Memoir:  Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin—-To Be Born In 1955, To Be Reborn In The Now

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”
Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa Henry!
You started me on many life-affirming paths.
You inspired me with the presence of your Lord, and you spared me the questionable religion.
You got me started watching Days Of Our Lives in 1967.
You always believed in me, no matter what.
I still carry your love with me.

Memoir: Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin

Suicide is a deeply troubling issue, and recognizing the signs of suicide ideation is paramount in providing support. By promoting mental health resources and helplines, we can only hope those in crisis can access the help they need. Often, the stories of the suffering remain buried under mountains of cultural and personal denial and the incapacity, or unwillingness, of sufferers to create a unique narrative around their brokenness and wounding and to seek any necessary additional help. Sharing stories of survival and resilience instills hope and reminds us of the importance of compassion and understanding in helping someone through their darkest moments.

I present my story of survival, transformation, resilience, and a unique search for truth.

Buckle your seat belts; the road will be bumpy for a while.

The Early Years

What is in a name, anyway?

My name had links to family members through my mother’s and father’s lineage, thus the two middle names, Oliver and Scott. The English language name Bruce arrived in Scotland with the Normans, from the place-name Brix, Manche in Normandy, France, meaning “the willowlands” or “brushwood thicket.” The name Bruce came to mean “from out of the brushwood thicket” to some. Initially promulgated via the descendants of King Robert the Bruce (1274−1329), it has been a Scottish surname since medieval times. The name Oliver has English origins. In English, the meaning of the name Oliver is the olive tree. The biblical olive tree symbolizes fruitfulness, beauty, and dignity. ‘Extending an olive branch’ signifies an offer of peace. The name Scott is from an English and Scottish surname, which refers to a person from Scotland or who speaks Scottish Gaelic. It also refers to a geographic description designating one from Scotland, The earlier race of 2nd-century invaders from Ireland called Scoti; Blue Men B One who colors the body blue with tattoos; Another meaning is “one not from here.”. Paullin in Latin has the meaning: small, and also of the lineage of Paul (of the New Testament). “From out of the brushwood thicket, an offering of peace, from a man not from here, tattooed by life, with a small, or humbled status, of the lineage of the mystic, Saint Paul.”

I was born at a northwest Portland hospital in November of 1955. There were nearly two feet of snow on the ground on the day of my birth. My mother had to take a taxi to the hospital because my father was at work at the time of my birth. My father’s employment helped to characterize much of my early years and my relationship with my father. My needs as a baby and a young boy were often trumped by Dad’s compulsion to work constantly and hard. He carried two jobs for many years, and home affairs were arranged to guarantee that Dad could continue that endeavor. Since I was a crying baby, and my cries kept my dad awake, I was wrapped in a blanket and stored in the car in our garage at night until he went to work at 2:15 every morning. Mom would retrieve me and then try to make things OK with me until her work preparation began, and then Pam and I would be passed on to a babysitter for the day for our first five years of life.

My sister preceded me in the primary family by sixteen months. I will only briefly reference my sister, Pam, not because I am trying to be disrespectful or unloving towards her. She was with me through the formative years, and she experienced at a soul level much of the same dysfunctional energies that I did. Yet, my sister became my competitor for the attention from the parents once my childhood sense “figured out” that only limited servings of family love and attention were available.

Before I learned to talk, my sister thought I was the best at about four years of age. She seemed to enjoy playing with me until I learned how to talk, then her attachment to me lessened, which probably coincided with her increased sociability with other girls her age.  I developed verbal abilities relatively late in my childhood. My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or inclination, to speak. My mother took me to several medical professionals to try to determine why I was not talking, though I do not know what was determined by the tests. Once I started talking, I proved I had the capacity for speech and A LOT OF IT. My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up.

One of my early memories from age four with Pam is that she would be by my side while I played with my favorite “doll,” Percy. Percy would talk to me sometimes, reminding me that I was loved, much like other special children have reported hearing God’s voice affirming God’s love for them and their spiritual significance. One day, I picked up the phone and started talking to Percy. I swore that Percy talked back to me while Pam stood next to me. I had Pam even believing me for a little while. In retrospect, it may have been the operator or purely my imagination.

Hopefully, God isn’t just a projection out of our imagination; each human being must determine the truth for themselves

My Uncle Worth died in February of 1955, 9 months in advance of my birth. His photo is included below. He was married to his wonderful wife, Aunt Effie, who also died before I had any awareness (when I was less than a year old). My grandparents dearly loved their Uncle Worth and Aunt Effie. My mother and Uncle Wayne also adored their great aunt and great Uncle.

When I was four years old, my grandfather Henry showed me the chair in the pictures below. which I immediately recognized and claimed as my own. I remembered making every piece of it by myself and assembling it together. In the “memory,” like a YouTube video, I had fashioned little wood dowel extensions from several pieces of wood to place into pre-drilled holes in already cut chair pieces to serve as nail equivalents.

How could I have possibly done that as a 4-year-old?

Of course, my mother guffawed and stated that it was a store-bought chair my grandfather had owned since he was young. I “knew better,” and to this day, the memory of the chair and its continued presence in our home both haunts and comforts me. As an adult, I learned that Uncle Worth was the original owner and builder of the chair and that he passed it down to Grandpa when he was a little boy. I still sit in the chair occasionally, and I feel a mysterious, beautiful peace and a sense of completion when I sit in the chair. Either soul-sharing and reincarnation are real, or, as a child, I possessed the occult gift of psychometry.

Looking at my history, I remain firmly seated in Life’s Mystery.

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The intersection of family history and  my birth in November of 1955 has created some interesting, and, at times, amazing stories for me.

Getting back to my sister, throughout the years, Pam appeared to channel some of my father’s negative energy back to me, becoming another voice for my father, especially when she became angry or unhappy with me. Also, the poor girl had to share a bedroom with me for my first two or three years, which did not bring her the greatest joy.

As a child, I learned that my world could be an unsafe place, especially while I slept. I remember lying awake at least until midnight most nights, fearing sleep and its dreams until I fell asleep out of exhaustion, even if bedtime was at 8:00 pm. I remember using that extra time to rehash my entire day and everything I said and did. I would see where I could have behaved better or differently for a greater advantage. I intuited that if I were a “better person” by day, my nightmares at night might not be so severe. Yet, my daily behavior rarely improved, for I was spontaneous and tended to impulsive activity.

I had terrifying nightmares almost every night until I was eight years old. I would be so afraid that I would stay in my bed and pee in it quite frequently, which presented some problems over those early years. Mother removed me from the top bunk of a bunk bed that my sister and I shared because of a couple of yellow “waterfalls,” which led to us having separate bedrooms by age 4. After I started sleeping by myself, my mother allowed me into her bedroom at night after my typical nightly nightmare terror sessions, as long as Dad had already left for work. I remember how protected from my demons, I felt as I lay in bed with her. I also know, now, that I unconsciously sought out women, MUCH MORE THAN MEN, to bond with, with the hopes that the relationship would bring a measure of safety and acknowledgment into my life, which seemed to be quite lacking in too many of my male to male connections. These forces formed an unconscious personality center, yet another locus of energy, in addition to other energy centers, such as the fear of being ignored, which directly influenced most of my future perceptions.

My sister and I fought frequently through the childhood years, and more than twenty times, we got into wrestling matches and knock-out, drag-out fights. Our last memorable fight gathered attention from the neighbors when we were teenagers when Pam was fourteen and I was twelve. There was lots of screaming, yelling, and cussing, with the occasional body slam and slap to the side of the head. No one was ever injured, other than any onlookers’ sensibilities. Pam and I were brilliant youngsters, yet we were both pretty messed up in our heads.

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Pam and Bruce in front of Grandparents home, 1956

Dad, Pam and Bruce at Rooster Rock Park on the Columbia River in 1957

I have memories of waking up from sleep and, with my sister, walking over to the garage window and crawling onto my rocking horse to look out of the window to the garage to see if our parents’ car was present. We were distressed by the parents’ absence if their vehicle was missing. To this day, we both agree that this event did happen and that it happened several times.

My famous rocking horse, which my great-grandfather had given to me.  My beloved  Uncle Wayne is overseeing the rider.

I started 1st grade at 5, taking an advanced entry exam to qualify me to start earlier. My mother arranged this because I was so unhappy with the babysitters that my parents had arranged to care for me. One sitter, named Jo Stanley, was an unloving presence who also had an abusive teenage son who terrorized me and threatened me with sexual assault on one occasion. I had several other decent babysitters from ages 0-5, but the Stanleys were my living hell experience. My mother especially wanted to help me, so she arranged advanced entry into the 1st grade. This action caused great stress to my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Tozier, who had difficulty accepting me and my “immature” behavior. To quote her from my first-grade report card: “Bruce’s main problem is talking to others and himself. Some of his behavior problems have disappeared, however, and he is working hard”.

One of our first daily activities in grade school was to perform the “show and tell” ritual. Students would bring objects of interest to tell stories about or relate their experiences with new or fun activities away from school. Each student would get in front of the class and have a few minutes to present. I would go up every day, whether or not I had anything new to show off or talk about. I wanted to be the person who had something to say and get positive feedback about it. After a couple of weeks of standing in front of the class, shell-shocked and silent, I was told to weigh and measure my words better, which was not part of my toolkit at that age.

The need to be recognized and heard, the fear of public speaking, and the appearance of suffering and death originated at different points in my life but became part of one big family in my mind as time went on. In the third grade, Mrs. Tozier had me again, and her final statement about me was the following: “Bruce is a careful worker and wants very much to do his work correctly. It has been interesting and rewarding to watch him develop this year. His main problems are social ones”. I spent a lot of time under the dunce’s cap in the back corner of the room. Mr. Hill, the school principal, and Mrs Tozier required that I take medicine for my hyperactivity to continue to be allowed in her class. My mother and my doctor conspired together, and the doctor prescribed me sugar pills, placing them in a methedrine-labeled prescription bottle. The “prescription” was given to Mrs. Tozier, who made sure that I took the fake pills daily. I miraculously improved, though Mrs Tozier’s perceptions of me were enhanced by taking the placebo!

Third grade photograph, Bruce back row, third from right

I had fantasies about friends, of which I had so few or none in the early years. One fantasy with remarkable staying power was that people would become attracted to me if I miraculously saved them. Otherwise, people would be uninterested in befriending or loving me. We lived in an area devoid of children my age and sex before 1965. I grew up isolated from friendship until we moved to a new neighborhood, which was much more mature and had more options for childhood friendships.

There were many moments in the earlier reaches of childhood when I loved my life. What I remember well from my childhood is My love for my mother, my Uncle Wayne, and my maternal grandparents (who provided for me a safe, loving home to stay with them at least one weekend a month for most of my childhood), My conflicted love for my father, My love for our pets My passion for exploring Nature and the great outdoors, My passion for playing with and studying animals, My love for running through the forests on trails, or creating trails, My passion for building ground forts out of fallen branches, My love for climbing trees and making tree forts, My passion for exploring islands on the Willamette River near our home, and, My love for playing with friends, which were especially hard for me to find, or to make while I was young.

Sometimes, I felt uncomfortable around people my age, especially the boys. I did not always enjoy playing with the boys, who could be too aggressive. In first through fourth grades, I usually hung out with the girls and played kickball and other non-contact or reduced-violence games with them. I would become quite attached to one or two girls, and I was already trying to figure out how to incorporate a girl into my life prematurely. I preferred girls to boys, becoming overly attached to girls when I was as young as eight years old. The girls, by and large, totally lost interest in me by 5th grade, so I had to stick solely with the guys for most of my childhood from that point forward until I was fifteen years old.

I usually liked my father, but I was often angry with him. Dad was often my only friend, and I felt betrayed by him whenever he over-enthusiastically punished me for doing something wrong. Whether I admitted it or not, I was always guilty of doing something wrong. If I did not admit it, I was lying, which could lead to yet another swat. As the Course in Miracles has stated, these were unrecognized calls for love by both of us. The day after the Columbus Day storm of 1962, when tree branches and fallen trees were everywhere, including our large backyard, my dad was so controlling as to how I was supposed to pick up the branches that I got angry with him, abandoned him, and walked a mile to help Steve Roth (son of owner of Roth BMW) and his family clear the wreckage around their home. I liked Steve’s mom, anyway, as she was always so friendly to me. They were comparatively wealthy, and I remember being told by Steve’s mother that my father was not wealthy like they were. For the first time, I became aware that families existed who were better off than we were.

I sometimes stole from my father’s wallet to go to the store and buy candy. I did all sorts of things I knew to be wrong, yet I took some delight in going against authority, and boy, did I pay the price! There were too many beatings with the belt. I committed most of the behavior Dad accused me of, so I deserved what I got, though mercy sure would have been a nice charitable gesture had he offered it to me or my sister. Looking back at my childhood, I was confused as to the best way to attract attention, and it may have been a subconscious desire to be recognized that motivated me to’ go against the grain’.

I was taken to Sunday school at a local church when I was six. I did not like it very much, and I did not nor could not believe that Jesus Christ “died for our sins .”I knew that I was not a “sinner,” at least not the way that they were trying to explain it to me, and that the language of this church was very harsh and confusing. When they told me that my only hope was to believe all of their vague, boring stories, I balked, and in my own unique passive/aggressive fashion, I just ignored what they tried to teach me. These Sunday School experiences showed me that the church was promoting many confusing stories with little relevance to my experience. I tried bible study only two more times in our new Milwaukie neighborhood but stopped when a girl I was interested in stopped attending. Women were the best reason for going to church. For me, that would prove to be accurate at least two more times, at times beginning when I was twenty-eight years old.

My father loved dogs and always tried to have a dog available for our friendship. He instilled in me a great love and appreciation for the canine species, which I still hold tightly. I loved my first dog, Nina, who died while running with me while riding my bicycle along a busy road while I was 7 years old, having been hit by a car (my fault for riding too far from home). I, of course, was devastated, and my dad and mom knew better than to make me wrong for her death, but I knew it was my fault anyway. Our “replacement” dog was promptly run over by our next-door neighbor when he got into his truck and backed over our sleeping dog. Heidi was our third dog, and she was a beautiful Samoyed. She became, without a doubt, the most wonderful creature I had ever met up until that era. I began to recognize the miraculous power that the ‘love’ for another being has on me. She became the ultimate canine companion for me, as well as for our entire family.

Heidi as a three year old

My father started disliking cats, even though he had grown up with a house full of cats. He even shot at the occasional stray cats he encountered on his property to protect his “wildlife.” I remember capturing a cat during that era and placing it into a burlap sack so that I could terrorize it. For a brief moment, I felt some strange excitement at the potential for abusing this innocent creature. After leaving it hanging on a tree limb in the burlap sack for an hour, I felt horrible and released it. I wondered then WHY WOULD I EVER WANT TO HURT ANY CREATURE? My experience with a BB gun reaffirmed that understanding when somehow a shot of mine hit and mortally wounded a bird. I was horrified by the creature’s suffering, and I suffered with it as I tried to put it out of its misery. My dad liked to tell the story of refusing to hunt with his father because he deplored killing, yet here he was, killing ‘innocent’ creatures, so it was indeed a mixed message for me. I was starting to question my behavior and its source, yet I was too ignorant to proceed on that reasoning too thoroughly.

In the early 1960’s my father felt uncomfortable with how the black race had integrated into the local culture. He would comment on co-workers who exhibited less conscientiousness than he did while at work, and he referred to at least one black person disparagingly. He would also offer pretty judgmental comments against the black race in general, especially when the LA Watts riots of 1964 happened. I could not share in his racism at the time, not knowing any black people or understanding what the basis for Dad’s prejudice was.

My father had a fixation on people’s appearance. He was SO JUDGEMENTAL of women who were overweight, and he was hard on my mother for any weight gains, almost from the beginning of my awareness of them as my parents. I was confused by this as well. I did not understand why Dad harassed Mom for her weight. To this day, I still retain some measure of extra self-consciousness about my weight and general appearance. Whenever I stray too far from my “ideal” weight, I begin the process to reestablish an approximation of what is acceptable for me.

I remember Mom and Dad engaging in “Punch and Judy” behavior, where they would trade insults/barbs. Mom and Dad never hit each other in anger. I never saw them hug once, and I was to learn later that neither had ever learned how to embrace until I showed them what a hug was and felt like, first in 1988.

I loved listening to music with my father and sister, and he played songs by Roger Miller, Burl Ives, and Johnny Cash quite frequently, so I grew up to love those performers. My parents were members of the Oakey Doaks, a square-dancing group of at least 18 married couples, many with young children. This active social group became the source of many of my mother’s and father’s best friends from 1958 to 1973. It was an activity that also took my parents away from our home, and we were left alone several times when they could not arrange babysitting at the last minute. I loved the people they knew and formed many short-term friendships with the children while attending out-of-town weekend events with that group—few friendships carried into adulthood.

I loved playing board games with my family and roughhouse playing with my dad. My sister and I would crawl all over Dad while he was on the floor and wrestle with him. Dad did love his children, and he really spent a lot of his “free” time with us as children. His problem was integrating the children into his busy agenda. He would take us to several of the local creeks so that we could collect rocks for his landscaping projects. Pam and I would earn 25 cents for each filled bucket that we would bring back filled with the smooth stones of the creek bottom. I became addicted to fictionalized history books, science fiction books and movies, and I loved the idea of becoming an astronaut, so that I could get off of this fucking rock and explore the” real” universe. In 1969, my father and I attended the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick, and after watching that groundbreaking movie, I became convinced that space traveling was in my future. When I scored ultra high on my grade school achievement tests and then virtually aced my PSATs and SATs in high school, my father finally started believing with me that I had an excellent chance at achieving that goal. He had never entirely caught fire with my potential before that point. He had been “saving” money for college for my sister and me, yet in 1969, he lost it all in a stock market gamble with his friend, Roland Mill. If my sister and I were to make it to college, we would have to do that with our assets.

I loved to climb trees, and the taller the trees were, the more excited and fulfilled I would become. I fell from trees two different times in my life. The first time I fell was from a tree leaning over a gravel road near our first home on Steamboat Way. I was eight years old at the time, and when I fell, I landed flat on my back, after a fall of about twenty feet. I got up from the ground, with all of the wind knocked out of me. I feared for my life because I could not draw my first breath. In a state of panic, I ran for our house several hundred feet before my lungs were to refill again. Another time, in our new neighborhood on Hampshire Lane, I climbed to the top of a big fir-tree, and pretended I was on the mast of a great sailing ship. A big wind did come up, and I lost my footing on the narrow top branches and fell almost eighty feet to the ground. When I awoke on the ground, I had a ten-foot length of the top of the tree firmly in my hands. I was bruised all over my body and sore beyond anything I had ever experienced before, but I had no broken bones. The examining physician could not believe me when I told him I had tripped while running in the woods, which was the story I needed to speak to avoid getting banned from tree climbing.

To steer in a little different direction for a while, let us talk about alcohol. I remember loving beer perhaps a little too much. One time, when I was five years old, my father watched TV with me and drank beer. He left the room, and I grabbed the beer and drank the whole thing. When Dad returned, he wondered where the beer had gone. Twenty minutes later I fell off of the couch because I had passed out, and then he knew. Dad kept a really close eye on his beers after that, and so did I! For the rest of my childhood, Dad had to be careful with me to keep me from drinking his beer, of which he usually had 6 or 7 cases stored in the basement. By the time I was 13 years old, I probably had already stolen several cases of beer out of Dad’s supply, but I never drank more than one beer at a time until I was fifteen years old. I never once saw Dad drunk, at least at home, so he really had it under control by the time I started paying attention. My paternal grandfather’s alcoholism seemed to have had an Impact on the way dad drank as a young man. My father enjoyed drinking, and was quite the social person, as well. But, his memory of his father’s behavior probably served as an excellent deterrent to abusive drinking, though my father certainly drank heavily after work during his earliest work years.

One revealing memory is from a 4th-grade science class, where the teacher placed a metal object on a burner, heated it, and then placed it into the water, where the uneven cooling distorted it. We were to describe in written form what we witnessed, and I had no clue how to describe it. I had to look at another person’s paper to see what they saw because I did not have the language to communicate what I had witnessed. This aspect of me also can be translated into how I experienced my upbringing while still being raised. I did not have the language to communicate what was wrong. However, I knew that I was witnessing something that was not right (I believe this phenomenon is directly related to the inability of many abused children to articulate their experiences to others). I asked to see what a fellow student had written so that I could write my version of what he observed. What I did in this situation is a microcosm of the process that most of humanity engages itself within the creation of our shared or Collective Consciousness. If we don’t directly experience something, we rely on others’ interpretations and, after a while, mistake their assumptions and judgments for the “truth.”

My ability to bring personal experience and insight into language would prove the most significant challenge to me in high school and in the years to follow, all the way up to the present. The childhood feelings of loneliness and abandonment, the frequent whippings with a belt by my father, coupled with whatever fundamental damage that may have been done to my soul through unintentional negligence on the part of my parents during my earliest years, may well have led to the creation (or revelation) of a dramatic story on the dream screen of my mind, which I will now recount.

1964 Dream
At eight, I had a most unique, realistic dream. The dream appeared when I slept very little, as I usually got to sleep no earlier than midnight, no matter how early I went to bed. I lay in bed and reviewed the day every night before sleep, seeing where I could have done things better or said something differently. My dreams finally evolved beyond the continuous nightmare phase before age 8.

Here is the dream:

Having received his directive from “on high,” the priest returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must go into their own home and face the “evil one” without any protection or care from their gods or their sacred symbols. The priest then returned to his own home, having tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing and then began summoning the dark forces. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts. The priest’s heart began to race out of control, sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. To continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog. Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth– the face of the evil one might be his own!

The dream of the mountain lake community of people, with the priest fighting the force of darkness, is still quite alive in my mind and remains a significant teaching for me as both a child and now as an adult. Idolatry and psychological projection are the modern names for the phenomena shown to me in the dream world. Being so immature and not too worldly in my knowledge, I did not have the necessary background to know what to think about the dream at the time. I discussed the dream with my older sister, who seemed to have some partial answers to its mysteries (based on her understanding of reincarnation), but so many mysteries remained for me. I waited, watched for further answers, and went on with the important business of being a carefree boy, though at times, I fleetingly experienced “self-awareness.”

I was required to take a World Geography class in the 7th grade; Mr. Vaught was the teacher and a Milwaukie Elks lodge member, as was my father. Mr. Vaught would report to my father during Elks club meetings about my wayward behavior, attitudes, and insufficiency, probably in an attempt to goad my father. Mr. Vaught was rude and considered me obnoxious and dull, as my father reported. It was through Mr. Vaught’s class that I was introduced to the Incan civilization, though, and Lake Titicaca, which is on the border between Peru and Bolivia. This lake was, and still is, a very sacred lake, and, according to the lore of the Incan people, it was where the origins of the human race began. I had an eerie familiarity with the lake and the area’s people. Lake Titicaca was the lake in my dream from three years earlier. I proceeded to consume every book on the Incan civilization I could find. I became hooked on the idea of traveling to Peru someday to seek out some answers and to experience its culture, perhaps for a second time. I eventually traveled to Peru in 2014, having a remarkable experience.

As mentioned, I was an isolated boy before 1965, and I never clicked well with people outside my family. I was small for my age, plus I had advanced placement early in school, which resulted in the insertion of a relatively immature boy into challenging peer situations. I had a limited number of friends, and I seemed to draw the “outcasts,” be they the eggheads, wimps, crazies, or quiet ones, to my circle of friends. One can see the kind of person I was by the people drawn to me. I would become intensely loyal to whoever committed to friendship with me, no matter their limitations or faults. Usually, it was the girls of my age group that I more readily befriended, until the age of nine years old, when we moved from West Linn to Milwaukie.

Boys were in limited supply in our first neighborhood, and many were prone to be antagonistic towards me. When I moved to Milwaukie, Oregon, in 1965, I immediately met three boys: Craig, Tony, and Randy. My next-door neighbor was Craig Salter, a quiet, introspective, slightly built boy who loved technical books and fantasy novels. Tony Mecklem was a slight build, private sort of young lad who lived down the road in a reasonably primitive home built by his father out of masonry blocks. But the main friend was Randy Olson, whom I will speak extensively about later.

Craig Salter 1970 yearbook photo

Randy Olson 1970 yearbook photo

Tony Mecklem 1970 yearbook phot​o

Here is a telling memory about how some members of my family saw me in public, as represented by my older sister in the public school system.  I remember being in the 3rd grade, and my sister already having a boyfriend of sorts from her 4th grade class.  That “boyfriend” had a younger brother, who was in 1st grade, who accompanied him.  The older boy was a bully, but instead of pushing me around, he ordered his younger brother to attack me.  I had never been in a fight before, and I was overwhelmed by the bellicose energy shown to me.  The boy threw my unsuspecting body onto the ground, and he proceeded to punch me, bite me, pull my ears and hair, and yell little kid obscenities at me.  Not knowing what to do (of course, my dad never taught me how to defend myself), but finally angry enough to do something, I began to imitate the lad, and overturned him and pulled his ears, and punched at him, and everything else he did to me, all the while being ridiculed and humiliated by my sister and the older boyfriend.  Hmmph, this kind of bullying was to happen in several different forms again over the next several years, as my sister seemed to draw young men into her experience that thought picking on me was the way to her attention and affection.

Another aspect of family shaming was evident whenever my father came to sports events that I was involved with from 6th through 8th grade.  He never took the time or effort to teach me or coach me on sports, but he was overly critical of me and my level of play on athletic teams.  One of his famous public humiliations of me was when I was pitching on the mound one day, and dad yelled out

“You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!”  

That is just an extension of the same “blanket party” behavior that he adhered to whenever he felt the need to garage my baby body.  I won’t go further into the details of the discipline that was administered to me over the years of my childhood at this time. School was not a problem for me in the new neighborhood, as the quality of the North Clackamas School District, at least in the grades schools, was substantially lower than that of the West Linn area from which we had moved from, so I was already a bit ahead of my peers, at least in math and English.  And, if the truth be known, I was starting to really get a handle as to how to succeed in school, by watching others who were doing well. I noted at the time that I despised, at times, the competition to get good grades at school.  Teachers graded on the curve, meaning that a small percentage of the students got A’s, as well as the same percentage got F’s.  Part of me had associated getting good grades with getting love and acknowledgement from my parents, and I hated the idea of having to compete with others to get love at home.  It was this experience that led me to sometimes feel good about other student’s failures at school, since it might mean that I would thus have a better opportunity to score some attention points.  Collaboration was definitely out of the question for me while living in this scarcity consciousness.

A little secret that I carried is that many times, I could access certain information that I had never officially learned before, and use it to succeed scholastically.  What does this mean?  Well, in addition to a nearly photographic memory that I had when I was young (which I lost shortly after I started smoking pot) especially during the stress of testing, information would just start appearing in my mind and I would just fly through whatever academic challenge was presented to me.  It felt like I was cheating at times, and I did not understand it, or question it too much.  I was probably recalling information that I had already stored, albeit unconsciously, but when I re-read more of my story,  I have to wonder if consciousness can be much more shared than we normally experience, at levels both above and below verbal levels.  After examining my awakening to the reality created by words, I could see that embedded into each word that we are able to understand is the whole of human verbal experience.  Each word is a hologram of the wholeness of our verbal reality.  If we truly understand ONE word, in its wholeness, we can perceive other aspects of the whole, as well. I as to later see that this insight also applies to the human being, as well.  If I can truly see the one, I can see the All.   I am sure that this will open up or continue some discussion somewhere, if somebody ever reads this obscure document.

I started to become a bully to some girls around the age of 10 years old.  If they were not attractive to me, they were susceptible to gentle, and not so gentle, ribbing and ridicule.  I found a behavior where I could get support from other boys, but it was damaging behavior on my part, and was to bring shame to me when confronted at a later time by victims of my abhorrent communication style. One time when I was 15 years old, and waiting for a bus in downtown Portland, a young woman walked up to me, asked my name, and then asked if I knew who she was.  I had no idea.  She then told me how I victimized her with my poor humor, and made her pee her pants once.  I told her that I was sorry, that was not who I was now, but I felt ashamed.  I met another of my victims, Jan J. when I was close to 40 years old in an Oak Grove Fred Meyers store, and I sought her out, introduced myself, and apologized for what I had wrought upon her.  She had long ago forgave and forgotten, but I had not.  It felt good seeing her living a successful life in adulthood, complete with a happy family.  Yes, I was part of the oppression of the feminine spirit, until I became conscious.

A real marker memory was when I was in the sixth grade, and playing outdoors during recess.  I noticed a group of people surrounding two fifth grades boys.  In my curiosity to see what was going on, I walked over to observe the crowd. The boys were in the midst of a fist fight, and there was lots of yelling and screaming.  I watched, and moved with the crowd as needed to avoid the fighting boys.  I had not ever witnessed such an activity before, and it was mesmerizing.  Suddenly, one of the fighting boys, Corey Sears, came over to me, and punched me in the face, and then went back to his fight with the other boy.  Not knowing what to do, I went to the Principal’s office, and complained about the fighting boys, and the punch thrown at me.  The Principal then scolded me for not intervening in the fight, and trying to break it up.  These boys, though in the grade below, were actually as big or bigger than I was, since I was their age, and not the ages of the kids in my grade.  I certainly felt no physical superiority or skill, or moral authority, to step in and mediate a dispute such as this.  Yet, it left me wondering how I was supposed to behave in relation to the poor behavior of others.

One of my childhood friends, Craig Salter was my next door neighbor in our new Milwaukie neighborhood.  He was of slight build, and he was a slow talker.   He may well have been a creative genius, but his “dreamy” state of existence was indicative of some fundamental issues going on inside of him.  I suspected from the beginning that his mother was mentally ill, as she was quite peculiar, and apparently quite a hypochondriac.  What concerned me was Craig’s similarity to his mother, as far as his mannerisms.  And I also suspected that Craig was bonkers too, but, hey, he was my neighbor, and as far as friends go, I could not be too choosy, eh?  I still wondered why I deserved to have such strange friends.  He was smarter than most people, yet he did not consistently apply his smarts to school, which was too restrictive for him.  On his own, before he was age 15, he had already designed a sophisticated internal combustion engine totally unlike what we use in today’s world.  He also designed and built his own models, FROM SCRATCH, of supersonic  jet airplanes, complete with spiral staircases made of pins and tiny pieces of paper glued in a spiral fashion.  He was also already designing transistor circuits by age 14, which just blew me away at the time.   HE WAS AMAZING!   I wanted his creativity so bad, as I felt that I had none. My abilities appeared to be quite mechanical, which left me having the sense that I was just another boring automaton,  that I was just parroting/repeating other’s thoughts and behaviors.   I enjoyed building model airplanes and ships from the WWI and WWII eras, and building sailing ships from kits that were based on sailing ships of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.  I enjoyed building them, but then I would be so critical of my efforts, usually by comparing them to the “perfect” models that Craig could produce.  I would become so unhappy with my projects, and an unusual perfectionist phenomenon would occur where I would feel pleasure at destroying my great works because they did not measure up to some (presently) unattainable standard that I had set for myself.  This is huge, as it reflects something “fundamental” about an aspect of darkness of my human soul (see “He just wanted to watch the world burn”).

There were many nights when I slept outside and gazed into the night sky with either binoculars or one of many telescopes that I, or my friend Craig, owned over the years, searching for flying saucers, or other interesting otherworldly objects.  I needed to know that there were other options for life, life away from the trauma of this planet.  Craig and I became obsessed with building rocket ships and developing our own rocket fuel.  We were both quite impacted when betwee 8th grade and freshman year, a friend of ours (Charley Davalos) died when his fuel cell exploded, sending shrapnel to cut his jugular vein.  Undeterred, I still became an avid rocketeer, building rocket ships and installing manufactured solid fuel booster cells into them, and then launching them thousands of feet into the sky.  Craig was stay in my life until 1987, though I only infrequently saw him after my first college years of 1973-1976.  Craig called me for the last time  in 1993, complaining of bizarre symptoms.  I asked him about his drinking behavior, and his reply indicated that he had been drinking alcoholically for several years.  Craig was having delireum tremens, a potentially fatal response to his alcohol drinking. I told him he was an alcoholic, he disagreed with me, hung up the phone, and I never heard from him again. 25 years later I heard from a high school classmate that Craig was institutionalized with dementia.

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Danny Beauvais was my neighbor from just down the street, who moved there during my seventh grade.   I did not hang around him much, because he was quite aggressive, and had a “hair trigger” when it came to his emotions.   He behavior frequently got him into trouble, His father was a paratrooper in the war, and had lost a testicle for his efforts during a mishap  He had a very attractive mother, who garnered more attention from other men than his father cared to experience.  I will just share one story about Danny, which involved a private conversation that my father had with Danny’s father.  In that conversation, Danny’s father noted that his marriage was failing, and that his wife was not faithful.  One day, in casual conversation, I noted that Danny’s mother had more interests than just his father, and Danny proceeded to get me into a body lock with his legs, and tried to squeeze me to death, until I took back what I said.   I kept asking him, in between painful grunts, why he wanted for me to take the truth back.  It did not matter to Danny, he just did not want to hear “the truth” from anybody, but himself.  I would not take back what I said either, and I paid a very painful price for that “stubbornness”, so what played out here is classic male communication around “painful truths” (I might be interpreted as still practicing that behavior).  We did not associate with each other after that  He ended up in prison a few short years later for assault, and committed many other crimes during the intervening period of time.

Danny is on the left

Jeff Tobin was a boy that I had met in the 5th grade.  We were not neighbors, but we were friends at school, and we were both quite energetic lads.  Both of us had excessive energy, and this did lead to both of us getting into trouble both alone, and together once or twice.  I was elected class president in sixth grade, which was not to last long.  I walked into the boys restroom, and Jeff and several other boys were flooding the urinals.  I did not have the common sense to leave immediately, and in a need to “fit in” I continued to flush one of flooding urinals, just as the principal walked in.  Well, I was immediately removed from my symbolic position, and I felt considerable shame.

Jeff Tobin 1970 Yearbook photograph

One time I was beat with a tennis shoe by health teacher John Pavlichek, after being accused of making farting noises in class.  It was actually Jeff who made the noises.  Jeff was not so significant to me at this level of relationship, where his significance increased was 11 years later when I resumed by friendship with him and worked with him in the PAMS (Portland Area Mailing System-an experimental locally developed  electronic mailing system implemented in the Portland Main Post Office).  I worked with Jeff in the PAMS unit for about one year.  He resigned after his first suicide attempt.   I was to meet with Jeff one year prior to his death, when Sharon and I crossed paths with him on the Oak’s bottom hiking trails. He was to take his own life when he turned 55 years of age, and the trust fund that his deceased father had set up for him ran out of money..

A most telling acknowledgement of my social maladjustment and mental state as a youth is when the church that our Boy Scout Troop had its meetings at needed landscaping work.  I needed to perform several community service activities to earn a badge to become a “Star Scout”.  My attitude was that I wanted to give NOTHING back to the community, or to the church that supported our Scout troop.  My father actually understood that attitude, and supported me in my antagonism towards service work for the community.  Of course, I never earned the community service merit badge, which meant that I could never earn my Star scout level, or move upward to Eagle Scout..  My antagonism against community support and participation became quite an ingrained part of my personality structure, and was to be the precursor to all future problems..

As a freshman in high school I tried out for the cross country team, because I was in great running shape from training throughout my eighth grade with Craig’s older Mark (who ended up designing the sophisticated software for the US Defense Department to use in the computers of their top secret spy planes).  Mark was 3 years older than Craig, but he was much more athletic and was incredibly involved in the community.  He was an inspiration to me, and I trained with him because he was so smart and motivated, and I wanted to hang with him.  I ended up running 3 miles a day for a whole year while in 8th grade, so I thought that I might be a good runner in high school..  Craig and I attempted to run cross country, but I quickly became discouraged by the “faster” runners who were already on the team, so I dropped out.  My father certainly was not involved in encouraging me to be a runner, though he did come to one of my freshman football games, which was to be my last game when I finally figured out that I was much too small to endure the pounding from young men almost twice as big as me.  I joined the chess club and the golf team my freshman and sophomore years, then dropped both of those options when I started using pot.

I first met Dan Dietz in 1969, when I saw him as a freshman in high school.  He came from Oak Grove grade school, and I came from Concord grade school, to join the freshman class.  We did not associate with each other, at least initially, and rarely acknowledged each other until the sophomore year.  An associate of his, Mark Anderson, was in my PE class, so that is where I first made contact with the “greaser” group that they all belonged to.  There was Bruce Chapman, Dan Dietz, Mark Anderson, Barry South, and the many drop-ins that associated with them throughout high school.  Bruce Chapman had a garage outside of his home, where he perpetually worked on his 1955 Chevy race car.  Bruce’s Garage took on an almost sacred connotation in all who knew him over the next few years, as it became THE GATHERING PLACE many weekend evenings.  Lots and lots of suds were consumed there, and soon I was to join them in their weekly celebrations of hops, marijuana, and fairly close friendship, it seemed.

Having been rejected by every girl I showed an interest in, and bullied a few times by the more mature freshman and sophomores, I finally figured out that my physical immaturity had finally caught up with me.  Being 13 years old, weighing 92 pounds,  being a freshman in high school, and not even having had puberty yet, made things really uncomfortable for me in the locker room, though at long last I got my first whisker somewhere between my freshman and sophomore year.  I gave up on the girls for a while, and continued trying to establish who might be my core group.

At this point, I had no idea who my people were, though I had still had 3 or 4 quite socially compromised fellow travelers who had been my friends since 5th grade. I was truly a stranger in a strange land, and the anxiety around this social adjustment was quite high.  Looking back, it is easy to see that I was in a vulnerable state of mind.

Designers and builders of machinery , or creators of ideas or new forms of art, are encouraged and empowered by their society and their own “creator within” to bring into the world of form their latest creations. Creators are happiest when they actually bring something new, or an updated version of the old, into the world. With the power of creation carrying us across the ocean of life, we can’t help but use that power to make idols, icons, and images that represent that which we are grateful for, or what has given us protection or sustenance. I am sure that fathers over the history of humanity have given crude versions of their primary tools of trade or weapons of war to their boys since the idea of gifting first arose. And, the father encouraged the boys interest in protecting himself, his family, and in a more recent evolutionary development, even his ideology. Yet I have to wonder how giving the gift of fear, isolation, shame, aggression, and the potential for violence is really the highest quality gift that our “creator” has to offer to us.

Each human child is dependent upon the quality of love, safety, and prosperity of the family household, and these are primary factors that greatly influence a growing child’s evolutionary path through consciousness. The parents are by intention also designers, builders, and co-creators of the early life and consciousness of the new child, even if it is the DNA that determines a greater portion of the heritage. My father spent five years at a local university learning about psychology, child development, logic, philosophy and religion, and yet his successful mastering of these subjects in school did not translate into insight as to how to best parent his children. My mother studied Dr. Spock and others, yet did not develop the insight necessary to know that placing a blanket wrapped crying baby in a car in the garage at night until dad left for work so that he could sleep missed the bulls eye for perfect child care by the widest of margins. All creators strive for perfection, and most parents are no exceptions, yet that desire for excellence is difficult to identify in dysfunctional families, especially by children who were negatively impacted by chronic parental mismanagement. Victims of wounding carry the pain well into adulthood, and even unto death, in situations where the trauma is never made conscious or gets addressed in a loving, healing manner.

With our final insight into the true nature of Consciousness and God, and our identity embedded within this creative principle of the Universe, we see that we can become either agents of a loving, regenerative force, or, in our ignorance, become the  malevolent architects of Armageddon, and our own destruction.

Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin, was a name cobbled together by my parents, to represent my nature, and indicate the true potential for my life.  Yes, there is a huge difference between potential, and actuality, and my life in my later years has become a “miracle experiment” for me in my own attempt to actualize my true nature. The revisiting of my times as a youth gives me a chance to bring compassion and understanding to those parts of my life that did not receive such compassion and understanding when I needed them the most.

I have brought the best troubleshooting and repair techniques known to mankind with me to rebuild my life.  I found that revisiting the past is quite helpful for reintegration, and healing, if done with the right intention. The parts of our lives that we resist looking at the most, are the parts that resist healing, and eventually get repressed, and we end up making them the unconscious influences and manipulators over our behaviors for the rest of our lives.

Pam and I leaning against one of our father’s prized new cars in the late 1950’s.

Randy Richard Olson

     This story is a thumbnail sketch of my relationship with Randy and the recovery process from the human condition, including my suffering, isolation, insanity, loneliness, alcohol abuse, and drug addiction. I first met Randy Olson when I was in fifth grade after he moved up to Oregon from California. He lived about 3/4 of a mile down Oatfield Road from us, and we rode the same bus to school together for grades 5-8. He had many friends, with me becoming an important friend to him, but by no means not his only friend. 

     Randy was an extremely gregarious fellow with a great sense of humor. He grew up awkwardly, at least physically, with his legs being extra long and out of proportion with the rest of his body. Shooting up faster in height than others in 7th grade, he became so much taller than his peers. He was given the unfortunate nickname “Lurch,” which he did not like. He was named after the extremely tall character in the ’60s TV series “The Addams Family.” We played pickup basketball, football, and baseball games every spring, summer, and fall together, as well as shared all of the normal sleep-overs, camping trips, bicycle rides, pool and ping-pong games, and activities that others our age would engage in, through our freshman year in high school.

