THE WANDERLING, CONTINUED:
More on the Wanderling and the Wanderling's Uncle...
My uncle was well accepted by most spiritual members of the indigenous people of the desert southwest he interacted with as a person at one with the Earth. He was married to a Native American of the Little Shell Plains Ojibwe who was a fourth level Midewiwin medicine woman that was held in awe by most that came within her presence. He himself moved with an almost cloak-like and uncanny nearly invisible ability, passing among people and places without disturbing the environment. Some say he was a Cloud Shaman and it may very well be the case. However, for the most part, he felt it was an impropriety to usurp for ones own gain or any other reason the traditional spiritual realms of others. Plain speaking, from a very young age I was, by example, both shown and taught by my father and uncle two very basic concepts: "When walking in the woods, never leave tracks," and "when you depart from a campground, always leave it better than you found it." Both concepts, although worded specifically in context, were meant to be expanded to the world and ones life as a whole, the philosophy meshing perfectly in my later teen years when I began study practice of Zen under the auspices of my spiritual guide and Mentor.
While it is true my uncle had to overcome seemingly unsurmountable traditional and cultural roadblocks to be viewed as "one with the Earth" in the eyes of the indigenous people of the desert southwest he interacted with, it did not just happen overnight. The following two paragraphs are from Castaneda's 1960s Paper On Datura, and offers perhaps the best insight and clarifications into how it came about:
Starting just out of high school and years before I was born my my uncle-to-be began studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and the Art Student's League in New York City. A year or two before the start of the Great Depression and barely into his 20s he decided to follow an important and well established artist he met and studied under named John Sloan to New Mexico. Sloan traveled to New Mexico each year for a few months to paint and relax. On my uncle's second or third trip, when Sloan returned to New York, my uncle stayed, having fallen in love with Santa Fe, the culture and the desert southwest. He was, if not more so, still a struggling artist and to stretch his limited funds and maintain his health he began fishing, hunting rabbits, and looking into the potential possibility of edible and medicinal plants indigenous to the desert. In doing so he was soon coming in contact with Native Americans. At first they found the white man foraging in the wilderness one day and painting pictures the next day a bit strange and kept their distance, but after awhile they discovered he was neither there to destroy the environment nor to exploit them. A few Indians, and then soon more and more, began to assist him, and in return he helped them with marketing their wares and making their art more commercially viable. He began looking into local plants, soils and rocks to enhance pigments and dyes. Overcoming many deep rooted apprehensions and suspicions he soon became accepted as one with the Earth and eventually many secrets and rituals that would otherwise not have been revealed were shared with him without concern.
Back then borders were just lines on paper, if that. As it was, most people didn't even have the paper. Arizona didn't exist as a state until only a few years before. In the desert wilderness traveling from New Mexico into Mexico into Arizona meant nothing. Tribal units pretty much kept to their traditional lands that basically just ran from their central operating core until they faded out with no specifically designated border. Although peoples of one group might interact with peoples of other groups they kept their secrets to themselves. My uncle went between tribal areas and cultures up and down and across the desert interacting and learning different ways and methods of either doing the samething or not doing the samething, giving him a much broader base of understanding. What might be poison to one group another found away around and a use. Where medicinal plants, datura or peyote might be ignored by one group, one, the other, or all might be embraced by another group or clan. Learning and respecting local and traditional curing methods and rituals, over time what my uncle did was refine and synthesize, strengthening here, eliminating there.
During those years he spent most of his time traveling and exploring in and around the desert southwest, operating mostly out of the Santa Fe, Taos, New Mexico area interacting mostly with the indigenous population or performing the role as an unofficial liaison between the two. During that same period, traveling in the desert he did have a meeting of some significance that involved someone of non Native American heritage --- the soon to be one day eventual author of over 100 cowboy and western books Louis L'Amour. L'Amour, while hitchhiking across New Mexico as a young man decided to take what he thought would be a good shortcut through the desert. It didn't quite turn out that way. He was dirty, thirsty, hungry and lost when my uncle and a band of Indian friends stumbled across him. As for me, it many years later when he came to Southern California, first on my grandmother's bidding, then my stepmother's, my Stepmother thinking he would be the best person for the job in overseeing me. He took a liking to me right away, however, I don't feel he was too excessively concerned with me one way or the other to start with. That is, until I came back from a trip to Catalina Island sort of rattled and he got out of me what happened. After hearing my story, which I sum up in THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana, right away he started figuring out ways to get back to the desert and take me with him. He told me there were people and places all over the desert, secret and sacred places that had people that would identify with my experience and me.
