(proposed) Introduction to Book #8: The Launching Pad

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

—-President John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

Mr. Trump is not the cause of the national crisis.  Our president is only a manifestation or symptom of a national disease for the major blocks of people who feel that they have been neglected, ignored, or persecuted.  Far too many people on either side of the divide have felt that way most of their lives, and continue to diagnose and treat themselves for their own stress, loneliness, and anxiety.   It is dangerous behavior to self-medicate, and much too easy to choose the immediately available remedies of drugs, alcohol, and/or awkward political and religious ideologies to treat symptoms of our national disease.  I have personally witnessed both mental illness, religious fanaticism and rigid fundamentalism, drug addiction, and the early death syndrome of the white American male through many of my co-workers, friends, family members, and acquaintances, and, even through myself.  I have developed a few insights and observations into the whole phenomenon over the course of my life, and I present them in my effort to bring healing to personal and national wounds.

In this book I address our personal and collective consciousness, the potential for both dysfunction and recovery, as well as our attempts at connection with humanity’s highest potential. I point out the darkened movements of human energy that become the underlying foundation for “toxic masculinity”, a name coined to encompass all that is detrimental to the male version of the human spirit. I discuss at length the Common Knowledge Game, which refers to the process by which we all become imprisoned by the way that we form words, ideas, and judgements against self and other, while attempting to maintain society’s often times twisted notions of what normal social connections should look like. I attempt to address difficult human emotions, and problems with expressing them skillfully. I make a commentary on my rocky relationship with American Christianity, and why I am no longer directly associated with that philosophy,  These life lessons were not gained in a classroom, or sitting at the feet of an Indian guru, as my experience, and resulting wisdom, is directly derived from my immersion into real life, through work, love relationships, friends, and family.

During the course of my work career, I was a mail clerk, maintenance mechanic, electrician, computer engineer, and instrument and electronic technician. I assisted in the building and subsequent technical support of the operation of multi-billion dollar chip fabrication plants in Oregon, and maintaining the pumping and delivery systems of the entire fresh water supply to the City of Portland, among many other less economically significant endeavors. I learned not only how to put people and material together to get a desired result, but also how to troubleshoot and repair systems that have become defective due to wear or poor initial engineering. I worked in a male dominated industry, and I had the privilege of working with many top notch men over the course of my career. The best managers balanced the need for productivity with the needs of the people performing the work, and I walked that balance beam as best I could when necessary.

As both a manager and a worker in the field, I dealt with cooperative and productive workers, but I also was to encounter innumerable damaged, broken, and even dangerous men, and I sometimes struggled with engaging with them directly, and meeting their needs. With the vast personality differences distributed throughout our industry, employment could be both extremely challenging and fulfilling as we all attempted to navigate the often times turbulent waters of male dominated work experience.. I would frequently wonder how any work gets successfully accomplished, especially with the diversity of interests and conflicts in philosophies and mutual negative personality assessments that characterized the crews that worked with each other. The desire to continue to eat and to prevent one’s homelessness through retaining one’s employment motivates most socially distressed and diseased people to avoid physical violence with others. Fortunately for the peaceful and the non-violent employees, the need to eat exceeds the need to beat, most days.  Many of these intellectually and emotionally challenged workers continue to resonate with Donald Trump’s personality defects and spiritual poverty, and celebrate it as if it were their own. The unconscious men tended to be minimally cooperative, overly competitive, antagonistic and verbally violent, misogynistic, judgmental, hateful, superstitious, jealous, racist, misanthropic, and abusive, both within the workplace and at their homes,  Several of these victims of their own unconsciousness were to become murderers, sexual perverts, child abusers, wife beaters, thieves, liars, cheaters, saboteurs, suicide victims, heroin addicts, alcoholics, and, generally,  the six-o’clock news worthy characters.  These are the men that may appear to be permanently “grounded” in a dangerous, collective unreality of fear and mutual distrust.

