Thursday, August 24, 2023

Autobiographical Essays on My Life

I took two creative writing Classes in college, one in I believe 1987 and one closer to 2000 or 2001 here in Northern California. I went to UCSC in 1989 and 1990 also studying Anthropology. In 1990 I was 42 years old. UCSC is in Santa Cruz, California near San Jose and San Francisco only Santa Cruz is on the coast and is a popular surfing location in California. Mavericks is likely the biggest surf in California potentially year around sort of like Makaha on Oahu in Hawaii. Mavericks is just north of Santa Cruz.

So, this was written all likely before 2001 on my childhood and younger life from birth through about age 30 maybe. It was first published online in my Geocities.com site. However, Geocities stopped being an ongoing thing around 2009 when Yahoo Business discontinued it. However, there is a restorative site called: https://geocities.restorativland.org 

where you can find your site or others that you had or others that I personally had a site at from June of 1999 until I stopped writing there somewhere between 2007 and 2009. I got Intuitivefred888 at blogger.com in 2007 I believe where you are reading this now.

Autobiographical Essays on My Life

I decided to compile some essays I wrote in college Creative Writing Classes on my life. I took the ones I like the best and put them here online. Since they were written at different times some aspects of my life will repeat themselves in various ways. However, each essay is written on a different aspect of my life and each are addressing different subjects in general. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did on reading them for the first time in several years. I have been wanting to do something like this for some time but things didn't come together for it to happen until now. Please enjoy!

Preface to all the Essays

What I am publishing here online is not only a partial history of my present life but also a history of my spiritual life and evolution during this lifetime. It is written and compiled in the hope that it will help make your lives and spiritual quests more survivable and helpful and that you too can evolve past wanting to take your own life when life gets too unbearable to even consider living another day! There is so much joy in life if we can just make it through the miserable parts. Take your life in your own hands and Create a life you can stand to live. Co-Create with God a life than contains as much joy and life as possible.

A New Lifetime-1948

written in 2000 AD put online May 31st 2005

In order to properly start with 1948 and my birth I need to begin with my conception in summer 1947. After having been married a little over a year to my father, my mother wanted a child. My father was 31 and wasn't sure about being a father. So my mother tricked him into having me by telling him she was already pregnant even though she knew full well she wasn't.

I think at some time during my life she told him the truth but I'm not clear exactly when that happened. However, when she confided in me this incident I was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old and she seemed to take great glee in sharing this with me like it had been a burden to keep this secret. Maybe this was because she knew if she hadn't done this she never would have become a mother. Mom identified very much with Mary, the mother of Jesus so for her having me was for her like having Jesus. However, this way of thinking is a lot to lay on any child.

On April 28th, I was born a little after midnight in the first few minutes of the new day. I was 24 inches long and the tallest baby ever born at Waldo Memorial Hospital in Seattle.

My mother speaks to me of going to her church in Seattle. It was a very unusual religion for that time and era. It was very similar to Christian Science and Church of Religious Science and Unity. She and my father believed that people followed in the footsteps of Christ to become like him through perserverance and reincarnation.

In this religion affirmations and what they called decrees were given in unison invoking what they wished from God. They were less asking for things and were more seeing themselves as the sons and daughters of God and as Co-creators with God. A part of this religion was demanding their rights as Sons and Daughters of God to become physically manifest and spiritually manifest here on Earth.

From my present vantage point of 52 I look back upon all this in an entirely different light than I was taught as a child. I have experienced first hand just how good and how bad these types of dynamic invocations can be. It is my personal experience that when a compassionate right mindful and wise person issues these dynamic prayers that they can do great good for all. However, when unbalanced immature souls issue these same types of degrees they can create great havoc in people's lives and all they touch. Compassion towards all life in the universe, as well as wisdom and maturity are absolutely necessary for good results ongoing!

My mother later told me that she thought all these decrees affected me in the womb before birth as well as after birth she hoped in a positive way. It could be said that I was trained in "higher consciousness" even before birth as well as after birth.

