Right now, I can't go on about Mr. Camacho's class. That's a whole story in itself. The important part is what I did next. A few months later, out of the blue, I decided to join the Navy. I hadn't really thought about it before. It was just an impulse. I had no idea what I was getting into. This is 1976. Nobody has short hair. Nobody.

The group of guys I'd came with got to hang around in our hair for an extra day because we'd arrived on Saturday evening, and the barbers didn't come back to work again until Monday. We got to know each other in all of our fuzz.

On Monday, when we came out of the barbers' chairs bald, we'd all lost our identities. We could not recognize any of the people we had just talked to a few minutes earlier. We staggered around for a moment, dazed by all skin.

Bootcamp was a real test. I made it, barely. My Basic Tech Schools were other testers that I got through on a 'survivors' grade. Then, we got to the math. I was terrified of flunking. I had been terrible at Algebra. I knew I was going to struggle.

Then, on the first day of that class, I had my arithmetical epiphany. As I sat there listening to the instructor describe the movement of electrons in a circuit, the lights just came on. I actually got it. Then I got Calculus, Boolean Algebra, Acoustics, everything.

That 19 week class was my next building block. Now I understood the Math and Philosophy. Well, I had a freshman's understanding...

What's a sojourner?

"I'll bet you guys are really pissed off at me right now," Mr. Camacho said as he walked back into the classroom.

"I don't want to talk about God, the Bible or who begot whom right now," he said as he took a seat on the table at the front of the room. "I want to talk about this anger you are feeling."

"Look around you. Look out the window. Has anything changed in the last fifty minutes? The sky is still blue, the grass in still green, the walls are still white and millions of people are still believing in God."

He paused for a moment to watch our foreheads wrinkle up with thought lines.

"The only thing that has changed in the last hour of Bible reading is your blood pressure. You are pissed off at me because you believe that I have no business, no right to make you do this."

I laughed at myself for a second.

He then held up another book. "This is Dr. Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams. We will use it to explore this hate you're feeling."

He then held up the second book. "This is Rousseau's Social Contract. We will use it to explore the reasons why I'm duty bound to piss you off."

He then held up the Bible again. "And we will use this book to turn you little atheists into God loving philosopher/sojourners with a thirst for knowledge and truth that will drive you for the rest of your lives."

He then hopped down off the table and walked over to the blackboard.

He spoke as he began to write. "The New Testament has a central power. This power has three parts; the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost."

He then took a step to the right, still facing the board. "Dr. Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is based on the mind's three part structure; the Id, the Ego, the Superego."

He took one more step to the right. "Social Contract is based on the three segments of a society; the State, the Sovereign, the Subject."

"I can't show you how each of these things works. There's not enough time. What I can do is help you see how everything has three phases, three parts, three lives. When we are done here you will be able to brake down any natural and man made object or action into its engine, its driver and its payload."

"Read the first chapter of Freud and I'll see you tomorrow."

With that Mr. Camacho turned and left the room.

We just sat there for a moment and stared at each other. I got up, went to the table, picked up my books and left. I was unusually quiet. I was busy thinking.

Mr. Camacho left us alone for most of that first hour. I read the assignment. It was my third or forth time through Genesis. I read the creation story, reassuring myself that only a fool could believe such nonsense. I paused again at God's Editorial We.

"We created man in our own image."

It was the kinds of questions that come with writings like this that had gotten me kicked out of Sunday School years ago. Yet, here I was reading the Bible again...and laughing.

I laughed about God first making day and night and then creating the Sun three days later. I snickered as I read how Adam rejected all of the God given helpers like sheep, goats and cattle, holding out for a real mate.

Then I got to the part about racism, slavery and the separation of class. You know it as the story of Issac and Ishmael. For the clear minded reader, this story is all about the Arabs and Jews. The separation of race. The banishment of the "wild donkey of a man" and ascension of "the father of all that is good."

