I have found some interesting reading at the website on Division Theory. It is Peter Novac's ideas about what happens when we die that intrigues me presently. His notion that unless we are able to unite the two different minds prior to death the two separate realities will split and go their own way seems to resonate with my experience in visions and dreams. He says that the conscious mind goes off and reincarnates to begin a new life fits with how many of the old religious documents describe what happens, but it is what happens with the subconscious mind, rift with all the memories and emotions of the past life, that really makes sense to me.

His website (divisiontheory.com) says, to the best of my understanding, that the unconscious mind, without the guidance of the logic and reason of the conscious mind, makes eternal judgement of the contents of it's memories, and if the judgement of it's eternal life review finds those life memories to be negative, then it suffers nightmarish emotional results forever. If, on the other hand, it finds the lifetime memories good, then it lives in a state of overwhelming ecstasy forever.

This seems to find equanimity with the various descriptions of heaven and hell put forth by the several religious dogmas espoused by the mahjor world religions.

It also catches my attention because of what I experienced in my "remembering vision" and in my dreamtime. I have had dreams of exceedingly horrific nightmares where catastrophe strikes suddenly and with overwhelming responses of sorrow and dispair, as well as dreams of ecstasy beyond belief or understanding.

To think that while the conscious mind goes off without the advantage of the memory of it's former life, or lives to create a new life with new memories, yet somehow haunted by their absence in the new life, appeals to what I perceive in the world around me. Many spiritual seekers, including myself, seem to spend a lifetime looking for something that has been lost without gnowing what that something really is.

The old religious documents suggest a way out of this dilemma, and that way out is to unite the conscious and unconscious mind during the present lifetime. So, how can this phenomena take place? By bringing what is unconscious into consciousness.

I've asked myself what needs to be there for this to happen. I would not state with any certainty that I know it's possible, but it does seem like doing that has been the focus of my efforts for as long as I can remember.

For about the last decade I have come to realize that what I have previously accepted as "knowledge" is the barrier causes the separation. Knowledge, in my estimation, is generally thought of as
being that information useful to conducting one's affairs in the sensory perceived world. Information about how to survive physically, mentally, and socially in a world full of creatures quite ready and willing to put an end to one's options to do as they please. It seems similar to an attack on what some call free will. And yet, I suspect that free will, whatever the expression describes, applied for survival purposes is a deception at best. Such a struggle is a misuse of this faculty. A more revealing interpretation of this expression might be labeled intent.

If it is one's intent to survive at any cost and to prevail in the struggle of daily life, then such an effort will bring about the resultant splitting of the two separate minds at death. If one's intent is to achieve unity between the two minds prior to death, then the faculty of intent or freewill gets focussed to it's best use.

> > 2.) Souls are not perfect. Souls incarnate into personalities that reflect their awareness. Yes, they learn, but a soul may choose to be a thug over the course of many lifetimes.

I distinctly remember creating both the body and the persona. I remember making myself into a frog to attempt to jump outta here. That didn't work, so I left my frog creation to it's own devices, it hopped off into the bushes (which me and my kind also created), and then I went about making myself into a rabbit. That nay-me-less rabbit could jump higher than a frog, but it's usefulness in escaping back out into my previous condition of bouncing around the universe in perfect ecstasy, found ano more utilization in the frog than in the rabbit. So, I abandoned the rabbit to it's own instincts (okay, I might have stayed in the frog longer than it might have taken some of the others), and eventually made myself into a kangaroo (a bigger rabbit), with stronger hind legs that could jump much higher than the frog or the rabbit. But, alas, no cigar. I found myself sorely disappointed to finally realize I would probably not be able to develop the perfect organic vehicle to jump back in hyperspace. I left the kangaroo, it hopped off, sporting a weird grin as if to suggest that it had unwittingly conned me into providing it with a body without a soul that was not responsible for any blame.

I made myself into a monkey and tried to climb outta here. I made made myself into a plethora of flying creatures to attempt to fly outta here and get back to my beloved sojourn. These creatures that myself or others like me created (by shamanly imitating each other mindlessly), and filled the earth and the skies with iterations of creatures that are still here. Shamelessly reminding me of my inadequacies to get away clean.

Then one day something oddly final happened. Like the stroke of a fiery sword, all forms of life including the created and the creators got split in half, and the grand effort to create the perfect form that would elevate us all back into the open-ness of space somehow got lost in the shuffle of our collective effort to find our other half. I call that incomparable event the Great Schizm when I attempt to say what I saw.

All the resourcefulness, all the ingenuity that we used to create the perfect vehicle got applied to the sudden and unceasing seeking of the other, and that's when the territorializing that we had engendered into the previous experiments came into play.

They (the other than human creatures) began making trouble for us. By now we had made ourselves into the most streamlined soul searchers ever imaginated, with the ability to conceive of and make tools to extend our reach and our search for the other. But, we could not or would not take the ti-me to go back in and reverse the adverse traits of our creations, all our time was taken up in searching for our missing soul mates, and attempting to make ourselves whole by trickery and deception. So, when we had trouble with the animals challenging us with their parodied territorial imperative, we just started killing them, and we're killing them still. No blame. Tasty!

The territorializing instinct didn't end with the creation of our not-so-useful experiments, but extended to the advanced animals we had made ourselves into as the best of the best, later called homo sapiens, among other archetypical typecastings. Territoriality had became the chief reason for wars. now running rampant among humans themselves. I remember the very beginning of wars, although I think I may have copped the scene more recently from Space Odyssey 2001. You gnow, the ape-man thing with the sticks and the invention of weapons? Yeah well, I liked that scene, it was very close to the original.

After that came your spears, your bows, your arrows, and some guy named Arthur got crowned King of England because he discovered how to make iron outta rocks. The Limies only had bronze weapons up until Arthur came along, and they were supremely disadvantaged in their struggle against invaders. True, it's all hidden in metaphor and fairy tales now, but he really got the idea from spying on some really secretive dudes in Italy where he was a slave. Recalling the red sandstone found in the fens and swamps around his native home, he realized they were equivalent to what the Romans used. He called his first iron sword Excalibur, it may have sprung from the red sandstone found in swamps because the idea for it came from a dream about some chick in a pond. When asked how he came into the possession of Excalibur and got to be King, he told everybody he had pulled it out of a rock, which, in a way, he did. Businessmen are never satisfied with becoming rich, they wanna RULE! Stupid assholes, they never learn that we dreamed them up, and all it takes to bring them down is to wake them up rather rudely. They simply can't handle the truth. Okay, okay, some of them can handle the truth. They remember too.

After the discovery of gunpowder, by another dreamer who spent most of his time sitting around on his ass, the war thing really got on a role, and wholesale slaughter became possible. I saw the whole thing from it's inception to the very day this vision came to me in the dining room of some stranger's house. I saw my entire history from the time I got tricked into coming here under the guise of entertainment for a nomadic star wanderer (It was all them purty colors that did it). Until my serendipitous, time-distorted remembering vision, the transformations were too fast to mull upon the particulars, but when I got outside my personality limits, the incredible became mundane.

All the way from one-cell amoeba-like creatures to the formulation of humans... and beyond. Oh, you don't think there are creatures who are more evolved than humans? Well, you are wrong. Some of the entities that got split in half actually found what had been taken from them and reached the state where the atonement ritual could make them wholy. The nay-me I like best is the title referred to as Avatar. I ain't much on Sanskrit, those new agers with their uppity "Namastes", and all that pretentious "My spirit bows before your spirit" really gets on my nerves. It's one thing to be born into that way of conducting oneself from the gitgo, but to attempt to jam it up somebody's ass for show, seem ridiculous and snotty.

I almost always remember that I'm a construct myself, and not only that, but also the father and maker of what appears to the sensory world for the most part, and since many other pearline creatures are too, they can be unmade without their sacrifice being a big deal. Whoosh... off they go looking for a new body. One that hasn't got a big hole in it.

The end of the vision, as all really good visions do, existed as a poser. It left me wandering and wondering about how I got to be so privileged to see the vision itself. Sometime I think the end exists as nuclear holocaust. where all the forms of earth are destroyed simultaneously, to release the spirit of life for to join together as one. Or... will it be just more of the same until a new planet is needed because we shit ourselves out of a ho-me. One way or the other, when the mushroom clouds start appearing, as they already have, somebody gotta come up with a new planet.

I had a cousin down in Mississippi who got mixed up with a woman like Deb. He drank hisself to death and then died of cancer. He was 58 years old. I didn't know Tom all that well, because he was around ten years older than me, and we lived nearly a thousand miles apart. He was a likable fellow, and kind to me as a kid. He taught me how to shoot a .22 semi-automatic rifle his family owned. He created some bright memories for me as a kid.

His mother was one of my father's older sisters, she and her husband Barney were also very kind to me. Aunt Marietta's family were really the only kinspeople I knew very well on my father's side. Except for Aunt Marietta, my father hardly ever visited his brother and sisters. My early experiences of kinship beyond my immediate family of parent's and siblings were all with a bunch of strangers who had never set eyes on me or my people. And yet...

My father was the only one in his family to receive a seventh grade education, much less a college degree. His family were all hard-working landowners, and my father attempted to engender them with genteel qualities that didn't exist for them, so they dismissed his efforts as the delusion of too much education. Maybe in my father's imagination his family had those kinder, more refined qualities. His family, however, were not kind to my father in response to what they sensed as accusation of lowliness. It hurt him that they resented his education. Why would they not? They were hard-scrabble, red neck mofos who followed the rough-necking trade wherever it took them. No blame.

