Focusing On Not Focusing

Bob Alexander's incredible article, By My Clock It's Always 9/11, pointed out that I am one of the, "... less that 30% ..." who is old enough to actually remember JFK's assassination. It also means that conversely 70% of those who are alive today have no direct experience or memory of the state of existence that the world was in BEFORE Kennedy was shot and thus, unfortunately, have no personalized awareness of the value of all that has been taken away from them, since.

The day he was murdered, I was in college and driving a delivery truck part time for the largest department store in Wichita Falls, Texas, which is a stagnated, oil based city about 140 miles from Dallas. The startling, breaking news on my little transistor radio compelled me to immediately swerve over to the side of the Seymour Highway, turn off the engine of the van and start to quietly cry.

You see, there is a powerful emotional difference between someone dying in the abstract and someone dying with whom you had a direct connection. Nineteen-sixty three was one of the more remarkable years of my life! I had spent a wonder filled and exciting summer teaching sailing on Cape Cod Bay and toward the end of that season, one Friday afternoon, I found myself standing at a counter in the Hyannis Airport waiting for a paycheck to be processed, when a sweeping crowd of people began flooding into the main lobby. It rapidly became obvious what was occurring as the Secret Service and press people started filling up the previously empty area and creating an expanding opening as the Kennedy family plowed through the crowd on their way to their private compound, which was down the road in Hyannis Port.

Striding through the buzzing swirl of people in flowing, rotating motion came John, Jackie and their nanny with John-John and Caroline on leashes -- mischievously giggling and torturing the nanny by simultaneously hopping off in opposite directions from her. Then unexpectedly a direct, eye-to-eye contact was made in unison with that instant and genuine broad smile combined with a definite nod in my direction and the most powerful man in the world exclusively acknowledged me! Not much, some would say, but enough to forever convert that person from being just another familiar abstraction into becoming a very real person to me " for the rest of my life.

A little over a month later, I was back in Wichita Falls, attending college and making my deliveries when one of my well connected Democratic friends asked a favor. She was in a bind and needed to rapidly pick up a large order of posters and flyers from the printers and deliver them to a meeting hall for a Democratic work party, that was scheduled for that same night. Having access to a delivery truck made me the logical candidate for the job. So, I forfeited my lunch break to help the Democratic Party out. A few days later, I received in the mail an invitation to join Kennedy in Austin for a fundraiser " on November 22. Since I had to work and had classes that day, I never made it to Austin -- and obviously, neither did John.

Since my father's early career was in the military, I spent the first sixteen years of my life as a Military Brat. And, since my father was raised on a remote farm in Michigan, we always had guns around and Dad made it a point to teach my brother and me how to hunt and fish. As a result, before I gave up shooting living things, I had shot enough animals to know that when Life Magazine published their enlarged color photos from the Zapruder film -- which showed JFK's head being blown backward -- I KNEW, without a doubt, that the final fatal headshot had come from the front and that someone besides Oswald had been firing shots in Dealy Plaza, that dreadful day. I was initially, and still am, amazed at how little was made of this obvious point!

Until that day in Dallas, I had NEVER doubted my country. As far as I knew, the US had ALWAYS stood up for freedom and as a nation consistently took the highest moral perspective. After all, we had almost single-handedly just saved the world from fascism and were now in the process of beating back the Commies while dedicating ourselves to going to the Moon! But when MY government started lying to me about what actually happened in Dealy Plaza, I began my decades long descent into total distrust and disillusionment with the direction that democracy was taking in my country.

It is hard for me to put my finger on exactly when I think that we lost control of the US. I sense that the seeds of overwhelming greed were planted in 1886, when a law clerk for a judge illegally inserted a few lines of text into a judgement in California which began the slowly evolving, but previously highly restrained, corporate legal evolution into super human status. However, I eventually came to realize that the under regulated corporations were just the preferred "tool" of choice, for the socio/psychopaths who -- as far back in recorded history as our historic documents can reflect -- have been the consistently detrimental, controlling 1% of our human family.

There is no point in me listing all of the insanity inspired mayhem that has come to pass since John Kennedy's murder. All of my friends and family are throughly schooled and quite bored to distraction with my many frustrated and frustrating rants, my excited and excitable raves which punctuate the continual and unrestrained, blatant onslaught of illegal and immoral abuses that we in the US, as well as all of those other people around the world, have experienced. Indeed I am, along with most of my contemporaries, rapidly becoming burnt out with all of the mind-numbing and fruitless struggles against the numerous and nebulous forces that are simply too overwhelming to even imagine, much less divert or defeat. The enormous monster just has too many heads, which are barely concealed beyond our feeble sight by shadowy clouds, floating in a semi-opaque, golden haze.

I was raised on and suckled at the teats of freedom, justice, honesty and concern for all sentient beings and our fragile environment. In the last few years, while my growing hunger for these diminishing values has been unabated and thus persistently gnawing away at me, I recently went searching for some form of relief. My youthful quest to leave this world in better shape than I found it, had long since been dispensed with by the growing mass madness I was constantly being subjected to. My Boy Scout motto to, "Camp without leaving a trace!" now only applies when I am actually out camping in the woods with my grandkids.

Rarely have I ever discussed this next series of experiences with anyone -- much less put it to print. But as I move into my 70s, I'm less concerned with containing my secrets and/or what others may think of me and instead am more concerned with what I perceive to be the accelerating pace of the dissolution of world harmony as well as the instinctive peace seeking unity of mankind.

So, in the mid 1970s, I noticed that I had unexpectedly acquired a unique and remarkable ability! At the time I couldn't (and still can't) put my finger on what had led to my development of this technique. It could have been any one, or a combination, of several things that created this amazing capability. I recall that I once tried to determine if it was a certain, or several particular books that I had read, my Kundalini Yoga or meditation practices, the biofeedback experiments I was into, various drugs I had tried, a singular or perhaps a combination of experiences I had had or just the Psilocybin Mushrooms I had been ingesting on a near daily basis for almost two years. While those Shrooms may have been some kind of igniting spark, I feel that this ongoing effect can still be activated -- even after 40 years without them!

Whatever the catalyst, I suddenly began to notice that I could actually will into my reality whatever I needed or wanted! Not necessarily every "little" thing that I desired on a whim, but rather just the "big" things of a grander nature. I had little control over the timeframe that these objects would appear, nor did they always materialize EXACTLY as I imagined. In fact, they ALWAYS manifested themselves exactly in time and usually not configured as I had imagined, but even BETTER than I preconceived. Now, before you drop out of this narrative and go grab some brain gargle, allow me to at least relate the first few times it happened.

About 1974-5 I was living south of Houston in a small waterfront community just outside NASA called Clear Lake. I had moved there for several reasons, one being that I'd seen a map of the world that indicated that area to be one of two of the best regions in the world for Magic Mushrooms. After learning from an experienced local fan how to find, identify, store and properly ingest those wonderful fungi, I decided to move away from the many obvious sources of pollution that were creeping into that area. At the time, I was ending a year of divesting myself of cigarettes, meat, alcohol, sex, all forms of credit and owning cars. In fact, I had "lavishly" existed the previous year on a total income of only $1,200.

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