My mother was always a very special person. I always admired my mother's singing voice and compassionate speaking voice and a general common sense and levelheadedness that I found absent from most women in the 1950's. It wasn't that most women weren't capable it was just that they didn't seem to be encouraged in their true capabilities by society in the 1950's. Because of the compassion, love and wisdom that I was always given by my mother and my grandmother who lived with us I have always revered women.

Mother prayed to a being her religion called the Elohim Hercules. He was one of Seven Elohim who supposedly built the Solar System. It was believed that a seven fold flame existed in spirit on the forehead of every human symbolic of each human soul being like a child of the Elohim.

While on the Cross Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic, "Eloi! Eloi! Lama Sabacthani" There are at least two translations or more. The best translation direct to English is, "My God, My God, how thou hast glorified me!" In this statement by Jesus "Eloi" is a plural noun for God that in English has become now Elohim.

My mother later believed that her prayers to the Elohim Hercules, Lord of the Blue Ray and spiritual Strength with the Solar System caused me to be very tall and strong as a child and adult. I personally believe my spiritual strength was invoked during my gestation period.

Later in life I watched so many people lose hope in their spirits whereas each time my life became difficult it only seemed to make me grow spiritually stronger in the long run. This doesn't mean I haven't been severely tested over and over again. It just means that no matter how bad I was crushed or destroyed I always seemed to be able to rebound unlike many people I have known.

I believe I owe my spiritual strength to God, and to my spiritual teachers which include my parents, relatives and friends.

Next Essay

Early Memories of Seattle and Mt. Shasta

These memories begin with seeing Arcangel Michael and his Band when I was two sitting on my Scottish Grandmother's lap while she sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing". I saw Arcangel Michael and his band appear in jeweled armor and smile at me as if I was one of them. The feeling I got from them was that they were holy soldiers for God. I also felt like I was one of them and that I too was a protector of the human race. This and other visitations by angels and masters set the tone of my whole life on into adulthood.

I can remember playing outside the duplex that sat next to my grandfather's house on his 2 1/2 acres of land covered with apple and cherry trees and rasberries and blackberries. It was near Seattle where my mother and father grew up. My Mom from very young and my Dad from 12 to 15 years old when his Dad bought his acreage there.

Random Memories of early childhood

I'm 2 or 3 Mommy is singing along with Mario Lanza on the record player. The music and the power and quality of my mother's voice amazed me and brought me to tears. Very little made me feel as peace or as inspired as when my mother sang---

I was interested in an expensive clock sitting on a mantle so I grabbed the electric cord and pulled it off. It broke and everyone was mad at me. I just wanted to see how it worked and to take it apart. I was 2 or 3.---

I want to go outside. They put my blue snowsuit on. I can barely stand up in it. I'm two or three. It's very cold and windy outside and the snow is blowing---

I'm 4 years old in Seattle. I'm riding my toy car up and down the cement driveway with my cousin Billy and my cousin Janice. Billy's 5 years older and Janice 7 years older---

My little girlfriend next door who is my age doesn't give me a toy so I push her down the cement stairs. Granpa knows just what to do. He beats my butt so I don't do it again!(consequences)

I'm 4. I walk several acres down a hill to Margaret's house but on the way I stir up a hornet's nest. They sting me many times so I run home screaming. Granpa knows just what to do. I show him the hornet's nest. He pours gasoline on it and lights it. No more hornets. I think that moment I knew I loved my Grandpa and appreciated him more than any other time---

I'm 4. My big cousin Billy takes me to a frog pond and show me frogs eggs. My concept of the galaxy and even the whole universe by holding hundreds of gelatanous frogs eggs in my hands that day. I felt all the life in my hands. I felt like God as I put the eggs back in the pond to become frogs---

I'm 4. That same summer we take the train to San Diego. We stay in California after that. I only saw Grandpa a few times in my life after that. He liked me because I'm a lot like him by nature. We both naturally love and worship nature. My Dad and his sister look the most like him in real life---

California 1952

On the train ride down I wore formal clothes. My mother bought me a trench coat and a briefcase like a little businessman and gentleman. If people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up my answer was, "I want to be a gentleman when I grow up." I looked the part even though inside my briefcase was a raggedy Ann an d Andy doll and comic books. I was 4 so the trip with my Mom and Grandma to San Diego by train was a long one and not as fun as Mom had expected. I guess travelling on a train even with one's own sleeper compartment was as fun as she thought it would be because she had a 4 year old to occupy. I don't think Mom was really prepared to be the mother of a boy child. All the better to figure ways to get what I wanted while I was still young.

Even then I knew I was smarter than Mom or Nana(her mother). I loved them but I had them both wrapped around my little finger. But don't get me wrong. I worshipped them both and would do anything to help or protect them. After all, at 4 I was almost grown up according to 1952 standards of male behavior. Seattle had strong English and Canadian influences in the local culture whereas San Diego had an entirely different flavor of Mexican named streets and towns and laid back attitudes that were culturally completely different than Seattle and Canada. Soon I was a Californian and enamored with all the craziness and what I now call Controlled Chaos that Southern California excels in. Unless one lives in southern California for several years one does not get just how deep this experimentalism goes. But it is not a naive experimentalism, it is a practical and efficient experimentalism that lives in California.

Bicycles and Beyond

When I was 5 for my birthday(this would be april 1953) I was given a 24 inch bike(which was actually too big for me). So I was given a foot tall log or board to step on so I could actually step on to ride the bike. The other thing I was given was a jackknife. Back then every boy had to have one. So I promptly tested to see if it was sharp on my right thumb. I still have a scar across my right thumbprint from that experiment. My mother didn't believe in stitches unless you were going to bleed to death or something so butterfly bandages sealed the wound and kept me from bleeding to death out my right thumb.

Later I tried to jump the bike off a three foot tall dirt cliff and failed and wound up in the middle of the street with all my eyelashes and right eyebrow ground off from the macadam road. I always took things to the edge but always survived somehow.

I'm climbing the apricot tree in the backyard at our rented house with a big yard in El Cajon, California. I'm picking and eating apricots with my best friend across the street, Danny Barsocks. We also ride bicycles together. One day his dog got excited and bit me in my stomache and left teeth marks and made me cry. I also started watching superman on TV at Danny's house there in El Cajon. We didn't get a TV until 1954. El Cajon was 1953 and I was 5. Dad bought property near Escondido, California from a development owned by some health guy named Pretorius. He bought 2 1/2 acres. He cleared the land with a bull dozer and killed several rattlesnakes with a dirt shovel. One was 3 inches wide and 7 feet long. because he didn't want it to bite me or him. When I was 20 I had to pull out my pistol and shoot a rattlesnake too because it was too near humans and someone was going to get bit. It was a Mojave green sidewinder that are small but 9 times as poisonous as a diamond back rattler. Most people who were bitten by green mojave sidewinder rattlers died back then because they take much more antitoxin for people to survive their bite than a diamondback rattler.

While I was 5 and eating the ripe apricots while sitting in a tree with my best friend Danny Barsocks little did I know that we were going to move again soon to Tujunga, California near the mountains in Los Angeles County. There I met another Danny who became my friend even though he shot me with his BB gun in the leg. Luckily I had jeans on so it only made a black and blue mark the size of a 50 cent piece. But it hurt a lot.

I was in first and second grade in Tujunga. One day a boy banged DAnny's and my head together on the way home. This hurt a lot so we decided not to walk by that boys house again as he was older and we knew we couldn't win a fight with a boy that old. We were 6. So we took another route home that was more physically dangerous but we were less afraid of running accross a busy four lane highway with traffic than getting hurt again by that boy. As we ran across the highway many cars almost hit us and honked and people screamed at us but we didn't care because we weren't hurt. A teacher from our school stopped and asked us why we were doing this and we told her about the boy that had banged our heads together. She asked us to point out the boy later in school. We did so and never saw him again.

I rode my bike one day barefoot but my jeans pantleg got caught in the pedal spokes which caused me to crash my bike and my toes got hurt in the bike spokes. After that I decided to always wear shoes while riding a bike.