My mother's father and all but one of his sons followed the road building trade and operated heavy machinery like bull-dozers and roadscrapers. They moved all over the southwest building roads and engineering places for industries.

The oldest son of my grandfather, my Uncle Howard, refused to follow in his dad's footsteps and got into real estate developement. He stayed in the same place his whole adult life. An incredible feat with our clan which has always migrated to where the work was. That's how they ended up in America, them that didn't get sent here as prisoners.

I seem perfectly willing to accept the notion of some families having a wanderlust gene that makes some them feel more comfortable dealing with their surroundings as if their surroundings was what changed and not themselves. amd what they perceived about them was not as a stranger, but as a familiar passerby and an old friend. It's hard to miss old friends when the only ones you have are always in your pocket.

I didn't think that much about the extended families of my mother and father. We moved from Mississippi to North Carolina when I was two years old. I knew more about my relatives through my parent's stories of their youth than I knew about the actual people.

When I did see my kinsmen in actual person I only saw them as charactors in my parent's stories, and I never possessed much of my own experiences with them as fellow humans in their own right. I deliberately returned to Mississippi to live near them to see what they were like, but it was like walking into a stone wall, yet,the wall did not seem as if it were there of their own choosing. Too little, too late. All fall down...

I had a cousin down in Mississippi who got mixed up with a woman like Deb. He drank hisself to death and then died of cancer. He was 58 years old. I didn't know Tom all that well, because he was around ten years older than me, and we lived nearly a thousand miles apart. He was a likable fellow, and kind to me as a kid. He taught me how to shoot a .22 semi-automatic rifle his family owned. He created some bright memories for me as a kid.

His mother was one of my father's older sisters, she and her husband Barney were also very kind to me. Aunt Marietta's family were really the only kinsfolk I knew very well on my father's side. Except for Aunt Marietta, my father hardly ever visited his brother and sisters. My early experiences of kinship beyond my immediate family of parent's and siblings were all with a bunch of strangers who had never set eyes on me or my people. And yet...

My father was the only one in his family to receive a seventh grade education, much less a college degree. His family were all hard-working landowners, and my father attempted to engender them with genteel qualities that didn't exist for them, so they dismissed his efforts as the delusion of too much education. Maybe in my father's imagination his family had those kinder, more refined qualities. His family, however, were not kind to my father in response to what they sensed as accusation of lowliness. It hurt him that they resented his education. Why would they not? They were hard-scrabble, red neck mofos who followed the rough-necking trade wherever it took them. No blame.

My mother's father and all but one of his sons followed the road building trade and operated heavy machinery like bull-dozers and roadscrapers. They moved all over the southwest building roads and engineering places for industries.

The oldest son of my grandfather, my Uncle Howard, refused to follow in his dad's footsteps and got into real estate developement. He stayed in the same place his whole adult life. An incredible feat with our clan which has always migrated to where the work was. That's how they ended up in America, them that didn't get sent here as prisoners.

I seem perfectly willing to accept the notion of some families having a wanderlust gene that makes some them feel more comfortable dealing with their surroundings as if their surroundings was what changed and not themselves. and what they perceived about them was not as a stranger, but as a familiar passerby and an old friend. It's hard to miss old friends when the only ones you have are always in your pocket.

I didn't think that much about the extended families of my mother and father. We moved from Mississippi to North Carolina when I was two years old. I knew more about my relatives through my parent's stories of their youth than I knew about the actual people.

When I did see my kinsmen in actual person I only saw them as charactors in my parent's stories, and I never possessed much of my own experiences with them as fellow humans in their own right. I deliberately returned to Mississippi to live near them to see what they were like, but it was like walking into a stone wall, yet,the wall did not seem as if it were there of their own choosing. Too little, too late. All fall down...

I wrote a post containing the following dialogue to a discussion group that exchanges views on the sayings of Jesus found in the Gospel of Thomas, basically just to stimulate more dialogue. It didn't work.

"Male circumcision serves the same purpose as female circumcision. To render the sex act less sensitive, and thereby such activity is less likely to become addictive. The desire is still there, but with circumcised men they don't get as much pleasure from the the act of coitus because there is too much scar tissue, much less the shame of being humiliated and defiled.

With the removal of the foreskin, the glans get exposed to the open air, and it is constantly rubbing up against rough clothing all the time it dries out and becomes tough as leather. It's a cruel thing to do to male beings because many circumsized men become bitter and cruel and use their penises like weapons to punish and express violence rather than instruments of love and affection. They'd rather make war than love. As insensitive as men can be some time, and there is no blame in their feeling used, women are happy to see them go to war just to have them gone. Besides, there's always the chance the husband will get killed or maimed, and there's always a little extra money coming in when that happens... and fresh meat.

Of course, circumcision is good for women. Most of them never feel anything down there anyway, and all they do it for is to have babies so at least somebody will always love them, and to control men, So, it's better just to remove the clitoris and major labia during early childhood so they won't get all cocky and start thinking
they special."


I didn't get much response to this post except from a woman who is obviously not a hedonist even though I seem quite sure she has not been circumcized. Since I didn't get any response from any men at all, I thought I'd try this circumcision rap on another group in a thread about shamans. Pretty much the same story but with a few fillip's difference


"Yeah, this is a very disenchanted pov. Everyone knows you can become a shaman in no time at all simply by going to a couple of weekend seminars.

Of course, being "wounded healer" probably helps. But, its not that big a deal. A "wound" such as circumcision is usually enough, and may exist as the original thought process involved in it's development among primitive tribes.

I've found that most circumcized men ignore thinking about the fact that circumcision is performed on men for the same reason it is performed on women. To limit the amount of sexual pleasure available to the victims of this brutal ritual, so they will not become addicted to a life of pleasure outside tribal law, but will be driven by the resulting anger and frustration to find fulfillment using other, more socially approved activities like war, politics, and moneychanging. I.E., the intent to create and entire tribe of shamans.

Between the disfigurement itself, the debiliitating numbness of scar tissue and the helplessness of being deliberately traumatized in this way at an early age, circumcision lasts an entire lifetime... and beyond.

Circumcision for women, the removal of the clitoris and minor labia, is no big deal and usually prevents a lot of heartache for the societies that practice such things. Most women never really feel anything down there anyway, and if they do, their response to such feelings usually brings disgrace to their own person, and even more to their husbands. This is what Jesus was referring to when he said that to enter the Kingdom of God women had to become like men.

To suggest that maiming is necessary to become a shaman is usually promulgated by those who have experienced such a debilitating trauma and want to set forth their shameful experience as the ring-pass-me-not for an otherwise healthy and joyous people."

Yes, I did write the above to stimulate response. Circumcision seems more popular in America with men. I've never heard of it being performed ritually on women here, unless as some holdover from first-generation immigrants who continues the practice.

To get only one response from over a thousand people seems a little unusual. I sense a lot of shame-based ignoring going on here.

I saw that female postal worker lottery winner on the Letterman show. She was old, fat, and had thin lips. She openly admitted that she was basically a miser and a cheapskate like me. But, she had the young pretty boy movie star at her knees... with only the smell of big money as the bird-in-hand. It was all she needed. LOL

Seeing ourselves in other peoples words and actions is what humans do best. It's delusional, of course, admittedly so, with the blind leading the blind! But, delusion is what we're good at, and our being good at is also the beauty of it. We are free of each others delusions, and we are free of our own delusions because we can only see what we think we were or would be, and presently, we ain't even that.

Why would we pretend to be this or that kind of person for each other, if other people, ourselves included, can only see their own concept of themselves in our words and actions?

I propose that every true motive is concieved with totally selfish intentions. Okay, maybe the motive is not intended as selfishness in any conscious understanding of the word, but in spite of that, is selfishness, disguised as our honest intent and all dressed up for a day in the life of a fool.

I compiled the information above after reading some internet articles about the Greek Cynicism movement. A person I feel friendly toward strongly suggested I am extremely cynical, and so I ran a search on Google because I wanted to understand what he was calling me. Greek Cynicism was indirectly fathered by Plato though one of his followers. You gnow, "what's-his-nayme?" or "Whoever." They stayed poor and made mockery of other peoples pretensions. I wish I had the nerve to do that. Right?

I composed the paragraph to see what it felt like to openly write something Cynical-like. People have said that I was cynical before now, but until recently, I had never actually been accused of being a Cynic. What I have written up to now exists only within the limitations I have imposed on myself, and yet, I enjoy testing those limits in small ways as I go along. I am still possessed by words and actions I have not written about. If I don't write about the stuff that needs to have it's say, I'll never have the chance to miss it, because if I don't write it out, it never leaves me or ever takes responsibility for it's own existence, as I devoutly wish for, as I ernestly prey.

Thus, I often stand accused of flaunting a brash attitude akin to some tarnished bravado that betrays a deep weakness or wound that purportedly makes me vulnerable to the eyes of the beholder. I just love for others to work this scam with me. Nothing opens the door for deep-rooted, debilitating remarks of sarcasm more than this spiteful projection.

The pain can go on forever and it is easily accomplished. My experience as a victim myself tells me they gonna give it up. They gonna roll over. Just like I gave it up. Just like I rolled over. In time, but not of choosing. Like me, they are waiting for that time to come, when their chance is gone.

Half Masks

The appearance of things caught drifting in matter
Leads on to a scheme or design.
The way of repugnance not totally shown
Is a symbol of ignorance benign.
In the pitter and patter of eloquent pose
The ghost of a maniac shows,
That the half-mask of life is endlessly empty
Until the spirit of death gnows it's throes.

fmp January,1972

A deluded sense of self importance brings the salt to the table, but it's the truth about our own selfishness that puts the salt into the wound and leaves the mark of ownership.

