Metaphysical Me

I'm a Libra, in spades. Music is a fundamental and constant element in my life - one of the majors - fire, air, earth, water, music.
There's never been a time where I've not been involved in some way with music. If I run away from it, it will come find me.
However, I've always been interested in the entire world and all of history and, gosh darn it, the universe. I always needed to check out what might be behind the curtain.

This truly was me:

I first had my chart cast and read by Robert Thibodeau at the Mayflower Bookshop in Berkeley, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit). It was a kind of magical place especially for a young (very early 20s) novitiate. Keep in mind this was in 1977-78, the early part of the "New Age" movement. Counter-culturists had opened up various enterprises - funky restaurants, used clothing stores, ramshackle record stores and bookstores like this with a lovely warm smell and piles of interesting books in barely logical groupings. As a Libra Sun/Neptune conjunct, I've always been sensitive to vibes and on the hunt for true spirituality. From the moment I walked in to the Mayflower, I had a feeling there was something there for me. It turned out to be a lot of something. It was my first step into another world, one that I'd have a foot in for the rest of my life and one which gifted me with amazing experiences and insights. At the counter, I met an intense, dark, slim man with longish hair and mentioned that I'd be interested in a reading. It was either right then or on my next visit that I was invited up to the 2nd floor to Robert's office where he showed me a hand-drawn chart he had cast. (There were no personal computers in 1978.) The very first thing he said to me was so unexpected from a total stranger that I reacted in amazed shock. How did you know that!?! He pointed out a few things in my chart (which I did not understand at the time) and continued on to give me a blunt, unromantic but very true reading. I was a bit dizzy after it was over. A bit later on the timeline, a tall, thin, lovely, eccentric Urantian palm-reader named Denny Fairchild, startled me with his insight. This stuff does work if it's done right!! There is definitely some juice in this orange.

Side note: In my misty consciousness in the first moments in the Mayflower, I was drawn to two books. It was if they had a spotlight on them. The first was a book that had imaged the history of the world into a compressing spiral - the outer rings represented the distant past as large sections, shrinking into the center for our current sped-up reality, finally reaching a static dynamic oscillation (close to the year 2000). Then .. the spiral split into two spirals perpendicular to the first, one going "up" and the other "down". To me this was the perfect way to describe what we're going through now. Those on the "up" side are evolving, working against gravity, working on ourselves, working to be good people - and ascending. Those on the "down" side are devolving, succumbing to gravity, the natural tendency to get worse, to degrade. They've stopped working on themselves now that Trump and many others like him have given them someone to blame and permission to be their worst selves. The warning in the book was to not endanger your own evolution by trying to save those devolving. They'll try to bring you down with them. Bless them and let them go. I try. The other one was a beautiful illustrated book about the Tao Te Ching, which had been calligraphized by the husband of my current wife, whom I met many years later. Whoa! This all happened in the first 10 minutes of walking into the Mayflower. A glimpse into the future.

I had just graduated from a prestigious music school, the New England Conservatory and was swimming around trying to work out who I was and if I wanted to JUST be a professional musician. Many of my friends and associates from that school have continued on to great prominence, but I was built differently. I had a curious, exploratory nature and even though I found my pot of gold in music, I was restless and relentless in following the whatever yellow brick road that promised to bring me to Oz. I had stumbled/been led to a vein of ore so rich that I could barely process it and seemed to have suprising twists and delightful characters. Plus, it was beautiful. I love stuff like this. It has symmetry, delicacy and meaning - not to mention a higher purpose. It's not just pretty paintings.

At the time, I was pretty unsettled and rather unhappy. I was too old (and had been in unfamiliar territory) for my high school friends (a lot of them were gone anyway), all my new friends were in Boston, I had no career but plenty of unattractive options (working in corporate Detroit like my dad - no thanks). All I knew is that I wanted to know what was what! I wound up enrolling in an MBA program at Oakland University near my home. Not an awful place by any means - a lovelier campus than I could appreciate back then in my self-conscious roil.

(I wish I could find this picture with me as a long-haired hippie type surrounded by well-coifed, besuited MBA candidates from Ford, GM and Chrysler). What a misfit! I also took a part-time job with a bank as a teller at Michigan National Bank, another way my life branched out (pun intended) and I met and hung out with a very different class of people - regular people with modest amibitions. Their goal was to be mellow and find good times - getting gently inebriated on one thing or another and listening to music. And having fun. What a concept! As a life-long disciplined practicer, this was foreign territory and actually rather liberating. I rode up to various rural campgrounds in a jeep listening to the Eagles. I went to some rock concerts, some blues clubs to dance my head off - I even discoed once or twice. I sang in a choir, I went to meetings of the Theosophical Society (some great stuff there), I listened to rock & roll in its late-70s peak. I occasionally bowled solo. I stayed overnight in Hell, Michigan and it turned out to be pretty boring. I had time on my hands and my parents' basement all to myself.

