with his wife and children to avoid the draft. Another friend had volunteered for the marines and became a Sergeant and was told to take his platoon into an area where nothing would be accomplished and they would all be killed so he refused to do it and got dishonorably discharged. However, the next sergeant to take his platoon was killed along with most of his men for nothing. Although he felt sick about it at least he was alive and could live with his conscience. Crazy times.

When I was 21 my parents moved to San Diego so I lived for a few months with my Aunt in the Hollywood Hills. The swimming pool was great but it finally got strange and I wanted to move. I got fired from a job working as an electrician for taking an extra day of vacation so I got another job in Venice, California as an electrician and crew leader wiring a large apartment building there. A free apartment on the beach was part of the pay. Within a few weeks I got two roommates to share expenses. We began to party with neighbors and friends on weekends. I suppose it was a lot like Haight Ashbury in San Francisco then in fall 1969.

Within 3 months I was getting way to weird and moved out and decided to stay with my parents in San Diego. People were dying from drug overdoses or going to jail a lot that I knew of. I realized Venice was just too strange a place for me to survive. So I left my apartment to my friends and moved to San Diego.

About this same time I was excommunicated from my parents' church. This was very hard on me as I had many friends world wide that I had known since being a child and they were forbidden to have any communication at all with me or they would be excommunicated too. This seemed very unchristian and this began to turn me against all churches because of the hypocrisy I was experiencing. I moved toward becoming more spiritual but less religious. I realized right then that religions are only political and that they have absolutely nothing to do with ones real experiences with God. One does not need a relationship with a church or even a priest or minister. One should be ones own priest and create a direct connection to God. Everything else seems to wind up being a very sick joke over time. I have seen so many peoples lives completely destroyed by churches, ministers, and religious crazies. I firmly believe more people are in the nut house from religious crazies than from any other cause.

From November 1969 until fall 1971 was basically hell for me. I came very close to killing myself during this time. A few genuinely spiritual people saved me from death. But I would not call any of them religious. Balanced spiritual people are the salt of the earth and religious fanatics of all persuasions are to be avoided because if you listen to them they will destroy your life or you will kill yourself because of their infectious religious insanities. Obviously, I survived it all and am hopefully a better person for it. Survival for me is the capacity to say in my mind to someone. "NO! I'm going to go my own way even if I have to die trying. If you can't be true to yourself you don't really exist anyway. You are just a cultural or religious biological robot. When the going gets tough the tough get going!

Next Essay

The Terror of God, of Life and of Death

I was showering this morning and I got it very strong to talk to you about the terror in my life as a child. I suppose the beginning of my terror was birth. I was born into the land that had murdered my previous body. Though even in that body I had secretly loved America, the reality was that they had murdered me and that I had died a horrible death at age 12 or 13 and now I was being born in the U.S. I was being born in the U.S. precisely because they had killed me. My memory was of being about 12 when I died at Nagasaki. Though I remember lifetimes before this the trauma of that death affects me in this life through my bout with whooping cough and childhood epilepsy. It was my karma to be born to the American people that had caused my death. This is the real way karma works. I love being an American now as an adult. However, for a soul the conversion from being Japanese, dying by nuke and then being born to those responsible was difficult emotionally for my soul to endure.

My first physical terror that I had to face other than birth itself was whooping cough. My parents religion didn't believe in vaccinations so I never received any until I was 15 and that was a tetanus shot for a dog bite. They always signed a religious waiver so I never had to have shots at school for anything. As an adult I realized that I had developed what is known as herd immunity. I was exposed to so many adults and children that had gotten shots that I became immune to everything as well. However, I wasn't immune to whooping cough and would turn blue often at age two the 6 months I had it when I couldn't get my breath and I almost died from suffocation many times.

When I look back upon that time I believe that I was too positive and demanding for my parents and I got whooping cough in order to be put into a more fearful obedient form that both they and the world could cope with. Though I survived whooping cough I became very fearful and shy because of my near death experience. It was as if the world was not ready for me and that I was forced to pretend I was someone else. So that is what I did. I tried to act how my parents and others wanted me to and became very passive aggressive. But I survived!

I remember being 8 years old and walking home with a friend from grade school in Glendale California. He told me how awful his life was. His father had beat him and left his mother and he alone. They had no money and barely had enough food to eat. I told him my life was okay and that I had a father, a mother, a grandmother, a bicycle and that we had a car. At which point he started beating me up. I felt sorry for him so I didn't hurt him back and only fended off the blows. He was sitting on my chest trying to hit my face when my father drove up and he ran away crying. I felt very strange. I was embarrassed to have my father see this boy on my chest trying to hurt me but I also felt very sorry for my very confused friend. My father asked me why I didn't hurt him or stop him and I said I felt sorry for him. I was always very big for my age so kids my age normally knew better than to pick fights with someone as big as me.

When I was about 9 I had heatstroke and for about and hour everything looked like a camera sees when you put on a yellow filter. The next year I was 10 and doing my newspaper route early one Sunday morning. I came home and went back to sleep at 6 am. A Black hand formed in my dreams and strangled me. Somehow this caused me to have my first epileptic seizure. During the next few years The Black hand eventually turned into an electrical tornado in my dreams that ripped off my dream head and arms and legs which caused me to go into a seizure. This continued about once every 6 months until I was 15. Since these seizures were much more terrifying than being stabbed or otherwise murdered I considered suicide during this period of my life. I became afraid of going to sleep because I thought I might not survive the next terrifying dream and seizure. At age 14 I had a particularly difficult experience with this. As I fought my way back into my body after experiencing dream dismemberment in a dream state I regained enough control of my body to try to run to my parents bedroom for help. Unfortunately, my bedroom door was ajar and I hit the end of the door with my nose and face and was knocked completely unconscious. My parents heard the loud bang and thud of my body hitting the floor unconscious and found me with a pool of blood surrounding my head on the floor from my broken nose. After an hour I awoke shaking. Since I couldn't stand yet I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall thinking and shaking from the trauma that I wouldn't survive another experience this bad.

I decided that I needed God in my life. Before this I was beginning to move toward agnosticism because of what I generally perceived to be the basic childishness and silliness of religion. However, there are no atheists in foxholes and I was definitely in a foxhole fighting for my life! Even as an agnostic I still used telepathy and other gifts. I saw no discontinuity in this as I saw telepathic gifts as a useful part of instinct and intuition common to all animals and people. I knew that all animals and people could develop their gifts if they found it necessary or useful in some way.

During the next year I fully lived the concept called Fear of God. In fact it went beyond fear to Terror of God. I went to church 3 times a week and learned to pray and invoke God in formal and informal ways. I had been attending church regularly for about 1 year when my next seizure tried to happen. However, this time I was ready. Instead of running as a soul in terror I faced the energy tornado of my dreams. Instead of letting it decapitate and dismember my dream body I said though terrified, " I AM in control here!" I was speaking powerfully as a co-creator with God in unison. Instead of being dismembered in my dream the energy tornado surrounded me and became my army of energy and light. I was still frightened like a King who is worried his army might turn on him but I felt a power that was and is amazing. It was a complete spirit rebirth for me. Instead of victim in my body I was empowered by God in my body.

Within 3 months my physical appearance completely changed and I was on my way to an entirely new kind of life than I had ever known before. There was still fear of God, and respect for God but now I was also empowered by God. During the next year I became fed up with people I met that spent all their lives terrified and cringing and moaning and living like Victims of God. I thought to myself, "Well maybe living like that is better than those people hurting or killing others but that isn't how I want to live." I thought to myself, "If I'm going to have to be a spiritual being to be allowed by God to live in a physical body on Earth then I'm going to have fun doing it! It was then I first coined the words 'Alchemy of Joy!' For when I had fun doing God's work it just expanded and expanded and expanded and became more and more fun.

My family always worshiped efficiency and logic. So I used this capacity to try to figure out how I could help the most humans the quickest and most efficient way possible. I have been playing that fun game now for 37 years since I was 15. I found that I could do more quietly than any other way. Some people like to be public but I found there was absolutely no resistance to God if one just acted in God given supernatural ways. This reminds me of an old saying. "Be careful how you treat others for you might meet angels unawares". In other words, "You don't know necessarily if you meet angels unless they tell you." Even then you might not believe them. So my theory is that most angels don't say a word about who they are.

Throughout my late teens and early 20's I found myself fighting supernatural battles out of body with my sword of light in hand like my friend Archangel Michael.

In 1980 I learned a new way. This way took away my fear. I met a Tibetan Lama and then many Lamas and Monks of the Tibetan Buddhist Lineages in California, Oregon, and in 1985-6 in India and Nepal.

This new way was much more efficient. The easiest way I can explain it is to not think of things as good or bad but to look at everything in life like one does the weather. Is rain good or bad? It is both and neither. Is Snow Good or bad. It is both and neither. I loved a bumper sticker I saw recently. It said, 'Rain Happens!' as opposed to 'Magic happens' or 'Shit happens.' In addition to 'Rain Happens!' I would like to see bumper stickers of Snow happens Or Life happens , or even Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

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Addicted to Love -1969

Originally written 2002

Just like the song. It was the craziest most tumultuous year of my life. The year started innocently enough. I was 20 and one of the youngest computer programmers and computer operators in North Hollywood, California. I was going steady with a girl who was attending a University in Michigan. We had gone steady for 2 years. She would fly out to LA every summer where I worked and lived and spend summers nearby me. I had planned the next 20 years of my life around her as we planned to marry as soon as she got her Bachelors degree. My parents openly bragged about my young success. I bought myself my first new car, a brand new 1968 Camaro just a few months before. Everything was great or was it? Why did I feel so much like I wanted to end it all? My parents were proud of me. I had a brand new car. I was engaged to be married. Why was I so internally at war with myself? Could it be because I worked Midnight to Noon seven Days a week with computers?

I remember that everyone where I worked was married and or had kids. There was a 20 year old guy like me with 2 kids doing computer operations. He said to me, What in the world are you doing working these hours? You dont have a wife and kids. I said naively, Im trying to get ahead. He said, I think youre foolish to be working these hours if youre single. You should enjoy life before youre married with kids like me. I should have listened to him because I found I couldnt sleep during the day and the lack of sleep started to make me sleep deprived and off balance. When I smashed into another car with my Camaro I knew something had to give. It turned out to be my job. I finally got fired because I just couldnt adjust to the hours. This turned out to be a somewhat lethal blow to my young ego. I decided I had burnt out on computers for a while and went to work with my Dad as an Electrician. I had worked in Bel Aire, Beverly Hills, The Hollywood Hills and all over LA and the San Fernando Valley every summer from the time I was age 12 to 17 with my dad and I had learned the electrical trade. Dad was working non union so I went to work with him. However, that summer Dad and Mom moved in late August to San Diego because he could make over twice as much at his San Diego Local Union IBEW than he could non union in LA. He was making about $30 an hour with the union when he retired in 1980.

In June 1969 my girlfriend came again out from Michigan for the summer. I gave up my bedroom at my parents house in Glendale for her to stay in and got an apartment so my girlfriend could live with my folks. My girlfriend belonged to the same church as my parents so this would be acceptable to my parents and hers since we planned to marry as soon as she finished at the university in Michigan. She got a temporary summer job at a nearby dry cleaners. One day she and I got off work and we took a walk at about 6pm nearby in Griffith Park which is a very large Hilly park in LA where the Griffith Observatory and the Los Angeles Zoo are located. While walking I asked her if we would have a sexual relationship after we married. She said, No, I want to stay celibate after marriage. I felt like someone had hit me on the head with a sledge hammer. Even though I admired her religious fervor I knew this wouldnt work for me. I was from LA and things were very different in LA than the Midwest where she was from at that time. I thought about it for 2 days. I finally said to her, I love you but I know better than to marry you when you want to be celibate. That wont work for me because for one thing I want to have kids. I think we should break up now before we hurt each other more.

She never forgave me for breaking up with her. We both were messed up for at least 5 years. You never completely get over your first real love.

She decided to quit her job and go on a religious retreat in Northern California for the rest of the summer. Though I knew I had made the right decision I was tortured every day by my love for her. Though I made new girlfriends I couldnt forget her.

When my parents moved to San Diego a month after she left I got an apartment in Venice, California, which was a lot like Haight Ashbury at that time. Actually, I had really wanted to live next door in Santa Monica on the Beach but the job I wound up with working as an electrician in included a free apartment on Venice beach fairly near the pier. A few weeks before I had met the first girl flower child who had come onto me. I had been sitting with friends ages 16 to 25 at a religious youth conclave when a beautiful girl about 18 that I had never met before came up and sat on my lap, put her arms around my neck and looked deep into my eyes. This had to be one of the most amazing experiences of my young life.

I found out later that Janet had previously run away from home in Long Beach and had hitchhiked to San Francisco and while there had had some problems with LSD. I had never known anyone like her before because I had never personally met any flower children yet. A friend of mine who was in a Band and I took Janet and another girl to swim in Lake Siskiyou, near Mt. Shasta. My friend was with Janet at the time.

Several weeks later I was back in LA and knew Janet lived in Long Beach, about an hours drive away by freeway from Venice. Since I knew she liked me I went to see her at a church youth group meeting. I asked if I could drive her home afterward. She said, Yes Later she said, Let�s go to the beach. I said, At night like this She said, Where would be safe? I told her of a beach in Palos Verdes that would be safe so we went there.

That night I was introduced to experiences that I didnt know existed before. That night I was introduced to the personal world of a lady flower child and a whole new world I had never even dreamed possible opened up for me. Its interesting to me now how things that are heaven when you are single become hell when you are married and raising kids.

Though Janet was very beautiful and wonderful and exotic in some ways in other ways when she flashed from drugs she had taken several months to a year previous she was really scary. For example, I took her to my cousins wedding. At the reception she had some alcohol while I was playing piano and singing and entertaining some of the wedding guests. I had had a couple of drinks as well. Well, Janet started flashing from the alcohol and got hysterical. She ran out and I thought she was going to harm herself. Later after I had calmed her down and was driving her home on the freeway she tried to jump out of my car at 70 mph. It is very difficult to drive with one hand and keep someone from jumping out of a car with the other hand while trying to keep from having an accident with the rest of the cars on the freeway. I finally managed a stop along the freeway after scaring myself and everyone else driving around me and calmed her down again. Though Janet and I dated several more times these kinds of incidents were just too scary for me. She was beautiful and wonderful and loads of fun but I just didnt want to be there if and when she died for real.

Though that Janet didnt stay in my life she opened the door to many, many other women in my life until I married for the first time in 1974 and had a son. By then I had become very alternative myself and had a full beard and hair down to my shoulders. In 1975 my mountain climbing buddy bought property in Mt. Shasta after getting his masters degree from UCLA and I helped him build his house on the land. I bought some land with my second wife in the Mt. Shasta area in 1980 and we built a house there in the early 80�s . To this day my heart is still in the 60s and seventies. Though many of my friends died back then I still miss the enthusiasm and hope and activism and joy. Addicted to Love? You Bet! Make Love Not War!

