Half a Century Ago

Half a century ago:

There was hybridization and selective breeding, but no GMOs.

I was part of the largest demographic this country had ever seen; after WW II our forefathers really got down on it and produced The Baby Boom Generation. We had a strong influence upon American culture but were unaware of the fact, being caught up in our own world. Bombarded by sales pitches, often we were coaxed down incorrect paths that would lead to nothing, or to ends that would serve others. We were brainwashed into thinking that love was the answer for all of our ills when I was seventeen, but the radio in our barracks sometimes played songs that made me wonder if there weren't other parts of life at least as important if not of a greater meaning. Granted, one of my favorite ones in that summer of '64 was "Sealed with a Kiss" by Brian Hyland; it was a very romantic ballad that had a line I could identify with because of the impending date of our completion of training: "…meet in September, and seal it with a kiss." But there were other songs that did not toe the love line. In "It's All Over Now" Mick Jagger put out a message in keeping with those four words while Gale Garnett did a reprise of the Paris Cabaret scene of the late 1930s, wistfully singing, "We'll sing in the sunshine." Looking back, I'm glad that I had no one waiting for me. Strange mixture, in this de facto physical prison of the Navy I found feelings of emotional freedom that would have been diminished by having a girl on the outside.

With the Internet, today, many different versions of the truth can be quite a bit easier to find than they were in 1964, but I'm not sure if it's better now because there are scores of paid debunkers, whores who have as their employed task the job of ruining and destroying any and all evidences of establishment lying.

In that time of the summer virtually everything over the airwaves was A) the wrong stuff to want; B) lying; C) twisted; D) disinformation; E) deflections to something else; F) or focused in on some (safe) useless crap. And then came the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the excuse to snuff out the lives of about 58,000 American kids (and a whole lot more Asian ones). We had been brought up in the age of "duck and cover," and the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis was fresh in the minds of every one of the recruits in company 366. We had H-bombs over our heads; the Cold War was raging, and America had a very powerful sense of raison d'être. Each of us had to deal with this atmosphere as best we could individually. If one of us were to think about these influences too much it would not lead to any positive pattern. Concentrated on too much, the result could lead one to cynicism and even nihilism; I'm tempted to characterize this negative in the words of Mel Brooks, in what he said about the time in England when the tales of Robin Hood became popular: "When things were rotten." But there was also a negative we all knew about. It was conveyed to us by our parents, who told us, by their experiences, that what they had gone through in the Great Depression had been terrible. Things could be worse – by far. In 1958 the U.S. had gone through a mini recession. Vietnam would be the eventual answer, but at a great cost. "Okay junkie, I'll get you the dope" (and he would only need more later).

A package of cigarettes cost twenty-once cents at the Navy exchange and a little more than thirty cents in town. A cup of coffee at most diners was a quarter but at the same time my pay, as a Seaman Apprentice, was in the range of thirty-two dollars every two weeks (so what the hell). And as another economic comparison, the minimum wage back in Omaha was a dollar twenty-five an hour.

When I left my family there were three television stations there; baseball was much more popular than it is now, and reefer was something that those nasty Mexican gangs smoked out in Los Angeles. The lid was still very much on the specific details of the assassination of John Kennedy. It wasn't just me: I can't say that in following a lack of knowledge that bliss results, but in checking alcohol consumption statistics for Omaha I found that in the sixties the locals consumed a lot of booze. It was, perhaps, a sign of the times that a few kids I knew weren't totally sure that pro wrestling was faked.

Most of the people I knew attended religious services at least once in a while. And in the years leading up to the millennium (not just the sixties), to be labeled a homosexual was a terrible stain to have on one's character. One of the recruits in our company was that way for sure: sometimes, on Sundays he would decorate himself with pinned handkerchiefs and dance on our center-table. How he got in, I'll never know, but I do know that the straight sailors were gnawed at by unspoken fear, and I was one of the ones who were scared of being turned over.

In the summer of that year San Diego was overrun with young men in uniform. The atmosphere of the Hollywood Theater was marvelous; it allowed this green bunch of swabbies an opportunity to harken back to the burlesque entertainment of the '30s and '40s, when sexual inferences and slight nudity, with suggestions, were considered to be at least slightly dirty. I looked around at the rest of the audience and saw nothing but sailors in white. Then, some weeks later, while at my next duty station, I went down to Tijuana where the hookers taught me that there is such a thing as bad sex.

In the early part of the decade Newton Minow had coined the term "a vast wasteland" to describe television in general. The words were accurate. But even during this period of drivel there were at least two exceptions: I thought that Naked City and East Side/West Side brought to the home a few excellent presentations of drama. Taken as a block, in TV there was not much for me to miss while at the Naval Training Center, however reading was another matter. During training there was no time for this, except for the manuals whose content we were tested on. But when I got to the air squadron after training once again I dove into my personal study program by checking out John Updike and John Steinbeck books from the base library. Also, in town I bought a book written by Henry Miller. It was total garbage from cover to cover but as a seventeen-year-old, I liked it that he used the word fuck a lot. Cool, during this time I learned the correct pronunciation for vagina too. As I look back at myself I see a horny, lonely, and uneducated kid, usually a little pissed off about the whole thing.

The Egg

In this paper I wish to communicate the Derdekea(s) to people collectively as well as to the individual. This is an Aramaic word. In the gnostic, Nag Hammadi Library, the beginning words of the codex titled, The Paraphrase of Shem are: "[The] paraphrase which was about the unbegotten spirit."

"What Derdekea(s) revealed to me, Shem, according to the will of the majesty."

The referred to unbegotten spirit is an entity, a body of vibrations and frequencies we all go through while we are in the wombs of our mothers. As I have said in other places, the number of Vud-hey plus Vav-hey is twenty-six, and this—in its sound as an acronym—is accorded the exalted place of being the most holy of holy names in the bible. Tied to this is the string theory that accounts for twenty-six dimensions, and (further) this leads to the number of letters in Hebrew and Aramaic, with their primary letters being twenty-two in number, related to the total of dimensions in the higher orders, while there are four ending letters (called "Sofit") that connect to the dimensional references in our world of height, width, depth and time. And still there is one more caveat: there is actually a fifth ending letter, the Pey Sofit, which is a translator sitting between the higher and lower orders. It is shaped like an outline of a fetus. This letter speaks of the unborn, of the time when we were awash in the vibrations of the totality. It was at this point in our development that we were in a halfway state, neither of the higher or lower worlds but (in paradox) tied to each. But, while many sages have tried to come to a higher level of awareness through the phenomenon of transcendence, using meditation, it is extremely hard to understand prenatal existence; after the trauma of birth we forgot.

The meaning of Derdekea(s) is raindrop, and can mean the collective rain at the same time.

Picture all of our individual souls as raindrops. We are discrete and physically separated but, behaving like glass beads, we can also act as prisms and lenses, and serve to transfer light. Here's the arrangement I saw: it is as if, in our short lives, we fall near to a great light. Next time you see a street lamp in the rain take note of the secondary radiance, a few feet out from the lamp; that is a product of the raindrops near to the source light and the raindrops act as little lenses. There is a collective glow to mankind, but as philosophers far wiser than I have said, "But we are not of the light;" no, the light belongs to the supreme source, even as we carry a spark of divinity within we are merely borrowing it for the duration of our short terms on this planet. And as far as we individually go, remember that according to kabbalah the maker broke the vessels that held the light, freeing it to go where it would. Some souls have much (some raindrops are very near the source) some have a little light (being farther away) and some have none at all. While the arrangement of the raindrops can mentally resonate it comes from the world of the inanimate. If we wish to relate it to something of life we can observe the Weeping Willow tree. Some of the branches are closer to the trunk than others and some are larger. At the same time that we are like raindrops (as our souls) our beings also resonate with a tree of the Garden of Eden, the Weeping Willow.

All this leads to the first sphere in the arrangement of the twelve, the house of Aquarius, the sidereal month that we are entering. The first is resonant to the infant in the womb; it ties to the first circle at the Cydonia monuments on mars, a picture of an Eiderdown Duck's nest, with the tetrahedron on the edge being symbolic of an egg. Each of the twelve presents a signpost in a normal human life. The first sphere is of the earth, the body where new life is being born at all times, while the twelfth one is the sun, the body that presents itself to the universe as a body that is always in the act of dying. This house is known as the water-giver; the fetus is surrounded by water; the last thing that happens before the actual birth is that mom's water breaks. Planet earth has about the same percentage of water on its surface as a human body. The time in the womb begins as we are an egg; the surface of the earth is made of tectonic plates, like floating parts of broken parts of an eggshell. The infant in the womb is a clean slate so it follows that the age we are entering could conceivably involve a process of erasure for most of mankind's systems and methods.