As a result, I did not leave employment and enter retirement with a balanced, healthy attitude towards much of the male population, so I began to troubleshoot and repair my own life system.  Why was I not able to soar to great spiritual heights with many of my male compatriots while employed?   What might have been my role in the proliferation of disease and enmity within the work environment?  Can I successfully search for higher degrees of understanding of myself and all of our fellow males, our beloved females, and the healing potential for all of us, including the planet Earth?  Why were so many of my male friends and acquaintances dying so young?  All of these questions, plus many more, contributed to the desire to write this book. My hope is that by the reading of this book the reader will be able to see everything just a little bit differently than they did before.  I use the Apollo 11 American experience of a moon landing as a metaphor for what we all might accomplish, should we each strive to place spiritual integrity, wholeness, love, and truth into our own spiritual rocket engines as fuel

The lunar orbiter/landing craft utilized a three stage rocket booster to get it into space.  Coincidentally, it has been proposed by others that the human being has three potential stages of consciousness, the unconscious stage, the aware stage, and the self-aware stage,  I utilize this three-stage model to represent the potential for growth and evolution of human consciousness, though there are other accepted models of more complex natures available for understanding.  Without all of these stages of the rocket booster, or of our collective and individual spiritual evolution and unfoldment, we have no hope of reaching the promising new frontiers.

In the first stage of our unfoldment as human beings, we spend most of our time in the unconscious state, and we are chained to life’s launching pad.  We are basically living life through our habits of thought, without a second thought about our thoughts and their ultimate source, or our subsequent behavior inspired by those inchoate impressions.  Relationships are more defined by power and control issues, and passive/aggressive styles of interaction predominate.  Fear, isolation or tribalism, superstitious reasoning around hope and faith, social insecurity, chronic emotional illness and scarcity consciousness, and a disconnect with nature with the resultant lack of connection with Earth and nature are the dark results.  Thus, there is little sense of curiosity, awe, mystery, and wonder while chained to this state of being.  Suffering is our present and future experience.  We may even attempt to destroy our lives and/or the lives of others through actions motivated by chronic despair,  We are consumed by our personal sense of self, and falteringly attempt to preserve and protect it, most times at the exclusion of all others unlike ourselves. In this first stage of our unfoldment, humanity forever exists on the launching pad of life, while never fully engaging the launch sequence for the truth of existence, with its spiritually empowered expression. 

While in the aware state, which is the second stage of our  unfoldment, we may begin the “launch sequence” for our rocket ship of life, and engage in more conscious behavior such as self improvement and personal goal setting and achieving. This second state of human evolution does not supply all of the conditions for transcending the self and its limitations, though it gives enough insight to indicate that a change of heart can be a desirable outcome.  Hope and faith take on a different meaning for those in the second stage from those still stuck in the first stage, because now hope and faith become expressions of a more conscious personal intention.  We now believe in the possibility that we can actually transcend ourselves and our problems, and we start drawing our resources together in anticipation of the beginning of the greatest adventure that life can offer.  We start to become sincere in our desire to improve ourselves, and to  reach out, however falteringly, to others who may be less fortunate.  Our “higher power”  gives us hints that we have access to much greater wisdom and power, but we continue to believe that we are not worthy, or we may still be a little overweight with hubris, either of which limits our full time access to our highest nature, and this delays our “launch date”, until the weather conditions improve.  We are finally beginning to see that the boundary between self and other is a lot vaguer than we ever thought possible.  There is now a lot of activity around the launching pad, and in the second stage of our unfoldment, we become willing to leave the safe confines of our lives and set our intention for exploring the unknown.  We might wonder what our next step in life is at this stage, which starts catalyzing that spiritual rocket fuel in our souls. 