Epilogue: Though the above was all true. Most of my life then was an experimental hell. I could not live without Marilynn. I became suicidal. Janet and all the women that followed just kept me alive. Though I didnt become addicted to anything but love, this wonderful free love behavior still haunts me and makes my life difficult at times. I have been true to my present wife since we married 7 years ago. Idealistically, I wish for a real utopian world of free love with everyone satisfied and very happy. I wish most people did not suffer as they do now serious psychological problems that are caused at least in part by sexual repression. Realistically though, watching a close friend slowly die of AIDS seriously killed all my hopes of any utopia for the human race. I guess serious suffering of the human race will continue. I realize now that I lived through a golden age that may never come again for any other generation.

I realize now that I could have eventually been happy married to Bonnie, who I grew up with since I was 6 in Sunday School. However, since she married at age 22 when I was 21, I still had about 5 more years to be ready for marriage to anyone. My first child was born when I was 26.

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1969-Trying to stay alive!

originally written 2003

Its 3 am. Before midnight was my now 13 year old daughters birthday. I was depressed today because I wasnt with her. Shes hundreds of miles north with my ex-wife, her mother. I called my now 13 year old daughter at 7 am Tuesday morning to talk to her before she had to go to school. Shes flying down to visit me for a week at Easter. Thank God.

I was inspired Tuesday in writing class to write of my own bout with suicide in 1969 and 1970. In 1969 I was 21. I remember being very angst ridden at the time. I felt conflicted between honoring my parents wishes for my life and my own unsure dreams of my future. I knew that to do what my parents wanted would be a life of death for me. I really didnt expect to live past 25 the way things were in my life.

I was dealing with what I called then hypocrisy everywhere I turned. It seemed as if everyone I knew said one thing but did another. I didnt want my life to be just another Lie like I saw in the lives of those around me. I was young and idealistic. I had a lot to learn. I thought people were grown up at 18. I didnt fully realize then that people never really stop growing up.

The closest I came to suicide was from November 1969 until September 1971. I remember it started when my father said, If you go on behaving like this you are going to get kicked out of our church. I remember I said, If people are that small and hypocritical then I want to be kicked out. However, I wasnt ready for the emotional reality of what that really would mean in my life. On November 11th 1969 I was ostracized from my church since birth.

I remember one night in late November 1969 I was crying and praying. I said, God please let me die! My whole purpose in living has ended. Please just let me die. I was very serious about this.

I could not see any reason to go on living for myself. Not one. I could see that it would upset my parents and relatives and possibly a few close friends. But for me I had no reason to go on living. I saw nothing to give me hope for any future at all. When I look back at this state of mind now I think to myself, I was just dying to self. My body didnt need to die. I just didnt know that I needed to psychologically die and become someone new. I was too young to understand that then.

When I was forbidden to speak to anyone in my church anywhere in the world I realized that theory and reality were two different things. My friends throughout the world were gone. I was isolated. To make matters worse my fiancee of two years obeyed the churchs edict to never speak to me again. To make matters even worse I was deeply in love with her. I never did get over her. The world I had grown up in since birth was gone. Though I was not catholic I understood now how terrible excommunication and shunning was. It is a type of murder of ones soul.

I remember feeling that since my life was gone that I must die. In some ways looking back at this now it is almost laughable to me. However, at the time it was very real and ultimately serious. Over then next two years I found that I had to rebuild who I was to go on living. The person I had once been becoming was useless and obsolete in my new world. At first I felt my power as a person was destroyed by this. But as time went on I realized that though I was very lonely I no longer had to be loyal to the ideas of those who had turned their back on me. By shunning me they gave me the power to be literally anyone I wanted to be. I could go anywhere in the world and be okay alone. I could be anyone I wanted to be. Though I was lonely I was also very powerful. Most people in life don�t ever experience this kind of empowerment. I saw clearly then that whatever happened I would survive.

I have run into some of my old friends from church over the years and most of them demonstrated their lack of open mindedness and lack of foresight and lack of understanding of people different than themselves. I feel very sorry for them and the inevitable suffering that close mindedness brings and am extremely grateful that they ostracized me now. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Like a Phoenix a new and very powerful and happy Fred emerged from that psychic death and is still exploring the world and the universe both inward and outward. Their ostracizm and shunning of me gave me the opportunity to make my life a very amazing one. Through their group murder of the old Fred I was able to learn to build a much better and happier Fred. Through being ostracized I have found the miracle of a life worth living. I will always be very grateful for the new life I have been given.If any of you have been excommunicated from your churches please hear me that if you are strong enough in spirit it is not the end of your life but just the beginning of something truly wonderful and amazing. I liken my experience in many ways to what happened to Moses. He is probably the character out of the bible whose experiences I can most identify with personally. In leaving his adopted home in Egypt and almost dying in the desert and then seeing God the "I am that I am". Yes, I can fully identify with these kinds of experiences.

It is said, "No man may see God and live!" This was my experience too. I sometimes see myself as dead because of having seen God. For in seeing God the person you were before always dies. It is as if one were just a nail and in meeting God one becomes a permanently magnetized nail which all steel and iron sticks to. In this way one who has truly seen God Face to Face automatically draws all souls consciously back to God from whence they all came.

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Thoughts on Almost Freezing to death

May 16th 2002

printed online may 31, 2005

I was sitting on my living room couch last Tuesday wondering whether I would need to go to the emergency room. I couldnt think very clearly. I probably had hypothermia. But I wasnt too sure what was wrong. I was about half as bad off as I had been when I went to the emergency room in 1998 for what I learned 7 months later was a heart virus. As I sat deciding what to do I thought back to what had caused my present lack of heat sense.

It was Christmas vacation from college 1971. I was going to college in San Diego. My climbing buddy Anton was at UCLA and a mutual friend of ours was at Sacramento State University. I drove my SeaBlue 1966 VW bug first to Palos Verdes in the LA area to pick up Anton. Then I drove to Chico where Bob, our friend was spending his Christmas vacation with his mother. Fourteen hours after I left San Diego after driving straight through all day it was now about 6 or seven pm at Bunny Flats at about 8000 feet on Mt. Shasta. I was 22; Bob was 20 and Anton was 19. I was very tired and it was snowing lightly. We all three put on our snowshoes and backpacks and started the 1 mile walk up to Horse camp Lodge owned by the Sierra Club as an emergency shelter. We had planned to hang out there a couple of days in the beautiful serenity of Mt. Shasta. However, this did not happen as we planned. I was tired from driving so long. Bob said, Are we sure we want to do this? With it snowing like this it could get hairy. Anton and I the ultimate risk taking adventurers said something like, Hey, itll be fun. Bring it on. However, if we had known what was coming we would have changed our plans.

There was three feet of snow already on the ground and the bottom two feet were packed so we were able to make very good time for about of a mile. Then we got into a white out. This was bad because between the clouds, fog and blizzard we could see no more than 3 feet in any direction. Anton and I thought we could still find Horse Camp because we had been coming here with our parents since we were children. However, we were wrong. When we found our footprint in the snow we knew we were in trouble. We had circled around and met our own tracks because of the white out. I was starting to feel a little sick and tired from driving 14 hours straight as well from San Diego.

Bob said, I just took a course in winter survival at Sacramento State University. We could built a snow cave with our snowshoes." Anton and I reluctantly agreed after discussing our potential deaths if we couldn't find the car in the whiteout. So we took turns digging a 3 foot high, 6 foot deep and 6 foot wide snow cave to weather the storm. I was the last to enter the cave. As I did I had a vision of a Golden City attached to Mt. Shasta. I often wonder if that was where my soul would have gone if I had died that night. I was the least prepared for this of the three of us. I only had an WWII army surplus down bag and a ground cloth. I didnt know if I would survive the night. We were so cold that we first shook and then our teeth started chattering and then our bodies started into convulsive shaking in order to stay alive. By morning I was laying in about 6 inches deep of water created by my body melting snow into my down bag. We began to see light through the snow because we had closed the entrance to keep the howling wind and snow out during the night.

Since I was the closest one to the entrance I dug with my hands and snowshoe up and out. When I reached where we had started to dig last night I started to panic because there was more snow. The guys said that more snow had fallen last night. I dug faster and more vigorously. Three feet of snow later I broke the surface.

The three of us let out whoops of delight to be free of our snowy tomb. The storm had abated. There was no wind to speak of and the visibility was several miles but still completely overcast. We knew we just might survive this. I looked down at my wet pants with concern because the temperature was below 25 degrees farenheit out.

Luckily as we packed down an area to be able to put on our packs all our pants froze except for the knees and so we didn�t freeze to death as I had worried. The frozen Levi jeans insulated us enough to go on. Since we now had 3 feet of packed snow with three more feet of powder snow on top it was extremely difficult to walk even with snowshoes. It took three packing snow steps for each step forward. If one did not do this then the other two had to pull the third out of the deep powder that that one fell into. It was very frustrating for us all and so each of us took turns packing the snow for forward movement of the group.

When we finally reached the paved road two hours or more later we were not even sure it was the road. We decided it was necessary to dig down to the road to find the pavement. This wasn�t easy because 8 feet of snow had now drifted onto the road. We were very grateful we did for it saved our lives. It was the paved road after all. We knew if we had gone past it we would not have survived. We would not have had the energy to return up the hill to the road. In the distance we heard a snowplow. We let out a yell knowing we were going to live. Luckily there was a snow blower to clear the road. When we finally found my VW bug there were only 3 inches of radio aerial visible above the deep snow. It was then we saw just how desperate our plight had been. We spent the next several days in the Lemurian Lodge in Mt. Shasta taking turns taking hot baths trying to get our arms and legs to work right again. All my arm and leg and hip joints hurt for the next 3 years. All people higher on the mountain than we were that night lost fingers and toes to frostbite.P>

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June 1974(UFO experience)

added tuesday may 31st 2005 while placing the information online. Note:It might be useful to understand that in June 1974 I was married and a new father. The snow was still deep in June 1974.I was around 7000 feet on Mt. Shasta at a place that is called Bunny Flats. The snow averaged 5 to 8 feet with 15 foot drifts in places. There was a crust on top so I could walk without snoeshoes. I only sank in about 6 to 8 inches as I walked in my boots up Bunny Flats toward Mt. Shasta. I was completely alone and the sky was overcast. As I came out of the deep snowy forest and back through the alpine snow covered meadow with a few trees towards my car and the paved road I saw the imprint. At first I thought it had been made by snowmobiles driving in a very tight circle. However, as I drew closer I could see there were no snowmobile tracks or even human tracks near this impression in the snow. Later I brought up my wife and baby and a friend from the little town of Mt. Shasta to see this impression. We all agreed then that this was like nothing we had ever seen before, a perfect circle, a perfect impression with three 3 foot hemispheres placed like a pod in the bottom center. Green antifreeze looking stuff with little black flecks in it along the top one foot all the way around the impression. We all decided the only human way to have made this was with a template of that shape dropped from a helicopter. Other than that it had been made by a UFO. endnote.

transcribed May 22, 2005

note: I was not allowed to remember this until after the 21st century began. I wasn't able to retrieve it until 5-22-05. Ragna, Elohar and I agreed it would have been too much for me to survive the memories at the time they occured. So they waited sealed inside my mind for a safer time to come through

My cover memory was walking up from the paved road at Bunny Flats through the snow. However, my actual experience was far different than that. This is the first time I was allowed to remember it so it is news to me as well.

As I walked up the meadows through the snow I stood transfixed as I saw a light in the clouds above me. I knew it wasnt the sun because it was moving. At first it looked white but as it grew closer I saw more colors. The predominant ones were blue and turquoise colored lights. They were spinning very quickly around a non spinning disc or ship. It landed less than 100 feet from me. The snow flew out in all directions to make a place for the ship in the snow. I walked toward the ship and felt hypnotized by it. I was rendered harmless by the ship. As I walked toward the ship suddenly I was in the ship. However, the ship was not a vessel of any kind I had been in before. It was a doorway rather than a ship because entering the ship put me somewhere else in time and space on earth or some other planet, you pick for I still don�t know where I was exactly.

I can describe what I saw. It was different than any place on earth I have been in the 20th or 21st century. The basic color of the land was green and beige but there was also more purple than I have seen anywhere on earth. The sky was also light green instead of blue or light blue. It could have been earth in a past or future time or another world or dimension.

Next, beings walked up to me that were humanoid. Their skin was pale and they seemed very intelligent and somewhat sad. They seemed a little nervous to be near me as if I was an intelligent gorilla or something. They first said, Will you harm us? I said in a monotone, No. I am made harmless by your ship. That is good. They seemed to relax a little at this point.

We are reincarnations of your parents. I said, I dont know what to do with that information. One of them said, That will come in time. We are here to open the door to your time and world. I said, Why? We wish to prevent a war. We wish to change time. Again I said, Why? They chose to put thoughts, terrible thoughts associated with a war that was past in their minds into my mind. Not being used to being able to filter such thoughts I let out a howl of pain. One of them said, Were sorry but we are still trying to create useful thought and feeling interfaces.

Our race mostly communicates with direct thoughts among friends and family. Speaking is only used with strangers and for business and politics. Since you are considered family we decided to try direct thoughts. We feel ashamed it caused you such pain. I said, Meeting you both is much more distressing than the thoughts you put into my mind. The one that appeared to be male then said, We hadnt really considered this possibility. I suppose it is naive of us to have thought it would be a smooth transition for you. We will go back to words because of your distress.

I said, I would appreciate this because I dont want to have a heart attack and die right here in front of you. The female looked especially distressed and said, We could not allow you to die. If you died we would just bring you back to life.

I said, After what I have seen here I am quickly coming to believe you could bring me back from death. They both laughed at this. Because they didnït have noses like the humans of our times their laughter was very different. At first I thought they were just choking or chortling. Then I realized they were laughing. I felt the hypnotic hold on my mind weaken.

Their laughter meant they were beginning to trust me more. The dynamics of our encounter began to become more comfortable to us all.

The female said with a look of anticipation, I am a reincarnation of your mother and Ragna here is a reincarnation of your father. We have traveled through time back to see you. I thought about this. Im very happy to see you but why have you come to me?

They seemed confused by my reaction. Dont you like us? I said, It is not about like or dislike. Ive just been scared out of my wits and surprised in a way Im not sure I will ever totally recover from. Im traumatized. You cant expect me to be totally okay after all this. Many of my kind would have fainted or died from the shock. Give me a break. Im doing very well considering the fact that Im completely unprepared for this encounter.

