About the Author
About the Author
This is not a autobiography. To do that I would have to be more transparent. I do not wish to share the horror, depths of despair and madness that come with life. If you have gotten this far you probably have experienced that for yourself. One foot in front of another.
To my daughter.
It was a mild day in the summer of 48 in Boston Massachusetts. My parents were anticipating my birth. It was nine months earlier on a Sunday afternoon that I was conceived in an unplanned act of lust, a Sunday afternoon accident as they told me. My youngest brother was 2 years older than I and they probably wanted to spread the births out more. When my mother was quite old she said that she wanted 2 or 3 girls and 2 or 3 boys and emphasized the order of girls over boys. My four older siblings were males and so was I. I never did ask what they thought when they saw me but mom's revelations made it clear. It did not effect my belief that every child should be a wanted child.
I would eventuality have 4 reoccurring night terrors. One of them was a surrealistic experience sliding along a friction-less transparent surface within a 3 dimensional infinite black void. In the far distance in the direction that I was "moving", the edges seamed to be pushing up as transparent geometric mountains. As I moved forward, the mountains grew and the opening started to close in on me, absolutely terrifying. I wondered what this meant. Could it be a memory of my birth or my growing awareness of death.
Recently I thought about those recurring night terrors. They no longer triggered any emotional response. Does that mean a lifetime of "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" may also fade to nothingness without the need to "take arms against a sea of troubles".
We moved from Boston to Crawford New Jersey. I had a couple of friends, the McNabs. I would go to visit them without a care. I remember the moment that I went from believing everyone accepted me to the knowledge that everyone didn't. It was like going from an unconsciousness to consciousness.
Later when we moved to Plainfield NJ. I would experience that there were groups of kids that I wanted to be part of that I was not part of and groups of kids that I didn't want to be part of that I was. In third or fourth grade I thought I had a girl friend named Bonnie. Eventuality a school administrator asked me to leave her alone. I protested that I was protecting her from other kids. Later I would learn that we are all delusional. The question that we all must ask ourselves is what are we delusional about now.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
This about the author page is incomplete and somewhat inaccurate. Left off is some of the pain, horror, disillusionment, humiliation and madness. I have only been as transparent as I can handle. Some things we take to the grave with us.
My parents kept trying for a girl. Two years later she was born. She came out as a beautiful baby girl. My parents had no clue that she would develop a severe scoliosis and have an IQ of 15. She would never walk or talk. My mother was a Cornell physicist the daughter of a Cornell scientist and professor and the granddaughter of a Georgetown physician. She would later teach high school physics. She could not accept her only daughters' condition. She always believed she would get better. She took my sister around to faith healers, Billy Gram and Oral Roberts. My sister only got worse. My Dad was a Yale chemist and a phi beta kappa Yale legacy. He did not believe that a god could change the past. This created a lot of stress within the family. I learned that this is how life turns out. My dad's life was effected by losing his mom when he was 6 due to complications from the "flu" pandemic of 1918. Dad didn't know if there was a god but he would say if there was, he didn't give a game about him. Dad was a critical perfectionist. None of us, including himself, measured up to some perceived standards that he had.
I had 4 older brothers who were twice my size and picked on me with a sister who needed constant care. Seven years later my parents would have a normal girl. I was on my own with what was probably ADD. My mom tried to get me held back a year in school but the school system declined. I was the academic under performer in the family. My dad once said to me that the world needs ditch diggers but that I couldn't even dig a ditch straight. Now I point out to my six year old daughter professions of people who didn't study hard enough.
My dad was very demeaning toward all us, creating an antagonistic environment but he did "his duty", stuck around and provided room and board for all of us. I grew up having no clue how to interact with people.
My dad worked at Merck as a chemist. They were closing out his section and asked everyone in it to find a new job. Dad said that it felt like he was fired. Dad would find a job in Illinois. He was salutatorian of his high school class and it was a forgone conclusion that he would follow his dad to Yale. He never made a big deal out of going to Yale and acted like it was just the local college whereas mom was a big Cornell booster. I could not relate, having been knocked down hundreds of times. He had graduated in the midst of the great depression and was able to get a job while many of his class mates couldn't and went on to get their PhDs. In chemistry you would always be a second class citizen without a PhD. Later he went to graduate school but with 6 kids and a full time job earning a PhD was a bridge too far.
I entered seventh grade in Illinois as an insecure, socially backward teenager. Although I was normal looking, I felt unattractive. I graduated from high school during the era of the Vietnam war and let my beard and hair grow effectively changing my appearance. Middle aged, white people would look at me seething with hatred. It was still better than carrying on my high school persona. I would be pulled over by police for driving as a hippy, the words still ring out “if he moves shoot him”. I felt that in some very small way I might have gotten a glimpse what people of color are experiencing but now I realize that I really hadn't. I now live in California where my 6 year old daughter and wife don't see color.
Around 1963 my coach saw a small bulge in a vein in the back of my leg. I would have an operation to strip the vein from my leg. That summer I couldn't run around but I was able to play on a swing set in the back yard doing chin ups and exercise called skin the cat. When I returned to school in the fall some fellow students noticed a difference and called me Mr muscles even though there wasn't much of a difference. The positive feed back led me to continue to exercise, eventually looking like an amateur body builder.
