My Story

Chapter 1: The Setup

Hell starts early. It is something we are taught how to get ourselves into as children. I can see that it started with my beliefs, concepts and ways of thinking that created boxes in my mind. I had to know everything and fit everything in a nice, neat box. The boxes became walls that started to close in on me until the walls become my prison.

At the time it seemed simple enough for are we all not taught to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. Yet this idea of right and wrong, good and evil was like a germ that infected my mind, body and soul. It was like the leavening that Jesus talked about. The more I saw things as evil the more the boxes would close in on me. The stronger my belief in the righteousness of my belief the stronger the walls of the box or prison became.

This is the story of my search for a better understanding of life, my awaking and what wisdom I gained that I can offer humanity.

My childhood seemed boring to me. There were no great dramas or conflicts. I do not want to bore anyone with the details but I do want to show how I was setup to believe certain things that eventually would lead to an experience of my life as living hell. I also feel there were certain events and situations that would motivate me to get completely free from the hell I got myself into.

I grew up in a lower middle class family in California. California seems different than most of the rest of the country. We like to be different out here. Maybe a little TOO different. In California there seems to be a culture of acceptance of differences. We are kind of given permission to discover who we really are. Although my impressionable years were in the 1950's which was a period of extreme conformity for America, Californian's were probably the least effected. I do remember often being taught that children are seen but not heard. This was an oppressive attitude that probably created a fear in me of speaking my truth. I was taught to 'stuff it' and keep it to myself. Stuffing it is not healthy for eventually we have to release that tension.

For my most impressionable years of 5 to 11 I lived at the beautiful mountain and resort town of Lake Tahoe. I can remember this time when life seemed so enchanted. It was just like a little fair world. Life was heavenly. I loved the mountains and seemed to expand into them. My older sister and I would go to the meadows and play with the horses. Or we would build rafts and float down the rivers. There was fishing adventures to the lake or we would find some sort of other adventure that would occupy us for the lazy days of summer. The winters where not that bad either for I learned how to ski and sled.

I was so much in love with the mountains that any problems that we had seems to melt away or I would just escape them by going into the mountains. I do remember problems in the family and in my life but they were mediated by my escapism in the mountains.

We went to a Presbyterian Church kind of regularly. Presbyterian's seem pretty benign and gentle group of people. They were not the hell fire and damnation type. We heard the sermons but I mostly daydreamed through them. The social aspect of church did add a lot to our life.

At around the age of six I had one of my most influential experiences. Like most kids I believed in my parents, teachers, the clergy and my government, but I was living in a make believe world.

One December day at a church Christmas potluck I was told that Santa was coming and I would get a chance to me him. I waited with great anticipation for Santa but was somewhat disappointed when my dad told me that he had to run an errand and would not be there to see Santa. Shortly after my dad left Santa came and I lined up with the rest of the kids to see him. When it was my turn I sat on his lap and started to tell him everything I wanted for Christmas. However, as I talked with him, I started to realize there was something familiar about him. Then I realized that this was not Santa Claus, it was my daddy.

I could not or would not comprehend what this meant to me at the time. My parents, my teachers, the clergy and society had conspired to lie to me about Santa Claus. It was these people that I trusted for my very survival and now, in my heart, I realized they were lying to me. My faith in family, school, church, government and society was questioned.

Why did they lie to me? What value did it have for them? I remember the song; "Santa is coming to town. He's making a list and checking it twice, going to find out who is naught or nice..." So you better be a good boy and do what your parents tell you to do. It was all to control and manipulate me. It was to enslave me to do the bidding of the authorities: my parent and teachers, the clergy and the government.

At such an early age it was too blasphemous to question the integrity of my parents, my religion or religious institutions or society as a whole, so I suppressed it into my unconscious, but the seeds of doubt had been planted. I was still to young and still needed my parents to question them. This was the beginning of the end of their tyranny over me, for I started to doubt and to question them.

I can see now that is the last thing any authority wants: to be questioned.

Later, when I became a mature and independent adult I could question their integrity and when I did I found it lacking. They were not worthy of my trust and faith. I could trust no one, not even my own mind which was "programmed" by them. I could not trust my beliefs because they were a product of the other people's beliefs and they had never questioned their beliefs, they just lied to themselves when they said it was true.

