Indians, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Other Things

So, I just finished for the second time a book, it's supposed to be nonfiction, but it's in Barnes and Nobles as New Age religion, about this psychiatrist, head of his department in a hospital in Miami, that accidentally hypnotized a woman decades ago and brought out a past life in her. Then he began to do so more with her through the years.

What the book sounds to me, upon rereading it, is that something like that really happened in some form. I have talked to two people actually, that they have regressed under hypnosis, to what they think is a past life. But so much of the book, I can't buy it. He sounds New Age to me. Like had some thoughts and theories and went after it. I've heard tidbits here and there about some of the things he said, but it was like old put into his perspective.

Still, I marked a lot of places. I read it and also a John Edward Crossing Over book, because of the story I'm writing and rewriting about a girl falling in love with a ghost. I want to give it some unique twists that have some groundings, in that regard at least.

I was to have a past life regression from one of this guys proteges actually. I lost my nerve and I won't say all the reasons why. I know one of his proteges. Very well, semi-grew up with him, and he lives in Austin now. I had a session with him, but didn't even go under hypnosis. Just made it a psychological session. I may revisit him now to try it out. I've wanted to ever since I lost my nerve, but now also, I just met someone that just did with him and was very impressed, and also I want to know more first hand.

I'm also reading on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was in my stack of must reads anyway, but now with my ghost story and Aztec story, it has some aspects I want to check out.

It refurbishes so much of my own thoughts through the years, and also other historical, theological, anthropological, and philosophical readings. I read pro and con on religions.

It is so intriguing and you read objective, or defenders, or minimalists on these subjects and try to filter it all with your own instincts.

So many these days, as opposed to when I was growing up, go back to the original Greek and Hebrew, Aramaic, or Latin from old Biblical texts. That is encouraging, because when I was growing up it was totally faith by so many in my church and related churches. I still think faith is the most important key ingredient.

I don't know any of these ancient languages, and even if I did, how do you interpret it. It is more than written accounts that are translated. What they are conveying, their audience, style, mentality. So much is involved.

So, I read secondary accounts by the million trying to get some gysts.

I won't go into it. But do get bugged when told it better just be faith and only what my preacher says. I want to include everybody's preacher too. I really want to know this stuff, including my heart's rendition.

But as you read, think, pray, and picture, piecing it all together, how do you translate the translations. Interpretations.

I was listening to the Mormon hour on NPR Sunday morning. I just finished reading the Book of Mormon from cover to cover last summer. In it it talked about cattle and horses, etc. brought over from Asia to the Americas by the ancient lost tribes of Israel.

Sure, there is no trace historically or archaelolgically that they ever existed here until the Spanish brought them. But they say that stuff about King David too, and then find something that hints or even verifies.

But still, no, I don't buy it. The impact the horse alone made on the Indians when they brought it and how swiftly. So, it didn't have to be that big a deal somehow thousands of years ago, but you get my drift, it doesn't really instintively add up.

Then I just read in the local paper how DNA forensic tests don't add up either with native Americans and Middle East genetic mapping. No shock to us non-Mormons. But again, the gysts. The Book of Mormon is a very impressive treastise. Do you have to take it literally? Mormons do? And if it is a lie, then they are in deep trouble anyway, especially if they pass it off as literal.

But ancient religious and philosophical texts in general, many times, were just trying to communicate. Talking spiritual truths and sub-conscious symbologies. It's all so complicated and incredibly interesting. It beats memorizing the ten commandments and leaving it at that.

You want to protect yourself from religious idealogues, but don't want to get swept up in occult kooks. How to balance any stupid thing anywhere.

Back to the Mormons. I love their choir and loved listening to it Sunday morning. Also they had an English group there that was beautiful. But the speaker said something that I keep hearing from sometimes even fundamentalists. With all this hate mongering Islam fundamentalist going on, it's easier to want to listen too.

The speaker said, we're getting to the stage of appreciating the beauty in others, their thoughts, their hearts, their spirituality. There is so much to communicate these things with in what we have in common as to be so torn apart by our differences.

