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Life Story #48
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I was born in Vietnam in 1965. I believe that the choice of location and time for my incarnation had some effect upon my eventual outlook on life, which is one of a constant state of war. That is the nature of this planetary experience, even though the herded masses weave dreams of pastoral happiness, from behind their pens and sheds. It is true that they harbor fears, for they fear the big bad wolf, though they gladly take trust in the butcher, who is constantly sharpening his blades.

My father at the time was an American correspondent covering the war for the wire services. My mother was a Vietnamese librarian who had a college education in the US. We lived in Saigon until the Tet Offensive, after which we moved to New York City. When I was seven, the family moved into the Manhattan apartment which would become the family base for the next 35 years.

FOURTEEN

Fourteen was one of the most pivotal years of my life because I discovered music, painting, and literature - the arts. I had found my course in life. It must have been my Higher Self which led me, that year, to the works of Mozart, The Doors, Celine, Dali, Thompson, and all the others who provided me with a way through this planets paradigm of control, and maybe keep a part of my soul intact during the process. Aside from their creative genius, they all displayed a healthy rebellious streak. I am a Sagittarian and pehaps this helped me identify with that. I suspect that my Piscean moon has lent me some ability in the sphere of music. At fourteen I got my first guitar and formed a band immediatly. And I began writing poetry and making drawings. I became a voracious reader and read constantly about the prophets and madmen and anything else which teetered on the edge of the reality box.

During my teenage years I also began an experiential loop that would lead me to seek out different methods for consciousness expansion, sometimes through natural and sometimes through chemical means. After reading Castaneda, Crowley, Baudulaire, and Rimbaud, I set out on a number of experiments with psychedelics. On one occassion, after I was in deep meditation, I saw a bolt of electricity shoot out across the room from an electrical socket. Even though the event remains a mystery to me, I feel certain that it was a physical occurance, and not merely a hallucination. It was, for me, a vivid display of synchronicity, as defined as "the conscious perception in a psychological time track of the simultaneous manifestation of the multi-dimensional universe and the recongition that all events, objects, points of view, perceptions and inteactions are ONE thing viewed from different perspectives."

TWENTY ONE


Twenty one was another pivotal year for me in that I moved away from home to go to college clear across the country to Los Angeles. My spiritual and creative interests continued to grow unabated. By this time I had covered much of the material on psychology and parapsychology, and moving fast into the realms of Kabbala, Buddhism, Taoism, esoteric Christianity, etc. including a wide smattering of New Age movements like TM and Eckankar. I found Eckankar to be of particular interest because it provided actual hands on techniques for consciousness expansion such as out- of- body movement, dream control, astral projection, soul travel, remote viewing, and others. 
I took it upon myself to pursue these disciplines with full intent and rigor, and for the next seven years maintained a strict regime of daily meditations, weekly fasts, dream journal writing, studying and so on. In addition, as par for the course, I gave up all chemical enhancements of the mind, including alcohol. The Eckists viewed the use of drugs as akin to breaking and entering into the house of higher consciousness. What one wanted to do was to walk through the front door as invited guests. This could be done through meditation.
Before I completed my experimention with drugs however, I had some uncanny experiences. One had to do with the ISBN number -the bar code. There had been rumours circulating about how the bar codes contained the number 666, but I wanted to discern the specifics of its whereabouts. That was when I had the idea of transposing the number 666 from the decimal system of numbering, to that of the binumeral system, in which 666 turned out to be written as the number 1111111111.... 
So there it was, 666 was not inside the bar code but the bar code itself. There was more - I began to see the bars everywhere. They were in the jails, fences, cages. In some terribly majestic way the bars were the trap which encircled this whole planet - a prison planet. 
It occured to me as well, that the world of drugs was a microcosm of the rest of the universe. There was the negative polarity and there was the positive. There were the fascist drugs which turned you into a slave, erased your individuality and punished you if you tried to escape its iron grip. Then there were the more democratic ones which imparted a certain degree of wisdom, and which did not form a physical addiction.

TWENTY EIGHT

At twenty eight I moved to Seattle to pursue a career in music. This was a very exciting and transitional period because I was following my inner calling. It was an uphill battle to be sure. I was breaking with societal expectations of making a "practical living" in a sociably exceptable line of work, ie. another cog in the machine. Not to mention going against my parents wishes, who were understandably disgruntled with my decision, having invested thousands of dollars in my college education. 
When I arrived in Seattle in the early 90's, it was the center of the international rock music scene. Local favorites like Nirvana and Pearl Jam became household names. Artistically it was a very exciting time, and I felt strangely meshed with my dharma. Over the next seven years I lived and worked in Seattle, formed bands, recorded, performed on stage and achieved a very definite kind of artistic success. 

During this seven year period, 1997 stands out as particlarly eventful. I was not yet 33 at the time. One day while perusing the shelves of a small private library in the Capitol Hill district of town, I came upon a copy of Matrix 3 by Val Valarian. Even though I had been an avid reader all my life, this book ranks as one of the most important books I have ever read.
The book absorbed my complete attention during the summer of that year. I read all 1000+ pages and shared it with some friends. It was a major expansion of consciousness, with a steep learning curve. This paved the way for a strange experience I had later in the fall. 