     Then, in his sophomore year, Randy got his first car, and the rest is history. He immediately found his first long-term girlfriend, a young woman named Terri-Lynn Barr, whom he met at the Portland Rose Festival. Terri had a friend named Sharon Denman, who befriended Tony Mecklem, another of our mutual pals, and they both had their first “almost adult” relationships starting at about the same time. I felt left out during this time. However, I finally got a couple of friendships with some girls in the approximate North Portland area where Terri and Sharon lived. 

     Terri-Lynn had a step-sister named Donelle, and one day, Randy drove Donelle down to Portland, where I had my first chance to meet her. This was not a date (far from a date), but when I first saw Donelle, I was hooked. She was the most beautiful young woman I had ever met, gorgeous beyond all description and incredibly intelligent and sensitive. I sensed that I had witnessed my future when I first saw her. I did not see her again for several months, but she had left an indelible mark on my soul, and I could not forget her. Since I was still not driving then, there was no way to meet with her alone, so I let all thoughts of reconnecting with her slip away. Randy said she already had a boyfriend in Vancouver, Washington, at Evergreen High School. I had such low self-esteem that I knew I could not compete for her affection.

     Randy did bring Donelle down again during our junior year (Rex Putnam High), and I made my move. Eventually, Donelle, I, and Randy and Terry became couples that shared much time and love. I only sometimes got along with Terry. This trend continued through most of Randy’s relationships with women that were to follow. For some reason, Randy’s girlfriends always eventually saw me as some sort of impediment to their relationship with Randy. One time, we were all camping at Short Sands Beach campground on the Oregon Coast, and Terry became so irritated with me that she pulled the tent stakes out of the tent that I was sleeping in. That is only one of many stories that show that I did not always have the best connections with Randy’s girlfriends, though there were a couple of times to follow in later years when my connections became a little bit too close with some of his ex-girlfriends, which brought me some additional learning experiences.

     My life experiences with Donelle became some of the most compelling, heartbreaking, and depressing experiences that I could never have envisioned for myself or her. She had a nervous breakdown late in her senior year and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She was briefly hospitalized and was placed on some powerful, experimental medications to try to keep her independent. She was able to graduate from high school, but her spirit was crushed by her disease, and so was mine. I went from being a potential lifelong friend and partner to a guilt-ridden caregiver, caretaker, boyfriend, and, eventually, husband to her. I left my boyhood dreams behind in the process, walking away from a full scholarship with the Air Force ROTC so that I could be close to Donelle and give her the support she would require for the rest of her life.

     Before I met Donelle and before I was introduced to drugs and alcohol, I was to become an astronaut. Still, I was p,ermanently grounded, and reigned myself to a life of mediocrity. I absorbed more than my share of alcohol and other chemicals to help me cope with my own dysfunction. At the same time, I watched my lover disintegrate and then, occasionally, resurrect herself from the effects of her disease through the latest medications introduced by drug companies. Yes, we both had lifelong diseases to fight, and we both fought losing battles. She eventually became a homeless street person, and the State of Washington finally accepted responsibility for her care after I walked out on the whole process. 

     I began my search for the truth of my being, though I was working with very few clues about which direction to head in. Randy stayed in contact with me; in fact, I lived with him after walking away from Donelle and then, two years later, after walking away from another lost relationship with a woman named Alcindia.

     Randy was always there to offer a helping hand. Though he felt terrible about what had happened to me, he always counseled me to look ahead, find another direction for my life, and try to enjoy the present moment as much as he did. Randy could never offer the direction of sobriety, however, as enjoying his beer as much or more than the next guy. I am sure he could not envision a life without the support of the spirits of the beer keg. Randy and I had roamed the Cities of Beaverton and Portland for hundreds of nights, enjoying the music, the people, the temporary friendships of others, and the support of many friends that Randy had developed over the years, including his many girlfriends. More of his story and my relationship with him will be recounted later.

     I invited Randy Olson over on March 13, 1987. He came over, and he, his girlfriend, and I proceeded to down an inordinate amount of my father’s booze and wine. My parents did not want me in their house without them being there, but I had a key. They were still snowbirding in Arizona and would not be home until the end of the month so I could keep my dysfunctional momentum going. Well, after partying with Randy until about 10:00 PM, Randy had to go home, so I was left alone with my horrible problems. I went into a rare blackout and then visited an acquaintance from the drug manufacturing community. While with the chemist, I had an awakening experience, which will be documented in greater detail later.

      Another funny thing is that Craig Salter called me two days later. Craig was a childhood friend, Randy, and I had known them since the 5th grade. Craig asked me if I wanted to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with him. He was required to attend meetings due to the conditions of the court that had prosecuted him for a DUI. Of course, Craig was not an alcoholic; at least he thought that he wasn’t. I knew that he was, though. I, in fact, was the person who got him drunk the first time in High School when Craig was 16 years old. I actually started him on his decline into his own alcoholism, just like Randy Olson had started me on my first drug, which was marijuana. I was a scholar, a nerd, etc, with no intention of ever using drugs in high school, but Randy and Tony talked me into it when I was 15 years old. That was the single worst decision of my life.

     So, Randy was there at the beginning of many of my life’s critical/ significant events. And he was there at the end of my self-destructive intentions. I could not take Randy into my new-found world of sobriety; I could only share, ever so briefly, my personal experience of it. My future conversations with Randy became increasingly less productive. I found that I was losing touch with Randy spiritually, emotionally, and physically. I did not see Randy in the last 8 years of his life. 

    The last time I saw Randy, he placed a 12-pack of beer into his car at a Hillsboro Fred Meyer’s store. He appeared hesitant to acknowledge me, and I felt he was trying to avoid me. He seemed sick and bloated, and I wanted to say something to him about it. But I did not, thinking it was not my right to intrude upon his life now. I had phone conversations with him three more times over the last eight years, with the last time being over three years before his death. Our friendship on life’s “outer plane” was already dead. And then, my wife Sharon reads his obituary in the paper, shocking me to my core. 

My lifelong friend, Randy, was dead.

    Yet, he still lives within me. I am so grateful to have known Randy. I now know that I could not take him to the spiritual places that I was to visit. It would have been the least I could do for Randy if only possible. He only needed a little willingness to join me to experience some of the joys of being on the path of recovery, healing, and love. Yet that willingness was something that none of us could give to another human being. I had pointed to the new direction, but he chose to look the other way. 

    His funeral was a shock to me; it was poorly attended (I only found out about it through chance when Sharon happened to read the obituaries and saw a listing for his funeral the day before). The most popular and friendly person I had ever known died almost anonymously. He had thousands of friends and acquaintances through the years, but in the end, he was nearly forgotten. He died in isolation, but he deserved so much better than that. You are still loved, my friend. 

     I am grateful to have known you and experienced the thousands of hours of life with you, the 48 years we partially shared. May you be at peace, my dear friend, at the center of it all, from where you started to where you have finally returned. Save a place on your couch for me, will you please? I will be welcome in the Kingdom if I see your apartment there.

January 21, 1955 – June 3, 2013

Thank you, Randy.

Donelle Mae Flick Paullin

Mental health has become an issue of national concern. I share in that concern at the deepest level. Throughout my life I have witnessed the oppression of our citizenry, and our collective mental illness, and to this day it continues to distress me.   The repression of powerful aspects of the basic human spirit is encouraged by our culture. Our political, religious, and economic enforcers, and those whose practice resides within the domain shared by all mental health professions, have found that they have limited options for dealing with the disease, resulting in feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and even institutionalized indifference.  On that down side, there are those within our culture who misunderstand or ignore, over-medicate, ostracize and marginalize, Isolate and imprison, abuse and punish, degrade and dispose, and just plain “give up on” the mentally ill.  On the up side, there are many family members, therapists, psychologists, spiritual advisors, and psychiatrists who have given their lives, hearts, and souls to the care and healing of our mentally ill, and my heart sometimes breaks FOR ALL OF US, as we struggle to manage both our own lives, while also being of service to these fallen fellow members of our family and society.

The psychiatric profession would do itself wonders to finally gain the necessary insight to understand the underlying message here, for we are all being impacted by our cultural INSANITY, and far too many American citizens will continue their own unconscious descent into darkness and mental illness. The mentally ill need better guidance, and our sick society needs better guidance, before it is too late for all of us.  Chemicals can carry a disabled personality only so far, and then the river of spirit, with healing and insight, must carry the diseased human being the rest of the way to sanity.  Yet, better than treatment is a plan for prevention, which a resistant society will not take the necessary measures to enact.

Early in my recovery from alcoholism, in April of 1987, I volunteered at the Lovejoy Care Unit for mental illness and alcoholic recovery.  I had spent a month there in 1984, and I wanted to give back to the institution, as well as offer some of my own experience, strength, and hope to those who sought recovery from their problems.  Tony D had a psychology degree, with a focus on recovery issues, and was a volunteer there as well., He had substantially longer term sobriety than my own.  Tony was responsible for assessing incoming patients, to help determine if they should be channeled to the alcoholic recovery wing, or to the mental illness wing.  My role was to assist with Tony, as requested, and also to facilitate in-house AA meetings.

One story that still stands out for me is Mary J., a young woman who passed through our office.  Jane, the nurse, brought her in, needing a fast evaluation for Mary, to see where she could be helped best.  Tony had his canned questions to determine drug/alcohol related illness, or non-addictive mental illness status.  I noted that his questions appeared out-of-place, and irrelevant to this person, sensing there was a lot more to her “condition” than Tony’s superficial questions could address.  Tony immediately judged her as “mentally ill”, without allowing for me to question Mary further.  There was a part within me that had detected that Mary was hiding her addictions, and needed a little more time to reveal herself.  I  believed that I might help to protect her from the assault of unnecessary medications, if I was allowed to delve deeper into her history.  Tony came down hard on me, and accused me of being more fucked up than the woman being evaluated, for even considering that he might be wrong in his assessment.   My volunteer position immediately became vacant, and I did not wait for him to even say goodbye, as I headed for the door.

I mention this story only because it points to a problem with professional bias. Each patient is trying to tell the world a secret, yet presently cannot reveal it. The mentally ill, like all semi-conscious human beings, do not yet have a safe container for their troubled feelings around whatever has traumatized their lives. It takes each patient a unique period of time to connect with the willingness to access the source of their pain and suffering. And it takes a specially trained listening ear to hear the broken person’s deepest meaning, as it can be buried among ancient pain relics from far distant places and times, and, in the extreme, disassociated personalities.

Many patients in need of healing may well head for the door, figuratively or literally speaking, if there is a perception that they are not being listened to with compassion and empathy.

That is the primary reason many never even reach a professional’s doorstep, for the isolation and fear informs the broken person that there is nobody alive who will understand them, and embrace them with love anyway.

My first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin, suffered from what psychiatric professionals labeled as paranoid schizophrenia. She developed this disease near the end of her senior year in high school. We had known each other for two years at this point, having dated for the last eighteen months. I struggled mightily to both help and understand her, over the many years that I stayed in relationship with her. I gained insight not only into her “disease”, which also devolved into multiple personality disorder, but also into the very mind of mankind. Mankind suffers from aspects of this disease in a collective sense, and the oppressed and victimized, and most innocent and sensitive people in our society are most vulnerable to developing such mental illnesses. ALWAYS REMEMBER, our mentally ill population, including the addicts and the alcoholics, are society’s “canaries in the mine”. We will all die of spiritual asphyxiation, should we neglect to listen to the stories being told by our most vulnerable, and damaged, family members.

I will now develop Donelle’s story of mental illness, by delineating five phases of her life.  These phases are fairly arbitrary, and are useful only for breaking the her story into descriptive segments. I have made references to other friends from my youth, I have editorialized in places, and I have revealed some dark secrets from within my own life, as well.

“We are only as sick as our secrets”

is an aphorisms frequently heard in recovery meetings. My present understanding is that

We are as sick as our secrets, while being victimized by society’s secrets, as well.

Phase 1:

     Donelle was never able to speak out against the abuse that she experienced throughout her life. Being born into a socially diseased family, where the mother’s narcissism and selfishness, and neglect of her young children, and the mother’s poor relationship choices that resulted from her own brokenness, led to the conditions of sexual abuse and assault against Donelle when she was but 6 years old. Her mother Marlene was a young bride, who married Donald Flick, in 1954. Don owned 2 sections of land in North Dakota, which he managed and leased out, as well as being a full time worker at the Camas Washington Crown Zellerbach paper mill. Don would work so much at the mill, that time at home was quite limited. Marlene would have parties at their home while he was away, and she would invite single men. There was always alcohol being served, and Marlene tended to promiscuity during that period of time. While she would be taking leave to the back bedroom with her latest “friend”, she would leave her young children vulnerable to whoever was left without a partner. Donelle, being about 6 years old during this difficult period of time, was selected and abused by Bud Barr, who was a child predator, heavy drinker, and all around bad attitude man. Bud would repeatedly abuse Donelle, and it was also later learned that he abused his other daughter from his previous marriage.

     Marlene and Don’s marriage collapsed, and they were divorced. But Marlene married the abuser Bud, and they moved in together near Five Corners in Vancouver, Washington. Donelle lived with her mother the majority of the time, due to the conditions of the divorce decree. Donelle had to face the threat of sexual attack from this criminal for the next ten years of her life, though her brothers told me that Bud was not allowed to be alone with Donelle, after Marlene and Bud moved in with each other. Yet, the damage was already done, and the little girl knew trauma intimately.

     Donelle’s mother, Marlene, divorced from Bud Barr in 1973, after she found a new boyfriend from her work at Parker Furniture in Vancouver.  Tom was the new lover’s name, and he tolerated both Donelle, and me, for a little while.  But after Donelle graduated, Marlene and Tom insisted that Donelle leave home, trying to foist her onto her father, who lived in Camas.  Don Flick accepted Donelle conditionally for awhile.  Don had remarried, to a woman named Alice, who also worked at the Camas Crown Zellerbach paper mill.  Alice was kind of quiet, slow and dull, and was not too expressive, at least initially, of Donelle coming to live with them.  But after eighteen months, Alice was ready to have children, and her patience with Donelle, and with me visiting them at their Camas home, ran out.  Now, Donelle was still being treated for schizophrenia, and she remained quite brittle, psychologically.  Donelle pleaded with her mother to let her stay at their home, and Marlene relented for a little while.  But after three months, Marlene and Tom insisted that Donelle move out, and she had nowhere to go.  Donelle’s family was ready to put her out on the street, literally, so in my need to protect Donelle, I was forced to move out of my parent’s home, and find residence in Vancouver, near where she still received psychiatric treatment at the Columbia River Mental Health Center.  My parents were aghast, as was the rest of my family.  How was I going to provide for myself, my wife, and continue with college?

Phase 2:

     Donelle and I got married in September of 1979, and she was doing quite well at the time. Her mental illness was being well-managed by the latest anti-psychotic ‘miracle drugs’ by all appearances, and she was studying to be a Sous Chef at PCC Sylvania campus.. She was getting good reviews and grades there, and because she had stabilized so well, I finally felt comfortable enough to marry her, having delayed marriage since 1973 because of our tumultuous experiences around her variable mental health. My relationship with her family was usually civil, but I had serious issues with the poor family support Donelle had always been the recipient of. There was a time several months before our marriage that I wanted to hurt both Bud and Marlene very badly, for mistreating and abusing Donelle. Under the right set of conditions, I had the will, and the potential, to bring the greatest harm to Bud, but I never acted upon my disgust and hatred.  I broke my collarbone fighting with her oldest brother Keith once, when I made confrontational statements against Marlene, and Keith felt obliged to defend her. Keith later apologized, and told me I had every right to be upset, but not until I wrestled with both him AND his wife, who had jumped me too.

     Our marriage started off well. Yet, one weekend near New Years, 1980 our step sister (Keith’s wife) had promised that Donelle could baby sit their two children over the weekend. Donelle loved their children, and felt honored and really looked forward to caring for her niece and nephew. One of her challenges was that she could not be a mother right now, and it hurt her knowing that we could not have any children until she showed at least two years of good mental health. Her sister-in-law reneged on the baby-sitting offer, making horribly erroneous judgements against Donelle, and broke her heart. Donelle had the most devastating nervous breakdown of her life three days later.

By January of 1980, she had collapsed once again into another ‘nervous breakdown’ which included “hearing voices”, talking to herself, and generally experiencing the ravages of her paranoid schizophrenia. She would repeatedly exclaim:

“I am controlled! I am controlled!“

yet be incapable of communicating with me who or what was controlling her inside.

I moved out of our shared apartment on Harrison St. in Milwaukie, and moved across the street into another apartment, so that I could stay in close contact with her. I needed to stay in other quarters because she was so disruptive because of her horrible disease. She would not sleep at night many times, and she would hear screams from the basement of the Milwaukie Police department, where she claimed they were torturing civilians, and she would cry out in anguish because of what she was “hearing”..

Dan Dietz was my best friend up to that point in time, and he was also the co-best man at our wedding. Dan had known Donelle almost as long as I did, and he knew all too well her limitations while she was in her “breakdown mode”. Dan was quite the drinker and party animal still, and Donelle, even in her diseased state, still liked to go out and listen to live music, and drink liberally. I demanded that Dan stay away from Donelle while she was in her breakdown phase, but he instead took her out one night, and they both drank to extreme drunkenness together. When I came over to Donelle’s place the next morning, I noted that her panties were on the floor, and that she was partially dressed, and still woozy on the couch. She told me that she awoke to Dan raping her after she had passed out. When I confronted Dan about it, He said that he did not remember anything, but I went ahead and broke my hand on a door that he stood in. I told him to leave, and i never saw Dan alive again. Donelle was to eventually receive new medications, which stabilized her enough for us to resume our marriage, which lasted for just two more years until early 1984. We divorced, and Donelle eventually became a frequently victimized homeless street person in Portland, Oregon

Phase 3:

In 1987, I visited Donelle at her apartment near Camas Washington. We had been divorced since 1984, but I still kept in touch with her on occasion, because of my concern for her. I had just gotten sober, and I wanted to make amends to her, as part of the program of working the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (total sobriety was to last for me for over 20 years, until I developed a pain killer addiction in 2007). This time, she was in the middle of a complete MPD (multiple personality disorder) type of nervous breakdown. She had candles lit throughout her apartment, and the setting was quite eerie. I sat down with her to talk, and I noted that she looked so young and innocent, and I was struck by the change in her appearance and countenance. As she spoke to me, I felt like I was witnessing a 6 or 7 year old girl, with the new persona that was now speaking through her. For some reason, I was inspired to give her feedback about her “six year old self” that I was witnessing. I told her that she was not responsible for the sexual abuse that she experienced from Bud (and perhaps one or two unnamed others during Marlene’s drunken soirees). I tried to be as forgiving and compassionate as my heart would allow to the naive, innocent child making its presentation before me. We both cried together, and my heart was broken, and I hurt like I had never before hurt as a human being. I can only imagine her own terror and fear around her own abuse at the hands of her elders. Later in this visit, another “personality” appeared. A calm, composed mature person then “incarnated” into Donelle. I asked who I was talking with. She told me that she was “God”, and proceeded to give me the wisest, most loving feedback that I had ever received as a human being up to that point in my life.

“I have many faces, but you have recognized mine, and you have reached the point of being able to accept beauty in your life.  You have made peace with your past, but peace does not last forever.  You have much work to do, but your work will have love guiding it, and protecting you.”

As I was open to “God” at that point in my life, it was a miracle that “God” could use the vehicle of a damaged human being to talk with me.  That is how “God” works sometimes.

Looking at my history, I remained open to the revelations from the Mystery

Who can say with certainty what reality truly is? Those who cling too tightly to what they think that they know, can unintentionally exclude a “whisper from God” that might be experienced and revealed in the newness of each moment, no matter what or who the source may be.

Donelle’s reality was a most challenging one. I am distressed by the abuse that men over the course of her life heaped upon her. She was the most loving, kind person that I had every known, and she got bulldozed by our culture and community, and her diseased response to it. Nature, or nurture? Had Donelle been lovingly nurtured since birth through her adulthood, I would only hope that the disease would not have erupted. Traumatization of our most innocent cannot lead to happy outcomes.

Over the many years that i knew her, i tried to be the best support person that I could be, but I was damaged goods, as well, so I failed in my mission, too. She deserved better that what I could give her, because I suffered under my own limitations of selfishness, addiction, and sense of personal powerlessness. With mental illness, we all tend to fail together as a family, as a culture, and as a human race. Those who can bring forgiveness, insight, compassion, and a sense of the Spirit are the true blessings for the sick within our society. I am not so sure about the ones who distribute the medications, however. They may help in the short term, but they tend to deliver a mixed bag of goods, that is for sure. The great gift we can give is a non-judgmental listening ear, and to keep our hearts open to the stories that are told.

Phase 4

In 1992, I was still in communication with my ex-wife, Donelle.  At this point, she was in the mental hospital at Fort Steilacoom, Washington.  She was committed yet again in 1990, and was languishing in there when I visited her.  This was the 3rd time I had visited her there.  She always had a shopping list for me to fill, invariably with some types of makeup.  She still liked to make herself look as pretty as possible, but the effects of the medication over the years on her had taken a horrible toll.  She was twice her normal weight, and she could not keep her food down consistently.

The most beautiful woman I had ever met was no longer that, and I was quite saddened, once again, to have to connect with her while she was so diseased.  The medication was quite the “double edged sword”, and had been for all of her adult life.    I don’t know what drug cocktails they were giving her this time, but they had the same conflicted end results.  (I now have little respect for the drug industry, or for a system that prescribes these drugs to people, rather than treating people in a more holistic manner).

This particular weekend, my wife Sharon was running in the annual Hood to Coast relay race.  At this point in my life, I was not a runner, having hung up my running shoes in high school, and also having retired from recreational basketball in 1985 due to back problems. My only responsibility was to drive to Seaside to pick Sharon up at the end of her adventure, after my visit with Donelle.  I was quite down after my visit, and the drive to Seaside from Ft. Steilacoom was very dark, and subdued.

When I started to enter the outskirts of Seaside, without even seeing one H2C (Hoot To Coast) participant, I picked up on a new energy that just started “vibrating in the ethers”.   I came to name this energy “TEAMWORK” after the fact, not knowing what else to call it.  It was the energy of collective support, love, companionship, and goal achieving, and I had never known that as a youth, as I had never experienced that on grade or high school sports teams, of which I never qualified for.   It was like a beautiful “spell” had come over me, and I was totally captured by it!

Running through my life’s history, I seem to have stumbled over a greater Mystery.

Donelle, and the mentally ill in general, suffer from extreme isolation, and are insulated from emotionally satisfying and connecting relationships.  Donelle desired such connections intensely, yet did not have the capacity to make them happen due to the chaos and distress that her mental illness brought to her.  A person will never know a greater heartbreak, than to know and love a mentally ill human being who cannot or will not respond to therapy, medication, and treatment.  Yet, there are some who are considered extremely mentally ill, who have actually connected with the higher truth of life, creativity, self-expression, and spiritual awareness.  It is a dangerous road to travel, the one where insanity and mental illness is one of the fog lines, and spiritual enlightenment is the other.  To bounce back and forth between those lines creates a turbulence unknown to ninety-eight percent of humanity.

Enlightenment does not come to the “fat and happy” people of our world. People who do not feel the pain of their own lives, and of their own poor choices, are not ripe for the experience of change.  And, enlightenment is NOT a gentle process, merely attained through reading books, practicing affirmations, talking with our friendly therapists, and attending a few workshops and conferences. To find true enlightenment, a path through personal, and collective, insanity is REQUIRED. Watch out for the so-called ‘professionals’ of our culture, or those latest pseudo-spiritual gurus, who continue to try to oppress this movement, and repress those impulses within themselves, and others under their ‘spell’ or control.

Many of our children are destined to journeys through abuse, darkness, isolation, abandonment, and insanity, because those are the qualities that permeate the minds of our unconscious parents.  We can all quote from the Bible, Koran, Talmud, Bhagavad Gita, or the sayings of the “enlightened masters” such as the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or more recently Krishnamurti, the Dalai Lama, OR ALL OTHERS, for the rest of eternity, but until we face ourselves and our diseased minds directly and honestly, NO TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE WILL OCCUR. The same is true for our country, and for our world.  I will see you, and be with you for as long as necessary, on the “Dark Side Of The Moon”, until Light is brought to our world, and our children cease to be the victims of our oppressive, abusive natures..

Our children deserve much better love, care, and concern than the vast majority of the parents with culturally conditioned insanity can attempt to give.  While incarnated into human form, with our poorly illuminated human minds, we can only witness the projections of our minds.  All that we will ever see, unto whatever eternity that we can possibly conceive of, is our self, so the most important question for each day is “how will I see myself today?”  The answer to that question determines whether I can see through the eyes of the truth of this moment, or just the limited eyes of the past. Our children pay a horrible price for our dark, ignorant projections of our selves, and our unfulfilled needs.  Each child deserves ultimate respect and love, or they eventually become just another dead illusion of our culture’s aging, decaying, conditioned mind.  The insight gained through mindful self-examination can erase the blocks to Love’s awareness, and imbue all life with a new meaning.  And our children can be seen for the Spirit that they really are, and be allowed to grow into the magnificent beings that they were meant to be, without the detours to greatness that poor parenting introduces.

Not everybody appears to have equal access to our infinite spiritual potentials.

Had my first wife Donelle, a most beautiful human being, not been severely traumatized as a youth, a much different life experience might have occurred, and many, many people would have benefited by Donelle’s conscious presence in her own unique, spiritual experience of life, healing, and humanity.

Traumatic experiences keep us chained to our launching pads. Healing is not so certain for those whose psychological damage is so profound. I have both witnessed and experienced great benefit from many people who have meditated upon their own unique illness and suffering, and we have had, literally, our trauma points reveal themselves to us, sometimes taking the form of actual ‘beings” who have taken residence within the body/mind of the sufferer.

Most mentally ill people would benefit greatly from trauma therapy. I remain hopeful that all mentally ill people will find a measure of healing for themselves, once the conditions for the application of that miracle are better supported within our society, or are mastered by individual healers within consciousness, and integrated within our collective experience…

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

– Nelson Mandela

Thank you, Donelle.

Donelle Mae Flick Paullin (2/18/1955—11/20/2022)

Sean Tucker

I first met Sean Tucker in 1972, when he moved into our area from his mother’s home in Colorado.  His father was estranged from his mother.  His father was a manager with the Bureau Of Indian Affairs, and Sean had chosen to live with him.  He drove a perfect four door baby blue 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, which was his distinctive chariot for most of the time that I knew him as a youth.  Sean had long hair, and always wore it in a pony tail.  We met at the Owen Sabin Occupational Skills Center, where I was learning Electrical Construction, and he was learning Printing.   Sean was a handsome young man, and he really had an easy time with dating women.

We both liked to smoke pot and to drink.  But Sean’s favorite drink was wine, which I did not develop a real love for.  We used to visit the Henry Endre’s Winery along Clackamas River Drive, and purchase half gallons of Mead, Rhubard, or whatever the seasonal wine choice was.  The winery did not ask for age identification, so we took advantage of that laxity frequently.

Sean became my best, best friend.  We did so much together, and I looked forward to having adventures with him, all the way until he joined the Air Force in 1978.  We took long drives out into the country, we played pinball at all of the local bowling alleys and arcades, we partied with all of the other local party animals on weekends, and we shared many family events and meals at my parents’ home.  Sean did not include me in his family events, however.  I had many drinking and using friends, but Sean seemed to exist in another realm for me, where spirit joined with love and friendship and shared values and meaning.  We would listen to Alan Watts on Saturday night, and while “high” sometimes laugh and giggle together at Alan’s wisdom and insight, though we might catch an occasional AHA! from our listening efforts.

We talked a lot about what God might be, and how we might encounter it in our journeys.  Sean was not a church goer, nor was I, so we were not limited by structured understandings at that time.  We would play with meditation sometimes, after hearing that a more prolonged “high” could be experienced through meditation than could be obtained through the use of drugs and alcohol.  One time I was meditating in a full lotus position on the pool table in my parents’ home basement, and my mother saw me, and was surprised and shocked by what she witnessed.  I was embarrassed by her discomfort with me, and shortly after that, ceased all attempts at meditation.

Late in 1977, when Donelle was in the middle of another relapse into schizophrenia, Sean, Donelle, and I undertook a road trip through much of Oregon in my 1962 Buick Skylark.  We traveled through much of the Oregon Coast, into Crater Lake, where we illegally camped along the lake rim, and Eastern Oregon around the Bend area.  Sean and I had our normal complement of pot and alcohol, as well as a couple of doses of powerful psychedelics, and Donelle had her mental illness, and all of the sometimes bizarre manifestations of it.  Sean had known my wife almost since the beginning of my relationship with her, and he was always a kind, supportive presence for her.  But, Donelle’s symptoms were hard to understand, and we were both quite helpless and felt out of control in the face of her disease of the mind.

One evening, we all sat around the campfire, and Donelle continued her sometimes bizarre behavior.  She was hearing some sort of collection of voices, and she would talk to herself, and sometimes confuse what we were talking about with what was going on in the secrecy of her own mind.  Sean and I would cast uncomfortable facial expressions to each other, and try to engage in conversation with each other solely, especially in the moments when Donelle became overly detached and unresponsive.  In a moment of insight, I spoke of my helplessness in the face of managing Donelle’s disease and treatment, and the futility of all of my attempts at understanding her mental illness.

I remembered that I had a form of LSD with me, which was a powerful mind expanding drug, also known for creating temporary symptoms resembling a form of mental illness.  It was then that I wanted to take the drug, and see if it would provide any insights into Donelle’s mindset, as well as how I might manage my relationship with Donelle.  Sean thought that I should give up on that thought, and stick to the pot and alcohol.  But I insisted, and I took the psychedelic.  I did not receive the desired illumination, but it showed that my deepest desire was to be of help to Donelle, as well as to try to understand the nature of mental illness, and how to bring a measure of healing to a most difficult life situation.

Sean and my sister Pam started seeing each other in 1975.  I was pretty annoyed to hear about it, thinking that I needed to take a shower after hearing about their short term relationship.  It felt a little like inbreeding to me.  Pam told me at a birthday dinner at a local Scottish pub in 2022 that she ended the “relationship” because Sean was too boring.  Well, I told her about some of the stories of Sean’s sexploits from 1973 until he started manning up with her, and I asked if she ever contracted any std’s.  I knew that this was slumming on at least one of their parts. That flew high with us, as we both erupted in laughter.

Sean went into the Air Force in 1978, and married a woman named Natty who owned a bar in the Philippines.  She was of Christian orientation, and Sean adopted the fundamentalist mentality through the course of his relationship with that woman.  A deep, spiritual brotherhood was to be gradually, over many years fade into nothing but memories, as his work, family, and Christian orientation took him far, far away from the possibility of a shared heart and friendship.  When I got married in 1979, my first choice for best man would have been Sean, had he been available.  I settled on Dan Dietz and Randy Olson, my other best friends, but these two just did not share quite the same spirit with me as Sean did during this era of my life.

I had one amazing experience around Sean, and it revolves around the time the rock group Heart was to come to town in 1984, to play an outdoor concert at Delta Park.  I had not heard from Sean for over four years at this point, as we  both had become quite busy in our respective lives.  Sean was stationed in Madrid, Spain at the time, and he did not ever write or telephone me, nor did I back to him.  I awoke one Saturday morning, in August of 1984, and I JUST KNEW THAT SEAN WAS ABOUT TO CALL ME.  No sooner than I had the thought, Sean called me, and told me that he was going on leave, and would be coming to Portland, during the same week that Heart was to play.  We were both quite excited about the prospects.

As I looked at my life’s history, at times I listened to the call from its Mystery.

It was hard to reestablish our connection when he arrived, however, as he seemed to have a lot of agendas that did not include me.  We did attend the Heart performance together, yet he got so drunk on Henry Endre’s wine that he became almost insane, and out of touch with me.  When it was time for Sean to fly back to Madrid, we promised each other that we would stay better in touch, but we both reneged over the years.

In 1986, after the Challenger disaster, and after my failed suicide attempt, I called Sean, who was still in Madrid.  It was never to happen, of course.  The full story is reported later.

We rarely contacted each other again, except through an occasional phone call, or, with the advent of the internet, an email.  In 2013, Sharon and I were car traveling through the southwest of America, and I contacted Sean to see if he could receive company for a day.  He could, and we drove 800 miles out of our way to travel up to Colorado Springs to visit with Sean, Natty, and their boys.  Sean immediately took me aside, and warned me not to talk about our past, or anything we had done together in the presence of his family.  I was left with nothing to talk about with Sean, except his religious beliefs, my spiritual beliefs, and superficial matters around employment and family.

They belonged to that nationally famous “super church” New Life Church, in Colorado Springs, the same one that was wracked with scandal when the minister, Ted Haggard was found to be using speed and paying to have sex with gay men.  I already had my suspicions about organized religion in the first place, even before all of the modern scandals around big churches and organized religion started erupting around our country.. Sharon and I had belonged to a local “super church” that had collapsed because of legal problems, and we knew firsthand that the marriage of congregation size and spirituality was a potentially fatal bond. Natty and Sean took us on a nice sightseeing tour for the afternoon, and talk of religion arose again.  This time,  Sharon and I rebuffed all attempts by the two of them to share our beliefs with them, for we intuited that they were enmeshed in this fundamentalist understanding, and that our experiences and beliefs would be considered blasphemy to them.  I sensed that the friendship was over, and I was very sad.  We only stayed the night, and in the morning, left for home.  I then realized that I may never see Sean again.

Here is a message that I ever sent to Sean, which happened right after my father’s death.

(from email of 10/02/2017)

Sean,
Thank you for your heart-felt sentiments.  I have been my father’s primary caregiver since 2009, when my mother died.  My father suffered from dementia, and depression and loneliness, since then (my mother thought that he was developing Alzheimer’s two years prior to her death, but he never forgot Pam’s and my name, though he did forget my wife’s name the last week of his life).

I went to the doctor with my father in January, trying to qualify Dad for hospice, but, incredibly, his physical health was not poor enough to qualify, even though he was deteriorating.  My biggest concern in January was that my father was going to outlive me, and that my sister would put him in a nursing home, as she had not explored or developed the “caregiver mentality”.  Anyway, with several of my peers already having died from brain cancer or heart disease, or suicide, I have been dealing with what is true and important to maintaining the highest quality of life for myself, and for those I share love and friendship with.

It all comes down to this, Sean.  Do you want to continue to be a dying voice from my past, or part of a living, loving presence in the Now?  That is a decision we both must make.  Phone messages and email messages cannot resurrect a dying relationship, only a truly shared journey together can.  This Requires sharing both space and time together, and a commitment to sharing truth, values, and Spirit.
I loved you and valued you as a friend when you were willing and  able to be present in my life. Almost 35 years have passed since that has happened.  I am in the home stretch of life, and gathering those together who are ready, willing, and able to truly share in these precious few moments we all have left.

Thanks for the time shared.  Memories cannot sustain me now. Presence, and the loving of others in the present moment gives me life, and renews my heart daily.  It is just too painful for me to pretend that we can continue being friends under these circumstances.  Either we have a lot to talk about, and find a new way to connect, and be real friends, or the grave site for our friendship for has already been dug, awaiting more time for the dirt to be thrown over our memories.
With love, and sorrow,
Bruce

Relationships sometimes end well before the body dies, or before the last time we say goodbye to each other.  I have experienced this sad fact several times over the course of my life.  This is a heartbreaking process, and the death of a relationship can cause a sense of loss as deep as the actual death of a person. I must grieve the loss of a friend, letting go of any illusions of future connections, and attempt to finish my emotional and spiritual commitments to the person.. This is hard stuff, and I forgive myself for “kicking the can down the road” for so many years.  I always held out hope that somehow I could resume a friendship that had actually died more than a generation ago.  The despair was crushing, though through that door the next step in life can be taken into the unknown.

Thank you, Sean Tucker

My 21st birthday

I was asked on my birthday in 2017 what my most “memorable” birthday was, and here, to the best of my recollection, is an account of the near death experience.  I was 21 years old, and my best friend at that time, Dan Dietz (RIP), and John Durkin, went with me to the Faucet Tavern. I was already a “seasoned drunk” by the time I had arrived at the age of 21, but being able to “legally” enter taverns and bars seemed like a big deal at the time (I had been getting into bars since I was 16 years old, usually accompanied by Dan). The southwest Portland Faucet tavern seemed like a great place to visit, as it was famous for its turtle races, and its all-around “party hardy” atmosphere.

Dan and I bought a bottle of booze, and we kept it in the trunk of his car, to “sip” from, in between beers at the tavern. I started out my birthday evening by playing several games of pool, gambling $5 a game with some “locals”. At that time of my life, I was a very good pool player, and I removed a few bucks from some very unhappy patrons. One unhappy patron followed me out to Dan’s car, where I was grabbing a swig off of a whisky bottle. He let me know that he did not like me having so much fun at his expense, and tried to fight with me. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but somehow the fight got “postponed”.

I walked back into the tavern, and enjoyed a couple more beers with Dan and John, and played some more pool. I was quite the “happy drunk”, though my behavior did not make the outraged individual I had already taken $20 from feel any better about me. The next time I walked out to Dan’s car, that unhappy man grabbed two of his friends, and they all tried to “teach me a lesson”. Dan looked out from the tavern door at his car, and saw that I was in trouble, and secured the bar manager. But it was too late, one guy pulled a knife, and the fight was on. There were a few lunges at me with the knife, and a couple of punches thrown (none quite hit me). There was a lot of loud voices, and some yelling and screaming.

The manager called the police, but at that same moment, the guy with the knife took a final stab at me. According to the reports from Dan, I spun kicked the knife out of his hand (which was an act of pure, unadulterated luck on my part), and then I threatened to take his head off with the next kick. The sirens of the police cars about to arrive there scared the three attackers away, and it also scared Dan and John, who quickly threw me into the car, and we drove off up Beaverton Hillsdale Highway towards Wilson High School.

I got angry with Dan for not coming out to help me with the attackers, and he told me that calling the police was the best that he could do. He then not so politely, invited me to walk home from close to Wilson HIgh, to Milwaukie, about 7 miles or so. I was fortunate to make it home in one piece, and not be arrested for being drunk in public, or for drunken walking. I visited Dan the next day, and apologized to him. He was in really bad shape, and he was still pretty hung over. And he was the designated driver!

Sadly, Dan and I ceased being best friends in 1981, after he assaulted my wife of that time, Donelle, while she was drunk and insane. Dan died of a heart attack around 1996, not even making it to 45 years of age. Many of my other drinking and drugging buddies have also died young, through suicide or disease, or are presently disabled due to the excesses of their young adulthood.  I met John Durkin several times over my construction career, as he was a safety contractor, eventually forming Sanderson Safety.  The last time that I saw John was right after Dan’s death, when we contemplated together whether to attend his funeral.  I did not, but John did.

I “heard” Dan Dietz’s laughter (hey, hey, hey!) the day after his death, and I almost drove off of the freeway, on I-205 on my way home from work at Blue Heron Paper Mill, where both John Durkin and I were subcontractors, or working for subcontractors, for the paper mill.

I became “sober” in 1987, after my own suicide attempts led me into an epic underworld journey. It is the stuff of movies, and of nightmares, will be documented later. %I am still “21 years old”, but with 47 years of extra experience! The last few years have been pretty sober, however, with a couple of minor slips. The world rests a little easier because of my sobriety, I am sure!

I know that I rest easier.

Life can be some kind of fun, huh? 

What a long, strange, miraculous, healing and redemptive trip it has been.

 

 

Thanks, Dan Dietz

US Postal Service

I had some enriching experiences with my employment at the US Postal Service, as well as my attempts at “higher education”.  I worked as a floor clerk, a letter sorting machine operator, and finally as a maintenance mechanic/electronic technician for a total of ten years, beginning in 1975, when I took a summer job with the US Postal Service during my summer break between my sophomore and junior years.  This was the same office that my father worked out of, and it certainly was not my dream job.  I was supposed to quit work when fall term for my junior year began, but instead I continued full time swing shift work, while going to school full time during the day. Add to that time management challenge was trying to manage my alcohol abuse and drug addiction, and a mentally ill significant other, and it was pretty easy to see that this story was not to have a happy conclusion.

I ended up dropping out of college my senior year, with few credits left to secure to get a degree, and even fewer units of personal desire to do so. School had the potential to become all-consuming, and I probably needed sobriety to have any hope in the first place.  So the best decision for a practicing alcoholic/addict is to keep the job I already had, and give up on the degree for a while.  That was the second major life goal that I literally smoked and pissed away, after resigning from the ROTC my sophomore year.  .

