Philosophical memories

My first spiritual preceptor was an old Chinese man, born in Indonesia. He had been a Buddhist monk before converting to Catholicism. I met him when I was just a kid, in California.

Just a kid, thinking about life...

I liked to think about things, and as I was growing up back in the sixties, I had a lot of questions. After our family moved to California, we lived in the Mohave Desert in a little town called Pearblossom. Close by was a Benedictine Monastery, St. Andrews Priory,  where I met this man.

Father Thaddeus Yang at Valyermo   http://www.saintandrewsabbey.com/category_s/79.htm

By this time, I was around 11 or 12 years old. In those days, the Benedictine monks were supposed to do some work or service apart from saying prayers and offering Mass. Father Yang used to make sculptures in driftwood. He would find an interesting tree branch fallen in the desert and sculpt it with a blow torch, finishing it with sandpaper and finally polish the work with the sweat of his fine oriental fingers. 

I would take long walks in the Mohave Desert, looking for cactus for my cactus collection, or rocks for my rock collection. At the end of the day, I would find Father Yang, standing over an enormous driftwood horse, his black monk's habit moving in the wind. In one hand he slowly waved his blow-torch over the wood. In the other was the ever-present cigarette. "Camels" was his preferred brand. He would weave the magic of fire and Chinese wisdom over the blasted wood as it gradually took shape. 

Driftwood horse

Then he would quench the flame of the blow-torch, drag on his Camel, and say "Yes, my son. How can I help you?" 

Somehow tea would appear and we would sit and sip the smokey Lapsang Souchong tea and discuss the secrets of the universe. I asked him, "How come Adam and Eve only have two children, Cain and Abel. And Cain kills Abel, so where do all the people come from?" He would smile wearily, puff on his cigarette, and say, "Ahh yes. But it never says there is only one Adam or one Eve. There may have been many Adams and many Eves. It's a metaphor, my child."

Father Yang always had me thinking. One day I asked him where he was from. He was Chinese, after all, but he had been born in Siem Reap, Cambodia. I had a lot of questions, so I pressed him to tell me more stories. He told the story of an ancient city where thousands of people came together with a spiritual purpose. He told me the story of Angkor.

Giant Head at Angkor.

It all seemed like science fiction at the time, but later we moved to the Pacific Palisades. My brothers and I would go to the beach,swim all day and hunt seaweed, underwater treasure,  and bottles we could return for the nickle deposit. If we returned 5 or 6 bottles we had enough for candy and a soda pop we could split. It was paradise.

We could walk to the beach from our house. We spent long hours playing on the beach and stayed in the water until we turned blue. But when I was interested in deeper things, I turned to another man who was a great mentor in my life. My Grandfather, Clinton Stoner.

Clinton Stoner

My grandfather was a mysterious man with a long career in Hollywood. He designed costumes and wardrobe for MGM and Warner Brothers back in the glory days of Hollywood. But one of the things that amazed me about my Grandfather was his library. He had thousands of books: UFOs, Dolphins, Telepathy, Telekineses, Lobsang Rampa, the Third Eye, Bhagavad-Gita, Edgar Cayce, the sleeping prophet, hundreds of old magazines called Fate Magazine, and a book by James Churchward on the Sunken Continent of Lemuria and the links between the Mexican Pyramids, Lost Lemuria, and the ancient city of Angkor Wat. I couldn't believe my eyes. Here were actual photos of the lost city spoken of by my eminent preceptor, Father Yang.

I was stunned. I began reading all the books I could on ancient civilizations: India, Greece, and Egypt. When the Tutankhamen exhibit came to the Los Angeles Museum of Art, I went again and again to visit. I saw the golden mask of the Egyptian boy-king. I wanted to know more about the original civilizations of this earth: how they saw the world, how they lived.

Philosophy: Part Two

Amidst the chaos of growing up I became intrigued with trying to understand the big questions. My rock heroes, the Beatles, had gone to India in search of truth. 

They had everything: fame, money, girls; but they weren’t happy. They wanted something more. Growing up in Hollywood I saw a lot of rich kids in my school, the sons and daughters of movie stars. They all took drugs. No one was happy. I thought to myself: “there must be more to life than this.”

