Dec 17, 2020
As more time passes, the more I recognize how fortunate I was in my upbringing.
Please take a moment and watch this revealing story video.
I started reading at 8 years of age. By 9 I was deep into it, riding my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed, from our home in Whittier to the library in La Mirada once per week, where I would pick up my next week’s reading. I read 1-3 books a week fairly consistently, till I was about 14. At 15 I had completed reading the bulk of the science fiction section in our new home town’s library in Goleta. It was at that time when I began speed reading by taking a course in 10th grade on it.
By the time I was 17 I was doing hard research reading by utilizing the library at UCSB, where my first scholastic based research project was the brain and cephalic transplantation.
Later in college as I was in Pre Med study, my next deep read and research project was on the effect of broad spectrum antibiotics on mental acuity and emotional disposition, where I did the lab rat work. Concept and motivation for that study subject came from watching a pal of mine literally go crazy and wind up in County Mental Lock up where my pal Ken Symer and I visited him. (That was where we saw Elton John who had committed himself after his breakup w Bernie Taupin)
From there I began to study business, as I had to work my way through school, and had already been competing in swimming, cycling, and surfing on relatively elite levels, as well as having apprenticed to a line mechanic at our local GM dealership, and creating a company modifying and building cars. In later years I retrained that mechanic to become a surfboard craftsman. He worked doing that until his death recently.
To this day, I attribute my innate curiousity and ability to think laterally, to the founding principles acquired in those years of reading. That was my passport to Philosophy study when I was pre teen, as well as the realization that I absolutely hated school, and in spite of the rigidity of parochial-Jesuit learning, began to understand the value in diligence and discipline.
Cut to decades later, as I eye my 65th birthday this Christmas, and realize that I have been given a life full of experiences, knowledge, wisdom and understanding that has me as an extreme outlier in global digi-programmed culture.
Makes me think back to those years studying Philosophy. My mentor was proficient in hypnosis. I agreed to let her try it out on me. She found it impossible. Over the years I let a couple others have a go. Same result.
When I was studying the Bible under Sumrall at LESEA, he taught on mind control and deliverance. One of the ways we stay free, is deep ownership and connection to God. That was when I learned about consent-permission and its role in reformulation of our mental and spiritual pathways.
We become that which we accept, embrace and practice.
This is how and why Christianity matters. That is who and what I aspire to being: God like. Christ like. Christianos is more than merely a Greek word. Deep subject. Many books exist on it.
HT to Dr Ed Brenegar for sharing the video linked above with me, which has motivated my morning post. Below are several images from this season’s shooting, as my Community State and Nation suffer under over lording via embrace of COVID stupidity, as they prod culture to accept the unacceptable.