However, I was tormented by a lack of clarity and certainty. What was my life about? What am I supposed to be doing? Should I go back into music? Should I continue on this foggy but promising path? There was a point when my over-dramatic nature brought me down to the basement floor - begging for an answer. Gradually a dim vision of Jesus himself appeared (in a kind of cliched pose). This image got closer and closer and finally was next to me. I leaned forward to pick up the pearl of wisdom I was desperate for. "Get Over Yourself" - was the epiphany I both deserved and needed. My holy vision had a sense of humor. Excellent!

The MBA program turned out to be another rich source of learning - law, macro-economics, human resources, planning and modeling methodologies, organization behavior theories, but most importantly - computers. I actually failed my first exam in that class. The question was how to order and re-order lists, one of the most basic computing tasks. I could imagine lots of ways to do this but rejected all of them because the logic seemed far too basic and repetitive to be completed in a reasonable amount of time. I was baffled. I could see what would be required to tell (basically) a blind robot how to do it logically (the greatest thing about learning programming was in realizing how many rather complex things we humans do without thinking). I got all the basics, including all the re-indexing required every time you added a new item, but couldn't imagine anything working fast enough to be practical. I couldn't imagine the speed of light (actually, electricity). The instructor took pity on me. He could tell I wasn't a business type and found out I was a musician. After class one day, he invited me to his car where we listened to his favorite classical music and talked about my terrible test. Somehow that broke a logjam in my head and I managed to grok the essence of programming - which is, basically, developing a program is slow, meticulous work that results in almost instantaneous execution. You are essentially guiding electricity down a channel using only true or false gates. As Bruce Lee said - think slow to move fast - one of the many brilliant paradoxes of life. The course I almost failed led to my 2nd career as a programmer.

Turns out, I was going to be paid to think and to build machines using words! If I only knew that then. At the time, I couldn't imagine where I could fit in and be useful. I had been introduced to law, accounting, psychiatry - all achingly boring to me. I also am not a Steady Eddie (my father was and woke up every morning at 6AM to trudge across the top of Detroit in every weather to his GM job. As a member of the Greatest Generation, growing up through the Depression and fighting in the 3rd Army in WWII, a steady job was a dream come true. For me, a spoiled Boomer taught early about the virtues of freedom and creativity, it seemed entombing. Life should be an exciting adventure (with breaks, of course) and I was itching to start mine.

I had been in a musical "tunnel" during my years at Interlochen and NEC. All I thought about and did was music (oh, and girls). I had been developing a vacuum that needed to be filled with a richer understanding of the rest of the world. This vacuum was rushing to be filled and this period of my life was full of learning opportunities, one after the other. Fate for me is magnetic, inescapable (if I don't fight it or push it). The right thing happens at the right time, the right person comes along at the right time. Even my errant steps led to important experiences and life lessons.

I was on the path, learning like crazy. Books came to me, including "As Above, So Below" by Alan Oken (above), who would play a major role in breaking me free of my former life. I explored numerology, palmistry, theology, channeling, esoteric astrology, all the world religions (including, in a weird twist that wound up in a baptism) the Mormon faith (which would rescue us from Peru - see "Stuck in Peru"). I was taught about the life within, the hidden structures and the informing vibrations (life is vibration - I KNEW it!). As a musician, this could not have made more sense to me. Music is the organization of vibrations into events. Turns out that's what the esoterics teach you about life itself. The first vibration started long, long ago and set off more and more vibrations. We're just vibrating atoms of energy - with the crucial difference of being aware of it. There is the exoteric (the exterior "face") of religion which tries to guide you to living a clean, sin-free, compassionate life but that is only the first part of the job. Once achieved - this calmer, clearer self can more readily enter into the esoteric realms. There is so much truth there that it's kind of hard to handle unless you first purged your soul, cleansed your mind and strengthened your body and emotions.

On the exoteric side, my MBA program surveyed the world as it was, the attempt to rationalize the competitive spirit and our acquisitory nature. Clean, organized, rational - these calm my mind. Maybe it's no coincidence that Libra and Library are almost identical words. The world of knowledge organized and accessible - best to build on a solid foundation. Plus, the knowledge is accessible to anybody willing to take the time to learn how to access it. The ultimate fair shake. Side note: what has surprised me about the internet is that, with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips now, too many of us focus on how to hurt others. Wow! I guess you could call me naive and idealistic, but I'm continually surprised at the depths my fellow humans will go. I understand the Manichean battle between light & dark. but I find the darkness hard to fathom sometimes. It feels more like a sickness, a mental / emotional illness. On the other hand, I'm more often pleasantly surprised by spontaneous human kindness, which we often happily encounter while traveling. Anyway, back to my life - I also started to study jazz piano and worked with a older black pianist at Oakland University who planted the jazz seeds in me and gave me a feel for where this music comes from. Again, music found me and I was soon involved in local groups - but now with an arms-length perspective.