The phantasmagoric visuals Gautama envisioned sitting under the Bo Tree represents to me that which appears each time I sit to practice meditation.

I have peculiarities I observe as I ritually prepare a place before me. Things have to be just so. It doesn't take long to establish the set and setting because I have been anticipating the time previously. I gnow exactly what I'm going to do to allow specific, recognizable events to occur. I hardly ever gnow what part of the process these events will occur, but I gnow where to sit and wait for them to approach.

Upon assuming my sitting position I attempt to wiggle around so that I will be as comfortable as possible for as long as possible. From years of practice I seem perfectly aware that the main reason I will eventually move out of my sitting position, will happen because my wrinkled old ass gets too sore to keep sitting there on it. Otherwise, if my ass didn't start hurting, I might sit longer sometime than I do.

I practice this ritual most days at around 11 a.m. for about an hour. I practice until it becomes a pain in the ass. Then, I stop practicing, and keep my stopping still.

I really don't enjoy experiencing a pain in the ass, or anywhere else that I can't turn into pleasure. That's why I put practicing meditation off until the last second I can get away with it, and still maintain some semblance of self-respect and/or presupposed integrity.

I've read quite a few books written by meditators. I haven't had many face-to-face conversations with them, but I do read their stuff in some irregular, digital pattern. It amazes me they have anything to say at all considering the subject at hand. Meditators sit down and teach themselves how to do nothing really well, and that's about all there is to it.

When meditators write about meditating, we seem to write about technique, and the problem with writing about technique is that technique can be so subjective, and so self-instructive that reading what other people have to say about resourcing that state of emptiness appears unuseful and tritely cumbersome for the most part. This open-ended reading habit appears tedious and unnecessary, but essentially so.

I think I read about what other meditators say about meditating to learn how I'm suppose to feel about doing it. Otherwise it appears like a very selfish thing to do. This unholy inquisitiveness about how I'm supposed to feel regarding this deliberate inactivity seems to be part of the deal of thinking I'm a certain type of person. Not only in meditation, but in most of the activities I created for the sake of somebody else's conscience, and executed as if it had sprung from my own head like the Goddess Athena. It is not as though I could actually own myself for my own reasons without excuses could I? As if I could provide myself with my own reasons to exist as my own hero. And yet, I vauntfully insist that I do and I am. Imagine that as the epitome of selfishness.

Meditation is sort of like masturbation, it seems to answer unasked questions within an imposed frame that usually passes by unnoticed, unless such ignorance is deliberately flaunted out of proportion. and then pondered until the time arrives when the chance is gone... and we are chosen.

I have started getting all sorts of odd responses to my blog recently. I must be doing something right. The responses I'm getting seem angry, mixed in with a little disgust. I can't be sure exactly what is disturbing people, because they themselves don't seem to know what it is. It may have something to do with my attitude toward selfishness. Selfishness was the last subject I wrote about on the GoT list, and that list, for all intents and purposes, has shut down.

Maybe personal selfishness is a sore point with many people. Do they still carry resentments from the time they were forced to share as children? Was the loss of selfishness as a child something more than we realize? What was lost when we were forced to share with others?

From the Gospel of Thomas found with the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt in 1945:

4) Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."

The above is the pertinent saying which I referenced in posting to the GoT list. When Jesus talks about being as a child he is talking about a newborn of less than 7 days age. A life form that has not learned the process of ideation. Innocent. Innersense. A newborn cannot distinguish another human from a jackal. It cannot distinguish friend from foe. As far as the newborn is concerned all that it surveys is itself, and it prevails through the word. It doesn't know that it's screaming is responsible for the comforting that follows to get it to quit screaming, but that learning is not far away.

Somewhere in the canonized version of the new testament Jesus says "No man shall enter the kingdom of heaven except through me. The "me" Jesus is talking about is the only "me" any of us know. Ourselves in the first person. Or, more specifically, Adam, the first person of the Genesis myth. The child of seven days previous to having it's rib torn out to be shared with the feminine aspect of itself. Previous to it's betrayal by that shared self. Previous to the knowledge of duality, and of good and evil. Previous to the Mother? Previous to entry into the womb? If the kingdom of heaven is only entered through an act of pure selfishness such as that possessed by the newborn child, and that innocence gets degraded by the dissolution of selfishness, no wonder some people get pissed off at the very hint that selfishness can and must exist as a desirable trait.

So, is that what is taken away from us when we are forced to share as children? When we are taught not to be selfish, are we also having the ability to enter the kingdom of heaven ripped away from us without recourse? Is that what my writing about the desirability of selfishness provokes in people? It reminds them that they had their ticket to ride taken away from them as if it didn't matter?

I"m gonna find out. And if I'm right, I'm gone have a lotta fun. Cynicism? You ain't seen nothing yet! LOL!!

I received a post from David K. that was interesting to me and I thought some of the other people who comment on my blog would like to read.

"I'm still a regular reader of your blogspot and from
the beginning I was amazed at your alias. To me you
are anything but a rabblerouser but a Cynic in almost
optima forma, "a distance creating mocker, a sometimes
grim and malicious individualist claiming having no
need of anybody and loved by nobody because he allows
nobody to escape from his sharp unmasking look "(Peter
Sloterdijk: Kritik der zynische Vernunft). And now I
read your other face in the moving poem Love's Labor
Lost, tragic and wry.

I haven't looked up the definition of cynic until today. I have assumed I knew the meaning of the term and thought it meant something similar to sarcastic. It turns out I was right in a way, but was surprised at how selfishness got into the picture.

Webster's New World Dictionary defines "cynical" as "1. believing that people are motivated in all their actions only by selfishness; denying the sincerity of people's motives and actions, or the value of living 2. sarcastic, sneering, etc."

There is a reason why I behave in a cynical manner, mocking people with extreme sarcasm, and sneering at their petty little efforts of adapting to the pressures of today's society. I do admit that I can become a "sometime grim and malicious individualist." I do what I have to. Many times I move outside of the conceptually perceived contructs that many people seem stuck in, and when I do that I do not want to be called to task to explain why I'm doing what I'm doing. I cannot be there in that specious present and critique my behavior as if it were something I did in the past. I have to be there... now!

Critizing my own behavior requires that I reflect upon my behavior as if I were on the outside looking in. As if I were not really there, but above and beyond the actual activity of my presence. It is not easy to get to the place where I can dwell inside the specious present, and then to have someone (anyone) demand that I stop what I'm doing to explain why I did or said something that happened in that specious present is more than I wanna deal with. So, I do whatever I need to do to get them off my back so I can continue in the flow of the eternal now. If it takes hurting their feelings or humiliating them to create the distance I need to make it happen, so be it. In these kinds of situations my motives are definitely selfish. When I get into the groove and I'm moving mountains I will not take time out to explain how I'm doing it. Screw you!

It took a long time to learn this from others who knew how to get there. I have been treated the way I treat people by the best I could find. I would find myself fascinated by their being able to do what they did and interfere in some way to get them to go slow and let me observe, and suddenly find myself in some corner somewhere in the fetal position trying to figure out what in the hell happened. The power of the flow has no respect for beginners, and humiliation is the teacher. Get used to it.

Right now I feel like getting drunk. My youngest brother just stopped by for a visit. He had a present for me. A few months ago his first wife died from complications due to diabetes. Her sister came from England to settle her affairs. In her house she found some of my earliest poems that I thought I had destroyed. I have a habit of burning things so I can move on. She sent the poems to my brother and he brought them to me.

I just got through reading through them. It's not like I forgot them over the years so much as I had put them behind me to move on to wot was sot before me in the present. Reading these poems moved me very deeply. They made me realize that a lot of what I think now was formed way back then, and that my awareness of what is real to me has deep roots.

When my brother handed me the stack of poems I glanced over them quickly, then lay them aside to give attendance to his presence. We chatted about this and that for a while, and then he reached over and shuffled through the poems and then laid them back down again. I didn't realize why he had done this. He had already told me that he had made copies for himself because he knows of my penchant for burning things like this.

It wasn't until he was gone that I picked the poems up to look at them again. When I read the one on top, I realized why he had shuffled through them. He had deliberately put the one he wanted me to see first on top of the stack.

We have another brother who is the middle of us three boys. In June of 1970 he was up in Maine working on a test car that was designed to find flaws in railroad tracks. He got sick up there, real sick, and was very close to death. I was away somewhere and didn't know anything about it. I wrote an odd poem at the time. At least it was odd to me, and a little out of my usual flow. A coupla months later it became apparent what the poem was about.

Farm Alarm

The whispering sounds of stillness
Are a symbol of the night,
And the thoughts of warning call me
Through the flash of inner sight.
Is there someone near in trouble?
Is there something I can do?
I gnow no answers easily,
But the call keeps coming through.
Where in Hell is my brother?
Does he need my help right now,
Or is he struggling just to call me
Or is it the lowing of a cow?
Tomorrow will bring the answer.
I hope it's not too late,
To gnow if it's a delusion
Or a gift I'll learn to hate.

June 26, 1970

Later, upon talking with this brother he told me that day was when his situation turned around. He was in a Catholic hospital and the local priest, thinking this incoherent fellow was Catholic, administered the Last Rites. Maybe that's what did the trick.