This was the beginning of a crisis of confidence and faith as I questioned society's ideas, beliefs and institutions. Over the years the ideas and beliefs would become my own. These beliefs had been created and passed on to me to comfort me, but they would not comfort me for I felt the deception in them.

I realize now what a gift the Santa Claus incident was for me. It was this incident started me to question authority. The willingness, courage and motivation to question authority only came from the pain I experienced of realizing that the authorities were not on my side all the time.

Because of this experience religion never got a grip on me. It was a systematic way of intimidating people at a very young age using idea and concepts to complex for their undeveloped minds.

I remember having two strong willed parents that would fight often. My mother was a intellectual match for my father, so she was not going to be dominated the way a good 1950's wife should be. So it was not a surprise to me that when I was eleven my parents separated and my mother took the four of us kids went off to the big city of Los Angles to live.

I would mark this as the end of my idealistic childhood and the beginning of the darkness that was to come over me for many years. The contrast of the beauty and serenity of the mountains with the dry, dirty, noisy and crowded city created a hardness in my heart.

I still remember the drive from my beautiful Lake Tahoe to LA. As we came down the Grapevine (on what is now Interstate 5) into the San Fernando Valley I saw a brown cloud floating above the city. I asked my mother what that cloud was and she said it was 'smog', which she explained was conjuncture of smoke and fog. The smog was ugly and hurt my lungs so I immediately did not like LA.

I remember thinking that if there were a button that if pushed would eliminate all human life off the planet, that I would jump on that button with both feet. Life became ugly from here on out for me.

Being a human riding in a car that was part of what made the smog I could not help but to begin to feel a sense of self hatred. My hatred or discontent with humanity grew from that time onward. I did not like people. I thought they were destructive to the planet, to the beauty that I had at Lake Tahoe. Eventually this manifested in my extreme hatred for America in my early thirties.

It was hard for my mother to support four kids by herself. The stress of this made her, most of the time, not very tolerant of the expressions of teenagers looking to come into their own. Discussions of any type were discouraged, for inevitably they would lead to conflict or arguments.

All my childhood I seemed to move a lot. By the time I was graduated from high school I had lived in twelve houses. I did not feel very attached to any place as home. Because of that I had a hard time developing friends. I became an outcast and socially inapt.

I quit trying to make friends after I did get into the 'in crowd' at one school just to be jerked out and put into another school because we moved a few blocks over the summer.

I became isolated from people. This created a deep sense of loneliness and resentment within me. The resentment was just another nail in my spiritual coffin that would take me deeper into my hell. Being so isolated from people while still among them created a strong sense of independence within me. I had to figure out a lot of life's lessons on my own. My social skills did not develop at the natural rate so I would be further ostracized and rejected by my peers for my awkwardness.

As a social outcast I did not develop social skills, I was not in groups, I did not have friends, I did not have the ability to interact with people. I remember my mother once telling me that I was a "lone wolf." Because I was an outcast anyway I was not susceptible to social pressure as most kids would be. Without the social pressure I grew up being more honest and less polite or politically correct. I started to look down on people for their cowardly conformity and lack of willingness to be honest in public situations.

Not needing to be a part of a social group I could develop at my own rate and not be held back by the need for conformity the group imposes upon its members. For example, in school when a student excels beyond the rest of the class and get straight As, the rest of the class starts to feel that the excelled student is different and rejects them. So to be accepted by their peers the smarter student 'dumbs' themselves down and denies their intelligence. My 'intelligence' was not academic in nature but still inquisitive.

The people who find great new truths or discover great new technologies are not the ones who conform to what society wants. They are the ones who break away from the pack and go their own way. Jesus went off from society and found his own way, not conforming to the expectations of family and society. When his family came to him and tried to get him to come back into the fold he rejected them and said that his real family was those who did the will of his Father in Heaven. Jesus even encouraged people to leave their families and go their own way (or the way that Jesus went, which was not the way of conformity).

The whole time in LA I felt very isolated from people. Since I rejected their city the city people rejected me. All I could see was the filth and pollution of the city. I found nothing of interest to me. I saw the stress that people lived under in the big city. This was the beginning of my disenchantment with humanity. I started to see life as ugly. I started to fear the ugliness. I started to hate that which I saw as ugly. I was moving into the darkness.

