N.A.I.L.S. and A.I.M.

Was sitting in a South Dakota restaurant in the '70's with two Lakota A.I.M. men and a lawyer from N.A.I.L.S. (Native American Indian Legal Services). I was listening to accounts of some of the everyday atrocities against folk at Pine Ridge. Wounded Knee was happening. At one point I said, "That makes me just want to throw this chair through that window." Dave, the N.A.I.L.S. attorney, gave me a sharp look and said warningly, "George!" I understood and immediately began to wind down.

Jail Time

Some years ago I did jail time, having been judged by a store detective and then a policeman as an accomplice of another's crime. (I was innocent.) A free ride to the county jail, relinquishing of all possessions, fingerprinting and photo, then placed in a small holding cell with solid walls and one small window in the door, and another prisoner making guttural sounds and grinding his teeth.

After a while, who knows how long, jail time is like no other time, I was taken to a large rectangular cell containing 14 cots, seven on each long wall, with an open toilet at one end and the cell door at the other. Two men were asleep or passed out on two of the bunks. Seven other inmates gazed at me curiously as I claimed a bunk and sat on its folded-back mattress in a semi-lotus position, relaxed and unmoving, as I searched for my options on getting out of jail.

Time went by. One loud-mouthed jerk shifted from his never-ending self-inflating harangue and recounting of his exploits to talking the others into luring a guard inside by one inmate pretending to be sick, then all jumping the guard and pounding the bejesus out of him. All seemed to agree that was a great idea.

O great! I was already nailed as an accomplice to something I had no awareness of. Now I was about to be an unwilling accomplice to something I knew about. I had had enough! I got off my bunk with cold steel deliberateness, already centering firmly from hours of sitting unmoving in deep meditation, and walked down that aisle to the door where the idiot was standing, my line of energy cast ahead of me to infinity, as if I was going to walk right through him and the door, and I was. His only options were to move or get knocked down. He moved. The consciousness state in the cell changed. His plan evaporated.

I reached the door, then turned around. He smiled weakly and said, "Hello, sir. How are you?" I said nothing and went back to my bunk, back into meditation position. The cell went calm.

Making The Most Of Things

Way back yonder in 1959, my Marine buddies and I, young and wild and invulnerable, partied through the Okinawa night, relieved to be in town, away from our Quonset hut camp. We were to ship out the next morning for war games so we were making the best of it while we could. I got back to camp just before dawn and showered and changed to fatigues (appropriate wear for my condition). All of us "smartasses" as we were called (and worse) were assigned to Naval Gunfire where our job was to go into enemy territory as deeply as possible and call in the coordinates of targets for the ship guns to demolish. Every boy's dream. In addition to shooting a .45 and M-1, I shot a ship. The downside was we were totally expendable. If surrounded by enemy, we were supposed to radio "Fire on me!"

So I drove to the Okinawa docks in my radio jeep to find the ship assigned to carry me to Taiwan, the site of the maneuvers. I drove aboard, chained the jeep in a spot I found in the ship's hold, found a top bunk (a piece of canvas suspended within a metal rectangle) and went to sleep. When I awoke, we were out to sea. I walked the ship and found I did not know a single person. Wrong ship.

I followed my General Survival Strategy which almost always works -- I acted like I knew what I was doing. I stood in chow lines when hungry and found a bunk when sleepy, otherwise keeping on the move and making some crucial acquaintances. All other Marines aboard were infantry -- groundpounders, grunts. I found we were going to hit the Taiwan beach in waves of landing barges. I got myself assigned to a wave and made friends with one of the ship's crane operators. He said he would lower my jeep into a landing barge when the right time came.

After a few days (the entire fleet was on the move), we were in sight of the landing beach. The maneuvers were made as real as possible, so there was a whole lot of hell going on, but with dummy ammo. Planes were diving and strafing. Large explosives were going off ashore. Men began to go down the cargo nets draped down the ship's side and fill the landing barges. The Navy dude hoisted my jeep from the hold and swung it over the side into a barge below. I climbed down the net and timed my drop. Due to the movement of the waves and the rocking of the ship and the barge, there were only certain moments to let go. I landed in the barge.

We sped away joining a moving circle of ten or so barges, all filled with men with weapons ready to hit the shore. My jeep and I were the only cargo in my barge. Uncircling into a landing pattern, we bounced full-tilt across the waves to shore. The ramp fell down and off I drove accompanied on all sides by screaming yelling men moving to close combat with other men wearing strange helmets identifying them as enemy. "Oh Yeah!" I thought, taking my camera out of the glove compartment, climbing on the hood of the jeep, snapping pictures.

"What the f**king hell are you doing here?" bellowed in my ear caught my attention. A major and a captain with "Umpire" markings on their uniforms seemed quite enraged. I followed my second General Survival Strategy -- "They told me to." The nuances of the resulting conversation escape me now, but it was definitely profanity-filled. They put a tag on my jeep that said it was out of commission due to a land mine. They put a tag on me that read "Brain Concussion" and made me lie down in the sand. I lay there listening to them talk about their lives. One of them nudged me with his foot and said to call for a medic. "I can't." More profanity. "Why the f**k not?" "I have a brain concussion." Hoo boy! That really set them off. So it's probably the first time in medical history that an unconscious man called for help.