I met some really interesting characters while working at the main office of the US Postal Service.  Some were incredibly damaged human beings, while there were a few diamonds who found a way to sparkle.  Larry was a Vietnam veteran from the Marine Corps, and he would tell stories derived from the front lines of the war.  He was involved in the fragging of an American Lieutenant, and that story disgusts me to this day.  Greg worked in the maintenance department, and he would funnel stories and literature to me about the right-wing American patriot movement, its militias, and their plans to take over the country with the help of the US military when the right American president is elected (actually, a president a lot like Donald Trump).  Paul and I spent a lot of time together after work, drinking and video gaming until all hours of the morning after work.  But he had a dark side as well, and I suspected him of being the arsonist who set fire to his disabled Uncle’s home, which resulted in his uncle’s death. But I met some good people, as well, including David Valdivia, who I still am in contact with, mainly with him being my late father’s and my insurance agent.  He left his postal career before the idea that he could do nothing else imprisoned him.

I was eventually promoted onto the maintenance team, where I started as a maintenance mechanic in 1980.  What I had hoped to become was an electronic technician trainee.  I did work on some older mechanical or electrical-mechanical mail sorting gear for a couple of years, which was quite boring.  Because I was the new low guy on the totem pole, I was last in line for all promotions, no matter how qualified, or unqualified, I was for any new or more favorable positions that opened up.

About one year before the start of the maintenance position, I again I applied at the University of Portland Engineering Department for readmission, but they were still unimpressed with me because of my meteoric fall from academic grace 3 years earlier.  I went from a being a scholarship student, with a strong B+ average in college, with advanced math placement, to a student who no longer showed up in class.  I apparently did not show the right initial interest, because I was told to attend a community college for a year, to prove that I was really interested in going to school.  So I attended Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus, for the 1979-1980 school year, to see if I still “had it in me”, getting straight A’s in the most difficult science and math courses offered.  I also took some philosophy and religion based courses, knowing that they would help me with the University of Portland readmission project that I was undertaking.  So now I get word that I am readmitted to U of P, at about the same time that my new maintenance position begins.  Will this new marriage work?

Since I was a new hire into the Maintenance Department, headed by John Zimpleman, I was relegated to performing the least favorable duties that the Main Post Office had to offer.  I was usually blowing dust off of equipment, tightening conveyor belts, replacing motors, resetting photocells, adjusting timing on the parcel sorting machine, or other sundry and mundane tasks that my precedents had dutifully performed prior to my “advancement” into their ranks. Right after I started, I was referred to the Employee Assistance Program, which was run internally to the US Postal Service.  My attendance had been fairly poor up to this point while I was a clerk, so this was a carryover from those days, too.  Larry and Mike tried to befriend me, and tried to get me to admit that drinking and/or drugging had something to do with the poor attendance, but I stood unaffected by their suggestions.  I had to go to 5 AA meeting to meet the requirements of the EAP, which I did, but I had a quart of beer stashed under my car seat for immediate consumption after each meeting, so the “message” fell on carbonated ears.

Well, after I worked for less than a month on graveyard shift I KNEW THAT I NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.   So, once again I combined work and school, and this time I knew that I was going to succeed, since Donelle was no longer in the picture, at least at this point (she was to return in the latter part of 1981), and I thus would be able to retain my focus, and not collapse into the confusing quagmire that I fell into after from trying to maintain a marriage with a troubled person, work and go to school at the same time, like I attempted 3-6 years previously.

From 1981-1983 I attended the University of Portland while working graveyard shift at the US Postal Service.  I did not have time to drink alcohol excessively, except for on weekends.  For the first year, I had great grades, perfect attendance, and a lot of hope for myself until I hit the last semester of my junior year. During the same period, Donelle came back into my life, after I found her hitchhiking along a busy road near my parents’ home.  She had been released from Dammasch State Hospital, and placed in an apartment complex on Roethe Rd. near my parent’s old home near Rex Putnam High School.  She was on Social Security Disability, and was receiving outpatient care as needed for her mental illness.  I did not immediately resume my marriage with Donelle, however, and we were still legally separated since the original commitment to Dammasch.

Eventually, after several weeks of contact with Donelle, I was encouraged enough by her progress to want to resume our marriage.  On the night before I was to move back in with her, my friend Paul, from the letter sorting machine gig, and I went out and really tied one on.  While in a bar near his home in northeast Portland, we came upon two female co-workers from the LSM’s, Candy and Lorna.  Candy was six foot tall, attractive, but outweighed me by forty pounds.  Lorna was a redhead, of reasonable dimensions, but very plain looking.  Paul had partied with both of them in the past, so he knew them quite well.  I had no idea what was about to ensue, however.

In a near blackout state, I accompanied Paul, and the two women, over to Paul’s house, where we continued drinking, smoking pot, and playing some video games.  I was ready to go to sleep, when Paul took off into the kitchen with the two women.  When he returned, I asked him if I could sleep on his bean bag chair.  With a big grin he proclaimed

“Why hell yes, you can.  But first, you get to pick which woman you are sleeping with tonight!”

“Umm, Paul, I am not really prepared for this one.  Uh, uh, uh, Candy, would you like to stay and talk with me until I fall asleep?”

The truth be known is that I had no desire for either woman.  They were not appealing to me in the least, yet I selected Candy out of some sort of need to protect the woman’s feelings.   Candy was quite pleased to join with me in Paul’s living room, where the bean bag chair was located.  Lorna accompanied Paul into his bedroom, and they closed the door behind them.  I was still quite drunk, yet I felt a little self-conscious.  We could hear laughter and raucous activity coming from Paul’s room, and we figured out what must be going  on.  Somehow, without me remembering exactly how, my pants disappeared off of my body, as well as all of Candy’s clothes.

I awoke the next day, naked, and laying beside Candy, who was still asleep.  I got up, wrote a note apologizing to Candy, and stated that I had made a mistake, and to please accept my forgiveness for having sex with her while drunk (while sober, I NEVER WOULD HAVE CONSIDERED SUCH A PARTNER FOR LOVEMAKING). I felt diminished somehow, for having sex with her.  For the next two months, she chased after me at work, called me at home, and eventually gave up, when I never returned her calls, and continued to spurn her.  Some disparaging writing ended up on the walls of the bathroom stalls in the Post Office women’s bathrooms about me and my penis, which brought huge laughs to the janitorial core, and, eventually, to the maintenance core, who shared the same locker room.  The joke was that Candy might be better suited to maintaining the Postal Service’s equipment, where blowing the dust off of equipment was a nightly endeavor.  Ouch, emotionally, for both of us.  I felt quite embarrassed, and it took way too long to live that one down.  I also felt bad, because even though I did not technically cheat on my wife, I was feeling like I had.

My self-destruct cycle resumed, and I restarted my active party mode, with my attendance at work tanking.  My attitude at even being there was in the dumps, as well.  I moved Donelle into the apartment in Milwaukie, and I joined her there, much to the disappointment of my parents, who continued to warn me about the potential for another horrible outcome.  She, of course, had that breakdown, resulting in the rape by Dan Dietz alluded to earlier.

While living across the street from Donelle’s apartment on Harrison in Milwaukie, after her breakdown, my father came to live with me for about three months.  He had been kicked out of his house by my mother, after she found out about his ongoing affair with the company nurse.  I was not too impressed with my life and my family, having an insane wife, and my parents marriage in a state of collapse, and now  my own father spending time in my own apartment, when he wasn’t sleeping at his girlfriends’ home.  My new normal was anything but normal, yet I seemed to have few choices.  Dad eventually had to end his relationship with the nurse, and moved back to his own home.  I had warned him that I would not be too friendly with him if he left my mother, so it would be best if he could work things out with her.  Donelle was kicked out of her apartment across the street, for being too disruptive during her breakdown.  Her neighbors did not appreciate her talking loudly to herself at all hours of the day and night, as well as her bizarre behavior.  I took her in, but it was really difficult for me, as well.  Her middle of the night screams and crying and carrying on were too much for me, as well.  I was finally able to force her to go back to her psychiatrist, and get on the latest medications for schizophrenia, which helped her immensely.

We decided to move to Cedar Hills Apartments, the same apartment complex that Randy Olson was living in.  I quit going to school once again, this time leaving the Electronic Engineering/Computer Engineering degree on the garbage pile, with just one year to completion.  My addictions resumed in earnest, with my introduction to Gary Graham, a local cocaine dealer and serious party monster and new friend.  Donelle was becoming too burdensome, demanding to go out almost every night to “party” and listen to live rock and roll music, and she eventually collapsed into yet another “nervous breakdown” by early 1983, so I was between a “rock” and a hard place.  I finally attempted to “kick her out” of our apartment, which she initially agreed to go, to hang out with her new “rock and roll” friends.  I was already finished with enabling and supporting her mental illness, and I was extracting myself from years of guilt and shame around my relationship with her and her illness.

One day, when she came back to the apartment after a night of partying with her new friends, I insisted that she get all of her clothes, and leave my unit for good.  She balked, and a yelling match ensued.  I opened the door, and pushed her out of the door, after she started pushing at me.  She called the police, and we were both arrested for Class C felonious assault.  Randy picked me up within two hours of incarceration, but Donelle had no one to bail her out, so she sat in the jail overnight.  We both had to appear in court the next week, and the charges against both of us were dropped, but she was advised to not step foot into my apartment again without permission.

I met Cindy Dahl, a letter sorting machine clerk, in 1983.  I was invited out to Lung Fungs near 82nd avenue, and another letter sorting machine clerk introduced us one night.  This was during the period of time during the final nervous breakdown that I could tolerate of Donelle’s.  It is a funny thing, I had no intention of going to bed with Cindy, but that night, we hit it off so well that she came home with me that evening, and we had a wildly great time together.  We slept in the same bed, and bedroom, that I shared with my estranged wife, who was now going out on her own, and not coming back some evenings.  I never asked where she was, because I did not want to face one of my Toxic masculine internal stories that I told myself, that if my wife ever cheated on me, I would kill her.  Well,Donelle walked through the door that very next morning, while we were still in bed, and grabbed some clean panties out of the top drawer of her dresser, smiled, said hello, and left.  That old toxic need to punish a cheating wife just miraculously disappeared, when I saw that we both appeared happier by our final separation from each other.

My relationship with Cindy did not last long, however  She tried to get me to hook up with both her and her very attractive female roommate, but I was too insecure to even consider threesomes and the complex possibilities of interrelationship.   After getting an assignment to travel to Norman, Oklahoma for three weeks more of training, Cindy told me that she was getting her breasts enhanced during the period of time that I was gone.  She was warm to me before I left, but when I came back, she wanted nothing to do with me, and I did not even get a chance to look at, let alone feel, her new chest ornaments.

I had learned a lot about computer and electronic engineering up to this point, and my new education placed me well ahead of most of my peers, and caused some concern among some co-workers who thought that I might try to parlay this education into a pogo stick to jump over their place on the seniority roster.  Shortly after joining ranks with the maintenance department, I was sent to Normal Oklahoma for training on troubleshooting and repairing some of their letter sorting equipment.  This was the first time that I had ever flown on an airplane, and it was my first great adventure by myself away from home.  I stayed in the University of Oklahoma’s student dormitory, which was shared with the USPS during the summer months for all students.  My roommate was Bill Y of New York City, who also was a maintenance mechanic/electrician from that area.  He happened to be a black man, and he is the first black person I ever had any relationship with, other than through basketball adventures throughout Portland that I used to engage in.  Bill was damaged goods, being a veteran of Vietnam, and still suffering from some very concerning aggressive tendencies and attitudes.  But, somehow, he held himself together.

One Saturday evening, six of us Post Office Maintenance Trainees drove a substantial distance from Norman to a bar in Oklahoma City.  There were five African-Americans, including my roommate Bill, and Jermaine, from New Jersey (who had a huge bag of weed that he just grabbed into and freely distributed to all who liked to partake) and me, the one pale faced party warrior.  I loved being with these guys, and I have never experienced more camaraderie and mutual respect than running with this group of men.  There was a bonding that I just did not understand, but I later learned one of the fundamental tenets of their group energy.

When we arrived, the parking lot was nearly full.  It was a huge club, with all sorts of action going on outside, and, I was to see, inside as well.  We found a decent parking spot, and all walked up to the door together.  Bill led the way, and the greeter held us all up, because of me.  They did not allow “white people” into their place.  Bill explained to the man that I was part of their team, and I was not a “white person”.  The door man told Bill that he would have to register me with the club, and so I was signed into the club, with the other five people with me signing the same paper, vouching for me.  I was told that I was not to dance with any of the black girls, and to keep with my group so as to keep the peace.  The place had several hundred black people partying and carrying on, and I got more than my share of searching, and many times, dirty looks.  Somehow I kept my cool, and paranoia would not have helped me that evening.  I settled in eventually, and enjoyed a couple of strong drinks.  Bill went outside, to share a joint with Jermaine, while the rest of us hung out to one side of the dance floor.

Suddenly, Bill came back in, with Jermaine in tow, and started waving his gun around in the air.  He started yelling very loudly, proclaiming

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt here!”

and authoritatively stated that someone had blocked our car in, and unless they moved their car immediately, someone was going to get hurt.  My other three friends surrounded me, and we all started walking to the door, with the express intention of leaving without anybody slowing us down.  A parting of the crowd, like Moses with the Red Sea, occurred, and we made it outside, awaiting the offending driver to move his vehicle.  Two tough looking dudes came outside, with a following entourage of onlookers, and moved the car, all the while with Bill still waving his firearm in  the air.

The offending car was moved, we all piled into the rental car, and Bill assumed the driver seat, laying the gun in his lap.  We tore out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell, and we all watched to make sure that we were not followed.  Bill later expressed one of his fundamental values, which was that we have to be willing to lay our lives on the line for our friends, and make whatever sacrifice that is necessary to protect each other from danger.  I began to really understand why I had never felt so safe and protected while with this group of men.  This was the civilian equivalent of a small military squad in a war zone, which, apparently, Bill still felt that he was in.  I have never felt this way with any other group of people in my life.  It was exhilarating, fun, bonding, challenging, hair raising, and enlightening to run with this group for three solid weeks.  I was someone I had never been before, respected, accepted, and honored as being a part of a family, where we were accountable for each others’ success and safety.  I was accepted into the field of human energy where I was unconditionally accepted as a brother, and a friend.

Well, I returned back to the everyday, boring world that I had left from after the training.  I still worked graveyard shift, and I continued to drink heavily every morning after work until around noon.   And my life entered full collapse mode with myself, and with my employer.  My employer was fed up with my poor attendance at work, and I had already lapsed into the severe depression and anxiety, and alcohol and pot were just not getting the job done.  It was suggested that I try the Physicians and Surgeons Hospital Care Unit for alcoholic recovery by our EAP (employee assistance program).  After weighing my options, which I really did not have any, I accepted alcoholic recovery as a good option, and checked into the unit in April of 1984.  The first two days, I basically spent in bed, while they detoxed me from any physical addiction symptoms through the use of the drug Librium.  That first day I was, basically, unconscious, by the request of the attending physician.

I spent thirty days in the unit.  I met many other people who were also attempting recovery.  My roommate was Tom Cravens, a man who had spent more than his share of time in trouble with the law, and with his drinking.  He became like a big brother to me while I was there.  Tom told me about his relationship with Steven Kessler and the 1968 Oregon State Prison riot.  That information seemed inconsequential at the time, but Kessler’s life wreckage would subsequently impact my life directly, in 1986-1987.  I befriended an ex-Hell’s Angel’s motorcycle gang member by the name of Scott.  Herm Gilliam (now deceased) of the 1977 Portland Trailblazer championship team was there.  So I was not alone in recovery, and it eventually became a unique, healing experience.  I almost came to regard the group therapy, talking sessions, and attempts at personal inventory to be like taking a vacation from life. My personal inventories were pretty weak, and appeared to be only people pleasing efforts, which was the best that I could do at the time.  My favorite past time was smoking cigarettes, and I was up to four packs a day of smoking Player menthol 100’s, probably the most toxic kind of cigarette on the market.

Claire was my personal counselor, and she also happened to be a Four Square Church minister, so I sure got a lot of Christian slanted recovery information, as well.  I was not too big on Christianity when I got in there. Claire was an attractive woman, and that alone helped to keep my attention focused on the good messages that she was trying to communicate to the groups, and to me as an individual.  I was not very fertile ground, with fairly shallow spiritual and emotional soil at the time. I had spent about a month in intensive study of Christianity in December of 1980, spurred by the course work of a University of Portland Theology class that I was required to attend. which somehow had kept me sober for close to a month, as well. But I met the  three drug worshiping and rich Deering brothers (sons of a famous Texas doctor) in January of 1981 whose access to the alternative “higher powers” of highest quality drugs captivated me, and that first adult Christian leaning quickly evaporated.

The last three days I was at the Care Unit, I started to feel the stress of impending release.  It was easy stay clean and sober in the hospital, but the thought of carrying a new attitude towards sobriety that had not yet really taken root into the real world was quite threatening.  We were set up with phone numbers of fellow graduates, and the internal counselors, just in case we were to need any support.  We had a family meeting the night before release, where the patients all had their family members attend, so they could get a little crash course in how to live with the recovering alcoholic.  My parents attended, and I learned something about my father that was pretty disturbing.  My father had internalized my struggle so much, that he thought that he needed to stop alcohol, that somehow I was in the Care Unit because of his drinking.  It took the therapist a long time to  explain to my father that the drinking problem was my own, and not his. My therapist noted to me later that she saw that my father showed characteristics of a man attempting to live his life through his son, which was why my addictions and alcoholism impacted him so severely.

I was discharged back to my home that I shared with Randy Olson, I was regularly attending Hinson Baptist Church at the encouragement of another Care Unit graduate.  I started attending AA meetings yet again at the Alano Club on Lovejoy, as a direct result of my attendance at the Care Unit.  Since I live only 500 yards from the Alano Club, I did not have too many excuses for not attending meetings, but I found a few, anyway.  Randy continued his beer drinking behavior undeterred by my sobriety, which suited me just fine.

Alas, I had to return back to work, which I loathed, but went ahead and gave it my best shot.  After repeatedly being denied an opportunity to take the same training that my peers in the electronic tech core were receiving, I applied directly to the training facility in Norman Oklahoma to challenge one of the preliminary courses in computer logic that the technicians were required to pass in order to move forward.  My local employer decided I needed some training in maintaining the manual letter sorting machine, so they sent me back to Norman in May of 1984, which is a significant date because I also had just one month of sobriety at this point, having just “graduated” from the Care Unit.

The national US Postal Service Training Center was located, adjacent to the University of Oklahoma campus, and we had full access to their campus and sports facilities, which was awesome.  I passed the regular training with flying colors, and on the last day was my test scheduled for the class challenge.  I breezed through the written portion of the test, on computer logic and electronic design, by scoring 70 out of 70 correct.  The practical portion of the exam I was quite concerned about, as it referred to equipment that I had no training or background on.  I only needed to answer one question out of the last 6 correctly to successfully challenge this course, and I could not do it.  It was right there that I decided that when I got home to Portland, I was going to get drunk.  I called my friend Craig, and requested that he meet me at the airport to pick me up.  I WAS BUYING!!  As Spirit would have it, my Care Unit counselor Claire Z got onto our airplane on our layover in Denver, and she rode the trip back to Portland on my plane.  I avoided her like she had the plague, and I never let her know that I was on the airplane.  The problem here is that I had already said YES to relapse, NO to sobriety, and  to talk with Claire would have helped me stay sober, which was not what I wanted.

Looking at my history, I saw that I often resisted its healing Mystery

Thanks, US Postal Service

Diane (Di Di) McCloud

I wrote my first love poem in 1984, when I became lovers with a woman by the name of Diane (Di Di) McCloud.  I had first met Di Di while she was running with Gary, a cocaine dealer and friend to both me and Randy Olson.  Gary and I became friends, and Gary eventually stored his money and cocaine in a safe house, which happened to be the home that I lived in.  How unlucky was that for me!  I got the privilege of running with the same important people that Gary did, including prominent local rock and roll DJ’s, as well as the best local rock and roll bands.  And, during this time, I started to fantasize about someday hooking up with his sweetie, but I never had any intention of having an affair with her.  Somehow, she stayed with Gary for over two years.  Di Di was quite the free spirit, as well as a drug addict, so Gary’s appeal may have been enhanced by his constant supply of drugs.

Randy and I were living near downtown Portland at the time  We lived on the 22nd floor of the Panorama Tower, and it was at this home that Randy first brought Di Di, who had recently broken up with Gary, into our shared lives.  She hung out with Randy for a few days, then lost interest in him.  Somehow, we hooked up after that, early in the summer of 1984, and this most beautiful woman professed her love and willingness to stay connected with me shortly after that.  I was blown away, as she was the most attractive, sexy woman I had ever seen.  I was so inspired by my relationship with Di Di, that I wrote my first love poem in 1984.  She treasured the poem, and actually sought another copy of it shortly before her own death early in 1987.  She was to become the first person that I felt I had ever truly loved, but we had to let each other go after a short period of time.

Di Di became a part of myself and my consciousness, and I had one profound dream with her in it, shortly after her death.  In the dream, I am confronted by a man exhibiting aggressive, unkind, abusive behavior.  In the dream, I am appalled, disgusted, and threatened by his manner.  I call out to a policeman, imploring him to arrest that man, and protect all of us from his violence.  Di Di then walks up to me in the dream, taking the policeman’s place, and states quite plainly that for love to reappear in my life, in all of its fullness, I must first “arrest” all of these negative qualities within myself, and rehabilitate my own passions, then love will reappear.  The dream ends, but the journey continues.

Though hibernating for oh so long

And hiding from the deep pain of winters’ chill

Love reawakens to sing its special song

So for how much longer can we be still?

With eyes that melt winters’ deepest snow

A tender touch that always seem to say

That all we will ever need to know

Will be learned along Love’s way

Two minds that were brought together

Two hearts that seek to share,

Two bodies that need no tether

Two become one, though still a pair

Heavenly nights and rapturous mornings,

Love promises through all of our years,

The sweet, stirring music of love sings

For two souls who now have the ears to hear.

True love can be the source of dreams

For two hearts continuing to awaken.

I pray that we are all each other seems

And share in Love’s next journey taken.

Written for Di Di, in 1984.

Thanks, Di Di McCloud

Alcindia Ford

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Alcindia represents an era with great overall darkness in my life.  I met Alcindia at “Bannisters”, a bar in Beaverton, after Randy and I moved into an apartment near 117th avenue late in the summer of 1984.  I danced with her one evening at the bar, then I brought her back home to the apartment that I shared with Randy.  She was a cute younger woman, who worked at the Aloha Intel Fab as a chip maker.  I don’t know what I was thinking at the time, other than I was a lonely man, and Alcindia might be a good short term friend.  We hooked up that first night, and there were no strings attached, at least not initially.

.

I continued to live with Randy, while still working the graveyard shift as a maintenance electrician.  Randy had a live-in girlfriend at the time, by the name of Claudia.  Randy thought that she might have psychological issues, noticing that she might be manic/depressive, or something along those lines.  She had come from another relationship where she lived with three guys, at least one of who was bi-sexual, and, according to Randy, she may have had relations with all three men over a period of time.  I rarely talked with Claudia, not knowing exactly what to think of her, and my schedule kept me away from Randy and her the vast majority of the time. The week following Alcindia spending the night at our apartment, Claudia became “interested” in me and my life for some reason.  I did not think much of it initially.  One morning, I came home from work, showered and went to bed at about 8:30.  Randy had already left for work, so it was just sleepy me and Claudia.  I was just falling asleep when my bed bounced, and a naked Claudia appeared next to me in bed.  Not knowing what to think or what to do about it, nature somehow knew what to do, and did so three times, and left me wondering how the hell I was going to explain this one to Randy. I did not tell Randy right away, feeling shame and remorse. 

.

I continued to see Alcindia, who came over on my weekend and spent one more night with me at our apartment.  Since we were just “friends” there was no need to tell her about my indiscretions.  The next day I was visiting with her and and her friend Baby at their apartment, trying to get to know Alcindia better.  Out of the blue, she starts telling a story to Baby about another girlfriend’s boyfriend who slept with his best friends’ girlfriend while his best friend went to work.  As she told her story, she repeated back to Baby, and to me, some of the language that was used during my soiree with Claudia, even recalling that there were three sexual interludes.  I was to learn, at a much later time, that she had placed a voice activated recorder under my bed.  I had my suspicions, but never confronted her about her “story” to Baby.

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As fate would have it, Alcindia also had sexual abuse issues in her background, which definitely impacted our 16 month relationship in various ways.  But, these issues did not lead her into the psychosis like it probably did with my ex-wife.   Unlike my sexually unresponsive first wife Donelle, Alcindia at least found a way to experience an orgasm, and she brought the fruitage of that exploration into our shared sexuality.  On a physical level, she was a small step up. On an emotional level, it remained an often times confusing, stimulating, sometimes happy, but mostly challenging relationship. When we hit an early “rough patch” in our new relationship, In a shameful moment of weakness, I gave to Alcindia a copy of Di Di’s poem.  I did not ever tell her that I had not really written the poem for her, and that I did not even love her.  I tried to fool myself from the very start that this woman was worth my time and effort, but we were BAD for each other.  Have you ever heard of the term “slumming”?  It was an unholy match, compounded by my own selfishness, loneliness, lack of integrity and honesty, and drug addiction and alcoholism. On a spiritual and emotional level, our relationship did nothing to enhance a shared vision of wholeness, instead, gradually becoming a source of pain and suffering for the two of us.  How a one night stand turned into a dark 16 month relationship is anybody’s guess, but my poor self-esteem, loneliness and need for female friendship sure played into it. 

.

Baby, and her boyfriend, both were to become quite prominent in our shared story, but I will keep their story at a minimum.  Suffice it to say that Baby’s boyfriend, who belonged to a motorcycle gang in Hillsboro, had access to pure rock crank/speed, which, at that time, I had never experienced before.  This is a very significant event, and I became an immediate, ardent fan of the drug.  This “friendship” would later accompany me into my underworld experience. Our relationship of 14 months cemented my unconscious determination to self-destruct through continued drug abuse.  After becoming sober yet again in January of 1985, after having a toxic event around drinking and using anti-anxiety medication prescribed for help with depression, I was yet again hospitalized, this time at the Cedar Hills Hospital, for recovery from mental illness and alcoholism. I profoundly disliked the atmosphere in this place.  I witnessed the abuse of mentally ill people, and it was disturbing and heartbreaking.  I  watched three male attendants rough up a woman about my age who did not immediately respond positively to one of the attendants requests.  The three of them ganged up on the unfortunate women, and proceeded to forcefully remove her from the room, and attempt to tie her down unto a bed.  She screamed and cried, and was subjected to quite a beating.  The only way they would later release her from her bondage was by getting her to apologize for her “indiscretion” to the attendants and the other witnessing patients.  The victim was apologizing for having to get beat, and this is how it really was.

.

Cedar Hills did have a recovery team on site for treatment of substance abuse issues, and they treated me with respect while I was there.  I was expelled after only three days because my health insurance had run out, and I did not want to pay close to $1000 a day out of my empty pockets,   Dr. Beavers prescribed me a high-powered antidepressant called Nortriptyline, which suddenly turned my whole understanding around. It was like a light went on in my mind, and for the first time in my life I was happy.  I happily stayed clean and sober for over six months, and found a renewed passion for life, my job at the US Postal Service, and even for the highly dysfunctional girlfriend that I had in Alcindia. I began to work out in our local fitness center where we lived, and I started developing some serious leg muscles.  I also gained about thirty pounds, ballooning up to 208 pounds, from eating a half gallon of ice cream almost daily.  Food in general tasted almost too good, while taking this wonder medication.  But, I did not feel comfortable attending AA meetings, because my integrity misinformed me that taking this anti-depressant was somehow part of a relapse process, and that by being on medication that made me feel that good I could not honestly practice the program, and I felt some shame around that. 

.

During this period of time, Alcindia’s mother moved in with us.  She suffered from severe depression, and psychosomatic ailments, and she became a disruptive, though friendly, presence in our apartment for the rest of our relationship. Things went well until Alcindia and I took a week-long vacation around the July 4th holiday in Bend.  In the middle of the week, I happened to see a partially smoked marijuana joint spill out of Alcindia’s purse.  Rather than replacing it, I somehow justified in my mind that it would be better to smoke pot and get high than take anti-depressants.  This messed up reasoning caused me to experience extreme shame, guilt, and self-consciousness, to the point that I would not return to work after our  vacation.  I called in sick for several weeks afterward, and I never returned to my “lifetime guaranteed job” of working for the US Postal Service.  After ten years, I sacrificed that career so that I could smoke a joint.  It was a fast downhill slide into depression, alcohol and further drug abuse. By November of 1985, which also corresponded to when I finally was terminated from the Post Office for failure to appear back at work, I also abandoned my now nightmare relationship with Alcindia, and left her for good.

.This one is difficult, but thank you, Alcindia.

The Search For Truth

It remains no mystery to me as to why many people choose continued addiction, or suicide over recovery and healing. Invisible wounds are the hardest to heal and the easiest to stay in denial about their life-threatening potentials. I was starting to see the end of my own road, with my out-of-control car crashing through all of the safety guardrails and continuing the race towards the finish line of my dead-end life.  I knew that my problems could not be solved, at least not on my level, and I knew of no other levels that were accessible, or available to me.  The time period of January of 1986, through March of 1987, was to become the time container for my descent into the furthest reaches of hell and darkness.

I moved back in with Randy in December of 1985, after ending my relationship with Alcindia in a rather dramatic fashion,  and I continued to stay with him until March of 1986. He had relocated into a smaller apartment in Beaverton, from the apartment that we had shared in 1984, after my divorce from my first wife, Donelle.  (note:  at this point, Donelle, though still quite mentally ill,  was no longer living on the streets of Portland as a homeless person).  On January 26th, 1986, after yet another night of fighting depression with the hops and yeast antidepressants, I woke up upon Randy’s living room couch at 8:45am, with him emerging from his bedroom, screaming to my clouded mind: “BRUCE, WAKE UP AND TURN ON THE TV!! THE CHALLENGER JUST EXPLODED!!!”

After watching that horrific event over and over, I had the crushing realization that my life was also over. Of course, to me, the explosion of the Challenger represented the final destruction of my childhood dreams of becoming a US Air Force pilot, and, ultimately, a NASA Astronaut. I saw mirrored in the Challenger disaster the total destruction of all of my hopes of realizing my life’s potential, and I made the decision right then and there to end it all, and fulfill a 15 year pledge that I had made to myself when I was just 15 years old. I had known since then that I was a hopeless alcoholic and drug addict, and if I could not shake the disease by age 30 (and if the disease itself had not already killed me) I would take matters into my own hands. I just held on as best that I could for the intervening years, and I tried my best to adapt to my self-destructive life situation. I never told another soul of my self-imposed 15 year “pull date”, should I fail at sobering up. I only needed to refill a prescription for some antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication that I already had secured from Dr. Dan Beavers, a psychiatrist that I had been seeing since 1985, and I was going to take them all at once, and call it a life. I went to the pharmacist, with the intention of seeing the deed completed immediately. 

.

While standing in line,  I was to see Mike L. who also was at the same Fred Meyer pharmacy.  Mike was Alcindia’s sister’s friend, who I had known through a few parties organized by Alcindia, and I started to share the smallest part of my story with him.  He immediately shut me down, stating that he had no time for other people’s problems, which reaffirmed my understanding of the other people’s tendencies towards indifference to each other.. The pharmacist would not fill the prescriptions, however, even though I had one refill left on each one, and he told me that I needed to see the shrink again.  I was not to be deterred. I  scheduled an emergency visit to my psychiatrist for that afternoon.  He perceived what might be happening within me, and he elicited a promise from me that I would not kill myself with the medication. Dr. Dan had just had another patient, Scott M. kill himself using the same medication that I had prescribed to me, and Dan was still grieving mightily, and could not tolerate another such event from a patient of his. So, he got the empty promise from me that I would not commit suicide.  

.

I immediately placed those pills under the front seat of my car, for easy access and immediate use, should the conditions of my life prove that it needed immediate termination.   I never intended to take those pills as prescribed, instead telling myself that unless I found a reason to live, that I was leaving this planet, without a rocket ship.  Thus, began my official “search for truth”.

I called my old friend, Sean Tucker, who was still stationed in Madrid, Spain for the US Air Force.  I was still suicidal, and told him that I had a fatal brain tumor, and that I was going to die soon.  He offered for me to stay with him in Madrid for a while.  The thought of a geographic change brought a little hope to me, so I secured my passport, and applied for my pension from the US Postal Service.  I was going to take that money, and use it for airfare and support to get me to Spain.

I also filed for unemployment benefits, to help with my immediate income needs. I filed for bankruptcy, as I had no intention of meeting my financial obligations, which were immense.  I had student loans, credit card debts, credit union loan debts, personal debts to my father, and other debts that totaled close to forty thousand dollars.  I wanted the slate to be clear by the time I was gone, and bankruptcy seemed like the right process to engage in. The bankruptcy was to eventually become official on the exact day of my thirty-first birthday, November 20, 1986, the final day of the expiration year that I had long ago accepted to be my own.

“No thanks, this is where I take my leave!” I announced in a rather angry tone of voice.  I grabbed my overnight bag, and headed towards home, even though I was drunk, almost to the point of being in a blackout.  Somewhere along Highway 26, beyond the Elderberry Inn, I crashed my car into a guard rail, nearly going over a cliff in the process.  I could not get out of the driver’s side door, it was so crashed in.  I quickly got the car back onto the road, in my attempt to get home before any more trouble befell me.  When I finally reached North Plains, I fell asleep at the wheel again, stepped on the accelerator, and rammed into the back of another car at freeway speeds.  We both pulled over, and I was able to bribe the owner of the car not to call the police, since I was DRUNK, by writing him a check for $471, which was every last penny that I had in my checking account.  My car was totaled, but somehow I was able to make it home, miraculously escaping death or a DUI citation. Di DI called me a month later, wanting to talk, and wanting a copy of the love poem that I had given her two years before.  When we met, she told me that the poem was the most beautiful gift that anybody had ever given her, and that she was sorry that she did not find the spot in her life for me.  We both cried, and parted company on rather sad terms.  We were never to see each other again.  She died one year later, when she was killed in a drunken driving related automobile wreck in Lake Oswego.

.

I was to receive the retirement money by the end of March.  By this time, my immersion into the Portland underworld was about to get underway.  I felt under incredible obligation to repay my father what I owed to him, which was nearly $3,000.  I no longer had enough money to give me sufficient support for a final trip to Spain, so I was stuck at home.  I then began to travel the darkest, most desperate roads that our city had to offer.  I needed every bit of my retirement money from working at the US Postal Service, where I had worked for close to ten years.  This money supported me as I wandered through the city’s dark underbelly.  I lived out of my 1977 Datsun 310, when I was not crashing in abandoned or empty homes with other homeless people,  while connecting with all manners and types of damaged, and dangerous, people..

It is a funny thing, I was nearly dead, or so I thought, so I had little fear as I met new people and befriended them. Most were people who I never would have associated with in my more ordered past, but in this phase of my life,  I did have a strong curiosity to get to know those who I would have avoided in the past. My only intention was to find the truth of living and of being , IF THERE WAS SUCH A THING, and I intuited that the Truth might be hidden somewhere in this darkness and unknown.  

.

I engaged will all types of individuals, and I had conversations with them about what life meant to them, and what they felt about God, Good, Evil, Darkness, Light, and human relationships. I carried my suicide drugs under my car seat, so that when the pain got too real again, I would make my departure from my world of little or no meaning, no peace of mind, and extreme personal suffering. My Datsun sedan was to become my main home for the next year, having eschewed all associations with family, and friends from my past.  This vehicle served me well. I then began to undertake my own unique journey, which took me into Portland’s underworld community of drug manufacturing and distribution, homelessness, witnessing of crimes against self and other, associating with and befriending homeless teenage victims of sexual predators and child abuse, friendships with members of motorcycle gangs and their hit men, felons, murderers, and undercover federal agents, some of whom were still investigating the criminal tentacles remaining from the Stephen Kessler, Wayne Harsh era when in 1982 a prison guard was murdered during the famous prison escape from Rocky Butte Jail, and, also, when DEA records were stolen from a federal facility by the same, infamous, Stephen Kessler..

.

I ran with my new “friends”, and my only intention was to be the best person that I could be, while living out the final moments, days, or weeks of my life. My intention was to bring harm to no one, and to practice the 12 steps of AA, even while still avoiding recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism, which I had totally given up on ever successfully completing. My AA book, which I carried in my car wherever I went, would later come in handy, but not in the way Bill Wilson, the originator of AA, ever had in mind when he co-wrote it..

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My first “realization” was that I needed to avoid sex. I committed to no new relationships with women, including no sexual encounters (pretty easy decision for me, as I was so beat up by my history of misadventures with women over the previous 14 years).

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My second “realization” was that I could no longer smoke pot, because it made me feel paranoid, and wanting to keep isolated, and in my need to find ‘truth”, those characteristics were counterproductive. Pot also dulled my emotions, intellect, resourcefulness, and curiosity, and I needed those qualities of being to survive in my new world, with all of the new people who I was to associate with.

.

I made a commitment to hang with the type of people who, in the past, I never would have befriended. The way I saw it, the people who I had judged against may well have had some of the answers that I was searching for. In my mind, I was already a dead man walking, so past fear of society’s undesirables receded into the background, and I now considered myself a fellow traveler in darkness. I met well over a hundred new acquaintances over the next year. I spent hundreds of hours in conversations with all manners and types of emotionally disfigured human beings, the same human beings, that while living my life of “white middle class privilege”, I never would have associated with. Yet in my final journey through life, these oppressed, maligned, and misrepresented human beings became my best, and only friends. I was to later realize that the same spiritual disease that afflicted my underworld friends also terrorized my privileged white middle class friends, only the privileged had better ways to mask their disease from themselves and others.

.

Methedrine, crank, speed, go-juice, or one of any number of other street names of the same street stimulant became my primary drug of choice, as it made me feel “social”, connected and conversational with all others. I would not sleep for up to one week at a time, while running with my peer group. The Punjab tavern on Foster Road became my main hub or center for social contact with many of the social branches of the tree of death that I was now climbing. Many a night, and after hours’ parties, were spent with a revolving group of my new friends there, with a main core group of people who had mutual interests. I don’t know how to tell the rest of this phase of the story, except for inserting a series of “vignettes”, where I am able to document and describe some of my major interactions with others. The following descriptions will, once again, appear fragmented and incomplete, which is a great descriptor for my life during this same period of time.

.

I will begin my story of the underworld with Ralph. Ralph was from Scappoose, Oregon, or so he said. He was the center point for much underworld activity, and I quickly became his friend, and driver, through many underworld adventures. Through him I met drug chemists, motorcycle gang members, hit men, armed robbers, practicing felons in possession of firearms, prostitutes, homeless victims of child abuse, heroin addicts, and Steve (not his real name), who was an undercover federal agent, and who would figure strongly in my future release from personal HELL. Steve deserves a story devoted all to his self, as he saved my life when I stood at the final brink, early in March of 1987. I learned to really love Ralph, who was an incredibly damaged soul, and his excessive drug use would sometimes cause concern for me. I noticed that paranoia was creeping into his mind, and we would joke about it, but he became my first living example of the damage that excess meth use causes. He was one of my “protectors” in the underworld, and would redirect others who were tempted to bring harm to me, because I did not fit in too well at times with Portland’s dark underbelly, being too healthy looking, too educated, and too well spoken.

.

My appearance would quickly change, however, as I lost 70 pounds, receding to 136 pounds by November. My big vocabulary betrayed me on several occasions, and I was counseled to use smaller words wherever possible. One time I was “busted” for using the word “magnanimous” while sitting at the bar, and I was told that people who use “quarter words” where a “nickel word” is enough were not welcome there. One quick little story about Ralph before I leave him for now. Once, I had all four tires of my car slashed while parked overnight for a party with Ralph and his minions. Ralph put the word out on the streets that this was unacceptable behavior, and whoever did the deed would answer to him personally, and to lay off of that car. I felt strangely safe, and protected, while with Ralph, even though there were continue threats against my safety and well-being. While jacking up my car for tire replacements, I had to use my AA book to help with extra elevation, which attracted some strange looks from those who already thought that I was a stranger in this strange land. Hey, I had finally found a constructive use for the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I actually felt a little pleased with myself. Ralph told me to “ditch that evil book”, and I kept it hidden from all sight from that point on, though to this day, I still own that very same book.

In his appreciation for me, Ralph also offered to me Sarah, his long-term girlfriend, who he had an “open relationship” with. But I had already eschewed all connections with women, other than platonic ones, because I feared that they would distract me from achieving my goal of either killing myself, or finding some new truth that would sustain my will to carry on. But I did share many adventures with Sarah. While hanging out with Sarah, we would occasionally visit incarcerated friends at the local jails. One day, she decided that we needed to visit Jake, who was being held in Clackamas County Jail until his transfer was completed to a federal penitentiary. I knew Jake on the outside, and he was always so kind and friendly towards me. I wanted so much to express my sorrow at his long-term imprisonment. It was on the way there that I learned that our “friend” was a “hit man” for a regional motorcycle gang that distributed drugs, and one ”hit” went horribly wrong for him, apparently. Sarah and I snorted some of the latest designer meth creations from our favorite local chemist just before arriving at the jail. It was just after that I had either a stroke, a prolonged seizure, or I was struck dumb, and speechless, for two full days, perhaps by the realization of the potential danger that I was in. When we met Jake at the reception area for the jail, all that would come out of my mouth were awkward grunts and squawks. Yes, the stress created by the meeting, coupled with the drug interactions, probably caused my loss of the ability to speak, thus contributing to the “conspiracy of silence” that my own drug use and addiction enabled.