************************************************************end i?1/2 edit The two talked in some strange European sounding language akin to German, Spanish, French and Italian. When I heard them speak their language I said, Youre from the future arent you?

They seemed surprised by my statement. The female said, Yes. However, we were conferring about your health both mental and physical.� I said, �I would say I�m in a minor state of shock and a little confused by it and a little scared because you obviously messed with my mind and rendered me harmless.

The normal way a human in my time would deal with this is to feel intimidated and threatened. However, I�m also a very instinctive and intuitional person and so I can sense what you are about.�

The humanoid Ragna said, �And what do your senses tell you?� I said, �You are telling me the truth but that there is more to all this than you are telling me.� He said, �Where do you think you presently are?� I said, �I imagine that I�m in another dimension or time and that you somehow brought my body through the walls of the ship somehow. What is difficult to deal with is that I�m not in a ship but in another time, place or dimension than my home time.�

Ragna said, �What do you see?� This question made me feel uncomfortable. It made me think that what they were seeing and experiencing was very different than what I was perceiving. I felt scared.

I said, �Are we experiencing different things?� His answer �Yes.� Made me feel faint. I started to lose consciousness. He said, �We have made an error. We did not realize how different people of our time were from yours.� Looking into his eyes I knew he was lying. I sensed his purpose was to test what I was made of.

I said, �Why are you testing me? I thought we were relatives.� He burned his eyes into mine and said, �I�m trying to see if I can allow you to remember this encounter or not.�

I said, �I have been through a great deal the last few years. This memory could destroy me now. Why don�t you veil this memory and let it come back when I�m old?� Ragna said, �For such a young man you are very wise.� I said, �Thank you, Ragna.� I knew at that moment I had gained an ally. We had somehow reached beyond relatives to respect for each other.

I said, �Am I still in the snow and just imagining this? Ragna said, �No. You are in the ship in stasis. Your body is warm and being cared for by the ship. Your mind body is here with us in the future. I again felt my senses swooning but somehow I hung in there. I was grateful for my perceptual strength.

Ragna began again, �It will be okay, Jonathan. We think we have your biology and mental and emotional interface properly calibrated.� I said, �Why was this calibration necessary?� Ragna looked at me strangely and then said, �It is a way of preserving our contacts. Once we calibrate a contact we can bring that contact back to life. The calibration is stored and used to bring our contact back to life and wholeness if death or insanity comes in any way from the contact. Until that calibration was correct we worried that you might die or fragment before we could calibrate your mind body interface.

I said, �Well, I�m glad that�s over.� And I meant it. Ragna smiled a wry smile. Elohar looked a little nervous. She hesitated and then said, �Are you angry with us, Jonathan?� I said, �Not really. I�m adapting to all this. It will take some time.� Elohar then said, �Don�t you like us?� I said, �You look and act and sound a lot different than the people of my era. You also feel fundamentally different to all my senses. I have to pretend all this is like a science fiction movie in order not to faint from the sensory shock.�

Elohar smiled. She was beginning to get it. She did remind me a lot of my mother. I was beginning to believe these two were reincarnations of my parents. It made a lot of sense. I put myself in their shoes. Whether they were my parents reincarnated or not it would make good strategic sense to try to convince me that they were my parents come again.

Since no one would believe me and no one but myself to protect me in this situation I knew I had to go along with the idea that they were reincarnations of my parents whether I fully believed this or not. My sanity might depend on this level of trust. Ragna and I had already agreed I must not remember all this for a long time. After all I had to raise my son without becoming a Earth world government guinea pig.

Ragna looked thoughfully at me. He said, �If we let you see the ship�s footprint what will you do with your real life experience of this?� I said, �I won�t tell the government as they might interfere with my wife and son. I can�t let that happen.�

Ragna said, �We have to tell your government that we have had and will continue to have contact with you our ancestor. The governments of your time will know as per the 1953 Eisenhower agreement to leave you alone as you are among the primary ancestor stock of the future. To interfere with you would cause a war. They will know this.� I felt confused. It seemed a little to weird for me. I said, �Am I physically related to both of you?� Elohar said, �Yes. IF YOU DON'T HAVE ALL YOUR CHILDREN AND THEY DON'T LIVE ON WE WILL NEVER BE BORN."

I felt a little nauseated this time. I thought of all the building blocks of time. I thought back to anthropology in college and of natural selection and of dynasties. It began to all make sense now. I asked, �How far into the future do you live?�

�We cannot tell you exactly but it is approximately 7000 A.D.� I said, �What is the primary religion on earth then?� Ragna looked a little angry and Elohar looked scared. Ragna said, �Most religions and science have all blended together with psychology and medicine to form ways of functioning much different than anything you have thought of or seen or heard of in your time. The very concept of religion as you now know it is foreign to us. The closest way we can approach it is to say there are still people who search for the truth and for meaning in existence. I tend to be more scientific in my approach and Elohar is more psychological and psychic in her approach. We have very different ways we approach the problem of life.

How do I feel about all this? Well, I was pretty terrified for awhile around 1985. I had grown beyond the �space brothers� kind of thinking and saw the movie, �Communion�. I finally reconciled myself by realizing that I could only be responsible for what I knew for sure. I could only stand before God and say, �I have done the best I could for all beings I met.� The rest of it is the responsibility of whoever or whatever takes control of situations or people. Those beings or things will have to stand before God in their own times. That is not my problem. Therefore, I am at peace with my creator.

Next Essay

Mining with Dad

written 2000 AD published online 2005

After my first wife and son and I returned from living in Hawaii in late 1974 I became a working partner in my father�s mining business. My father and several other relatives and a buddy of mine who was an architect were in business operating a mine as well as developing a Mill for processing Ore in 29 Palms, California. My father and I and my architect buddy were working partners and then there were several investing partners. We filed mining claims in the Virginia Dale Mining District doing hard rock mining and also did some asseying near my fathers Aunts old 1930�s mine in Arizona. In Arizona we dug into dry washes to check the feasibility of refining the deep sand for gold and silver. We later decided that the Arizona idea wasn�t cost effective.

On one of these trips to the Gila Bend area it was late June. In a large city nearby the area we contracted with a backhoe operator to dig down 16 feet in the washes to take a sample and then we would fill it back in like before. These washes refined gold over thousands of years out of the gold veins. When it rains a lot in the desert there are flash floods because there is not enough vegetation to stop the water in a desert. I have seen 3 to 4 feet walls of water bearing down a wash. God help any person or animal in its way. Anyway, we were checking if it was economically feasible to process low grade ore already broken down to sand. We found it wasn�t cost effective.

However, many people use vacuums on rivers in California and throughout the Western states to vacuum up gold and silver dust out of the cracks in rocks and under or near large boulders where it tends to collect over thousands of years. You may have seen some of them in wet suits while you were traveling down a River like the Klamath over the years.

On the trip above with the backhoe, the backhoe operator and my Dad to Gila Bend, Arizona I had not counted on the heat. Because it was late in June the temperature reached 120 degrees or more during the day. I sweat so much that salt crust formed on my shirt under the armpits. It was also a problem for me as I had already had heat prostration twice in my life, once at age 10 and once while planting trees near Quincy, California in the Sierras. The coldest it got while we were in the Gila Bend area was 100 degrees farenheit around 6 am in the morning. Since Dad and I would only be testing samples for 2 or three days and since there was over 30 miles of dirt road to get there we just slept in the back of our open pickup truck. My only relief from the heat was to go to a windmill that was pumping water up to a trough for the local birds and animals and take off my t-shirt and soak it with the sulphur smelling water. Since I brought my Honda 250 XL along in the back of the pickup I would ride my motorcycle full out down the dry washes to reduce my temperature. I did this every couple of hours so I wouldn�t go unconscious from the heat. There was no one else but us foolish enough to be out in that high heat within 10 or 20 miles.

Van Tassel

Around this same time we bought a mill for refining Gold Ore. It had a huge ball mill with steel balls 8� in diameter inside. A ball mill looks something like a huge cement mixer about 10 feet in diameter. We also purchased a shaker table that washes the by then powdered ore across the table and into all black sand which could include Gold, Silver, Iron, Platinum etc. depending on what is in the specific ore you are processing. My father heard of a Jaw Crusher which will take a rock up to 12� to 15� in diameter and bring the pieces down in size to under 3� each. These smaller pieces are run down a conveyer belt to the Ball Mill. The final machine is the shaker table which refines the ore further into what we called black sand. At that point it is ready for smelting or in other words being melted and separated into Gold, Silver, Platinum etc.

Anyway, Dad heard about a very old and well built Jaw Crusher for sale by a man called Van Tassel. I couldn�t figure out what he would be doing with a jaw crusher. He owned Giant Rock Airport near a little town called Landers, California. He also had fly-ins to his airport and held Flying Saucer conventions there about once a year. So my Dad and I went to see Van Tassel. He showed us his integratron nearby which he said aliens had told him to build, so humans could stay alive for hundreds of years. We bought the old jaw crusher that was built like a tank for a few hundred dollars. With a little WD40 it worked like new. If it had been been stored outside anywhere else but the desert it would have rusted away 40 years before. We installed the crusher with a 50 horsepower electric motor. However, you didn�t want to be within 20 feet of it or you could be seriously injured by rocks under 3� exploding out of it at high speeds. Needless to say we put an electric kill switch over 20 feet away for emergencies.

Skiing June 4th 2005 Today I thought I would write about skiing. This has been one of my favorite long term things that I like to do. I have been quoted as saying "skiing is even better than sex" which is true. I'm not sure that this would have been true from ages 12 through 35 but from 35 to now skiing is definitely better than sex.

I especially like skiing virgin snow. Sometimes this can be a problem though because there are several kinds of virgin snow. For example, on cross country skis sometimes known as metal edged mountaineering skis I have experienced skiing from Bunny Flats on Mt. Shasta heading down hill cross country into virgin snow up to 25 feet deep. However, after a depth of 3 feet of snow or more it doesn't really matter that much how deep it is as long as you have at least a vague idea of snow conditions in general. For example, in starting at Bunny Flats there sometimes are one kind of conditions that look okay. However, a mile down the trails one might find that one foot of snow or more was sticking to the bottom of ones skis. This can be hell to deal with especially if it doesn't want to come off and if you don't have something like wd40 or something else to keep sticky snow from building up on the bottom of your skis.

If you are skiing downhill at a manicured slope on downhill skis or a snowboard this is never a problem because the snow grooming machines take all this into consideration as they are grooming and packing the snow each night and early morning before the skiers hit the slopes. However, if one is mountaineering skiing at multiple elevations one ungroomed snow one can run into some very serious unforeseen problems.

For example, one day in the early 1980's when I lived in the little city of Mt. Shasta I decided to ski up from Bunny Flats which is approximately 7000 to 8000 feet up to Horse Camp which is a Sierra Club owned Stone and mortar shelter built in the 1930's with large timber roof joices built to withstand 40 plus feet of snow right at tree line where the trees stop growing at approximately 9000 feet in elevation on Mt. Shasta. When I skied up to Horse Camp that day I decided to stay at this elevation and try a level traverse to my right towards Panther Meadows. For over a mile I did fine. However, all of a sudden all the snow above and below me about 100 feet in all directions started sliding down the mountain into what became a small avalanche. Because I wanted to be able to breathe when it stopped I kept stepping up on top of whatever snow was on top and tried to stay there. Luckily with many quick steps and totally out of breath the snow stopped and I was only waist deep in the now stopped small avalanche. This experience cured me of above tree line traverses in very deep fairly new snow. I had almost died in this avalanche. Only by being a very skilled and quick skier had I survived. Even though my skis were completely level and not heading downhill in any way I had side slipped between 500 to 1000 feet vertically down the mountain. I quickly left the area before more snow came down to bury me. I learned a very good lesson that day.

On another day I was skiing on non metal edged cross country skis that I bought in Ashland, Oregon in 1976 so this day would have been 1982 or 83 with a male friend and my stepson. My wife and daughter and younger son were skiing but they weren't as fast as my older stepson and friend who were racing down the mountain. I was trying to keep up because I felt they had chosen a particularly dangerous route and I was concerned about my stepsons safety. However, I was going so fast I neglected to slow down when I bottomed out coming down one hill and was going to use my momentum to fly partway up the next hill. I heard a loud crack and realized I had broken one of my cross country skis. When it cracked it through me nose forward into the snow. I barely missed having the broken ski tip shoved up my nose in the process. Though the ski broke and lost its camber I could still use it like a ski-snowshoe and so pushed myself a couple a miles through the snow sliding on my left ski and pushing like I was on a scooter with my broken right ski.

In the late 70's I was skiing with friends who were other building contractors. We were all about 28 to 30 years old. I was divorced from my first wife and so I left my 3 year old son with my mother and took off for a couple of days skiing with my buddies. None of them had skied before either cross country or downhill. They had rented cross country skis but because they were city folks they found cross country to tame for them. Actually, since they were beginners I chose a pretty tame area near Big Bear and Mt. San Gorgonio, the highest mountain in southern California so no one likely would get injured. So we went to a place called Snow Summit in Big Bear, California. They had many ski lifts and all the guys and myself rented downhill skis, boots and poles. The year was 1978. There were 5 of us and we had a really great time. By the end of the day all of us were skiing downhill at over 30 miles an hour. We all survived the day and most of the guys took downhill skiing up as a permanent winter hobby they had such a great time! However, when I strapped on cross country skis again the first thing I did was run into a tree. I had forgotten for a moment that I couldn't do a turn spray snow and stop suddenly. That was so painful that I never made that mistake again.

The most awful experience skiing came in 1991 when I was skiing with my son who was then 17 and a boyfriend of my stepdaughters. I had come to my favorite part of the ski between Bunny Flats and Wagon Camp Rd on the Mountain and then out to Everitt Memorial Hiway which is usually plowed for snow all winter and spring. As I was enjoying the long run down my favorite part I hit an ice patch which separated my skis so my legs were trying to go into the splits. I hung on like that thinking I wouls slowly recover and bring my skis back together to a standing position. Unfortunately, I hit another patch of ice which is unusual and I went into a complete split and stopped very suddenly. This ripped my pants from crotch to left knee and I also pulled my left hamstring which is extremely painful.

My son and my stepdaughers boyfriend were very worried about me. Although I was in severe pain I decided to tough it out as there weren't cell phones then and we had no way to communicate with emergency personel. I painfully got up and basicly skied out on my undamaged leg the 2 miles to my car.

When I got to my home in Mt. Shasta I found I couldn't walk the next week and even after one week I could only move on crutches. It took me about 6 months to walk without dragging my left foot in a limp and then another month to retrain my muscles in my left leg to walk normall again.

Though I still ski after that experience I tend to do more downhill skiing as it is a lot less strenuous than Mountaineering skiing. I still ski downhill at Mt. Shasta at the ski lifts there and at Squaw Valley in the Lake Tahoe area whenever I can.