The third stage of our  unfoldment is the self-aware state, which is achieved once one has not only left the launching pad, but has also transcended the boundaries of the historical self.  We can now soar into the new, unexplored mysteries of human spiritual potential and love for all being, human, animal, and the whole of the planet Earth.  We see that, in our true essence, we are a hologram of the whole, and our intentions now carry the need to protect, honor, and enhance the health and well-being of the totality of life, and not just that of our family, friends, neighborhood, country of origin, or species.. We become consumed by our impacts upon the world, and upon each other.  A driving question of existence becomes how we can be of greater service to the ignorant and/or less fortunate among us, including the animal world.  We are no longer consumed by our personal sense of self and what others might think or expect of us.  Personal suffering is transmuted to compassion and empathy, and we have the experience of transcendence and mysticism.  Our “higher power” is no longer a theory, but a living, breathing reality residing in our hearts.  We are now rocketing into a new dimension of being.  From this exalted position, all that we see, and ever will see, unto eternity, is ourselves, and our primary action in this world is to bring more love to our Self.

Why would anybody ever want to become more consciously aware as a human being? Why would anybody ever want to explore the unknown and unknowable within one’s self, and leave the safety and security of all of one’s accumulated life experience? Why would anybody ever want to begin to question, and, potentially, then abandon, all of one’s personal knowledge, especially the memories that lead to one’s suffering? Why would anybody ever want to commit several thousand hours of their valuable time in reading about religion and spirituality, enhancing introspection, developing intuition and insight, making amends to ALL people and institutions that we have harmed through our ignorance, improving the mysterious practices of both meditation and prayer, and exploring new meetings and workshops with strangers?

Why would anybody ever want to develop the intention of transforming one’s life so as to be happier, healthier, and better connected with the greater meaning and purpose available? Why would anybody ever want to undertake the epic journey of transforming oneself, and being reborn into a new reality where the will to live and prosper is an innate part of being? Why would anybody want to take up the spiritual mantle of all consciously realized human beings who have ever lived, and attempt to carry that energy forward into a new, unique life experience, while blessing other people’s lives, as well as one’s own?  Why would anyone ever want to rocket themselves into another, infinitely more expansive vision and dimension of existence?

In 1995, my grandmother, Beatrice Henry, was hospitalized after becoming extremely ill. She was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma, and given a prognosis indicating a short period of time left for her to live. The oncologist had suggested to the family that she would respond positively to one round of chemotherapy, to “reduce pain and suffering”. The toxins released by that therapy overpowered her kidneys, and sent her into a form of systemic toxicity, causing temporary loss of consciousness, and accelerating her physical deterioration. My wife Sharon and I asked to have my grandmother stay with us during her dying times, as there was no way that I wanted my grandmother to die in a hospital or care facility.

One day, shortly after she arrived at our home, while still barely conscious, one of her three granddaughters, Carla, brought her newborn son, Kodiak, over for grandma to see. He was the typical boy baby, healthy and happy, and full of potential. Yet my grandmother, still bedridden and semi-conscious at the time, in a most uncharacteristic manner, proclaimed:

“My, Carla, what a homely baby that you have!”

Carla, Sharon and I were all stunned, and surprised. My grandmother always loved babies, and always treasured each and every one, yet this response came from a place within her that we did not know or recognize. Over the course of the next two weeks, her kidneys started functioning again, she gradually regained her consciousness and awareness, and eventually she was able to walk short distances again. .She was to see Kodiak again during her period of minor recovery, and this time stated:

“My, what a handsome baby boy Kodiak is. Carla, you must be a very proud mother!”

Women, especially those who have carried the life of “another” in their wombs, know at their deepest level the experience of biological 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. Healthy, aware women know, at the deepest level, that their babies have ultimate value, and they will see beyond any apparent lack of physical beauty. All babies are beautiful, and there is little question about it. My grandmother was dying, yet she was able to once again see the beauty of human potential, and acknowledge it at the deepest level.

I have had a target on my back for much of my life, and I never understood why until later in adulthood.  Like most everyone else on this planet, I have been subjected to the family and cultural forces of oppression and repression and crazy making communication and behavior.  I have found that most people do NOT appreciate feedback about their errant behavior, and if I wanted to make more ‘friends” and be accepted by groups of damaged people I certainly would not offer to the world this book.  I would probably have written a vacuous book about four minute meditations for success, or a three step enlightenment techniques for transcendence.  But that is NOT me.  This book is NOT for people who want to stay grounded in their own unconsciousness, but instead for those who want to understand why they are not soaring upward into new dimensions of being and doing, for in the complete seeing, is the new being revealed.