Amen brother.

Chesty Puller

I'm at work doing retention reports and listening to a cassette tape I bought God knows when on Marine Corps bootcamp. I'm putting everything from time immemorial to CD's with this machine that converts digitally.

Yes, it does bring back memories. More than any name mentioned through all this is that of Chesty Puller. He was a cousin of Patton. Both from Virginia, both from VMI, though Patton later transferred to West Point.

I do have the movie Patton and I very much appreciate what he said about my alma mater. Though he was from VMI and West Point he came across a lot of Aggies in his Army career. There were more Aggies in World War II than any other institution or group by far, including the academies. Anyway, Patton said, give me a company of West Pointers and I'll win this damn battle. But give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I'll win this whole damn war.

I had never heard the name Chesty Puller until I was twenty-one and enlisted in the Marine Corps. He was all they talked about. He embodied everything you think about Marine. So, on this tape they talk about him a lot too. Not stories, just about, like you're supposed to know already.

The closests thing they told a story was one sentence about Chosen Reservoir. That's where he really made a name for himself. Two Marines, one enlisted, Dan Daily, one officer, Smedley Butler won the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. Chesty Puller not even once. But he's the one that epitomizes.

At Chosen Resevoir in North Korea in 1950 he was the commanding General. It was so cold there that the rifles froze. Men had to urinate on them to get them warm enough to fire a shot. The Chinese had dreadfully just entered the war and did swarm warfare, like Mongul hordes, with bayonets just coming at you in massive horrifying waves. He and his Marines were so outnumbered and completely surrounded. Chesty Puller called his men together and said, 'finally we have them where we want them. They can't escape now. No matter which way we turned they're there when we charge them. And they charged, and won.

At first the Chinese inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans, but guys like Chesty Puller inflicted such casualties back with such fewer men, that the Chinese soon were depleted and were not an effective force to be reckoned with much longer. That's when a truce was formed.

I still get goose bumps over stuff like this. I was during the Vietnam era and saw how everything was done by the enemy to deflate moral, but nothing did it like the enemy at home. The war was soon not openly debated, it was just condemned, and the troops with it. There was a huge difference in the result as a product. Not military results, though with the fact that we pulled out, then that too.

I remember the day we graduated from boot camp and they handed us our new dogtags, our names, blood type, our social, except in those days the Marines still had service numbers. And a big USMC. I just kept staring at that USMC. I was a Marine. We marched for the last time from our quonset huts to the buses to take us to Camp Pendleton for Infantry Training and sang the Marine Corps Hymn along the way. Everybody's favorite verse was the one they keep singing on this tape.

If the Army and the Navy
Ever look on Heaven's scene
They will find the streets are guarded
By United States Marines.

The spirit and pride is so strong. To see how liberals still think this is Vietnam and expect the same show is more than antiquated. Even Vietnam wasn't Vietnam until we made it such. We are fighting more the enemy within than the enemy abroad. It is such a disservice to not grasp what being a Marine is. The pure undiluted sickness of this mentality to see a Marine as a goon or baby killer. It wasn't true even then, much less now. If a war or mission is wrong or inappropriate, in a democracy you can debate it and cut to the chase of it. But it is like a Moslem determining everybody is an infidel, even a moderate Moslem mentality. There is an idealogue mentality that keeps an honest debate from occuring. Preordained and immovable concepts. Like religious fanaticism.

Taking It To Bed With You

It's spring break now and our writing critique got cancelled. I had so much prepared, yet, it is kind of nice to take a spring break.

It gave me time to think though. I've started a story I began long ago. I stumbled across some old stories I had forgotten I wrote. But one I was aware of and have intended to get to and made up my mind it would be this year. It's a novel.

As I cleared out old old computer diskette programs stored in my closet a week ago, I came upon these old stories I had written on Word Star way back, some short stories on a word processor you never heard of from England called Pipedream. I was living in Switzerland at the time.