I have a 16 year old daughter now that outskis me. However, she is beginning to take up snowboarding as she can now outski everyone in the family. She finds snowboarding more challanging but in some ways more rewarding than cross country or downhill skiing. Though I have tried snowboarding I usually feel pretty out of control compared to skis. After skiing the first time at age 15 on the old bear trap non release bindings and then skiing pretty regularly since 1976 I think I would have to live again in an area like Mt. Shasta for it to be safe enough for me to convert to snowboards. Unless you are good enough at something to be fairly safe at it when you are my age, 57, it just isn't wise to be doing it at all.

The events of my life for Alchemy of Joy

1980 the Lama and Medicine Men

I had always been a little afraid of non-dualism. I think this is because I was raised as a Christian Mystic. Even though I had been taught to believe in reincarnation just like Christian mystics did before the year 300 or so AD I was not prepared for non-dualism as a daily practice. However, my wife talked to me and made me more comfortable with the concept. She said that Tibetan Lamas and Native American medicine men were very similar in demeanor and attitude. Since I had always been interested in both I decided to go to Oregon with her from our home in Mt. Shasta. We called our home our Mt. Shasta White House.

When we arrived at the initiation we found it was the Thousand Buddha�s Empowerment. As I walked into the room many people were present and the lama looked directly into my eyes. I found myself to be 2 places at once as easy as breathing. I knew the lama had generated the second place within my awareness. I was surprised I didn�t fall down but somehow I was able to walk to my seat in the room. The second place I was wearing a different body and loincloth in Asia. I believed this 2nd awareness had already taken place.

I was standing on top of grassy rolling hills covered with the flowers of springtime and he said to me, �You don�t belong inside any building or in any church. You are a Yogi. Your job is to do spiritual research for mankind. You are still doing this now hundreds of years later.� I was amazed to the point of fainting. As I sat there trying to understand what had just happened to me I knew this sort of thing didn�t happen in the western world that I knew of. The second thing I thought was that I had touched upon something very profound and to my liking. The third thing I thought was that Brahmanism came before Buddhism just like Judaism came before Christianity and Islam. Since I had studied anthropology and was a cultural and religious relativist I thought to myself �What religion sprang out of the ground with shamanistic roots just like ancient Judaism and ancient Brahmanism. I knew both of these root religions were over 10,000 years old. Then I had it!

The root religion of the Americas was native American Shamanism still practiced by Native American Medicine men. I spoke loudly to God then in my mind. �Send me a medicine man, God.� Looking back on this experience my first initiation with a Tibetan Lama sent me to a Medicine man. 3 years later this would come full circle when I was sent back through my vision quest to Tibetan Lamas and Buddhism. I believe now that I had to ground my spirit into the earth of America before I could properly reconnect with Tibetan Buddhism to receive advanced initiations and do practices when God and the primordial Buddha showed me to. I don�t see either path as superior to the other. I see both paths as a part of my ongoing path. Here in fall 2000 I still go to sweat with medicine men and still do the Tibetan Buddhist practices I�m guided to.

My prayer to God for a medicine man was granted quickly. I visited a friend in Mt. Shasta, named Anton and he said a medicine man was visiting that he just met. I knew this was my answer. When the medicine man came to visit so did I.

I�m changing his name to protect him. When I met Eagle, he was not what I had expected. He was harsh and judgmental and firm and orderly like my father. However, when I meditated upon it I realized God had sent me a task master. I wasn�t entirely comfortable with this arrangement but I knew it was my present path.

What we shared in common was a very terrifying experience with God that brought him into being as a powerful medicine man. This reminded me of my own terrifying experiences with God as a child and young man. For three years, Anton and his girlfriend and my wife and kids and I studied with Eagle. This culminated with a four day vision quest of no water and no food. Anton�s girlfriend was the first to feel the pull for a vision quest. Second was myself. I stepped out of a sweat lodge one evening and saw the radiance of spirit upon a flying bug. The bug flew towards Eagles home 100 miles away on the Trinity River. I knew that moment it was time for my vision quest. The arrangements were made. I was a little apprehensive of being alone and not eating or drinking anything for four days miles away from the nearest human in what turned out to be a bear wallow. Luckily for me no bear used the wallow while I was on my quest. Many times I thought I heard them but it could have just been my mind playing tricks on me.

When the time came we went to Eagle Cliffs on the Trinity river where Eagle and his family lived near a bend in the river. It was ten miles from the nearest paved road and 5 miles from the nearest dirt road. Eagle and his wife and kids like to be remote with their horses, their house and their tipi. Eagle also had an apprentice who lived on the land with their family.

We were to start with a sweat in Eagle�s sweat lodge. As we were preparing the sweat lodge the trinity river turned brown. Eagle had never seen this before. Though I was a little frightened by this omen I took it to mean that this was a major purification that was taking place in my life. The river stayed brown until I reached the bear wallow a few miles upstream after the sweat. By this time it was twilight and it was moving toward darkness. My wife earlier had decided to join me on my vision quest. Eagle said it was okay as long as we were celibate and only prayed together. We took only ground cloths, sleeping bags, and matches and native American sweet grass to burn as incense while we prayed. We also brought prayer rattles to keep time with our prayer songs that Eagle had taught us. Our first animal sign was a female wood duck that came down the river with her babies past us every morning and up the river every sunset to their roost. I saw that as a family sign that would help us protect our children. The next sign that touched us both was a mated pair of bald eagles that flew by. This was very good medicine and meant to us that God was listening to our prayers and that we were connected to God in a good way.

The first and second day I was fighting with myself. My body kept telling me, �You�re going to starve. You�re going to die out here with no food.� So I kept telling my body. �We are here for a good purpose. We want to know what we are to do next in life. We will not eat or drink until we know the answer.�

The night of the second day it rained a little so my wife went into a cave and I put my sleeping bag under a fallen tree that was 5 feet across so I wouldn�t get wet. The bears had dug a place big enough for them and also me so I stayed relatively dry.

That night I had my first terrifying vision. At first I was Merlin the magician. Then Merlin became more intense and ferocious and grew fangs 3 feet long. I was scared to death and didn�t know what this meant. Now almost 20 years later I know it meant I was going to be intiated into the peaceful and wrathful Tibetan deities. Wrathful in a daddy spank sort of way. In the battle hymn of the Republic it speaks of God�s terrible swift sword. The best way I can express this is that God is not a wuss. Even when I was just a child he was relentless and merciless upon me until I learned to use the gifts he had given me correctly.

Know this! If God gives you gifts you will be sorely tested. Gifts are like a pilots license. No one including God is going to let you misuse powerful gifts. You�ll drop dead first. The same was and is true with me. I know every moment of every day that if I misuse the gifts I have been given to help live on earth and throughout the universe I will be struck dead in a moment. As a young man this was very hard to live with. As a mature man it only makes me feel secure. It makes me know just how much God loves every part of life in the universe.

Though I had many visions the Merlin vision and the next vision affected me the deepest.

Then I became a great Golden dragon. I was 50 feet high and up to 100 feet long. I breathed out Golden fire on thousands of people but they were not burned. Instead they were sad before the fire but after the fire they smiled and looked alive and enlightened. I knew from that moment that I must study Tibetan Buddhism for that was my path to help life. That was my path to help mankind and all life on earth. Today I see part of this path fulfilled in my writing. Everyone it touches it lifts like I saw in my vision. All who can be uplifted by the compassionate dragon fire of God flowing through me makes me rejoice in God that he didn�t give up on me when I would have. God never gives up. We can do no less in honor of him/ her/ the being.

Next Essay

And Finally Dharmsala

written Monday Feb. 25th 2002

January 1986

After taking the train from the Kalachakra Empowerment and initiation given by the Dalai Lama in Bodhgaya, India to over 500,000 people we eventually 2 weeks later wound up in Dharmsala, India. Dharmsala is in the Himchal Pradesh State of India near Kashmir and Pakistan. It is at about 5000+ feet up in the Himalayas built along the ridge of the foothills of the Himalayas. It consists of Upper Ganj and Lower Ganj. Upper Ganj is about 1500 feet higher than lower Ganj. We stayed in upper Ganj. The Dalai Lamas palatial residence is in lower Ganj. The upper Ganj is also called Mcleod Ganj.

We first stayed at the Kailash Hotel in Mcleod Ganj. Within a few days we moved to the Green Hotel further up the ridge road.

Both the Kailash Hotel and the Green had an excellent view of the snow clad Himalayas rising up to at least 15,000 feet within a few miles of us. It was an awe-inspiring sight. We were told not to go into the forests alone at night. There were groups of monkeys, some over 5 feet tall that hunted and killed dogs, and sometimes people or children if they were traveling alone. The biggest ones stand 5 feet tall and are silver fur up to their necks and then black fur to the top of their heads.

Rowshan, a week ago got Deli Belly while we were staying in New Delhi, which is similar to Montezuma�s revenge. When I sent Lobsang, Geshela�s Tibetan translator to get medicine for her she had an allergic reaction to it. In New Delhi 1985 there are no prescription drugs. So when he asked for a medicine for Deli Belly the pharmacist gave him something with morphine in it. Since the ingredients were not written on the bottle we gave some to Rowshan, then 12. She immediately went from running at both ends to seizures. We were very scared. Lobsang went back to the pharmacist and was told morphine was in the medicine and said she must be allergic to morphine. Rowshan�s mother and I decided to get her out of New Delhi and up into the mountains where most tropical lowland diseases die. So we obtained train tickets and within about 12 hours we all were in Dharmsala after changing to a bus for the last 2 hours of the journey.

Luckily, we were right. As soon as we reached Dharmsala we took Rowshan to a Tibetan Doctor and She gave Rowshan brown herbal pills that looked like large rabbit pellets. Within a few days Rowshan was well and enjoying the amazing Dharmsala with the rest of us.

There was a Shangri-La like atmosphere to Dharmsala. All these Tibetans are refugees from Tibet. They have all come here to be with the Dalai Lama who lives here. They are all Devout Tibetan Buddhists. They are always smiling and many are still in their native Tibetan traditional dress, especially those older than 40. At the KalaChakra Initiation there were thousands of Bhutanese, Tibetans, Nepalese and other Tibetan Buddhists from all over the world. Many of them came in their native dress and many had walked thousands of miles for 6 months or more to be initiated and empowered by the Dalai Lama into the Wheel of Time or Kalachakra Empowerment and Initiation.

Because of the 4 day Kalachakra Empowerment that I had received along with my family a few weeks before I felt very much a part of the spirit of Dharmsala and had deep empathy for the sweet, struggling, compassionate strong, resilient, tough and sometimes na�ve people I encountered every day now. It broke my heart to know what they had all endured.

There was no heat in our Green Hotel room. We purchased a portable kerosene stove to sterilize all water we drank by boiling it 5 minutes or more and for making tea, Tibetan Noodles and whatever. This kept us from freezing at night and reduced our restaurant expenditures. At night the temperatures were dropping to 15 or 20 degrees farenheit even though it might reach 55 during the day. After all we were in the mountains and there was snow nearby at our altitude and it was January.

My sons, Star and Chris made friends with many Tibetan Boys while we stayed in Dharmsala. Though Star was pretty quiet, Chris had always been very gregarious and both Chris and Star became a part of this group of friends. The Tibetan boys were fascinated with the stories that Chris told of both our travels and of our life back in the U.S. One or more of the Tibetan boys were learning English at the Tibetan School. Later that week while Chris and Star were off playing with the Tibetan boys Sikh Separatists came up to the boys in a Mercedes. Two men got out and one pulled a gun and tried to kidnap my two boys. All the little 10 to 15 year old Tibetan boys pulled their knives and got ready to attack the men to protect my boys. The Sikhs got scared and got back into their car and drove away fast.

This was all pretty normal for life in Dharmsala. At times I can hear the Indian Army at the base of the Mountain of Dharmsala firing off their machine guns in practice. When I first heard this I thought we might be experiencing an attack. However, when I asked a Tibetan who could speak English, he said that the Indian Army protects the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Culture. The ancient relationship between Brahmanism, and Buddhism is very close. It is very much like the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism in the western world. There are differences but basically both believe very similar things.

So since Hinduism, which is the major religion of India and that came from Brahmanism and Buddhism which also came from Brahmanism. As a result the Indian army protects Dharmsala and the Dalai Lama primarily from the Chinese. Because the Chinese are now atheists and communists for the most part they are hated and feared by all Indians. I would say that the Chinese are even more hated by the Indians than they hate Pakistanis.

Also, Lumbini, where Gautama Buddha was born was in ancient India and so India considers itself the cradle of Buddhism, Brahmanism, and Hinduism and even of the Sikh religion, which is a combination of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity etc. I had very excellent experiences with Sikhs generally because they seemed to be the most technically advanced of all the groups in India. They seemed the best informed on the world stage of everything that was going on. However, there are extremists in every religion like the ones who tried to kidnap my sons.

My wife and I met a lady from Minnesota that called herself Tara. She was going to see the Nechung Oracle. I said I would like to go. However, when it came time for me to go I got a bad feeling about it so I didn�t. I have always been an extremely intuitive person that many times knows what is going to happen before it happens. It was one reason that I felt reasonable safe to travel with my whole family like this. Even though we had many close calls with death and injury during these four months I knew we would all survive even though I also knew we would never be the same after this amazing experience. I knew that we all would be truly citizens of the Earth when we returned in a way that we had never been before.

I would like to share what for me was the most amazing experience that I had in Asia. One morning a Tibetan monk who was a friend and who spoke English showed up and invited us to see a very High Lama. We agreed and the 5 of my family joined the monk for a two-mile walk up to where the High Lama was in retreat. When we finally reached the stone built hut we walked in and the Lama was sitting on a table with his glasses on in the lotus position and his right hand raised in the teaching Maitreya mudra and his left hand was in his lap. I asked the monk what was happening here. He said that this was Ling Rinpoche, the primary teacher of the Dalai Lama. He said that Ling Rinpoche had been like this for about 2 years now in deep meditation without sleeping eating, drinking or defecating. The energy in the room was beyond imagination. I was seeing something not believed in the western technical world. I began to cry in amazement at what I was experiencing. In the western world you are born you live you die. In other words a+b+c=d. This was another thing entirely. This meant that a+b+c did not always equal d. It could also equal e or f or g or whatever. This experience broke my worldview like a living Zen koan. I walked outside and cried in amazement for about 20 to 30 minutes. This experience has deeply changed my worldview. This man had been meditating and blessing all life on earth while his body did not putrefy or decompose for 2 years. This was completely amazing. Nothing would ever be the same for me.