I got into a silly fight while fighting over a toy in a friends backyard. We grabbed each others faces and squeezed so both of us were getting hurt. His mother sent me home even though my friend had started the fight. I decided fighting was really stupid and it hurt a lot and nothing was ever gained so I decided not to fight if I could survive without it. I never started any physical fights after that. I was 6. Luckily, I was usually one of the biggest kids in each of my classes so people knew if they made me mad enough I might seriously hurt them because I was always very strong. So I learned that bluffing and attitude could go a long way and usually prevent major fights.

When I was 12 I grew from 5 foot 2 to 5 foot 10. Since I was almost 6 feet tall and very strong my father set me down and said to me, "Freddie, if you ever get really mad you might kill someone. If you get really mad no one will be able to stop you until someone is dead. You have to be disciplined enough not to get goaded into fights because you will kill someone if they make you mad and you lose control." I took what my Dad said very seriously because I knew he was right and I didn't want to kill someone by accident if they made me angry enough. I learned through will power how to handle any situation. I found that I was usually more intelligent than people who goaded me. I stayed alive and so did they.

When I was 8 we moved again to Glendale, California to be nearer to the church my parents were in charge of. Mom mostly worked at the church while Dad worked as an Electrician until I was 12 and then started his own Electrical Contracting Business. They gave up being in charge of the church because my mother's father died and she had a mini nervous breakdown and then my Dad started his Electrical Contracting Business. I Started working for him summers. I found I like working with my Dad. I could make money and see who my Dad was around men. I found he was totally different on the job than when he was with Mom. I found I liked being around the Man's man that my Dad was. People who worked in Construction swore a lot and teased and made fun of each other. I liked that one always knew where they stood. If you insulted a construction worker you could expect a fight or worse. It was like a battleground if one wasn't careful how one dealt with them. I learned to respect my father because most of these men thought that Dad was a great guy because he told funny stories and always made the men laugh. Dad didn't swear around MOm or Nana or me at home but boy did he swear with the men on the job and laugh. Everyone was always laughing when Dad was there. And yet he was a workaholic and worked harder than anyone. Once when my Dad worked in San Diego the company laid off 300 electricians and kept him because he outworked them all. That was Dad, a joke telling workaholic who was proud of his abilities as an electrician.

His Dad wouldn't let him go to college and become an electrical engineer like Dad had wanted to. But recently I realized that during the Great depression of the 1930's most Electrical Engineers were starving without jobs. However, Electricians and tradesmen were always needed and working. Grandpa understood something Dad and his brother Bob didn't.

The day in Tujunga when Danny and I almost got hit by four lanes of traffic my Mom's Mom who lived with us, "Nana" broke her ankle. She came up to meet me the new way across the Eucalyptus forest and broke her ankle. She was 66 years old and lived with us.

She had taken care of me since she was 60 years old when she had a stroke when her husband left and was in a coma for one month. Mom said she was a different person when she emerged from the coma. She was less stressed and more mellow. Mom thought that God sent someone to care for me in her new Mom.

Nana lived with us after Mom and Dad married in 1946 and mostly stayed with us until I was 21 except for a short time when I was 12 to 14. During that time she was so upset to be living away from us that she over medicated herself and almost died so Mom eventually had her live with us again.

When we lived in Poway, California. Nana turned 80 in 1968 so when she was 82 in 1970 she went to live with Mom's 2 sisters in Seattle. She passed away in 1978 when she was 90. Mom's two sisters both passed away at age 90 also in Seattle.

The 60's and Beyond

A month after I turned 16 I bought myself a 1956 Ford Station wagon. I called it my surf wagon and reversed the rear shackles so it was on a rake. In other words the rear end of the car was higher than the front which made it not only look "cool' but was very interesting if you had to turn fast. Your rear tires might slide in the direction of the turn. One day Mike and I and 2 other friends cut school and went to Malibu in my surf wagon with 10 foot surfboards hanging out the back to surf. One of the guys stole a plastic squeeze bottle of mustard from a burger joint and was drinking mustard on the 1 hour drive back home. I didn�t realize he was jealous of my owning my own car. Unbeknownst to me he sprayed mustard down the back of my car during the drive. It had discolored the paint by the time I found out. He never drove anywhere with me again.

