This is where I’m supposed to tell you something about myself. It’s all very boring.
I was born in Iowa. I grew up in Illinois in a small agricultural/industrial town. I was a geek in about all the ways I could have been. I played trumpet in the band. I liked math and computer science. I did some farm work. After high school, I went into the US Navy, where I studied a bit of physics and learned about electrical distribution systems. After the Navy, I did a lot of odd jobs, from factories to retail sales (Nothing stimulating or worthy of report).
Somewhere near the end of my military service, I had some kind of mental breakdown from which I have yet to fully recover. It had something to do with my religious (protestant christianity) upbringing clashing with the training I had received in the Navy. The clash of paradigms didn’t appear to allow both to exist within the same mind. But it all happened in a flash, similar to how I have heard Near Death Experiences described. I didn’t choose one over the other the way most people seem to do naturally over the course of their lives. This occurrence left me feeling like I didn’t know who to trust, or how I could know who to trust with providing me with a true account of the world I inhabited. I started reading a little philosophy. Nothing at all significant, but at the time it felt like it was.
About that same time, I read a fiction work by Hermann Hesse, “Narcissus and Goldmund.” About halfway through the book, I set it down as it dawned on me how great a writer this guy was, so much so that I had been experiencing this work of fiction much more vividly than I experienced my own life. Right at that moment, a small droplet… more of a slight mist, just the tiniest of wetness hit my cheek… it was like an explosion. This was the first true experience I had ever had in my life. There were no preconceptions to get in the way of it, I suppose. I don’t really know how or why it happened. But I do know it was a beautiful sunny day, about 85 degrees and a gentle wind. I was sitting on this huge warship in the middle of the vast deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. That one little drop of water seemed to connect me to everything.
This is the ship I was on.
I started reading about mysticism. I tried to learn about other people who might have had an experience like this, partly so I could share it with others, but also so I could have it again for myself. What was that experience? How am I supposed to describe it to anyone else? Most people to this day seem to be resistant even to the possibility of the experience. I find myself getting embroiled in all kinds of silly debates. People always assume that when you are speaking of religious topics, you must be wanting to argue with them about it. They seem to be incapable of just accepting that this thing happened to me, or that it might also happen to them if they allowed it to. Ah, but it really doesn’t matter, now does it? They will either have the experience or they won’t.
I had tried off and on going to college. I couldn’t find any motivation to study the sorts of things that the workaday world will pay you for, so in the end I just accepted what my interests were and took my major in philosophy, with a minor in religious studies. I completed school about the time I turned 40. And now you know.
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