All the rest of my family, my wife and 3 children seemed in a state of shock. I wasn�t just in a state of shock. My worldview was shattered and it would be replaced with something much more real and beautiful and useful to all.

TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION

The following is a true story. If it hadn�t happened to me I might not believe it:

It was 1974. My son had just been born and my first wife and I had moved to the little town of Mt. Shasta at the foot of the mountain of the same name near the northern border of Oregon in California. I decided to drive up on Mt. Shasta as far as the snow had been plowed on Everitt Memorial Highway. This took me to Bunny Flats. Since it was overcast and cold and during the middle of the week I was alone. Luckily the snow had been exposed to enough sun during the last weeks to create a crust I could walk on as it was still 6 to 10 feet deep at that elevation. I sank in only about 6 inches or so. I walked up a mile or so up the mountain to about 9500 feet in elevation where the trees stopped growing and I could see a good view up the snow capped mountain. Since my son was only a few weeks old I prayed for a long, healthy and happy life for him. As I walked back down through the deep snow to my car I saw something unusual. At first I thought it was just a 30 foot diameter circle made by a snowmobile. However, as I drew closer I saw it had no snowmobile tracks or even human tracks anywhere near it. Also, it seemed new. As I looked closer I realized it was extremely strange. There were three 3 foot diameter hemispheres like pod prints in the very bottom of the impression. On the upper 1 foot of the of the print 25 to 30 feet across was something that looked like algae and green antifreeze mixed evenly spread in a circle. I went to town and got friends to witness this. As we gazed at this we could think of no other plausible explanation than a ufo landing print. An army colonel years later asked why we hadn�t reported it. I said I didn�t want to be experimented on the rest of my life with wires under my fingernails. He looked shocked.

This was strange enough. However, 22 years later I and my second wife and kids had rented a house in Mt. Shasta in 1990. It was the summer of 1992. I was alone in the kitchen. It was early afternoon on a clear day without a cloud in the sky. I heard helicopters that I knew had to be military because they were so loud. I went out to look and there were three unmarked military helicopters in formation about 3000 feet above Mt. Shasta City where I was. However, the unmarked grey military helicopters were not the weird part. The really weird part was the silver grey flying saucer accompanying them. I could not believe my eyes. I decided I would not blink it was so amazing. Though my eyes were tearing up I continued to stare. As I watched the flying saucer disappeared right before my eyes. The three unmarked military helicopters moved off in formation in the direction of Nevada. I was completely blown away by what I had seen.

A few years later after thinking about this I started to believe what I witnessed was time travel of an American Flying saucer that may have been based in Nevada because that was the direction the helicopters went after it disappeared. On top of this the ufo appeared to be the same shape and size of the print I had found at Bunny Flats 22 years before in 1974. I found myself going through a complete paradigm shift after that. This wasn�t fiction. This was real life. Do I ask you to believe this? NO. I wouldn�t. Do I believe it? I have to. I experienced it. The only conclusion I can come to that makes any sense to me at all is that our government has ufos and that those ufos travel not only through space but also through time.

I inserted the above story so I wouldn�t have to write it again.

The following is a memory that was screened from my access until I reached in my life the 21st century. I'm finally allowed to remember it. However, as I washed dishes in my kitchen in Mt. Shasta that summer of 92, something happened before I heard the helicopters. I found myself again in a dreamlike state that I had experienced many times before. It was more familiar since my experience in June 1974 because I had been allowed to remember the space ship print and to take friends to visit it. We all knew what it really was and we were all smart enough to know that sharing it with the authorities would have been a mistake for all concerned. However, this is my screened memory that has finally opened up May 22nd and 23rd 2002.

When I arrived in the contactee state I was someplace else in place and time. Where I was was always a mystery to me. It was always very similar to being asleep at night and dreaming only it was like lucid dreaming. I think it is designed this way to more easily alter the mind to create cover memories. This is done, I believe so that the people of the future earth can not destroy present day people psychologically and physically. They seem to have the need for contact but do not want to erase their future by killing or making crazy their ancestors. This makes perfect sense to me.

On this particular visit with Elohar and General Ragna I said, �Hi. What is it that you need?� Elohar said, �You have been chosen as a present day representative of earth to meet with the Galactic Sentience.� I said, �I�m a nobody on earth. Why would I be chosen?� General Ragna smiled, �Who you are to the beings of earth is unimportant to the Galactic Sentience. What would be important to this amazing being would be your previous contacts as a soul with him.� I said, �I have no memory of any contact with the Galactic Sentience. I don�t even know if the Galactic Sentience is a who or a what or where or even if it or he or she exists.� General Ragna said, �That is understandable considering your present lifetime.� I didn�t know quite how to take this so I remained uncomfortable and quiet.

The next thing I knew I saw a bright light in the distance. I said, �What�s that bright light? Is it sentient?� Elohar and Ragna laughed that strange noseless (they had nose slits but no protruding nose like the humans of our time have) laugh of theirs that put chills up my spine and made me know for sure I was dealing with a very different psychology and reality than I was used to. Later, however, they both confided in me that they were both scared for me and laughed in fear and wondered whether I would survive the encounter. They had been warned not to tell me that though.

So I was a completely innocent babe in the woods meeting the non physical Galactic sentience that had an IQ millions of times greater than me and also was clairsentient and who fed on knowledge of all kinds.

As the light became brighter I began to think about Jesus and the Light people talk about in near death experiences. However, nothing anyone said or did could prepare me for the full experience of meeting the Galactic Sentience. I reached out my hand for the familiar earth handshake. However, the Galactic Sentience simply ate me and then I fainted. That is the best I can do to explain my experience. When I began to awake I felt I was having about 1million simultaneous dreams and thoughts. I thought I was going to throw up. I decided that I might be dead and that I might have to get used to this. So I relaxed. This seemed to help a little. I could then experience not having a body. This seemed to go on interminably. I began to be able to isolate thought streams into bubbles of awareness. I began to notice that there were many bubbles of different stages of my childhood being �Played like a video tape simultaneously. Imagine a being who could process hundreds or thousands of moments through time of your life simultaneously. I decided that I must be dead and that I was having an experience with God.

Soon after that The Galactic Sentience spit me out and I woke up looking at my hands. They glowed white along with the rest of me. I was grateful to have a body again even if it glowed. I felt very altered from any state of consciousness I had ever imagined or experienced since birth in my physical body.

The Galactic Sentience talked in my mind. I will call it he even though it has no sex that I know of. He said, �Who do you think I am?� I said frightened, �I think you might be God.� He said, �Being from earth you might consider me to be a God but I am not infinite so I am not The God of the entire universe. However, considering me to be a demigod like Hercules or someone like that might be useful.� I said, �Are you the one that my mother prayed to while she was pregnant with me?� He said, �Maybe. However, I�m not sure that is a useful thing to say.�

I said, �Why did you eat me?� The Galactic Sentience laughed. It was the laugh of an amazing being. He said, �I didn�t eat you. I simply needed to experience all your life since conception on earth and every biological process including your conception. Only in this way could I know for sure if you could be entrusted with the care of earth and its heavens eventually.�

I said, �Did you just say that you wanted to entrust me with earth and its heavens?� He said, �Yes. But that won�t happen for a long time so you shouldn�t worry. You need only learn and grow as a being and try to stay alive so it can all come about as planned.� I felt faint so I began to fall down. A chair like object broke my fall. I looked at it. It seemed to be made of light and started to look like a throne. A mirror appeared in front of me and I saw a crown of light upon my head. I started to laugh believing now that I was dreaming this because it was all just too surrealistic for me to take seriously. He said, �It is too much for your mind to take in all at once. It will coalesce in the years to come. In 2002 I will allow your truest memories to come forward. You will need them then to go on living. You will have the strength to cope with it all. I have foreseen this.�

I stood looking at the light of the Galactic Sentience with my mouth open in complete stunned amazement. I knew no one on earth would ever believe this. And worst of all I knew some day I would have to try to explain all this to earthlings. It was just too much to think about. I sat back in my chair throne and went to sleep. I heard the purring sound of the consciousness of the Galactic Sentience. I felt like his new pet or new toy. I dreamed. I let go. I felt peace like I was dead.

Note: I think this is why I think I died or am dead sometimes. How else can a human cope with something like this?

After I wrote the above I had time to think the rest of the day. Now it is evening of the same day. At dinner I realized that one of the reasons that I watched Cast Away, the movie with Tom Hanks over and over on DVD was that I was trying to ferret out the above memories. I finally have succeeded in getting to them after all these years. I can see that my mental filters toned down much of the book, Memories to a more polite form of legend.

However, my first deep memory contacts with Elohar and Ragna were very strange for someone of the 20th or 21st century. I probably had many other experiences with them before and after my birth but they were probably enhancements of one kind or another so I wouldn�t have formal memories that could be reactivated like the above ones were.

What makes me happy?

April 30, 2002

Recently, I went to Mt. Waterman and Twin Peaks in the mountains above LA. It took me back to being a boy with my parents still in their 30�s and how great it was to hike those mountains and once in a while camp, sled or ski there too. Last week I took my 28 year old son there. Even though we spent time on Hollywood Blvd and the Sunset Strip and went 4 wheeling on the edge of Big Bear his favorite part of the trip was walking the beautiful old trails and listening to my stories of how happy I was to relive those wonderful days in the 50�s walking the trails there with my parents. My father died when my son was 11 about 17 years ago and my mother now has senile dementia. My son got asthma from the shock of my father�s death. For the two of us to share times when we were all fairly young and still healthy and alive was an incredible joy that I had thought was gone forever until I relived it.

Traveling all over the world and meeting interesting people has always been fun for me. When I was younger all my girlfriends brought me incredible joy. However, I soon found out that that joy eventually turned to incredible pain whether we stayed together one day, one week, one year or 15 years. It seems that the other side of joy is always great pain. In other words �no pain no gain.� So it appears to be true that whenever one experiences incredible joy they must be prepared for the other side which is incredible sadness. Knowing this makes life bearable so one does not constantly feel bushwhacked by the sadness and the pain.

Family has always brought me great reward and peace. Whether it was my parents, my cousins or my grandparents or later my wives and my children I always felt very rewarded. I did not always believe I would survive breakups with either girlfriends or wives when they occurred but generally somehow things always became eventually survivable somehow, some way.

After I was 26 when my first son was born my children became my primary source of joy. As I held my first son in my arms after my wife and I delivered him alone by ourselves I realized what all the intensity and dating and craziness of the 60�s and 70�s had been all about. It brought a whole new joy that I had never experienced before. My son and I bonded from birth. This became very important when 3 years later his mother and I divorced. She gave me full custody of our son. I was 29 and she was only 26 when we divorced. Looking back it seems to me that we were too young to be married let alone to be getting divorced but that was then and this is now.

More than anything else fatherhood made me accept my responsibilities as a man more powerfully than any other single factor. This brought powerful joy, pride and pain.

Some people speak of their happiness coming from their careers. This hasn�t been true for me. I have become fairly cynical about careers. I think this is because I am a very free and independent thinker like my father before me. I tend to tell people what I think and this isn�t very useful in most careers. So I have found that being an entrepreneur worked best for me after struggling through other options in my 20�s. So through trial and error I learned that my independent nature is best suited to creating and running businesses.

A Few years ago I had to retire because of my health. But now I�m much better so I�ll probably start another business for fun and profit and the chance to travel and meet new people. I hope to have the joy of a long and happy life so I can travel and meet more of the amazing people of Earth.

MOM�S LAST TRIP

written originally in 2002

My mother is a stranger now with many of my mothers� memories. Mom is now 83. I still visit her in her dementia facility even though she is no longer the person who raised me. We thought at first it was Alzheimer�s but realized soon it was senile dementia. The doctors said it is caused by an inability to process some B vitamins by the stomach and a hardening of the arteries in the brain. There is no cure for senile dementia. All I know is that Mom is no longer rational. She�s harmless. She�s just not rational or an adult in her thinking any more. When she almost burnt down her apartment last November we realized she was no longer safe ever being left alone again for even a few hours. We were able to place her in the most humane convalescent hospital in our County in California in early December. She�s been there now 8 months. In 1999 she told me she didn�t want to drive her Gold Honda car any more. At least once a year she drove up to see her two older sisters in Seattle where Mom and her sisters were raised. On her last trip alone Mom fell in the bathtub and scraped her back in a motel in Oregon and couldn�t get out. She screamed and the management had to extricate her from the tub. She lost confidence in taking trips alone after that. I was worried then that Mom would fade out quickly once she lost her independence in driving. In my own mind I picture myself driving a car until I die. I hope this is the case.

My wife�s mother had died that year and I had almost died that year from a heart virus. Though I had recovered with no heart damage my confidence was shaken. So I took my Mother and daughter to Europe partly to rejoice in just being alive. I knew that if I could do this I could do anything. Mom was more difficult than I had expected when we boarded the British Airlines plane bound for Heathrow Airport from San Francisco over the polar route. It was a red eye flight of 11 hours. We left in the evening and got there the next morning.

I had thought in planning that my 10 year old would be difficult on that long a flight but it was actually my mother who was whining and difficult. I had no way of knowing she was already showing early signs of senile dementia. One of the early signs is not being able to cope with any changes without great distress. One comfort for me was British Air�s free gratis packet of socks, mini tooth brush and paste and a blindfold and ear plugs for sleeping. The ear plugs were the best.

Since Mom was 80 and overweight, walking more than a block was not possible for her. So a wheelchair was obtained through the Airline at Heathrow. Part of the way we road a golfcart type of vehicle through the terminal to the local British flights. I noticed there were many different types of food that were different than in the US. Within 2 hours we boarded our next plane to Edinburgh, Scotland. I was pretty exhausted and my daughter and mother were pretty out of it as well. We had now been traveling at least 18 hours and had left the previous evening and lost 6 to 8 hours in the time change. When we arrived at Edinburgh we were all pretty out of it. I rented a car and immediately had to deal with driving on the left side of the road and negotiating roundabouts without killing us all. I was very glad I had reserved a hotel room for us within a few miles of the Edinburgh Airport. We all slept and wound up waking up at 3 or 4 am Edinburgh time which would be comparable to between about 7 and 9 pm here on the west coast.

Since we were completely out of sync with the local time we decided to get up and drive to Glasgow to see where Mom�s parents grew up. It was dark and I got on the wrong exit from a big roundabout and wound up in Edinburgh rather than Glasgow. Then I got completely lost and couldn�t find any place where I could stop and buy a map. The drivers seat is on the right side and it was a floor stick shift and the shifter was to my left instead of the right. Driving on the left side of the road through roundabouts and shifting on the left and driving on the right side of the car was a whole lot to deal with while dealing with heavy traffic and heavy jet lag and it was taking me to the limit of my abilities. I finally decided after 2 days of frustration with traffic and getting lost and nearly getting us killed several times that I would head up into the Scottish Highlands where there are less people so I could get used to this new type of driving in a more safe less lethal environment and get over the seemingly unending jet lag. We drove up toward Aviemore where there are ski lifts in the mountains. I felt more at home there than anywhere I have ever been on earth. I recently found out that this is an area where my Scottish ancestral clan was from. We were able to understand the Scottish dialects in this area fairly well which helped a lot at restaurants etc. We also visited Findhorn, Inverness and Loch Ness.

Mom thoroughly enjoyed this part of the trip. My daughter and I love being out in the country and marveled at the lakes and different kinds of trees than we have here on the California coast. The birds were very different than California as well. We noticed, for example that ravens are very big there and have a much bigger head than here in California. My daughter and I rode the ski lift up to the top and took a hike on a blustery day. We also saw Reindeer which live in the area. My daughter was amazed by the reindeer as they were so big and had such interesting behavior and horns. They had sort of a nostalgic Santa Claus magical effect on her.

After about 5 days in the Highlands and Loch Ness and Inverness we returned to stay in Edinburgh. My daughter and I really loved Edinburgh Castle which dates back to the 1200�s. It is amazing to go to a place that tied to history that far back. By now I was also an expert driver according to Scottish and English standards. I could get on and off roundabouts with the best of them.

Finally, I was able to avoid rush hour traffic and navigate us to Clydebank where Mom�s mother grew up and then to Ayre where Mom�s Dad grew up. Mom�s parents immigrated to America in about 1910. Mom was born in 1919 and grew up in Seattle which has weather and a climate similar to Glasgow and Edinburgh which are the two main cities in Scotland. After we visited Clydebank and Ayre we visited Loch Loman. Loch is just Scottish for Lake. It rains a lot in Scotland and England so there are a lot of lakes.

Finally, it was time to meet my son, Star and his friend in Munich. At this point my mother became more difficult. She was just getting used to being in Scotland and she couldn�t deal with any more change, I guess. Since we were staying in Edinburgh, it was easy to drop our rental car off at the airport and catch our flight to London and then our flight to Munich. As we disembarked from our flight in Munich there was some problem between the English Steward and the German ground crew. The Germans pronounce Munich (Munchen) and an airport is a flughaven which I think might might mean plane haven. They argued for a while before we were handed off to them.

I think it might have been that none of the 3 of us spoke German and that they had trouble finding someone who spoke English to us. Star and his friend met us at the baggage claim. They had already been traveling around Europe for a month or more and had already been to Scotland where Star�s friend had spent his junior year in college. They had also visited England, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands and had just come from Berlin, a place they both liked a lot. Star said he was most impressed with some girls he had met from Australia. We rented two taxis to fit us all and our luggage in and went to rent our motorhome. We all traveled in the motorhome through Oberamagau and into Austria, then Switzerland and finally Italy.

I think my favorite places were Zurich, Switzerland and the ride up the cogwheel train to Jung Frau and Mt Eider in the Swiss Alps also in Switzerland. Mom mostly stayed in the Motorhome and looked out the window at all the beauty. She had trouble getting in an out of the Motorhome and so stopped trying and just stayed there the whole trip except for getting out and into a 500 year old hotel in Zurich which she loved just like the rest of us. By the time we flew back to London Mom had retreated into herself into a very strange place. My daughter and I didn�t know what to do so we enjoyed London and brought her food. Mom retreated into TV even though it is quite different than TV in the US. At times in the Motorhome the stories she told my daughter scared my daughter.

Mom no longer had useful mental filters about what was proper to talk about. When Star and his friend went on their way in Italy it was just too abrupt a change for Mom and she was strange after that, especially in London. Though I always love my mother I found it hard when we returned home to California not to be angry with her for making the trip so difficult for me and my daughter. Now I realize that Mom was mentally leaving us slowly even then. I�m very grateful I was able to take Mom to Scotland to visit where her parents grew up before she got too old or died. Being with Mom and my daughter in Scotland is something I�ll never forget.

The Hawaii Experience

Written online beginning may 31st 2005

When I was about 15 I was working with my father in Palos Verdes for worldwide church leader. In the leader and his wife's extensive library was a series of paperbacks by James Churchward and written originally in the late 1800's. They lent me several of these books. The first one I can remember was called "The Ancient Symbols of Mu". These books spoke of Mu being the first civilization on earth predating LeMUria and even Atlantis. Like Atlantis Mu sank beneath the waters. It made me think that there might have been some kind of interplanetary war both in regard to Mu and Atlantis even though Atlantis sunk between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago as recounted in the Noah experience in the bible.

Anyway, Mu sank where the Hawaiian Islands are now being slowly reborn. In fact all the Hawaiian Islands were built by the same volcano as the plates slowly shift to the north, even Kauai and little Nihau, then Oahu, Molokai,Maui, Lanai, and last but certainly not least the big Island of Hawaii that is still growing every day as the lava spurts up and makes it bigger and bigger even now.

When I journeyed first to the big Island I was 26. My wife had been in Hawaii for three years living in and around Hilo before she and her previous boyfriend had returned to Los Angeles to find better jobs. Now she and I had had a son a few months before and she begged me to return to Hawaii. However, it could not be for her the magic place it had been as a single girl tripping the light fantastic with her ex boyfriend.

However, for me it was an all new experience for me. We leased a car for three months because we couldn't afford a good enough one and also I had the feeling because of her disapointment that we wouldn't last here. I was right. Some friends from Alaska met us unexpectedly at the beach one day. I was quite surprised as the wife of the couple with kids was someone I had been in love with though we had never dated. Though this made things a little uncomfortable for my wife and I as she knew of my past feelings for this now married lady with a daughter we all settled down to have a fun time on the big Island together.

Unfortunately, the husband rolled a big Avocado (about 1 foot across) that grew in big trees overhanging our rented house off the roof for me to catch. However, I was barefoot and there was a big sharp piece of glass in the high grass near our house and I cut my big toe from bottom to top which required about a dozen or more stitches to close. This prevented me from working at my job as I couldn't stand up without bleeding severely. So I sat at home with my leg up high so I wouldn't bleed to death most of the time. Meanwhile our finances were dwindling while my wife played all over the island with our friends and their daughter while I stayed home and watched our baby son. I felt pretty upset about all this.

The good thing about all this was that God taught me a great lesson during this blank time I had waiting at home with no TV or good books to read. First, I had to entertain, change and feed my son breast milk which my wife expressed during the night and froze in order to build up a stock so I could thaw and my son would still be happy. Second, I had plenty of time to think about life. On one of these occasions I was sitting outside in an outdoor bath tub with my baby son during the day and I finally realized something very important. "It was that only people who live in climates with snow or cold or lack of food or shelter part or all the year have to become neurotic to take care of their food, shelter and clothing. In tropical climates one does not have to worry that much about shelter or even food that much as long as the population density isn't too high. Also in tropical climates one naturally becomes much more intuitive because thinking too much (unless you have air conditioning)in tropical climates makes your brain heat up and you will get a headache or worse. Therefore I realized that the natural state for humans is this Eden state. However, if you stay too neurotic you can't slow down enough to get intuitive and really enjoy a tropical Eden too long."

Coupled with this I realized that the so called work ethic was completely destroying the pure naturalness of everything on earth and that the likely outcome of all this neurotic work ethic was extinction of all life on earth. It wouldn't happen immediately but within a few hundred years. end of realization.

Since then,however, there have been many years to ponder this completely logical supposition. Though I still basicly agree with this idea I have one caveat. This one exception is that if people on earth become organized enough and of one mind enough they won't go extinct with all life on earth. Instead they will keep alive the species they prefer and reterraform earth to be exactly what they want. I'm not saying that this would be good. However, it just might be better than extinction!

How this realization affected me personally was profound! It made me realize that the neurotic work ethic obsessed Northern nations were all kind of crazy and that I grew up in this crazy environment too. I had to ask myself the question, "Do I want to stay in this abnormal state of neurotic unbalanced work ethic." My answer was, "No. I want to work Smarter not Harder." I want to become enlightened so that my every thought and deed becomes an automatic blessing to all it touches.

So though I cut my foot and didn't get to play around the big island with my friends I became much more enlightened than I ever imagined I would that early in life. Even when we had to move back to the mainland I kept this attitude of enlightenment flowing through my veins. So that no matter what happened in my life I wouldn't really lose my center again. "Nothing's going to change my world", like the Beatles said. More later

Women I have Known

This following essay was written because I saw the movie "Venus" with Peter O'toole and Vanessa Redgrave and two other classic english male actors and the young woman who plays the part of "Venus".Today is Friday at 4:39 pm pst February 9th 2007

I was watching the charactor that Peter O'toole played so excellently in "Venus". His meaning in his life was as he said, "To Give Pleasure". As someone who also "worships" women and who is also on a spiritual path I would say it differently for my own life. I would say that I always revered and worshipped women. Though I am a man I never really trusted men or boys. I have many good male friends but men in general I have no trust in having grown up with them. What I found growing up in the 50's that even though one couldn't totally trust girls or women entirely either, what I did find was that women like my mother and grandmother (MOm's Mom) who lived with me and Dad did not lie anymore to me and Dad than they already did to themselves. So I found that the basic kindness shown to me by my mother and grandmother turned me into a gentleman. At times I was a long haired gentleman but always a gentleman which has always held me in good stead with the ladies.

My mother and grandmother were very kind to me in fact they spoiled me mercilously. At one point in my life between ages 1 and 4 I had my mother, my aunt, 2 grandmothers etc. all living on the same 2 acres of land owned by my grandfather in the Seattle area and they competed by loving me and spoiling me mercilously to the point where by age four all my front teeth had to be pulled out so they didn't rot out my permanent teeth. All my female relatives had fed me so much goodies and candy that my teeth rotted out of my head. So I walked around a few years with no front teeth. Then when My big two front teeth came in fully I ran into the back of a 1949 Dodge 4 door on my bicycle and broke my adult teeth in half. There were two little teeth marks into the trunk of the car where my teeth broke and shattered.

So I was a snagglepuss from age 9 when my two front teeth broke off until I was 15. At about age 10 I was in La Canada, California (L.A. area) at a restaurant with my parents and relatives for a Sunday Brunch after church. I noticed one of the girls from my class looking longingly in my direction. I was wearing a really nice blue suit with a vest and jacket for church so I thought she was admiring my nice clothes. When I went to grade school the next day in Glendale I saw this girl and her friend talking. Finally, her friend that I think was named Debbie came over to me and said, "My friend wants to go steady with you." I felt sick as I wasn't ready for girls yet. So I said, "I'm not ready to date anyone. I'm still a kid." I knew many of the kids in my grade were already going steady as it was 1958 some had even bragged about having sex but this was a pretty rare thing at age 10 but I knew there was no way I was ready to go steady with anyone yet. Debbie went back to her friend and she looked crushed but also hopeful as I had said I wasnt' ready to date anyone yet.

I remember when I had to square dance and as you dance you had to rotate partners. You had to put your arm around the girls and hold their right hand in your left hand. Finally, I had rotated to the girl that had wanted to go steady with me. I was really scared because it felt really awkward to hold in my arms a girl that obviously wanted to kiss me if not more. I was very uncomfortable. But there was something precious about this experience of being liked and wanted by someone other than relatives. This I suppose was the first girl my age at least who had fallen in love with me and who was courageous enough to tell me "Through a friend".

As far as girls I was "In Love" with there was one beautiful blonde wispy girl when I was in 4th grade named "Kristina" that I was totally in love with.Blonde hair and blue eyes and from Sweden. I was very shy and so was she. I don't know if I ever even talked to her socially at all outside of normal schoolwork business.

An important day for me was when my wonderful female 4th grade teacher Mrs. Krell read one of my first real writing stories before the class. After reading it she said, "Does anyone know who wrote this?" Debbie, (the same one as above) said, "It's Fred. He's blushing!" The whole class laughed at my embarrassment including Debbie and Kristina. However, I was amazed at how wonderful it was to be recognized for being a good storyteller and writer. I already knew I was a good musician and public speaker. So somehow beginning to be known as a good writer in 4th grade also set the tone of my life.

I went out for basketball in the 6th grade. I was so tall I was good at it. The coach was pleased to have me on the team. However, this was the last year I went out for a sport. I started working more at jobs. I worked a lot of places for everything from a dollar an hour at age 12 for digging a ditch on a construction site to 3.50 and hour in my late teens for working with computers. the minimum wage back then was about $1.16 per hour and would be a whole lot more than the minimum wage does now. (I bought an 8 year old stationwagon in 1964 in excellent condition for 600 dollars to show you how far money went then. a brand new vw "beetle" or bug cost only $800 then).

The switch to junior High School (beginning 7th grade) brought on many changes. My grade school had been in a lower middle class area but if I went to the junior high from that grade school Horace Mann grade school I would have to go to a school known for the khaki boys gang. The khaki boys gang wore (at that time) white t-shirts khaki baggy pants and an ankle boot with a razor or switch blade tucked in next to the foot for easy use. My parents knew about this and decided to move to another area so I could go to an upper class junior high (Wilson junior High School). However, when I moved there the upper class kids already had their own clicks one could not break into and become a member. So I found it really difficult because I though I was attracted to many of the upper class girls there was no way to get close to them even though in my mind I wasn't ready to date yet.

When I moved on to High School (10th grade) I still wasn't dating though some people I knew were. However, several sequences of events changed all this. One of these changes was the assasination of President Kennedy which happened while I was at high school. I was leaving my gymn class for English Class when someone said that the president of Mexico had been assasinated. I said, "That's awful!" I walked on to English Class where several girls were crying and boys were swearing and some boys were fighting back tears. The teacher seemed so distraught Mrs. Barr (a very sexy 20 something in a miniskirt) let everyone vent their anger and pain. I don't think any event in my lifetime had the effect of the assasination of President Kennedy. The closest event to it in power, meaning and pathos was 9-11-01 since then.

This event jarred me to my senses and made me realize that I wanted a girlfriend. Life was short. A girl who sat behind me in was a beautiful blonde haired blue eyed girl from Anchorage, Alaska. I finally mustered the courage to ask her out to a movie. It was "Beach Blanket Bingo" with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicelo and it played at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. I remember I asked my friend, Mike, who had a red '51 ford convertable sedan to take us to the movie. He dropped us out in front of the Alex Theatre where many people were standing in line for the movie. Unfortunately, I kicked his thermos out of the car and it broke to my embarrassment. However, Gayle and I had a great time at the movie. I walked her home after the movie with my arm around her shoulders. We went to two more movies and on the third date I tried to kiss her. It was the single most disapointing moment in my life because I didn't know how to kiss yet. I kissed her block style like one kisses ones mother so I was very disapointed. As I walked home another boy who wanted to date her drove by in a car and tried to pick a fight with me. I talked him out of it as I said I didn't know if I was going to date her anymore. Which was true. However, that summer I saw her while shopping so we went ice skating which was fun but even though she was beautiful we didn't have enough in common to keep dating.