As it turns out there are many, many known to "a select few" but "undiscovered" sites and sacred sites scattered throughout the desert southwest and elsewhere. When I visited the Pendejo Cave and the Sun Dagger site at Fajada Butte with my uncle, both were known to a select few, just not to the scientific world or general public. Even more secret and more sacred are the still undisclosed and undiscovered solstice-equinox caves I visited with my uncle as described in Julian Osorio. For some reason not known to me, my uncle seemed to have carte blanche when it came to knowledge and access to spiritual people and places. In striking contrast, Carlos Castaneda, as an up and coming anthropology student doing field work while attending UCLA and afterwards, wrote about how difficult it was as an "outsider" to breech the boundries of acceptance. In his book The Active Side of Infinity Castaneda writes that "he met with an extremely seasoned anthropologist who had written and published a great deal on both the Yaqui Indians of Arizona and those of Sonora, Mexico." He told Castaneda "that the Indian societies of the Southwest were extremely isolationist, and that foreigners were distrusted, even abhorred, by those Indians." Another colleague, speaking of medicinal plants and their use just as Castaneda began his search, but sometime before the use of Sacred Datura that he speaks of in his first two books, told him, "if there still were any traditional curing practices, the Indians would not divulge them to a stranger." (source) Such, it seems, was not the case when it came to my uncle.
Because of being with my uncle I was accepted without question by the Native American spiritual elder at the Sun Dagger site, but I was questioned without words whether I was worthy or not when I traveled with my uncle to the Pendejo site. After my uncle's wife told the elder of my experience with the vultures, which were eventually to become my Totem Animal because of the incident with them, he looked deeply into my eyes and apparently liked whatever he saw. Many years later an almost duplicate episode would occur in the presence of the Jamaican man of spells called an Obeah.
As to the two exposed sacred sites, I never said a word about either until long after they were revealed...and since they have been revealed look what has happened, especially to the Sun Dagger site. It is closed off and not even accessible anymore. So many people treked up there it started to fall apart, yet up until it was "discovered" it had stayed safely intact and working for over 700 years. If you recall, when my uncle, the tribal elder, and I accessed the butte, I was NOT allowed to go to the actual physical location of the Dagger with them. (see)
My uncle had taken me to see the much more accessible and less fragial, ground level Supernova Petrograph at Chaco Canyon during our trip to the Sun Dagger site, explaining to me that the image depicted the explosion of a star in the year 1054 AD which since that explosion has created the Crab Nebula. Some years later my uncle caught wind there was a similar depiction rendered in the remote cave paintings in Mexico on the Baja peninsula. Knowing the supernova had been recorded in China and other ancient cultures, he went to see it. My uncle visited the Baja cave paintings well before 1962 and, although years before he had met the then very young yet-to-be professor when he was traveling in Mexico as a teenager, Clement Meighan, he never met him grown up and as a professor. However, he was quite pleased with what Meighan, the UCLA archaeologist that introduced Castaneda to things Shaman, had reported about the condition of the prehistoric paintings following his visit to the site in 1962:
"It is noteworthy that, with one exception, the sites visited showed
no vandalism, pothunting, or marking of the paintings with initials."
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It was my uncle that inspired me to build a flying machine crafted after a Da Vinci design. However, it was my own idea to drag it up to the top of the two story building across the street and launch it in an attempt to fly, eventually crashing into the porch and partway through the front windows of the house across the way. As for the Crab Nebula, I had seen it through a reflecting telescope he and I had built ourselves from a kit we bought through mail order, with me actually having to grind and polish the mirror as part of the construction process.