That experience occured while I was driving north one night on Highway 99, in North Seattle. Looking up at the early evening sky, I noticed, coming in from the west, a group of twelve glowing orange discs, flying eastward. I pulled the car over into the parking lot of a diner, and stared at the UFO's pass over head, and eventually disappear to the east behind the Cascade mountain range. 
Initially I was not sure what to think. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and rationalized that, though it was a truly amazing sight, it was most probably just a satellite re-entering and breaking up in earth's atmosphere. However, later that week week, a friend of mine did some research on the internet and found that indeed there were numerous sightings of the event reported, and that NORAD had also officially acknowledged that a satellite did break up in the atmosphere at that time and location. The problem was that NORAD stated that the debris was travelling from east to west, eventually crashing "safely into the Pacific Ocean." This was the exact opposite of what I had witnessed with my own eyes. The fact that they had covered up that information, made me doubt the voracity that it was a satellite at all. And this personal experience led me to view the entire Matrix material in an even deeper and more personal light. Indeed, it changed the entire paradigm of my world view. 

But '97 was still far from over. I then met and fell in love with a girl from Washington State who I considered to be my soul mate (or shall I say we soul mated). We would remain together until my 42nd year, which was just recently. Yes, the Law of Attraction was in full swing at the time, and we shared many common interests. She was an artist, and we could relate on that level.But she also had a very open and expanded consciousness, and took a keen interest in the Matrix 3 material. It can be nice to have a fellow wayfarer share your path, especially one that looked great. In addition, she had some very unique life experiences. Once, when she was a young girl playing with her sister in front of their home near Mt. Rainier, they were both abducted by aliens in a ship, and then later released. The sisters did not speak of the incident for years, but more recently confided to each other about it and were amazed at their mutual recollection of the event, which they had both supressed as being a "dream", albeit a very vivid one.

And finally in that year, a dear and close friend of mine died in a most tragic fashion. This was a significant blow to me, and I not only lost a true friend but a fellow wayfarer in this world, with a tremendous sense of humor I might add, which I believe makes the traveling all the more enjoyable. My friend had a deep intuitional understanding and sceptism about the world and the matrix in which we as a society are enmeshed, and we spent many years trying to unravel this Gordian Knot together. I would have been truly amiss if it were not for my meeting my new girlfriend, as I have mentioned. 

THIRTY FIVE

Two years after that, Uranus returns once again and as usual wrought many changes. This time another move, back to New York City. I had left Seattle for a number of reasons, but still wanted to pursue my musical interests, and since I was in my home town, I decided to form a band with a drummer and guitarist who I had known since childhood. Even though we had gone our seperate ways, we were still closest of friends. The drummer had recently married, and had become a very successful commodities broker on Wall Street. But he was very enthusuiastic to get back in the studio and make some music like the old days. He was a brilliant musician. It was the summer of 2001 and I was working dilligently at composing the music when tragedy struck. My drummer was working his day job at the World Trade Center on September 11th, and he perished with the rest of the brave men and women who died on that horrific day. For weeks I saw that terrible black cloud hang over the city. It was an overwhelming tragedy on so many levels, and here now a personal element was introduced. My mind raced for months afterwards as I once again delved back into my esoteric studies. The Matrix material was invaluable in guiding me through this labyrinth that the negative forces had imposed on America, and the world. Everything I had studied had bearing upon that very moment, and this moment now. It all comes down to survival. This is big stuff. This is the biggest story there is. And the Matrix material strikes at the very heart of it all. And for this, I feel like I am very lucky, for having walked down that library aisle back in Seattle, and found that book.

After 9/11, I didn't give up music, but I did re-think my overall plan of action. Due to a series of setbacks, I felt that my Higher Self was urging me to expand my field of interests. I decided to renew my focus in the field of film and camera work. I took numerous classes on lighting, video editing, documentary film making, etc. until one day, due to a series of fortunate and unfortunate events, I found myself with the opportunity to join a documentary film crew in Baghdad, at the outbreak of the Iraq war. And so in late April of 2003 I flew into Jordan and drove east towards Baghdad. I spent four weeks based at the Palestine Hotel, and took some amazing footage which included the inside of a newly deserted Abu Graib prison, car bombings, grave sites. It was a fantastic journey which just built upon and tied into everything I had learned and experienced up to that point. I took footage of bombed out buildings and all manner of destruction. I do want to note here that all the government ministries which I visited had been destroyed by coalition forces, but the oil ministry remained standing, and operational. US tanks sat in front guarding it and I heard that all the employees continued working straight through the ordeal, and their pay was uninterupted. To this day, it may still be the only thing that works effieceintly in Iraq. 

FORTY TWO

I am now forty two, and another Uranus cycle begins. Again the changes are sweeping and coming in fast. My soul mate and I have just recently seperated, though we remain close and connected, even though she has returned to the Seattle area and I am still on the east coast. It is interesting that this assignment for Matrix 6 has come through (she alerted me to the call for submissions last month) for I am in fact taking stock of our past seven years together, as I re arrange the house and collect the old photographs and poems and memories. I may even put a book together, who knows. There is a certain sadness and attatchment here, but also an excitement about life. But I can see the Law of Balance shift back and forth. My father was recently diagnosed with cancer. This will be a tremendous challenge for him, especially being a physically and mentally active man. There are so many battles going on, here on this planet. It is war all the time. And now, having not much more to say, I just want to thank you directly for the courage you have shown and the light you have shown to people like me. It is more than inspiring. It is that single spark that has ignited and keeps this engine going. 

And we can still laugh, even in the face of death.