There were two beautiful identical twin girls that lived down the street from me. I asked Sharon, the twin I knew best to go to Malibu beach with me. She had long brown hair and a great personality and figure and green eyes you could easily fall into. However, neither she nor I were comfortable dating anyone yet. I felt very strange with her on the beach. We kissed a couple of times but the communication just wasn't there between us. Neither of us felt the magic I guess even though the beach was beautiful. Later I met Gayle and asked her out. She was a blonde haired blue eyed girl from Anchorage, Alaska. I think I liked her beauty her freshness and her out in the country vibe. She liked to go to movies and to Ice Skate so we did both frequently. However, something was still missing for me. I asked a girl from church who was 21 to go to a political rally with me. She said, "Yes." And so we went. However, we wound up at a drive in theatre instead. She was very surprised at her feelings for me as she was 21 and I was only 16. We went steady for about 1 year. We would go to Mulholland Drive and kiss and make out until 4 am sometimes on weekends. Sometimes I miss those days terribly before going all the way. Of just making out and sweet talk and the innocent trivial things that lovers can do like listening to music and watching the stars and all the city lights from high up.

We used to have really great philosophical conversations like what we were going to do with our lives? Where would we travel to? Would we ever marry? What would the future bring? Once real sex came into a relationship it was always stressful. We both usually knew that if we didn't stay together we probably couldn't be friends. Sex kills good friendships usually unless you keep dating. That was a sad truth I hadn't really experienced up close yet in my relative innocence.

Whether it was with a girlfriend I was dating or just climbing mountains or surfing with male friends I think I enjoyed most the philosophical conversations we had of wondering if there was a God and what life was really about? What did we love? What did we hate? What could we tolerate? And most of all "What was the point of it all anyway?" When I look back at those times I was always happiest when trying to figure it out. I don't think anyone ever completely figures it out. I think at some point you just have to pretend you have it together so you don't frighten your kids with the truth. Which is "Kids, No one really knows everything or really has it completely together. It's all a bluff. And the biggest and best bluff wins. "Look! I've got a great Bluff. I live in an affluent house in an affluent neighborhood about 1 mile from the beach and within 2 hours of the San Francisco Bay. But am I really happy. NO! I'm not. I'm content. I don't think I've ever been happy for more than a few months or years in my entire life. Now isn't that a scary thought?

At age 17 I started going out with a girl from my church. She was 18 at the time. She went to Los Angeles State University and I was a junior in High School. She was a very intelligent and very beautiful blonde blue eyed amazing woman, a real handful. I had fantasies of marrying her. But I was a little too young. When she was 22 she married a guy Texas and moved to Texas to live there with him. I remember one time I rented a motorcycle to take a ride with her. Back then you didn't need a special license to ride a motorcycle or to wear helmets so motorcycle deaths were pretty common on freeways and around town in L.A. county, California.

Anyway,  my girlfriend and I took off on a motorcycle up the Angeles Crest Highway up into the Ponderosa pines that grow above 4000 to 5000 feet in the Angeles National Forest. We had fun while riding up. We drove as far as Mt. Wilson Observatory which is about 6000 feet in elevation and looks directly down on LA. Back then there were relay towers for all the television stations as cable tv wasn't common like it is now and almost everyone in LA had roof aerials to receive the then 12 stations available in LA. On our way down the mountain I got behind a slowpoke and decided to pass on a blind curve. Anyway, someone was coming the other direction. There was only a one or two inch clearance from each handlebar as the two cars passed each other on the one lane each direction mountain road with me and my girlfriend in the middle. I white knuckled it and thought that we were both dead. I decided not to tell  my girlfriend we had almost been killed as she was behind hanging dearly on to me not understanding fully the situation. I was still pretty shook up inside when we returned the motorcycle to the rental agency and drove her home in my car. However, I hid my feelings as it was bad enough that I alone knew that we had come within an inch or two of dying at about 70 mph on a mountain road.

