Updates

It's been quite awhile since I've written an "Update," partly because there has been so little to report. I'm in the mood to write one but am thinking carefully how to proceed; because this is going to be more of a "blog" than an "update".

As the economic crisis has developed and deepened, the country is gradually facing what I faced early in 2007. My home-based video production business was like the miner's canary. If the economy seems at all uncertain, the first thing that small businesses and corporations remove from their marketing budget is that proposed video.

This leads me into thinking about being ahead of my time, the effects of being ahead of my time. It's a paradox. I can't talk about being ahead of my time because no-one can hear me or will believe me, precisely because I am ahead of my time.

When I lost my business early in 2007, I also lost my apartment and my relationship of six years. One of the few honest things she said was that she "didn't get me."

At that time, I had also exhausted all possibilities for promoting "In Another Life," the documentary this website was created to support. I tried everything. It was ahead of its time, also. Taking into account that I had only $1,300 to produce it, compared with, perhaps, $100,000 or $200,000 used to produce most documentaries you see on television, it was technically competitive. That is, given that I didn't believe in cheap tricks like running the camera around a man standing deadpan in his yard, speeding it up and slowing it down, just to "creepify" a scene and have something to show while the narrator says something cynical. Or, how about the scene in one of these shows where the child who remembers a past life is shown with light rays streaming out of his face? Know how they did that? There's a "filter", a setting, in my editing software, Final Cut Pro, called, appropriately enough, "light rays". You hold down the left button of your mouse and you drag "light rays" from the "effects" column onto the video in the preview screen. Carnival time!

But, I digress. While promoting the documentary, I used my real name on the internet. You can see just how much effort I put into it, by Googling my name. The last time I tried it, some six pages of links came up. Unfortunately my name is not "Bob Smith". It's a unique name of Greek heritage. I suspect, but cannot prove, that this destroyed what little chance I had of bootstrapping a home-based business in a highly technical and competitive market in the South. The aforementioned girlfriend, while breaking up with me, had a take on this, too: "Nobody cares." I have to hand it to her that she had an economy with words.

Now, over a year and a half later, and despite her periodically recontacting me wanting to be "best friends" (which sadly, I didn't feel she meant deeply, even if I was the type to be able to do such things), I'm finally more or less recovered from all of that. I find myself looking around for the elusive soulmate, and not finding her.

So there is a whole discussion around soulmates and reincarnation...it would seem to boil down to this. It's all Fate, which is all karma, the result of actions and attitudes in past lives. But the yearning won't leave you alone, so you look even though you know that your looking is irrelevant.

I am far from perfect. Certain strengths and attitudes appear to be fashionable in society. There were periods in society when my particular strengths would have been more in demand. You know, the whole issue of whether a person is a "terrorist" or a "freedom fighter". Are you co-dependent, or do you invest deeply? Are you wanting to be joined at the hip, or do you want a loyal partnership? With each strength there is a hidden weakness, until we perfect all virtues and become like the Buddha.

In general, then, I find myself out of step with society. In some respects I'm ahead of my time; in other respects, I'm simply out-of-step. Throughout the '70's, when I nominally identified with the hippie movement, everyone was liberating themselves sexually and expressing free love with no commitments or attachments. But I was looking for my soulmate, as I had been since well before puberty. I tried drugs, though really-speaking I had been experiencing (or vaguely remembering having experienced) altered states of consciousness before then. Drugs were kind of the carnival version of the symphony I vaguely remembered and wanted to experience again. Though I became psychologically addicted for a couple of years, I felt about them as I felt about flashy special effects editing years later. They were gaudy and coarse somehow; they never could take me where I really wanted to go.

And as for free love; well, sex was certainly tempting because of the closeness I sensed it could lead to with the right person; but I always ruined my chances by getting too serious (and that, too quickly), because I really only ever wanted a soulmate. Just as I really only ever wanted the drugs to be what I was trying to remember and recapture.

What's been coming clearer to me recently is this business of success and matching with society. Being too different--including being too far ahead--is a recipe for rejection. This is the great fear of conformists, and it is, I am finding, a realistic fear. I always thought it was nonsense. Success comes from being just a little ahead of society--not too much ahead. Light waves that are at the top end of what the human eye can perceive are beautiful; light waves that go beyond what the human eye can perceive are simply invisible.

You probably think I'm bragging. What's to brag about? I sold three copies to universities, through Films Media Group, the first half of this year. It sits next to Bill Moyers' films in their catalog. Films Media Group is the oldest and largest company selling media to universities. If "In Another Life" had no merit, if I was imagining all of this, it would not have sold any copies to universities, and it would not be anywhere near Bill Moyers. Bill probably spent $200,000 on each of his films. I spent $1,300. If my film wasn't ahead of its time as I'm suggesting, it wouldn't be there.

Now. In 1971 I first heard of Meher Baba. From 1971 to 1974, I experimented with zen meditation and drugs, and I did a lot of reading. In 1974 I got off drugs (after an awful bad trip at a Greatful Dead concert, 4th of July in Miami), and soon thereafter became a follower of Meher Baba. My 34-year journey has taken me to where I am today, helping to archive his legacy in audio and video.

Inasmuch as it is possible for a human being to gauge such a thing, there is no question for me anymore that Meher Baba was the Buddha of this age. He was also the Christ of this age. Each culture has a term for this Being, who visits us periodically through history.

Well, this isn't unusual, is it? Lots of people follow a teacher who they take to hold that Office. Except that I've somehow found the real one.

So if I wasn't out of step with society before, I certainly am now, when you factor this in. It's not through any great merit of mine that I am now irretrievably ahead of my time. It is because I hitched myself to a star that turned out to be...well, no words are adequate. A rocket.