I would apply to a mediocre 4 year public school where I would experience marijuana, LSD and plenty of alcohol. I would proceed to go from probation after my first term to terminal probation after my second term. I was terrified that I world permanently flunk out of college. In my first term I got a D in one of my math classes. In my second term I would drop the next math class in the sequence that I was taking but still went on terminal probation. In my third term I would re-take the class that I got a D in as well as the prerequisite to that class. I got A's in both classes and my grades went up from there. In the prerequisite class I got 10 points higher on every test than everyone else as I had full knowledge of some material on the exams that wasn't taught in the class. The exams obviously were too difficult for the class but I enjoyed letting people think I was one of the smart ones, never letting on.
After another year I decided to transfer to the University of Illinois, which was ranked as a top ten university by both Barron's Guide to Colleges and U. S. News and World Report (first published in 1983) and follow my mom into physics. I was still drinking and doing drugs and would do poorly in my first and second semester at the U of I. I dropped out of school during my second semester rather than flunk out. After some repeated failures I would go for a visit to the U of I. I decided to see if any of their colleges were still open. One was and 2 years later I would graduate still as a socially awkward, insecure person, not feeling as a fully legitimate U of I person but of course I was, having earned it through my own persistence and will power. I had saved some money working on the rail road replacing rail road tracks and working in a paint factory as a formulator. I also got a small scholarship and a student loan but what really made a difference was a $6,000 trust fund that my maternal grandparents had set up. Without the trust fund I probably would have never graduated. I feel that my white privilege was, besides being white, the trust fund, and felt that everyone should have a chance to go to a college even though as a blond haired blue eyed son of two generations of Ivy league graduates I never felt “white”. The bluebird poster included in my book is one that I had my first year at the U of I. During a LSD trip the poster became three dimensional with the eye having an infinite field of depth.
It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
Albert Einstein
Even during the great depression of the 30's there was a great number of wealthy people. The counselors at Yale had told my dad that he would be an average student at Yale which he was. Many of his fellow students had attended private academies which was a tremendous advantage. My mom waited tables at Cornell and graduated in 3 years to save money while my mom and dad both had food kiosks where they could make some extra money selling snacks to other students.
After college I moved to Chicago and got some unsatisfying sales jobs. One of my customers needed a foreman. It was a leather tannery where the hides would be soaked in huge vats to soften the flesh, run through a defleshing machine and tanned in huge machines filled with toxic chemicals. They had told me that you couldn't talk during the summer because of the flies but they were messing with me as the flies were more interested in the flesh. Everyone had razor sharp knives that they used to strip the flesh off hides and trim the leather so confrontations could escalate quickly. I took the job and I survived a couple of attempts on my life while I went to graduate school at the Illinois Institute of Technology at night.
A comprehensive exam that doubled as the PhD entrance exam was required for graduation. Illinois Institute of Technology knew that I had a job offer from GE assuming I graduated and yes I passed the comprehensive exam or so it was recorded while my fellow student who already had been working at US Steel did not. The foreign students who were in the back of the class were talking to each other in their native language throughout the entire exam. Illinois Institute of Technology was a for profit university.
I spent 2 years with General Electric, one year in Hendersonville North Carolina at the industrial and street lighting division, 6 months at a Cicero Illinois where they made major appliance parts and 6 months at the commercial appliances division in Chicago Heights. Hendersonville was a pleasant town of 6,000 where GE was doing very well. They were purposefully not booking orders because they were concerned that they would have to beat the sales results the next year. Life was easy unless you were black. I learned the difference between a Yankee and a damned Yankee. A damned Yankee stayed. My second assignment was in Cicero Illinois overseeing the making of heating cores for dishwashers. The pressure of meeting their own production goals were so great that they were shipping boxes of defective cores to Louisville where they would be assembled into the dishwashers. The last assignment was at the commercial appliance division where they were doing so poorly that GE would soon sell it. My boss would cry in his office and his boss would mumble incoherently.
After I graduated from the U of I, I moved to Chicago and bought a weight bench and weights. I worked out during graduate school and continued to add muscle. From Hendersonville I returned to Chicago and got an apartment 34 floors over Lake Michigan. I was part of corporate GE and looked like a bearded Mr. America. I would date woman who were 7 levels out of my league but of course it was all an act without any real self confidence. Many girls would come up to me just to touch me. To all the women I loved before, thank you very much.
I had survived the harsh Chicago winter of 78 - 79. In 1967 I had rode my motorcycle from Northern Illinois to California and ended up in Huntington Beach 4 blocks from the pier and 4 block from the beach. I bought a surf board and surfed that summer. I was going back to California. I packed up my 280 Z with my skies and stopped by Eldora Colorado where I skied for a while. I continued my journey toward California and eventually when I came to a fork in the road I took it.