As I look back now I realize I was reacting to what life was offering in such a way as to experience negativity. I was giving my power away to the events of my life. I did not know how to NOT give my power away.

My father became no father. It was not his fault, he was an asshole. He was born that way. At least that is how my mother saw it. So she pickup up all of us four kids and moved us to beautiful Los Angles the land of movie stars and smog.

After that I had no father for all practical purposes.

At that time I felt a great lose in not having a father, but years later I realized that losing my father at this time was really a great advantage to me. I read that Jesus lost his dad at around 12 years of age. I have since looked for and found an advantage to losing my father at such a young age, but I did not see it then. I only felt the hole in my heart.

I also lost my mother. She was working so much to support herself and four kid that we never saw her. And when she was around I remember her being exhausted from overwork, so much that she was too tired, stressed or angry.

I really did not need my mother after the age of five or so. Her continued presents in my life would only have been as an enabler had I spent much time with her. My mother would have tried to help me with my challenges and thus enabled me to stay undeveloped in those areas. I learned a lot of good lessons by not having somebody to protect me from the truth.

I did not need my father after the age of 12 or so. His continued presents would have only acted as an authoritarian oppressor, to lord over me and to oppress my young and impressionable mind. My father would have oppressed my explorations and hence denied me the opportunity to fail and learn the lessons from that failure.

There are advantages to losing your parents at this early age. I had the freedom of having my physical needs taken care of but still being free to pretty much raised my self.

I realize now that this was a real blessing, a real gift. I had the freedom to become who I want to be instead of what my parents perceived I should be. I could become the person I was meant to be without the influence of parents. I could become a free spirit.

As an unruly adolescent I had to learn to fend for myself and to take care of myself. This fostered a sense of independence (hence the name Freedom). I had to figure out a lot of things myself. This required me to develop my abilities of problem solving and discernment that have served me very well. These skills also enabled me to not get caught up in needing social approval and the need to join groups for social acceptance. I think this is what caused me to not join religious or spiritual groups and get caught up in their rigid social constraints.

When I mother became financially and emotionally responsible for herself and four kids there was a lot of pressure on her. Her first job she was only paid $325 a month and that had to house and feed four kids and herself. Even though this was the early 1960's that still was not enough. There were times that my mother did not call us to dinner because she did not have anything for us to eat. I can see this weighed heavily on her.

With this heavy burden I could see that she felt very stressed and the stress made her very reactive to what normally would have a challenge of managing four kids and a house. So she responded by getting angry. She would scream a lot.

I felt oppressed by my mother's anger. I became very sensitive to her words in trying to read how she was feeling. I guess I could now say that I became over sensitive to words. I was afraid of people who got angry. I carried this fear for many years.

My mother never hit me. But she "hit" herself with her anger. Anger is very abusive to oneself. Even as a kid I knew this. Since I cared for my mother I did not want to she her hurting so much. To deal with this I became timid around her and around everybody. I did not want to upset things and cause her to get angry.

This is not to say that my mother was a bad mother, she was just overly challenged. She did not have the coping skills to deal with the stress of taking care of four children and herself alone.

My mother gave me a great example of love, which was a deep and profound experience in my life. When I was pretty young, probably about seven, I got the measles alone with my sisters (my brother was not yet born.) My younger sister and I got over them in the normal amount of time but my older sister did not. My mother was worried about this because she had heard that measles, if they last too long, can do permanent damage or even kill. So my mother called the doctor who told her to induce the spots on the skin to eruption. To do this he said she should draw a hot bath that was just less than scalding. He said this would be very uncomfortable for my sister but that my mother would have to hold her in the water until the spots erupted.

I can still remember how my sister screamed and cursed my mother for doing this. My mother had tears in her eyes but also knew that if she did not do this then my sister could die. My sister could not understand this. The spots erupted and my sister got better. But I can see that my sister always held that experience against my mother and still does not have much of a relationship with her mother.

I can see that this act was loving even when those you are loving can not understand how you are loving them. This is unconditional love for it was not conditional upon a return of appreciation or love.

This is one of the greatest gifts that my mother could have or did give me.

Another gift my mother gave me was a quote, I think it was from Voltaire, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death for you to have the right to say it." My mother may not have been able to live up to that quote in her challenged and stressed life, but I was inspired to wanted to life up to the sentiment.