There was one poem I wrote just after my divorce from my first wife I had just about forgotten about. I probably forgot about it because I felt like I had to forget this woman and what we had shared because it was too painful. Some years later I came up with a theory about certain dynamics that happen between some men and their spouses that I thought was fairly original at the time. Today I read this poem and realize that I knew the truth even back then.

Love's Labor Lost

There was a little boy
who sat all day
and watched the sun
and clouds at play
and felt the breeze
blow through his hair
until his mother's love
caused him much despair
so he ran away
he ran away.

His joy, his thoughts,
at last felt free
without control
no love had he
to remind him of
the clouds and sun
and his heart
went out to anyone
then he was scared
cause no one cared

So he did look
'til he had found
a woman's heart
with love abound
to replace the fear
of no one near
who cared for him
and held him dear
then he was glad
and no longer sad

He lived with joy
most everyday
and watched the sun
and clouds at play
until the day
that they were blessed
with a fine young child
a welcome guest
until he felt her share
with the child her care

Again he felt
his love betrayed
mistaken thought
had love mislaid
his world was small
it made no room
except for him
the bride and groom
so he ran away
he ran away

There was a man
with a little boy's mind
who watched the world
and prayed for time
to find the love
he thought he'd lost
until he found that love
was his only cost
so he went away
he just went away.

December, 1971

Funny thing, my dream life is great these days, but my days are less than exciting. I think I must be going through some change whereas the things that have interested me in the past don't interest me so much any more. It was only a feigned interest for the most part anyway, so if a change is coming (or already here) I could not be more pleased.

I have been attempting to write a piece on the process of how we each form our personalities from birth. I can see it in my mind's eye, but the effort to write it down gets tedious. I feel like I'm writing stuff that anybody with any secondary education should recognize, and most of them do, it's just that they don't seem to connect it with themselves.

Developing a personality as the modus operandi for dealing with the world appears to exist as the main thrust of our existence for most of our lives. Yet, this very effort seems to lead us to our deepest problems in acknowledging what the purpose of life is. The purpose of life can get understood intellectually fairly easy. But, the problem in carrying out the purpose of life seems hindered by the very part of us that understands it, our personality.

We seem to revere our personalities more than that part of us that creates the personality, and that aspect of us that actually creates the personality, once done, seems to get left behind as not important. The message in most of the myths of the world is that this transformation of the degree of importance attributed to the personality is what leads us to live in illusion, and living in illusion causes most of the heartbreak that happens in our lives.

Last week I was reminded of this by a correspondent on one of the e-mail discussion lists I subscribe to wrote about the kind of person he is. He named off several personality attributes he had developed. He wrote that he didn't drink any acohol; he didn't hurt animals;he has studied karate and become somewhat of an expert at it;he was the member of some socialist group, and some other activities that seemed to indicate to him that he was a pretty good person. In in my response to him I questioned whether his determination that he was this or that kind of person was all that noble, and his response was that's the way he was. He wrote, "That's just the way I am." In effect, he seemed convinced that who he really was... was his personality!

I don't know the exact mechanics of just how we make the mistake of thinking that what we really are is something we ourselves created, but it appears to exist as a very common event. The myths tell us over and over again that the creator can get very pissed off about being ignored in this process. John Bradshaw, a writer who was a Catholic priest at one time, describes the problem by calling the creator the child within. In the story of Jesus in the Bible, and other documents, he speaks of the child and children in general quite frequently as the redeeming factor that allows us to truly see life as it really is. In some ways his message appears to be consistent with a lyric from back in the 60s that goes, "... we got to get back to the Garden."

Getting back to the Garden means to me that we return to the state we were in as newborns. In other words, we have to get back to the state of mindlessness as we first appeared at birth previous to developing our personalities. This state, which pre-exists any and all personality attributes, accepts all the world as if it were just part of ourselves. It was only when we begin to learn to distinguish one object from the other that the trouble began. In this state of being, we didn't know our ass from a hole in the ground and all things were equal.

That is not to say that one should abandon the personality, but the personality should not rule the roost. It exists as a tool the creator uses to make it's way through the world of the senses. Some myths seem to suggest that both the creator and the personality can be transformed into a separate but equal entity which can change the entire world we live in, and in fact this transformation appears necessary to move on to the next plane of existence.

What a beautiful dream. Somehow I had come across these two relics. The main one was some sort of solid gold sculture about the size of a fist. The other was larger and was some sort of totem. It was more like a wooden carving that stood about as high as my waist, was gilded with some translucent, multicolored coating, and appeared very, very old. My feeling during the dream was that I had somehow found these objects and they were legitimately mine to do with as I chose.

I approached this old woman in a big mansion to see if she would be interested in buying them. Her family, composed of her children, mostly daughters, pretended she could not afford them even for a few thousand dollars. But the old woman knew what the pieces meant, and to her family's surprise, was not concerned at all about the money. We both knew she was wealthy beyond their knowledge.

Somehow the scene shifted to include other people. Perhaps she had called them to her house to consult with them about the authenticity of the relics. Three people appeared. They walked in side by side. The two people on the outside of this row of people walked almost mechanically like robots. They had a golden glow about them and perhaps were not people at all. I now get the impression that they were the original owners of the objects, and wanted them back.

The middle man of that group seemed to want to argue the position that I had stolen the objects and bring the price down from the terms the old woman and I had discussed earlier. I was unmoved by their shenanigans and was prepared to leave with the objects, although I didn't know who I could approach to offer them up again. Apparently they realized I was going to walk and upped the ante to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I still wasn't satisfied and indicated such.

Then an older man appeared to the left of me wearing a business suit, rotund and bald-headed, he entered the fray by saying, "I will make you a one-time offer of three million." I turned to him and said, "You want both of them?" He said "Yes." I asked him, "Will you make the arrangements for me to have an account at the (Swiss) bank?" He said "Yes."

The three people turned and walked back the way they had come, still glowing and shining, and with great ceremony.

The entire dream took place in a goldenish atmosphere that pervaded everything, and I felt wonderful throughout the entire scenario. I was aware that I was dreaming during the entire affair, and don't think I ever wanted to change anything about it. It was too powerful and I continuously marveled at the wonder of it just as it opened itself to me.

I waved goodbye to that good woman and went on down to the river. My first sight of it impressed me with the strength of it's current. It had been raining upstream when I got there, and it wasn't as clear as what the woman had led me to expect. Still, compared to the water of other rivers it was pretty clear. It had cut it's way through the limestone hills, and the shoal I found myself on was not all that common for the shoreline on the other side of the river. The steep hills around it was covered with forests, and kept the river bound within a more narow stream than the rivers in the flatlands I had come from. It appeared as if the Ozarks pushed the water into a narrow stream in such a way that the water seemed to covort and play with itself as it rushed through the hills.

I had been on the road for several days by the time I got to the river and hadn't had a bath for a while. Since there was no other people around I decided to get naked and wash out my clothes in the river water. Even if it wasn't as clear and clean as it usually was, my clothes would certainly smell better after I rinsed three days of perspiration out. I anchored my clothes with the river stones that permeated the bottom of the river and waded out to about waist deep to clean myself.

The whole river bottom was composed of smooth stones. It was difficult to walk because the stones were large enough that they didn't give at all when I stepped on them. The only sand about was there on the shoal itself. In the river the current was too fast for sand to accumulate. When I got far enough out in the water that I could sit down and wet myself all over I stopped walking, it was too rough on my feet.

The water was cool, but it was mid-summer so it wasn't too cold. On the other hand I was quite hot, and my dip in the river, except for the way the rocks hurt my feet, was very refreshing. I tried swimming a little bit, but found myself carried by the current for about a hundred feet downstream very fast. This meant that I had to walk back upstream on the rocks, and the idea of swimming faded fast. Eventually, I worked my way back over to the shoal so I could walk on the sand. I left my clothes to be washed by the current, and went for a little walk to familiarize myself with the area.

There was quite a few places where people had camped on the shoal. It was easy to see where they had built campfires. There was a lot of driftwood around to use for a fire. I decided to camp on the shoal that first night myself. I was worried about the woman coming back, so I picked a spot well away from the road that led down to the river. I figured she might not look too hard for me if she did come back.

The shoal itself was about two hundred yards long, and seemed responsible for the road that led to it. Other than that shoal the hills rose quickly on both sides of the river. There were a few slues in the shoal so that to traverse it required moving about quite often. The campfire sites seemed to show that the locals who came there had their own favorite spots. There were a lot of boulders exposed by the run of the river along the shore, and I had a little fun jumping from one to the other.

Before I checked out the eastern end of the shoal I took my clothes out of the water and hung them on some bushes to dry. Then I worked my way downstream to the other end of the shoal to see what I could see. I was very impressed by the nature of this place. The flatlands where I came from only had an occasional fist-sized stones that had washed down from the piedmont, and here I was surrounded by rocks of every size. The trees on both banks hung out over the river and in some places it looked like the river was going through a tunnel. I felt very priviledged to be alone here.

It was getting late in the day when I realized I needed to return to the other end of the shoal where my stuff was. I needed to get my clothes and then get some firewood together to make my fire while I could still see my way around. I didn't want to be moving around in the dark because of the possibility of running into snakes. I waited to look for the firewood a little longer than I should have, but there was so much of it that it wasn't really a problem.

I didn't really need a fire to cook with. All the food I had was canned meat and the crackers that I had bought earlier. I just wanted a fire to sit and look at. I didn't have a sleeping bag with me, and that was very inconvenient. Especially when the mosquitoes came out and started biting me. The fire I built seemed to keep them off the front of me, but they attacked my back with enthusiasm. By the time I decided to lay down in the sand and try to get some sleep I was covered with mosquito bites everywhere my skin was exposed. The mosquito repellant I had brought with me didn't seem to help much. By the time their feeding frenzy slowed down I was miserable with the itching.

