Alone on the Mountain

Summer is a time for recreation and renewal for most of mankind. I had a particularly mystical night of amazing dreams and prophesies and visions. These two factors contribute to this article. Though all of you might have your "Sacred Places" on earth, mine has always been Mt. Shasta. That is not to say that I haven't also visited "Sacred Places" all over earth like Dharmsala, Bodhgaya, Glastonbury, The Tetons of Wyoming, The Himalayas(all of it is amazing) etc.

However, Mt. Shasta I was first taken to and blessed by the leader of the religion I was raised in when I was 2 months old there in the little city of Mt. Shasta in 1948 when I was first born.

The next time I went to Mt. Shasta we were just passing through and it was winter time and I was 4 years old and I wanted desperately to get out and play in the snow. We had moved from Seattle to San Diego that year and my mother desperately missed all her relatives in Seattle and was homesick for Seattle. Being 4 and already having driven from San Diego to Mt. Shasta I was incredibly bored and wanted to get into the snow. So my parents finally had enough of my complaining and stuff and threw me out into 4 feet of snow. About 5 minutes later I was freezing my hands and feet and butt off and came back into the car crying because I didn't have gloves or proper clothing on. However, my parents knew I would stop crying to go out into the snow for a while. At that time it took about 5 hours to drive from Redding to Mt. Shasta (not the one hour on a freeway it is today). It was the same for the Grapevine coming from Los Angeles to Bakersfield back then also. It was several hours drive instead of the one or so today and many truckers died from brake failure on both stretches corkscrew roads of what was then 99 instead of Interstate 5 now. So coming from San Diego we had already driven two days to get from San Diego to Mt. Shasta and still had one or two days drive ahead of us to get to Seattle. Now you can drive from San Diego to Seattle easily in two days (even though three is a lot more comfortable). Nowadays I can usually reach Mt. Shasta in around 6 to 8 hours depending upon the traffic and weather conditions that day. And I remember having driven from Los Angeles(Glendale) to Mt. Shasta in my 1966 VW bug in 10 hours once in 1966 when I was 18 as long as I only stopped for gas and drive through food.

After the blessing there at 2 months and freezing in the snow at 4 the next time I went to Mt. Shasta was the summer  when I was 5. Our religion own several thousand acres there still and owns Shasta Springs in between Dunsmuir and Mt. Shasta and in Mt. Shasta owns the Amphitheater where the pageant of the Life of Christ is put on every summer for the general public. Nearby I'm told is the newest "I AM" School. I attended the "I AM" School when it was in Santa Fe in 1965 and 1966 when I graduated from High School there in May 1966. It was a really amazing experience and living at 7000 feet in all the natural beauty of Santa Fe and waking up to 3 feet of snow outside my dorm room in October was a very amazing experience to someone from the Los Angeles and San Diego area growing up.

When I was 5 my father who was an electrician and before he became an Electrical Contractor when I was 12 took me and went up to Mt. Shasta to help modify and improve the electrical wiring at Shasta Springs and at the Amphitheater at that time. I was left mostly to fend for myself at 5 during the days in an incredibly beautiful mountain environment. For the first day I was bored being alone but then I noticed there were other boys there too whose parents were donating time improving the grounds and Amphitheater so I hung out with 9 to 12 year olds who showed me the ropes so to speak and took me down trails to waterfalls and to the railroad tracks to create experiences like the 4 boys had in "Stand By Me" the movie that took place in Oregon around 1960. One summer by the time I was 12 we would stand on top of the railroad trestle bridge while the train drove underneath and shook the bridge. Since the Sacramento river is very pristine and beautiful at that altitude we screamed as the train went underneath us on the bridge and felt we were kings of the world, the train whooshed by the river underneath and three or four boys standing on top of the shaking bridge who were kings of the world in that moment.

And so the Mt. Shasta area became synonymous with freedom and exploration the rest of my life. It became my "Spiritual" Home that has always been there and always like a father or mother has called me back either to live there or to visit one or more times every year.

These experiences made me always drawn to camping and hiking and swimming and eventually skiing in the wilderness and then into the remote wilderness all over the world as a teenager and young adult and adult. Never was I happier than being in some remote and beautiful forested place or at the ocean or in the remotest beautiful desert. I always equated Cities and buildings with insanity. They were shelters but when people stayed in cities too long they always became strange and crazy. Only in wilderness did I experience any true sanity at all. But as I grew older and escaped the cities more and more I realized in the end I was more comfortable in a Suburban environment than living too remotely. I learned that the craziest people not only live in the inner cities but also the most remotely. I have never had bullets flying over my head in the cities. However, I have had bullets several times flying over my head like bumble bees from my cousins hunting jackrabbits and from deer hunters shooting at deer but their bullets carrying over a mile and buzzing nearby my head.

In the process of all this I began to equate "God Experiences" with nature more and more and churches as  a much less useful and less effective alternative to real "God Experiences" in the wilderness. I found myself more and more traveling with friends to remote places but most especially up onto Mt. Shasta during summers at Panther Meadows, camping for up to a week up near the Climber's Sierra Club Cabin at Tree Line or hiking over to Squaw Valley where it is also amazingly pristine during the summers.

Eventually, after leaving the religion I was born in (hypocricy in all religions finally became to much for me at 21) and I experienced a mutual parting of the way which led to being suicidal for a couple of years. But in the end I realized I could never be a whole person and to think my own thoughts and search for the truth wherever it lay or was and be that involved in any religion.

All religions are like drugs. Too much only makes you crazy and interferes with your survival and sanity. However, in the other extreme "There are no atheists in foxholes". This says a lot about human beings which is something like, "Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. But not enough of the good thing also brings death and insanity." 

So, once again like the Greeks I believe in "Moderation in Everything". I think this is what attracts me to the middle path of moderation in Mahayana  Tibetan Buddhism even though I also have many Vajrayana or "Lightning Path" or "Diamond Path" initiations as well from several Tibetan Lamas.

In the end I have found that "God is where you find (Him, Her, The Being)"

But one is more likely to meet God when "Alone on the Mountain" so to speak than at any other time or place.