After a wonderful summer with  my girlfriend in 1965 I started my senior year at Glendale High School again. I had grown up so much the last few years that I found it impossible to go back to high school. It just felt so dumb and immature to be back in high school learning the same things in a different form that I had basically learned by 4th grade. I decided to drop out of High School and go to work. Dropping out of high school and getting ones own place was a pretty common thing those days. Girls I knew were getting pregnant at 15 and married at 16. I remember how confused I felt when I accidentally met friends in a drug store. They were 16, one was carrying a baby and they were both my age. They told me they had gotten married and had had this baby. I felt so confused by this I thought I was going to throw up. I just couldnďż˝t imagine getting someone pregnant and getting married at 16. However, by 17 I could imagine going to work, dropping out of school and doing whatever I wanted.

Luckily for me my parents interceded. My mother and father sat me down and said, "Why don't you go to our church�s private school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Remember your friend Victor? Didn't he ask you to please come to Santa Fe and go to the church school so you could hang out and ski and explore the area? I thought seriously about this. If I went to Santa Fe I wouldn't have to work full time and I could have fun and not have to deal with my parents for 6 or 7 months. I agreed.

So in the middle of October 1965 in my senior year of high school I went to the train station in Pasadena nearby.  My girlfriend went with us. She was crying. She was very in love with me and hated to see me go. Though I loved her to I was young and arrogant and fickle and immature. Many times I wish I could have been mature enough to stay in L.A. and possibly eventually marry her. However, that was not to be. Remember I was only 17. What do you expect?

So I kissed my girlfriend goodbye and hugged my parents. As I climbed up on the Santa Fe bound El Capitan train I wondered if I was making a mistake. I met many interesting people the next 18 hours or so on board the train. It was the first time I had ever traveled away from my parents this distance in my life. I went through many changes the next 18 to 20 hours. I also met many people from all over the US. The easiest to talk to were the men in uniform about my age returning from Viet Nam. I was struck by their strangeness. Even though they were within 2 years of my age all their youth had been sucked out of them. They were men in all the full awfulness of the word men. I vowed then to find a way not to get sucked into Viet Nam. However, without my father I believe I would have been drafted and gone within one year of turning 18.

After graduating from a private High School In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the next thing I had to worry about was the draft. Many 18 year olds like myself were getting drafted and going off to Viet Nam to get mentally messed up or killed. It always seemed to be one of the other or just getting physically and mentally maimed for life. Though I wasn't looking forward to this. I was very patriotic as that was how I was raised. I felt a duty to go if asked. In Santa Fe on my 18th birthday my father had called and told me to go to the Post Office to register for the draft. He told me to let them know that I might need a medical deferment. I didn't know what he had in mind at the time but I did know I had had sunstroke which meant I didn't do well in continual heat and that I had had Childhood epilepsy which meant I would have a seizure at night about once every 6 months while dreaming and worrying about a school test or something between ages 10 and 15. When I returned home he took me to my LA doctor, and got me a 4F. I was very surprised.

My father was a very intense person. I was 18 and was not going to get killed or maimed physically or mentally like my friends. I felt a little guilty. I felt even more guilty when a roommate of mine turned out to secretly be an army deserter and had to go to jail for 5 years when he went home to Minnesota. I also felt bad when another friend had to move to Canada with his wife and children to avoid the draft. Another friend had volunteered for the marines and became a Sergeant and was told to take his platoon into an area where nothing would be accomplished and they would all be killed so he refused to do it and got dishonorably discharged. However, the next sergeant to take his platoon was killed along with most of his men for nothing. Although he felt sick about it at least he was alive and could live with his conscience. Crazy times.

When I was 21 my parents moved to San Diego so I lived for a few months with my Aunt in the Hollywood Hills. The swimming pool was great but it finally got strange and I wanted to move. I got fired from a job working as an electrician for taking an extra day of vacation so I got another job in Venice, California as an electrician and crew leader wiring a large apartment building there. A free apartment on the beach was part of the pay. Within a few weeks I got two roommates to share expenses. We began to party with neighbors and friends on weekends. I suppose it was a lot like Haight Ashbury in San Francisco then in fall 1969.

Within 3 months I was getting way to weird and moved out and decided to stay with my parents in San Diego. People were dying from drug overdoses or going to jail a lot that I knew of. I realized Venice was just too strange a place for me to survive. So I left my apartment to my friends and moved to San Diego.

