MEMORIES

MEMORIES (First Installment)

©Edward R. Close 2018

I’m sitting here looking east, watching gray clouds scurrying from left to right, reversing the flow from the Gulf of Mexico, that brought us unseasonable warmth and rain just yesterday, and tomorrow may bring us ice and snow again.

I love the world of contrasts. I suppose that’s why I have traveled around the world, living and working in climates and civilizations nearly opposite to those into which I was born. I’ve experienced temperatures form - 32° F to 134° F, (-36° C to +57° C) from Iowa to Saudi Arabia. I’ve lived through tornados in Missouri, hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico, a storm in Egypt, and several earthquakes in California. I’ve visited Australia, Africa and Europe. I’ve flown the polar route, and over the sun drenched Greek islands, and visited Eve’s Tomb in Jeddah; the Pyramids of Giza, the Ancient City of Petra in Jordan, the pyramids of the Toltecs and Aztecs, and the caves of the Mayan Civilization; and I’m not through yet, there are still places I’d like to go if time and resources permit.

I’ve climbed high mountains and explored deep, dark caves. I’ve explored families of languages, from the Teutonic roots of English and German to the Latin roots of Spanish, Italian and French, to the Semitic roots of Arabic and Hebrew, and the Indic roots of Sanskrit. I’ve teetered on the brink of death and reached for the intense ecstasies of life. I’ve explored the logic of math and science and the wonders of human consciousness. And yes, it has taken a while. I’ve been blessed with a long and healthy life. I started this journey in 1936 in Arcadia Valley, in the heart of the Saint Francois Mountains of Southeast Missouri, one of the oldest pre-Cambrian igneous intrusion exposures on the planet, replete with minerals, ores and crystalline stone.

A descendant of European adventurers from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, my journeys soon began from the isolated hills to St. Louis, and later to Arizona in 1949 when my father returned from World War II.

 Synchronicity in San Juan

One evening in 1973, I was walking along a street in the Candado, a part of San Juan Puerto Rico, between Santurce and Viejo San Juan, enjoying the cool ocean breeze, when I thought I heard someone call my name. I looked up and almost directly above my head was a sign reading: ‘El Centro de Karma Yoga’. Intrigued, I followed a short path down from the street toward the lagoon on the landward side of the Avenida Ashford. The path ended at a flight of stairs leading to the second floor of a small building sitting on the bank of Laguna Condado. At the top of the stairs was small porch-like room overlooking the lagoon through louvered glass windows. The louvers were open, allowing the aroma of flowering Flamboyan and Flor de Maga trees to waft through the room.

Several pairs of shoes and sandals were lined up along the wall, so I removed my shoes and sat on a bench facing the door at the opposite end of the room. The door was obscured by strings of colored beads hanging from the ceiling almost to the floor. I could hear soft voices coming from inside but couldn’t make out any words. My plan was that I would wait until the class, or whatever it was, broke up and talk to someone about meditation meetings. I had been a meditation group leader in Washington DC for about three years, and it would be nice to be part of Yoga meditation group while working and living here.

I was sitting there quietly, with closed eyes, when I heard the beads stir and a small dark-eyed woman with long black hair done up in a large knot on the top of her head, poked her head through the beads and beckoned to me, saying:

“¡Adalante! ¡Estamos esperando!” (Come on in! We’re waiting!)

I followed her into the inner room where several people were sitting on pillows in a circle on the floor. She said something to the group in Spanish, that I didn’t catch, and then turned to me and said in English: “I am Aury. Please explain to us how you meditate.”

Over the next two years, I attended weekly meetings at the Center, and at the request of Aury Moya, the founder and Director of El Centro de Karma Yoga, I taught monthly classes in meditation techniques there. After a few months, friendships developed with several of the Karma Yoga Center students, and one of them, Carlos, invited several of us to his cabin, up in the El Yunque Rain Forrest one weekend for a picnic and swimming in a mountain stream which they called El Rio Sangre de Los Santos. (Blood of Saints River). Conversation got around to that first night when I climbed the stairs to the Yoga Center, and I asked about the strange way Aury had invited me into the meeting. I mentioned that I thought that she may have been expecting someone else, and I just happened to show up. Carlos looked at me quizzically, and said:

“No, man. She told us for several weeks, that when the class got to the point of discussing meditation techniques, someone would be here to teach that part of the course for her. The week before you showed up, she said ‘next week will be the meditation class’.”

“But, I had never met Aury, or talked with her, before that night.” I protested. “How could she have known that I would be there that particular night?”

Carlos laughed, and said: “Aury knows a lot of things, man! She described you to a ‘T’, and even said your name was Eduardo! And, when we were all there that evening, we asked ‘where is that meditation teacher?’ And she said: Be patient, ‘he’ll be here in a few minutes’ and then you showed up!”

In the fall of 1981, I stepped down from a bus in the yet-to-be-built industrial city of Yanbu 336 kilometers north of Jeddah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. The bus driver, a Somali, leaned out of the bus and said: “Company man be here soon.” After which he closed the bus doors and drove off toward the Yanbu-Jeddah highway. I was alone, standing beside what looked like a boxcar in the middle of the desert.

As the dust settled on my shoes and my suitcase, I stood looking toward the black peaks of the Hejazi Mountains. Dust devils swirled across the desert between me and the mountains, and I wondered: “What have I gotten myself into?”

...To be continued.

WAR MEMORIES AND HOPE

A HISTORY OF CONFLICT

REMEMBERING A SEPTEMBER 72 YEARS AGO

©Edward R. Close September 2017

It seems that human beings are a volatile and unstable species. Our history on this planet is dotted with horrible wars and millions of war-related innocent deaths. The little valley where I was born is no exception. In the center of the Louisiana Purchase, Arcadia Valley had been affected by the French and Indian wars, the Civil War, World War I and World War II by the time I was 10 years old.

The first European settlement in the Valley, on Stout’s Creek, was burned to the ground and all the settlers massacred by Native Americans in the winter of 1780. As a child, I played in and around the earthen works of Fort Davidson, the site of the Battle of Pilot Knob, which took place in 1864, occasionally finding arrowheads, lead bullets and cannonballs, relics of the massacre of 1780 and the Civil War 84 years later. In the early 1900s the first automobiles required better roads than the horse and wagon, and when a road bed was excavated near Fort Davidson a mass grave of Civil War soldiers was discovered. The site is now a State Historical Park. Bloody war with hand-to-hand combat has not occurred in the Valley since 1864, but before another 84 years passed, residents were impacted by the effects of World I and World War II.

I have vivid memories of life in the Valley during World War II: Air-raid drills, nightly blackouts and food rationing. My father, who was Tri-City Constable in Arcadia Valley at the time, obtained full-face gas masks for himself, my mother and me. I was fascinated with the masks. I still remember the sounds of the flap valves opening and closing as I breathed in and out. We planted Victory Gardens to assure that we had food if the large cities and transportation routes were destroyed.

Even though the war in Europe seemed very far away, we were told daily by radio, newspapers and even comic books, that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hiro-Hito were evil men, it was even suggested that the Japanese were not really human! And that this axis of evil was bent on destroying our world. Why, I wondered, would the Japanese, Germans and Italians want to bomb our little town in the middle of the San Francois Mountains? I didn’t know at the time that we were located only about twenty miles from the largest high-grade lead mines in the world, the source of most of the bullets used by US armed forces in World War I and II. And the iron mines in our valley and the next valley north, were primary sources of the iron ore used to make everything from guns to tanks for the war effort. We were only about 70 miles from a large secret underground storage of aviation fuel, and about the same distance from a large scale Uranium 238 processing facility. We were in the middle of important targets for the enemy.

My fraternal grandfather was a son of German immigrants, and there were many families of German origin in the valley, along with a mix of people of almost every other European heritage who had been drawn to this area to work in the mines. Long before World War I, my Great-grandparents had discouraged their children and grandchildren from learning German. Their attitude was: “We are Americans now, so we must be Americans and speak English.” Still, as World War II loomed, there were German sympathizers in the Valley, and in 1936 the Nazi Bund established a local chapter in the Valley.

My dad, who was half German and half Irish, born in the major mining town of Saint Francois County Missssouri in 1908, volunteered for the U.S. Army in 1925, and served for four years in Hawaii, returning home to marry and start a family before World War II began in Europe. He knew about the NAZI Bund in the Valley, but would have nothing to do with it. In 1941, when the US entered World War II, he was still under draft age, so he volunteered for the Navy, and served as a member of the Amphibian Scouts and Raiders, known today as the US Navy Seals. He was on the Treasure Island Naval Base in San Francisco Bay with the men of Operation Olympic, set to invade the Japanese homeland, when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Harry S. Truman, also a Missourian, decided to drop the bombs, in part, because of the anticipation of up to 90% US casualties in the invasion.

With the fall of the NAZI’s Third Reich in May1945, and the surrender of the Japanese, signed on board the USS Missouri September 2, 1945, World War II officially ended. I remember the day well. When we received the news via Radio KMOX broadcasting from St. Louis, a wave of emotion swept across the Valley, and the jubilant residents of our town drove up and down the main street, Missouri Route 21, shouting, blowing horns and waving American flags. The WAR WAS OVER! But many waited in vain for their fathers, sons and brothers to come home. More than 400,000 US service personnel were killed in the war. I was luckier than some of my friends; my father did come home.

If President Truman hadn’t ordered the bombs to fall, Operation Olympic was scheduled to leave the West Coast of the US for Japan in early September 1945. My father, a member of a platoon of Amphibian Scouts and Raiders would have been in the first wave to land on the beaches of Japan. Their job was to sabotage key Japanese facilities in advance of fourteen Combat Divisions of Soldiers and Marines, the main invasion force, which was to land on November 1.

Why am I sharing these memories? I believe that civilization now stands at the most important threshold in all of human history: Belief in scientific materialism has produced reliance on the things of technology, and has robbed us of meaning and purpose. Without meaning or purpose, we are as likely to destroy ourselves as not, just because we can. We have a choice: We can follow the path of materialism which has resulted in war after horrible war, or we can step up to a new level of awareness. With the discovery of the existence of the third form of reality, a form that acts as the agent of Primary Consciousness in the physical world, and with empirical evidence and mathematical proof that consciousness, not matter, is primary, we can escape the dead end of materialism. 

Scroll down to the post below to read my address to the members of the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialist Science, August 26, 2017.