Sleep did not come easy. After all, I was alone in the middle of the Ozarks and I wasn't familiar with the kind of animals that hung out there, especially of the human kind. The mosquitos bites had changed to more pain than simple itching, so I lay there a long time before I fell asleep.

I woke up early. The mosquitos were back. I could see that they were going to make my life miserable. I hadn't planned on them when I sat at home and planned this great adventure, but they were nothing in comparison of what I would experience later on that day.

Just after sunrise I had visitors. A couple of young men came to the shoal to do some fishing. We saw each other and waved. They seemed friendly enough, but it appeared obvious that they were there to fish, and after our brief greeting they went about their business with a great seriousness, occasionally yelling at each other when they caught a fish. About an hour later a family with three young children also came to the river, and when another family showed up I figured it was time for me to start moving down the riverside to look for a cave.

When I got to the end of the shoal, the road along the shore, that was only useful to 4-wheeled vehicles, ran out. That was when I discovered that moving along the edge of the river was going to be much more of a challenge than I had previously reckoned. The river cut straight through the low mountains of the Ozarks, but they were still mountains, and the steepness of the hills running up from the river valley was very sharp. There was somewhat of a trail for a little ways, but that soon ran out because of the steep incline of the hills. Down toward the river itself there was a lot of underbrush that was hard to get through, and there were a lot of briars that were very frustrating to try to maneuver my way through.

I looked uphill to see if it was any better up there. The trees were larger, and it appeared to be less underbrush, but the hillside seemed straight up and it was hard work to keep my footing. There were a lot of loose rocks that caused me to slip and slide. One time I fell about twenty feet before I could save myself from falling head over heel by hanging on to some low limbs. My day pack was kinda heavy, and was not helping me keep my balance. I started sweating profusely as the heat of the day arose, and all the physical work I was exerting just to make slow progress, made it all the more excruciating. I really wanted to turn around and get the hell out of there, but for some reason I keep fighting my way through the woods. By this time I had just about forgotten about finding a cave at all. I was more worried about surviving than finding a cave.

After innumerable times of stopping to rest and forcing myself to get up and get moving I finally got to a inlet where a small stream joined the river. The stream itself was fairly small, but the valley it had cut through the hills was quite wide. It was a spectacularly beautiful place.

I sat down to rest, collect my thoughts, and figure out what I was going to do next. As I had clumsily tramped my way through the thick woods along the river I had heard people on their rented boats moving down the river. Oh, how I wished I was on those boats with them. They were having a wonderful time, while I felt like I was struggling for my life. There at the open area of the stream entrance I begin to actually see them floating along the swift current of the river laughing and having a great time. I didn't want them to see me, so I sat on a big boulder that was hidden by some bushes.

After a while I decided to go swimming again because I was soaked with sweat from all the effort needed to make my way through the woods. I rinsed my clothes out again, and found a spot where the water of the river and the water of the stream met that allowed me to relax without getting taken downstream by the river. A couple of canoes passed. They saw I was naked, but they laughed and waved at me as they continued on their way.

After I had refreshed myself for a while and recollected my mind, I decided to explore the valley created by the stream. This place was like a dream to me. The water of the stream ran down one side of this cut through the hills, and it was sandy on the leeside of the stream and made walking pretty easy. As I approached the first bend in the stream I heard the motor of a car coming toward me in the distance, and so I hid myself behind some bushes to see what was going on. I knew that it meant that there was a road nearby and I was tickled by that prospect, but I didn't know what kind of people might be coming around the bend.

From behind the bushes I saw a 4-wheeled vehicle come into view. They passed about fifty feet from me, and I got the impression that it was two guys out on a drinking toot, and I was glad that I had hidden myself. They drove down to the river, got out of the truck, and it looked like they were going to hang around for a while. I decided to climb up the hill behind me and look around for a cave while I waited them out.

There was a small spring that seeped water down the hillside, and it had cleared a little open space that I followed up the hill. The climb was very steep, but the water ran over some large boulders that made my climb easier. As I got higher up on the hill and sat down to rest for a while, the view down into the little valley with the stream seemed even more beautiful. I sat there for a long time just looking it over. Again, I forgot about looking for a cave. Climbing in these hills was no walk in the park.

My serenic repast was broken when I heard the truck crank up, and then I watched it as it rounded the bend and I couldn't see or hear it anymore. Then, I made my way down the hill again, filled my water bottle from the spring, and started working my way over to the road the truck had taken. I had decided to get the hell out of here. This was no place for me.

There was a road. One may have needed a 4-wheeled vehicle to go all the way to the river, but once the road moved into the hills it was a decent path to walk. It was all uphill for a long way.

The interesting thing about this walk was coming upon several abandoned homesteads. It was easy to figure that when the government bought the land along the river to make a national park out of it, that the people who had lived there had to move out. One of the homesteads had a stone house that was still intact. It was very small and consisted basically of one room with a fireplace, and from the debris scattered around I could see that the stone room had other wooden rooms attached to it. The fire place looked like it had been used for cooking. Of course, there was no electrical lines or evidence that there had been running water. It looked like a family had lived there. I got the idea that the stone walls of the place was put up by one man, and that accounted for the smallness of it. It probably took a pretty good while for one man to put it together. The fireplace itself had probably taken a couple of months for one man to find the rocks and bring them together in one place, much less to actually erect it piece by piece. The sight of it filled me with admiration for whoever had made this happen.

I had looked at an Arkansa map I had picked up at the state border when I came into Arkansa, and from what I could make out and figure from where the woman had taken me and the way I had walked along the river, it couldn't be more than ten miles to the little town the woman had turned off at. The more I walked, the more I figured I had figured wrong. I hiked for about three hours at a good pace, and I hadn't even gotten to the top of the mountain yet.

When I did get to what looked like the top, the road got a little better, and I saw a cottage that looked like a summer cabin, and electric lines strung out along the road. Then I came to a house that was obviously occupied. I didn't walk up to the house straightaway, but called out to the house to see if anybody answered. After a couple of minutes a middle-aged man walked barefooted and rumpled looking out to the road to talk with me. He seemed a little leery to see me standing there, but he was obliging when I told him how I got there and asked him how I could get back to town. He told me and I asked him if I could fill my water jar, and he pointed to a faucet, and walked back into the house.

He told me to continue along this road until I crossed a railroad track, and then turn left, and eventually this would lead me to the small town. I was very encouraged to have some idea about how I was going to resolve my situation. I had a full jug of water, and I set off at a good pace down the graded road. I didn't expect it to take very long for me to get back to civilization, and besides I was now walking downhill.

That didn't last long. Soon I was going uphill again, and there were no more houses for a long way. Finally I came to a well-kept house with gravel in the driveway and lots of flowerbeds and shrubbery. I kept on going by the house, but down the road I stopped to rest a bit. As I sat there I heard a vehicle approaching from the same direction I had come from. Soon a pickup truck appeared with three men in the front. I waved as they passed by, and for some reason didn't feel at all strange when all three of them gawked at me as they drove past. The truck continued for a while, then turned around and came past me again with the guys staring at me again. Then when they got to the graveled driveway they turned around and came back, and this time they stopped.

The driver was a big man with a red, florid face. The other two guys were skinny looking with dark eyes and dark hair and never spoke a mumbling word. The driver asked me where I was going. I got up and walked over to the truck to talk with them. I wanted a little better look. I was a little nervous because I seemed to know there could be trouble if I didn't mind myself.

I told the man who was driving my little story of getting lost and was trying to work my way back to town. He stared at me for a moment, and told me he was going to town, did I want a ride. I was so tired I didn't really give a damn about their intentions any more, and told him I would appreciate a ride. The driver told the guy on the passenger's side to "Git out, and git in the back, and let this gentleman ride in the front, I wanna talk to him."

Without the slightest hesitation, the guy got out and scrambled his way into the back of the pickup, I got in, and away we went down the road, hopefully toward town.

Turned out the driver was a preacher of the most fundamental kind, and the two guys with him were members of his church. From the way he had been obeyed by the guy in the back of the truck I sensed that they would do anything he told them, and that if he told them to knock me in the head, they would do so with no less hesitation, so I tried to present myself with as much politeness as possible.

It turned out that the little town was about ten more miles down the road. The only reason the preacher had picked me up was to save me for Jesus. We came to the railroad, he did turn left, and when the edge of the little town became apparent I was very relieved. The preacher let me out at the laundermat I had asked him about, and I expressed my gratitude and went inside and washed my clothes. By the time I finished washing and drying my clothes and sponge washing my body in the bathroom of the laundermat and making myself presentable, I had made up my mind that I would wait for a better time and circumstance to find myself a cave to meditate in. Arkansa and the Ozark mountains had whipped my ass.

I have experimented a bit with sensory deprivation. I built my own float tank and used it for about two years. What i really wanted to experience was to spend some time in a cave. Finding a cave to use to experience nature's own sensory deprivation chamber has not proved to be an easy thing for me. I haven't found it easy to find a cave to sit in. I haven't experienced it yet.

I began to research about how to find a cave on the internet. There isn't much information there that would do me much good. I did read about the conditions that allow caves to happen, and found out that certain areas of the country have more caves than others. Kentucky has a lot of caves such as are in the Mammoth Cave area, but I've had some bad experiments in Kentucky, so I didn't want to go there, My next best choice appeared to be in Missouri and Arkansa. Well, I'm a wanted man in Missouri for driving with an expired license a few years ago, so I decided to hitch-hike out to Arkansa to see if I could find a cave there that would suit my purposes.