This book, which is my only creative baby, may be greeted by readers with this same initial negative response as my grandmother had for Kodiak. The “launching pad” of the life that I was chained to was not a pretty place, and it was not populated by the happy, healthy, wise human beings that one would prefer to be associated with.  The beauty and infinite possibilities for my own “rocket ship” will not be immediately recognizable by most people.  My story is quite HOMELY, and it will repel all but the most curious, courageous and loving of readers. But, like my cousin Kodiak, this story is full of potential, and points to a healthy and happy state of being, once the “homeliness” is presented and acknowledged. 

My search for Truth, with the subsequent delivery of my spiritual “baby” is nothing like anything that the reader has ever seen before. It will be difficult to assess its value and relevance, until it has “an opportunity to grow on the reader”, and whatever toxicity that the story stirs up is filtered out. The story will not have universal appeal, yet, to me, it is my only child, and as such it remains a “handsome baby boy”, full of life, love, and the potential for healing. And, this “handsome baby boy” is the story of my exploratory trips into my own “inner space”, where my mission to support personal and collective evolution continues to this day.  Not only did humanity make it to the moon (why do moon landing deniers even exist?), each of us also has the potential to reach God, Truth, Love, Compassion, Healing, and Light, after we leave the launchpads of our own lives.

My goal in life was certainly not to become a diseased human being, attempt recovery from that disease, write a book about the process, and, establish myself as an authority on subject matter that makes me irrelevant to all who have no interest in healing or in my journey.  Life is more about building a better state of consciousness, with enhancing the life-affirming qualities, and the cultivation of greater insight, than the books that get written, and the foes that get smitten..Literally, the words of my story are the vapor trails of my journey through the space and time, and no one should set out as a goal to just chase my trails, or anyone else’s, for that matter.  We are all capable of making our own unique vapor trails on our journey to the higher dimensions of our life experience and its supporting consciousness, and we can develop the willingness to share those inspired words with others…

Through our resonance with the “wise ones” of our age, and of all ages, we may yet drum up sufficient support for a healing change in collective and individual consciousness, before our planet fails, and our civilization collapses upon itself..

Why choose this goal?

“. . . But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?. . . “

Just like the journey into outer space that America undertook to reach the moon, America can also succeed in the journey to the center of our minds, where all of our opportunities, and perils, reside.

“. . . not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win,. . . “

This book is comprised of 193,963 words, and is grouped into thirty two chapters. It has been written by a man who never had anything to say, or a desire to say it, until nearly dying thirty-one years ago. It only took another thirty-one years to finally put life experiences to words, after more brushes with DEATH.. Death is the final and greatest frontier, and motivator for the procrastinator.. Early death threatens everybody, including our planet Earth.  It will be noted that on several occasions in this book, I will be speaking up for Mother Earth, as her voice has been drowned out by the American Capitalist concerns of this age..

This life of mine has become a “Miracle Experiment”, in which I attempt to penetrate our cultural conspiracy of silence, the conspiracy that keeps mankind unconscious of itself and its underlying dysfunctional attitudes and behavior . Its unhealed traumas, and it’s unloving engagement with our Mother Earth. This keeps us imbalanced and diseased, which prevents humanity from achieving its collective potential. Note that the title indicates that I am penetrating the “conspiracy of silence” rather than dispelling it, as the power of the collective experience still dominates human consciousness. My life was not lived in vain, however, for I am a part of a massive movement to heal the American soul. I will continue to write, and to speak out, until I am no more. The story that follows is my attempt to document the process, and present it to the world

“. . . we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. . . . “

 We have been called to be the “truth tellers” of the world, which releases us from the bondage to the past and the unhealthy conditioning that keeps unaware people eternally chained to the launching pad of life.  The following book is the story of my own preparation of my launching pad for spirit, and may it bless each of us in a way that benefits the most of us.  And, even if our own life appears to be the only life to be positively impacted by our hero’s journey, that is MORE THAN ENOUGH.

If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.
– Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes)