School Story
Excerpt from bio:
There is no need to retrace my steps through the wonder years, other than to say that I was the happy product of a left-brain engineer and a farmer’s daughter. The fact that Mom believed in God while Dad was non-committal became the winds beneath my sails, launching me on my voyage to discovering the Peace That Passeth All Understanding.
I would point out that I did suffer two traumatic events before the formative age of eight. Both involved the loss of puppy dogs: one given away; the other run over. I still have the graphic impressions of the abject sorrow I felt over my parents’ decision that Poochie had to go, as well as the tormented grief seared into my brain the night my father had to break the devastating news that Prince Valiant Bosco had crossed paths with the school bus earlier that day, in hot pursuit of a cat, no less. That night for me was a sleepless ordeal of tearful demands for God to explain the reason my dog had to die. Failing to obtain a satisfactory resolution to my immature philosophic confusion, the Sacred Wound of those lost companions may have fomented in me the desire to unravel this Issue of All Issues once I got older. In any case, the takeaway here is that the intensity of my reactions to the tragic ends of my beloved pets testifies to my exceptionally sensitive nature.
Like most kids back then, Sunday school was compulsory, up to a certain age. One of my fondest memories from those days was a toy James Bond Walther PPK and shoulder holster I got from Santa the Christmas after Thunderball. I wore it to the First Baptist Church under my suit jacket for the next year, pretending I was on a mission to spy on the sinister minister’s vast, right-wing conspiracy. The way I saw it, secret agents needed danger, excitement, beautiful women, and cool gadgets, not a Savior!
By my mid-teens, the lure of surfing sparked a healthy rebellion from parental control, as well as facilitated my falling away from formal religion. Later in life, I came to appreciate my mother’s insistence that faith in the Lord be instilled in me, but at the time, I didn’t get it. For the record, that is, there was never a time in my life that I didn’t “believe in God.” But at fifteen, I felt surfing juicy waves brought me closer to Him.
The Hippie movement was another factor influencing the way I conceived of spirituality. Timothy Leary’s promotion of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, using the “tune in, turn on and drop out” motto, was a compelling pipedream melody. In addition, sensational reports from the headlines of that era’s social media indicated that people were having transcendental experiences after ingesting mescaline, psilocybin and blotter acid. The popularity of hallucinogenic drugs was promoted by Aldous Huxley in a Life Magazine article from the 1950s, with marketing devices like the 1960s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, followed by the Grateful Dead Road Show Trips of the 1970s, where a cornucopia of research chemicals was distributed throughout the Land of Opportunity. Along with a host of dislocating societal changes in every arena of modern-day life, these disruptions of the status quo on the youth culture precipitated the adoption of a renegade spirit, first portrayed on the big screen by Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. I couldn’t afford a motorcycle, and since surfers didn’t cotton to leather, and because the need for corrective lenses precluded Ray Ban Aviators, I settled for the androgynous cool of Rick Derringer, circa All-American Boy, 1973.
In my late teens, while reading The Teachings of Don Juan, I fell under the spell of Black Magic Woman, which led me to investigate alternate forms of worship outside the monotheism of traditional Christianity, creating a fertile ground into which the seeds of curiosity began to fall and sprout and grow. Thanks, Carlos!
The story begins in high school, as I was moving out of the novice pot-smoker phase into the harder stuff, meaning psychedelics. During my last two years at Mel High, I participated in the National Science Foundation, which was administered by one of my teachers, Mr. Ballauer. During my senior year, he allowed me to devote the 6th hour of my school day to researching a topic of my own interest, with the added bonus of not having to enter the Science Fair, or attend his chemistry class. What I chose to study was the burgeoning field of brain-wave biofeedback. Through the use of EEG machines, the cognitive researchers of that day were exploring altered states of consciousness previously only within the reach of yogis and Zen masters. In lieu of computers to access the World Wide Web, library books, magazines and current research articles provided the source materials that informed me about the varieties of religious experiences being had by test subjects at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, KS. How much of this research was funded by the intelligence agencies and what the military did with the results we’ll never know.
The next mile marker on the highway to spiritual growth was my purchase of a book on Hatha Yoga, and a Transcendental Meditation course I took in 1974. Both book and course offered practical tips which I began to follow for the sake of managing stress and improving concentration.
Another seminal influence was reading the book Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe. One of the chapters contained the story of a woman who had what the author described as a “mystical experience” while randomly vacuuming behind the couch in her living room. This book was an educational primer; the reports of Out of the Body Experiences gave me a heightened sense of what the human potential of This Mortal Coil really is.
From the end of high school in 1974 until where the next paragraph picks up, I was mostly concerned with trying to meet girls, catch waves, identify a career and make enough money to buy weed, man!
To be continued . . .