Meher Baba wrote a book called "God Speaks". It answers every question and points to the depths beyond anything you could ever understand with your intellect. When I was a child, I used to look at the sky and see the Seven Sisters, Pleiades, and I called it my "question mark". It symbolized what I was trying to understand, which I didn't even know what it was I was trying to understand.

There were two things I desperately longed for when I was a child. One was to solve the riddle of my "question mark"; and the other was to find my soulmate.

Well, how likely is this, I have mused, lately--I never found my soulmate, at least not yet--but I did find the answers to my "question mark".

Now, one of the two people who edited that book for Meher Baba was Don Stevens. He's a very interesting fellow. Many years ago he was a top executive in research, with degrees (as I recall) in math and physics, for a major oil company. He got curious, having a scientific background, about paranormal phenomena. Among other people, he became friends with author Stewart Edward White (whose wife, Betty, communicated with White from the other side), and he met Dr. Ian Stevenson. Finally, his search culminated in becoming a Sufi, and that branch of the Sufi's was taken up and "reoriented" by Meher Baba. That's how he came to co-edit "God Speaks".

I asked Don whether he would be willing to be interviewed for "In Another Life", not really expecting him to agree. He did agree, on the condition that he be allowed to give a warning about the use of hypnosis to explore past lives out of curiosity. Don was the only person in the world I would have made such a concession for, but I did make it. When I included Don, and Meher Baba, in my documentary, I knowingly offended 95% of the new-age movement, which was my most likely audience. I threw fame and fortune away, gladly. Don spent time preparing for the interview and gave me well over an hour. You can see a portion of it, which overlaps with the part I used for the film, on this website, now, in the Interviews section.

Don would not let me subtitle him as anything other than a "disciple of Meher Baba". He wouldn't even let me include his degree abbreviations. So when people watch the film they have no idea who they are seeing, or how fitting it is that he tells his story, or how qualified he is to represent the archetypal Westerner encountering Eastern teachings through a genuine Eastern spiritual master (in this case, the Master of all masters).

But they feel it. They feel the weight and depth of his balance between head and heart, and his sincerity.

So, where was I going with all this? That by putting Don, and Meher Baba, in the film, I made sure I was now so far out of step with society--including, new-age society--that no-one would relate to it. Even one professor who briefly championed it, enthusiastically recommending it to 75 of his colleagues, could not understand that Meher Baba had said that (psychedelic) drugs were harmful physically, mentally, and spiritually, and that they were useless in the spiritual quest except perhaps--if and only if you were a sincere seeker--to initially wake you up to the fact that there was, indeed, "something else".

So I lost him, too, and with him, a prominent new-age group he was connected with. In a similar way, I lost almost everybody. Meanwhile, "What the Bleep" creates a stir. I still haven't seen it. It got some of the same work done, just questioning the materialistic paradigm.

Lately, Victor Zammit is doing some good work in that area as well. For years, he and I have both been challenging the notion that materialists hold the high ground of rationality. I remain, apparently, in the background; he is surging ahead into the foreground. And I am pleased for him, and we have cooperated by cross-promoting, and it's just the way it falls out.

I see myself having my influence more often from behind the scenes. It's been months since I've done a radio interview; a couple of years since I've been approached, and I've stopped seeking them out on my own. My website sinks slowly in the search engines, and the number of hits slowly diminishes. But people from all over the world continue to visit the website; three classes in three universities will suddenly be confronted with a bone-jarring contradiction to the materialistic paradigm this year; and on rare occasions, someone will still write me thanking me for the work I'm doing.

My energy now goes to preserving the audio and video materials connected with Meher Baba--oral histories, interviews, speeches, films. I work in obscurity and am paid a stipend. Women don't seem to find anything particularly attractive about me, especially when I can't afford to take them out. I joked with a friend of mine that if I asked a woman out, I would impress her by splurging on "biggie fries". But it's no joke, really. I have fun in my simple way. I actually live a wonderful lifestyle, two blocks from the ocean. In a minute I'm going to cruise around for garage sales. I'll be editing a historical video later today, adding subtitles, for something that will be seen across the world someday, and cherished. It's an interview with a huge revolutionary named Pukar who intended to challenge and expose Meher Baba as a fraud. Finally he ended up seeing Baba at a meeting and was so deeply moved he wrote a note donating all the money he'd been collecting for the poor, as a revolutionary, to Baba for his work with the poor. Then he tucked that note in his clothes, took them off except for a loincloth and stood on them, thus symbolically offering himself and everything he had to Baba. In later years he would go into villages and loudly announce that Meher Baba was the Avatar, and of course he would mostly be ignored or ridiculed.* The revolutionary newspaper he used to print, "Pukar" (literally, the "Cry" or the "Call"), became "Meher Pukar," dedicated to Meher Baba.

Probably not too unlike me in many ways. On the whole, therefore, my ex was correct--"nobody cares". But she was way off-base about why.

What's the point of all this? I'm a good enough writer, from having been a writer in so many past lives, as it seems, that usually I just instinctively wrap up to a point. I have no point today. Somehow I am exactly where I'm supposed to be. That's the only point I can see...make of it what you will. I am not kidding about Meher Baba being the Buddha of this age. If you can't entertain the idea now, I am saving his video and audio legacy so that you can revisit the idea in one or two incarnations. It will be there for you.

*Incidentally, you may think I'm trying to convince you to accept and follow Meher Baba. Actually if I were you I'd think twice about it, because his method is the elimination of the ego, and that means, you'd better be ready to stomach a large dose of humiliation.

Music opening this page: "High Landrons," Eric Johnson (Ah Via Musicom album)
All I can say is, if you have a chance to see Eric in concert, don't pass it up...
sell the car and hitch to the concert if you have to.