After a quick heads up from my uncle's friend, the famed meteorite hunter Dr. Lincoln La Paz, almost exactly one year to the day following my Catalina experience, we went to the suspected crash site related to the Roswell UFO, walking much of the then nearly fresh debris field, my uncle wanting to see if there was any truth behind the so called Hieroglyphic Writing reported on some of the metal scraps. Quite by coincidence we just happened to be in the same general area on a road trip so I could learn first hand about The Long Walk endured by the Navajos and Apaches as well as visit the gravesite of Billy the Kid, located two miles outside of Fort Sumner, New Mexico after an excursion into the Arizona Strip. We had been searching for fossils related to the Teratorn, a giant bird with over a twenty-foot wingspan thought to be the inspiration of Native American Thunderbird legends. Before La Paz caught up with us we had been cutting across the desert after having holed up for some minor exploration at the Elden Pueblo where prehistoric Native Americans had buried an extremely rare type meteorite, thought possibly to have come from the surface of Mars or the far side of the Moon, in a ritual fashion as well as visiting the Meteor Crater.
Following our arrival in Roswell my uncle talked to a number of people in and around the local area, both men and women, none of who I remember specifically and none who were, except for possibly one, military types. He did talk to a man who my uncle said was an archaeologist. I don't recall anything about him except at the time I wasn't sure what an archaeologist was. However, in retrospect, as things have unfolded since then, I believe he was most likely W. Curry Holden, although I must admit the possibility exists that it might have been the somewhat more unorthodox William Lawrence Campbell. Campbell, known throughout the desert southwest as Cactus Jack, was thought by many to be not much more than a Pothunter rather than any sort of accomplished archaeologist, or at least that was the case in his early years. My uncle and the archaeologist, as part of a team formed by La Paz --- with me tagging along --- visited several remote sites apparently related to the Roswell Incident. Other than a long, narrow stream of glass-like fused sand that could have been anything, but somehow seemed to have some significance to everybody on the team except me, I never saw anything that seemed saucer related such as gouged out earth, crash skid marks, or LARGE pieces of debris. Nor did we ever get to see anything that resembled hieroglyphics, at least I didn't.
In the summer of 1952 the relationship with my uncle came to an abrupt end. My dad and stepmother had been on an extended trip to Mexico and South America for a couple of years and during that two-year period their marriage deteriorated to such a point it ended. Although I was no longer living with my uncle we had been traveling on the east coast that summer with a planned trip to France when my father somehow contacted my uncle. He said he wanted me to go to California immediately in order to register for a new school in the fall. I was also informed that I would no longer be staying with the foster family I had been living with, but instead, living with my grandmother.
Not finishing the summer with my uncle was a huge disappointment. Unknowingly, our last summer together had been set into motion by my soon to be no longer stepmother before she and my dad left for South America. For my 11th birthday my stepmother, who I loved dearly, had arranged for me to meet one of my then favorite childhood heros, the cowboy-western movie star, Roy Rogers. Prior to the death of my grandfather, my grandmother and grandfather lived in the small California mountain community of Big Bear Lake. The two knew Andy Devine, legendary movie sidekick, who owned a sort of locals travern on the road from Big Bear Village to Big Bear City. Through that connection my stepmother put together the plan for me to meet Rogers. My uncle thought the whole thing somewhat frivolous, so he came up with a much bigger plan, which took a couple of years to put into place. His intention was for me to meet the smartest man in the world, the greatest artist in America, then the greatest artist in the world. In those days the three were, at least as far a my uncle was concerned, none other than Albert Einstein, Jackson Pollock, and Pablo Picasso. My uncle knew the first two himself so he was able to set those meetings somewhat easily. Jackson Pollock coming down from his studio on Long Island to the city after a one man show in Paris and the finishing of his last action painting ever. Albert Einstein along some lake one afternoon while we watched a rowing team practice. The meeting with Picasso never happened. My dad ending the trip before we got the chance to go to Europe. As the door closed between my uncle and myself and our adventures together ended a new door opened. First, just as I started high school I met the person I call my Merchant Marine Friend then two years later I met my Mentor in things spiritual. He inturn introduced me to Zen. In the beginning I did study-practice under his auspices, then under the venerated Japanese Zen master Yaustani Hakuun Roshi (without much success it should be added). After that I spent months and months half a world away nearly on the roof of the world doing hard time in a Zen monastery followed several years later by additional study-practice under the little known and mysterious American Zen master Alfred Pulyan.
The meeting with my mentor was not, however, my first experience leading toward things concerning the Absolute. Between the the time of the incident on the island of Catalina and the meeting with my mentor, while still not yet in my teen years, my uncle took me high into the mountains of the Sierras to meet a man of great spiritual Attainment by the name of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, an introduction that ended with a startling and uncanny result. See also:
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
It should be noted that Adam Osborne, who, as a young boy grew up at the Ramana ashram and the son of one of the foremost Ramana biographers Arthur Osborne, played a prominent role in the Last American Darshan as linked above.
BLUE POLES NUMBER 11, 1952, ENAMEL AND ALUMINIUM PAINT ON CANVAS
82 7/8" x 15' 11 5/8" by Jackson Pollock
Sixteen to eighteen years passed with my uncle and I not seeing each other for no other particular reason than I had moved on to study-practice under my mentor coupled with my father's early insistance, for whatever reason, that we stay apart. Then, late in the year 1968, my uncle called for only the second time in his life, telling me he wanted to meet me in Kingman, Arizona --- Kingman being approximately halfway between where I lived in California and my uncle's abode near the Sangre de Christo mountains of New Mexico.(see) After talking for nearly a half a day, just as we were parting he gave me a small package to deliver it in person to a man in Laguna Beach, California --- and whatever I did, NOT give it to anybody else under any circumstances. When I arrived in Laguna Beach I found the man sequestered in a remote cave hidden in the hills above Laguna Canyon Road. The man, Dr. Timothy Leary. The contents of the box not known. In the end the meeting in Kingman rekindled the relationship between my uncle and myself, afterwhich he and I spent many, many long hours and days going over our lives together and what we had done during the years we were apart.
My uncle was truly an interesting man. If you explore the various references and links throughout all the pages I offer regarding my uncle and look at his philosophy, the circles he traveled in, the people he interacted with and knew, many famous and experts in their fields, with his influence on them and their influence on him, you might ask yourself why isn't he famous as well? In the end you can basically see why just by his nature. British playwright and author, W. Somerset Maugham, writing of his main character Larry Darrell as he searches for and finds spiritual Enlightenment and chronicled in the novel The Razor's Edge, probably sums it up best with the following paragraph:
"The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature." (source)
W. Somerset Maugham, THE RAZOR'S EDGE:
A few years before my uncle died he embarked on a personal expedition to explore the Vortexes at Machu Picchu high in the Andes of South America. Afterwards he traveled over to the Brazilian side to bio-search the
banisteriopsis caapi vine associated with the Ayahuasca Sorcerer's Brew along the upper reaches of the Amazon when he broke his leg. Returning to the United States, weak from the complications of that break, with dementia sneaking in and his body defenses down, cancer took over and he died a couple of years later at age eighty-six. For a more indepth more-or-less year by year break down of the adventures and actual years, dates, and times my uncle and I spent together please see: THE WANDERLING AND HIS UNCLE
Their Life and Times Together
HOW THE WANDERLING GOT HIS NAME
THE WANDERLING AND WIKIPEDIA
RIDING THE CAB FORWARDS
MEETING DR. LA PAZ
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
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THE WANDERLING'S JOURNEY
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SEE:
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SEE ALSO:
POWER OF THE SHAMAN: WHERE DOES IT COME FROM, HOW DOES IT WORK?
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Ironically enough, the FIRST time my uncle ever phoned me, at least long distance anyway, the desert community of Kingman, Arizona was involved as well. It was the end of May 1953 and my uncle wanted me to join him there. Because of the subject matter of the call, a suspected UFO crash similar to Roswell, my dad blew his stack and put the kibosh on the two of us traveling together.
Instead my dad sent me to spend the summer with my stepmother on her ranch deep in the Mojave Desert. Every time my uncle thought of that summer he went off on a tangent. No matter how many years passed he still could not believe that my dad would not let me join him in Kingman, but was willing to allow me to spend that same summer with my by then ex-stepmother --- who, in the regular every day turn of events, took me to meet one of the most infamous prostitutes Los Angeles had ever seen, Brenda Allen.
For more on the Kingman incident and level of involvement by my uncle please see KINGMAN UFO as well as the section on Kingman in Frank Edwards and the story on a lost viking ship in the desert as found in Vikings of the Desert Southwest.
KINGMAN, ARIZONA
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