I dated one more girl from High School. Her name was Sharon and she was an identical twin that I knew from school. I was very attracted to her and took her to the beach and made out with her on a blanket but I still didn't really know how to kiss so I was mostly frustrated after that experience. I didn't really have enough in common with her to have conversations that I was really interested in having with her. So I was beginning to see that this whole dating thing was way more complicated than I had ever imagined. It didn't matter that we were attracted to each other. If we didn't have conversations that were interesting to me then I wasn't really interested in that person. Also, this was before I was in my early twenties and changed to a different mode of dating. I was very innocent and naive at this point and was really only interested in dating women that I might marry one day so I was completely frustrated. After all I was only 15 and 16 years old.

I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday and a month later bought myself in 1964 a 1956 Ford Stationwagon that I called affectionately my "surf wagon" as I saw myself as a surfer as that was a very popular thing to be then since I lived near enough to surf as long as I was willing to drive 1/2 hour to an hour depending on what beach I wanted to surf at with my buddies.

Several things at 16 changed my life a lot. The first thing was that I went to a desert church retreat in Yucca Valley, California. After a fun weekend I drove home with two women. We drove in a new 1965 Chevrolet Impala Stationwagon. The three of us sat in the front seat as this was before bucket seats took over the auto industry. This was a very intimate experience for me because I was sitting next to a 21 year old woman from my church that was very beautiful. The driver was a lady about 30 whose husband that had recently died in an auto accident so she was a little manic because she had two small boys to raise alone now. The 30 year old said to me, "You must be a bmoc". I said "what does that mean?" She said, "Big man on the campus." I saw these two women looking hungrily at me and was sort of amazed at both their desire for me. The next week I asked the 21 year old to go to a political rally with me. On the way to the rally I talked her out of it and we went to a scary drive in movie instead. She felt a little embarrassed that I was only 16 and she 21. However, when we began to kiss because she was so scared at the movie she gently stuck her tongue in my mouth. I was completely amazed. I finally got just how amazing this all was. In that moment my life completely changed and I was not only in lust but also in love. Everything was different after that. She and I went steady for about one year. However, I wasn't mature enough to maintain that relationship and I found her to be too emotional for me to feel safe in that relationship. It took me a long time to figure all this out. She loved me enough for us to eventually marry. If I had been 30 this might have worked. However, I was only 16 and had a whole lot more to learn so I broke up with her and started going with another girl from my church who was 1 year older than I that went to L.A. State University in Los Angeles. This relationship also was with with someone that I knew that I might want to marry one day. However, there was no way I was ready for this deep a relationship either. It wasn't until I was 26 when I eventually married for the first time. Unfortunately, I had been excommunicated from my church by then so it wasn't to either of those two girls. However, in retrospect I needed to separate from that church for my life to work properly anyway. Friends of mine who stayed in my parent's church all their lives all seemed to have psychological problems because of it. That is my assessment anyway. I guess I believe that God is fine but what many people do in churches that turns their heads inside out just seems to make them nuts and way out of touch with reality. It makes perfect sense to me why so many pediphiles and child molesters never are found out in churches. The whole "churchy" point of view prevents molesters from being discovered. This out of touch with reality church point of view causes suicides, molestations, unwanted pregnancies, unwanted children and a host of insanity among millions of church faithful.This is not just in Christianity either. This is true in all religions

The A-Frame

written starting March 17th 2007

I know this is out of order but I decided anything new i write I will put at the end in order not to interfere with the flow of the above essays.

In 1980 or so my wife and I bought a piece of property. At the time it was very inexpensive because it did not have electricity or phone service or piped in water available. A previous owner had put in a septic tank with a little 4 foot by 8 foot wide little wooden hut with a toilet inside.

The inside was partly eaten away by porcupines that like the glue that bonds the plywood layers together. So parts of the plywood internal wall were already eaten except for about the last 1/16" layer of wood. This was only on one inside wall so the structure still had basic integrity because of external wood siding and roofing. The roof was totally okay because the porcupine could only reach as high as it could stand up.

The property was at 4000 feet elevation on the side of Mt. Shasta and it did have a spring that came right out of the ground that we could gather washing water for. We weren't sure about using it for drinking so we gathered drinking water elsewhere or boiled water to drink the spring water. The property was 10 miles from the nearest small town and 3 miles down a series of dirt roads. Because the 2 1/2 acres of pine, Cedar, oak, and manzinita had a truly wonderful perfect view of Mt. Shasta.

We decided to build an A-Frame and to home school our children then ages, 6,7, and 9 years old. My father and I had built many houses over the years and though he was retired then he came to help me built this A-Frame with great enthusiasm the summer of 1981. Before he came I constructed a shed about 8 foot by 8 foot out of logs and covered with tin from a local aircraft hanger that had burnt down. They allowed me to salvage the tin for free as long as I would haul it away. By lining the inside of the shed with 8 ml. clear plastic I made it completely waterproof and the logs and tin roof and siding made it empervious to both wind and snow. It was also about 13 feet high and had a loft inside for sleeping or camping. We also, at the time had a 1971 VW camper van with a pop top for extra sleeping. We spent the summer of 1981 laying the foundation and floor and framing our A-Frame. Since we paid for the land outright we found we needed to sell our VW Van that we called "FIG" because that was part of its license plate in order to buy enough flooring and plywood for floors and walls and to buy green roofing felt and tar and windows.

Since we could get up to 7 feet of snow at one time during the winter an A-Frame was perfect for shedding snow if we weren't there in the deep winter. Between the months of December and February getting stuck in the snow on the land was a real possibility if one wasn't very aware of oncoming weather.

Many times we had to park our vehicle or vehicles 1 to 2 miles away because of the snow levels and put on our cross country skis. (The children had skis too.) Then we put put on backpacks and tow sleds full of gear to the A-Frame. Hopefully we could carry everthing in one trip with everyone helping or I would go back and make any extra trips by myself.

Within 2 years or so we bought a better vehicle for these journeys, a 1974 Scout II that could push up to two feet of snow in four wheel drive. I think that was the most amazing off road vehicle I ever owned or drove. Also, one neighbor was crazy enough to try to plow the road even when the 7 feet of snow was coming down at 3 am in the morning. However, I didn't want a plow on my vehicle because it only tended to make ones vehicle not last very long if you put a plow on it and used it on dirt roads covered with snow.

This may sound kind of goofy in this day and age,but one day we were all so happy after our A-Frame was finished that we got me and my wife and all three kids and even our dog on the handlebars of my 1974 honda XL dirt and street motorcycle and rode up to 9000 feet on dirt roads. About half the time our dog ran alongside the bike but then she got tired and in sympathy I put her on the handlebars. Finally, at about 9000 feet we started hitting patches of snow and finally decided to park the bike and walk instead. Obviously, we only did this once and it was only possible because there was No ONe on any of the dirt roads because we were so remote then. Going down was a little more difficult than going up and it was necessary to down shift and use only the back brake very lightly to keep everyone safe while returning down the dirt and gravel roads to 4000 feet in elevation. Back then there were dirt roads all the way up to Clear Creek and Cold Creek. One traveled up right next to mud creek canyon. By the way mud creek is so filled with lava dust that to this day you can't see more than six inches or less into the water because of the volcanic dust and sand.

In order to appreciate all this fully my being able to build this A-Frame on the side of Mt. Shasta and to be able to home school my children for 4 years and in this way to fully live my dreams between 1980 and 1984 or 5, it has also allowed me to bear much of the shit in my life since then knowing that I at least got to live my full dreams for a few years.

So many people never risk the risk to live their dreams. At least I lived my dreams for 5 years until my father died and my life fell apart in August 1985. I don't think I fully regrouped from losing my father until I almost died in 1998 and then recovered and took my mother to Scotland to visit Clydebank and Ayr in October 1999 where her mother and father grew up in Scotland. The towns are both near Glasgow, Scotland.

Some other amazing experiences while we lived there was lots of game playing with the kids, lots of reading books together like The Blue Adept Series and the Narnia series entirely. Since we didn't have electricity at the A-Frame we used Aladdin Kerosene lamps which are extremely bright and also candle lanterns for trips outside to the john at night in the wind. We also installed a sink and kitchen area and an old clawfoot 19th century large bathtub. We heated the water in a large washtub on top of a bonfire outside and then moved the very hot water in 5 gallon white buckets for baths. Though life was very work intensive out there it was very inexpensive and extremely rewarding. We found that buying our food in bulk at the market that predated Berryvale was the best way to go. Also, there was a food co-op in which we could buy rice, pasta, peanut butter, and powdered milk that we would store in 5 gallon white buckets with sealable lids to keep all the critters out.

If we left the A-Frame for a couple of months without a house sitter we would have to deal with rats that might try to move in and make messes. However, mostly our life there was amazing. There were bears, deer, flying squirrels, Golden mantle ground squirrels that the kids would try to make pets. However, sadly, usually their tom cat would find a way to make a meal out of them when no one was looking making the kids very angry. Finally, when the oldest got to be 12, he said, I want to go to school again! Since my father was dying we decided to move back to the Bay area and buy another business. However, none of us would ever forget our amazing back to woods life. If you can imagine this: The land was paid for. The A-Frame was paid for. Any vehicles we had were either paid for or on small payments. We had no utility bills. All we had to pay was property taxes, food, clothing, kerosene for lamps and gas for our vehicles and chain saws and replacement tools like shovels, axes, mauls, saws etc. Life was amazingly rewarding while being amazingly reasonable! We lived our dream! It was a dream we could afford until my father began to pass on. Thank you God!

The dream we lived no longer exists except as fond memories for us. But I can say one of the main reasons I'm still alive was that God allowed me to live that dream even though many others I couldn't live I got to live that one fully.

The property has been sold, the A-Frame torn down, a new house built basicly on the same spot. But still, we lived our dream, we home schooled our kids. WE LIVED OUR DREAMS!

Stand By Me!

written March 27 2007

There is a movie called Stand By Me. Since there is more than one movie by this name let me describe the one I mean. In this movie several boys around 1960 or before walk down a railroad track somewhere in Oregon to find a dead body of another boy and have amazing adventures. They are all 10 to 12 years old. Though in my life there were no dead bodies(at least between ages 6 and 12) there were many adventures in my life like this movie.

Shasta Springs

Shasta Springs was a resort that President Teddy Roosevelt visited. It has mineral water coming out of the ground and I believe at that time there were developed hot springs and there was even ozone that rose from some of the water that if inhaled burn your nose. Vacationers like President Teddy Roosevelt also enjoyed area. If you want to see what he saw basicly, the following address you can paste or type in if you want to see what he saw then: http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/cal07.Html Also, at wikipedia.com under "Shasta Springs" is a lot of other interesting stuff in addition to this photo.

My first clear memory of Shasta Springs and Castle Lake took place in the summer of 1953. In 1952, when I was 4 years old is my first real memory of Mt. Shasta. We had been riding in the car during the winter on our way to Seattle to visit relatives who missed us the winter of 1952 when I decided I wanted to play in the snow of Mt. Shasta. My parents let me because I was being difficult. Soon, I was screaming from cold cold hands and feet and very miserable. This is how kids learn how really cold snow on the ground as well as coming down out of the sky can be.

So anyway, in 1953, 6 month later I had grown up a lot. In April in El Cajon, near San Diego California I had turned 5. Back then you were considered almost an adult in my Dad's family as he had been given his first rifle at 4 years old and expected to go hunt for food with it. That would have been 1920, in Oregon most likely.

There is a funny story that when Dad was 6 years old in Coos Bay, Oregon, their mother sent his brother age 4(with a 22 pistol), Dad (with his remington 22 pump) and the oldest brother(with a small gauge shotgun) out to get doves for dinner. The only problem was they were so young that they didn't know what doves looked like so they brought home about 10 robins. Since anyone knows that robins don't have enough meat on them to eat unless someone was very very desperate, their mother kind of hid her laughter and tried to honor the boys by cooking them anyway. Dad said they were mostly full of shotgun pellets and they all had to keep pulling the pellets out of their mouths so they didn't break a baby tooth or something. Their Mom and Dad really got a kick out of this story!

Anyway, backt to me in 1953. Mable Bured went to our church in San Diego so Dad and I caught a ride all the way up to Mt. Shasta at Shasta Springs with her in her 1949 Dodge.
http://custom.autos.yahoo.com/gallery/photos-car-3127
If you paste this it is a photo of exactly the car we rode in only imagine a dark color like brown or navy blue.
Boy, that thing was a real tank. Imagine a Lincoln Continental built like they built cars back in 1949. Look out!

It took two or three days to get to Shasta Springs back then because Interstate 5 didn't exist yet. Also, there was no freeway over the Grapevine Between San Fernando Valley and Bakersfield so it was very dangerous and truck drivers and others died quite often when their brakes failed over those windy curvy roads. It took about 5 or more hours to go over the grapevine then. Now, with Interstate 5 now it is about an hour or more instead with the freeways in.

The other place it took a lot of time was you had to go up hiway 99 and there were no freeway bypasses for Bakersfield,Fresno, Modesto, Merced,or the worst, Sacramento. Then you drove through Williams, Red Bluff, Redding. After that you were completely exhausted from driving. But no! Now you had to drive 5 hours up a windy mountain road to get to Shasta.

However, I remember driving from Los angeles to Shasta Springs as a young man going up Interstate 5 in 10 hours in my VW Beetle. However, in 1953 it took forever to do the same thing. I would say 4 hours from San Diego to Los Angeles, then 5 hours over the Grape Vine, then 12 hours to Redding. Then 5 hours up the windy mountain Road to Shasta Springs.

So I would say it took 26 hours total to drive from San Diego to Shasta Springs in 1953. And that would be if my father drove, Not Mable. When we arrived at Shasta Springs my father went to work doing electrical work for the church. Shasta Springs, I believe is at least 1800 acres of cabins, cafeteria and auditoriums and trails etc.

When I first arrived I remember I got very bored at first helping my father with electrical stuff. However, later, I got to meet several kids that were up there with their parents working on the church property with their parents too. Soon, I found all sorts of fun things to do. There were streams and trails and even railroad tracks if one walked down the right trail following the Shasta Springs down the hill to the tracks. Then, every summer from when I was 5 years old when I spent 6 weeks with my father there to when I was 12 my family and I spent 1 to 2 weeks in this fun fun place in the forest. Also, there were big swings built in a sand box that one could swing on and even jump out of. Later, there was a malt shop called Saint Germain's Pantry that I could buy Shasta Root Beer or Wild Cherry soda from or even get a Vegeburger or a Milkshake, Malt or soda at. Soon, everyone seemed to know me by name and I felt safe with all my friends in my religion that came from all over the world for those 2 to 4 weeks during the summer. I met people from Canada, Switzerland, England, Scotland, Germany, Australia etc.