.

I cannot comment at length on Wayne H. (this is his real name) right now, as it would be inappropriate.  I met Wayne one day while with Sarah, and he actually seemed to remember me from our childhood.  The last time that I had seen Wayne was in the late 1970″s, when he was a Clackamas County Sheriff.  I had seen him driving his police car, and I had thought, at the time, what a great coup it was for him to become a sheriff, based upon my limited understanding of who he was as a person.  He and my childhood neighbor Jack Brownlee actually took a chainsaw to one of the fir trees supporting my tree house, causing it to fall in the woods.  This was the same tree that I had fallen out of when I was in fifth grade, while waving to Jack’s younger sister, Marcia, who I could see in the next cul-de-sac from my elevated vantage point.  Wayne and I  talked briefly, yet I was not to befriend him under these conditions.  I wish Wayne nothing but the best, and I remain unconvinced that he is the “bad person” that the press made him out to be, for supplying the getaway car to Stephen Kessler..

.

Hal was a tall, lanky fellow, who wore black rim glasses. He had always seemed to have a cigarette going, which was common with the crowd that I was now running with. Hal was the alternate transportation for Ralph, when I was unavailable. Hal lived in downtown Portland, near the Scientology office. We became friends for a while, and spent a lot of time processing information together about the insane people and situations that we were experiencing while hanging with Ralph and Sarah. There was never a dull moment, that was for sure.8

,

Hal was from a devout Catholic family background. His family was economically disadvantaged (POOR), and Hal had to work even while in high school to help his mother make ends meet financially. He had taken four years of college, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in forestry, and he was no dummy, that was for sure. He had a strong work ethic, when he was employable, but now he was suffering from the after effects of some sort of emotional breakdown. To support his income stream, he peddled speed at some of the local strip bars and taverns. It was a high risk proposition, as he had to make exchanges with some really damaged people, as well as potential exposure to informants and snitches. He tried to present a happy face, though whenever I saw him. I felt a strange, sad feeling. One time, while visiting him at his home, I saw a copy of his college degree from Oregon State University. His photograph was next to it, and it was only from six years previous. yet, he looked twenty-five years older now. I was a little surprised that I could feel my own heartbreak around the loss of human potential for somebody else, yet not even feel it for myself.

.

From time to time, we would get involved in discussions about religion, philosophy, psychology, and society, in between snorting lines of our latest shipments. He was the best person for animated discussions, which were accentuated by the stimulants that we liberally used together. Hal loved to make extensive commentary about the Pope, or about the state of American Catholicism. I would usually just listen to him after he got all “fired up” because I just did not share the same sense of oppression that he experienced because of his religion while he was growing up. I certainly was oppressed, no doubt, but at this point I did not have a really good clue as to why I felt that way. He would always end his religious take downs by stating, unequivocally, that heaven and hell are right here on earth, nobody has to die to get there.

.

Just look around, he would say, the evidence is obvious.

.

“I carry heaven and hell in my own mind, Bruce. I don’t need the Church to tell me how to feel, behave, or believe, for they just add more layers of hell for me to sort through to find my own little piece of heaven”.

,

“Hal, I don’t really follow the Christian religion, or Catholicism too much. I only know that I carry more than a nodding familiarity with Hell. Since I do not experience anything resembling heaven on earth, I guess that is why the church people hope that it exists after we die, because we sure aren’t drinking from its fountains right now!”

 

.“Bruce, there was a time when I occasionally knew peace of mind, and that is when I first knew that I did not need any God, any Jesus and his crucifix, or any Pope to lead me into my own greater good. But after walking through this world for the piece of time that I have, I have somehow lost all hope that it will return anytime soon. The damage in the world is becoming the damage in my own mind. I despair that the world will ever change, and I doubt that any change is even possible for myself”

.

“Hal, wow, I actually might be your long-lost brother from another mother. I don’t have any answers. I stopped using pot because I wanted to see if it was preventing me from accessing important parts of myself. I use speed now, because it helps keep me engaged with the world in a more social way, yet I am no happier than I was before. I stopped using antidepressants last year, and now I am just riding this bucking bronco until I get tossed for the last time. I am not planning on picking myself up again, when I hit the dirt the next time.”

.

Yes, our discussions never ended on a positive, life-affirming note, but how could they? Hal was to get arrested, and charged with drug distribution, when another “friend” of ours, Cowboy Ron, snitched on Hal to save his own, sorry ass. I won’t give Cowboy Ron the honor of much comment. No, I did not change Cowboy Ron’s name here. I only hope that he sees himself here someday, if he survived his own private hell. Cowboy Ron hurt a lot of people, including his wife and children, but that is another story, for another day. Sometimes the predator becomes the prey, and maybe that was what he was really looking for, in the end. People do bad things to hurt themselves, and other people sometimes just become collateral damage. I did not enter the underworld to judge anyone, including Cowboy Ron. I sometimes ran with the wolves, but this rabid dog challenged me in ways that made my flesh crawl.

.

Robert was a convicted armed robber, who was recently released from prison in May of 1986. One night, fate gathered us both together to sit at the bar in the Punjab tavern. The bar was a long, semi-circular arc, which seated up to 14 souls. The bar had two pool tables, and several tables and booths where people could be comfortably seated. And, there were several video games, which drew my attention at “after hours’ parties” where I was usually quite wired, and needing extra entertainment. I was sitting at the bar yet again one evening, conversing with the owner Jack, who was to become another friend to me, when Robert slid in, and sat right next to me. He was dressed in a leather jacket, which was popular at that time, and fairly new jeans. He was about my age, 30 years old, and looked like he wanted to talk.

.

Let us “tune in” to a conversation that we engaged in that evening:

 

.Robert: Hey, I have a plan for this seat, is it OK for me to sit next to you for while?

.

Me: Why, of course! Where are you coming from, you appear to be already having a good time.

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Robert: Well, tonight is the night for good times, for sure. I just needed to get out, and get some “fresh air” and hook up with some old friends. I have been out of the neighborhood for a long time, and I am hoping to find some old friends.

.

Me: Well, maybe a new friend might show up, say, right next to you this evening?!

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Robert: That would sure be nice.

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Me: My only requirements are that you are not a murderer, because if my life has to end tonight, I want it to be by my own hands (I said this half-jokingly)

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Robert: Hmm, I was just released from prison, having spent ten years behind bars for a pretty famous robbery committed in 1975.

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Me: Oh, really? You really made the news, eh? I think that your notoriety won’t get in the way.

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Robert: Umm, I killed a man while committing the robbery.

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Me: (gulping, I am feeling rather uncomfortable and stupid now, and my thoughts began racing).

.

Robert, everybody deserves a second chance, let me buy you another beer, and let’s turn our attention to the present.

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Robert: Sounds good!

.

We clink our glasses together, and each take a big drink. An ‘old friend’ of Robert’s comes up to the bar, and accompanies Robert into the restroom, leaving me at the bar. I ask the bartender for a shot of whiskey, which I quickly down, and then wash the bitter flavor away with a big drink of beer. Robert returns to the bar, sans his “old friend”.

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Me: Well, what is up for the rest of the evening?

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Robert: (slurring his words noticeably, and his eyes had lost their luster) I think that I will just hang out here for as long as I can, then move on down the road a piece.

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He then closes his eyes, and slumps down, face onto the bar. Then, he falls off of the chair, and tries to right himself on the floor.

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Me: Bartender, I think that my friend here just got sick, should we call an ambulance?

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Jack: Heck no, Bruce, he is right where he wants to be. If you could, please help him over to a booth in the corner where he can try to get his shit back together.

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Me: Jack, did he just shoot heroin, or something? Why would he do that to himself? I just don’t understand, because I want and need to talk to people now, and that would be so counterproductive.

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Jack: Bruce, SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST WAITING FOR A BETTER DAY. Today is not the better day for Robert, and it may never arrive for him.

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Me: Wow, thanks for that, Jack, I did not really understand, but I think that I do now. Let me get him out of view before we all get into trouble.

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The Conspiracy Of Silence claims yet another human being. The heroin completely shut him down to his humanity, and left me wondering what my own fate might be,. This story goes on, through an almost endless array of struggling, spiritually darkened humanity. I will continue this story with many other human beings that I had the privilege, honor, and distress to meet and converse with. Each one of them helped me to find the next step on my own path to recovery, and to finally embracing the path to truth and love within my own heart.

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Dorothy was a young woman in her early 20’s, who had two young children. I was invited over to her house one evening, and was privileged to have a fairly intense discussion with her about our life’s issues. She was a heroin user, becoming dominated by the needs to use, and she was also “shadowed” by a former lover, Jakob, who was incarcerated in jail at the time of our connection. While I was there, I noted her “scraping” used spoons, so that she could get together enough heroin residues to give her a fix. Her supply was out, and she was waiting for her next delivery, so things were getting a little “tense” for her We spoke of what we thought the real powers of this world were, and it got a little interesting. She did not believe in the power of “God” or “Jesus”, having long eschewed any connection with such concepts. She lived for the moment, and knew all too well that “shit happened” regardless of how “good” or “bad” a person was. She believed that her criminal boyfriend, Jakob, had extraordinary powers, and could “astrally project himself” out of prison at night. As long as she had company (friends, or heroin), Jakob could not materialize into her home, and threaten her and dominate her, as he did when he was not imprisoned.

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“There is only darkness, Bruce, and all of the people who attempt to use it. Those who use to help others are considered “good people” yet, these same people will turn against others in a heartbeat, should the need arise. Good people do not really exist, just fucked-up people who occasionally make helpful choices for themselves or, inadvertently, for others, usually while they are really just trying to selfishly take care of themselves”.

.

“Dorothy, I believe that we all have both energies, and it may only be that if we stumble upon the right understanding, we can act more from a not-so-dark, not so selfish position, and occasionally help ourselves and each other to have better lives”

,

“Well, how much time and energy do you put into having a better understanding of yourself, and being more helpful to others?”

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“Good point, Dorothy. But I actually try to look at the forces of darkness within myself, to see where I might also be negatively impacting myself and others through a lifetime of not fearlessly confronting those energies. I have no idea what will be revealed, if anything, if I ever successfully overcome my own darkness. I continue to search for the reasons to stay around here, and see if there is any real value to staying alive. My old way of seeing life sure has not brought any lasting happiness or social responsibility to me. If there is no Truth to stumble upon to keep me going, then I may as well allow the darkness that I already know to finish swallowing me up, and take me away from my own suffering”.

,

“Heroin is quite helpful for me, Bruce, have you considered trying it? My supplier will be here shortly, and I can give you a little bit.”

.

“Dorothy, thanks for talking with me, and making the offer to share with me, but I have to return to some other business that I am attending to, so time for me to leave”.

.

My search for Truth would have ended that day, had I stuck around Dorothy’s home. I was only minimally tempted to try heroin that day, as I felt quite disturbed by the darkness that I felt coming through Dorothy. I never saw her again.

.

Steve belongs in a special story all to himself, but I will include him here because he had ultimate importance in my “search for truth”. I met Steve at the same time that I met Ralph. Steve was a very intelligent, well-dressed man, about 8 years older than me. He drove a nice 1982 Chevrolet, which somebody had tricked out (I did not think that he did it, however). Shortly after becoming a “peripheral person” in our rotating community of characters, his car became impounded by the police, and he could not get it released back into his care (or so he said). That is where I first became suspicious of Steve, because I sensed that he was looking for somebody who might have an inside track” into our Portland Police Department, and its inner workings. Steve and I shared a lot of time together over the 12 months that I wandered over the underworld landscape. I could always count on him to give me good insight into others, though he held the truths about himself close to his chest. He became a big brother to me, at times, and would not spare me criticism, if I appeared out-of-place, or out of touch. He would criticize Ralph’s excessive drug use, all the while using extremely small amounts of the same stuff, which he poured from a very tiny vile. He initially could not understand why I thought it necessary to be where I was, either, though he was the only person that I ever told that I was on a search for truth, while continuing to use speed, and alcohol. I did not understand, at the time, how he could get by with so little use of drugs. From time to time, Steve would seem to test me, by exposing me to new situations and people who required some sort of help or intervention.

.

Through Steve I met Georgette, a 15-year-old runaway girl, who was escaping a sexually abusive father by being homeless in the southeast Portland area. She was hanging out with another sexually abused homeless young man, named Greg, who was three years her senior, and already skilled in the art and science of locating abandoned or temporarily vacated homes, for their own temporary residences. Greg was always accompanied by five to ten other friends, who would be his assistants in illicitly securing property or goods for resale, and, I was to learn, help distribute freshly manufactured methamphetamine. Greg, I would learn, was also about to peddle Georgette, for added income.

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Georgette was a tiny young woman, no more than five foot two inches, and ninety-five pounds. When I first met her, I noted her innocence, and my heart almost broke, and I felt helpless, though I wanted so much to protect her from her fate. She had developed “pink eye”, and I saw an opportunity to break her free from this group of itinerant thieves and junkies. I had her grab her meager belongings, and I placed her in my car, and we talked for hours. She was the younger sister, or daughter that I never had, and I wanted to keep her safe. I finally whisked her away from the gang, and drove her to Outside In, where she could get necessary medical help and counseling. I had recently received a retirement payout from my 10 years working at the Postal Service, and so I had some extra money, which I stuffed into her pocket. I told her, in no uncertain terms, that I never wanted to see her again with her “friends”, or there would be serious hell to pay. I never saw her again, though a tape recorded message of my conversation with her would mysteriously show up a few days later.

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One evening the next week, I was sitting at the bar in the Punjab tavern, which was my second home, talking with Jack and a couple of acquaintances when a cassette tape was thrust across the floor, originating from a table on the other side of the tavern.  There were four men seated at the table, and none would maintain eye contact with me when I looked their way.  I got off of my bar stool, leaned over and picked up the cassette tape, and looked at it with Jack and the two men sitting on either side of me.  We discussed what it might be, and none of us wanted to confront the table where the tape originated from, for we all had our own paranoia and suspicions of strangers.  Jack walked to the back of the bar, and grabbed a cassette recorder, and inserted the tape into the player.  My voice started speaking from the machine, and a fear took over me like I had never felt before.  When I saw what the subject matter was about, I asked Jack to please stop playing the tape, as it was making me extremely uncomfortable.  I asked Jack for the tape, which he gave to me.  The other people at the bar started 6 me suspiciously, as well, and all that I could offer to the listeners was that Georgette must have been miked, and that somebody in the bar wanted to “out me” for having befriended her. Greg (Georgette’s ‘handler’) was to later engage me, and asked to speak to me in private. “

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Bruce, I hear that you might be able to help in my situation. I have a friend who has set up a trailer near 82nd avenue, and we can hang out there, and use it as our base of operations”

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“Greg, I am not sure what you are asking of me. My time is quickly running out, I am afraid, and whatever “help” that you are seeking, I probably do have sufficient assets to draw from”.

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“Well, we have a pretty good operation going right now. I am getting lots of merchandise stockpiled, and, in fact, we have filled an entire basement near 52nd avenue. Before you say no to anything, let’s go over and check it out”.

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“OK, but I can’t be tied down to any one place, any one situation, or any one person. I certainly do not have any interest in buying or selling stolen items. I will go over with you and have a look at the house, though.”

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We drove over together to the home on Duke Ave. near Brentwood City Park in my Datsun 310, talking about a wide range of subjects. Greg appeared to be only about 17 years old, yet he told me that he had been on the street for over six years. I could tell that he was feeling me out, asking me many leading questions. My paranoia, which was a gradually increasing inner experience for me over the last several weeks, was barking at me, the closer we got to the safe house. As we entered the driveway to the home, Greg then asked me

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“Bruce, you sure don’t talk like anybody that I have ever met. You talk about things that I don’t like to think about, or would normally not even consider. You are so different, and you sound a little strange at times, I think. I think that we should be partners. I can tell that you do not like women by the way you have ignored all the girls we hang out with, and you should know that I have little attraction for women, as well. I only feel a strong bond to men”.

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I think that I then swallowed a golf ball sized lump in my throat

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“Greg, I don’t think that you understand. I am not sexually attracted to ANYBODY. I want to meet people and make friends with no ties, sexual or otherwise to anyone. I have to travel light, because I am going to be leaving very soon.”

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“I have heard you say that before. Where the hell do you think that you are going to go”?

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“I got a passport earlier this year, with the intent to travel to Spain, to start a new life, or maybe to die. I think that my journey will not be taking me too far from home now, though”.

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“I don’t understand. Why do you talk of death? Are you dying?”

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“I am really not sure what I mean anymore. I know that something feels like it is dying inside of me. I won’t know until more time passes, and I meet more people. I will then know for sure what I mean” 

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“You don’t make any sense. Maybe when you see what we have in the basement, it will be easier to make up your mind whether to stay or to go”.

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We exited the car, and walked up to the front door together. Greg knocked on the door, and a nearly fifty year old woman of unkempt appearance answered. 

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“Greg, come on it! I have missed you! Umm, I have not been able to organize everything yet.”

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“Martha, this is Bruce. He is OK, don’t be afraid of him, I’ve known him forever Don’t worry about the mess, we can take care of that later”

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There was some more small talk, and then we walked downstairs. Martha had merchandise almost stacked to the ceiling covering almost the entire basement, of which I estimated it was 1500 square feet. There were brand new boxes of retail merchandise, as well as some “used” items of very good condition. It was like an unofficial hardware section of Home Depot, and the clothing section of Fred Meyer. I saw chain saws, table saws, drill motors, hand guns, shotguns, military style guns like an HK 91, toys, kitchen pots and pans, appliances, car parts, lawn mowers, bicycles, clothes, shoes, and just about anything one could imagine. We walked into a closed off section of the basement, with Martha becoming quiet, and almost reverential. “

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I want to show you how the lab is progressing. Dieter has made great progress, and has secured all of the hardware and chemicals necessary to get started. We have not been able to get Jeff bailed out of jail yet, so we may have to kidnap one of our other chemists for a week to run a test batch or two” .

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She opened the door, and there were three tables filled with Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers of various sizes, Bunson burners, propane tanks and fittings, glass cookware, coffee filters, some sort of automatic stirring or mixing device, stainless steel pressure cookers, and a host of other tools that I did not immediately recognize, even though I had taken chemistry lab several years before. There were also several Mason jars and mayonnaise jars filled with substances of various colors, some of which were liquid in nature. I do not remember if they had made provisions for ventilation, though there was a window that looked north located near the ceiling that would have been adequate. I made sure not to offer up to them the fact that I had some background in chemistry, as the thought of being trapped in a lab as an assistant for a week or more sounded a bit like imprisonment to me, no matter how much free drugs might be made available to me.

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“Well, let’s smoke a joint, and celebrate the good fortune that we are about to have!” Martha then pulled out a stick and lit it up. When it got to me, I declined. “Aren’t you a partaker of the wacky tobacky?”

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“Not today. I’ll stick to my crank now. I need to keep my head clear, and the joint just gets in the way of what I am trying to do”.

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“I don’t get it. Pot is the best stress relief available, save for the brown or black holiday”.

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“I am trying to figure some things out. It is hard for me to function at the level I need to while high on pot”.

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“Are you sure you are OK?”

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“Oh yes. By the way, I could use a line of crystal, can you send me a life line?”

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“Now you are talking! Let’s get the party started.”

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And with this group, another one week run starts, with no sleep, little food, and too much conversation. I was never quite sure what to make of Martha. I never saw her again. Greg lost interest in me, and found himself a “friend” to hang out with him at his trailer. I saw him from time to time after that. He looked worse and worse every time that I saw him, and I think that he reflected back to me my own disease and disfigurement.

I don’t remember exactly when I first met Barbara, but Steve had introduced us in the late summer.  She kept turning up at after hours parties and other supposedly spontaneous happenings around se Portland that I had been invited to,  She was to become an emotionally unavailable running mate for several exciting weeks in the fall.  She was a pettite woman, and had a outgoing personality that attracted others to her as much, or more than, her physical appearance.  Barb wasn’t interested in sex, as her focus was to be lighthearted, to have fun, and to use drugs, to excess, if possible.  I attended one party in NE Portland with her where we were with fairly high class, normal looking people, and I felt safe with her, probably one of the only two times I ever felt that way in the underworld.  Like most time with her, at the end of the evening, she discarded me like an empty potato chip bag.  She was an unpredictable person, and my kind of gal for these times!

One of the best times of my underworld life was on Halloween.  Her girlfriend, Joanne, and Barb invited me to go out on the town with them, as long as I dressed up as a pimp, and them as .prostitutes. Barb and Joanne wore skimpy skirts with stocking and exposed garters, and the look was NAILED. I still had a pair of leather pants, a nice expensive suede leather jacket, velvet hat, fake gold chain necklace, and cowboy boots, so I had the look down. it covered up my emaciated body to near perfection. I also got the first, and only, complement about my sexy appearance in my life so my self esteem in the underworld was at a record .level,  to be sustained for about 8 hours before collapsing back into the self-hating ruins that I had grown accustomed to..

We drove downtown, and started bar hopping early in the evening.  Everywhere we went, it was ELECTRIC, the three of us stunned others and we got all sorts of attention, though it was mostly the unwanted type by guys with their needs.  Up The Down Staircase, The Last Hurrah, Jakes, and several other stops made for an exhilarating evening.  Barb finally tired of having me around, and discarded me around 2:30 am.  She could be quite blunt at times and I always knew that I was around her only when she wanted the company of someone who had no expectations of her.  She could be demeaning, and was to me several times, but who was I to complain?  I sensed that someone, or something, or a combination of the two, had an iron grip on her soul, and limited her freedom.  Loneliness and loss of desire to keeping living were two acquaintances that had their grip upon me.  Welcome to the club, Barb, there is open admission, all comers welcome!.

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I continued an incredible downward spiral into addiction, and Steve commented to me, in November, how I looked like I could be the “Aids Poster Boy” because I had become so slight of figure, and so unhealthy looking. I had started “hearing voices”, and I had become paranoid, as well. Yet, I did not let on to others that I had become so disfigured internally, though the signs were starting to appear. I “heard” that there was a major undercover operation active in Portland, and that dozens of criminal indictments were immanent. In reality, that was partially the truth, yet I should not have known that, let alone warn a few others of those “facts”. Steve wanted to know how I knew of these indictments, and I would not tell him. I noted that people were tailing me almost all of the time now, and that some of my conversations were being recorded in my car.

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One day I tore my car apart, searching for the transmitter, or the recorder. I had two different people stop by, and try to interrupt me from the search, which only added to my own paranoia. I did not locate the transmitter, but I really began to fuck with any listeners’ mind, by talking dark shit, and renaming myself “the Wild Card”. I let my world know, in no uncertain terms, that I was no longer aligned with anyone, as I was on my way to my own death.

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I will fast forward through three months more of Hell. My main core group had collapsed, with Ralph relocating himself to protect himself. I had lost touch with Steve, my last connection with sanity. I was running with a new group, and most were intravenous drug users. I met Doctor Dave, a short, friendly man, with a severely pockmarked face, a man who also recently was released from jail. He introduced me to intravenous drug use. He ever so carefully shot me up with speed, for my first time of ever using the needle, and most subsequent times, as well. I could not shoot up by myself, as I feared needles so much. But the incredible rush I received from intravenous drug use made me want to use this hastened path to Death frequently for the final two months of my drug abusing life.

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I will share a story of Frank, and Steve’s providential return to my life. Another house had been commandeered near the intersection of Holgate and McLoughlin Blvd, and that became our new hangout. Our new leader, Frank, organized a big party, and we had over 70 people show up. This was in early March of 1987, and I was ready for my swan song. My mental health was irreparably damaged, and my “search for truth” had apparently only uncovered a hastened path to Death for me. Frank had just secured a fresh batch of speed, and heroin (which I had never used before), and he was mixing up his renowned “witches brew”, and invited me to join him.

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Sure, why not?

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I had nothing to lose, but a life that was already dead. I started to accompany Frank to an upstairs room, when I spotted Steve talking with a healthy looking 30-year-old woman, a person that I might have been attracted to, had i been healthy. I overheard her calling his name, and it was NOT Steve. “Steve” saw that I heard his real name, and he then knew that I knew. Steve took me aside, and tried to explain. I instead stopped him, and told him that I had suspected him all along of being undercover. I also told him that his secret was safe with me. I told him my journey was about to end, that I was going upstairs with Frank, and if I survived that experience, I was going to return to my car, and grab the pills under my front seat, and finish business, once and for all.

.

Yes, I was finished.

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“Steve” grabbed my arm, excused himself from his ‘girlfriend’, and took me outside to his car. We then drove to my father’s house, and “Steve” then commanded to me

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“Bruce, I can no longer keep you protected and safe. Your search for truth has to end within this dangerous world. Now your real search for truth must begin, starting with your relationship with your father. I never want to see you again, but believe me, I am going to try to help you, any way I can. You deserve so much better of a life than you have given to yourself.”

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We arrived at my father’s house, and he let me out. He and his partner drove my car to my dad’s house later that evening, and I never saw him again. The pills had disappeared from under the driver’s seat, as well. There was no way that I was going to go back to Dr. Beavers, as I was too ashamed to have anybody see me in the state that I was in.

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Note 1: One year later, he called me, to check and see how I was doing. I was a year clean and sober, and, in tears, I gushed with my love and gratitude for “Steve”. He was the best friend that I never knew I had.

,

Randy Olson was to return to my life, yet again.

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I was still a mess, strung out from months of drug abuse, alcoholism, gambling, and I still only weighed a mere 135 pounds. My face was all broke out, and I had the most horrific shakes, and I “heard voices”. I had experienced convulsions several times.. I was still drinking, but I was no longer using drugs very much. I invited Randy Olson over on March 13 of 1987. He came over, and he, and his girlfriend and I proceeded to down an inordinate amount of my fathers’ booze and wine. My parents were still “snow birding” in Arizona, and would not be home until the end of the month, so I was still able to keep my dysfunctional momentum going. Well, after partying with Randy until about 10:00 PM, Randy had to go home, so I was left alone with my horrible problems.

.

It was then that I entered into a blackout, and picked up one of my father’s loaded guns, and drove, quite drunk, to Brock’s home in the Milwaukie area. This person was an associate of one of the drug chemists in the underworld culture that I had just emerged from. I have no idea why I went down there, but I awoke from my blackout when the gun in my lap discharged, shooting a hole in the front door of his apartment. He had two sleeping children on one room, and a sleeping wife in another room, and I was fortunate to have not brought harm to anyone. He then brought a hypodermic needle out, and injected me with crank/speed (I still would not inject myself.) I immediately snapped out of my drunkenness, and proceeded to talk with this guy for 24 hours. I got one more injection, and then clarity finally hit me. Literally, a light went on in my mind, and I saw the utter insanity of the person I was with, and the insanity of my life. I stood up, laughed at the guy, called him, and myself, nuts, and walked out of the front door, got into my car, and drove back to my parents’ home. I was changed, though I just didn’t know how much at the time.

.

As I had only five dollars left to my name, I needed to make a decision. Either I needed to buy more beer and cigarettes, or I needed to get some gasoline for my car, and go visit my grandparents in north Portland. I kept the five dollars, and drove to family. My grandparents were happy to see me, but were concerned for my appearance. I claimed to have the flu, and grandmother nursed me back to some semblance of health over the next five days, while I detoxified and had withdrawals from cessation of cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs, all at the same time. I returned home to my parents’ home after a week at the grandparents.

.

It is another funny thing, two days later, out of the blue, Craig Salter called me, for the first connection in three years (he was a childhood friend that both Randy and I had known since the 5th grade, and the same person that I chose to have my relapse with after my Care Unit experience), and asked me if I wanted to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with him. He was required to attend meetings due to the conditions of the court that had prosecuted him for a DUI. Of course, Craig was not an alcoholic; at least he thought that he wasn’t. I knew that he was, though. I, in fact, was the person that got him drunk the first time in High School, when Craig was 17 years old. I actually may have started him on his own horrific decline into his own alcoholism, just like Randy Olson had started me on my first drug, which was marijuana, and may have indirectly contributed to my own eventual decline.

.

Anyway, I went to that AA meeting, because the way I figured it, since God was such a big part of AA, and since I was searching for TRUTH, there must be a relationship between those two forces, and AA must have an angle on that. I proceeded to attend over 270 meetings in my first 90 days, since I had nothing else to do, having lost my job, and, basically, my life, to my disease. Craig eventually stopped going to meetings, after his court ordered attendance ended. I continued to attend them, feeling like I had finally found my spiritual home. I did fall into a temporary trap at the HInson Baptist Church, thinking that my personal TRUTH must somehow be hidden in the church system, and that I could unearth some more by attending church, and being baptized.

.

I then spent thousands of hours over the next several years in AA meetings, communication, investigation, reading, writing, meditation, associating with all types and manners of people, and, eventually, healing my relationship with my parents (especially my father). I was enlightened by a new teacher, a recovering alcoholic by the name of Jack Boland, who had released to the world many series of tapes on recovery and spirituality. I was given one of his tape series of recovery by a co-worker at the Fred Meyer warehouse, John Johnson, of whom I will be eternally grateful to, on May 16, 1987. I then listened to these tapes over and over, during the Memorial Day weekend, and something miraculous happened afterwards, probably as a result of my openness to the experience brought about by listening to these tapes, and practicing some simple steps from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

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Alcoholic Anonymous Twelve Steps

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1). We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

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2). Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

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3). Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

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4). Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

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5). Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

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6). Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

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7). Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

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8). Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

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9). Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

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10). Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

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11). Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

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12). Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

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My search for Truth, which had taken me through the darkest regions of hell, was about to give me wings, and enable me to fly to the sun, and beyond. Yet, the prison guard with one of the primary keys to release me from my own spiritual imprisonment was my own unhealed relationship with my father. Overcoming a lifetime of oppression and control by others is no easy task. It also must be done clean and sober, for the true depth and healing of the experience to permanently take hold. I began a new relationship with my father, starting with my new-found sobriety. The real fruitage of healing from the relationship was not to become apparent until many, many years later. 

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That is another story, for later.

.Thank you, underworld experience, and my best friend there, Steve.

Note: Stephen Kessler was denied parole in 2018, and will spend the rest of his life in prison. He was regarded as the most dangerous criminal ever encountered, by several federal agents.  He died in 2019, while still in prison. Wayne H. was a friend of my neighbor while I grew up near Rex Putnam High School, and he eventually became a Clackamas County Sheriff prior to his own fall. We knew of each other, and he was well-known for his connections with automobiles, and, in fact, either intentionally or inadvertently supplied the getaway vehicle to Stephen Kessler during his prison escape. Coincidentally, I was roommates with Tom Cravens in the Physicians and Surgeons Hospital Care Unit in 1984, when we both sought sobriety (Tom was successful, but I was not). Tom was one of six co-conspirators with Stephen Kessler during the 1968 prison riot, where a lot of the Oregon State Prison in Salem was burnt down,, and shame was brought to our Oregon Governor, Tom McCall. While growing up into the beast that he became, Stephen Kessler also shared the same school as my present wife, Sharon White, and, in fact, beat up a teacher while in the same classroom that he shared with my wife (end note)

1987

The story is going to take a quick diversion here.

In April of 1987, after I had been sober for about one month after 16 years of hell, I had a series of three dreams, on three consecutive nights.

In the first dream, I was an early teenager, hanging out with 4 or 5 other boys, who were my buddies.  My name, in the dream, was Bobby Clements.

In the second dream, we are all enlisting, as a group, to enter WWII.  We told the recruiter that we all wanted to fly on the same plane, or we would not accept service.  We were promised that the Air Force would do everything in their power to make sure that we all were on duty in the same location, and, perhaps, share space on the same military aircraft

In the third dream, I am piloting an aircraft, with all of my buddies assuming support roles.  We are flying into anti-aircraft shelling turbulence, and I can no longer keep the aircraft under control.  My buddies stay in their positions, but apparently whatever hit us from below, is a fatal blow.  I know that we are all going to die.  The dream ends.

I researched Bobby Clements substantially for two months (prior to advent of the internet) later in 1987.  I had seen a park with the last name that I was researching south of Salem towards the coast, and drove to Philomath, Oregon with my wife Sharon, researching the Clements family there, but I came up short.

Several decades later, my sister took up the search for me.  My sister is a STRONG BELIEVER in reincarnation, and she has memories from her own past life experiences.

In her research, she came up with Robert “Bobby” Kelly Clements, of Nova Scotia, Canada.. Robert flew a Lancaster bomber for the RAF out of England, and he was allowed to hand pick his crew, according to the records. He picked his five Nova Scotia friends!

His story was identical to what I saw in the three dream sequence, according to the family reports that she had read about “Bobby”, too.

Umm, Bobby was an electrician prior to his enlistment.  As an eight year old, I wanted to become an electrician more than anything, save becoming an Air Force pilot.  I had a full ride scholarship to the Air Force, was in the ROTC at the U of Portland, then dropped out due to my first wife’s severe health issues.

I eventually retired, as an electrician, in 2016,.

I tried to commit suicide in 1986, when I finally realized that my childhood dreams of being, first an Air Force pilot, and then an astronaut, were never, ever to be realized in this incarnation.

Eerie!

Here is my letter to my sister, acknowledging the experience:

Like a bumblebee, whose body is too big for his wings, it lifts up its heart, and then it sings, and then it flies. . . I want to fly, don’t you want to fly?-—Jerry Florence, and Alliance.

Truth is either ubiquitous, though ignored by many, or it does not exist at all. Even though some readers may care little about my personal sharing around my experience of Truth,  it still does not remove from me the moral and ethical obligation to try to present my perspective on this most important spiritual phenomenon.  My own sister stated to me, on a trip to Hawaii in November of 2021, that my spiritual journey was a total waste of time, and few could care less about the narrative around my experience. My older sister Pam, like most of our culture, sees little value in my story.

Should I remain silent about the Truth,  and by my silence support the perception of my own supposed ignorance around this ultimate issue? By my continuing silence I may even support the erroneous contention that there is no Truth, that Truth has no ultimate existence.

My choice, obviously, is to attempt to present my experience of the Truth. Opinions rise and fall like helium balloons in our sky. Yet, Truth is the sky that they all must travel through. And, as difficult as it is for me to try to successfully communicate around this profound issue, I continue to try to write about the infinite, mysterious sky that embraces, and overshadows, all of our shared life experience.

I have now written nine books since 2017, none of which have been published, for reasons obvious to me. I have never been much of a writer, and I could not even string two sentences together prior to 1984. I present this material to the reader, because the Universe gave this material to me for free, and I finally became willing to deliver it to others, even if the others never appear. It is the truth that we give that enables a higher possibility for the life that we might want to live.

I continue to live a life of anonymity, while adoring all of life, with its challenges for all of us for being fully present for it. May the inquisitive reader find that which has been eternally sought for, by those forced onto the path of truth by their own interior GPS. Following new paths of consciousness towards the Truth can be an exceedingly long, though, ultimately, satisfying journey.  The sun gets so hot sometimes, on Life’s endless highway, enjoy the shade whenever necessary, and bring penty of snacks!

His Master’s Voice

When the Master Speaks, WE LISTEN!

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable. 

— Maya Angelou

Beginning on May 24th, and extending through July 21st, 1987, I had a series of three spiritual events which, to this day, guide and direct the consciousness presently unfolding within me. I have had other conscious contacts with the Mystery,  but these three spiritual experiences provided the pillars to support all of my further movements through the Spirit. To not share my experiences, in this time of greatest need for our world, would be an act of selfishness, and hiding, on my part. I do not wish to dishonor the life that I now share with our Universe by keeping it secret.  Sometimes, the Conspiracy of Silence that dominates human consciousness manifests itself by my silence around the activities of Grace, and my unwillingness to share my gifts with others.

Here is an important part of my story of personal transformation and self-discovery.

Beginning on the first Sunday after my first sober day in three years, March 22, 1987, I resumed attendance at Hinson Baptist Church, in southeast Portland.  In my earnestness to follow the right path through this religion, I accepted a baptism, scheduled for May 28, 1987.  Whenever I attended this church, I always dressed up in my nice blue pin stripe suit. I first bought this suit in 1984, specifically for church attendance when I was released from the Lovejoy Care Unit, a hospital dedicated to those recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism. I had been placed in the Care Unit in March of 1984, at the request of the Employee Assistance Program from the US Postal Service, where I had worked from 1975 until my termination in 1985.

In recovery groups, there is a term called our “look good”. We try to present a pleasing exterior to the world, even though our personal inner world may be in total disarray. Those who understand the principle of “look good” will understand the need for a suit to attend church. We try to “fit in” on the outside, even though we do not necessarily feel a kinship with the people we may be presently associating with. The suit is helpful to provide information to others that we belong in their “tribe”. Yet we also know that if we compared our insides to their insides, there would be little possibility for honest connection, due to the shame, hiding, lack of self-esteem, and lack of a developed faith in the ideas that the others may claim to be adhering to. Recovery groups also advise us to “fake it until we make it”, and for some through extended play acting they may actually live into the truth that they do not presently entertain as real to themselves.

I attended Hinson Baptist Church, first time in 1984 while connecting with a new healing potential while within the Care Unit for Alcoholic Recovery. I then continued my attendance after my release from the Unit with a fellow recovering patient at the Care Unit, Steve. S, who had been a member of that church most of his life. After my relapse back into alcoholism and addiction from recovery in June of 1984, after almost 90 days of sobriety, I discontinued all attendance at that church. I was to begin a “search for truth” beginning on January 28, 1986, after my life had totally fallen apart. After I had reemerged from my “underworld experience” of 1986-1987, I had assumed that reintegration back into a familiar church setting might be appropriate. I followed a familiar path offered to me by the Baptist church, which was to accept a “baptism”.

On the weekend prior to my baptism, I received my first ever conscious visitation of the spirit.  On May 24, 1987. I had a deeply personal, spiritual event. It manifested in my experience, for lack of a better description, as having the feeling of being held in the loving arms of an infinite motherly presence, and I felt like I was being reborn as a person as a result (I will further develop this experience later in this work).

During my baptism ceremony, I spoke loquaciously about Spirit to a big audience, most of whom were strangers to me, save my parents and my grandmother. My father later stated that I missed my calling, and that I should have become a minister. When I described my spiritual experience to the minister after the baptism, he requested that I attend a training to get my “beliefs” more in alignment with the structure that the American Baptist church accepts. He was amused and perplexed by my performance at the baptism, and he stated to me that I needed to have a better understanding of the philosophical requirements for becoming a true “Baptist” in faith.

Really?

The minister misunderstood my experience, as it represented a direct connection with the God of my spiritual understanding, and not his. This was to be one of the many introductions that I had to the patriarchal values which dominated American Christianity.

During this period of time, I also needed to get tested for AIDS, since I had relations with at least two women who had sex with bi-sexual men. I also had my own intravenous drug activity, during my darker days in my underworld tour of 1986-1987. I was looking for some support during this time, as the threat of a death by AIDS was quite real to many of us. Though I had finally decided to “live”, I was plagued by death terrors that AIDS promised to all who suffered from it during those times. I found that there was NO SUPPORT TO BE FOUND, at the Baptist Church, where all people with the potential for having AIDS were regarded as outcasts from GOD, and undeserving of support or respect from the good Christian folks. This helped to cement my understanding that our religious institutions exist to support something other than just our spiritual natures, and their ignorance of such things causes the injection of some really unhealthy outlooks on life and love into the collective mindsets of their parishioners.

The last straw for me was when the lead minister claimed that of all of God’s creatures, only man has a soul, and that all of earth’s creatures have no basic spiritual essence, I was aghast.  A religion that makes such a claim for man by uplifting its own standing in God’s universe by reducing the spiritual standing of his animal brothers and sisters is Ptolemaic, self-centered and egotistical to the absolute extreme, and another supporting reason as to why our earth is under such attack right now.  As an individual searching for the “Truth Of Being” I thought it was best to steer clear of organized religion, where truth is not so much a sacred value, but instead more a medium for ignorance and a marketable commodity that also is used to help keep people philosophically controlled, and united in one particular way of looking at life.  Historically, religion in general remains the primary avenue for the proliferation of ignorance among the people who don’t have the insight or take the time to think for themselves.

I was to be educated by a new teacher, a recovering alcoholic by the name of Jack Boland, who had released to the world many series of tapes on recovery and spirituality. I was given one of his tape series of recovery by a co-worker at the Fred Meyer warehouse, John Johnson, of whom I will be eternally grateful to, on May18, 1987. I worked there for several weeks under a temporary contract through a temp agency. When John heard from me that I was attending church to try to find God and Truth, he smiled, and he said to me that he had something special for me that might be more appropriate to my needs. The tape series was called “Twelve Steps To A Spiritual Experience”, and it was comprised of three 45 minute long tapes.

I listened to these tapes over and over, during the Memorial Day weekend, and something miraculous happened afterwards, probably as a result of my openness to the experience brought about by listening to these tapes, and practicing some simple steps. By this time I was two months “clean and sober”, when I had the most remarkable of experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNMViVDz_Xw

12 Steps Revised To Reflect My Experience

1. Through our own extended suffering, we finally found the desire to want it to end. We admitted that when we become self-destructively habituated to any substance, situation, or relationship, we lose our freedom of choice, bring unnecessary trauma into our lives, and into the lives of others, and fail to achieve any lasting sense of inner peace and joy. We finally realize that our lives have been lived unconsciously, and they have become unmanageable as a result of that neglect.

2. With our new found hope and openness for change, came the desire to begin to awaken to higher possibilities for our lives. We realized that, in our essence, we have an interior, though neglected, power that will heal us and restore us to balance, if we pursue it in earnest. We now realize that we have not been living up to our full potential as human beings.

3. We made a decision to turn our will, and our lives, over to the care of our higher interior power. We become open to the possibility of embracing a new Truth for our lives. We want to access the power to continuously evolve, and we want to cultivate our heart to be more loving to ourselves and to others. We decide to let go of ANYTHING that impedes our progress towards happiness, healing and wholeness. We realize that without the deepest of desires, and intentions, to change our behavior, we will not be transformed.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. We have lived a life without a high sense of self-esteem, and we have made unfortunate choices because of the scarcity consciousness that has resulted from it. We realize that when we find the blocks to our evolution, and become willing to remove them, our new found insight will guide our paths with precision to the Truth of our existence. This is our entrance onto the path of mindfulness and higher consciousness.

5. We admitted that we were not being truthful with ourselves and with others, and by talking with another who we may trust, yet not be beholden to, about our errors in judgement and in actions towards our self and others, we can better deal with the shame and self-judgement that so often arises from the deadly secrets that we once felt that we must keep. Just by honestly talking with someone else, our burdens can be lifted. Our secrets need no longer keep us imprisoned, and mentally ill.

6. We became entirely willing to let go of our attachments to unhealthy attitudes, behavior, and people. We wish to see clearly, without the limitations of our past, of our family history, and of our cultural conditioning, with all of their embedded trauma.

7. We open our hearts through humility and the willingness to change to embrace a new possibility for our life. Our new found sense of connection with our higher interior power inspires us to become more grateful for the gifts that we now have, and we are now spiritually preparing to finally give back to the world in a meaningful, positive way. We want to finally let go of all of the emotional charged memories which keep us trapped in a dead past. We may begin to rejoice, as our past demons are now becoming transformed into our present angels.

8. While we were unconscious to our higher potential as human beings, we brought emotional, spiritual and perhaps even physical harm to other innocent beings, and we want to try bring healing and peace to those who have suffered from the effects of our ignorance. We realize that through the mirror of all of our relationships, dysfunctional or otherwise, we are granted a view into how we truly see ourselves. We want to see through the eyes of Truth, and not through the pain and suffering that unfulfilled relationships may have brought to us.

9. We made direct amends wherever possible to all people we may have brought harm to, except when to do so would bring further injury to them or to others. Our guilt will not be assuaged at the expense of others. We make full application of our new found wisdom, and our renewed desire to bring no harm to any sentient being. We want our world, and our own personal sense of self, to feel safe from further attacks from us, and our honest disclosure of our mistakes to those impacted by our errors in judgement will continue to support that intention.

10. We continued to take personal inventory, and, when wrong, promptly admit it. We have become honest with ourselves. We practice mindfulness, and continue to develop our capacity for insight into ourselves. We now know ourselves, and we now know many of the potential impediments to experiencing and expressing the Truth of our being. We no longer solely abide in old modes of thought, and now we are more focused on the beauty of the present moment.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Truth of our being, praying only for knowledge of Truth, and the willingness to live within its infinite domain. We now understand that this whole process of recovery is a meditation on life, and that the evolving, healing life that we are now experiencing is our living prayer. We finally realize that the capacity to change, to evolve, to grow in our infinite spirit is the whole point of our human existence. We are now traveling upon new paths of consciousness.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we attempted to carry our message of recovery to our world, while continuing to practice these principles in all our affairs. We have finally become whole, and are now conscious, caring human beings. We have accepted full personal responsibility for our lives, including our past, and our present, and no longer blame anyone for who we are now. We are now experiencing prosperity on many levels, and have witnessed the healing of ourselves. We have saved the world—from ourselves. Our life is now our truest teacher. We realize that we have no power to bring salvation to others, yet, it is our responsibility to point to the way of healing for others who may still be suffering, and who may finally become interested in overcoming their own limitations.

Be mindful, oh Mankind, of all of the painful secrets that we must keep,

For, by our suffering silence, we will not awaken, but just die powerless, and asleep.

On May 24, 1987, as I was driving toward Beaverton to visit Randy (longtime friend and fellow “party monster”), a wonderful vision came to me. It was the vision of a loving mother, holding a baby, and I felt the love of this wonderful UNIVERSE for the first time in my lifetime. There is the love we have for each other, for our friends, our pets, our children, our families, but this love that I felt flow into me, and though me, transported me into a heightened awareness, and awe. The beauty was too great to talk about, the feeling so overwhelming, so healing, so resurrecting. I had to stop my car on Canyon Blvd, and I got down on my knees and prayed my thankfulness to a CREATIVE FORCE that finally had found me receptive, and open, to its presence.

I made it to Randy’s house, and I met with him for the first time since my blackout experience (you will have to read my book for those gory details-no deaths, but there were gunshots). Randy could not believe his eyes, he said

“Bruce, what has happened to you? You look different, you look happy. You look at peace. You have changed!!!”

Yes, I had changed. I started talking to Randy about my experience, and Randy started to get tingling sensations up and down his spine. The hairs on his arms starting sticking up straight off of his arms! Randy exclaimed

“Bruce, what is going on. When you talk, I start to tingle all over. What has happened?”

“Well, I think that I am having an experience with God, Randy.” I said.

“Bruce, that kind of an experience is not for me right now, but I am sure happy that you are having it, because you needed something different in life really bad, and really quick. I feared for your life!”

How right he was! I only wished that Randy could find the will to want something better for himself, but, alas, he never did. Randy died in 2013, still smoking cigarettes and drinking excessively. Randy died in his car, which he had just parked in his driveway after returning from Subway sandwiches. He was 57 years old at the time of his death, at the exact same age as his father died. I still feel his loss.

Randy with my parents and me, during Thanksgiving of 1993

The vision of a loving mother (actually, the Mona Lisa), holding a baby, came with a feeling of the love of this wonderful UNIVERSE for me for the first time in my lifetime. This love that I felt flow into me, and through me, transported me into a heightened awareness, and awe. The beauty was too great to talk about, the feeling so overwhelming, so healing, so resurrecting. Later, I was taught to understand that this energy is the Divine Feminine, of which our patriarchal world continues to suppress daily, and has successfully done so, more or less, for at least the last 2400 years).  The wonderful feelings that accompanied that vision became known to me as divine horripilations.

The image of the Mona Lisa holding a baby is a fascinating, enlightening image.  It was reported some time back that Leonardo DaVinci had painted the Mona Lisa as a self-portrait of himself, in feminine form.  His message is subject to interpretation, but in today’s terms, he was honoring his feminine side, or nature.  He saw that the source of all creativity came from this mysterious, non-conscious center within himself where feelings of wonder, awe, mystery, and sensitivity to and compassion for others arises from.  His mission was to symbolically represent the divine within himself, through the most effective medium of the day, which was painting.  My own consciousness chose this as a healing image for myself, and I also saw how this feminine side carried all of the divine love and deep feelings of goodness that I had ever wanted for myself.  I was literally re-birthing myself, and this image of the mother holding the baby pictorially represented that new birth to perfection.

I still was not healed and whole, as my body was still wracked with pain, I was constantly shaking, and I still had that annoying chatter in my mind. I was experiencing the symptoms of schizophrenia, and I still thought that I could “hear” what people were thinking about me. I rationally countered my own insanity by challenging each of these observations, reaffirming to myself that if I did not hear these statements from the mouths of the people that I posited they came from, I was to ignore them. It was quite the challenge, for sure!

I still occasionally felt those “divine horripilations” that seemed to remind me that I had touched something extraordinary in nature.  I stayed obsessively involved with AA and NA, attending 270 meetings in 90 days, and I continued my prayers and meditations. I started reading several great spiritual works by M.Scott Peck, such as The Road Less Traveled, and People of the Lie: Hope For Healing Human Evil.  Mr. Peck spoke to most of my issues, and problems that I had with Toxic Religion, and I felt like I had found a friend and another teacher of truth.  I still had some free time to explore around, and I would take overnight trips into the wilderness, to “get close to Nature, and to God”.  The feeling of love that I carried with me from the May 24th experience had started to fade by the middle of June, but I still felt blessed, and I was hopeful that continued recovery from my devastating mental illness and neurological trauma might continue.

“HE IS HAVING AN EXPERIENCE WITH GOD”

It was June 22, 1987, and I was hiking up to Larch Mountain, a beautiful peak that overlooks the Columbia River valley, and from its vantage point all of the major mountain peaks of the area can be readily observed. In the ancient times (I was to learn several years later) this area was considered sacred ground by the indigenous peoples, who came to this area from miles around to honor their Great Spirit, and to hold their sacred ceremonies and prayer rituals. I arrived at the top, and allowed myself to become as quiet as my mind would allow for.  I slowly did a 360 degree rotation, observing for the many miles around me, in all directions, the incredible beauty of the area, the mountain peaks of Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, Hood, Jefferson, and the great winding river called the Columbia River.  It felt as if I were on the top of a great observatory, and, today, I was the only person with this special view, and I was quite grateful just to be alive, and have this privilege.  I bypassed a guard rail, and I then climbed around the rocky peak so as to be hidden from the view from anyone.  With the additional privacy that I had created for myself, I then felt comfortable enough to begin to pray and meditate for just a little while.  I was pretty poor at this activity, as my mind refused to quiet itself.  But, at least I made myself available to Spirit, in the way that felt appropriate to me.

Larch Mountain, near observation deck

My nervous system was still quite compromised from all of the poisoning caused by the chemistry experiments masquerading as methamphetamine/crank that I had ingested over the past 18 months, in addition to continued heavy alcohol abuse.  I had been clean and sober for 3 months, but total recovery seemed out of the question at this point.  I had been a drug addict and alcoholic, more or less, since I was 15 years old, but the last 18 months had really taken a toll.

My health was improving a little, but I still was having physical tremors, almost identical to Parkinson’s disease, and I was also experiencing the psychological discomfort of “hearing voices”, a delusional activity within my mind which consisted, at this point, of mentally generated feedback about whatever I was observing, or doing at the time.  The voices were nothing more than my own thoughts, yet, in my mind, they appeared to be coming from a center not of my self-aware self, but of something, or someone, not quite me. It literally was like having a play by play announcer operating in my mind, who verbalized everything that was happening, as it happened, with no color commentary added to it,  It was a third person perspective, with a running monologue documenting anything that my consciousness was focusing on at any particular moment..

I had an uncomfortable relationship to these mental processes, and I did not report this to medical professionals, fearing that I would be hospitalized, or placed on the same destructive medications that I had seen administered to my mentally ill ex-wife.  I had resigned myself to a life of marginal mental health, at best. Yet, I had no choice, either pursue the truth and see what manner of healing it might bring to me, or give up on myself, and live out my years in suffering and with continued deterioration.

A light, warm breeze carried the fragrance of the nearby pine trees to me, drawing me away from the problems of my body, and of my mind.   I continued to be absorbed by the beauty of the area, and the majesty of the unobstructed views.  The mountain peaks began to feel closer to me, for some as yet unknown reason.  I felt as though I could reach out and touch each of them.  The river far below me felt close, very close, and the whole panorama seemed to be drawing nearer to me, and I began experiencing everything in a different way than I ever had before.  And, for the 2nd time in a month, I started feeling possessed by an immense beauty and love.

A month ago I had experienced a vision, and, with its presence, all of my loneliness and depression had lifted. I attributed that temporary healing to the presence of the vision, and there had been a love that had flowed into me during its presence.  The “vision” had disappeared, but it had left its memory of a beautiful, unconditional love, and with it, traces of hope, and the expectations that something was to follow, of some as yet unknown nature.  Well, something was following now, and it was “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet”.

A voice inside of my head then stated, with its typical matter of fact nature,

“HE IS HAVING AN EXPERIENCE WITH GOD”.

I was no longer separate from that which I was viewing.  Everything revealed itself as an extension of myself, of my own true nature.  For the first time in my existence, I could see that, as far as I can see, all that I will ever see, unto eternity, is my self.  Then, with a sense of all of my thoughts now being my own, I asked myself

“Wow will I see myself today?” 

I saw that all of humanity was my true family.  I saw that everybody was either my brother, or my sister, in this new, true nature that was revealed within me.  I looked within myself, and for the first time in my life, I only saw peace, as well.  The third person monologue had stopped!!  I held my hands out before me, and my hands, which usually shook so bad that I could not even write my signature clearly, or use a spoon to eat from a bowl without making a mess, were steady!  Peace had finally found me on a mountain peak, and I had finally found my true self.  And, I had finally found that life, that TRUTH, I had been seeking since I know not when.

And, I had finally found what real recovery is.  It is not just stopping drinking alcohol and using drugs obsessively.  It is the decrease, and, ultimately, the elimination of all patterns of thought that keep me from caring for this world, and for all of the life upon it.  I can’t be alive, and live life fully and holistically, without loving my fellow man, and all of the rest of the life upon our planet.  Think of the love that we have for our newborn baby, or our favorite pet, feel that love completely, with no reservations at all.  We spare none of our hearts or souls, do we?  Can we give this love to all of the plants, insects, and animal life, aquatic and land based, upon this planet? Now think of that family member or acquaintance who is causing us so much distress, so much anger, even hatred.  Anger is not bad, or evil, unless it becomes entrenched within our being, and institutionalized within our society as racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or other forms of hatred. Can we give the same love that we would for our baby to that person who we are distressed with?  If we can’t let go of those negative emotions, then that is an example of our separation from God, or Truth.  I don’t have to travel to the underworld again to find that truth, or to look for somebody who might listen to me.

“WHERE ARE MY PEOPLE?”

became the question of the day, after I hiked the short distance back down to my car.

I then drove towards Portland,  from Larch Mountain, and was guided to go to NE 73rd and Glisan, where the US Postal Service’s EAP program was based.  I walked into the door, and I was greeted by both Larry and Mike. The last time that I had seen Mike was when he visited me in the Care Unit 3 years before. Larry had been the director of the EAP-employee assistance program-since I could remember.  I called out to them by name, yet neither man immediately recognized me.   When I mentioned my name, they were both blown away.  I was happy, or, more precisely, ebullient, and Mike said that I was simply “radiant”.   They wanted to know what was going on with me, and I stated, with a matter of fact attitude, that I was having a spiritual experience, and they both gave me a huge hug and acknowledgement.

Inspired by this reception, I returned to the Main Post Office, and checked in with the Personnel Department, where Eleanor Workman was the head of the department. My father and Eleanor were friends prior to my father’s retirement from the USP in 1982. She immediately recognized me.

“Bruce, it is so great to see you again! Wow, you are looking healthy and happy! I have thought of you often since your termination. Please, let me give you an application to reapply for your lost position.”

“No thank you, Eleanor, I just wanted to express my apologies for working for this company in such an unhappy manner for so many years”.

“Bruce, you could get the job back with little problem, since the Post Office knew that they fired you even though you were still a practicing alcoholic. “

“Eleanor, what would make me the happiest is if you could schedule a meeting between me and the head of Plant Maintenance, John Zimpleman. “

Well, he was “in”, so I went right up, and I had a direct opportunity to make amends to him for my poor performance from 1980-1985.  He greeted me warmly, listened to my story, was quite impressed, and then stated”

“Bruce, I wish that my son could discover what you just found, because John Jr.  was rapidly descending to your former level. I accept your amends, and I wish you well in your future!”

Wow, this day of amends went so well, I remained ecstatic about all future interpersonal possibilities.

One day that next week, while visiting our world famous Powell’s Book Store on Burnside in Portland, I saw my old psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Beavers.  He was standing in the metaphysical section of the book store.  I walked up to him, and he did not immediately recognize me.  I stuck my hand out to him, and re-introduced myself to him.

“Bruce, this can’t be you, can it?  Last time I saw you, I was wondering how much longer you could survive if the medication did not turn your life around.”

“Dan, the medication worked just fine.  I never used it, at least not in the way that you would have intended for me to use it. I actually carried it around with me for over one year, prepared to use it for my suicide if I did not find a reason to live. I finally found a new way to live life without medication, drugs, or alcohol.  I now accept full personal responsibility for my thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and activities”.

“Bruce, that is the desired outcome for all of my patients.  Congratulations on your success!”

I gave Dr. Dan a hug, and apologized for using him like a tool in my effort to manipulate my former employer, the US Postal Service.  He said that I did not need to make amends to him, and that he was there for me to serve all of my needs, whether I considered them dysfunctional or otherwise.  But it still felt good to see Dr. Dan and show him my healthier sense of self.  I was to never see Dr. Dan again.  When I recently saw his obituary for his premature death in 2015,  I felt great sorrow, and cried.

In the continued interest of “finding my people”, I attend the INTA Conference in Portland In August of 1987 (International New Thought Alliance).  The person that I was most interested in seeing was Jack Boland, the recovering alcoholic who had started a SUPER CHURCH in Minnesota, with well over 5000 members.  He also had  a following of many hundreds of thousands of recovering people worldwide, as his approach to spirituality, sobriety,  and healing was pretty universal.  The integration into this new community was a fascinating immersion into a group energy that I had never experienced before.

I WAS SO HIGH THERE!!!

I got to see firsthand a group of well over 1000 people warmly embrace the musical group Alliance, which starred Jerry Florence.  They had some hits in the 1980’s, and they were a group of gay men who all had HIV’/AIDS.  Having recently left that “evil” Hinson Baptist Church where gays were bashed regularly, this was like a breath of life to a drowning man, even though I had no homosexual tendencies.  The tenderness that I felt towards Jerry Florence and the group of men that constituted Alliance still lives in me today, and I still have tears today for the suffering of all people who have been judged as unworthy or just

Marsha (Masha) Feldman was a beautiful Jewish woman, of Russian descent, who sat directly across the aisle from me at the Jack Boland talk.  For some reason she came over to ME after Jack’s talk, and began a friendship with me that was to last for over one year.  She had lived quite the life, hanging out with many of the most beautiful people that Portland, Oregon had to offer.  She had hung around rich men with their fancy cars, homes, and clothing. She had told me that she spent much time with weight lifting men, many of whom worshiped their own bodies.  Some were bi-sexual, and she was a little concerned that she might have made contact with the AIDS virus.  She was suffering from an unspecified auto-immune deficiency, and she would not tell me what it was.  She was a princess of sorts, and expected to be treated that way.  Why she latched onto me is anybody’s guess, but I am sure that there was an underlying spiritual reason for this connection.

Masha was troubled and had recently visited her rabbi for some support.  Her rabbi had informed her, in the interests of her own personal happiness and sense of well-being, that she should give up on understanding “GOD”, and to instead pursue more ‘grounded’ approaches to her physical and emotional health and welfare.  She certainly had the physical aspect mastered, as she worked out daily, and kept her physical energy and beautiful appearance at as high of a level as possible.

The International New Thought Alliance conference of 1987 was part of her higher involvement in the social activities of her community, both inside and outside the Jewish culture.  We traveled all over Portland together, visiting various recovery and spiritual groups for the first time together.   We delighted in discussing with each other all manners of healing and methodologies for achieving higher spiritual experience.  Hey, it felt wonderful to have a new friend on my spiritual journey.  As a direct result of this connection, we visited the YWCA of Portland, on 10th avenue.  Every Sunday there was a tape group meeting hosted by Marie Schmidt, a student of Joel Goldsmith, the creator of the healing movement “The Infinite Way”.  Since Masha was Jewish too, like Joel, she had an immediate connection, though it did not last long for her.  I continued with the Infinite Way for several years afterward (and I still practice some of their principles today).

As I moved forward spiritually in that great summer of 1987,  I was still quite new to the path of healing and transformation. I had left my old life behind, and I was open to the experience of spiritual connection, and mastery. I had developed quite a meditation practice, eschewing committed relationships with others in order to develop a deeper spiritual practice. I remained excited about the possibilities for my life, as I had finally made conscious contact with the God of my understanding. I had recently experienced dramatic, if not miraculous, healing of my body and my mind, and a new energy permeated my being. I felt like I was finally swimming in the sea of meaning, though I still had not connected all of the dots, or started consciously rebuilding the new self. But, I could have never anticipated the experience I was about to have, on this particular day, July 21, 1987.

The Master Teacher

“Master Teacher of the Light, Master Teacher of the Light” I repeated within myself several times during an evening meditation, which is a mantra that I had developed to aid my focus for my meditation practice. I was meditating several hours a day, and though my life was bearing fruit from previous connections with the Spirit, I remained driven to find deeper and deeper layers of meaning, and experience of my true nature and being. Well, this meditation was to become Truth’s “bell ringer” for me. Without warning, I was lifted from my body awareness, and I then had a sense that I now had a decision to make. It was like I was driving an automobile, and I realized that I could continue steering, and heading in my usual direction for life, or I could “let go of the controls” and experience something totally different and unique.

I released the steering wheel of my mind, and my conditioning, and there was an exhilarating inner rush whereby I was totally released from myself and what was left of my old psychological set, and my burdens, and my body!  My essence traveled into a great unknown, neither light or dark, and it was like I passed through some sort of great matrix of vibrating energy.  I had entered into a dimension of experience where infinite interconnected structures of alive and intelligent energy were manifest.  I did not recognize what I was witnessing, nor do I have the words to adequately represent this web.  Later, I was to learn that this matrix was the very collective consciousness of mankind, with all of its intelligence, and its stupidity.  I quickly flashed by what was, at this point in my life,  that unrecognizable and unnameable energy, and began almost a half spiral downward, where I came to a place of complete darkness or emptiness. I felt totally at home here. I felt as if I was in a safe, though infinitely expansive womb.  It felt like it held everything in the universe, yet there was nothing at all to witness here, at least initially..

Almost immediately, a laughing, happy voice seemed to be speaking to me, or, more precisely, through me, in this “secret place of the most high”. Messages floated through, like

“No teacher shall effect salvation, I must work it out for myself”, and,

“Think no thoughts”, with

“Follow new paths of consciousness”,

And then, a mathematical formula for re-entry back into the great unknown was given to me. It was a differential equation that I could understand, and which stated (in layman’s terms) that with the total elimination of the movement of time based thought, the direct perception of reality was possible. The limit, as delta T goes to zero (T is thought as a function of time), divided by delta t (t is time itself), delta is the “change in”, or as LIM dT/dt, as dt approaches zero, with T=f(t). The solution of this equation is the great unknown, INFINITY, or that which I sought.  The difference between timeless spiritual being and time-dependent human becoming took on mathematical and spiritual significance for me on the deepest level.

The final messages, however, were the one most difficult to reconcile within my life, and the ones which remained troubling for me through the subsequent years. First, there is this component:

“YOU CAN’T BE REAL”.

When it was stated, it was stated through me, with a joyful, laughing voice, yet when I re-entered my normal way of being, it became an almost threatening statement, and one that continued to challenge myself, and my ego daily, even into the present time. And yet, to see again, as God, or Truth, sees, I must be mastered by this truth. The ego is the sum total of all of my judgments, the sum total of my human experience, my acculturation, my conditioning, my “separation from God, Love, my fellow-man, and Truth”. The ego looks out from itself, and sees everything, and everyone, as if they are separate from its self, while totally failing to see that “all that it ever sees, unto eternity, is itself”. There really does not exist the “you” that I have formed, my perception of “you” is an incomplete mental creation that only exists in my mind, and which may or may not be shared by others, and most certainly is NOT shared by you.

The human race tends to confuse the verbal description (or mental image) of the person with the actual experience of the person, who, regardless of appearances, is infinitely more complex, and worthy of love and acceptance, than the human mind can readily accept. My ego is the sum total of all of my time based thoughts about time based behaviors of myself, and others. If I want to see clearly, I must accept that my main mode of viewing the world was through the ego’s eyes of time-based judgements and the unreality that this creates. To die to this mode of living is to truly be reborn of the spirit.

To “follow new paths of consciousness”, while knowing that “you can’t be real” sets up quite a transformational dynamic within consciousness. If “you” can’t be real, then everything that I associate with “I” is preeminent. Every time I identify with a person, a process, or a place, I have created either a “new path of consciousness”, or I have reaffirmed some older, more familiar, potentially worn out path that I have already been traveling upon. “I am an electrician”, or “I am an alcoholic”, or “I am a son of Beryl and Corinne Paullin”, or “I am full of shit”, or “I am a lonely, isolated person”, or “I am angry with X,Y, Z”, or WHATEVER I associate my self, my “I am” with, either continues my path in old directions, or creates the imperative to create new words, thoughts, and experiences around a new direction. I could just as easily say “I am no longer traveling old paths of consciousness”, and then STOP thinking time-based thoughts, and rehashing and rehearsing old memories, to create a new life experience for myself.  I would then have to trust in a “Higher Power”, “the Unknown”, and the “Mystery” to create my new “timeless self” in each unique moment.

Lastly, a most confusing revelation came, as well. I could see the field of energy that constituted my body/mind awareness. I saw embedded in it two almost complete thought forms, or identity forms, which I recognized as two distinct entities. Yes, I had two extras attached to my field, and they were not there for my greater good, for sure. They were the psychic internalization of cumulative childhood trauma that I had experienced. I came to regard these two unwelcome components to my life force as tricksters, though I noted that their presence seemed to allay the feelings of loneliness of my ego, perhaps only because they seemed vaguely familiar to me. They appeared to be almost caricatures of two unique people.  I sensed that I was supposed to let go of these illusions of self,  but I did not know what to do. I was to learn later, much later, after my father’s death, that these two tricksters were creations that I had made in my youth were traumatic wounding events that my creative mind had turned into dark advisors, or tricksters..

The two extra identity vortices in the human energy field matrix that constituted my conscious sense of self did not really ever disappear, they just became unconscious again, for me. I later was to associate them with two black holes in consciousness which appeared to swirl around issues based upon my lack of self worth and the fear of death..  Little did I know that they were to become the most critical components to understand in my desire to form a better ongoing human/spiritual experience.  I now understood the basis for the potential for the development of disassociative or multiple personalities disorder.  I saw how the whole human race suffered from this disorder, to varying degrees. Schizophrenia, oppression of others, repression of self and feelings, passive/aggressive behavior, people pleasing, prejudice, racism, misogyny and the like all shared a common foundation.

All of these teachings were too much to digest in that moment, in that year of 1987, and for many years to follow.  But, this is a true path of humility, to finally see in its totality the shortcomings of the human mind, and to become willing to go beyond it. It was all so fresh and new to me and I was not the best communicator around the experience. I had no one to discuss this earth shattering spiritual event with, save one person, Masha. I knew that everybody else would think that I had gone insane, so I kept this inner teaching a secret to everybody else for many years to follow.

Masha, my new friend, was an amazing listener, and such a good friend, that we struggled through the teachings together.  We talked endlessly about our spiritual experiences, discussed the enlightened masters of the day, traveled and explored through the Columbia Gorge together, attended recovery meetings, slept under the stars together, slept in her apartment together, yet we never made love, as I was not to be her prince charming, as she related to me fairly early on.  I continued to see Masha as an extension of my ‘search for truth’ process where I remained celibate, so I was not too disturbed for that to continue (for most of my life, sex had not been all that satisfying for me).   Yes, this was yet another rejection of me on a pretty basic level, but I was relatively unaffected by it.  This rejection did not darken my life because of all of the other light that was being let in.

We continued to hang out together, and spent lots of quality time with each other in platonic, yet blissfully loving, situations in various settings around our area. On one of our tours through recovery meetings, in which Masha hoped to find a girlfriend for me, we were introduced to Laurie Hartmann, a woman claiming to be an adult child of an alcoholic.   We had a pleasant conversation together, and i secured Lauries phone number.  Masha noted that Laurie was her exact height and weight, had the same blond hair, and appeared to be physically fit, and happy.  Sheesh, something did not feel quite right, but she looked just fine.

Two of our favorite areas to visit were in Mosier, near the Tom McCall overlook at the Columbia River, and Washington Park, near her apartment in southwest Portland.  I continued to struggle to make sense of the three spiritual upheavals, or revelations, that happened over the period of May 24 through July 21, 1987, and attempted to understand other available teachings.

Looking back, everything worked out just fine, I think.  Pursuing a woman overly concerned with appearances could not have brought long-term happiness to me, and there was little reason to hope that a love relationship with Masha would have worked.  Masha was 10 years older than I was, which did help open me up to the possibility of dating older women (hello Sharon, my beautiful wife and love of my life, and, yes, an older woman!).  Prior to this, it seemed only younger woman had even the remotest of interest in me.  I always considered myself too immature for older women, anyway.

The search for Truth and love continued in new ways, yet I was not fully convinced that I had found my own unique path towards it .

I made a sincere effort to establish the “perfect” relationship with Laurie.  Alas, my efforts were not to come to a long term fruition.  We did enjoy each others’ company for several months, but I had to experience some real trauma and drama both early on in our relationship, and at the end of it.  In the interests of practicing safe sex, Laurie insisted that I get an AIDS test, due to my past choices for drug use and sexual activity.  At that time, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, so it was pretty normal to have reservations about both the disease, and getting tested for it.

I went to the public health clinic, and submitted my blood sample for the test.  It was handled in an anonymous fashion. so as to protect the individual who is tested, and keep their results secret.  My health department contact was a friendly gay man, who tried his best to help me find peace around the whole process.  Yet, in the three weeks it took to get my results back, I developed death terrors, and experienced anxiety unlike anything I had experienced before.  It was so much easier for me when I held the gun to my own head, figuratively speaking, than when the potential for a fatal illness took over that role, and potentially removed my freedom of choice in how I should have to die.

My test came back OK, of course, so I was able to continue on my new path of life with Laurie, and share in the joy of a more liberated sexual expression.  Yet, there was something amiss within Laurie.  She was in the midst of a spiritual crisis, where she no longer believed in the power of her “God” to deliver her to her own promised land of fully expressed human potential.  She was depressed, and she needed anti-depressants to sustain her.  She made poor choices around maintaining her independence,  and the direction that she was heading was to become a dependent bride, and, ultimately, a mother to several children.  We shared eight months together, got engaged, and then broke it off while still remaining lovers.

The story bends back to my relationship with Masha for a moment.  Masha called me about a year after I had last seen her, in November of 1988, to wish me a happy birthday.  I was already sensing the potential end to my relationship with Laurie, and I told Masha about that (yes, Laurie was my “replacement for Masha”).  She reported to me that she was now engaged to some Christian leaning dude who was quite a bit homelier than I was.  (Oh, was that supposed to feel good to me?)  She regretted not having released her prejudices earlier, so that we could have had a deeper relationship. She thanked me for teaching her the value of the spirit, versus those who over-valued money and appearance. 

It was a bittersweet revelation to me, and I never heard from her again.

Thank you, Masha Feldman

“YOU” can’t be real, continued!

I have always known that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we, as humans, live our lives, and communicate with each other. I have not always known what the source of my own disease was, however. My disease of misunderstanding drove me to the brink of death, into insanity, drug addiction, despair, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. My life could only be characterized, by the time I had turned thirty years old in 1985, as a committed search for the grave.

In 1987, I experienced that series of real spiritual transformational events, resulting in the miraculous healing of my body and mind. There was such a huge disconnect between the consciousness of the “old ways”, the “diseased”, the “dying” aspects of myself, and a new order of being that was trying to discard the old me.  My old misunderstanding of life, and of myself, was to be replaced by another version of my infinite potentiality. It was a remarkable time, and people who knew me then could feel the energy that was bubbling up within me. I had found a newborn enthusiasm for life, living, and a healthy re-integration back into the flow of humanity,

Humanity, alas, did not collectively share in my inner experience, nor could it.

I traveled all around the City of Portland, much like I did when I sank into its underworld, on my original search for truth. I no longer visited the drug dealers, manufacturers, itinerant thieves, motorcycle gang hit men, or any of the other characters that helped to enlighten me while I traveled the road of darkness. I now met with, literally, thousands of people who were new to me, in a multitude of different group experiences, to engage with and get to know “my people”. When I literally, and spiritually, came off of the mountaintop on June 22, 1987, an intention planted into my heart was to locate “MY PEOPLE”. My life had changed, and so did the nature of the people that I was to become interested in , and who became attracted to me, as well.

On one of my journeys, I visited a crystal store, which was a new-age rock shop on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. The owner of the store stocked books which promoted some of the speculative spirituality of that time. Every day, many people congregated at that store. They appeared to be part of a well-meaning group of spiritual aspirants, yet I could not quite grasp the ideas that “spiritual masters”, or even ultra-evolved aliens, were communicating to the human race through these crystals, many of which were originally located in Brazil. Books had been written about them (such as the Starseed Trilogy), and there was a popular, though misguided, attraction to the possibility that these crystals had special powers. Even some of these supposedly evolved people had evaded the truth that their enlightened minds were the source or cause of special powers, and not any objects in the world of effect.

I had several conversations with Jack, the owner of the shop, as I visited the shop at least three times to look at books, and be conversant with this “new-age” community of people. I challenged him about selling some of these crystals to naive purchasers for several thousand dollars each. Jack, quite the economic and spiritual realist, claimed that he was only meeting a need, and not promoting an idea or agenda. After all, he is a capitalist now, and he needed to pay his bills.

One of our conversations had to do with what our responsibility as evolving, healing beings is to the rest of humanity, which continued to struggle with its own broken truth, as it had since time immemorial. Jack listened with great interest in what I had to say, as he always did. Jack had the capacity to listen to what was being said, acknowledge the person where they were, and point to a direction where they might want to look. In some sense of the word, Jack was a GURU. I was not attracted to GURU’s, however, as my nature tended to rebel against so-called authority figures.

My Master Teacher, the source of wisdom within me, revealed itself within me on July 21, 1987, rejects the notion that any teacher can deliver to another their salvation. The inner message, received as if delivered by thunder in the silence of my being, was that “no teacher can bring salvation to others, it must be worked out within the self”. There were a few other messages delivered, as well as a few visions, but I did not have the context at the time to fully interpret and understand the totality of its life-changing, life-affirming message.

That is where personal experience must rise up and become incorporated within a new narrative, a narrative informed by the new energy, an energy that is more inclusive, and universal in its application. Without our personal story becoming married, as it were, to the new truth, life changing wisdom could not become part of our nature, nor could we become verbal around a new world order that was trying to reveal itself to all receptive beings.

I pondered with Jack the possibility of bringing healing to others, as I felt so blessed by my own healing, and I felt that I had something unique and precious to share with the world. Jack listened intently, as he always did, thought for a moment, then with a BIG SMILE stated simply:

“FUCK THE WORLD!”

I was confused, and asked for clarification.

“Bruce, the world could care less about your healing, and what new truth or messages that you might be able to bring to assist others in their journey. The world, as it now exists, exists for a reason. The whole fundamental consciousness has been established to make the common man feel OK about being less than who they are, in truth, and to limit and control those who might develop the insight to rebel against the established disorder. The whole of religion, and philosophy, was designed to help keep people in their darkness, while telling them that they are on the path to their own salvation through the belief in powers greater than themselves. It has always been about disempowering, and controlling, the population. Could you imagine how the powers of the age would respond if everybody sought for, and found, the Truth?, There would be chaos, and the world would collapse into a form of Armageddon. The world of religion, and this bastardized Christianity that Americans practice, is the ultimate form of oppression. And the oppressed BELIEVE that they are the chosen ones, while they subject themselves to the fantasies and hypnotism of their faiths”.

One of his final statements set me back in my chair, and I almost fainted.

“The “world” has created its own dysfunction, and revels in swimming in its own cesspool of misunderstanding, and there is NOTHING a sane man can do about it, other than just laugh at it.”

Though I felt a part of myself feel rejected by his statement, I also felt a resonance with his statement of truth.. I had lived a life of little or no value up to my transformation, and I felt that I finally had something to contribute to the world, yet here was a prominent figure lecturing me to turn my back on the world, and to just go out and enjoy my life, and LAUGH AT THE WORLD.

Here is the eerie part:

In the spiritual experience of July 21, 1987, when I first reached the “Master Teacher” within my own being, I had traveled, without my body (of thought, past consciousness, etc.) to a place of silence so deep and powerful, and which was subsequently perceived to be the very womb of creation of consciousness itself. It was there that I heard the Master’s voice.

“You can’t be real”

was the message, laughingly expressed through the deepest silence, peace, and love that I had ever experienced. For a moment, I was allowed to look through the eyes of God and see that the entirety of the matrix of consciousness of the human experience was unreality itself. All that the Truth can do, is to laugh at it, and dismiss it.

And now Jack, two weeks later, was parroting the very idea that “God” had revealed to me.

All that I knew was that at that special time I felt as though I was a guided missile of the truth, and I was to have many more remarkable connections with evolving people over the next several years. These connections helped me to flesh out what had been revealed within myself by my own Master Teacher,  or source of wisdom common to all of mankind when it chooses to access it and listen to it.

I chose to be silent about my experience, for many years to follow. I carried a grin on my face that the despair of the world could not erase for several of the following years. I stopped laughing at the world when my responsibilities to my life increased.dramatically in the mid 1990’s, while, concurrently, my new, more spiritually inspired, persona developed. I was not to live the life of an acetic monk, or live the artificial, though idyllic, life of a member of an ashram. Traveling through the diseased world of form, with one’s need for eating and gainful employment, while witnessing the world’s corruption, its sin, suffering, and dying, tends to distract one from the truth that “all that is human, is illusion”.

And, watching the drama that unfolded from within the White House from the Anti-Christ 45th president tended to be quite disturbing, and shows how twisted human consciousness may become.

I am still attempting to laugh at the world, though God consciousness appears to have dramatically ebbed, at least for now, and all that I can do, many times, is be anxious, and cry.

I have known at the most intimate level, the darkest night of the Soul.

Unlike the years from 1987-1993, when I meditated up to six hours a day, and lived in a continuous blessed state, I am unable to meditate for longer than a half hour now. And, yes, the continuous blessed state is only a memory for me. I could return to it if I abandoned the world, but I love too much of the world and its infinitude of sights and sounds to do so at this time. Reading, writing, integration into nature, exercising outdoors, and conscious meditation upon day to day life now fills my day. Most days, I am at peace, and I feel fulfilled. The daily news remains a source of information, and I tend to avoid conservative points of view, opting for more liberal and progressive interpretations of reality.

I have recently attempted to write several books about the potential for the transformation of consciousness. To the best of my ability, I have translated the message from the Master Teacher,  but I am not an adequate messenger, for sure. Publishers dislike my style, and editors have a problem with my tendency towards intensity and verbosity. Yet, potentially, we are all containers for Infinite Spirit, albeit broken ones, and that can be more than enough to bring a blessing to self, and to others.

All that I can now say is this:

Welcome to the ILLUSION.

Please, enjoy yourself while you are here.

Discard all of our knowns and conclusions into the universal dumpster, and live from the state of “unknowing”, where insight and new knowledge may be spawned. There is only one Mind, and it can be experienced in the unknown realms within human experience.  Intelligence and its active agent, curiosity, only thrive when one is not permanently committed to a point of view.

Changing our consciousness is a natural and normal experience, when we are not suffering under the infinite weight of the oppressive nature of collective consciousness. Drinking alcohol, using drugs, spinning madly on a merry-go-round, jumping out of airplanes, or even traveling to outer space is the expression of our natural need for change. The key is not to become addicted to the avenues chosen for release, for then they become new forms of oppression for our hearts. Permanent release, liberation, or enlightenment, occurs, when one loses attachment to the world of form and effect, its accumulated verbal constructs, and all forms of release, with its accompanying pleasure and pain.

If you are not enjoying the show, remember, you are the co-creator of it. Try changing the channel, and see what happens.

Pain is inevitable, though many forms of suffering are optional

There must be the DEEPEST of desires to find the truth, and the DEEPEST of intentions to not neglect it in the face of attacks from others.

The human “Conspiracy Of Silence” points to the FACT that mankind covers itself with illusory verbal constructs, and worships the illusion as if it is fact. The Truth remains forever buried, thus, the foundation for the “conspiracy” is created, and maintained, throughout eternity.

The truth that I live is the only truth that I can give.

I have saved the world from myself, and there really is nothing more for me to do, save witness the suffering of others, and point my finger to a potential new direction for those who choose to awaken.

Those that do not choose to awaken, will remain stick figures in other people’s dream of world domination.

Hildegard of Bingen, the great German mystic and writer from the 12th century, became ill whenever she did not write. The same experience has become the truth for myself, and, potentially, may be the truth for all of mankind. Collectively, we are terminally ill.