As a child I was told that children are to be seen and not heard. I have always been told to shut up, keep quiet, do not speak unless spoken to. I have always been discouraged from being honest and encouraged to keep things to myself. I was taught that in polite company we do not talk about almost anything, particularly religion and politics. In polite company we do not talk about what we are feeling. I was taught to stuff it, to hide it from others and even from myself. I was taught to believe and obey, to be a good child, a good student and a good citizen. If I just believed and obeyed then everything would be find. I was taught to fear being honest or the honesty of others.

Being intimidated by my mother's anger, my reaction was to hide or avoid her. Whenever my mother gave me any attention she was usually angry.

Although physically I was not abused as a child, my mothers anger and screaming lead me to abuse myself. I loved my mother and did not want to she her hurting. So when she got angry and started screaming I could feel she was hurting, yet there was little to nothing that I could do about it. I had no choice but to withdrawal.

So I learned to avoid attention for fear of getting into trouble. My stomach would tighten up whenever people would look at me or I got attention in the class at school. I never volunteered to answer a question.

I can see now that I was being conditioned to react to words in such a way as to abuse myself. I was being programmed so that people could control me with their words. As a kid I could not see this. I could not even see this as an adult until I went looking for it in my forties. I now can see that all of my problems were just a product of my conditioned reaction to words, language, concepts and ideas. Or, to put it more simply, all my problems were just a product of my reactions. I was uptight and reactive. I did not know how to relax and not react. I feared my reactions to people's reactions to me. I did not do anything that I thought might cause them to react to me.

This is being shy. This is being a coward. This is withdrawing from life.

I was particularly afraid of females or maybe just had little interest in them because I lived with an angry mother and two sisters. I was around women a lot but did not date until I was twenty two. That means I went through all of high school and the army without a single date.

I was trapped in the cage of my fears and knew of no way out. I felt condemned to being a coward. It was safer to be alone. I became a loner.

Words of rejection are the hardest to take. I guess that we all experience the pains of rejection. So did I. I can now see that I rejected others out of fear. I rejected almost everybody and almost everybody rejected me. If I was afraid of them they would be afraid of me. I was lonely because I was afraid of people. I would push them away with my words or my attitude. I was stuck in my loneliness because I did not know how to not reject people.

I had been taught to fear myself and I guess I was a good student. If I was afraid of myself it means I did not like myself. And that was part of my hell. I was trapped in the presents of somebody with whom I was afraid. I could never get away from my fear.

I can see how this caused me to be very conservative. One day in high school there was a debate about whether long hair should be allowed on boys. I had short hair and sided with the conservatives that that long hair was wrong.

I was a coward and did not know how not to be, so I was trapped in my cowardly conservative state. I did not even know that there was a option to be free from cowardliness.

Being timid I was very lonely. I had very few friends. After we moved to LA I had even less. I did not fit in.

Therefore, I would spend a lot of time alone. In that time I would get into feeling sorry for myself. I felt some comfort in this for the feeling itself was comforting. I could only feel sorry for myself if I cared about myself. (Now I can see that caring is a aspect of love so I was beginning the process of developing the skill of loving myself.)

At times I would imagine situations where I would be rejected by everyone and would end up dying in some dramatic way. Then, I imagined, everybody would feel sorry for me too. Then they would miss me.

As a loner it allowed me time to think about things that I would otherwise not have the time to think about. I did a lot of thinking or day dreaming. I can see now that this type of thinking was not structured or focused so it is part of what got me so far into my hell later on. I would imagine all sorts of things that were not based in reality.

Being an outcast I felt no social pressure to conform and be accepted. I did not feel the pressure that other kids did to try the last 'thing'. This included drugs, which were very prevalent in my high school. I never tried drugs, even as of today. I have never even had a joint, the big thing back in high school and college. I just never had an interest. I could see the down side of drugs for they became a crutch and limited the user. Drugs seem to blind people and weaken their resolve or ability to think for yourself.

I may have used aspirin on occasion when my pain was too much but I still do not like any kind of drugs, including pharmaceuticals. I had no interest because I wanted the truth, I wanted reality. Drugs alter the truth and hide reality from us. It is reality that sets us free, not drugs. Therefore, I try to discourage people from using drugs, even pharmaceutical drugs, for they hide the truth from us. I encourage people to tune into their bodies and find out what they need, not cover it up with drugs.