I didn't know exactly where I should go in Arkansa to find a cave for meditating in, just the general area where they should show up, and so when I made my plans to go there I found that I could travel I-40 to Little Rock and turn right, and the area between Little Rock and on into Missouri should serve my purposes.

I decided to use my day pack to make the trip. It isn't a very large bag, but I didn't figure I would need a lot of stuff to sit in a cave. The problem with my day pack is that it doesn't facilitate carrying a sleeping bag. It's too small to put a sleeping bag inside it, and doesn't have the tie-downs to attach a sleeping bag to the outside, so I went without one. This proved to be a mistake as I got out on the road.

I caught a ride with my brother over to Fayetteville where he works to start out on my trip. By going that way I figured there would be at least some local traffic, and it would take me through some old hills that used to be mountains called the Uwharries. These old hills aren't what they used to be hundreds of millions of years ago, but they are interesting to me because of the stuff that hasn't rotted away yet. I have found some perfectly white granite rocks that have flecks of gold in them in those hills, and thought I might find some other interesting things like those rocks as I passed through there. The flat swampy coastal plains where I grew up don't have many rocks, and so I have a natural interest in them. I knew I wasn't going to pick up any rocks and haul them around in my backpack on my way to Arkansa, but I might find an interesting location I could return to later in my car.

As it turned out I didn't have much of a chance to look around in the Uwharries, the rides I got didn't allow it. I got stuck in this small town where there was not much traffic, and spent most of the first day standing by the road. When I did get a ride it was with a young man who had just gotten off work and was going to Winston Salem. I remember this guy mostly because of the truck he was driving. The thing about the truck that was so memorable was that it didn't have any brakes, and when he came to a place where he was required to stop, he would have to down-shift as fast as he could and pump frantically on the brake pedal. It was a little scary because we were in the edge of the Uwharries and there were some pretty good hills in that area where having good brakes is a good thing.

This young man had a story he liked to tell. He was an acoholic and had just got out of clinic where he dried out, and this job he was working putting up sheetrock was real important to him. He had to drive fifty miles one way every day to get to the job, but he had messed up so many jobs because of his drinking that he said he was lucky to have it.

He had a hobby he liked to talk about. He was a woodcarver, and his favorite thing to carve was wooden indians like the ones that used to be in cigar stores. He told me that he carved some really nice ones, and there was a tourist trap called JR's we were going to stop at just so he could show me the ones they had on display there. The cigar store indians at JR's were vastly inferior to his, of course, and the thing that made him mad was that JR's didn't seem at all interested in having better quality carvings in their place.

We did stop at JR's so he could show me their wooden indians, and finally we got to Winston Salem without having a wreck because of the bad brakes on his truck. He put me out at an intersection of I-40, and I was glad to be there in one piece. Driving through the side streets of Winston Salem in an old truck with no brakes was quite an adventure. When I asked him why we were taking the side streets he told me he didn't have a driver's license.

The intersection of I-40 he put me out at didn't appear to be a very good place to catch a ride, but I got lucky. Within fifteen minutes I got a ride with a young man going to Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis was a good five hundred miles away, and he was driving a fairly new car with air-conditioning, so I was fairly pleased he had stopped to pick me up.

The driver had a fairly interesting story. Presently, he was a good Christian and had a good job in the computer industry, but during his college days he had been a speed freak and a drunk. He told me that Christ had saved him from a horrible life. He was a fairly bright person and had figured out how to make his own methamphetamine, so he had gotten in deep trouble with his self because of the constant availability of his drug of choice. I pretended to be interested in how Christ has saved him from his own weakness, but I was more interested in how he made his own crank. Surprisingly, he seemed very interested in telling me. So, for the next ten hours or so he explained to me exactly how easy it is to make it happen. I guess I should have written it down, because I have forgotten everything he told me except that it somehow involved ether, which he said was easily available over the counter in spray cans sold for starter fluid. Somehow I think I deliberately forgot what he told me about how to make my own crank because I figured I'd get into the same trouble of using it just like he did.

He let me out east of Memphis in a suburb called Germantown. Germantown is about ten miles outside of Memphis. The intersection he let me out at was a terrible place to catch a ride, but I had been sitting so long that after about an hour I decided to walk to Memphis just to get some exercise.

A woman at a nearby convenience store told me that there were sidewalks all the way to Memphis. What she didn't tell me was that I had to walk through the roughest part of Memphis to get to the Mississipi River. The roughest part of Memphis is pretty rough indeed. Lots of drunks and crackheads. Probably a good thing I didn't know. I believe I was there on a Sunday. There wasn't much going on in Memphis. I did find myself walking past the Sun Studio where Elvis recorded his first records. I knew that because there were signs all over the place saying as much. It's located in a rundown section of town fairly close to the Salvation Army store.

I finally worked my way back over to I-40 in downtown Memphis where there wasn't much room for cars to stop if they were interested in giving me a ride. I squashed the fleeting fancy of walking across the Mississipi River Bridge. Eventually I did get a ride, and in a few hours I had reached Little Rock, Arkansa. I had to go about ten miles west of Little Rock to get to the road leading north through the Ozarks. I had passed through this area several times in the past, and was surprised at how it had developed since my last memory of it. There had been a lot of road-building going on and it seemed a little unusual to see how many new industrial parks there were around. I finally caught a ride out to where the road I was looking for was, and soon found that the new look of Little Rock quickly faded away as soon as I got a few miles down that road. I soon remembered why the Ozarks are referred to as Dogpatch.

I got a ride with this guy who was going to do some work on his summer cabin. He was a retired military guy. He certainly didn't look like most retired military guys I've run across. He started telling me horror stories of how "outsiders" can run into real problems up in the Ozarks. I had heard them before. He stopped at a feedstore to pick up some fertilizer he planned to use up at his cabin. My suspicions of this guy developed a little when one of the employees at that store expressed surprise that I would be hanging around with this guy. The impression I got from his comment was this guy I was riding with was one of those people who preyed on "outsiders", so when he offered me a job helping him work on his cabin I decided it was not a good thing for me to do. He turned off the main road to go back into the hills where his cabin was, and seemed real disappointed that I refused to go with him.

The place he turned off at was sparsely populated, and I had to walk a while before I got to a country store that was about five miles down the road. There wasn't much traffic on the road, and what there was didn't even slow down in curiosity. I began to feel a little nervous about where I was. There was no good place to hide in case I ran into trouble, and I felt trouble brewing.

The country store was used mostly as a gas station from what I saw. It seemed to be the only one around for the local people. It had a hokey touristy look about it. As though the owners were attempting to pull in some of the people going to the National Park further down the road. Inside there was not much stuff that went beyond milk and bread for the locals, and snacks such as tourists might be interested in. The prices were very high. I was getting into the area where I might find a cave, so I bought some cans of tuna and a box of crackers so I would have something to eat if I found one. The people who worked there were not too friendly, but they weren't openly hostile either.

I stayed near that store for four or five hours. It was a hard place to catch ride. Traffic was not only slow, but it was going the speed limit right pass me without any need to slow down, and there wasn't much of a shoulder on the road for them to pull over if they did. I figured my best hope was to catch one of the people who stopped at the store. And eventually, that's exactly what happened. A thickset woman in her late thirties pulled out of the store's gas pumps. She went past me at first, and then stopped and backed up to get me.


It always surprises me when women pick me up when I'm hitch-hiking. It just doesn't happen very often. As we drove down the road this woman explained to me that the only reason she had stopped was that she was originally from California, and she knew none of the locals would give me a ride. She planned to drop me off in the next little town where I would have a better chance of getting a ride because the traffic had to slow down to go through the little town.

She liked to talk. She was going home from work, and said she had to stop by the dairy where her husband worked to talk with him for a little bit, and because he would be pissed off at her for picking up a hitch-hiker, that she was going to let me off beside the road while she drove in to talk with him. She would pick me up again on her way out. The buildings of the dairy were just visible from the road, so when she stopped to let me out she told me she would be back in about twenty minutes, but if I got a ride to go ahead and take it. We both knew I wasn't going to get a ride.

She was good for her word. When she came back she stopped and picked me up again. She told me that she had ended up in Arkansa because back in the Hippie days she and her second husband were looking for some cheap land to buy where they could "return to nature". The land in the Ozarks was very inexpensive compared to California. She told me that she was now disenchanted and was trying to sell her land. She didn't really like the cliques of the locals, and they didn't particular like her and her "hippie ways". I didn't know what to talk to her about, so I asked her what astrology sign was and about her children. She had five children, three of them had already left to go out on their own. She intended to divorce her husband. She told me she was an unhappy Aries.

I told her why I was in the Ozarks, that I was looking for a cave to meditate in. She assured me that I was in the right area, there were a lot of caves around, but that when I looked for them I would have to be careful of the marijuana farmers who were constantly on guard against people looking to steal their crop and some of them booby-trapped their pot fields to discourage people from stealing their pot. She told me my best chance was to look on the National Park land that stretched out along the river. She said the Park was a big tourist attraction because the water in the river accumulated from all the limestone springs that fed it, and that the water was clean and pure enough to drink because it had been filtered through the limestone. The tourists would rent boats that would take them down the river to see the land along the river.

As a matter of fact, she said, her house was very near the river, and that she would take me down to the river before she went home if I wanted her to. I agreed that being off the main road portion of the river might work out good for me, and agreed to go where she was going to take me because it was isolated, and if I found a cave, I didn't want anyone to see me going into it.