It was always fun meeting new kids and new adults from all over america and the world. From age 5 to 12 Shasta Springs WAS my world where everyone believed like my parents did and I didn't have to hide who I was or what my beliefs were from anyone. It was a breath of fresh air that I waited for all year.

However, as I grew older I saw more and more hypocrisy because my parents were in the inner circle of the religion. They were the lay ministers of the Los Angeles "I AM" Sanctuary. Most people didn't see what they saw that were just regular members. My parents and I saw the inner workings of the church and all the people who metaphorically at least "stabbed people in the back" to move up the social rungs of leadership power within the church. It was understood that we weren't supposed to speak to the regular 'IAm' students about all this.

It was when my mother's father (one of my grandfather's) died when I was 12 years old that it all came to a head for me. Mom started to have a nervous breakdown because she was very upset at how her Dad had died. Then people started to verbally attack my parents because they saw Mom was weak with her father dying. I had no use for such evil people in my life and stopped going to church entirely as a result of this. Ordinarily, my father, being a very intense person would have easily stood up to all this. However, my mother begged that they stop being ministers of the Los Angeles Sanctuary. He sadly agreed. My mother was very grateful.

However, I was also battling childhood epilepsy and so at 14 started using powerful prayers and returned to church in order to physically survive. After I invoked God into my body everything changed in my life. However, there was a side of me that remembered all the hypocricy. The confines of church life grated on me in a variety of ways until I was 21. At that point I had to Go my own way.

1969
Nineteen sixty-nine was the wierdest, strangest, most life altering year of my entire life.

The year started innocently enough. I was 20 years old and still living at home with my parents. The previous year I bought my first new car, a 1968 Camaro. It had a 327 on board and I found it to be one of the fastest cars I had ever driven acceleration wise from about 20 to 70 mph. I got a job working as a computer operator and also did some programming for a company in North Hollywood. They did automated processing for the biggest car dealerships in the state. The core computers were the IBM 360, the optical scanners which were Univac computers. The optical scanners burned the data onto punch cards. Then we sorted for different fields collated when necessary and did the final processing and printouts on the IBM 360's. At that time we were working on computers worth millions of dollars so there we purposely no windows so no one would see the value of what we were working with.

I worked from midnight to noon seven days a week. Because I was young and trying to break into the computer field at the time as a long term serious professional. However, the first problem with all this was I could never adjust to the hours. I would get home at noon and want to go outside into the sunlight and go driving or something. So by 4 or 5 pm I would try to go to sleep and couldn't. Then I would get up and watch tv until 9 or 10. Then I would go to sleep for an hour and then get up at 11pm and try to get to work. This went on like this for several months with the expected results of my physical health and mental acuity suffering terribly. Finally, I was fired because I began to make mistakes. Before this happened an angel came to me and said, "We are NOT going to allow you to make the same mistakes you did in Atlantis. You will either quit or you WILL be fired." So I was given a choice by God and failed because I was trying to be a business success.

Another strange thing was that even though everyone thought I was a success living this life at age 20. I was terribly unhappy with my life. I was happy only with my car at this point. Just before I was fired I stopped being a virgin with an old girlfriend from years before. However, at the time I was going with someone else so this, at least for me became an ethical problem. It wasn't that I was going to tell my steady about this. It just began to eat on me in a new and different kind of way. My steady girlfriend was several thousand miles away in college. After I was fired I tried to move where she was because my ego was totally crushed by being fired. However, that climate didn't suit me. Besides, I was a California Coast kid. All the time I was away the temperature didn't get above 30. This wasn't the kind of place I wanted to live. So after a few weeks I left and returned to L.A.

My father, at the time was working for an electrical contractor. He had sold his interest in his electrical contracting business because he found he could actually make more money as a journeyman at that point. He got me a job as an Electrician's helper when I returned from back east. The biggest problem that Dad ran into was that though he made very good money as an electrical contractor he found it very hard to set aside enough money every year for taxes. So every year he owed thousands of dollars that were already spent. This put my parents in debt borrowing money to pay taxes. He finally just got disgusted and sold his part of the partnership and went back to being a journeyman electrician.

So, now I was working with my father in the San Fernando Valley. At the time we were working on a warehouse that was a very large printing business.

At this warehouse they printed unsavory things so this year I found myself confronted at every level with serious ethical questions in a way that I never had had to face except once for 5 years during the time I had Childhood epilepsy. Suddenly, because I was no longer a virgin and because I hadn't told my steady that this had happened I found myself in a long series of ethical collapses. Looking back now I can see it was inevitable that I eventually come out of the fairy tale of childhood and become a man. However, at the time the whole thing was for me an ethical horror movie. I kept being put in situations where I made decisions different that I had originally thought I would ever make. Both my internal and external reality made no sense at all to me. I was in completely uncharted territory and "yes" I was scared because starting with the collapse of my job working with computers I realized that God wouldn't let me go the Atlantis computers and robotics route in this lifetime. I was beginning to see why.

The reason was that though I was extremely logical and reasonable it was not enough. God was trying to get me to learn "compassion" for all beings. I was very good at being efficient. But being efficient isn't enough. Hitler was efficient at killing the Jews. 'Efficiency without compassion is the road to hell!' So I was scared because I didn't know what to do with myself. That summer I asked my steady girlfriend whether we would have a normal sexual relationship or not. She said, "I want to remain celibate after we marry." I knew that wasn't going to work for me so I broke up with her. Maybe the girl I stopped being a virgin with told her what happened. I don't know. All I knew at the time was that I watched them walk on the moon for the first time and she watched them walk on the moon and we were 600 miles apart and not together like we were a few weeks before.

Even though I knew I had made the right decision to break up with her because I wanted children and if she seriously wanted to be celibate then children were out of the question. However, I was not prepared for my feelings because we had gone together for 2 years and had decided up to that summer that we would marry.

Also, at the time I wasn't really understanding that I also was in love with another girl that went to LA State University that had been my previous steady. However, I had been unfaithful(remember I was a virgin then) which meant I had kissed other girls while we went together. She knew about this but still cared about me. However, I never told her that I went out with other girls because I was afraid of my feelings for her because I was too young to pursue these deep feelings. This was another problem in 1969. I really was in love with two girls and only really realized I was in love with one. So when I broke up with my celibate girlfriend and then my previous girlfriend got married I knew I was really screwed

At about this same time I got fired from my Electrician's job because my Dad had moved to San Diego and I had stayed in Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills at my Aunts. After a couple of months I got tired of living with my Aunt and swimming in her pool and decided to try to move to Santa Monica. Well, rents were way too high for me there but I finally landed a job in Venice next door that had a free beach side apartment on the boardwalk. I jumped at the job mainly because of the beach boardwalk apartment. However, I knew nothing about Venice. Venice is just south of Santa Monica on the beach. However, in 1969 it was most like Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. In other words it was a hippy hangout.

A girl in the next apartment invited me to a party. She was an atheist. I thought I was 21 and was cool. But this was a party unlike anything I had ever been to before. It was the kind of party where I wasn't sure I was going to live through the night or not. There were some pretty scary people there. However, somehow I survived the night and stayed alive. This one night ushered me into a very strange and unfathomable world. Three months later I decided to leave because I found the whole Venice scene so crazy that many people I met were either going crazy or some I knew would not survive long. However, since I basically am a survivors survivor I got out while I was still alive.

About one month after I moved into this beach apartment my father said to me, "You know, son, people in our church are not going to accept all this. They are going to kick you out if you have friends like this." I remember saying to him, "Well. If they are that big of hypocrites then so be it!"

It is really strange the things that you consider important when you are 21. On the one hand when I had to leave my church and friends worldwide it was really awful. On the other hand, I was FREE. I didn't have to play all the crazy games any more just to be accepted.

I have watched many of my friends who stayed all their lives in the church become hypocritical in almost schizophrenic ways to the point where they basically lost their sanity and sometimes their lives.

Also, one of my teachers in another church once confided in me. "You know, Fred. People who have come to our church from the one you grew up in almost all have psychological problems." By that time I was beginning to understand why.

The basic fact is that humans are relatively simple beings with basic simple needs. However, when people try to aspire to something impossible they tend to first become hypocritical like priests who molest males of any age or females of any age or fundamentalist pastors who molest males of any age or females of any age or any religions priests or pastors of any religion who get too caught up in repressing normal sexual feelings. Things like food, sex, going to the bathroom are all NECESSARY bodily functions that if repressed just tend to make one crazy. It doesn't really matter what one believes "if they don't have sexual release, if they don't eat right, if they don't go to the bathroom, then understanding people like I do now they are at the very least going to have some pretty serious psychological issues. At the worst they go crazy and die!

Now here is the caveat. There are about 10% of the population that really are asexual or nonsexual that totally don't deal with these issues. Mostly they can't have children or don't have children. However, these are the minority of humans. For most humans, denying food, going to the bathroom, water or sexual release will make them hypocrital, and downright nuts in time. When sexual denial is compounded by a religion for centuries the amount of problems this causes is astronomic in thousands to millions of peoples lives. With institutional sexual denial, problems abound in the followers of those religions and all one can do is to feel very sorry for the suffering it will inevitably cause.

However, this is not to say that the search for enlightenment should be abandoned. On the contrary, every one of us becoming enlightened helps the human race survive another day, another hour, another year, another century. However, enlightenment is not a close minded thing. If one is to become enlightened he or she must be open to life, God, as God shows the being, wherever life or God leads you, you must learn and follow in order to become enlightened. The key to enlightenment can be found in a few words like: Compassion, Wisdom, Truth. For example just studying these three words and what they really mean can lead to a persons enlightenment even if they join no religion in their lifetime.

Vision Quest: 1983

My Grandfather was not a religious man. In fact when my father got religion in his twenties he used to call my father "Jesus Christ" and not in a good way.

However, I'm beginning to understand my Grandfather just now at age 59 because I only got to spend time with him until I was 4 years old. I saw him a couple of times after that but basically he shared his ideas with me when I was little.

My grandfather's church was nature. I find it to be my church as well. All spirituality and religions come from nature. If you trace all religions back to their core it was some guy or lady fasting, praying and getting quiet and observing nature in the desert, the mountains or some other remote place. This is how all spirituality and religions started. As basic spirituality gets institutionalized in religions a lot is lost. So when I really got serious about approaching what it was to be spiritual I had to let go of all religions and return to nature like a Merlin, a shaman, a yogi. I began as a scientist trying to understand what it was to be human beyond all the claptrap of ridiculousness in both society and religion. Because I was both serious and thorough I was successful. I understood science and I was beginning to understand nature. Through a Vision quest in 1983 I was led to the component most lacking in my life: Compassion for all sentient life in the universe in all time and space. Now you may think this is funny but even though I had always been an extremely kind and generous person to relatives and friends during my life up until then I had not really learned what Compassion for all life everywhere really was. (at least in this lifetime)

It began when I was in a sweat lodge with one of Charlie Thom's sons. Charlie Thom is a Karoc medicine man: http://www.earthcircle.org/ This is his website. Please paste if interested. I first met him in 1983 at a sweat by another medicine man that I was studying with. I do not have permission to tell you his name.

If you have never been in a sweat lodge with a real medicine man whose lineage has been handed down for thousands of years it is a remarkable experience. The sweat lodge is symbolic of the womb of mother earth. When one enters the sweat lodge one expects to die and to be reborn through the experience. During the experience one prays, sometimes cries and always emerges reborn into the world from the womb of mother earth, the sweat lodge. During this particular sweat I came out after a few rounds and I had the spins from the incredible heat inside the lodge. As I stood there naked except for a towel I could see power on a small flying thing. I always looked for signs. This flying thing headed toward the Trinity River. I knew the time had come to go on my vision quest. I was both happy and very frightened as I knew this experience would drastically change my life. However, I also knew that God had my path set out and I needed to follow it so I could be of use to God in this lifetime.

So within a week or two I had made the arrangements to go on a 4 day no water and no food vision quest. I should also say here that I know medicine men who have gone 9 to 11 days on vision quests and have survived the ordeal with no water or food. However, the people that went this long had vision quested many times and understood just how far they could take this without dying.

So 4 days is pretty standard for vision questing. It takes about two days for ones body to begin the initial stages of visions. I found this time particularly onerous because my body kept saying to me, "Eat something, Drink something. We're going to die." So I had to keep saying to my body, "Body. This is a very special thing we are doing so we can be of use to God and to mankind and even to ourselves. We are doing this to help ourselves and everyone." At that my body resigned itself to the experience.

To make this even more interesting I was 5 miles from the nearest road, next to the Trinity River and in complete Wilderness with the nearest person being several miles away. On top of this I had chosen a bear wallow and sometimes I was concerned the bears might want this place back. The first day I saw a mated pair of Bald eagles flying overhead. Also, every morning a female wood duck and her brood of little ducks would swim downriver in the morning to find food and upriver to roost in the bull rushes every sunset.

I had many visions but there were two that stood out. In the first vision I became a Great Golden Dragon that breathed fire upon thousands of people. But the fire I breathed made them smile and become happy. It did not burn them. I was bigger than most houses and though I could fly I was perfectly happy to be on the ground breathing my fire of enlightenment into them and making them smile.

I believe this first vision has become reality through this website. Through this website I breathe out the fire of enlightenment that I discovered and gained through a lifetime of experimentation and research. I try to share only the best of what actualy works with all of you.

The second vision terrified me. At first in the vision I became a Merlin or Gandalf like figure but then as I looked into the mirror I grew fangs that were 3 or 4 feet long. For a long time I was disturbed by this vision. But starting the next year or so I began to be initiated into Tibetan Buddhism by lamas. My Dragon vision took me directly to Tibetan Lamas and their initiations. I was given not only peaceful initiations but also peaceful wrathful and wrathful initiations. I guess the best way to explain all this would be to say that a wrathful initiation is a way to always succeed no matter the situation as long as your basis is compassion for all life in the universe. another way to say it would be "Daddy Spank"(Dad being God Spanking the initiate into acting compassionately). In other words through these types of initiations one moves forward in enlightenment extremely quickly and powerfully. Also, supernatural gifts grow extremely quickly and powerfully.

Unless your spirit guides you in this way I would not advise it, for the vajrayana or "diamond path" is extremely powerful in ways I cannot even begin to describe and not to be taken on lightly. Unless you are completely commited to permanently ending the suffering of all sentient beings in the universe you should not embark on the diamond path.

The other thing I can say without hesitation is that if you misuse this path you will die very soon. Do not embark upon this path unless you really have developed compassion for ALL sentient beings!