God Seekers

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Three times this evening I've tried to write of a time in 1977, the summer in June or early July, when I visited Daytona Beach and got my tattoo. I still have that tattoo, a seagull on my right shoulder that, at the time, I named Harmony.  I had initially wanted a dove, but my friend Bud couldn't draw a dove.  So I opted for a seagull.  The tat was free, so I couldn't complain. Shortly before that trip to Daytona, I had been introduced to "The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ."

Toward mid May, I had broken up with my fiance, Frank, mainly because I had to get honest with myself; I didn't believe in the depth of my soul that a God of love would send people to an everlasting place of torment.  I was and had been trying to believe it; I was trying to believe it for Frank.

Frank and I had lived together for about a year in a cabin near Taylorsville, North Carolina. After the break up I moved in with Tula, who was in her 80's I think. I lived at Tula's for a month or so and then moved onto the Randall's farm, near Stony Point, into a mobile home in their pasture.

I ventured back into Transcendental Meditation after leaving Frank.  I was practicing TM when I had met Frank in the late spring of 1976.  I gave up TM to please Frank and to try to believe what Frank believed.  Frank went to a small country Baptist church, so I did too. Almost every Sunday, I'd find myself at the altar in tears of shame wondering if I was "saved."  I sang in the choir. God we sounded awful, twangy like some backwoods hillbillies.

I had resigned myself to becoming the wife of Frank and living out some sort of fantasy with Frank as the head of our home and I as the woman to please him; I wanted to please him. I loved Frank and he was good to me, though he could be quite critical of people.  It was a somewhat odd combination.  Frank, a handsome 22-year old acoustic-guitar-playing hippie who liked to get high,  and me, a now-straight 17-year old teenager who had been into TM, sinfully cohabiting and faithfully reading our Bibles and attending a small, country Baptist church.  We engaged in some experimental sex, the closest I ever got to a threesome.

As part of the role of becoming Frank's wife, I thought I'd take a job down the road from where we lived.  So for nine days I worked in a furniture factory sanding wooden chair arms and parts of furniture, the same repetitive motion over and over and over.  It was nine days of torture boredom.  I had never watched the clock so much in my almost-18 years of life.  Those nine 8-hour days felt like 20-hour days. My respect for factory workers went up; I don't know how they do it.

I wanted to know God, or so I thought, but not the God I had learned about at the small Baptist church, the God that Frank apparently believed in.  A God who would send a person to burn in hell, whatever that meant, for eternity unless the person believed on Jesus Christ.

I left Frank, though I loved him, and went back to TM.  I guess I got back in touch with my TM instructor in Hickory; her name was Dee.  I attended a three-day advance; at least I thought of it as an advance. Attendees practiced meditation rounding which is meditating a lot, in rounds, over a few days all with the purpose of accelerating the process to God-consciousness. The advance was held in Pinehurst, North Carolina. Some meditatiors were supposedly levitating in a room I wasn't allowed to enter, at least until I was more deeply enlightened or something.

But alas, I didn't stick with TM. I don't know why exactly that I gave it up;  I had been a faithful meditator for over a year prior to meeting Frank.  I had volunteered at the TM Center with initiations and took the course, Science of Creative Intelligence.  At high school I had hung up posters of Marhareshi advertising times and places of local lectures on TM, where I also volunteered setting up the rooms and being there for support and to help answer questions.

After I broke up with Frank and dabbled again with TM, I also began to listen to Ram Dass.  I had a vinyl lp of Ram Dass to which I'd lie on the floor in the front bedroom at Tula's house and listen.  I read the book "Be Here Now." Janet, Tula's granddaughter who was around my age, joined me in my quest.  She too was an enlightenment seeker.

At some point on the journey I met Gretta.  It seems I had met her while I was still with Frank. Gretta worked at the health food store in Hickory.  The Triplett's had owned it; Mrs. Triplett was a yoga instructor.  She had a son who was a year or two older than me.  Gretta was a truth seeker too, but she was a Christian, different from the TMers and yoga folks.

Gretta and I ended up getting our aura's balanced sometime that spring or summer of 1977.  Some guy up in the mountains in Valle Crucis, near Boone, had a following. His teachings stemmed from "The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ." I bought the book, but I don't think I ever finished reading it. I would practice a meditative prayer I learned from the leader, the guy who had balanced my aura and had told me all sorts of sins I'd committed and how I needed to forgive myself.  For the prayer, I would sit cross-legged and picture light coming down from heaven, entering my body through my head, and then flowing out of my body to all mankind.  I'd recite the prayer that went something like, "Mother Father God, may the pure white Christ light fill me and flow through me filling my body with light that is radiated to all mankind."

While at Daytona I recited that prayer to the sunrise, as I sat cross-legged on the beach, pretending to be spiritual.  I passionately wanted to be enlightened, to reach God-consciousness.  I wanted to be an instrument for God, for His love and peace.

It wasn't long after, sometime toward the end of July, when I first spoke in tongues at a Lutheran Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.  I must have shared about that experience with Gretta and Janet.  We were all searching to know God.

I have a difficult time recalling the exact time table all this took place, but it must have all happened between May and September of 1977 as I had broken my relationship with Frank in May, a few weeks before our wedding date and around the time I graduated from high school.

Later, in November and December of 1977, Janet and Gretta and I together took the Power For Abundant Living Class which, at that time, included both the foundational and intermediate indoctrination classes of The Way.  We then lived together in a Way Home in Hickory, running classes and "moving the Word."  In less than a year I was commissioned as a WOW (Word Over the World) Ambassador, at that time the outreach program for The Way where a person would "grow ten years in one."  I think Gretta and Janet went WOW too at some point.  Our search for truth and God was over, at least mine was.

Or so I thought.

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