I was 21 in 1969 which was the single craziest year of my life. I don't think I could survive another year like that one.
There is who you believe you are and who you think you are going to be and then there is what actually happens. And for me, what happened simply wasn't survivable for me. But, I couldn't commit suicide because I had too much honor to do that to my parents. So, life became unbearable for awhile. Luckily, I'm a very strong and adaptable person. However, this took anything I ever thought could happen in my life to a point where I never believed it could go.
It could have been worse. I could have gone to Viet Nam as a drafted soldier and got on heroin, got PTSD and either died or be walking the streets talking to myself like many my age still are today from that horrific war. (all wars are horrific by nature).
But, instead I broke up with the girl I had planned to marry for 2 years (from age 19 to 21) and then I was asked to leave my childhood church. I didn't expect all this to mess me up the way it did. I found I had planned the next 20 years of my life around this girl and my church and now both were gone. I saw no reason to go on and wouldn't except for my parents. I couldn't do that to them so I didn't.
But, what happened was really good because I survived it somehow. What happened was that I was sort of suicidal from 1969 until around 1973. The worst was from 1969 to 1971. I survived by always having friends and a girlfriend that loved me. Because of the era I wound up dating at least 25 different girls between 1969 and 1973 which changed me a lot. This might seem a lot for now but for then a lot would have been 100 to 1000 girls. Because there wasn't VD much in the crowd I hung out with and Aids didn't hit until around 1980 or so and herpes wasn't that big until the late 70s or so. So, this wasn't the condom era yet.
But, boundary failures when you are trying to grow up enough to know how to stay alive for your 30s and beyond are much different than the boundary failures I wrote about with my mother with Senile dementia and cording and all that.
So, the kinds of boundary failures were more about trying to find ways to stay alive when you wished you were dead. So, for me this was about dating someone that loved me so I couldn't kill myself because she loved me because I couldn't do that to her or my parents.
This worked until I was 24 and met my first wife and we had my son before I was 26.
However, I think I'm talking now more about boundary failures that often happen to young men trying to find a way to stay alive. I think girls were a lot more naive in some ways than now. Also, because my friends were mostly college students during that time the philosophy in Los Angeles and San Diego during these times was much different than now. I think it might be best summed up by "Make Love Not War" and when soldiers came home on leave often they would put on wigs and pretend to be one of us. I thought actually this was a good idea because I always felt sort of guilty about not having to go to war because I had had childhood epilepsy until I was 15 which caused me to get a 4F which meant I wasn't going to Viet Nam to fight.
So, some of the love ins like at Griffith park in 1969 we also populated by soldiers dressed up with the times with long hair wigs and stuff like that as the Youngbloods played "When you come home to San Francisco" and Buffy Saint Marie also sang there too. But then, it was nice to be able to run at that point because the police came in and hit anyone with billy clubs that didn't run fast enough when it was over. I could run pretty fast back then.
In regards to the Viet Nam War I guess I was relatively neutral. I didn't like young men being drafted the moment they graduated high school if they weren't immediately going to college. But, I also didn't want a nuclear war with Russia and China (because then people believed in the Domino Theory). Here is an example of the Domino theory as countries that might have been taken over by communist takeovers then:
Referring to communism in Indochina, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower put the theory into words during an April 7, 1954 news
Domino theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_theory
The domino theory
existed from the 1950s to the 1980s. It was promoted at times by the
United States government and speculated that if one state in a
region ...
Wikipedia
Domino Theory - Cold War - HISTORY.com
www.history.com/topics/cold-war/domino-theory
Find out more about the history of Domino Theory, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com.
The History Channel
So, this was what I actually thought at the time. If I had been drafted at age 18 I likely would have gone. The person against me getting drafted was my Dad who knew I was eligible for a 4F because of my childhood illness. However, I wasn't thrilled about being drafted either, especially since more people my age (born 1948) died over there than any other age. 50,000 died and 250,000 were wounded and uncountable people had PTSD (some are still walking our streets talking to themselves from it).
So, the biggest boundary failure of that era was the Viet Nam War itself because of all the young boys fresh out of high school that died about 2 weeks after reaching Viet Nam on the front lines. If they made it about 6 months alive on the front lines there they likely might make it home. (But none of them came home in one piece) they all had varying degees of PTSD when they got back that affected them often when everyone least expected it.
However, even though some of my roommates in apartments were veterans, most of them were mostly just college kids because there was some sort of imaginary divide that existed but mostly it was just association. The people you worked with or went to school with you tended to associate with. It has always been this way. So, most people I knew had sort of mixed feelings about the Viet Nam War like I did. And we all found the whole thing very confusing.