Thin Permeable Membrane

like f w h myers said for some people there is a thin permeable membrane between the supraliminal and the subliminal i have a thin one when i close my eyes i almost immediately see a different world as real as this one this journal is in and when i open my eyes i am right back here again even when my eyes are open i am aware of a vastness beyond what is right in front of me nothing changed for me when i dropped acid back in the 70's i had always been in the place where acid takes you a vast universe of interwhirling flow i already knew it well and that is why i think i am a mutant my brain fluid must be a tripping juice or at least predisposed so that when i was opened up into the cosmos that day when i was 12 and given a look around it didn't seem that strange at all of course if i revert to the baptist language i was brought up in it was that i had received the gift of the holy spirit and was whisked away to the 7th or so heaven like saint paul and that language is fine and comfortable with me i know what it means and i know i am no saint but i do experience things differently than many folk do

Cukes

Back in the '70s, a strong good friend invited me to take over the fecundity of a large cucumber field. It was mid-summer and the cukes were reproducing like crazy. I said ok.

The deal was to pick the cucumbers while they were at a certain small size and sell them to the pickle people.

Every morning at dawn I would make my rounds to pick up my crew. Have you ever tried to round up hippies? Like herding cats. We would eventually get to the field and begin the stooping hours of moving aside the leaves to pick those green phalluses from their Adamic Eden. Some of the women would start picking topless as an aid to us men for zen and yogic attentional training.

At the end of the picking day, the cukes were hauled in an old converted truck bed trailer to Irene, South Dakota and poured into a size sorter. The little ones got the biggest buck bang per pound. Meanwhile those cukes were steadily growing.

And so the summer progressed with hot humid days and afternoon rain storms and double rainbows, the rich smell of earth, laughing camaraderie, and stoop-muscled backs.

Brothers of the Gun

My friend Jerry and I were coming back to South Dakota from a martial arts training camp in California in 1974. Jerry had an old beater of a car with no air conditioning. As we crossed the desert, the temperatures soared. We didn't care. We were pretty happy with our training camp experience, plus we had a bottle of tequila we kept under the seat, sipping on it occasionally to wash down the food we had brought along. Eventually though, our clothes became too much. The heat was stifling, even with the windows down. Soon we were riding along naked, sitting on towels.

We topped a rise and there were two Highway Patrolmen with a speed gun. They pulled us over. One came to my passenger window, the other to Jerry's, as we were pulling on our pants, then shirts. "Are you his father?" the one said to me (I have had white in my hair and beard for some time). "No." Jerry told me later that the other one asked, "Are you his son?" We got out of the car and talked a bit. Soon we were standing on the side of the road and they were showing us how to use the speed gun. No ticket. Just a friendly warning and we were on our way.

The Preacher Warned Me

The preacher warned me that if I kept going to college (Georgia State at night) it would change me. He meant for the worse as far as my belief in Baptist doctrine. And he was right. But I was already changing.

I attended Georgia State for six years -- five of them at night. During that time I held various jobs (driving a cookie truck around Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee; running a check sorter for a bank; psychiatric aide in a mental ward of a hospital; community coordinator for Head Start; teaching martial arts). My wife at the time was also working to help support us.

At Georgia State, I formed a close relationship with Drs. Irma Shepherd and Joen Fagan -- two strong good folk, both clinical psychologists, who had a light of awareness in their eyes, an open inclusive nonjudgmental manner, and an inner strength which made up a triple combo I had not previously seen in a human. I signed up for an Individual Research course with Joen which led to a couple of publications.

At age 12, I had a powerful mystical experience and seemed to have an awareness after that that others did not. The Baptist Church was my life -- we were there every time the doors were open and they were open a lot! -- but I noticed that no one ever spoke of such experiences. Irma and Joen were both acquainted with Abraham Maslow, so through them I became aware of Maslow's work on peak experiences -- which sounded suspiciously like the experience I had and continued to have at varying degrees of intensity. Voila! I had my two variables for my research: peak experiences and degree of belief in fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

My hypothesis was a simple one. It seemed to me that having a consciousness that was locked into one single way of seeing the world and no other was incompatible with having a consciousness that was boundless and oceanic.

First, Joen and I developed a religious dogmatism scale (Fagan, Joen and Breed, George. A Good, Short Measure of Religious Dogmatism. Psychological Reports, 1970, 26, 533–534) which was able to distinguish among religious affiliations -- Baptists and Catholics were highest scorers, Episcopal and No Affiliation were lowest scorers. Then I gave the scale along with a request for the reporting of peak experiences to 110 folk.

My suspicions were confirmed. Persons with low adherence to conventional religious beliefs were more likely to experience peak moments than persons with moderate or high adherence (Breed, George and Fagan, Joen. Religious Dogmatism and Peak Experiences. Psychological Reports, 1972, 31, 866).

This is where my concern with belief systems as virtual reality helmets began. And where I determined to ride through life as helmet-free as possible.