The style of some of them was so different I had to reread and rethink, not sure they were mine. I was shocked. The novel I figured I would have to rewrite 90%. But parts I could not believe I had written. Was I me then?

I had seen an episode on British satellite, of an old series from when I was in high school, maybe college, called the Ghost And Mrs. Muir. I vaguely remembered the show so watched from curiosity. In it, the Ghost visited Hope Lang I think it was, as usual, but there also was a character of a twentyish Shelly Fabres. She was the sister of Paul Peterson in their own TV series, I think it was Donna Reed. But she had a crush on the Ghost, or something. I was inspired anyway and started writing my own story of a deeper involvement, Louisiana setting, because they have more ghost stories, so I thought. Better settings for sure.

So, I am rewriting a great deal of it already, but much came out so well the first time. But these nearly twenty years later, I have gone down a lot more roads and am so caught up in this story once again, it follows me everywhere. I take things to bed with me and I dream about it, and in my times of half sleep, it is constantly on my mind, plots, subplots, more details, this won't work, maybe this idea.

I was eating at a fast food before going home to work on it more. I am changing one of the characters in particular, and want to get the ghost and certain spiritual aspects down better, got out more books at home to read, you know, read a hundred pages to get a paragraphs worth of ideas or information. I ended up buying $40 worth of even more books, most of them on sale, clearance, so have so many more now to read and I love the subjects anyway. I even saw a book by Jonathan Edwards the psychic, talks to dead people guy. I've seen him on TV a few times years ago, and thought to give him a shot. Maybe I'll learn something, more ideas.

Parts just don't fit and it's horrible, I barely sleep. How to make this plot work, in sync, believable. Sort of anyway. Before the night is over, by dawn, in some glorious symbolic way, you think of something. Some of it seems good, some just a lead. More wrestling with it, more twisting and turning, more reading, more opening up to new places in the universe, more to yourself that you've chewed on for years, and here's a place for it now in this story maybe.

Writing, even for us unknown nobodies, probably never will be's, is fun. But it's almost like raising a child. And will you be a successful parent? It's not a hobby. You're simply not getting paid.

Texas Independence

My parents came for the weekend and the guy I grew up with, who now lives near me again, but in our new area, called me up. They were having commendorative celebrations of Texas' 170th anniversary of declaring, then winning Independence. We live just half hour or so from Washington-on-the-Brazos, where the Texas Revolutionary Legislature declared independence. Speakers, reinactments, bands. It was very nice and very nostalgic, for our heritage, and old times growing up.

We visited the rennovated Independence Hall also.

My friend actually lives just outside of Indepence. Goes to the Baptist Church there, the one that used to be the chapel for Baylor before it moved from there to Waco. Sam Houston's mother-in-law attended that church, and once when he was visiting her he carved his initials on one of the pews, which they still have. I may begin attending services there now myself. I was taken with the place.

You get so proud, so sentimental, so partriotic at times like we shared at Washington-on-the Brazos. Great to share it all with the boys too.

And I met a guy I was in the Aggie Band with too. He was telling everyone how I used to haze him, told his wife too there. After he left A&M, so I now found out, he was a Captain with the 101st Airborne. I was so impressed, proud of him. My oldest, the Marine wannabee, came over bug eyed to shake his hand. The first he had ever met from the 101st.

But even the bands. Pioneer instruments, accoustic. And one retold the events of those days, and then sang a song about it. They even sang Walt Disney's Ballad of Davy Crockett. The one that was hardest to keep from sniffling over, right after he read the letter to the Legislature, arriving to them the very day they declared Independence, from Travis, the famous one, how we shall never surrender or retreat, and how he answered Santa Anna's demand for surrender with a cannon shell. Then the band sang the Ballad of the Alamo, from John Wayne's movie. I had forgotten just how powerful those words were. It was like from the Bible or something, they were so powerful. I wanted to enlist in the Texas Marines.

You can't help but think and feel during such times as this, how this is what life is about. Not the NFL or house payments, but this, spirit, devotion, duty, and freedom.