She turned down this street in the little town that eventually turned into a dirt road, and the further we went down that dirt road the rougher it got. We came to a fork in road, and she told me she lived down the road that split off, but that she would take me down the side road because it led to the river spot she had told me about. This road was hardly a road at all, but more of a one-lane path through the woods. By the time we got near the river I had figured out her real reason for taking me down to the river was to have sex with me.

I wasn't very comfortable with this idea. I don't like the idea of messing around with married women for one thing. And the next thing was that I didn't feel any excitement with this woman. Over the years I have found out through experience that the old saying about a woman scorned is pretty much the truth, so I was in a quandry about how I was going to deal with this.

If I had been a young man and still in my prime, and could have gotten aroused by just about any woman, this wouldn't have been a problem, but I was sixty years old and had lost a lot of interest in sexual activities, and it would have to have been an woman that really interested me to get it up to get started. I felt totally dispassionate around this woman. She had told me she was an Aries, and I knew she would not only be available, but would initiate whatever needed to be done to make what she wanted to happen. So, I knew I would have to refuse her advances rather than just leave it alone and feign ignorance.

Sure enough, when we got down toward the river far enough and she couldn't risk taking her car any further because the dirt on the road was getting mucky, she stopped, got out of the car and made her play. She did it by pretending to pick something up and letting her skirt ride up her considerable butt. She was not an unattractive woman, and the way she did things could be fairly alluring at an earlier time in my life. What I did was pretend not to notice and walked toward the river which was just around a bend in the road. She called out to me to stop, but I kept going toward the river. She yelled out to me that she had to go, but that she might come back before dark. I told her that would be okay, but I kept moving. I never saw her again.

The dream was about merchant marine ships. The problem was that the cargo that was on a slower ship needed to be transferred to a faster ship somewhere in what seemed like the South Pacific, and the interaction of characters had to do with the competitive nature of the crews on the two ships. The Captain and the mate of the faster ship had flown to an earlier port than the slower ship so that they could discuss the transfer of the cargo and arrange the logistics of the coming transfer before they got to the port where the faster ship waited.

A couple of incidents seemed so strange that they should have made me realize I was dreaming. The first one involved the speed of the slower ship. The "slower" ship got up to speeds of 60 miles an hour. To my knowledge only nuclear-powered ships could go that fast at all, much less a small cargo ship. The actual cargo was never discussed. But, there was an conversational exchange between the mates of the two ships as they approached the port of exchange that indicated the priviledges of the faster ship. The faster ship got the choice of all the top-rated movies for later viewing at sea even before the slower ship arrived in this port, and the mate of the slower ship was miffed at this priviledge.

The first incident happened at the earlier port where the captain and mate of the faster ship boarded the slower ship. The captain of the faster ship got aboard the launch of the slower ship okay, as his rank would be priviledged, but the mate "didn't quite make it" as the slower ship pulled out of the port. The mate jumped in the water to try to catch the launch boat, and when it looked like he was too slow, he literally started running on top of the water to catch it, and it was only the efforts of the one of the crew members of the launch who got down on the guard rails of the launch to catch his hand as he raced across the water that he was able to board the launch.

The speeds attained on the slower ship may have only seemed rather remarkable to me as the dreamer. In my own experience on destroyer-class vessels where trial speed runs between Oahu and Midway Islands only got up to 36 knots with the whole ship trembling like it would vibrate apart if we went any faster, so the speeds attained in the dream seemed incredible to me, even though more modern vessels especially built for speed might go faster. Maybe I saw the ports as being of the South Pacific because of these former speed tests.

The ships only stopped at these two ports to pick up the captain and mate and to make the exchange. They were not military oriented ports. There were neon lights shining across the water at the ports but we never went ashore. The slower ship got painted with phospherated stripes at the first port to help it be recognized at the port of exchange to speed up the logistics of tranferring the cargo. This would not ordinarily happen so the paint stripes should have appeared as unusual too.

As the dreamer I saw the ship leaving port and was aboard it too to hear the conversations. It was as though I was not perceived as being present to hear the conversations, but was there as a witness nevertheless. I seemed to be invisible. it seemed like I was in an out-of-body state and not a participant.

I have been present on what has seemed like space ships in other dreams, so maybe being on water-bourne ships would not have seemed all that unusual to me. The uniforms were of a nautical fashion, but too casual to have been military ships. The water was beautiful. It had that greenish tint that deep water always seems to have, and it was almost translucent.

In my experiences with certain research chemicals I have seen the characters on some of the space vehicles as various creatures that wouldn't ordinarily have the forms they did and also possess that level of intelligence. In ordinary dreams without special inducements I would have changed the various creatures into having more ordinary features like humans. To see them in the chemically-induced visions as large insects that commanded space ships was almost too spectacular to believe, and so this difference makes me think I automagically changed them into something more familiar in regular dreaming. Maybe even to the point of changing the scenario from space ships into nautical ships.

Sometime I get the impression that anthropologists "create" our former incarnations into "ape-men" with primitive features such as they show in scientific magazines with the same facility. The intellectual abilities are of the same order, but it's the experience in giving order to the elements involved in prehistoric times that is primitive. The actual intellectual primus is already in place and has been from the beginning and survives death.

Writing about dreams is so digital. I don't remember dreams sequentially, although they do seem to occur in linear order. It's just that my memory of them is so nebulous that it takes remembering one part of the dream before I remember other parts of it. Probably the most intriguing incident of this last dream was the mate trying so hard to catch the launch and not be left behind, so that he would have had to catch an airplane and be left out of the logistics meetings, inspired such fervor that he literally swam so fast that he was able to attain enough speed to emerge from, and run across the top of the water, was intrinsically fascinating and helped me to remember other parts of the dream.

I suspect that if I had waited an hour to write the dream down the memory of it would have faded altogether. The incidents that allow the digital-like recall seem to exist as the real trick to remembering any of it.

When I begin to write about those unbelieveable incidents is the key to the whole recall process. I suspect the fantastic nature of what is considered unbelievable is specific to the dreamer's beta state experience though. I have a couple of friends who teach chemistry who would have probably seen unbelievable molecular structures instead of nautical ports like I did, because that's their ordinary beta state activity, and they would have written about what seemed fantastic to them just as I write about what seemed fantastic to me. However, I think all of us would have been pretty impressed by a guy running across the top of the water. LOL

Maybe this equating what one experiences in ordinary beta state life in dreaming is the real secret to lucid dreaming. To recognize one is dreaming in real time, some specific incident in the dream has to appear unusual to the dreamer. And what appears as unusual to a person who makes a living as a lawyer, and what appears unusual to a person who makes a living as a chemist would seem completely different. What would appear fantastic and unbelievable to both a lawyer and a chemist might pass right by a dreamer who makes their living as an assembly line worker at the local Ford plant, who was dreaming about court systems and chemical labs.

There are other states we all seem to participate in besides the ordinary day-by-day "wakening" beta state and the alpha-theta dream state. The delta state is an example. The delta state happens at the very bottom of the dream cycle and doesn't seem to associate with the beta state in which we normally make a living. It may associate somewhat to a mixture of all the various states we encounter, and the average person might not make that connection in the delta state in such a way that some part of what happens in the delta state seems unusual enough that we realize we're dreaming, and be able to take control of dreaming in the delta state.

Maybe this is what happens with experienced meditators through their long experience in attaining the various states and recognizing the different associations possible in each state or combinations of states. Their familiarity with what might seem unusual in one state or the other allows them to realize what can be brought to lucidity, and thus control.

There is a voice I hear sometime just before I wake up or just before I go to sleep. If I hear it as I fall asleep I find it almost impossible to go to sleep, and if I hear it in the morning I can't go back to sleep. It doesn't happen often.

The last thing I heard was that I would die unexpectedly. That death would catch me off-guard. It was a pretty simple statement. And not anything more than that. It did not tell me how soon I would die unexpectedly, just that I would, so it could be anytime.

I came close to dying a couple of years ago. I was eating with my mother and niece in a restaurant and some sausage I was trying to swallow went down the wrong pipe and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I was totally unprepared for this. Nobody had the slightest idea what was wrong, only that I was acting funny. I was very calm about it at first.I tried to cough the sausage out, but that didn't work. Then, when I realized I was going to be able to get enough air in my lung to blow the sausage chunk out of my wind pipe I stood up and continued to try to get air in my lungs. Nothing I did was getting me air. Finally, a young man a couple of booths away approached me and asked me what was wrong. I could no more speak than I could breathe, but I used my arms and hands to indicate the Hiemlic manuever, he realized the meaning of my gestures, and got behind me and forced the sausage out. It took a few minutes to get to breathing correctly again. I sat back down realizing that I had come very close to death. Maybe, if I had passed out from a lack of oxygen and fell to the floor the sausage might have come out on it's own and I wouldn't have died, but from the reaction of the people around me I don't think so.

This event made me realize the fragility of life and how I am always just moments away from being a dead man. Something like this will probably kill me, I just don't know when, and somehow I don't really care. Better this than to lay suffering for months and perhaps even years withering away from some disease that slowly takes my life.

Perhaps a car accident will cause my death or somehow I will get caught up in some violent incident in which I get killed by gun fire. Maybe I'll drown during some unpredictable way. The way I imagine it, I'll be living my regular life one moment, and the next moment I will be struggling to live without even realizing that this is my final moments in this body.

