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(1971-1975)


XIV

14 JAN 73 - Once upon a time I looked around me and began to wonder if this were real. Mommy and Daddy and George, my brother, and Barbara, by sister, of course, seemed all just the same - and the sun and the sky and the trees and the house and Cookie, my dog, of course. But there was a feeling I had that this was all somehow a little weird. I kept on wondering about it for several days. Each morning when I woke up I had to remember who I was and where I was and then I would get up and everything was just as it always was, but then, sooner or later, usually not too long, I’d remember that feeling and then it would come back; and it was as though I was looking at a little model in a big store window at Christmas, when the little toys and puppets move this way and that way and voices come out of a machine and electric trains go zooming around, in and out of tunnels, and there’s cotton smoke and fake snow all over the place. And so I kept on wondering. One day I had this feeling real strong! It was late in the afternoon. I’d been for a long walk, up the tall hill out back of our place. Up at the top you can see all round for miles and miles. The wind was blowing hard, so the tree-house swayed out over the steep drop to a tiny creek that curled far below. Down there was the swimming hole. I wasn’t supposed to go alone. But I did anyway, looking for snakes. A storm was coming up. The wind whistled through the trees and blew my hair. I could smell the rain. The dark was hurrying up our little valley as a big cloud closed in. I got down out of that tree fast and started running down the hill and back home. The house was a tiny thing off in the distance. I saw a lightning flash way down the valley and then I heard the boom. I kept on running! I startled a little armadillo and then a bobwhite bird. It beat its wings in frantic excitement in the strong wind and disappeared again in the tall thick grasses. Just as I reached the garage the fat drops came splattering down and there was a big flash and bang. I must’ve jumped three feet; and I yelled out! A live-oak tree in the front yard was split down, top to bottom, with one big piece crashed over on the ground. The rain kept coming, so much you couldn’t see! And I ran on in, yelling...

"Mommy! Mommy!"

"It’s alright, Phil, it’s just some lightning," she said and held on to me close, but I could tell she was scared too.

"Oh yes, I know, Mommy, I watched the storm come up the valley and then I ran all the way back and I got in just in time and the lightning hit the tree and I saw an armadillo and a bobwhite bird and the lightning was so loud I jumped way up! Mommy, are we real?"

"Oh...what!? What a question! Of course we are, Darling."

"I know, Mommy, but that’s not what I mean. I mean are we really real, I mean REAL?"

"Oh! Well, when you put it that way...yes, I think we are quite real, Honey. Don’t worry."

"Yes, but, Mommy, I mean, is there something else? You know, like, could somebody see us the way we see those puppets in the store window at Christmas?"

"Oh, that’s what you mean. Well, I don’t know, Darling! I don’t think so; but you never can tell. You sure have been doing some big thinking, haven’t you? - Now, go get cleaned up for supper."

"Yes, Mommy. But - Mommy, I hope there’s something more. I want there to be!"

"O.K., Honey, that’s nice, but run along now. Time to eat!"

16 JAN 73 - This afternoon Ralph and two of his male LW friends witnessed an apparent miracle. Ralph called me right afterward, very excited. It seems Maude and her sister Gertrude were driving their VW very, very slowly, because the brakes were out. Another car, the driver apparently not realizing until too late how slowly the VW was going, roared up behind them, traveling very fast. The three boys were in another car, a little behind them, in the adjoining lane. If not for this the speeding car could have simply gone round the VW. But with the boys’ car in the way, there wasn’t room for the maneuver. Just as the impact was about to occur, the car that had been coming up behind was just suddenly in the other lane, with no loss in speed, in front of the boys’ car, at the instant they expected the crash. It continued roaring on down the road! Ralph and the others all felt there was simply no natural way this could have occurred. Interestingly, the sisters had both been having dreams of a terrible auto accident for several days. Ralph said the vehicle behind came to within one foot of the VW and then was just suddenly in the next lane, as if it had always been there, a feat "impossible" given its velocity and closeness to the Volkswagen.

In November, Steve’s son, Leon, fell into their apartment’s swimming pool and apparently had drowned. He had already turned blue. No breathing or heartbeat could be detected. He was reportedly still not breathing by the time they got him to the hospital. But he was revived and is today very much alive and apparently as alert and bright as ever. Are such things adequately accounted for by medical science alone? I do not know.

"All men in this world are prisoners waiting for death, except a few rare ones whose bodies are in this prison but whose life is lived amidst the stars." Maulana Rum

Racism is far from dead in America! Tonight, after I’d sold our most expensive vacuum cleaner model to a Black lady, Mr. Montgomery, a bigoted, redneck old man who’s been a salesman all his life and who now employs his talents part-time for Gibson's Discount Center, said to me: "I want to congratulate you, you know, on selling that nigger a Power Drive! That’s doing pretty good when you can sell a coon one of them." We live, indeed, in Caesar’s world. (And I, I’m afraid, mostly am just one of the centurions.)

5 FEB 73 - Ralph left early this morning from my apartment, for Italy.

The Lifestream Way now seems to me a system of utter vitality, a way by which to completely transform my life and my reality.

9 FEB 73 - Still lightly snowing here in Austin. It is gorgeous outside!

Is now only a month till I can apply for LW initiation.

18 FEB 73 - Dreamed last night of my spirit merging with Maharaj Dayal Nam Ji's astral form.

19 FEB 73 - I now think that if there is life after death then LW is definitely the way. And if there is no life after death, then LW is perhaps the best of a world of illusions. And it may then be "real" in the same way the spirit of Santa Claus can persist even after our literal belief in him has ceased.

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