Meanwhile, on the esoteric side - along with everything else that was happening, I was invited to the 1978 ARC (Aquarian Revelation Conference) at the Colombiere Retreat & Conference Center in the little town of Clarksdale, Michigan - not far from my home. This conference was epic for me. I cracked open like an egg. It was my first physical encounter with Alan Oken, whose books I had devoured. There was a ritualistic feeling to our encounter, as if I was being washed and dressed to meet the Magi. Turns out we were soulmates - two sides of the astrological coin. It was a dazzling experience as he has a strong charisma that is informed by genuine spirituality and devotion. But he's also a carnal creature and I was a bit shocked to have him seduce me. I had attended his lecture that day about the four levels and genders of any human - a person could have a male body with female emotions and mixed gender mind and spirit (BTW, I use male and female but it's more assertive/passive or positively/negatively charged). I would say I'm male body, female emotions, male mind, female spirit.) This opened my mind to the understanding of relationships. Opposites attract. It's certainly possible to have a strong relationship between two people whose bodies are both polarized male or female, but the rest of their "structures" are balanced in partnership. I've gotten to know many gay couples who are highly compatible because their non-body components have "electro-magnetic" attractions - to put it rather scientifically. A big problem in the world is our shallow understanding of things - we judge books by their covers. To some of us, it just seems wrong to have couples of the same physical form in love or experienced lasting relationships. This is unfortunate for everybody, including the shallow judger, but can be said to be the root of racism. Some of us can't look past the physical. And there's SO much more then meets the eye.

I'd never had an encounter like that - before or since. It taught me so much about so many things and introduced me into the world of the outsider/insider. Those who are rejected by the world often form much deeper and more intimate relationships with fellow exiles. Again, so many historical parallels (heretical cults, the Beatniks and Hippies, even musicians). We outside insiders have insight, compassion and refined senses of humor (and often aesthtics). We can't conform so we don't feel forced to conform. Our thinking and feelings are freerer and more spontaneous. We feel we have fewer people to answer to. It's hard to be more outside/inside than a gay astrologer who speaks multiple languages and claims to be a disciple of an ascended master.

Little old Michigan me, as middle as they come (middle-class, middle-of-the-road, Middle America) was shedding his first coccoon. Alan was an aristrocat in bearing and behavior and I was introduced to a new class of people - the spiritual and intellectual elite of that world. It was hard to hide my clay feet. I wound up getting invited to live with him in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After graduating with my MBA, I packed up my crappy little Chrysler and headed south. Santa Fe (Fanta Se, as we called it) was a world away from Michigan (and certainly New England). It's brown and barren, with brown stucco buildings and brown, dry bushes and brown-red dirt. It was dry and clear and there was room for dreaming and fanatasizing. Alan ran a rather classy metaphysical shop called "Voice of the Turtle" and I continued my metaphysical browsing. Our relationship didn't survive that long. I've always been way more interested in the lovely, curvy, hairless female body. And things fit nicely, too. I found the physical aspect to be a kind of a chore, in a way. I reminded myself of the Greek model of teacher/student and went along to the extent I could, but we could both see it wasn't going to work. I was then let loose and wound up sleeping on the couch of a lovely (female body, male emotions) girl/woman called Betsy Shiels. She was the paid companion for one of the Harvey brothers - rich owners of a string of restaurants made famous by Judy Garland.

He provided her with most everything. A very nice house in one of the better Santa Fe neighborhoods, a car, some cash money - nice deal. All she needed to do was to keep him entertained. This involved a number of not-so-awful tasks - mainly bringing around young people such as myself, and some other tasks that were never completely confirmed - you get the idea. He was an old man with a not-so-genial temperment. Betsy was a spark plug and possessed a truly outstanding and athletic rear end bumper along with a bumptious and fun-loving spirit that was contagious. They genuinely cared for each other, it seemed. We often drove over there to just hang out at his house and execute various hi-jinks, often by his lovely indoor pool. There were party drugs available and for a short period, I learned about the hazards of cocaine. One story I tell on myself involves me injesting some marching powder and holding forth relentlessly to a group of people only to notice when my ego smoke cleared that they had beat a hasty retreat away from me. Nothing has quite the impact on a Libra as social rejection. That was the end of my cocaine phase.

To be continued