The types of boundary failures (I call them that now but then they were just a part of growing up) was that many of those girls who loved me really didn't stop loving me (nor did I stop loving them either) but events occurred of one kind or another which caused us one by one to go our separate ways. I think our culture wasn't ready for either the Viet Nam War, the Birth Control Pill or anything else that happened during the 1960s and 1970s. We all that made it through all that were sort of more survivors than anything else. And many of our friends died in Viet Nam, racing cars, drug overdoses, committing suicide over lovers who were no longer there, dying in childbirth etc. etc. etc.
So, many were casualties and they died and then there were the survivors like me. So, I guess that's how I would put it: "I survived the 1960s and 1970s." I was 21 in 1969.
Note: I was thinking that the domino theory could apply also today in regard to Russia but not in regard to communism and totalitarianism, atheism and anti-capitalism yet. However, I think Putin is planning all of this if he can get away with it. This would just be the normal KGB conditioning that he went through (brainwashing) as a young man. (He was a Colonel in the KGB before he led Russia).
Here would be the new sequence: Ukraine and Crimea, Georgia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria etc. etc. etc.
So, this might be the new domino theory ascribed to Putin. Is Ukraine our next Viet Nam? or something else?
Also, I sort of wanted to share about psychic changes in people including myself during the 1960s and 1970s.
I think now people are more "reading the internet" trying to get all the facts they can rather than experiencing themselves and the world more like people did in the 1960s and 1970s. There were styles of behavior of different eras. So, the people who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s would be more apt to say things like, "Do what you can and the rest can." In other words "life isn't perfect so there are a lot of things you are just going to have to stuff." However, my generation hadn't had to survive the insane level of PTSD of our parents and grandparents and relatives and their friends so often we would just think all these older folks were completely nuts. (However, looking back now anyone who had gone through what they had would have to be a little nuts to survive all that).
So, since I was a baby boomer always people my age wanted to experience and to enjoy life as much as possible. And we were able to do that partly because our country was the richest it had ever been form about 1950 through about 1973 when the Arab Oil embargo happened. The Arab Oil Embargo along with the Viet Nam War sort of bankrupted the U.S. in many ways and we have never been the same economically ever again. But, one of the best things out of all this wealth was sharing the wealth which resulted in things like: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964" by LBJ who was president then.
This allowed a whole lot of other progress to be made as well which greatly has changed the whole world.
Now, we are sort of going online rather than traveling the world like we did then as much as a nation. We might go work somewhere in the foreign country and stay there 5 or more years because we couldn't get a good job in the U.S. but we are less likely to travel places for months at a time and meet people and explore the world as we would have during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
There was a "spiritual Awakening" that happened in the 1960s and 1970s that my generation partook of which basically sort of meant that the college educated amongst us tended to explore other religions and other philosophies around the world. This all happened at a time when I was asked to leave my church after I broke up with my girlfriend of 2 years (also a member of my church) so I was open then to explore new ideas and new religions and new experiences because my past ended and I was creating my new future life that I could stand to live.
I still believed in God I just didn't believe in churches or ministers anymore because I had been very discouraged by my experiences with the complete hypocrisy and dishonesty among churchgoers which was "Do what I say not what I actually do".
So, I had had more than enough of this dishonest behavior in all churchgoing people and decided to live whatever I believed 24 hours a day and 7 days a week rather than just be hypocritical for 2 hours every Sunday.
Note: I was thinking that the domino theory could apply also today in regard to Russia but not in regard to communism and totalitarianism, atheism and anti-capitalism yet. However, I think Putin is planning all of this if he can get away with it. This would just be the normal KGB conditioning that he went through (brainwashing) as a young man. (He was a Colonel in the KGB before he led Russia).
Here would be the new sequence: Ukraine and Crimea, Georgia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria etc. etc. etc.
So, this might be the new domino theory ascribed to Putin. Is Ukraine our next Viet Nam? or something else?
Also, I sort of wanted to share about psychic changes in people including myself during the 1960s and 1970s.
I think now people are more "reading the internet" trying to get all the facts they can rather than experiencing themselves and the world more like people did in the 1960s and 1970s. There were styles of behavior of different eras. So, the people who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s would be more apt to say things like, "Do what you can and the rest can." In other words "life isn't perfect so there are a lot of things you are just going to have to stuff." However, my generation hadn't had to survive the insane level of PTSD of our parents and grandparents and relatives and their friends so often we would just think all these older folks were completely nuts. (However, looking back now anyone who had gone through what they had would have to be a little nuts to survive all that).
So, since I was a baby boomer always people my age wanted to experience and to enjoy life as much as possible. And we were able to do that partly because our country was the richest it had ever been form about 1950 through about 1973 when the Arab Oil embargo happened. The Arab Oil Embargo along with the Viet Nam War sort of bankrupted the U.S. in many ways and we have never been the same economically ever again. But, one of the best things out of all this wealth was sharing the wealth which resulted in things like: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964" by LBJ who was president then.