As usual, the more I read, the more angry I became. I resented having to go over this material. I resented dragging religion back into my life. And, above all, I resented every person who believes the Bible.

I was genuinly mad when Mr. Camacho came back through the door.

This time he was carrying the rest of our text books. My first concern was how huge these books were. 600 pages each, easily.

Now I was really mad.

A few months after my first excursion, I enrolled in two summer High School makeup classes being held at the University of Guam. Yes, I had dorked my homework for the sake of the experiment. I had to make up an English class and a Civics class.

The English one was easy; Composition. I always could tell a story. The Civics class did not sound like fun. It was American Government.

The college was about twelve miles from our home. I drove down the road that day dreading the work, but I had learned that time was a commodity I could invest if the subject attracted me.

I parked in student parking. It felt cool to be an adult, sort-off. I was going to a university (to take High School classes.) I walked up to the temporary building and opened the door. There were four other guys already at desks. No girls. The dudes (all white guys) were scattered around the room, not sitting in a group.

I sat down in the back. I knew one of them. The others were from a different high school. We talked for a minute, introducing ourselves. Just as we'd gotten comfortable, the door burst open and this Guamanian teacher strolled into the room. He held the American Government text book high over his head.

"My name is Mr. Camacho! This class is called American Government!" He proclaimed, as he spun around to show us all the cover of the book. He then walked over to his desk and abruptly slam-dunked the book into the trash can.

"However!" He had our attention. "However," he repeated, "we are not going to study this book in this class because you people are not ready to participate in a republic!"

He then turned to the blackboard and began writing.

"These are your reading assignments!"

"Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
"The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud."
"The Holy Bible."

"Today, you will read the Book of Genesis!"

He then turned, walked back through the door and closed it behind him.

That sea urchin lookin' thing

In 1975, I read Carlos Castaneda's A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. In the book, he describes a fundamental meditation exercise called "Silencing the internal voices." Basically what you do is turn off your mind. Sensory Deprivation studies were a fringe craze for while after the book came out, culminating in the movie Altered States in 1980.

I was 18 in 1975. I worked on the exercise for six months, about an hour each day. I eventually developed a visual tool to help me through what was becoming a very frustrating experiment. My tool was the vision of a Stop Sign. The red octagon, the word STOP. My plan was to visualize myself rolling up to the sign. I would stop, then, just as I would do in my car, drift slowly past until I could no longer see the sign.

I did this for about three weeks. On the day of my breakthrough, I was close to giving up. I came home from school that day and flopped down on my bed. The first couple of tries reverberated off into the ether, creating the usual vapor trails that foiled my darkness. On the third try, I sped up toward the sign. This time I slammed on the brakes, skidding past the sign...completely.

I could feel my body suspended in the black for just a moment, then, instantly, I was transmuted from flesh to something else. I was still in the room, but I was actually sticking out of the wall to my left, near the ceiling. I know this because my viewpoint was not looking up from bed but looking down from above. I saw my body on the bed and simultaneously could "feel" my torso sticking out of the wall. I waved my arms around in front of my face. I could see them.

The sensation seemed to last for only a few seconds, but I could have been up there for hours. Just as I was feeling pretty cool about this out-of-body experience I was having, I saw an object moving toward me from stage left. I glanced at it as it pulsated by. It looked like a giant sea urchin with millions of spikes moving in and out from the center. As it passed me I thought to myself, "That's a working model of the universe. I better remember that."

In a flash, I was back sitting up in my bed, adrenalin rushing throuh me. It took a few seconds for me to calm down. I got up, went to my desk and drew a picture of the thing. I went back to school the next day with a smile on my face. I didn't tell people. I just laughed all day.

However, if I had known at the time that I had somehow cracked my reality and opened some sort of portal to the spirit world, I would not have been laughing.

30 years later, I have decided to let the cat out of the bag.

There is a God. You can go join with it and come back to Earth. In my Blog, I want to talk about faith, understanding, obligation, charity and humilty...the things in us that are God given.