I headed south to Los Angeles where my brother was living at the beach in Playa del Rey. I found a job at Hughes. Soon afterward I was offered a different job that I didn't like. I decided to leave and travel around Europe for a while. I had gotten an apartment right on the sand in Playa del Rey. The landlord let me out of the lease. I packed up my 280 Z and left California but on my way out of town I took one last interview. It was at 100 Wilshire Blvd Santa Monica, a 21 story building with floor to ceiling glass walls overlooking the Santa Monica beach. I was awe struck by the view. I would be doing scientific programming and optimizing their private telephone networks. I asked for the job. Not thinking that I had a shot at it and having no place to live, I got in my car and continued heading out of town back to Illinois, on my way to Europe. In Illinois I received word that someone was trying to get a hold of me. It was human resources. I had gotten the job. They offered me a 60 percent raise over GE. Off I went to the place of eternal summer. From my office I once saw a full circle rainbow.
The building was two blocks from the Santa Monica outdoor mall where I would go for walks. In the early 1980's there was a place where they were doing meditation. I decided to try it. During meditation or everyday life you just naturally go from breathing out then breathing it and so forth. At some point during one of the meditations I stopped breathing. The involuntary response had ceased. I don't know how long it lasted for. It had never happen before and would never happened again.
During this time I decided to try past life regression with Betty Binder. I didn't believe in it but what the heck. I had two experiences. One was being a grasshopper minding my own business eating some blades of grass and when a beetle with huge pincers chomped down on me and ate me. I felt nothing, the beetle was doing what beetles do. Nothing personal. The other was as an early north American explorer, leaving an Indian girl to continue my explorations. I didn't really believe that they were past lives but they were certainly amusing. It sure did freak Betty out and she declined to work with me further.
In the early 80's I had gotten an apartment overlooking the ocean just a block south of the Santa Monica pier. My girlfriend had gone to Europe on vacation. One completely sober Saturday afternoon I was sitting on the couch looking out over the ocean when an indescribable benevolent entity appeared about 4 feet away from me at the other end of the couch. It was oblong, radiating soft white glow and about 4 foot tall. It gave me a feeling of complete peace. I had never felt anything like this before or since. A religious or spiritual person would have interpreted it as an angel, god, Jesus or some metaphysical experience. The feeling of absolute peace was amazing but I interpreted it as my own brain's projection which is how I see the world.
I become a successful software developer, travel the world and got married at age 51. My daughter was born when I was 64. I retired from work at 69. During meditation I have experienced unconscious consciousness where my consciousness was everywhere and nowhere with no observer.
During an LSD experience in the early 1970's I experienced a oneness with my 1928 Plymouth that I was restoring. That experience which many people have under psychedelics was unworldly but very different to the intellectual, emotional and ego-less experience of an enlightened feeling of oneness. I lost the desire for drugs and alcohol long ago and live a simple life looking after my wife and bringing up my daughter.
What I see around me is nature whereas some people see God or God's hand. Life has made sense to me for some time. I continued to study and meditate. One day at my wife's urging I wrote up some of my personal history for my daughter.
It is an absurdity on many levels to claim to be enlightened. Being enlightened isn't a static position. It's an on going processes of enlightenment after enlightenment. Even to the casual observer my ego is still with me, a little older, wiser and quieter. The flame of desire is still there. But I share that flame with the rest of us. I recognize it as something that binds me to others more than separates me.
How can any man be weak who dares to be at all?
Henry David Thoreau...
Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
Henry David Thoreau
Thanks for letting me sing this song.
I have always been self conscious about not being enough. Research shows that intelligence is not fixed and students who have teachers who recognize this have greater improvement than students who have teachers that believe intelligence is fixed. I have always been my own student and my own teacher. It's taken me a long time to get here because I didn't always have the smartest teachers.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
I encourage my daughter to take her place as a leader as her generation eventually will inherit the reigns of leadership as long as she doesn't want to be majority leader of the Senate. I explained to her that if you want to be able to do what you want when you grow up you must build a strong foundation. Her mom, grand-mom and I constantly work with her. I don't want her to experience the unpleasantness and fear of being unprepared that I had. I teach her and her girl friends computer programming using software from code.org.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Emily Dickinson
She likes dresses, dolls and boys. She will be a mom some day. Within a few generations (200 years) one of my descendants will be born who will have an indefinite life span. This letter may be read by future generations. Hello descendants!
I created a website and a book. Creating a website was easy. One day I registered a domain name for $12 and within 10 minutes my website was up and running using blogger, gmail and my favorite quotes. Over the next month I added additional pages to the website and from that, this book was created.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein
Out of body experience:
A while back I was walking through a grocery store on my way to the check out line when I felt a separation from my body. It was as if some of myself was no longer in my body. I just started laughing at the drama that my emotional animal body had been going through all my life. It seamed so absurd. Maybe this was what the laughing Buddha is all about and probably what people call an out of body experience. I have not felt it again, but like the other one time experiences I've had, I do remember them.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Erich Fromm
That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
William Wordsworth
This website has been turned into a book on Amazon. After you have read the chapters from the website feel free to go to:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2F69NZ/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb
and write a review of the book. I can be reached at
davereynolds711@gmail.com