Please, save yourself.

And write a great story, or book!

The thoughts, beliefs, and experiences that tell us that all that we, and each other, are is our past and our memories, is the tomb that we as individuals, and as a part of cultural collective consciousness, imprison ourselves with.

Truth is the antidote for all inaccurate, second-hand, toxic and limiting theories. Truth is not just for the saints and sages. Yet, very few people have any interest in it, because of the belief that they are already covered by their religion, or that only their “savior” has the truth, or is the truth. There are others who believe that they already understand it, or, for others, that there is no such thing as “truth. Sadly there is also a category of human beings who are so absorbed with their material world existence that the search for “truth” never even begins, because it does not sound very interesting or entertaining.

One cannot possibly find the sacred, using only the flashlights provided for by the profane.

Truth is extremely difficult to conceptualize, because truth is elusive, and exists above and beyond all of the words used to chase it with descriptions. Truth is often times best described through our inspired art, poetry and music, where more of the brain becomes engaged to the energy attempting to be shared. But our words still serve a valuable function, yet forever remaining only pointers, or place-holders, for the energy that must be personally experienced, or it will never become psychologically real to the witness.

“Why struggle to open the door between us, when the whole wall is an illusion”-—Rumi

Jesus, The Buddha, Mohamed, and all of the other heroes or idols of religion and spirituality become potential hindrances to the truth, if we only follow and/or worship them and their words, and don’t see beyond them to the truth that is fundamental to all of us.

Don’t follow the path. Go where there is no path and begin the trail. When you start a new trail equipped with courage, strength, and conviction, the only thing that can stop you is you!—– Ruby Bridges

And the real observer, the sacred, can only laugh at the vast matrix of verbal consciousness created out of the disfigured mind of man. None of our understandings of God, Truth, or Love is real in any lasting, eternal sense, no matter how “sacred” the mind of man may have imbued those words with, and historically worshiped them as such.

In the deeper realms of truth, in the deep silence of the sacred within, some difficult, but transformative truths are revealed. There is no such thing as a “you” or a “them” in any ultimate sense of truth, though as we travel through this strange, wonderful world, we must continue to entertain those illusions because of our race’s consensus agreements that such entities must exist, and that their stories must be honored.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” —-William Blake

With the cessation of all movement of thought that has a time base, the revelation of another way of seeing is experienced. Seeing without the limitation of the word is the domain of infinity. The word is the measure of our time based reality, and serves a relative purpose only. Yet, as far as we will ever see, unto eternity, is our self. Will we see the continuation of a limited sense of self, the self fragmented by the word with its concepts of time and space, or will we finally apperceive the all-inclusive self, unlimited by the word and all of its historical relationships with concepts developed within human consciousness?

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.—- James Baldwin

I AM

I am the brightest of mornings, I am the cloudiest of days, I am the silent night altar upon which mankind prays and preys.

I am the Olmec and Mayan of times old, recent, and new,  I am all civilization’s ruins, and I am the ever-evolving life that regrew.

I am the bird’s call, I am its flight, and the wind beneath its wings,  I am the music and its spirit that joyously lifts all hearts up to sing.

I am the water, I am the lagoon and the bay, I am the infinite ocean where my children are birthed, live, love and play.

I am the blue sky, I am the weather changes, and the gathering of clouds, I am the lightning storms that are now appearing so dangerous and loud.

I am the wind and the sun, I am the warm soothing breeze, I am even our cold’s most raucous cleansing sneeze.

I am the dolphin and manatee, I am the mangrove lined shores, I am waves crashing against rocks, that photographers adore.

I am the mind, and I am the end to its lonely thoughts, I am the heart’s loving web in which we are miraculously caught.

I am the boisterous protests, and I am the crowd made quiet, I can be even be found witnessing the white supremacists’ riot.

I am the wealthy, and I am the hurt, oppressed and poor, I am your heritage, history, and future until we all are no more.

I am the Sanders and Pelosis, I am the Putins and Trumps, I am love’s warriors, and I am also hate’s chumps.

I am the Christian, and the Hindu, I am the Muslim and the Jew I am the Atheist and Buddhist who you never thought that you knew.

I am the cancer and its treatment, I am the movement towards health, I am the healing balm that works mysteriously in stealth.

I am the grief, and I am the pain and the sorrow, I am the deepest well of hope from which we eternally borrow.

I am your lifetime, I am your body and its breath, I am the blessed last moment before each of our deaths.

I am the death of the false self that leads to the only true heaven, Our denial of this truth brings the hellish news on channel two at eleven.

I am the sacred, and I am even the profane, I am the source of all that we treasure, resisting me only adds to life’s pain. 

I am not the movement of our thoughts, while we cling to concepts of time, I am the emergence from all shadows, we all must reach for the sublime

What is my name, and where is my place? Being ONE is seeing Me on every smiling and suffering sentient beings’ face.

This poem was written January, 2019 while on vacation at Hopkins Bay, Belize. I had yet another immersion in the Mystery.  I wanted to honor of all of the innocent oppressed, bullied, victimized, traumatized, gassed, misogynized, persecuted, marginalized, neglected, abused, murdered, alienated, and institutionalized human beings, and all of the animals that are being driven into extinction, as we are all overrun by the principles of toxic masculinity in it’s almost infinite varieties of forms.. Toxic masculinity, toxic fatherhood, and toxic religion are cultural and historical impediments to achieving and maintaining happiness and good health.

Set out, pilgrim. Set out into the freedom and the wandering. Find your people. God is much bigger, wilder, more generous, and more wonderful than you imagined. – Sarah Bessey

The question remains: How will we see our self today? Are we the eyes and ears of an important part of an unbroken whole, or are we only a fragmented part seeing through the kaleidoscope of a broken mind?

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” —Anaia Nin

Religious reasoning is often just an oxymoron, being subject to fantasy and tribal control dramas throughout human history. This illusory thinking style will never bring anyone closer to the Kingdom Of Heaven, but it may bring the adherent closer to the hypnotic spell of religious tribalism and delusion. To find Truth, we must let go of the controls of the past, be they religious, philosophical, familial, emotional, and/or physical in nature. All of our knowledge is an accumulation of incomplete perceptions, no matter how hallowed or sacred the concepts derived from which have become over our history. Our personal and collective knowledge accretions may even become a prison cell for our spirit, until we find a way to release ourselves from the pillories of our ignorance.

What is Truth?

Sacred silence and its unbroken vision of one infinite self.

Perfection lies, behind all eyes,

We, who would look within ourselves, will find,

The Sublime Surprise, of which all Life does comprise,

The Divine Self of all Mankind.

We, who have made our choice, with one free voice, Call to our Eternal Source Supreme,

We will no longer roam, we are coming Home,

We are awakening from the “human” dream!

With courage drought, from fear made naught,

We move from temporal shadow to Eternal Light,

The Kingdom sought becomes the Vision caught,

Whosoever overcomes, now sees with unhindered sight! T

he Love All-Knowing, the Truth now showing,

With Divinity, We walk hand in hand. In us its growing, through us its flowing,

Embracing all between space and land.

With Hearts entwined, One Soul Divine,

To this world, We are a blessing immense.

Though we pass this way for but a day,

With Divine experience, who would dare dispense?

If you don’t want to disown your own unique Spirit, watch out for truth’s damned distant relatives! They will try to steal your spiritual inheritance!

Fundamentally, we are all magnificent, radiant beings of infinite potential, yet our sleeping minds create images of us and the other which are forever limited, and limiting. We surround ourselves with religions and other communities which help to support our erroneous concepts of ourselves, and the other, and our spiritual integrity and dignity remains compromised until we wake up and assume our rightful place in Love’s Universe.

There is always something to do. There are hungry people to feed, naked people to clothe, sick people to comfort and make well. And while I don’t expect you to save the world I do think it’s not asking too much for you to love those with whom you sleep, share the happiness of those whom you call friend, engage those among you who are visionary and remove from your life those who offer you depression, despair and disrespect.-— Nikki Giovanni

Will Love ever win out?

Meditate on that one, if you dare!

So, finally what is Truth?

Truth is not part of the structure of thought, existing at a transcendental level of unknowing where our hearts and our intuition join together in the sacred silence of our infinite potential. Yet, the bridge of words created between the truth and our conscious mind becomes the “word of God”.

Never give up, never give in, never give out. Keep the faith, and keep your eyes on the prize. Together, we can redeem the soul of America.“

—John Lewis We must first  lose our mind, with its historical accumulation of knowledge and questionable theories and memories, to find the Truth underlying all of Life.

Prayer

If we could all divest ourselves from our religious or scientific and/or secular backgrounds for a moment, and consider what is about to be discussed, we can share in the possibility for a greater personal and collective revelation of oyr spiritual capacity.

It has been said that prayer is nothing more than intentional or focused thought.  It has also been said that prayer is our line of communication with our higher power.  As the understanding of “prayer” and of our thoughts evolves, we finally note that the words point to something so simple, normal, and natural.  Yet, these words also point to a much greater potential for shared reality than most people understand, or realize.

There is a band of frequencies in the spectrum of universal life force where humanity resides. Our minds already arise from this base, or fundamental ground, of being or existence. We naturally can access all of these frequencies, yet we must discern which ones to attach our life force energy to, and which ones to avoid. We all are accessing these frequencies together, as a human race, thus the incredible potential for overlap of experiences, synchronicity, empathy and compassion.  For example, reincarnation may be the experience of one’s unusual sensitivity to the crystallized life history of a deceased person whose energy is still vibrating in the spectrum of universal life experience.

One story really stands out from my electrician apprenticeship program that I attended from 1988-1992. Gary Johnson was another apprentice in my class, and he, at times, appeared a little distracted and dull. I knew that there was more to him than that, though I never really positively acknowledged him in any outward way. We were American Males, after all, and rarely do we reach out to each other in any physical, meaningful, loving way. One day we were scheduled to take a very important test, one which would determine if we would successfully continue in the program, and eventually finish with our electrical license. For some reason I felt an intense desire to pray for Gary.

This was not a typical activity for me, praying for somebody that I did not know well. After the test, Gary came over to me, and asked me why I prayed for him. Nobody, I mean NOBODY, could have known that I was praying for Gary, including him. Are we all connected? My spirituality was not a flashy garment that I wore to gain attention from others, because of my need to keep a secretive silence about that aspect of myself. I was a participant in an industry dominated by unconscious male energy, and I knew that would be ridiculed and ferociously judged by all of the toxic energy of the men, having been a participant in that activity prior to my own awakening..

I stopped praying for co-workers after that, not being comfortable with the mystery of what had just transpired.

NOTE:  Gary died early the next year.  The reason that he appeared distracted is that he was keeping a secret from all of us.  He already had his diagnosis, with a poor prognosis, though he claimed that his lack of energy was due to the care that he had to give to his terminally ill mother,

Telepathy and prayer can refer to the same experience, as well as prescience, remote viewing, and other psychic phenomenon. It is too easy to discount, or “poo-poo” this aspect of human potential. Our world culture will continue to further hypnotize itself with its higher technology entertainment, and many will lose their way because of over reliance on these toys of communication.

What will open us up to the possibilities of the “unknown”?

Most of us continue to define our life by what we already think we know, and by what others, such as parents, friends, teachers, ministers, etc. might think about us. Time based thought and activity generated from a past frame of reference remains the dominion of our ego, whether we consider our minds healthy and happy, or insane. But for many of us, in order to find the real connection with love, joy and sanity, we must let go of envy and competitiveness and the need to control others.  We can let the natural peace at the center of our being decide what is best for us.

Thank you, Gary Johnson

Grandfather Great Spirit

1992 Dream

in 1992 , while living in the Rock Creek area with Sharon, I had a most amazing dream, and for me to even be willing to share it with you is the miracle of love, and trust, that I have  (only Sharon has ever heard it , and she had no choice-she woke me up from the actual dream).

In this dream, I was in my grandfather’s home, sleeping in the bedroom that i always slept in as a child.  A “fierce, fiery cluster, or orb, of pure light and love” hovered over me, and though it did not have human form, I knew it to be “my grandfather”.  In shamanic terms, it was an actual experience of my eighth chakra, though, in my dream state, I recognized it as my deceased grandfather.  I was being drawn into his love light, and I knew that, for me to continue, this energy would destroy my body because my body was too weak to support this “fire of love” that came to me.  I did not care, for I had finally found what I was looking for, and I began to rise up, and attempt to join with it, knowing my “body” would be destroyed in the process.

Now, in real-time, in the physical world, my body was shaking and almost convulsing, and, to Sharon, my “crying and distress” showed that I was having a nightmare.  In her concern, she woke me up, and I had never felt so disappointed to have to wake up, as it ripped me away from this most remarkable inner experience.  But the dream carried many fruits with it into the world that our bodies inhabit  (Also, the prayer of gratitude-Grandfather, Great Spirit, Thank You, appeared in my mind and heart back then, as well).  I knew that if I wanted to entertain, or to even host, the higher vibrations of love, my body (both physical body and the body of thought constituting myself) I needed to be dramatically strengthened or my body would literally be destroyed, and this was part of the underlying motivation that culminated in my becoming nearly an elite athlete, by the time I was 46 years old.

The Divine Feminine

LOVE’S REUNION  (poem by Bruce Paullin)

I stumbled over the frozen wilderness for oh, so long!

With a hole in my heart that life could just not fill

Until I stopped to rest, and heard a gentle voice singing a long forgotten song

That promised of my release from this winter world of painful chill

Her lyrics spoke of the return of Life to freedom

And the release of shivering minds from darkness’ frozen, fearful hands

She drew me closer without any further verbal tethers

And prepared me for the walk back to Love’s now awakening lands

Her warming presence melted the icy hardness that I used to know

Inspiring within me the courage, to myself and my world, to say

That, to all of my past memories’ barren trees of lifeless knowledge, I now refuse to go

I will now accept only the lessons learned along Love’s Infinite Way

Yes, she met me while I was with the dark companion

But it was to her pleasure to take me home to share her loving lights

And give me the shelter of Love’s never setting summer sun

She changed my cold mourning into happier, heavenly nights!

By freely offering of herself and all of her sacred charms

She moves me through life’s clamorous valleys unto its silent peaks

I can now retire from a life of fruitless wanderings

To live in the Source of Peace of which mankind forever seeks

Her life is resplendent with Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty

For these are the robes with which she clothes her being

The gift of Love now unwraps before my inviting eyes T

o reveal her ecstatic vision, which is now all-seeing

My search for Truth and Love Sublime has finally ended

For, I now fill my empty cup from her joyous running streams

I have reunited with my eternally fulfilling lover

And, her healing waters dissolve all of my painful dreams

I only seek to remain within her all-embracing arms

While through all life she extends her ever unfolding surprise

My first waking breath each morning brings the certainty

That, from my bed, joined as one, we again shall arise

My broken heart and shattered life is finally mending

And, wedded to her life, I now call her my faithful bride

Life no longer has a fearful road ahead to travel

For, One with God, on Love’s lighted path, I now gratefully stride

I have lived two complete lives.  I experienced anamnesis, though much of the first life is still available to me, through family history, and through my own very good memory.  My second life,  though characterized by significantly different energies than the first, is still powerfully influenced by our culture’s resistance to practices that enhance intelligence, and reduce the historical impacts of patriarchal dominance.  A culture that continues to oppress the divine feminine, be it our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our grandmothers, our planet Earth, or,   the silent, repressed part of our self, continues to live out of balance with itself, and remains dominated by male power and control issues.

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Some aspects of our lives just seem to continue to elude our ability to communicate around them, and add to our cultural conspiracy of silence.  Life was never an easy journey for me, and had it not been for some deep need to understand my dysfunctional process, and try to find the underlying truth amid my personal chaos, I would have passed away long ago.  Some wounds are so deep, and primal, that just pasting new names onto aspects of the disease are not enough. Names are only a convenience for communication, and are never comprehensive and inclusive enough to completely reveal the true natures of what they were created for in our minds to represent in the first place.  Naming is the way that our consciousness weighs and measures new forms of life, ideas and experiences, in the attempt to insert the unknown and the mysterious into a present context for understanding.  Naming tends to attach a dynamic process to a fixed point in time and space, and thus lodges it in the past.

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But, the act of creating stories and context, and just being conversational about the details of life does not dislodge the detritus from our field of consciousness. The Devil is in the details, figuratively speaking, and if our need is for change, we need to find a way to see under the vast matrix of details that only float on the surface on the mind .  We who still choose to name processes and create stories must also have personally explored and experienced the movements through consciousness, and found the way to the silence at the foundation of our being.  Otherwise, the process of naming, and the resulting stories that arise from naming, are just more intellectual knowledge and entertainment for a superficial mind, and will not pry open the healing doors to supreme silence, with its insight and wisdom.

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We must  uncouple from the fragmentation of our wounded, time based minds, and instead anchor our sense of self to the healing silence, the sacred silence, at the center of our being..

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The intellectual and the atheist, though possessing finely tuned minds, can never explore the mystery, and the depth, of the human soul, and comprehend that we all have a connection with Infinity.  The willing explorer of the new paths of consciousness or the mystic both have access to the limitless territory of the Spirit, and will soar to new heights and see the sights rarely seen by the rest of mankind… 

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But first, a message from my sponsors.  I will recount, to the best of my ability, some narratives around my mother, grandmother, wife Sharon, and others.

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I have always loved my mother, Corinne Beatrice Henry Paullin.  I have always taken for granted my mother.  She was like the air I breathed, I rarely saw her for who she was, yet I would not have survived without her.  She was one of the finest, most loving and reliable persons in my life.  I never doubted her love or caring for me, or for our family.  She loved her younger brother, Wayne, as much or more than any other sister.  She was treasured by her own grandparents, who were relatively prosperous, as well as by her parents, who were lower in income.  Mom’s grandpa was the first really old guy that I had ever met.  I remember visiting him and his “new” wife (a nurse who married him and took all of his money) in Salem, and Mom requesting that I go over and kiss the old man, who was seated upon some sort of chair with a potty built into it.  It is a kiss that I will never forget, the kiss  of foreboding death.  His funeral was to be the first that I attended, as well.

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I took her for granted for all of my childhood, and into adulthood until the age of 31 for me.  She always wanted the best for me, she tried to be a motivator, she tried to help me right my ship whenever it listed too severely and I will forever be grateful to her.  We did not talk much over the years, even though we spent so much time together, especially from the year 1995 on, when Sharon and I moved into my parent’s neighborhood.  Beginning with Mom and Dad’s fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2000, and extending through 2009, Sharon, Pam, Aunt Susie, and I shared in most of the vacations that were taken, due to the need to be more present for our aging parents..

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Suffice it to say, my mother was severely overshadowed by my father’s exuberance and outrageous nature, though she did not seem to mind most of the time.  My lack of elucidation on my mother’s story shows aspects of my own poor communication style, and aspects of Toxic Masculinity that directed me to not pay more conscious attention to her as a human being, and create better stories about her and her life.

Going through all of the photographs of my mother has caused me to think also about many aspects of my own life: what a great gift that life is, what a great debt of gratitude I owe my mother, and father, for what is the greatest opportunity in our known universe, which is to live on this planet. I am so fortunate to have been born into a family with a mother who always tried her hardest to do the best job she could do, whether it be raising children, working in any of her numerous jobs, enjoying friendships, or just living life to its fullest.

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By hearing some of the talk of friends who have called since mom’s death, I have heard some wonderful, funny, and fascinating things about my mother that I never got to experience personally. She was, at times, an enigma to me, but I could always count on her to be there for me, no matter what was going on in my life. I tried to return the favor later in life, but I could never repay her for all the good she brought me.

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I just enjoyed sitting with her, talking or quiet, and sharing time. My mother always seemed to need to be on the move, however, so those shared periods were short in time, though frequent in later years.  Every time we sat down, and the conversation started to turn “serious”, especially about death, dying, or emotionally laden issues, she would just pop up from the chair, and state:

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“Macy’s is having a great sale today.  I gotta go now!”

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And, with a smile, off she would go.

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I still feel inadequate, and not up to the task, of fully representing the beauty and the humanity of the person I called mom, and that the rest of the world called Corinne. I do know that she loved life, and her friends and family, and always sought the best for all that she knew. She loved the outdoors, and that was reflected by many years of camping and travel trailering. She loved hiking, and logged thousands of miles hiking and Volkswalking through the years, through many states and countries. She loved to dance when younger, and enjoyed many years of square dancing, and many friendships that ensued from that activity. She also loved her golfing, and had many friendships that she enjoyed from that activity.

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.Beatrice Simpkins Henry and Kenneth Wayne Henry (this section got all screwed up by WordPress, sheesh!)

My maternal grandparents were my second set of parents.   My first memory is of being at my grandparents’ home, and probably dates around the summer of 1957.  And, it was my Uncle Wayne talking to me that I remembered.  I was still in a diaper at the time (my mother said that I wore diapers until I was at least 2 years old).  Of course, I was not speaking yet, being an extremely late developer, but I still remember having some vague thoughts, and I understood the verbal question given to me in this memory, though no words of my own making seemed to form in my mind, just “picture impressions”.  I remember my uncle asking me if I had messed up in my diaper, while I walked/staggered up a path to the porch of my grandparents’ home.  I had no reply to give.

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I spent many a weekend at my grandparents’ home over the years, and when I turned 15 I lived there for 3 straight months painting their home, and hanging out with local teenage girls.  My parents were very liberal in allowing me to spend as much time with my grandparents as they could tolerate.  The biggest issue in the early years was that my sister and I fought quite a bit, so Grandma would try to keep the peace where possible, and sometimes limit our time at their house accordingly, or just allow one of us at a time to stay.

.Thank you, Grandma Beatrice Simpkins Henry and Grandpa Kenneth Wayne Henry

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In August of 1987, I met Marie Schmidt, a practitioner of Joel Goldsmith’s

The Infinite Way,

which is a movement involved with mysticism and spiritual healing..  She was a woman about 87 years old, who taught every Sunday at the old YWCA on 10th Avenue in downtown Portland.  I had seen a simple advertisement for her tape group, while attending the International New Thought Alliance conference in Portland in August of 1987.  The tape group was a combination meditation group, and a forum for listening to the taped teachings of Joel Goldsmith, a spiritual healer and mystic who first began his healing practice shortly after the Great Depression began.

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She had been holding weekly meditations and tape recorded playbacks of Joel’s actual messages since 1962. Marie would sit in the front of the room, and lead a 15 minute meditation, followed by the playing of a cassette tape of one hour length.  She had a collection of at least 300 tapes, of which I eventually copied virtually all of them, and committed them to memory as best that I could. Marie had over 1000 hours of his recorded messages, which she ended up giving to me, and which I converted to digital format.. Some of the tapes were the old style reel-to-reel, and I was not able to convert those tapes to the more modern digital format..

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I was captured by this group, which had mostly older people who attended.  I believe that I was the youngest person there, for the period from 1987-1991, while I remain involved with her group.  Initially, I kept my distance from most of the people, not really being sure what the whole business was about.  I eventually drew Joan Madsen and Marcus Jones into the group, who I knew from the International New Thought Alliance convention of 1987, as well as Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Living Enrichment Center.

One day in February of 1989, after I had just broken off an engagement to be married to Laurie H, and I was devastated.  The sweet old woman, Marie, offered me a “healing session”.  Well, I had my doubts, and nothing to lose, and I was a little curious about this “healing business”.  I went up to her apartment, still devastated, and meditated with her for 15 minutes. At the end, Marie spoke the “message” that she heard from Spirit, in regards to me.

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“More perfect than you are, you could never be”,

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with

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“All that is human, is illusion”.

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Well, OK, but how can I possibly apply that spiritual salve?.. 

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As I thanked her for her time, I then noticed I was totally at peace, and I was “healed” of all of my emotional disturbances around the ending of my engagement to Laurie.  It was as if the winds of Spirit had blown away everything from my mind, except peace and joy.

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As I look at my life’s history, I have been healed by its Loving Mystery.

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I later tried to have her heal my mentally sick ex-wife, Donelle,  with no success.  So there were limits to her ability, though she always stated that God  heals, not herself . I can almost now hear Marie’s voice, telling me, in regards to all of us:

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“More Perfect than you are, you could never be.”

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How that manifests in all of our lives remains an unraveled mystery, to be experienced by us each day that we have the privilege to wake up.  She would tell me that we are all blessed by each other’s continued walk through life.    Love goes before us, to make all of  “the crooked places straight”. We are Loved, and, in fact are Love Itself.    The body goes where it must, but also, so does our Hearts.  Go in Peace and Love, and always be willing to bring healing to any situation, for that is our mission, and who we are always to be.

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In 1994, Marie was placed in the St. Andrews home near Mt. Tabor, when her nephew noted her deteriorating health, and he was concerned about her decline.  Marie continued to practice healing with the other patients, even while under care of the attending professionals.  My last visit to her, prior to her death, was characterized by her still restating to Sharon and me of our perfection in the eyes of God.

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“More Perfect than you are, you could never be.”

Believe in yourself. Believe in your potential. Be in your UNIQUE PRESENCE.

Thank you, Marie Schmidt, Eileen Bowden, Mary Baker Eddy

 I dedicate the following chapter to my wife,

Sharon White. 

The lessons of love learned while with my wife Sharon could encompass an entire book of its own.. On July 4, 1989  I met Sharon, and her daughter Hayley while attending a Course In Miracles discussion group in the basement of the Unity Church in southeast Portland.  Right off the bat I was struck by what a genuine human being that she was,  appearing real, honest, deep, and personal. Her daughter exhibited some unusual behavior, and I could tell that Sharon was dealing with troubling mental health issues with family members.

I eventually joined in relationship with Sharon, after being reintroduced to her at a Living Enrichment Center gathering around the Twelve Steps of Recovery, a several week presentation by Mary Boggs, the minister of LEC.  We both scheduled our attendance at a Course In Miracles weekend retreat that LEC was sponsoring over the weekend of August 4, 1989.  When the retreat was cancelled, I offered to Sharon that we create a retreat of our own.  I chose Cultus Lake, a mountain lake in Central Oregon, which my family had camped at several times when I was a young person.  We proceeded to hit it off so good together that weekend, that we knew we were right for each for now, and for a long, long time to come.

LEC Course In Miracles Weekend handout

Come September, though, I could see that I was becoming quite involved in Sharon’s life, and if I did not travel to Boston soon, and research a powerful dream that I had, I would have no opportunity to do so in the future.  So I arranged a week trip to Boston, not knowing what in the heck I was going to find there.  I knew that the Mother Church of the Church Of Christian Science was located there.  Joel Goldsmith’s teachings had some of their origins from Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings, so maybe I  was supposed to go there to see or hear something Ms. Eddy related.  I did go by the church, and sat in on a few sessions.  I was asked by one of the ministers what I was doing there, just visiting, or did I have a desire to learn more about Christian  Science?  I told her that I was a student of Joel Goldsmith, and that I had also read some of Mary’s works.  She immediately escorted me to Mary’s private study, which nobody had access to, save a special few individuals.  She told me that I probably would like to sit and pray and meditate there, and for me to take as much time as I like.  So, that is what I did.  I found my sense of the sacred and profound, and felt blessed by this exposure to the Church, and to Mary Baker Eddy’s private study.  I will never know for sure if this is what the dream wanted for me to do, but that is what I did.  I wanted to make sure to honor the energy, and its revelations, as best as I could.

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I moved in permanently with Sharon later that year, and her daughter Hayley lived with us until July of 1990, when she struck out on her own, to find her own truth and healing.  I was having some difficulty communicating with Hayley.  Sharon and her daughter had some unique mutual control dynamics that were not healthy or satisfying to witness, or to participate with.  Sharon ended up signing up for a class from Diana Martha Clark, who was teaching a twelve step recovery course on co-dependency, which Sharon ended up benefiting greatly from.  Hayley had a lot of growing up to do, and I became disturbed by her need for chaos, need to hold her mother as an emotional hostage, and her lack of respect for my need for peace and honest, loving expression in communication. 

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Hayley could be particularly harsh, angry, and insensitive, and I felt like I was always walking on eggshells with her. One weekend in July of 1990, I went to my grandma Henry’s home to stay while she was out-of-town.  I spent literally the whole weekend in prayer and meditation around my troubles with Hayley.  Then a most unusual thing happened.  I “heard” that my issues around Hayley had been resolved, and that she was not to be an issue any further.  I went back to our apartment that Sunday evening, and upon my re-entry, I was informed that Hayley had decided to move out, and live with Martha Cannon, a former patient of Sharon’s. Remarkably, the only problems that arose with my early relationship with Sharon, other than daughter related, revolved around Sharon assuming that I knew what her needs were before she expressed them to me, but that misunderstanding quickly worked itself out.

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As I look at my history, I see the workings of the Mystery.

EPSON MFP image

Sharon and I shared a common passion of finding and expressing the joy and truth in life, and we meditated and prayed together for many hundreds of hours together, especially early on in our relationship.  The fruitage of one of our shared meditations is the following “poem”.  I had a particularly deep, profound connection during a meditation around 1990, where I had once again entered into Truth’s domain.  There was no apparent message, that is, until I returned to my conscious mind.  The silence then used the words in my memory to create the following message.  The first stanza I wrote in 1985, prior to any real spiritual unfolding, and I could never finish it until this meditation in 1990 filled in the body of it:

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THE VOICE OF AWAKENING

Though the slowly shifting sands of time,

Create ever taller hills for this lost soul to climb,

It must be in my selfish, hateful world of no reason or rhyme,

I must begin the search for Truth, to find the Love that is sublime.

“Oh seeker of Truth, God’s high mount you would climb,

Though you now stumble through the valley’s shifting sands of time.

Stop confusing your mind with worn out rhyme and reason,

For they are forever charged by Truth with treason!”

“Oh mental marathoner , only on Life’s treadmill you now stand,

Just re-using the same words and thoughts keeps you life’s ‘also ran’

You’ll forever chase in vain Love’s all-knowing voice,

So be still, for with your run’s end, is the Cause to rejoice!”

“Oh marionette’s dancing image of the screen of the world’s mind,

With all of those conditioned beliefs in control, what freedom could you find?

Release yourself from all of those memories’ materialistic strings

To prepare for the inner Wisdom that only my Intelligence brings!”

“Oh shadow boxer of evil, when will you ever tire?

Tis only champion of a dream world to which you aspire!

Cease giving energy to your illusions with those mental pugilist blows,

And reveal the peaceful mind of the One who now knows!”

“So please wake up to Love’s voice sweet somnambulator,

And realize the eternal truth that “I” within “you” is greater,

Than any mental image you could ever form or learn,

And then your World will reflect the One for whom you now yearn!”

And then the real “punch line” to the search for Truth:

“To be in realization of Truth, is to find God’s high mount another illusion to climb,

Created by fearful, desirous minds caught on the merry-go-round of time”

The dark, restless mind remains forever bereft of Love’s Rhyme and Truth’s Reason,

And only chases after mirages, until it sees all of its movements are guilty of treason!”

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While continuing in a loving relationship with Sharon, I joined with many communities of like-minded people, or continued my present participation in them, such as Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, Adult Children of Alcoholics, the Course In Miracles support groups, the Infinite Way, The Living Enrichment Center (LEC), with a very important men’s group experience that arose through my relationship with LEC, and The Empowerment Community with its many offshoot core groups.  Sharon and I became part of a “couple’s group” with two other couples, which became a 20 year affair, lasting all the way until August of 2017 (ending with the death of our dear friend, Marty).

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One of our backpacking trips was to become quite a memorable experience for both Sharon and me.  I awoke one morning during the summer of 1992, and finished preparing to leave on a weekend hiking and camping trip with Sharon, up to the Mt. Adams Wilderness Area.  My senses were somehow heightened, and I felt as though I could see and hear better than I was accustomed to.  Food tasted better, the air carried many more scents, and my entire body felt alive with vitality, and sensation, well beyond what I was accustomed to experiencing in my day-to-day life.  I had to work that day, so I ignored my “extra sensory perception” for most of the work day, and I remained excited about joining with my beloved partner on a hike to Lookinglass Lake, which would end up becoming around a 10 mile hike, in one direction.

Our drive took longer than expected, and we arrived in the Wilderness area too late to reach the developed campground, so we parked for the night in a snow park area, and set up our tent to shelter for the evening.  We sat outside of the tent, and I began to experience, in its fullness, that “extrasensory perception” yet again, but much more profoundly this time. It was as if I had sensory receptors in the dirt, the sky, and the trees.  It was as if I had grown roots, so to speak. I not only could see the ground all around us, and the beautiful trees, and the sky, I could FEEL the ground, and it was as if I extended all the way through everywhere that I could see.  It was the experience, in a new form, of “all that I can see is myself”.  It was like I was “hearing” and “seeing” and “feeling” for all of nature that surrounded us, and it was a mystical, transcendental event.  My new body was the earth, the sky, the trees, the wind, the insects, and my human shell.

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We finally lay down for the evening in our tent, and though I was still quite profoundly experiencing this event, I was able to fall asleep beside my beloved.  Shortly afterward, I awoke to a great light enveloping our tent, and I arose to go outside to see what was happening.  In the sky appeared a Great Light, and the entire surrounding area was bathed in a light that totally eliminated all shadows, even though it was near midnight!  I awoke Sharon, who rose to witness the light.  To this day, I have no clue if the light is associated with my “heightened mystic awareness”, or if it was just a coincidence that a UFO would awaken us to bathe us in its radiance.  After we returned home, I told my mother about the light, and she reported that the week before, a mysterious light in the Mt Adams wilderness area was also reported, so who knows what was happening there?

Looking back at my life’s history, I remain immersed in the light of its Mystery.

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To feel pain is to be alive, to feel another’s pain is to be human—-Leo Tolstoy

Grandfather Great Spirit Revisited

Like Anais Nin, I am a writer, and an explorer of the deepest, darkest recesses of human experience, in addition to being a mystic, and spiritual adventurer.  I constantly surf the seemingly chaotic waves of spiritual evolution, while attempting to bring healing and balance to my life as I ride my consciousness onto Spirit’s final peaceful shores.

I have been struggling with extremely high blood pressure as of late, even though I have been taking high dosage anti-hypertensive medication.  I also have been experiencing anxiety at high levels, about once a week for the last two months, even though my stress levels are far below average.  Yet my body still is “keeping the score” about individual and collective traumatic injuries that I have experienced over the last 68 years, and these silent, embedded/embodied wounds can often rear their sleeping ugly heads and roar back to life, and severely penalize me, and many,  many other innocent victims.

I have been working on traumatic wounding, and all of our potentials for healing, for the past 7 years, resulting in eight books (none published so far, but the eighth, once an epic book, was edited down from 1150 pages to about 250 by Melinda Copp .  It will be sent to a final editor, as soon as I stop re-editing it/procrastinating).

All of which brings me to a dream I had on October 25, 2023:

I awoke at midnight, with an extreme anxiety reaction.

I was dreaming of being in a car with my grandpa Henry (my mother’s father, who died in 1990). There were two dark, threatening characters in the car with us. I knew that I must confront the two dangerous men, to protect my grandpa. I exited the car, and, in my mind, knew that I must subdue these men, even if it cost me my life, otherwise my grandpa would perish.

The conclusion says it all–I was totally willing to sacrifice myself to save the presence of my grandfather.   Yet, what does the word, and the experience, of “grandfather” really mean to me on the psychological/spiritual plane?

To backtrack a bit, in 1992 , while living in the Rock Creek area with Sharon, I had a most amazing dream, which we have already read about.

(The following paragraph was written in the year 2017, regarding first 1992 grandfather dream)

This whole scenario, minus the 8th chakra understanding (or grandfather’s dream light) played out in my real world.  In my intense desire to finally bring forth my story of hope and healing to the world, the energy unleashed caused me incredible suffering, both physical and psychological, and I knew that I was going to die, if this energy did not get transmitted in such a way that my body could survive. I am hesitant to talk of it, even now, as there is no guarantee that this body of mine is still going to hang around.  Yes, I gained access to an incredible energy field, yet, for over one year, I remained quite fatigued.. But, I know that I am supposed to be writing this account of my 1992 dream, as the “God Chills”, or horripilations, accompany my words.

(End 2017 paragraph.  This energy coincided with the beginning of my writing career- probable causal relationship).

Thirty one years later, after the first grandfather dream, I come full circle to my grandfather. In 1992, I was willing to disappear into the ball of light my grandfather was. Yet, upon awakening, I knew that I was not strong enough to carry that vast, seeming infinite energy of love.

By the confrontation with, insight into, and the subduing of these two dark forces within me, the liberation of “Grandfather, Great Spirit” becomes inevitable.

I now cue in a small part of a transcendent meditation I had in 1987,  My Holy Spirit (more like Sacred Silence) gave to me, for a brief moment, a view of my life energy field.  In it were embedded two “tricksters”.  The “Silence”  just witnessed these forces with me-for we were One for that miraculous moment, but We/I took no immediate action upon them.  I was troubled for 29 years as to what these “tricksters” represented, but I knew that they were not there for my good, and yet I had no narrative for them.   I eventually forgot about them, and continued the process of rebuilding my new, more spiritualized identity, without directly addressing these confusing, ineffable forces, until late 2016.  With the encouragement of my wife Sharon, and best friend Marty Crouch(deceased), and the inspiration of Sheila Hamilton, writer of the book All The Things We Never Knew, I finally began weaving into a coherent narrative the story of the collective and individual effects of traumatic wounding

Dark forces common to all humanity plague all of us, either directly through our life experience, or through our relationships with other members of our family and of society.

Intergenerational trauma (the effects of war, terrorism, murder, religious wounding, alcoholic predispositions, patriarchal-societal dominance and oppression, with resultant misogyny and child neglect, racism, income inequality, etc.) plagues all of us, whether we are conscious of these facts, or not.  We all make accommodations to these dark forces,  and yet those adaptations that we make often define us, rather than encourage us to fearlessly confront the issues, and press onward for transformative change within ourselves and our world.

Personal wounding and subsequent dysfunction and repressive responses through individual life experience (moral injury, abandonment/neglect as baby, ptsd) are dark forces that torment most of us and must be faced, if we are to be clearer channels for healing and love’s intentions.

I am those tricksters, while remaining unconscious, and unmotivated to do anything about them.

I am Grandfather, Great Spirit when I confront these issues, see them for what they are, and refuse to be led down the dark pathways that they inevitably point to.

I get very sick when I stop looking at these issues, and also stop writing about them.  I will be getting new blood pressure medicine tomorrow, to protect the body from the potential for further damage (I had a mini-stroke of the right eye in March, temporarily losing vision,  from heightened blood pressure, and agitation/anxiety).

I firmly believe that as the book is finally published, as I continue to evolve, and as I also write and talk about my insights, the process of spiritual healing will bring greater health benefits to me, and to those inspired to action by all such efforts.

My first experience of crowd energy

Was when I attended my first rock concert in 1971.  There were well over 12,000 people attending, and the MIND BLOWING experience was a unitive event where my presence was distributed over the entirety of the crowd.  If you have never experienced this, you cannot understand this.  Over the many years from 1971, through the present moment,  I have found that I am sensitive to crowd energy (a palpable form of collective consciousness), and I can “feel” the collective energy of several types of groups of people, and actually draw from it, and add to it if I am receptive to what is going on.  And, unfocused groups put off such diffuse energy that there is nothing special to tune in to, and I find little to attract me to such energy.

In 1992, I was requested to drive to Seaside, and pick up Sharon after her 30 hour committment to running the Hood To Coast relay race.  Upon my arrical to the outskirts of Seaside, I felt an amazing energy, almost as profound and exultant of an energy as I felt at the 1987 International New Thought Alliance convention in 1987.  It was like te ethers were vibrating with an electricity, the power of teamwork, and comraderie.  Wow, teamwork, what a feeling!

Since there were over 12,000 runners and many more support people at the event, it is no wonder that a field was created in and around Seaside, the destination of the great world-famous event.  I became so impressed with the energy of the experience that I committed to running with Sharon, and I began to run with her several months later, so that the next year I could join her Hood To Coast team, the Sole Mates.

(note:  This experience led me to become one of the top local older runners in our area, culminating in way too many awards, and injuries, but also leading me into a deeper understanding of two of the darker forces predominant in male collective consciousness, which are excess competition and greed)

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It was the summer of 1993, and I had scheduled a 5-day retreat with Eileen Bowden and 20 other followers of the Infinite Way, a mystical healing path originated by Joel Goldsmith (died in 1964).  The retreat took place in Federal Way, Washington, at the Pacific Palisades retreat center overlooking the Puget Sound.  I spent the four days in silent contemplation and meditation, with several group talks given by Eileen over the course of the time period.

Eileen Bowden Retreat

Eileen Bowden, who lived in British Columbia, Canada, was a student of Joel Goldsmith, the originator of the Infinite Way.  Joel was a non-practicing Jew, and was led into Christian Science in the 20’s, while his father was on his death-bed.  Joel watched a Christian Science practitioner heal his father, and Joel caught fire with the possibilities for bringing spiritual healing to all of life (life that is receptive to healing, that is) because of this.  She was hand-picked by Joel to continue teaching the Infinite Way, as she “had the message”, meaning that she had achieved, or attained, the “Presence”.   She would enter into the sacred energy, and then give her unprepared talks (she spoke extemporaneously for at least 1 hour for each talk given).  Our role as “listeners” was to be in a sacred, meditative space, as well, so as to contribute to the total energy of the experience.   The result for me from this experience was that I was totally “involved” in the sacred energy of the Spirit, with the total quietness/stillness of my mind complemented by perfect peace, and joy.  I carried this energy for a full week after the experience.  Some call this experience samadhi, bliss, enlightenment, heaven, or whatever points to that state beyond the normal human, verbally intoxicated state.