Why would death be any different for me. I have lived in a very reckless manner much of my life. I have taken chances with my life on a fairly regular basis when I was younger. I have even went through the motions of taking my own life a couple of times and that obviously didn't work.

Probably the one time I thought death was certain was the time I jumped of the mountain in Yosemite National Park. I was in a situation where I thought death was inevitable, and so I acted in a way that at least indicated some choice on my part.

The one thing that worries me somewhat about dying unexpectedly is that I may not realize that I'm dead. When I do die, I want to realize that I am dead and move on with the choices available when death takes my body away from me.

My out-of-body experiences have convinced me that there is life after death. One experience when I was out on the road hitch-hiking was particularly convincing. I got put out at the intersection of two Interstates somewhere down south of here early in the morning hours about three o'clock, traffic was fast and there was very little of it at that time of day, there was no sign of any houses or stores around this intersection for me to disturb anyone by my singing, so I danced around and sang at the top of my lungs as a diversion from the extreme fatigue I was experiencing from being out on the road so long. Suddenly I found myself high in the air above my body and looking down at this fool singing and dancing in the middle of nowhere. My only thought was, "What has become of me." In that moment I realized I was not that fool down there singing and dancing, but rather, the "me" that was up in the air looking down at that fool.

This is what I think will happen when I die, unexpectedly or not. If at the time of my death I am attached to my body and don't realize that it is dead, I will hang around it trying to bring it back to life, maybe forever.

I don't know and probably can't know if there are choices about what to do next upon the event of the death of my body. I have read stuff that indicates that there will be choices, but if the spirit that is really me is unable to accept the death of the body and hangs around futily trying to get back in my body and reanimate it I may miss any choices that may exist at that time. The Tibetan Book of the Dead paints a scenario of this order that kind of makes sense to me.

But, without a living body, which I have always returned to when I lost my sensory contact with the world, it is hard to understand what really happens at the moment of death or what happens after that. When I have lost contact with the physical world previously, like when I have been in the hospital and lost that conscious contact through anesthesia, I don't remember anything. When I lost consciousness from eating trumpet flowers down in Key West, I don't remember anything after I passed out. When I smoked the Diviner's Sage and fell into a stupor however, I was consciously aware, but I was totally disassociated from any awareness of who or where I was, and that's how I think it will be when I die.

I had read everything I could to prepare me for smoking the Diviner's Sage. I spend a couple of days reading other people's accounts of what happened when they did it. Nothing I read prepared me for what happened though.

I had a sitter for this occasion. I had read that having a sitter was a good idea because some of the reports I'd read warned that people do strange things after they inhale the smoke, along with the warning that how a person reacts can be unpredictable. The ritual requires that one attempt to get as much of the smoke into their lungs before the ingredients of the sage takes over and does what it does. The biggest problem is that some people jump up and run and can hurt themselves by doing that. I was going to smoke the sage upstairs in my bedroom, and I wanted someone to be there to stop me from running and breaking my neck trying to get downstairs. Later, when I was sitting for a friend of mine while he smoked the sage, he did jump up and run, and it happened so fast I couldn't stop him. He did not get hurt.

I used a combination of some regular sage leaves in the bottom of the pipe, and packed some concentrated sage that was five times stronger on top of it. I wanted to have the full experience on my first effort, and I thought using the concentrated stuff would optimize those chances.

I was also warned to inhale the smoke while I was sitting down so that I would not fall and hurt myself when I took the smoke into my lungs. So, I sat down on the edge of my bed so that if I fell backward I would fall on the softness of my mattress. This turned out to be a good decision. I lit the pipe and took as much of the smoke into my lungs as was possible and held it down for as long as I could. My sitter was helping me light the pipe, and was urging me to hold it in as long as I could. When I couldn't hold the smoke any longer I blew it out, and immediately took another lungfull from the pipe. I held that as long as I could and took another.

Before I finished that toke I felt the effects of the sage. I experienced a bunch of colors with my eyes closed, and those colors had a shape that became my entire sensory awareness. The shape was like a the Nautilus seashell. Event the colors I saw conformed to and was arranged like the little growth ridges in the shell. It was out in front of me at first as though I was seeing a circle of light on a flat plane in front of me, and then that circle swooped over me similar to flipping a hoola hoop over my head. It became the only thing I was aware of. As the flat circle of pontilistic colors enveloped me into itself I heard a circus-like voice shouting, "Here we go!", and as it swooped over me and enveloped me I fell back on the bed. That was the last thing I was aware of as a human being.

At that point I was inside of the shell-like environment with the colors existing as my only awareness. I had no concept of being a human being. I had no idea that I had a body or lived on the earth. I had no memory of anything and just was. I was totally detached from anything that reminded me of my former self. I was just there. I lay there struggling for orientation. I didn't know where I was or who I was. There was nothing to attach this awareness to. There was just the colors. I somehow found myself searching for the origin of that voice I heard as the smoke overtook me. I had no concept of time in the least, just that I didn't know what was going on. I felt helpless. After existing in this formless, timeless place for what seemed like an eternity I became aware of some entity and I reached out to it. I realized that I was trying to get a grip on something... anything! I realized I was communicating to this entity, but I didn't know what I was saying or what it was saying back to me. I was lost in the immediacy of the moment, and could not store information about what was going on. It was going on, but I could not reflect on what was going on to make sense of it.

The first awareness I had of being a human and where I was happened when I asked the entity, "Have you got me?" It was at this moment that my sitter, thinking that I was talking to him, answered me by saying, "I am here."

When I heard my sitter's voice I began to orient myself to the situation I was in. I lay there for a few minutes realizing that what I had experienced had happened because I had inhaled the smoke of the Diviner's Sage into my body, and that I was alive and had a body, and that I was laying on my own bed in my bedroom. I wasn't dead.

This is what I think will happen when death comes. Total disorientation and helplessness. The brain will not function at all and no memories of what has happened when alive will be available to latch on to. There will be consciousness, but nothing to attach that awareness to. The memory of the sensory world will be gone and that conscious awareness will be alone with itself. Only the Other can help that conscious to orient itself to the situation it's in. If there be such. Only if there be such. I do not gnow.

Other than my reading about Semiotics lately, I have been stymied in my creative efforts recently by my decision to go on a diet and lose some of my rather immense girth. The diet I am following, more or less, is a low-carb diet basically along the lines of the Atkins diet. I have been avoiding sugar, rice, potatoes, and breads for about a month now. I didn't weigh before I started this regimen and I haven't weighed since I started the diet, but it has had a strong effect on me. I seem subject to grumpiness and a bit of depression during this time, and my enthusiasm for writing about my life has literally gone down the drain.

I suspect my physical life depends on the habitual use of sugar in one form or the other, and that what I am experiencing has to do with the withdrawal sympthoms of this addiction. While these withdrawal sympthoms evidence themselves more in my physical body, my mental life seems to have an equal toll taken upon it in the form of the depression I have been experiencing.

Depression is an old, old story with me. It doesn't sneak up on me as it did when I was a kid. I'm familiar with the signs of it to such a degree that I'm aware of the smallest parts of it as they appear. Depression is something I have a habit with. There was a lot of it going on in my early life during the time of my teen years and expecially during my twenties. I ended up committing myself to the state hospital when I was in my late twenties.

Prior to the time I committed myself to the state hospital I spent a considerable amount of time going to see psychologists and psychiatrists to attempt to understand why I felt so depressed. I think most of them tried to help me in the best way they could, but this is a very difficult area to deal with, because they are humans themselves. At one time I thought I wanted to enter this field as a professional, but in the years since I realize there is not much they can do without endangering themselves simply by their association with their patients.

I didn't follow through with my interest in becoming a psychologist. When I started taking courses in that subject I found it to be the most boring subject I encountered. My impression is that the people who do go into this field do so to help themselves. Instead I decided to study acting.

Formal education has not worked with me. I think I know why, but I can't say I'm certain about it. I think it has to do with my determination not to let myself be gulled the way I was when I was a young prepubescent kid. I believed everything anybody wanted me to.

In the times of past
when I was a boy
I listened to every word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fear
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.

Just to settle down
I bought a wife
with the pictures
that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not understand
that I was a man
just for loving,
and Lord, I can't smile.

Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the golden rules.
To be the biggest damn fool!
To buy my way into the dreams
to make things fit
into my schemes,
and Lord, how I screamed.

I could sing a song
about pretty girls,
and all the friends I know,
but the song I sing,
with a distance ring,
is about a man
without a plan
to own the future,
or kill the past.

fmp '69

Even as a kid I seemed prone to conversion, brainwashing, and the sympthoms of metanoia. One of the first times that I remember clearly was in a church by a preacher named Reverend Cox. I was nine years old. It shocked my parents to see my small body walking up to the pulpit to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. They didn't think I understood the implications of such a decision. They were right, of course, I didn't understand the implications, but I was in the full throes of conversion, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They had no choice but to go along with me on this. It was probably a mistake on their part to leave me alone with this guy for his "instruction", but doing the Christian thing in a small town in the Bible Belt was expected, and they probably had a difficult time finding arguments to restrain my enthusiasm. The next event of conversion happened when I was thirteen, and it given the direction of deciding I'd had enough of Christianity.

My decision not to take Psychology as my major in college probably had a lot to do with my susceptability to conversion. Somehow I realized that to get into the field I had to undergo a type of conversion to allow it to happen, and I had enough of that. In fact, I think that's why formal education did not take with me. Any and all of it requires such a conversion. My studies in dramatics seem to lead me much more effectively toward my unseen goal, that of learning to induce conversion myself.