If I had not been an outcast I probably would have wanted to conform. I would have wanted to be accepted by my peers so I would have tried drugs.

It was not until my late teens when I started to think independently and began to question all authorities. I remember getting in trouble with my teachers because I would question what they taught. In church I was a trouble maker, for I questioned the Sunday school teachers beyond were they could answer. This showed me they were people who did not know what they were talking about. They wanted me to believe them just because they said I should.

I realized early that I could not believe in the God of my family's tradition. My experience with Santa Claus had created a lot of doubt in my mind about the "family's tradition." I realized that I could not know it there was a God or not. It did not make sense to me to believe either that God existed or that God did not exist. So I called myself an agnostic.

Years later, when I started seeking, I realized that being an agnostic was the only rational, intelligent and open minded perspective a person could take. The theist and the atheist are both believers in what they want to be true and not what is true. They live in make believe worlds. Their desire for there to be a God or no God deluded them. But my perspective left me open to experiencing the truth. I did not want to lie to myself. I wanted to stay open minded.

I can not see why others can not be honest about it too. Why do we have to lie to ourselves and believe that there either is or is not a God? I guess it is because we are so emotionally immature that we let our emotions dictate to us what we will think.

This does not mean that I was not a believer. I was a believer. I believed in anything that supported my dark view of humanity. Because of my loneliness I had an ugly perspective on life and found philosophies to support that perspective. I would believe the worst possible reality. If I believed something was bad I would go out and prove it to myself. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so is ugliness. My eyes were very ugly. I saw almost everything as ugly, so I had an ugly life experience.

I would see people as stupid or bad then act towards them that way and they would respond in kind towards me. I was a walking self fulfilling prophecy. I was also a walking hypocrite. I thought believers were idiots but I was also a believer. My religion was within me and it was dark. I did not need to go to church to find stupidity, I had enough for myself.

I could see that Christians seriously missed something. Their hypocrisy was so blatant that it was nauseating. Their Christ was a pretty good guy but his followers seemed to totally missed what he was about. The Christians had not found God nor had they entered the Kingdom of Heaven. They were the blind leading the blind and I did not want to follow them into their dark pit.

In my teenage years I had tried many different churches, but they were all the same thing. I even tried a Jewish synagogue, but that did not interest me either. Back in the 1960's there was not many other options beyond Christianity or Judaism. I did not know of anyone who was actually finding something. At most, they only talked about the possibility of finding something.

At best religion seemed only like a social club. People would go to church to be around people and enjoy one another. Since I was an outcast I would not be accepted. I had taken the Sunday school teachings seriously and had actually questioned them. this was not acceptable. Sunday school was not like regular school, you were not suppose to understand the material, you were suppose to accept and believe it.

I seemed to know this intuitively by this early age. Therefore, I rejected their religion and avoided Christians until I was almost thirty-five.

I knew instinctively that Jesus had something to offer me, but his followers did not. I knew that sooner or later I would have to face Jesus. But now was not the time. I was not ready and able to cut through the crap to get and the truth.

When I lived at Lake Tahoe my older sister and I were very close. We spent a lot of time together and I really looked up to her. I felt a very strong bond with my older sister. She had been my best buddy.

I feel that I had a lousy education. When I left high school I was in at least the top one third of my class, yet I felt I was a functional illiterate. Maybe I was not as uneducated as I felt but I did not have confidence in my intellectual or academic abilities. I was never trained in critical thinking. I was gullible enough to believe in a lot of childish things.

It is proof of the failure of our education system that students like me had never been encouraged to develop the ability to discern between what is real and unreal. We were trained to be good producers, consumers and obedient citizens. We were not trained to question authorities. We were no better than the Hitler Youth we heard about in Nazi Germany. We were taught to believe and obey.

I never remember any classes on such basic life skills as managing a check book or managing my emotions. I would guess that my emotional intelligence (EQ) was around 15 where my IQ was well over 100. I was not at all equipped to manage life emotionally. Being emotionally uneducated I was susceptible to just about any kind of confidence game. I would have voted for whoever I was told to vote for.

I was the kind of citizen that would have made a good Nazi. Salute the leader and do what I was told.