 My father was a TV executive. He would bring famous people home. I spent many afternoons learning to play Gin-Rummy with Cesar Romero, the original Joker from the Batman TV series. He liked to practice his game with me before going over to the Friar's Club in Los Angeles where he played for high stakes. I took quite a few games off him and remain a good card player to this day. Being raised in Hollywood was surrealistic. Meanwhile I read Dostoyevsky to try to make sense of it all.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I was impressed by some interesting things that Dostoyevsky had said. In “Crime and Punishment” his anti-hero Raskolnikov sets out to prove that there are no rules. He wants to realize the amoral position of Superman. Of course this is not the TV Superman whose adventures I followed along with Batman, but the Ubermensch whose actions are “Above Good and Evil.” Dostoyevsky was questioning the principles of Nietzsche who critiqued dogma. The hippies liked Nietzsche because he attacked the hypocrisy of false morality. Here, Dostoyevsky was taking on this giant of philosophy in a detective story about an ax murderer. I liked Dostoyevsky. He wrote a book called “The Idiot,” about a Russian Prince who suffered from epilepsy. By this time, my epilepsy was interfering with my social life. I had a pretty serious gran mal seizure on the floor of my auto-repair class in high school and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance. People thought I was strange. I did my best to fit in with the other kids, but I guess I was a bit eccentric. 

Auto-shop class

Some people called me “The Idiot.” I discovered that Dostoyevsky himself had epilepsy. He began having seizures after he was condemned to death by firing squad and reprieved at that last minute. So I liked that my literary hero Dostoyevsky had written a book with that title. It changed my life. Later I read the Brothers Karamazov. Father Zossima reminded me of my old Chinese friend and mentor, Father Yang.

 I think it was in that book that Dostoyevsky argued that “without God anything is possible.”  His point was that if we accept Nietzche’s point of view, we leave in a meaningless world where chaos reigns.

Around this time my American dream was shattered by my mother’s divorce from the abusive French actor/Hollywood producer. Her life changed. She was no longer the perfect suburban housewife serving martinis to the hollywood crowd.  She took up transcendental meditation and got a job working at the Bodhi Tree bookstore where they sold incense and posters of Ganesh.

My mother had always been goodlooking. 

After a stint as a child actress in B pictures, she had been a Hollywood Starlet as a teenager. When she parted ways with the Marquis of Aubignosc, a number of suitors appeared: there was Australian Actor, Jerry C., author of “Jai Hind!” about India’s struggle for independence. There was the Italian Painter “G.” who did impressionist landscapes in the style of Paul Gaugin.

She dated Jeffrey Hunter, who was Jesus Christ in the The Greatest Story Ever Told. 

Jesus destroyed his life. He complained that he couldn’t walk into a bar, because people would fall on their knees before him and pray to him and ask him for favors. He was trying to make a come back on Star Trek, but after one episode the main part fell to William Shatner. 

 Finally, there was “El Profeta,” a talented singer-composer from Mexico. Everything changed when he came into our lives. 

My mother put the house up for sale. I knew it was happening, but somehow teenagers don’t always pay such good attention to what their parents are up to. I couldn’t believe that our beautiful house in the Pacific Palisades would just disappear. But one day, I came home from school and she was having a garage sale. In short order she was packing things in boxes. My brothers and I would walk to the beach from the house on a lazy Sunday, wending our way down Sunset Boulevard. We would take a shortcut through the Self-Realization Fellowship of Paramahansa Yogananda.

 It was a sprawling property with lots of green grass and apple trees. We would steal apples on the way to the beach. After a long day at the beach we returned home, to find the car packed and ready.

“We’re going to Mexico,” she said. The Prophet beamed a smile from behind the wheel of his apple-green 1958 Chevrolet convertible. She drove the red Chrysler station wagon we had owned since the snows of Connecticut so long ago. My brothers rode with her. I got in the front seat with the “Prophet” and off we rode to Tijuana.

In my youth, I thought there was a need for guiding principles to set my moral compass for life’s journey. As  I look back on six decades, I feel that I have often been  picked up by a tornado in one place and set down, lost in another. Life’s journey follows no set path. It can end at any time. One’s moral compass is oft to no avail.

Guiding principles can carry you so far, but a genuine search for truth forces you to discard easy solutions and simple dogmas, in spite of any affinity for Dostoyevsky. Still in all, in spite of all the cynical bitterness of my façade, I have never lost my sense of wonder. I continue to remain a truth-seeker, baffled by my questions, but filled with joy at the miracle of life.