About Me
It's Not About Me, but
I’ll tell you a bit about myself. Some of you will find things in my past that you will relate to and some may well find nothing relatable. Oh well.
I’ll try to tell an abbreviated story of my internal life from my earliest memories up until I had my internal senses re-opened for good at age 21.
I was born and raised in the Washington, DC area. My father was an artisan and my mother kept books. They were non-religious and a bit different, and we lived a lower-middle-class lifestyle amongst mostly Protestants, and Catholics, but I had much healthy contact with the upper-middle-class kids who lived nearby.
Overwhelmingly white, there was a healthy smattering of Jews in the neighborhood, but I did not meet anyone I knew to be Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or Sikh, or Sufi until I went away to college. I have a younger brother, but we’ve had very little contact for more than 30 years.
My brother and I attended excellent public schools and I excelled in academics from Kindergarten. I was athletic and big for my age until I was fifteen (where it seemed I got a lot smaller or everyone else got a lot bigger), and was a solid competitive swimmer from 8 to 18.
Between ages 3 and 10, I remember three different experiences that dominated my internal life.
First, I often and over many years dreamed that I could fly based on many experiences. Once, around the age of six, after trying hard to fly using the same technique I "used" in my dreams for about 15 minutes, I ran into my mother and demanded, anger mixed with sadness, “Mom, I can’t fly anymore!” It took some convincing for me to accept that I never did fly . . . at least in this particular universe, external to my physical form.
Second, purely out of pleasure, I found, through serendipity or natural human experience, how to open my own inner senses of seeing and hearing, and I went in that direction many mornings and evenings for a few minutes in my bed most days and nights. I realized decades ago, that this may be more common in 3 - 6-year-olds than is generally realized by adults.
Third, I had many similar dreams between the ages of 5 and 10 where I was outside at night and I saw flashing lights, sometimes colored sometimes just bright lights, chasing each other in the sky. It looked like what I imagined then and now to be either fights or chases or small spaceships leaving and returning to a large “mother ship.” For at least several years, even as late as age eleven or twelve, I assumed everyone else had seen these phenomena because it was so regular and obvious to me from my experiences. At the time, and I could still be confused about this, it was not at all clear to me that these were dreams. I am NOT referring in any way to so-called "alien abduction," I'm saying that I either dreamed or was outside and saw unidentified flying objects in the sky.
From fourth grade, besides Marvel and DC Comics, I read extensively about Greek and Roman myths, Norse legends, Knights of the Round Table, financial and investment books, and comparative religions. I became deeply religious between the age of 11 and 14, an agnostic from 15-18, and pretty much an atheist by 19.
High school found me excelling in forensics and student government. I had 4 or 5 great friends and a large group I was friendly with, with very few enemies. I was voted “most likely to succeed” by my classmates. After wanting to be a physician, then a metallurgist, I entered college on financial aid (a prestigious US university) wanting to be a lawyer (the forensics training, I suppose).
I met three remarkable teachers in high school.
The first was a 10th-grade English teacher who had been a beatnik. He introduced me to existentialism thru readings in Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus and this led me later directly to Hesse, and books like “Be Here Now” and “Autobiography of a Yogi.”
The second was my 10th and 11th grade Math teacher, a black man of impeccable respect and respectfulness. He insisted we call him Mr. and he called EVERY student Mr. ____ or Ms. _____. But it was so much more. No one feared him (my school was 97% + white), but everyone feared disappointing him or losing his respect or love. Though my parents were not racist for their time, he taught me, by his actions, character, and being, that races differ only in skin color. Cultural and historical differences and preferences? ok . . . but essentially, at the level of the internal, everlasting, infinite - Only the surface differences of skin color, hair, facial features, etc., signifying nothing.
The third was my 11th-grade English teacher, a gay man who never made any effort to cover his flamboyance (forgive the cliche), but never mentioned or referenced his preference. While I could not understand his sexuality, I came to know him through class and student plays that he directed, as an extraordinary caring, and hilariously humorous human being and my life and understanding changed thereafter.
In college, I started using hash, then marijuana, and later psilocybin, MDA, and LSD. I used them almost entirely for internal, spiritual exploration, and I saw clearly that our normal everyday awareness is just one channel of a seemingly infinite number of channels. I also realized that one can never judge the usefulness or harm to others from drugs, so I do not proselytize for them. If you tempt someone into deep waters, you may find you’ve pushed a person who cannot swim. Not a good idea.
At age 20 I had an internal experience that convinced me god, or ultimate consciousness or infinite love or the source of all energy was to be found within and not outside the human form. I also knew that I did NOT (with all my reading, thinking, feeling, and seeking everywhere) possess the knowledge of how to get to that source myself.
At age 21 I came face to face with someone (a real living person) who could show me that technology and knowledge of how to approach the source within myself; I asked them to show me, with as simple a desire and heart as I could muster. They showed me and returned me to 4 "tunings" (my best approximation of an accurate description) through the inner senses, 2 of which, as mentioned above, I practiced when I was a young child, and my life was forever changed. I had access to the internal, eternal, and infinite.
After 44 years of practice, I realized the end destination of meditation. Two years later, I knew what I had to do related to that experience. There is NO rule anywhere that says you must spend even a fraction of that time.
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