About this same time I was excommunicated from my parents' church. This was very hard on me as I had many friends world wide that I had known since being a child and they were forbidden to have any communication at all with me or they would be excommunicated too. This seemed very unchristian and this began to turn me against all churches because of the hypocrisy I was experiencing. I moved toward becoming more spiritual but less religious. I realized right then that religions are only political and that they have absolutely nothing to do with ones real experiences with God. One does not need a relationship with a church or even a priest or minister. One should be ones own priest and create a direct connection to God. Everything else seems to wind up being a very sick joke over time. I have seen so many peoples lives completely destroyed by churches, ministers, and religious crazies. I firmly believe more people are in the nut house from religious crazies than from any other cause.

From November 1969 until fall 1971 was basically hell for me. I came very close to killing myself during this time. A few genuinely spiritual people saved me from death. But I would not call any of them religious. Balanced spiritual people are the salt of the earth and religious fanatics of all persuasions are to be avoided because if you listen to them they will destroy your life or you will kill yourself because of their infectious religious insanities. Obviously, I survived it all and am hopefully a better person for it. Survival for me is the capacity to say in my mind to someone. "NO! I'm going to go my own way even if I have to die trying. If you can't be true to yourself you don't really exist anyway. You are just a cultural or religious biological robot. When the going gets tough the tough get going!

Next Essay

The Terror of God, of Life and of Death

I was showering this morning and I got it very strong to talk to you about the terror in my life as a child. I suppose the beginning of my terror was birth. I was born into the land that had murdered my previous body. Though even in that body I had secretly loved America, the reality was that they had murdered me and that I had died a horrible death at age 12 or 13 and now I was being born in the U.S. I was being born in the U.S. precisely because they had killed me. My memory was of being about 12 when I died at Nagasaki. Though I remember lifetimes before this the trauma of that death affects me in this life through my bout with whooping cough and childhood epilepsy. It was my karma to be born to the American people that had caused my death. This is the real way karma works. I love being an American now as an adult. However, for a soul the conversion from being Japanese, dying by nuke and then being born to those responsible was difficult emotionally for my soul to endure.

My first physical terror that I had to face other than birth itself was whooping cough. My parents religion didn't believe in vaccinations so I never received any until I was 15 and that was a tetanus shot for a dog bite. They always signed a religious waiver so I never had to have shots at school for anything. As an adult I realized that I had developed what is known as herd immunity. I was exposed to so many adults and children that had gotten shots that I became immune to everything as well. However, I wasn't immune to whooping cough and would turn blue often at age two the 6 months I had it when I couldn't get my breath and I almost died from suffocation many times.

When I look back upon that time I believe that I was too positive and demanding for my parents and I got whooping cough in order to be put into a more fearful obedient form that both they and the world could cope with. Though I survived whooping cough I became very fearful and shy because of my near death experience. It was as if the world was not ready for me and that I was forced to pretend I was someone else. So that is what I did. I tried to act how my parents and others wanted me to and became very passive aggressive. But I survived!

I remember being 8 years old and walking home with a friend from grade school in Glendale California. He told me how awful his life was. His father had beat him and left his mother and he alone. They had no money and barely had enough food to eat. I told him my life was okay and that I had a father, a mother, a grandmother, a bicycle and that we had a car. At which point he started beating me up. I felt sorry for him so I didn't hurt him back and only fended off the blows. He was sitting on my chest trying to hit my face when my father drove up and he ran away crying. I felt very strange. I was embarrassed to have my father see this boy on my chest trying to hurt me but I also felt very sorry for my very confused friend. My father asked me why I didn't hurt him or stop him and I said I felt sorry for him. I was always very big for my age so kids my age normally knew better than to pick fights with someone as big as me.