This allowed a whole lot of other progress to be made as well which greatly has changed the whole world.
Now, we are sort of going online rather than traveling the world like we did then as much as a nation. We might go work somewhere in the foreign country and stay there 5 or more years because we couldn't get a good job in the U.S. but we are less likely to travel places for months at a time and meet people and explore the world as we would have during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
There was a "spiritual Awakening" that happened in the 1960s and 1970s that my generation partook of which basically sort of meant that the college educated amongst us tended to explore other religions and other philosophies around the world. This all happened at a time when I was asked to leave my church after I broke up with my girlfriend of 2 years (also a member of my church) so I was open then to explore new ideas and new religions and new experiences because my past ended and I was creating my new future life that I could stand to live.
I still believed in God I just didn't believe in churches or ministers anymore because I had been very discouraged by my experiences with the complete hypocrisy and dishonesty among churchgoers which was "Do what I say not what I actually do".
So, I had had more than enough of this dishonest behavior in all churchgoing people and decided to live whatever I believed 24 hours a day and 7 days a week rather than just be hypocritical for 2 hours every Sunday.
So, I wasn't interested in top down religious stuff I wanted to experience personally whatever I was going to believe in and so I did and still do.
This allowed me to grow all the time in my beliefs according to my studies and experiences of the moment.
As a young person at 21 I fel sort of "set free" in some ways in 1969. There was a sense in which I really didn't care whether I lived or died. So, the sky was the limit in the kinds of risks I might take during the next 4 years. So, I was likely more in danger of dying by accident than dying on purpose always. Because I was always pretty much a physically fearless person in my life. Because I was tall 6 foot 5 inches and usually knew what people's intentions were (because I am an intuitive) I had an advantage that most people didn't seem to have of really understanding what was going on around me more than most people tended to. Also, because I was allergic to alcohol through my grandfather and father and found at 16 that I was a very bad drunk I didn't drink alcohol after one bad experience when I was 16 with my friends.
So, sometimes while going mountain climbing from San Diego towards Mt. Shasta with friends I would do things like psychicly look through fog at 70 mph when I could barely even see the hood of the car. When it was dangerous I found I could muster more of my psychic gifts. And so many of my gifts quickly developed in this kind of situation. A friend who was a mountain climber but who also was very intuitive and intelligent like me often was along for this kind of (developing exercise of psychic gifts).
Another thing I tried while reading the "Don Juan" books by Casteneda was "looking for my hands" while I was dreaming which was a way to develop out of the body powers. However, when I finally succeeded at this I was sort of blown away that my hands looked fluorescent green in my dreams when I was asleep. I couldn't really figure this out and still haven't to today.
So, in 1970 I climbed Mt. Shasta with 3 friends from my church (that I was no longer a part of). 2 of these friends had also been asked to leave our church and one was still a part of the church because we were too progressive and 1960s like for our very conservative church.
As I climbed the mountain and experienced "The Burning Bush" is the only way it makes sense to describe (on Mt. Shasta at about 2 to 3 am) in August 1970 this experience changed me a lot and I sort of see this as a very life changing experience maybe like Moses had too. I found my arms the next few months hurt like they were on fire and finally I got sort of frightened as this continued and got worse and I thought by October or November that I might actually spontaneously combust from the pain the way it felt. Now I see this experience as a descent of the "Holy Spirit" which is what I thought is was then too but I didn't have anyone to teach me what to do with this power.
I used as much of this power healing people that I could and seeing what I needed to do but at a certain point it was more than I could deal with. Also, your remember I invited God to live in my body when I was 15 and God moved into my body and my childhood epilepsy ended right then and I never had another seizure again.
But, this holy spirit thing was overwhelming in a way nothing had been before and I began to be afraid because it was just too much power for me to know what to do with. So, I thought I might die from this power by just catching on fire (spontaneous combustion). This was a real problem for me and finally I found a way to deal with it.
Many people I knew back then had all sorts of amazing realizations that completely changed their lives like this. So, I wasn't alone having holy spirit experiences that were beyond belief. This was what many people experienced too. It was like God pulled out all the stops to keep us (the children of Earth) from nuking ourselves out of existence in the 1960s and 1970s.
We seem to have come to another danger time like this now. So, likely more people will have amazing spiritual experiences like I have had around the world during these times as well.
When I have talked to God about all this he has said stuff sort of like, "What happens on earth mostly has to do with what all my children on earth decide to do together here. Being on earth is a great learning experience as long as the race can continue ongoing here for thousands and thousands of years."
Because God has shown me this I realize Armageddon is just someone's death wish or suicide wish because life was just too hard and PTSD for them thousands of years ago when they wrote about this.
Also, the whole Armageddon thing is to freak people out so they give more money to the churches more than anything else and always has been.
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