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Awakening Part 4

(written in 1992-1993 time period)

Perfection lies, behind all eyes,

We, who would look within ourselves, will find,

The Sublime Surprise, of which all Life does comprise,

The Divine Self of all Mankind.

We, who have made our choice, with one free voice,

Call to our Eternal Source Supreme,

We will no longer roam, we are coming Home,

We are awakening from the “human” dream!

With courage draught, from fear made naught,

We move from temporal shadow to Eternal Light,

The Kingdom sought becomes the Vision caught,

Whosoever overcomes, now sees with unhindered sight!

The Love All-Knowing, the Truth now showing,

With Divinity, We walk hand in hand.

In us its growing, through us its flowing,

Embracing all between space and land.

With Hearts entwined, One Soul Divine,

To this world, We are a blessing immense.

Though we pass this way for but a day,

With Divine experience, who would dare dispense?

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The experience was somewhat perplexing to Sharon, as she wondered why I was having this profound experience, and why it continued on for so long.  She had many questions, but the perfect peace that I was experiencing was not ebbing, at least initially.  I had to return to work, as I worked for a living as an electrician.  At work, the energy continued to flow in its own unique way, but well into the work week I started to question the value of “enlightenment” when I still had to continue to work.  My co-workers were so out of touch with these things that I considered important, special, or sacred, and I could not quite get a handle on how this spiritual experience would have any value in the workplace.  I dared not speak about it, or show any type of behavior that would distinguish me from anybody else, and the dominating attitude for me was to “just blend in” as best I could.

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I had already cut way back on meditation with the beginning of my running career in 1993, and when the spiritual “energy” finally ebbed, I despaired a bit, and I felt a little awkward pursuing any deeper connection. I needed a powerful ego to support my intentions to make a successful career, and I knew that I needed a healthy sense of self esteem, beyond just having my “secret connection”.  I had started questioning that commitment to the connection, and to the value of a process that I was uncertain as to how to integrate into the rest of my life.  I needed an empowered self, a self that could promote and defend itself from the often times threatening world of toxic male dominated construction trades.  Ever so gradually, my  commitment to my spiritual unfoldment began to ebb, and I wrapped my spirit baby in a blanket, and placed it into a garage so that I could sleep, just like my parents did to me as a youngster.  But my love for my partner, Sharon, and for all of our shared friendships and family did not ebb, but continued to increase and enhance the quality of my life.

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July 30, 1994, Sharon and I had a “commitment ceremony” in our backyard.  We had over 75 people attend, including most of our immediate family, and many, many friends.  I had solidified in my own mind and heart the absolute value of my relationship with Sharon.  She came to represent to me integrity, honesty in communication, speaking from the heart, empowered divine feminine energy, compassion, service to others, and the celebration of our shared humanity at the highest level, of any person that I have ever met, even up to this very day.  I have made many mistakes in my life, but I celebrate every moment of every day my relationship with Sharon.  She is truly made in the image of the highest power in our universe.

Giving our vows, July 30, 1994 Eddy Brame (Crouch) officiating

The years 1995-2005 were dominated by employment for both Sharon and I.  Sharon, who is a nurse, became a manager for Legacy, and eventually became a hospice nurse for Providence.  I continued on my career as an electrician, occasionally accepting management roles.  This  also was the period that I focused on improving my running ability, as well as increasing my participation in our family environment.  Gradually, our huge circle of friends diminished during this period of time, and death started creeping into our awareness as important family members and friends starting passing away.  Losing my grandmother in 1995, and Victor Thomas in 1996 were two most troubling losses. In late 1987, I had a dream where I saw a ring with seven jewels on it, but it was missing its major stone, though the ring had a setting just waiting for the jewel to be inserted.  The missing jewel was much, much bigger than the seven stones.  What could this dream possibly mean?  I was engaged to be married to “woman number seven”, Laurie Hartmann, at the time, so to have this dream was disconcerting.  More was to be revealed at a much later time, when my future wife, Sharon, was to choose a ring for our second wedding in Las Vegas, in 2004.  Without any knowledge of my dream, Sharon proceeded to pick a ring at the original Mother Goose store with SEVEN SMALL STONES and ONE LARGE CENTRAL STONE.  She had picked out, without me being present or having ever told her about my dream, the EXACT ring from my dream.  I had forgotten about the dream, until I located a journal in August of 2018 that I had in storage since 1988.

As I look at my history, I am surrounded by the “rings” of its Mystery.

Sharon retired from her career as a hospice nurse in early 2009, and wrote her first book,

Whose Death is It Anyway, A Hospice Nurse Remembers

Sharon helped me with the care of my father, Beryl, over the period of time after the death of my mother in 2009, though Dad’s death in September of 2017.  Sharon took over care of my aunt Susie, Dad’s sister, after the death of  her daughter, Sharyn, in August 2017.  Sharon continues to be an invaluable guide and aide for me as I walk down the challenging roads of being present for dying friends and family members, including pets.

Sharon, Penny, Evey at Sharon’s 70th birthday Parachuting Experience

Sharon remains an inspiration to me.  She appears to get younger every year, and her outlook on life tends towards optimism, and she remains upbeat.  She is a “connector” to this day, and she reaches out to everybody that she can, in her attempt to be the voice for healing, love, and friendship in her world.  She continues to draw miracles into her life, and she has a special intuition, or inner knowledge, that allows for her to make connections with people who the “normal folk” of the world would never get to experience.  Sharon continues to be the “gem of greatest value” in my life, and her spirit sparkles with a brilliance unmatched by anyone that I have ever met.

Thank you, Sharon!

Iris

    I have always loved the canine species. My father was also an admirer and dog owner for all of his life, and he raised me and my sister with dogs throughout our childhood. My mother and father usually were the most responsible party for the care and maintenance of our dog family members, though Pam and I would assist with feeding and exercise. Yet when I hit adulthood, I could never find the time or inclination to bring a dog into my life. That all changed in 2001 when, at 45, a mystery dog came into my and my wife Sharon’s life.

    A beautiful white German Shepherd pup materialized out of the wilderness in January of 2001. My sister and a US Forest Service ranger had found her and her mother abandoned or lost and wandering through the Clackamas Wilderness area. It is unknown how long they had been lost, though the puppy was nearly ten months old. Her mother was elusive and escaped my sister’s and the ranger’s grasp, yet this puppy decided that hanging around with humans was probably a better option for her.

    My sister already had two dogs and did not need another, so she offered this beautiful animal for our stewardship. Sharon and I were initially resistant, as our careers dominated our Monday through Friday workweek. Pam brought the girl down to our home, and this dog immediately made herself home in our house on her first visit. When Pam left, she took the dog with her, but I could see this being wanted to stay with us. My heartstrings were already being tugged on quite vigorously, and I found a new openness to having a new family member.

     I was in training for the Las Vegas Marathon then, so we prepared to travel to Nevada. I told my sister she would have to keep possession for another week. Pam wanted me to give the animal a name, as she had no tag or collar when she found her and had no idea what her name was. I thought a bit, and then the light came on. Sharon has always loved the iris flower, and she brought her Love of its structure and fragrance to me. I knew I needed to name our new girl Iris, knowing that we both had deep roots in our loving spirit with that name. 

    Iris took an immediate liking to her name. Iris was a very skinny youngster when we took possession of her. She immediately took a liking to us and to our home. Right off the bat, I could tell that this dog was a unique being. She was highly well-mannered, gentle, curious, and boy, what an athlete she was! Once, we were walking along Clackamas Road near our home, and Iris spotted a squirrel running up a tree. Iris broke free and jumped high enough into the tree to get about seven feet off the ground. That squirrel barely escaped her leaping grasp, which placed Iris in a fork of the tree’s main trunk. She was to fall from the tree into the brush below, unharmed. While she wandered the wilderness with her mother, she learned to be a small critter hunter just to stay alive, and she definitely had the physical skill package to keep eating. She had an amazingly graceful stride, and when she decided to run, it brought me the greatest joy and thrill as I witnessed one of nature’s most outstanding athletes in motion.

    Iris’s second family set became my sister and her now-deceased husband, Larry. But Iris spent the vast majority of her time with us. She was our constant companion on hiking adventures, and Iris was a true outdoors friend. Iris hiked many Oregon Coast, Mt. Adams, Mt Hood, and Mt. St. Helens trails, as well as numerous Columbia River Gorge trails. She also graced the trails of Northern California, where she enjoyed the Redwoods more or more than we did. Whenever Iris encountered wildlife along the trail, such as a Roosevelt Elk, Iris would briefly chase it and immediately return to us to ensure we were OK. She would lead all hikers on trails, running far out in advance to scout the trail and ensure it was safe for us. Iris would always return to us to encourage us further or prevent us from progressing whenever she sensed danger. If we hiked twelve miles, she walked and ran at least twenty miles during the hike. At least two times, she prevented Sharon from heading off the trail in dangerous directions, so she was our outdoor adventure protector and angel.

     I was quite the runner in those days, logging at least six to ten miles a day during my training periods. I would take Iris with me, and on significant stretches, I would unleash the beautiful girl and let her run free. She moved with a fluid grace like I had never seen in any animal before or since. I would sprint ahead sometimes, and she would zoom past me and look back as if to encourage me to run even faster. When I engaged my own fastest speeds, she would flow along beside me, running with a shared joy, and then speed off ahead of me and not stop until I slowed down or changed directions. My heart soared with her, even when my body could not quite keep up. 

     She had an unusual fear of running water and would not cross over streams unless she could jump over them. One time, while hiking around Mount Hood, we needed to fjord a fast-running snow-melt creek. Iris would not walk across it, yet she walked back and forth, up and down the creek, until she found a perfect launch point; then, she exploded off the rocky ground.

     She slept next to our bed at night on a big, comfortable dog cushion. She never bothered us as we slept while being a perfect companion at home at all other times. She was a most gracious canine hostess for all who visited us, and she was friendly with all domesticated animals, including our grandson’s cat, who came to stay with us for a week. She would offer her body as a pillow whenever our grandsons visited and needed to nap on our couch.

     I loved Iris as much as any parent could love their own child. I did not have any children, and my grandchildren, through my wife Sharon, were physically unavailable to me, so Iris was my surrogate daughter. I was so proud of her when she became the very manifestation of God’s Love for me over the years that I was to be her steward and friend.

     In 2005, my father brought home another beautiful Husky puppy, Rocky, to replace his recently deceased Samoyed dog, Peaches. Iris and Rocky became fast friends, and it is evident that they enjoyed their time together at home and hiking wherever we went when we took our father. Rocky tended towards over-exuberance, and Iris would occasionally give Rocky a lesson in manners, a lesson that my father was unwilling to deliver. But Rocky and Iris became good friends to each other,

     In April 2007, two cottonwood trees along Kellogg Creek fell across the middle of our home, causing immense damage. A team of arborists came with their man lift to try to remove the tree wreckage from our house. The two cottonwood trees were of substantial size and had created two impact troughs in the roof of our home, with the damage estimated to be nearly $45,000. While the two men continued their overhead work, I walked into the house to retrieve some personal items. Iris accompanied me as I walked into the living room, attempting to get to the back of the home where our bedroom was. Suddenly, Iris started barking furiously and backed away from me. Strange, I thought, what in the heck is going on with Iris? I had never seen her do that before. I turned around and walked two steps towards her. Right then, the arborist lost his load, and a six-foot-long tree trunk weighing two hundred pounds fell through the roof; RIGHT WHERE I HAD JUST BEEN STANDING. In forty years of arborist work, the professional had never lost a load or caused an injury. Iris had saved my life, as that log would have pile-driven me onto the floor and left me with not much of a skull left.

     On December 1, 2007, at 3:45 in the morning, Sharon and I awoke to a piercing cry beside our bed. I rushed down to Iris’s side and held her as she died. I asked Sharon if I should try to resuscitate them, but Sharon said it appeared beyond our ability to bring her back, and we had to let her die in our arms. We were heartbroken and devastated, and we both then knew a loss that equaled any that I had ever experienced in my life. Our Spirit Dog had left us, and life would never be the same.

    I felt a crushing guilt at the loss of our treasured Love. I had relapsed earlier in the year and had become addicted to Oxycontin, which I initially needed to treat myself for a broken leg. The leg finally healed, but my addictions had not. In my diseased, opiate-hijacked brain, I created a story that my beloved canine companion, an authentic Angel of Love from God, had to leave me because of my spiritual corruption. My recently over-opiated, addled brain could not decipher the natural gift of her beautiful presence in our lives until a time later when healing could resume again within my heart.

     One year later, to the very second, Rocky woke up and howled for one minute at my father’s home. According to my father, Rocky had never done that before and never did it again up until his own death in our home on June 23, 2016.

Dogs and friends just do not get any better than Iris. I still miss her.

 

On one of our many hikes, Iris was the greatest hiker ever

Iris in one of her many memorable poses in the great outdoors.

Obituary: Iris White Paullin (5/1/1999-12/1/2007)

Beloved friend and doggie-daughter of Sharon White and Bruce Paullin

She was a friend to everyone she met on her unique road of life.

She was filled with puppy energy all the days of her life.

She brought her joy and Love to all.

She was compassionate and intelligent and had a seemingly miraculous ability to read our body language and thoughts.

Her sensitivity to the world provided extra benefit to us through several potentially life-saving interventions on her part, both on the wilderness trail and within the home.

Peace and Love were built into her very nature, and her sane and spiritual presence brought order into our often chaotic lives.

When we returned home at night after a long day at work or when we were preparing to leave, yet again, for work the following day, she was always there to greet us with a kiss.

Iris died on December 1, 2007, at 3:45 in the morning, after waking from her sleep to let out a heartbreaking scream of death.

Her cause of death was a heart arrhythmia, which has infrequently happened to other members of her breed.

It has been documented that this form of death is known to occur during the deep REM sleep periods.

We are grateful that fate chose her death while we were both at home and while she slept on her own bed next to us in our bedroom. We shared in her life and in her death.

She is still remembered by all who knew her, even neighbors who witnessed us taking her on her daily walks and runs through the neighborhood.

It is the time we devote to the ones we love that affirms their importance and eternal presence in our lives.

Thanks to all who shared in our beloved friend’s life!

Yet another angel has found her wings.

The Boy and His Dog, by Sharon White

Running through the fields

Bounding over logs,

Stretched out

Flowing gracefully

Or chasing rabbits and squirrels

Our White Iris streaked into our house

And planted herself in our hearts

Bringing joy, intelligence, compassion, and sanity

Offering and receiving Love unconditionally

She weaved her way 

Into the fabric of our being.

How very wonderful

To watch you throwing your toy frog or ball into the air

To hear you communicating with us in your howling language

To taste your hair in our mouths after cuddling with you.

To touch your beautiful white fur

To smell your doggie breath!

How very sad and devastatingly lonely

To have you ripped away from us so suddenly

To hear that piercing death cry.

And to watch for the return of breath, which did not happen.

And to touch that beautiful body as the warmth faded.

And to witness the lifeless shell of the most loving of friends.

But how very wonderful,

To see you with our hearts,

To feel your presence at our feet,

To have all of these beautiful images of you.

Bouncing the ball, excitedly catching it!

Wrestling with your master, scrunching between his legs.

Walking with your mistress,

Talking with your pack in your own inimitable way.

How devastatingly wonderful-

THIS BOY AND HIS DOG.

Thank you, Iris,

Thank you, Bruce,

Thank you, Sharon.

Ginger

This is written in honor of our beloved Ginger, who died on June 6, 2016. I am going to write this one from Ginger’s perspective. Ginger’s relationship with us coincided with one of the most challenging periods in my life, and her story is still not yet quite fleshed out in its fullness. But here it is anyway, even though it is only a skeleton. 

     As a dog, it was a challenging mission for me to communicate with my human companions. This is the most difficult story for me to tell now, as I lost my life experience in the year 2016, so I must channel this story through my beloved human companion to have it written. I never learned how to talk human very well, let alone put my thoughts to paper. But my Holy Canine Spirit listens well to me, and she says she can translate my story through Bruce. Please forgive me if what I say appears to be a little simple or, at times, confused. I live in a different world than you do, yet our worlds overlap in love, mutual support, and companionship when they are not in collision due to mutual misunderstanding or grief.

      I was born into this beautiful world through my mother in the year that you call 2007. I started my life in a pile of other warm, furry family members. We did not have much energy to do much other than hang around the warm, milky way of Momma’s belly. Things weren’t too clear for me what I was supposed to be doing, so I just did what came naturally and followed the lead of the other little warm ones who were my family. When my eyes finally opened up, I finally got to see what I looked like because there were eight other little guys and girls who looked like each other, so I must be one of them, too!

     Occasionally, another giant creature would come by and watch us while we tugged at Mama. She was a strange-looking critter, bigger than Mama, always standing on her hind legs, and she only had hair on her head, unlike our Mama. I did not know what to think about her, and my brothers and sisters accepted that she somehow belonged in our lives, but we weren’t sure why she was. Many darks and lights passed, and my brothers and sisters were getting bigger. We would nibble on each other when we weren’t tugging on Mama’s milk makers, or we would wrestle with each other. Eventually, they all fall asleep together in a big pile.

    

    I was created and prepared to bring comfort, love, and protection to the human creators who build great structures and invent magical things. Yet, with all of their creativity, they cannot consistently create self-worth for themselves or lasting, loving relationships with all of the other members of their species. My favorite invention is their metal legs, which whisks them away at incredible speeds along hard paths. I especially like to ride in them and stick my head out of the window to feel the rush of the air through my hair and over my face.

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    I first met my human friends when I was a youngster. My first human was a young woman, much like Mama’s helper, who did not know how to care for me very well. My human did not feed me through her belly and made me eat some solid, foul-tasting stuff out of the can. I got sick pretty often, and I was often not able to hold my food down very long without giving it back to her. She fed me the same food as her cat, a funny-looking creature about my size initially, though I quickly became much larger. I did not hate the food, but it did not taste like anything special. And it did not taste good when it came back into my mouth again, which was happening more and more frequently.

    My human took me to a place where other animals go for short periods so that other humans can look at us closer. He stuck something into my backside that stung and removed a dark-colored fluid from me. I could tell he was concerned about something, but I did not understand what my human and this man were discussing.

    I was to return to this place two more times over the next three hundred nights and days. During the last visit, the vet told my human that I might need to go to sleep to make me feel better. He said that if I slept the rest of my life, my human might be happier. My human was not pleased to hear that man in the white coat’s story and left his clinic with me. I was glad to be awake still ’cause I did not like the idea of sleeping the rest of my life. I loved to run with my friend and ride in her box with spinning feet.

     

     My human said something about my having poor kidney health and that she could not afford to provide care for me, so she took me to a place where other homeless animals lived. I was saddened to lose my human, and now I was in a place surrounded by other sad friends who had also lost their human. This place was called West Columbia Gorge Humane Society, and it was what they called a “no-kill shelter .” Well, that was undoubtedly reassuring; let me bark at you! I was still an active young girl, and I wanted to live!

    I was there for two months, and finally, a lovely couple came up from Oregon to have a look at me. They put me on a leash and took me out for a run! I was so happy! I had not been running since my first human abandoned me, and I knew then that I might be heading to a home with some new great friends. They were both great runners, even though they only ran on two feet. How do they not fall over, anyway?

    Yet when I arrived at my new home, I was greeted by yet another furry little creature like my previous human companion had. Her name was Patches, and she seemed to rule the house. She would follow her human parents everywhere they went, and they called her their “puppy-cat”. I knew it would take some time to find where I fit here. She was always sweet to me, but she was a little hard to get to know because she spoke a different language than all of us. I could talk human a little better than she could, but I lacked confidence since this family was new to me.

     

I felt that my new home was haunted by the ghost of a departed loved one. Many smells told me that I was not the first of my kind to bless this household. Yet a vibration still present told me I had much work to do to help my new friends find their way in our new shared world. The room where they slept at night still had the scent of the death of a beloved friend and partner of theirs. I was to learn that her name was Iris.

     I could feel the sorrow that still plagued my male friend. I sensed that he felt responsible for his friend’s untimely death, and I knew that I had much work to do to help him with his healing. I could smell the place next to my human’s bed where their friend had slept, and I overheard them say that this was the exact place where their first friend had died. My only desire was to be the best friend I could be and perhaps become an angel, just like their first friend had become.

    My new humans had some problems with me. My only intention was to be their friend and protect them, yet it seemed like I was doing something wrong, and I could not figure out what I needed to do. My new dad had his own father, a man named Beryl, who just loved and adored me, so I knew that the problem may not be my own, but what was I to do? But I loved it when Beryl would compliment me and tell me what a wonderful dog I was. Beryl had an excellent companion named Rocky, who became my best friend ever. I saw Rocky and Beryl almost every day of my life, and they became my family, too. This Siberian Husky was among the most intelligent, exuberant creatures I ever met!

    I knew someday my new dad, Bruce, would love me too, but he seemed distracted. My master had grief issues, and they only worsened upon the death of his mother six months after I entered their lives. I heard that they had to disconnect her from some sort of life support, and the entire family hurt mightily because of that. But as a result of the mother’s death, we saw Beryl and Rocky every day. Beryl would drive his metal legs down to our house for his evening meal and always have Rocky with him. This went on for three years until Beryl lost his driving abilities due to the progression of something my companions called dementia. 

    I later learned that my dad, Bruce, was also having problems with his work. He worked at the City of Portland, ensuring the water was pumped to all the homes. Yet he also was under grueling stress from a place where he worked, which he called a “hostile work environment.” He was also taking some kind of medication to help overcome a problem that had arisen in the year before Iris’s death. He called these little strips Suboxone, which eliminated his dependency upon something he called Oxycontin. I overheard him say that his life became hijacked by Oxycontin after he became addicted to them to treat the pain from a painful spiral fracture of his tibia, an injury incurred through his training for competitive running, which took several months to heal. The month that I came into his life, he made a decision to get help, and the doctor prescribed him this new medication. He was to take these strips for over one year. At the same time, he visited an excellent doctor named Reznick, who brought him great healing messages. But whatever was going on, we just could not quite get our hearts connected initially so that I could soar like an angel with him, just like his previous friend, 

    My forever brother wanted to run with me the first year we were together. He could run with the wind, and boy, I liked to try to run with him. He was not like the other humans, who seemed much larger and slower than he was. I heard him say he was one of the fastest older long-distance runners around, but I only liked to run shorter distances because that is where the fun is! My ancestors would run for forty miles in a day over vast, dangerous terrain just to seek food and shelter, but I already had both, so who needs to be a hero? My human dad would run vast distances daily before I met him, sometimes putting nearly thirty miles in a day! What’s up with that? No wonder he broke so many of his leg bones while training over the years; he is just too heavy of a runner to be running on only two feet! Thankfully, he had slowed WAY DOWN by the time I hooked up with him! Yet, his nickname on his magic viewing screen is run4play, which I don’t think he has ever done since he was a puppy. It is essential to have a goal, though!

     Initially, I ran with him with ease. But as time went on, for some reason, I felt like I was overheating, and I could not keep up with him on his runs. He understood and stopped taking me on those hard runs with him. But my human companions always took me on daily walks, which were always excellent! And, every afternoon, I would get a second walk once Rocky joined us in the evening, so life was good!

    I became a collector of balls! It did not matter what size the ball was, if it was on the ground, it was fair game for me. Over the years, I got my teeth into hundreds of balls, including at least eight basketballs and four tetherballs. Dad would attach a tether ball to a string on a pole and swing the ball around, and I just went crazy waiting for that ball! I would jump my highest, sometimes sink my teeth into the ball, and feel the rush of air as it escaped. Mom and Dad would utter something, sounding like a groan, but I knew they shared my joy.

    My parents made sure to keep me supplied with tennis balls, too. Dad would throw the tennis balls with plastic slingshots, and I would chase them. I would not bring them back because that was just too much energy. So, Dad would make sure to have several in his possession and throw them to me all around the park. He would sometimes gather them back up and just toss them all again! He was quite the ball guy, too!

I took innumerable walks and hikes with my human companions over the years. I loved the wilderness walks, especially those with a creek nearby! I would overheat and then walk through the creek, and the water would cool my overheated body! I could always walk so much further when we had the friendly water spirits nearby. Otherwise, I would have to stop repeatedly and await some cooling water from my companions. I drank more water than my humans, yet they never minded. Some of my most challenging hikes were from Larch Mountain down to Multnomah Falls Lodge and Ramona Falls.

     My companion had to spend more and more time taking care of his disabled father. Because of the continuing problems with his employment, he retired early in 2013 to take better care of Beryl. We went up to Beryl’s house every morning while Bruce prepared his breakfast and made sure that he was organized for the day until the dinner hour. Bruce would drive his metal legs up every evening and bring Beryl and Rocky down to our house for dinner. I have two homes now and a great family! 

     Retirement from work made Dad a new person. Dad had healed of his grief and was bonding with me on a complete, loving level, and I felt, as he felt, that we were now companions of the Spirit of Love. One day, we were all sitting around on our deck, and I heard Dad say to Mom that having us together in love and companionship made him feel whole, and he had never been happier in his life. Yeah, for our team!

    One time we went camping at Cultus Lake in 2015. We went hiking around the beautiful high mountain lake one day. I was confronted by a young human with a mechanical contraption that looked very threatening. Dad called it a mountain bike, but I had never seen one before and needed to protect my family. I nipped the woman in her thigh to make sure that she stayed away from us. Everybody was quite concerned about the nip, and I noted that Dad gave her a check to cover her $310 emergency room visit to examine my warning to her. Dad and mom felt like we were no longer welcome at the campground, so we quickly left. We then moved to a fantastic new location, camping on a beautiful lake called Crane Prairie Reservoir.

    Over the next year, my stamina dramatically diminished, and I continued to be sick occasionally. I visited the vet several times and had some tests performed. It was then found that I really did have kidney disease, and that was the reason that I overheated so often. Barbara Cain, the beautiful veterinarian, started giving me water injections under my skin to help me keep water in my body since the kidneys were not doing their job very well. My owners never mentioned putting me to sleep, as they were dedicated to my life and wanted me to live the best life that I could, even though I had such problems. So every couple of months, I developed a camel hump of water, and I maintained my health as best as possible, though I seemed to feel worse and worse every day.

     My time was almost gone, the Great Canine Spirit informed me. We saw how my human suffered so with the care of his own father, and his troubled mind struggled with how to best protect me from the ravages of my own kidney failure. I loved my human so much, and my heart ached for him and his suffering. So I woke my brother up and brought him to our living room couch in the middle of the night. He would call this time at 2:45am or in the morning. It was a very dark night, early in June.

We both sat on the couch, facing each other silently. My brother reached his hand out to the side of my head to caress me, and I held my heart paw out to him, for it was time to carry the message from the Great Canine. A light appeared all around us, as it always does when I exchange love, yet this time, my brother seemed to see it, and be amazed by it. He looked around and at me in wonder and curiosity. I could see that he could see that a death was near.

     I could also see that he was confused. I could feel that his chronic distress was causing him to confuse my impending death with his own. I kept my heart and my message open, and he then heard my truth, that he no longer needed to give me those horrible water injections to keep me alive, those huge camel humps that the beautiful doctor friend had been giving me for the last several months.

     My humans then took me on a fantastic trip to the state that they call Utah. We traveled to places called Zion and Bryce, and we took some wonderful walks and had great views. My daddy had to lift me into the car now, as I was too weak to jump into the back seat on my own most of the time. I could get out alone, though, so we made it work.

I only had a little time left. My daddy would take me to the river and let me wade along the shore. I still loved the water; it kept me feeling cooler and loved. Daddy would carry my favorite balls and sticks, but I could no longer chase them. But I could lay down and chew on them a little, which seemed to please Mom and Dad.

    My day for forever sleep was here. I walked down to lay beside the creek in the back of our home. Dad thought that I had chosen to die there, and after staying with me for a few hours, he went up to bed. He left the patio door open in case I might come into the house. It got to be in the middle of the night, and I heard Iris calling me from inside the house. I struggled to my feet; I WAS SO WEAK. I staggered towards the deck and then rested. I staggered up to the step and somehow reached the door’s threshold. I had to rest some more. Finally, I just knew that I had to make it to where I slept, where Iris had her final sleep so that I could have my own. I barely reached the bedroom and then fell upon my bed.

     I heard Iris call to me and say it was OK to let go and that she would guide me the rest of the way. I did not want to leave my friends, my saviors, yet Iris told me that I had earned my wings and to let go of my pain and sickness and fly with her to my next experience.

I hope to greet my beloved humans when it is time for them to leave their own pain-filled bodies. Until then, I will run with Iris in the great meadows of our new home, with boundless other friends, where we no longer have pain, are no longer sick, or have limited energy. 

I am finally free.

Thank you, Ginger.

 

 

 

 

 

Marty Crouch, and me

Marty (left) and Me, on a Columbia River Gorge hike in 1998

A New Easter Sunrise

Over the years, I have become deeply disturbed by the developments within our shared world, within my individual consciousness, and the points of connection between self and other, through language, religion, and philosophy, that have created oppression, repression, and the resultant physical, emotional, and social disease.  Starting within myself, I have seen how a lifetime of oppression, and repression, had brought about a sequence of serious illnesses, physiological as well as spiritual.  I saw how a dark force, common to all of humanity, lived, moved, and had its being enshrined within my own heart and soul.  I also saw how the medical, economic, religious, cultural, political, and spiritual traditions had failed in their understanding of humanity, and it’s basic, innermost needs of being valued and listened to.

Virtually all men and women have experienced oppression, repression, and the resultant diseases of the spirit at some point in their lives, and we have been both the victims, and the conscious and unconscious perpetrators, of this behavior. We have all attempted to manage our symptoms in our own unique, yet all too often broken and dysfunctional ways.  I have wanted to help myself, my father and several of my male friends, to develop greater insight into these issues over the years, but I did not find a consistent interest being expressed by others in exploring these issues with me.  But my friend Marty did begin to show great interest in my Facebook posts beginning late in 2016, and this opened the door to a different level of sharing between the two of us.  Concurrently, by this point in time, all other women and men had either ceased responding to my Facebook posts, save my wife and my friend Jim H., or had stopped following or unfriended me.

Together, Marty and I shared over twenty years in a couple’s group (three couples who were long term friends), many weekend trips, nights out for dinner and entertainment, and then the book club that we also shared together for the last several years, Marty and I were quite friendly with each other, yet rarely spoke at great  length or depth, or showed extraordinary interest in developing a deeper friendship apart from our wives.  I noted how his wife organized and dominated his life over the years that I had known him, and how she would all too often speak for him, or even verbally run over him in group meetings.  It was common knowledge that when his wife was present, Marty would not consistently reveal himself and his own story, and he would instead defer to his wife through his silence.  My own experience of his wife was that she was usually quite willing to listen to what I had to say initially, then she would often fill whatever empty space appeared with herself, rather than wait for me to finish my story and whatever message I might be trying to deliver. At this point, much like Marty, all further talk from me would end, and I would just listen to her, no matter what important items I might have to share with her or the group that we might be attending together..

This brings me to January 11th of 2017, when I had my first seizure. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning, and went into my office and sat down.  Suddenly, I lost all ability to move, and to even think, though I remained quite aware during this approximately one minute process.  It was then that I became aware of a “black mass”, almost the size of a golf ball, in the left portion of the brain area of my inner field of body awareness.  This was the first time that I had awareness of the energy field of my body since July of 1987, when I had my first, and only, experience of detecting my own “life energy field”.  I became quite concerned by this whole experience, though I kept it to myself initially.  Every subsequent time I looked internally, I could still see the dark mass.  In February, I had yet another seizure, this time much milder, and in a public setting, while playing cards at Jim’s, who was a mutual friend of both of us (and another member of the couple’s group).

I did not talk about the seizures, or the black mass, initially, because I thought that I might be losing my mind. I later began talking about it with my wife, and two friends, and it was theorized that it might be related to something spiritual or psychic in nature.  But I came to know it as death, at least in a spiritual sense.  I saw that there was no negotiating with it.  Prayers, meditations, affirmations, reading, talking with others, nothing seemed to have any impact upon the dark mass.  I knew that some sort of death was coming my way, though I felt little need to discuss it with a doctor.   I did tell my family doctor that I feared that my own death might precede my father’s, when I took my ill father to see her about January 4th of 2017.

On March 5, 2017 Marty suffered a major seizure and was hospitalized at OHSU.  Marty had been in a four year recovery phase from malignant melanoma, a process first diagnosed in late 2012.  He appeared to have been successfully treated with Interleuken II therapy, a powerful immunotherapy regimen.  Now, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  My wife Sharon and I visited him two days prior to its surgical removal.  Marty and I talked about our seizures, and I was struck by the similarity of his seizures with my own, though mine were relatively tame by comparison.  I told Marty that my perception was that Death was making itself known to me, through the dark mass that I could “see” in my own energy field.  I was also beginning to see a relationship between our problems, but I was hesitant to tell Marty about it, though I told him that I hoped that his brain mass did not indicate a death for him.

That next day, Wednesday, at noon, I had another episode of such intensity, and duration, that I dared not even attempt to get up from the couch.  I had previously arose from the couch, and briefly lost consciousness, so I was all shook up, yet I still had no desire to get a doctor involved.  Sharon came home later that afternoon from her creative writing class, and found me quite compromised.  She listened to my story, and accepted my decision not to seek further medical attention, since this was perceived as a spiritual crisis, while she offered her own love and care. She monitored my blood pressure, and when she noted when my breathing became shallow, to offer me a paper bag to breathe into, lest I sink into a panic attack.

Each time I tried to get off the couch, I became quite dizzy.  I continued feeling quite physically subdued, and some sort of anxiety reaction was also happening with my body/mind.  I was also losing my ability to talk.  It took all of the power that I could muster to force words out.  It was reminiscent of a time 31 years before, when for two days I had an event that prevented me from speaking during a portion of my trip through the underworld.  I lost my voice for two days when confronted with the reality that there were dangerous people I was associating with, and this fact had finally, and powerfully, struck home with me.

The present time, I actually felt like my consciousness was trying to escape, and it took all of my resources just to hold it together.  I characterized this present event to Sharon White as almost losing my mind, while having an almost neurotoxic component to it.  I did not want anything to do with another neurological exam, having been through that horror several years before, when I had experienced excruciating headaches.  I tried to go about my normal activities, while being grateful that I did not have to provide care for my disabled father, whose care that week was taken over by others.

Thursday came, and I had not improved much.  It also was the day that Marty’s tumor was being removed.  I had dual concerns, for Marty, and for myself.  I went about my limited daily activities as best I could, but I became quite conscious of my own fear and anxiety around Death, both of self, and of other.  I continued to listen to the occasional taped “spiritual wisdom” tapes of some of my past teachers, hoping to hear something that might bring me comfort. Well, I listened to Jack Boland, the nationally renowned speaker and master of the recovery process.  I owned a tape where he referred to me personally, said he knew me, probably better than I knew myself. He then stated that he wished pain, not peace of mind, to all who had not yet fulfilled their interior spiritual obligation to cleanse their hearts, as this is the great precursor to any lasting spiritual progress . Those who understand this statement UNDERSTAND.  And here I thought that I had already performed that process! 

How wrong I was.

Thursday evening came, and after yet another nearly sleepless night, I got up and sat in the family room, and awaited for Sharon to join me .  My life’s message was bubbling up within me, and I felt a compulsion to share it with my world.  Yet I also knew that there were few, if any, people presently in my life who had the time, or even the interest, in listening to what Spirit was trying to “pour through me”.  As I lay out on the couch, feeling my own emotional/spiritual death about to overtake me, I cried out in despair to Sharon, to please share my message, since I didn’t believe that I had the capacity to deliver it in a way that others could hear, or understand.

Sharon looked at me with acceptance, love, and compassion.  Sharon had been listening to my story for close to thirty years, and she had witnessed me sitting on my voice for most of that time.  She then stated unequivocally that

“Bruce, your message is your own, and must be spoken through you, or not at all”.

Even my tears, and begging, would not change her mind.  I was in such pain and agony, that I knew that I could not go on with my life in any kind of healthy way, and I did not know what to do.

I had the experience of a lifetime of people experiencing me as less of a human being than I am, starting with my own diseased father, followed by a steady progression of angry, sometimes hateful, judgmental male and female power figures, with a few very notable exceptions, and I did not know how to act or feel differently.   My voice had been silenced by myself and others, even in many settings where spiritually aware, conscious people gathered to celebrate ‘connection’.

This loving act on Sharon’s part by refusing to speak for me was instrumental in the recovery of  my ability to speak and to write.  I could not let myself die again emotionally and spiritually, so I asked my Spirit how to best deliver my message.  A prayer from my past, first created from a dream in 1992, formed in my mind and began with “Grandfather, Great Spirit, Thank You”.  All of a sudden I was COMPELLED to write, and I did not stop the process until fifteen pages of a story poured through me. My Spirit chose the format of a parable, perhaps knowing that it would be discarded, without reading, by those who already believed that they knew me.  But the curious ones, the ones who had an inner Spirit that had not been yet stymied, would read, and appreciate, this aspect of the message that I now felt compelled to give to my world (the story is included at the end of the memoir).

It took less than two days to write, and it was the first story I have ever written.  I was never a writer, and before recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction, most of the insight that I had was irrelevant to recovery and healing, and certainly was not worth “writing home about”.  While hospitalized for a month in 1984 for alcoholism, the journal that I was required to write about my daily insights seemed to be written by our society asking for permission to continue to be dysfunctional, rather than me getting in touch with my pain, and making progress with healing.  People pleasing stories may be easier to read and write, but they sure lose their allure when one finally decides to move into the neighborhood of truth and real insight into self.

The dark mass in my body of energy disappeared upon completion of my story, coincidentally at about the same time that Marty’s tumor had been surgically removed.  To this day, I remain healed of that darkness, though I was forced out of bed frequently , to write, and to share with, the One who listened.  Yes, I finally learned that I needed to listen to myself, more than just listening to other authorities. Some nights, I only slept 3 or 4 hours, and so I got out of bed to write until my wife Sharon awakened at 5 am.  After writing prodigiously for three years, I found my normal sleep patterns again, and the writing ceased being a middle of the night experience.

As a result of this process, I had an insight that is extremely difficult to talk with others about, an insight about my relationship with Marty and his disease in the final year of his life.  I saw how I had become attuned to Marty on an emotional and psychic level.  Some have called this connection radical empathy, some have called it telepathic, some have called it just plain fucking mysterious, and some would call it insane thinking on my part.  For me, this is a natural outcome of “prayer” as I defined it earlier following my experience with Gary Johnson of my electrical apprenticeship program.

Somehow, Marty’s structure of consciousness, his ego mind, part of his sense of self had resonated with me, and I felt his presence within my heart and mind.  This is how I was able to sense the dark, golf ball sized mass in my own brain. It was not my cancer, it was Marty’s.  And I was also finally able to articulate the forces of oppression and repression within both of us for the first time.  I never had the capacity to communicate around the two black holes or tricksters, revealed by the teaching from the Master on July 21, 1987, that were embedded within my own field of consciousness before this time.  Somehow, through Marty’s resonance or attunement with me, a bridge of words was created to describe the vast matrix whose complete description had eluded me for all of these years.  The light of my own awareness, shown through Marty’s matrix of consciousness, created the shadows, or words, words that ached to reach from the unknown to the knowing parts of myself.

During this period of time, Sharon and I attended Matthew Fox’s Cosmic Christ Workshop in Tacoma, in April 2017.  After Friday evening’s seminar about mysticism with the Master Spiritual Teacher, Matthew Fox, we returned to our hotel room, to rest up for the next morning’s follow-up workshop on the Cosmic Christ. I had quite the deep, peaceful sleep, which lasted six hours for me. Prior to awakening, I had a most interesting, powerful dream. What was/is fascinating about this dream is how absolutely awake I was, while having the dream.

In the dream, I opened a door, and walked into a room that was well lit.  The room seemed neither familiar, or unfamiliar to me.  Inside of the room there was a man standing, who was also neither familiar or unfamiliar to me, as well. He greeted me, holding a cup out to me in his hand. He gently offered it to me, and for a moment I considered what it’s contents might be. I then knew that if I drank from it, I would become “intoxicated”, but of a different nature that was still consistent with the path of “sobriety” I currently walked upon. I then noticed a table, where an opened map laid open upon it. The man walked with me to the table, still holding the cup.

I looked at the map, and it was a topographic style map, similar to what I might use for traveling and/or hiking with. There were two distinct areas to it. The path or road, on the right side of the map, had only one dark, solid line drawn from the bottom to the top of the map. But, the section on the left side of the map had several dotted lines that only remotely “paralleled” the route on the right side of the map. I had no judgement about each of the path styles, yet I remained curious about the several dotted line paths, which intersected each other, while also “snaking” their unique individual routes up the map. I noted also that the “dotted line” paths also did not ever cross the path of the solid, dark line, though all of the paths had no distinct starting, or end point.

