Biographical Highlights--Part 2

What is this flood, overcoming body and sense?
I feel the walls of my skull crack, the barriers part,
The sun-flood enter--

Love, magnified, floating eternal seas of essence--
Before and behind births and deaths
Spiritual gravitation, the emergence evermore expanding.

Back to the first word of speech,
On to the last utterance of seers,
My soul catches the perfect song.

I am 16, and I fall in love for the first time, for real. I don't know what such words might mean to you, but I can tell you that, in my case, it was revelation. Love can be a catalyst for spiritual revelation. At each stage of life we think we know what it means to be alive, but we do not know. At best, we know only a small veiled bit of what it means. My sense of everything changed, turned, spiraled up into mysterious vistas that I never had a clue about, never knew existed. Worlds within worlds opened, colors, and entities, deities, angels, realms of beauty, and the vast intricate net of fire that is part of the foundation of the world and of everything.

The time machine moves forward a very short way. It is night, a dark and windy night but lit by moon and stars and a fleet of fast moving dark clouds. I'm on my bed looking up. There is a giant oak outside my window, heavily bearded with Spanish moss. The wind whips the giant oak, and I watch and listen to this shadowy sentinel. I've never watched or listened quiet so closely as tonight. I am thinking seriously about death. There is an answer in the wind and in the dark. The tree is old, the wind older still. Through the ages trees and wind have been with us, just like this night. This dark is the same as I remember from other lives and other times. The time tunnel is full of shadows, but I remember. I know with absolute certainty that death is not what it seems, that we have all been here for ages and will be here ages hence.

In the school library I find a few books on parapsychology, and one on hypnosis. My friend Jerry and I save our money to pay for a course in hypnosis. We can only afford a single tuition, so we flip a coin to see who will go, with the agreement that the winner will teach the other what he learns. Jerry wins, and teaches me. Neither of us proves a good hypnotic subject. But I do learn how to put myself into a state of light self-hypnosis; this will prove useful in a way that I could not have imagined.

It is 1963. I graduate from high school, shelve plans to attend college, and join the US Navy. I have no idea why I do this. I am a sleepwalker. I am naïve wanderer, afloat in events beyond my kin. I sleepwalk through electronics training school. Suddenly, I am a radar operator…

My high school sweetheart sends me the proverbial "dear John" letter.

(I'm in a remote part of Hawaii in prisoner of war training camp. The marines dressed like Russian soldiers chase us through the jungle. We've not eaten in three days except for a bit of wild fruit from trees. The US Russian-marines capture us and we spend two days and nights huddled in a small man made cave surrounded by barbed wire fences and people with guns. We are "interrogated" roughly and realistically by a few pseudo-Russians who speak with realistic accents. You are to reveal certain things to them, and when you resists you are thrust into a wooden box the size of a piano bench. In it, scrunched down into a small ball, there is absolutely no room to move. I'm left in the box a while, how long I'm not sure, because I hypnotize myself and my residence there proves a relief from the surrounding chaos.)

…I spend a thousand hours in the air. I'm in the dimly lit cabin of a four-engine super-constellation looping between Midway Island and Alaska; the cold war is on and we are watching for the Russians. The mystical life is always with me, a ground of being undimmed by the clamor of external events. Sunrise from above