When I was about 9 I had heatstroke and for about and hour everything looked like a camera sees when you put on a yellow filter. The next year I was 10 and doing my newspaper route early one Sunday morning. I came home and went back to sleep at 6 am. A Black hand formed in my dreams and strangled me. Somehow this caused me to have my first epileptic seizure. During the next few years The Black hand eventually turned into an electrical tornado in my dreams that ripped off my dream head and arms and legs which caused me to go into a seizure. This continued about once every 6 months until I was 15. Since these seizures were much more terrifying than being stabbed or otherwise murdered I considered suicide during this period of my life. I became afraid of going to sleep because I thought I might not survive the next terrifying dream and seizure. At age 14 I had a particularly difficult experience with this. As I fought my way back into my body after experiencing dream dismemberment in a dream state I regained enough control of my body to try to run to my parents bedroom for help. Unfortunately, my bedroom door was ajar and I hit the end of the door with my nose and face and was knocked completely unconscious. My parents heard the loud bang and thud of my body hitting the floor unconscious and found me with a pool of blood surrounding my head on the floor from my broken nose. After an hour I awoke shaking. Since I couldn't stand yet I sat on the floor and leaned against the wall thinking and shaking from the trauma that I wouldn't survive another experience this bad.

I decided that I needed God in my life. Before this I was beginning to move toward agnosticism because of what I generally perceived to be the basic childishness and silliness of religion. However, there are no atheists in foxholes and I was definitely in a foxhole fighting for my life! Even as an agnostic I still used telepathy and other gifts. I saw no discontinuity in this as I saw telepathic gifts as a useful part of instinct and intuition common to all animals and people. I knew that all animals and people could develop their gifts if they found it necessary or useful in some way.

During the next year I fully lived the concept called Fear of God. In fact it went beyond fear to Terror of God. I went to church 3 times a week and learned to pray and invoke God in formal and informal ways. I had been attending church regularly for about 1 year when my next seizure tried to happen. However, this time I was ready. Instead of running as a soul in terror I faced the energy tornado of my dreams. Instead of letting it decapitate and dismember my dream body I said though terrified, " I AM in control here!" I was speaking powerfully as a co-creator with God in unison. Instead of being dismembered in my dream the energy tornado surrounded me and became my army of energy and light. I was still frightened like a King who is worried his army might turn on him but I felt a power that was and is amazing. It was a complete spirit rebirth for me. Instead of victim in my body I was empowered by God in my body.

Within 3 months my physical appearance completely changed and I was on my way to an entirely new kind of life than I had ever known before. There was still fear of God, and respect for God but now I was also empowered by God. During the next year I became fed up with people I met that spent all their lives terrified and cringing and moaning and living like Victims of God. I thought to myself, "Well maybe living like that is better than those people hurting or killing others but that isn't how I want to live." I thought to myself, "If I'm going to have to be a spiritual being to be allowed by God to live in a physical body on Earth then I'm going to have fun doing it! It was then I first coined the words 'Alchemy of Joy!' For when I had fun doing God's work it just expanded and expanded and expanded and became more and more fun.

My family always worshiped efficiency and logic. So I used this capacity to try to figure out how I could help the most humans the quickest and most efficient way possible. I have been playing that fun game now for 37 years since I was 15. I found that I could do more quietly than any other way. Some people like to be public but I found there was absolutely no resistance to God if one just acted in God given supernatural ways. This reminds me of an old saying. "Be careful how you treat others for you might meet angels unawares". In other words, "You don't know necessarily if you meet angels unless they tell you." Even then you might not believe them. So my theory is that most angels don't say a word about who they are.

Throughout my late teens and early 20's I found myself fighting supernatural battles out of body with my sword of light in hand like my friend Archangel Michael.

In 1980 I learned a new way. This way took away my fear. I met a Tibetan Lama and then many Lamas and Monks of the Tibetan Buddhist Lineages in California, Oregon, and in 1985-6 in India and Nepal.

This new way was much more efficient. The easiest way I can explain it is to not think of things as good or bad but to look at everything in life like one does the weather. Is rain good or bad? It is both and neither. Is Snow Good or bad. It is both and neither. I loved a bumper sticker I saw recently. It said, 'Rain Happens!' as opposed to 'Magic happens' or 'Shit happens.' In addition to 'Rain Happens!' I would like to see bumper stickers of Snow happens Or Life happens , or even Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

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