At the Cosmic Christ workshop Saturday morning, Matthew asked if anyone had a dream that they wanted to share in the big group. Not being a “realized person”, I felt uncomfortable sharing the dream. But when it came time for a break, I took a book to Matthew for signing, and shared my dream with him. He refused to tell me what it might mean, but he had a smile on his face, and told me to let it tell me it’s meaning.

On our drive home, Sharon took controls of the car, and I started telling her the dream again. It was then that the horripilations began in earnest, and the full meaning came through me. A complete mystical understanding, and teaching, was built into that dream, and it was then I realized that I had indeed drunk from the cup of the Spirit. Yes, I became quite “intoxicated” with Spirit, and I knew then that we had truly been blessed again by the Master Teacher.  I was later to finally realize that this “map” was how I was supposed to represent the story of the conditioned versus the unconditioned mind, in the form of a book to be written by me.

This dream was a complete spiritual teaching, and for that, Great Spirit, I thank you, and my gratitude to you will be expressed through the life that you live through me, for now and all time to come. Yes, mysticism, the heart of all vibrant, evolving religions, also can be a personal reality. It is not, however, for those clinging to structured understandings of life.

We met with Marty and his wife at Marco’s restaurant one day on the week following the workshop. Marty’s recovery from the surgery to remove the brain cancer was going well.  I continued to carry a sense of the Transcendence, it was as if a higher vibration of being was carrying me, and my powers of insight, awareness, understanding, love, and compassion were at their peak.  At our lunch the group was to discuss options for hiking in the future, among other activities for sharing friendship activity.  Sensing his own death may be close, Marty wanted to engage in activity that he had delayed over the years.  He wanted to  prepare to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, so our discussion revolved around that activity.

Yet, we also came to discuss the Cosmic Christ workshop.  I wanted to speak from the energy that was uplifting me, and the amazing dream that I had, but Marty’s wife made sure to dominate the discussion.  Even when I tried to share some of the teachings, she grabbed her phone, and started Googling information, the very information that was being delivered from me.  It was typical of her, and it was offensive.  I understood at a very deep level what Marty experienced with this woman, and my heart opened at a much deeper level for Marty.

On a late April couple’s group meeting at Marty’s home, I was able to talk about my experience of “transcendent energy” for the first time with Marty, with Jim also present for the discussion.  Marty’s wife had disappeared into the back bedroom with Jim’s wife for awhile, so we were able to talk at length about a subject that Marty’s wife would have balked at, or run over with her own knowledge or Google obtained information.  Marty was genuinely interested in what I had to say, as well as what I had to say about the potential for spiritual healing.  His own father had a spiritual experience prior to his death, and Marty wanted to have a taste of the divine experience, if possible, in the lead up to his own death.  I promised Marty a copy of a meditation that I had prepared, based on the spiritual experience I had on July 21, 1987.  I text messaged to Marty the following day, after a remarkable dream.

Text message to Marty

I hope that the guided meditation will be of some benefit to you.

Meditation Experiment–As a direct result of the  “transcendent experience” of July 21, 1987, I developed a “thought experiment” for you, Marty. This is a both a teaching, and an interior journey, and it might be useful for accessing the One Real Teacher, which lies deep within all of us.

This is my own unique verbal bridge, from the deepest part of myself (which is non-verbal in nature) to my conscious mind, and will not work for most others, who must make their own personal ‘direct connection’.

This is only a template, to be filled in by your own unique journey towards Truth. It only points in a direction, and this ‘meditation’ is definitely not for everybody.

THE MEDITATION

After quieting the body by sitting down comfortably, let us breathe consciously, and deeply, for a few breaths. Usually, the following of our breathing will quiet the mind a bit, which is important if this “experiment” is to bring any results.

Let’s now ask of our self if we are ready to listen for the truth of the moment. Are we willing to travel to a new place in consciousness, and conscious awareness, that perhaps we have never traveled to before?

Ask our self if we can “let go of all thought controls” that keep us in the past, that keep us in judgement of self, or other, that keep us from experiencing a deeper appreciation for what this moment might be able to bring to us?

Now visualize for a moment that we are driving a car, heading to a direction that we feel quite familiar with. Before arriving at the usual destination, ask our self what would happen if we just “LET GO OF THE CONTROLS”, even if it is for just one moment?

Is it possible?

Keep trying, until we can see our self actually letting go of the steering wheel. As we let go of the steering wheel, imagine, now, that the car “disappears” that was around us, and find that we are now being carried into some new, as yet, unexplored realm of experience.

If it is still familiar territory in our interior visual field, we will need to restart the thought experiment, or just give up altogether on this particular thought experiment, and find a different path to the interior dimensions.

If we have “LET GO OF THE CONTROLS”, we are now finding that we are being “guided” by a “teacher” or a “messenger”, who has not revealed who or what it is, what kind of form it might take, or why it might, or might not, exist for us in this new moment.

Yet we know that there is no need for fear, even though we are now being “guided” into a complete mystery, and “unknowable” experience.

There is a sense of exhilaration, because we are no longer secured to our “body of knowledge” anymore, which may also feel like we are having an “out of body” event.

We are free, yet we do not yet know what we are being liberated from. Stay in this “unknowing state”, while still being “guided by our inner teacher”.

We now pass by an amazing, infinite array of interconnected, interlocking “membranes”, which are neither “light” nor “dark”.

We seem to “float through, and then underneath” this web of “who knows what?” – then  we reach a place of absolute still, and calm. {Much more will be revealed later, when we have developed the interior fortitude to face our individual and collective demons}

If we are really “there”, we find a silence, which is so quiet, and peaceful, that it may “startle” us initially, yet we quickly settle into it, and appreciate its essence and nature.

A “voice” may appear within our now quiet minds, and may begin to speak “through us” rather than “to us”. We will become the mouthpiece for a teaching, or a message, that we have never heard before, yet we are willing messengers for this new moment.

We begin to recognize an incredibly happy, joyful, laughing voice, and we know we are right where we are supposed to be, in a state that is so natural, and normal.

We might wonder why it was so “unknown” in our past, but we save all questions for later, so as not to miss the rest of the experience.

“Follow the new paths of consciousness” we hear, and speak within our hearts and minds simultaneously, directly and powerfully to ‘our self’.

“No teacher can give to us our salvation, we must work it out for our self”.

“Think no thoughts, especially time based thoughts (memories) about the “you”, as any “YOU”, cannot ever be real here”.

“To return to the “UNKNOWN”, we must eliminate all time based thoughts about our self, and “the other”, including God.

We now know that this moment, outside of time, has all of the information that we will ever need, and does not need our input to reveal itself and its real, eternal nature.

As the “teaching” ends, we are shown those forces which have attached themselves to our energy fields, which provide “companionship” yet they provide no lasting spiritual value, and will inhibit our future growth and development.

FURTHER FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LIFE

Be easy on our self, as it will not be immediately obvious what the nature and purpose of these inner/interpersonal forces are.

They served a purpose, yet they will have to leave. But, first, we have meet them directly, to get to know them better, while further dealing directly with our “conscious” world, and the life we live in it.

Welcome to our Real individual, and collective, self. There is no room here for “you and me”, “us and them”, there is only room for the ONE.

This will trouble us greatly when we return to our ‘normal’ consciousness from this experiment. This is normal, and we will learn from the tension created by this dynamic.

Eventually we learn that we dream through the “collective” mind of mankind, and the “collective” also dreams through us. Yet there is also One Other Option, which has eluded most of Mankind.

As we travel back to this place, over and over, over many years, if necessary, we find what we have always been looking for.

We also find what has been holding back the rest of mankind for all of time. Many of the very structures of thought that have been ‘worshiped’ or unconsciously accepted are seen to be the source of the Shadow within mankind’s heart and soul.

This journey is not for those who want to continue to just worship the past, and all of its dead thoughts, and heroes.

This thought experiment is a technique for shaking the mind free, even if just for a moment, from its lifetimes of its ‘knowns’ or certainties.

Truth does not come into a mind that has already been crystallized into a structure that does not permit curiosity, and insight.

If we are sincerely seeking Truth, prepare for a real shock.  If our minds have not been shocked, we have not yet met our goal.

“YOU WILL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR”, please don’t give up looking before the Real miracle appears, OK?

Otherwise, we will only find a continuation of our past, as it extends into an all too familiar future.

The gap between self and other is the source for all judgement, hatred, and illusion. That gap is the “YOU”, which is only a mental creation, and “YOU” can never be real, in any absolute sense. As I look out from the place where I stand in life, as far as I will ever see, until eternity, is my self.

How will I see my self today? 

“I will find what I am looking for”.

“God” laughs WITH us, when we finally recognize the insanity of our perceptions, and allow love and healing to fill in the space between “YOU” and me.

If we seek truth, beauty, and wonder with all of our heart, we will find what we are looking for.

“The Devil” another creation out of the mind of man, laughs AT us, when we don’t, and we all suffer accordingly.

A happy, spiritually healthy life involves tuning into what I really want to find, for in the tuning, there is a turning.  Then, all that we will ever see, unto eternity, is our real Self.

As the wise ones advise:  To change my world, I first change myself.

I anticipate that the process will take a bit of time to work so that it is apparent to you.  Daily, or hourly, practice might be appropriate, unless your spirit tells you otherwise.   We are all blessed by our sharing last evening, so thanks to you and Eddy for providing a wonderful setting for all of us.

Now Marty, to bring you up to the present, I awoke this morning at 2:45 am, and I had a profound “sense of the presence”, whatever that means.  I could almost feel all of us gathered together again, and I asked for the “blessing” for all of us.  I have no concrete proof if such an internal process actually reaches anybody outside of my “field”, but I then entered a dream state, and something profound occurred.

I dreamed that we were all together in some sort of  noisy “industrial plant”, and there was an electrical system that needed reconditioning.  As I awoke, I was “told” that your security lock needed to be removed from the “electrical panel” that I was working on  (me, with you and Sharon witnessing).

I was wearing sound proof headsets, to protect me from the “industrial noise”.  I also observed others who had already performed their “work”, noting the discards in the nearby “dumpster”. I also saw how I needed to integrate my actions with their work, though it felt like we might be getting into each others’ way at times.

Symbolically to me, it is obvious what my subconscious was communicating with me.

Letting go of the controls, trusting in “the process” and turning over our “work” to “others”, even if for a moment, is difficult while being overwhelmed with the daily “noise of the mind” and the activities of our lives, and threats to our health and well-being.  But, even if we succeed in “getting the work done”, whatever that means, and how it might express itself, we have to suspend our fear and lack of trust in the process, as we still have to turn over the “operation” to others (trust in a higher power within our isolated self and its limiting ideas, all the while knowing that power resides within our heart and soul).

Marty, you have a resistance to your own healing.  You must remove the self-protective mechanisms and controls that you, and perhaps your wife, have layered over your consciousness for many years, or, perhaps, for your entire life.  These controls lock you out of your own greater good.  The very state of consciousness that made the melanoma possible, and helped support its presence and growth, is still embedded within your mind and heart.  Infusions and medications, though potentially helpful, alone will not get the job done.  If the supporting structure embedded within your ego is not dramatically altered, or transformed, then the conditions for the continuation of the growth and spread of the cancer have not been sufficiently altered either.

My “higher power” has ultimate confidence in you, and sees the absolute present beauty of who you are, how you are “innocent” and  Not Responsible for this melanoma wounding, and it has also seen the wonderful potential for your future life.  Once again, there are no guarantees, but I see this for you.

I plan on living into this dream with you, for a long time to come, Marty.

Thanks again for a wonderful evening,

Blessings to you!

Marty was able to maintain good health for only a few more weeks.  I gave to him a copy of a meditation that I had created, but it had little positive impact for Marty.  My intention was to help him release his understanding of who he was, and for him to have an experience of his divine nature at the deepest, most healing levels.  Marty was a man of highest intellect, character, moral and ethical integrity, yet he had not ever experienced the release of his great creation, his ego, into the great Unknown, though he certainly desired to reach that place in consciousness.

Marty, Sharon, and I went hiking to Dog Mountain in the Columbia River Gorge, on the Washington side, about three weeks later.  Marty had just started on a new targeted drug therapy, with the hopes that the drug would keep the metastatic cancer at bay.  We took our time hiking this great, challenging hike, and Marty persevered, and made it through the hike with great spirits.  He was so encouraged by his performance that it was only natural for all of us to begin the preparation for a great Pacific Crest Trail hike, to fulfill one of Marty’s dreams.

Two days later, he began losing all use of his left leg and arm, and then became wheelchair bound.  It was postulated that he was experiencing a reaction to the new medication, Keytruda, which caused unexpected inflammation of his brain, and damage to his nervous system. The potential metastases to his brain had already caused concern to Marty and his wife, with the fear that it would impinge on his sense of self, and on his competent, highly intelligent, insightful, loving mind.  Yet at this stage, Marty remained fully present.

Dying, death, and transformation continued to be a subject of interest to Marty, but now it took on a special urgency.  Because of the complications of the medicine, Marty lost much of his treasured independence.  He lost the desire to scan Facebook for any insight into his friends or the concerns of the day, as all of his energy became devoted to just getting through the day with as much peace of mind, and with as little chaos, as is possible under the absolutely overwhelming conditions of his declining life.  We all gave up on the idea of hiking, lest he somehow regain his physical function again.  He was prescribed anti-inflammatory medicine to help reduce the brain swelling which had caused his disability, and he continued on anti-seizure medicine, just in case.

Marty communicated to me his sense of being inarticulate, in relation to the new experiences of his deteriorating state brought about by metastatic melanoma, and the encroachment upon his critical brain centers which had already begun. A life transitioning from being

highly engaged with the culture and the world, and immensely supportive of his wife while doing so,

physically healthy and active,

spiritually, intellectually and technologically stimulating and expressive,

at times exciting and challenging,

occasionally joyous, and,

regularly immersed in family and social interaction,

to one that is

physically inactive, and almost home bound,

threatened with the loss of intellectual competence,

challenging in anxiety producing ways, and

humiliating, depressing, and emotionally painful, and

without normal joy and hope for the future, and

devoid of physical intimacy with the wife,

immersed in family connections, but now not under the old rules, and

a myriad of other less than happy adjectives,

And, then attempting to describe the changing experience, while still in the middle of it, is a most difficult proposition.”

A story came to my mind after our morning’s meditation, of which I sent to Marty in text message form, and I include parts of it here as a small record of our journey together.  The message is as follows:

“Marty, all of your descriptors are perfect, and they will change, as you change. While in meditation, the following images came to my mind:

Life can be like a lifelong adventure hike (perhaps the Pacific Crest Trail of everyday life?). On one side of the trail we are witnessing the unbroken beauty of nature and of our own wholeness and connection to it, and the joy of unfettered movement of an innocent mind and healthy body while walking through the magic and mystery of the unknown. Yet, on the other side of the trail, a wicked forest fire has erupted, obscuring our view, threatening our safety and freedom, and taking us out of the beauty and wonder of the new moment. Its flames are now, more than gently, lapping at our back side, burning away at our past, burning away at our clothing, at all of our hidings and holdings, and at all the knowledge and memories that we cling to, and hold so dear.. When you search for names to characterize this process, I understand at the deepest level why it is hard giving it a new name, or calling it “good” or perfect while still being so painfully “burned” by one aspect of it.

Losing independence in life and in decision making is a most difficult proposition.

Losing the ability to get out of bed and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night by oneself can be demoralizing.

Losing the ability to plan for the day to day exigencies of life can make one feel less than empowered.

Losing the sense of intimacy with one’s partner, who is now more or less the primary caregiver, and not the lover, feels a bit like love has abandoned us for now.

Losing strength and mobility, and being dependent on another for all movement around the house, and now, around all of life, feels like life is almost stripping us of our dignity.

Losing control of one’s bladder and bowels, and wearing supplemental underwear, and the insertion of pads onto our beds to trap our incontinence, can feel like adding insult to injury.

Losing the use of the left arm and leg, and then not having others respect one’s sense of loss, feels like the world has become insensitive to all suffering individuals.

Losing the desire to keep living on dying’s terms, while all of the other losses kept accumulating and accelerating, can make the thought and actions related to Death With Dignity an attractive option.

Yet, your journey, with this measure of suffering becoming folded into it, is part of humanity’s unbroken wholeness, of which we all remain a most treasured, though challenged, part of. Can you begin to trust that Love itself is always guiding, and coming out in its many new, challenging forms? Love is soon to become your new and only garment, and any holding back will only increase your pain.

Marty, our hike on the path continues, and the “forest fire” always burns (it burns for all of us). Hope and expectancy tells us to keep walking, because the “view ahead is always changing”. But, what was our past continues to burn away in uncertain and many times anxiety producing ways. Around one of those next bends in the trail, there is only the unknown, bringing whatever is to come. And, also around that same bend, the “fire” will have burned away all that is unlike your true nature, revealing who you were “in the beginning, before the World was”. Giving it a name is the challenge unique to all of us. The articulate ones write great books, and attract lots of attention to their words. You don’t need that.

There are already many fine works available for the curious to read on the subject of death and dying, but your life is now your greatest teacher. Now that we finally have realized that facts and knowledge alone are not enough support to make all of life’s decisions with, we can willingly enter through the doorways to a new spiritual awakening, populated by creativity, intuition, and insight, where transcending many of the troubling aspects of the ego, and finally accepting the inevitable deaths of our bodies, becomes more likely.

Transformation, and death, can be so closely related that many people have profound spiritual experiences on the final stretch of their life’s path. Yes, I had a “death” 31 years ago, and people who knew me before the change, and then afterward (and who were not my direct family members) witnessed them. I was accused of being a “walk-in” by a friend from the 90’s (one of those “new age friends” I met in one of our men’s group meetings  from Living Enrichment Center), and I too was at a loss of words to articulately describe the death and dying process that I went through, let alone this subsequent “resurrection” that I am currently living through.

Thank you for reaching out to me in your time of greatest need. I am honored that you regard me as “the best thing you have done recently” when you got me to become involved in the OHSU Men’s Cancer Survivor’s Writing Class with you. To have a published author and Dr. in Philosophy, a highly intelligent and sensitive facilitator and several others over the past few years giving mutually positive, life affirming feedback on all of our creative writings, rather than the mixed bag that many have grown accustomed to receiving in our normal life experiences, is a revelation of sorts. Thank you for honoring and respecting the words that we all write, and the words that we directly speak to each other. Thank you for involving me in a process where I can listen with my heart and mind at the deepest level to those creative urges and surges that we all share in. Thank you for allowing me into a process where I can give you extra love and attention, and draw you away from the trials and tribulation around the home long enough to give you a sense of release, and relief.

You and me, we are both on the same path, though I experience it differently right now than you do. I “die daily to all that was myself”, through a process of personal inventory, mindfulness, and insight, though small parts of the old me pops up and reminds me that I am still human, and part of this glorious mess that we call humanity. Yet, right now, what seems to be different between us is that I have, more or less, a fairly secure sense of continuity between the past and the present, and I still experience the “illusion of control”. Of course, your fine engineering mind rebels at all thought of loss of control, even while personally witnessing the dramatic effects of that powerfully humbling experience.

It is really messed up to finally find ones place in life, one’s most healthy relationships with new and old friends and family, where healing and acceptance FINALLY reside, TO FEEL LIKE WE HAVE FINALLY BEEN INVITED TO LIFE’S PARTY, AND THAT WE TRULY BELONG, and then have a disease process creating conditions that feels like a rug is being yanked out from under us, the very rug that sustains our connections, and our future. It can feel, at times, like life itself is rejecting us, while our body continues the profound ejection process of our life force.

I parked myself on the outside of humanity for much of my early life, because I never saw or felt the welcome mat set out for me, by my early experiences of family, or many of my early relationships. And I was not skilled enough to create a welcome mat for myself among the diverse groups of people that I met through school and work in my “pre-30 year old” life. Most relationships with males were troubled, and too many men seemed to be dominated by the aspect of the Common Knowledge Game that included judging all others unlike ourselves as bad, ignorant, stupid, ugly, and undeserving of further positive regard, unless there was some obvious economic or personal power gain to be made from the relationship. I gravitated towards girls as friends, as a child, and then women as a maturing human, as they did not play the “put down” game so profoundly as my male peers and authority figures did (at least the women I met and befriended did not). I clung like a drowning swimmer to an inner tube to any male friendship where I was accepted, more or less, for who I was, without having to accomplish superhuman feats of accomplishment to just “fit in”.

Toxic Masculinity is the cause of so much suffering in the world, and the cause of some of our own suffering, and, at times, I am still repulsed by the baseness, cruelty, and ignorance of many males. The spawn of Toxic Masculinity is Toxic Religion and Toxic Capitalism, and thus the whole world suffers with us. I will try not to get too political, but the election of the POTU$ was a gut/sucker punch to us. We have been victimized by this type of male energy, as well as most women and children (though many do not understand the “following the herd” and the sexual dynamics behind it), and, when I was younger and more unconscious, I probably victimized others with my “masculinity” as well.

My past unwillingness to talk or write much stems from being shut down for much of my life, by others who did not want to listen, or did not have the time to care, and my unconscious involvement with the Common Knowledge Game, where I let the opinions of others, or my perceptions of the opinions of others (another deadly creative twist of the illusory mind) drive my own unique expression nearly into the grave. Your story of your relationship with your father resonated with parts of my own past, and self-esteem issues certainly arose through our fathers’ own lack of insight, and limited ability to be emotionally present in supportive, meaningful ways.

Thanks you for caring, and for listening with your heart. And know that I give to you all that I am, and all that I have, as well. I hear you, Marty, and I know that there is much challenge ahead for you. Yet, “ahead” will not be done in isolation, or away from your family, and your friends. The miracle for both of us is how our hearts merged at this most troubling of times. This is one of the “great unknowns to be experienced” around each bend of our life’s path. You will experience many more “great unknowns”, as the release process continues.

I will walk with you, in freedom, to whatever extent we can,

I walk with you, in pain, while we must,

I will walk with you into the unknown, where we will eventually recognize nothing but Spirit, as we release ourselves from our bondage to our deteriorating minds and bodies,

I no longer will burden you with thought experiments for personal transcendence.

I will no longer advocate for prayer or meditation for you, nor will I withhold from you any potential benefit derived through my own relationship to those processes,.

I will walk with you into death, each in our own time, and in our own way,

I will integrate part of my individual destiny with your own, and, ultimately, join with Destiny itself.

I am grateful to have you as a friend. I am also grateful to share with you in the good intentions and prayers of our spiritually inclined/religious friends and family.” We all mean well, perhaps with some of us needing more targeted training in supporting you in the way that has the deepest meaning and significance for you.

It is quite appropriate that my wife, Sharon, chose for her lone published book the title

“Whose Death Is It, Anyway?”

It is all of ours (end of letter)

I began to accompany Marty to his Men’s Cancer Survivor Support Group creative writing group, through OHSU, in late June.  Marty had wanted for me to join it several years earlier, but I never felt that I had anything to write about, even though I was also a malignant melanoma survivor, and I could not justify going there because of it.  But now that Marty needed friendship and support, I felt honored to join with him, and to share some writing time with him and his writer’s support group.

Marty communicated to me, during our weekly drives to the Men’s Cancer Support Creative Writing Group at Oregon Health Sciences University, that he and his wife were having insurmountable issues with their relationship.  They no longer were intimate, and had not been for quite some time, and Marty struggled to feel love or affection for his wife anymore.  He wanted a divorce, yet was powerless to do anything about it, since he has been so severely weakened by his malignant melanoma, and its effects on his mind and body.  He believed that his wife is insane, and I find it hard to disagree with him, based on my own observations.  Marty was starting to have some unexpected hallucinations, where he would wake up from his sleep, and yet his dream world would continue into his “waking world” for awhile after waking up.  He and his son and daughter-in-law wanted him to be relocated to a neutral care facility, where he can receive high quality care, and not be exposed to his distressed and neurotic/psychotic wife.  His wife insisted that if Marty is moved, she will move into wherever he is relocated to, and sleep next to him on the ground, if necessary.  Marty felt trapped, and also felt that the cancer treatment that he was now receiving will have no positive outcomes, so he needed to plan for his own assisted suicide through the Death with Dignity process.

Near the end of August, Marty related to me how it would be better to die quickly, so that more money would be available for his wife after his death.  I was shocked and surprised by his lack of self-worth, and I called him on that.  I told him that even if he needed to be relocated to a professional care facility, or to a hospice house like the Hopewell House, the money spent would be minimal, compared to the substantial amount that he had accumulated through sales of homes and properties.  HE WAS WORTH EVERY PENNY THAT HE SPENT ON HIMSELF.  Marty just could not accept that.  He had already spent $840 on his end of life drugs, and he felt that the amount spent on the medication would also continue to be a financial burden upon his wife.  He also stated that to continue to live would be to only add to his wife’s nightmare of her own distress and insanity.  He stated that he had to die, so that she could live.  Now, I was distressed, and I felt like I was a helpless witness to a self-imposed crucifixion process

His wife considered herself a minister, and a teacher, and a leader, for those on “the spiritual path”, and she had this understanding of herself for close to thirty years. She was quite the planner, and was also studious, and read everything readily available to support her knowledge, or need for knowledge, in areas revolving around her main concerns in life, or in her teaching arenas. She had quite the rigid understanding of the facts, and, in fact, her “facts” became her idols, of which she trusted, at the exclusion of any teaching, or learning, that those around her might try to impart to her, either unintentionally, or through a need to help her to see more clearly. She was pretty specific about who she would accept her “facts” from, as well, always seeking authority figures, and not fully trusting anybody who did not already have an established reputation.  She had little or no sense of humor, and appeared limited in capacity to embrace the “unknown” or the present moment, as it tried to present itself to her every moment of her existence.

When her husband began his dying process, I became actively involved in her life, and their shared life, on a level that I never anticipated I would. A defining story came near the end of her husband’s life, when I was providing care for him up to two times per week. She rattled on endlessly about how to best care for her husband, even though I was already an established help mate, and quite successfully navigating the unknowns, and the difficulties, with his care. Her husband became quite unhappy with her care for him, and he considered her incompetent, and uncaring, and he informed me that he wanted a divorce from her, as she was so “insane”, and there presently was little or no love being shared between them. Yet he was helpless, and powerless to do anything about it, as his fading life force had removed all options for change for him.

Yet, she would not stop her irritating teaching mode of existence, forcing me to finally confront her.

“Please stop trying to teach me about stuff that I don’t need to know, or don’t want to learn? Can’t you trust that your husband and I are successfully navigating these difficult times together, and that we can manage without your endless control?”

“Oh, Bruce, you are just going to have to treat this like it is an AA meeting. I have to give you this teaching, as I have no choice. Just continue to listen until I am complete, and then take what you like from it, and leave the rest.”

“Actually, I don’t want or need any of your teaching, or your lessons. You teach fear, and distrust of me, as well as the Unknown, and i have grown weary of your intellectually dominating behavior, as has your husband. Please get into your car, and leave for a while, so that we can all breathe a little easier.”

It only took me 23 years to speak my truth to this knowledge dominatrix. My love for her husband, and my attention to his needs and greater good, took precedence over my own feelings of inadequacy in confronting his wife about her terror of death, and her alienating, crazy making communication style. Her spiritual dementia needed to be challenged, lest I lapse into deeper degrees of anxiousness, powerlessness, and unreality. Confronting a difficult reality takes more energy than most of us care to bring to the table, yet, not doing so diminishes our own standing in Truth, Life, and Love, and that was my experience up to that point. I finally rose up from my historical conspiracy of silence, and spoke my truth.

In the absolute, All that we ever see, unto eternity, is our own self. As I look upon the world, and all of my relationships with the people, the land, the animals, and inner and outer space, I see an evolving landscape that demands collaboration and involvement by ALL PEOPLES, and representation for those beings who do not have a voice in such matters. This is a landscape that demands that I make my own unique impression upon it. I must first confront the demons within my own mind and heart before I strike out against the “outer world”, lest I project unhealed images and intentions upon the unsuspecting population.

I had very poor training since birth in how to successfully navigate group energy, up to, and including, the whole of society that we all participate in. As a boy, when family discussions turned into arguments, many times I found myself either raising my voice against the angry voice of my father, or retreating into submission and fear at the threat of being attacked for being contrary to the flow. And, I internalized that I was probably wrong anyway, and would be punished if I stepped out and asserted myself too much. I learned that I could undertake less obvious means of rebelling against authority, sometimes through indirect, or obvious, self, or other, destructive behavior.

Passive/aggressive tendencies have haunted me most of my entire life, and becoming “self-aware” has gone a long way to keep me from employing those unskilled coping mechanisms unconsciously, though I am still occasionally haunted by their presence. Having undertaken the inner work of insight, and maintaining mindfulness, and identified those sources of suffering within myself, does not instantaneously remove all of the darkness within. But is also does not remove from me the responsibility to call out those who are the external agents of oppression and repression, no matter how much I might love them or want to protect them, or even to protect myself from the ramifications of asserting what is right, true, or proper in any situation.

So I spoke out, and she actually consciously and considerately listened to me.  She still felt obligated to give me the latest details on Marty’s care, even though I did not need them.  I continued to help with small tasks around their home, once or twice a week. I continued to attend, and participate with him in, the men’s cancer survivor writing group at OHSU, until two weeks before his assisted suicide.  Of course, my survival from melanoma went much better than his, as mine has not yet metastasized, and hopefully will not in the future.

I came to deeply miss the only man who responded to my philosophically challenging Facebook posts.  My heart aches for the married couple Sharon and I have shared so many outdoor adventures and community memories with over the last 25 years.  Somehow the disease in our shared lives, and individual lives, and our own inability to transcend their emotional and spiritual impacts, led to another form of death, the end to our friendship.

Love goes before all of us “to make the crooked places straight”, but while chaos’s clouds obscure the view, it is hard to see the path. Being open to each moment as it unfolds in its own unique way, and being present with self through insight clears the fog, and keeps the door open to love’s unfolding mystery.  But, It remains a mystery to me, how to plan for and successfully navigate the rivers of life that carry us into death. Reading more books, and gathering more information, is not going to get the job done for me. I try to remain open to the mystery, though it still troubles my heart. I may never heal of that, but miracles are still possible.

Death really sucks for those with much life left to live, period. I am not fooled by the promises of a “reward in the afterlife” offered by some. That reward is only a painkiller to be ingested by the magical thinkers who struggle mightily with the concept of death itself. The thought of an after-life vacation in “heaven” is more addictive than opiates, and drives national and international irrationality and insanity.  It is our eternal struggle.

“And, in the end, even death shall be conquered”.

I am not “in the end”, obviously. “Fear of death” can be conquered without it being masked by even more illusions of thought. That is the path of today’s spiritual warrior. I guess that I somehow signed up for the course. The only study materials are supplied through a committed involvement with life, on Life’s terms, and not on my ego’s terms.  I am no longer allowed to just audit the course, now that I am in the final stretches of my own life. I just hope that my “final stretch” is an engaged, joy dominated experience. I do have some control over that

Marty chose to exercise his right to the Death With Dignity process on September 10, 2017, without ever informing me of his decision.  What he had informed all of us was that there was to be a party at their home on Saturday, Sept 10, as a celebration of life, and to honor him and his wife for their successful life experience.  The evening previous to his final day, Sharon White, Anne LaBorde, and myself had been planning to attend the Michael Franti and Spearhead concert, which we had tickets for.  Sharon and I look forward to Franti’s concerts every year, as he is the musical advocate for all that we embrace with our hearts and soul. Sharing this common theme of celebrating and honoring the dignity of all people, and living and loving life together as one infinite family in God’s Kingdom (No religion necessary, thank you!), is what continues to give me reason to wake up every day.

My friend for 20 years, fellow book club member and creative writing partner with the men’s cancer survivors’ writing group, and our hiking partner was to leave our planet somewhere between 6 and 7 Sunday evening. His mission was to enter the Mystery, and the Unknown. Nobody was to know that Marty was dying the next day. We were all supposed to participate in some sort of celebration of their marriage, and their shared life. I was unsure whether to cry, vomit, or run away.   I saw that he had regained full use of his left arm and hand, and he was starting to regain feeling in his left leg.  Thus, I was stunned and surprised and even hurt by his decision to proceed with his Death with Dignity option.  His main fear, however, was that future metastatic lesions in his brain would take away his sense of self, and rob him of control over his future dying process, so it was time to die now, while he still had freedom of choice in such matters.

I first sat next to Marty for a couple of minutes, then I gave him “my message”. He apparently did not know that I knew about his decision to abort his mission today. He was relaxed and quiet, and he listened well to me, and to those who talked with him. I was previously told that I was to be included in his final “death with dignity” process, but due to unknown reasons he shelved my support at the last minute.I still am a bit confused, and my heart is hurting. Crazy making communication around his “assisted suicide” is understandable, but that still does not protect me from its emotional and spiritual fallout. My stomach almost lost its contents, but not my heart.  I just KNEW that he was healing, yet my knowledge had no power or authority to sway Marty’s decision making around his own life and death process.

We attended the Michael Franti concert that evening, after making an early exit from Marty’s “celebration of life”.  I cried almost the whole way through Franti’s song, “Life is Better With You”, when Michael played it that evening.  Life was better with Marty in it, now we all must deal with life without Marty.  How absolutely devastating of an experience it must have been for Marty’s wife and for his son Chad.

Marty took nearly twenty hours to die, using the medication prescribed to him by his doctor, ultimately dying on September 11, 2017 (yes, 911).  We were not included in any preparation, planning, execution, or support for Marty or for his process of dying.  Sharon, a hospice nurse, and expert on Death and Dying, was almost totally shunned by Eddy during the last three months of Marty’s process, resulting in creating almost insurmountable rifts in the 30 year friendship.  The only reason that I was present was due to a direct request, I mean DEMAND, from Marty to his wife that she accept me into their household during this most difficult of times.  If it had been up to her, she would have excluded me completely, as well.

So I really was dealing with a lot of difficult issues.  I would not have considered myself to be the most appropriate person for these life experiences, yet I found a way to remain engaged with all of the following situations:

1). the care for, and eventual death of my father, on the day of Marty’s funeral, and the difficulties in the management of his estate,

2). the challenges in supporting the protracted dying process, and the eventual death of my good friend Marty in the week prior to my fathers’ death

3). dealing with the (hopefully) temporary insanity of the wife of my now deceased friend, and her ongoing spiritual dementia,

Facing a two-fold challenge, with one coming from being fully present for a married couple we have known and loved for a generation and the other for the continued care of my disabled father. A terminal diagnosis for the husband, coupled with the wife’s death terrors, obsessive compulsive nature to prove her own worth and to also protect and honor her partner, in the face of their collapsing lives, kept me engaged with the unknown, as my good friend lost parts of his wonderful life, and mind, on the way to a Death with Dignity.  Being “fully present” as a life witness, while being a loving friend, in the face of his deterioration and potential death, and with his partner’s fear, anxiety, neurosis, and potentially, own emotionally self-destructive attitudes and behaviors, placed me in a position for “accelerated understanding and spiritual growth”, and generated unexpected anxiety for myself..

I used to say “growth is highly overrated” in a humorous manner when I feigned aversion to situations known to create opportunities for personal evolution. I looked for real humor in the face of the adversity, and I kept coming up short. I missed the healthy version of my friend, while I learned to embrace the deteriorating version. I  experienced some shock in the face of his accelerated change and his wife’s emotional collapse.   It is said that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”.  Apparently, the teacher was Death Itself, appearing as Marty, and as my friendship with him and his wife.

Eulogy for my friend, Marty

(I wrote it, but it was not used by his wife)

I never knew what I was getting involved with when I offered to you all of my heart in friendship this year, having withheld so much of myself over the years. 2017 was the year when I finally learned how closely two male human beings could connect, and ultimately become “one” on a journey of exploration and discovery on the way to your own death this past Monday, at 1:24PM.

You are/were an important missing piece in my own journey of self discovery. I tried to bring you along on the journey into the Unknown, deep into the Mystery of Life. You introduced me to Death in a way that has changed me forever. We walked together while we still could, while you still had hope for your Miracle. Another definition for Miracle now lives in my heart, and Soul. When our human knowledge parading as Truth is unveiled for the lie that it really is, insight, intuition, and Love are finally enshrined in our Heart.

Through your death, I have been Destroyed, and I am now Renewed.

Rest in Peace, Marty.

I have included, below, one of Marty’s Last Creative Writing Stories below, from the OHSU Men’s Cancer Survivor’s Writing Group, August 25, 2017. I finally joined him in this group in July, after avoiding the commitment with him for 3 years. He called my acceptance of joining the group one of the best things that he did for the two of us.

He apparently died to me after the September 1st Writing Group meeting, obsessing with preparing his car’s GPS and OnStar system for his wife the whole drive home after the writing group. He was, basically, unresponsive to me on the day before his death.

Here is Marty’s final creative effort, a story of release from societal expectations, rigid attitudes,  structure, repression, and the lifelong oppression of the human spirit into the infinite freedom of Spirit:

We visited the Riverview Cemetery last week, Doyle and I. Truth be told, I dragged Doyle there with me. I’m a green burial plot owner, and I wanted to see my plot and its surroundings in the morning sun from the East.

Although the hour was early, a couple of parties were already at the site, evidently an early graveside service and a couple visiting a recently- interred loved one with their dog. I was also looking for a sign of completion – a sign that Eddy and I had completed the arrangements for a “final rest” in a good way.

I looked up the hillside and remarked to Doyle, “Look, a coyote loping through the midst of the people and their pets with such obvious self-confidence. You can always recognize a coyote – even if you don’t think you have ever seen one before. They are never frightened – just there, immune to danger and above the fray.”

Yes, I recognized my sign, the age-old sign of the trickster, the shape-shifting presence of the coyote. May he safely inhabit this place forever. (end of story)

Marty, though I miss you, you are now safe, healed, and whole.

Riverview Cemetery and Marty’s Final Resting Place

Thank you, Marty Crouch

A New Story Needs To Be Told (August 2017)

The fatal flaw with all philosophies touting the coming of a new age of peace and enlightenment is that they fail to embrace a fundamental flaw in human character and reasoning (the flaw which is typically male in nature, with a few exceptions). All “teachers” who promote the “light”, without first addressing the required walk through the personal and collective “darkness”, are offering up shallow containers for those who need to drink deeply from the waters of the Spirit. We are left thirsty, and confused, as to why we do not reach the “promised land” as offered by others who are supposedly “in the know”.

When Jesus of Nazareth stated that “the poor will always be amongst us”, he was talking about those who were not only poor economically, but emotionally and spiritually as well. He knew that men who were poor spiritually repressed their feeling nature, and tried to oppress others who attempted to express it, as well. He was referring to a basic defect in character, or nature, which permeates the intellect of men, and the way men communicate within themselves, and with their external worlds. Men tend to neglect there empathetic and compassionate side, and use their errant personal and capitalist inspired philosophies to justify greed and selfishness, and to give themselves permission not to feel for others less fortunate than themselves. He knew that male energy, and all patriarchal cultures, in general, are out of balance, having repressed so much of our basic, human (feminine) nature that we can no longer access our innermost divine/human nature, where all love and healing bubbles up from.

Built right into the very fabric of life, is death itself. Our own cells within our bodies are constantly dying off, and being replaced by others so that we can continue to live, and even evolve (or regress as the situation may dictate). So also should not all of our old thoughts die off, to be replaced by newer, more vibrant creations, if we are to continue to live, and grow, and even evolve?

Women, especially those who have carried the life of “another” in their wombs, know at their deepest level the experience of physical creation, the bringing forth real life into our shared world. It is not just the fertilization of the egg that brings life; it is also the carrying and internal nurturing of the developing fetus for almost nine months, then delivering the viable, complete life form to the world. Women know, at the deepest level, that their babies have ultimate value, regardless of what the “egg fertilizer” might say or do to try to imply otherwise.

It is then that the parents begin to practice whatever are the socially or culturally acceptable norms for raising the child, coupled with their own ‘insight’, from the baby’s birth through its young adulthood.  The spiritually unaware male figure, try as he might, never quite catches the “spirit of the creation”, and begins the process of impressing his own disfigured consciousness upon the unsuspecting developing human being.  Yes, the “sins of the father” meaning, the errors in spiritual understanding of the entire culture, and the individual father, are inculcated into the baby.

I have had a very painful “rebirth”.  Yet, this birth is what I have been looking for my entire life (and, perhaps, many lives, if reincarnation is true-who knows for sure?)  I refuse to raise my “New Born Child” according to the established norms of our diseased times. I will use all of my human resources to communicate, as best I can, the unfolding new reality bubbling up within my heart and soul. I will not oppress, or repress, the ever unfolding new reality, of the self that I am, and that I am to become. Toxic Masculinity, Toxic Capitalism, and Toxic Religion are not welcome guests in our home, though they continue to “stand at the door and knock” at the interior doors for all of mankind.

Please save yourself