When I was young I began to realize that what adults were telling me about their lives or even about historical figures didn't really mean that much today in my own life. So, I quickly, (because I wasn't stupid) realized that I had to mostly live according to my own life's experiences. Because whether it was my parents or grandparents lives, or something out of a history book or even a religious book was usually a completely different place and time and often a different language and set of customs from anything anyone actually lives and thinks today. So, I realized that if I didn't pragmatically live from my own experiences and the experiences of my peers that I would be just as ridiculous as all the people I met who were trying to live from books and ideas made up in a different context 100 to 5000 or more years ago. Then around age 20 or 21 I was reading in the UCLA library waiting for a friend of mine to get out of class about Confucius and he was saying how "man should study man before he studies spirit because otherwise that man would become ungrounded and loose his bearings." I began to see the truth of this because I was watching young people believe all sorts of crazy stuff around those times and many were believing such untrue things that they were dying or going crazy from it. This was around 1969 during the Viet Nam War. So, I set out to study man at that point. I studied philosophy and psychology and everything that I thought would help me understand both myself and the world around me. I studied Cultural Anthropology and realized that I was what was called a "Natural Shaman". The definition was of someone who had psychologically died but whose body lived on somehow and who was able to communicate with both the living and the dead. This perfectly described what had happened to me. I had died but my body still lived because that was what God wanted. So, I learned how to cope with being both dead and somehow alive at the same time. At that time being a Natural Shaman wasn't something acceptable to be within polite society. Though this has changed now it has changed almost 360 degrees to be what it once was then.
So, I went on to study what kept me alive and what kept others alive and in my spare time I did suicide counseling of others because I was trying to stay alive myself around those years. I learned a great deal about myself and all the people I met and tried to help stay alive both inside and outside of college. I then tried to study to become a psychologist and was about 3 years into this when I met my first wife and she got pregnant and we got married. And so I now had a reason to stay alive but I needed to go to work to support my family and so college was going to have to wait. So, by learning from my own life experiences and the experiences of all those around me I survived to have a son and become married and to take my responsibilities as a father seriously. Now my son is 37 and passed his bachelor's of Science in Nursing last Year. All my kids over 25 have college degrees now. My life has been an amazing one and I'm grateful to God that He has given me so much time here on Earth to do all the things he has. Thank you God!
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