Ferrocement was yet another collected methodology of structuring thin shell architectural products, like the flower kitchen counter in the photo above. All of our work spaces and gardens were always in various stages of succession, and never finished in a salable condition.

An intuitive writer once suggested that domed roofing focuses cosmic knowledge into a home. Even fading translucency allows sun light to shine through, and older plants manage to tolerate the dimming effect. The plain lighting effect is very serviceable and we always loved translucency, despite the difficulties we bore as innovators.

An attic heat-pump was originally wanted; however, the search in the market place, (consisting of printed phone books for each individualized city), surprisingly lacked such products or services for my extended area, (as of 1980).

As the years passed by, I was to increasingly verify the horrible repression of good startup products, which were intimidated by jealous competitors. For example the heat pump products specifically sold for house heating were blocked from consumer markets until long after the year 2000. I had wanted to adapt such a heat pump to absorb the heat of our attic dome after 1980; however, innovative manufacturers were prevented from marketing the equipment. Actual commercial efforts were factually suppressed as documented and explained here.

The same website is extensively organized to explain utter disorder of our world. As I see it, mankind is mislead by the powers of hate, which infect mankind, until he heals. The professionally written essays promote healing of our planet.

Forty years later, the original dome sheathing remains intact and also becomes hazier underneath. Subsequently added layers periodically renewed its weather proofing. Light strength decreased while the insulation value increased.

Alda had spent decades studying and working with hardy perennials inside and outside, and initially through rock gardening and other fragrant perennial seed exchanges. We let natural succession crowd out areas for periods of time, until we got around to clearing out the invasive weeds and cleaning up construction wastes.

Here is a funny analogy of mankind's life conditioning. We live in a sky dome evolving a soul's existence, with new layers of rebirth added over the old ones.

Lifetime after lifetime, we experience it as many times as necessary, before developing consciousness to higher levels beyond the dimmer stages passing by. We evolve through the trials and errors of mankind's evolution.

However, not so fast, as the ethos of profiteering literally enslaves populations, for power and glory, lavished only towards top, and by attrition through successive ages, by misguiding the status quo, which gradually reaps the ecological devastation, from a wrongheaded classism sown, and forgotten ages passing by. We can improve on this.

Reincarnation was thoroughly suppressed by the western power-mongers, even stemming from the emperors who promoted tedious theologies of the past. A popular attitude asserts, "you only live once", so you might as well ignore the wasted resources and pollution, with quips like "not in my backyard".

Sadly in the 2000s, the gross ecological debt is politically diverted from tyrannical mismanagement, and its unaddressed pollutions. Then it is billed to the public, through taxation, and depletes the public resources, while ignoring its polluting culpability, traceable to instigators at the top, or irresponsible ignorance of silent partners.

My consciousness evolved slowly, painstakingly sorting through various illusions. The grounding of physical labor combined with study of existence through a variety of more and less relevant books and sources, and also by striving for common sense, that is, a sense of facts, and facts which we must personally verify within nature.

Did we inherit traits from ancestral genetics alone? Or had we actually retained traits as fragments of memories, from past life experiences?

Teaching this kind subject matter is nearly a forbidden even as a hypothesis of knowledge, due to complex zeitgeist-agendas, which dominate the public mind ad academia.

Mankind has been offered assistance many times, but the desires that motivate the buyer, can sometimes misguide, and the will to develop knowledge is then fumbled, and this has spoiled the the grounds for greater understanding of life and its necessary purposes.

Robotic parroting without self development, instead of discovering firmer consciousness, has stagnated men over many lifetimes. Does the man get stuck in dull patterns, life after life, until better patterns are tried?

Consciousness development liberates mankind while the shadowy power of monopolization deplores its loss of unaware slaves. Decades passing, of internet bloggers is sharing countless ways to live more freely, according to personalized lifestyle types. These are just first steps to sorting out what will motivate succeeding generations.

Entrapment by personalized, slavish disabilities of us all, has been gradually dissected and quietly remedied, through incarnated human benefactors, including the best scientists and cultural leaders, (improving the opportunities for human evolution).

Overly used emotional entrapments have ingrained cumbersome attachments. Knowing that the new awareness of ecology should lead us all away from the war economy, challenges us to test unfamiliar substitutions, which could replace the industrial havoc.

I'm thankful for the freedom to attempt innovations and yet decades later, to find little shared interest in this kind of work. The Socratic realization, to the effect "that we know nothing worth knowing" was a better realization, and this was hardly heard at all, as evidenced by hardened obsessions with delusory emotionality, (including my own).

For a while "Cap-it-all" green roofing became a business dream. Apparently the raw concept could not sell-- "What? You want a translucent dome for an attic?" "What, you bother with domes when sheathing is flat?" The visionary ignores those issues.

Solar plastics do turn hazy, filtering out wanted sun rays and wearing out in that process, but testing its many other benefits for tomorrow's translucent-materials, was our worthwhile sacrifice.

General construction materials and processes ignore the waste streams produced on the whole, which increase the bulk of disposable materials, (and entropic waste in general). This is compared with conservational life styles which never taught at large.

From a small budget standpoint, cedar 1X4s were hand-laminated for efficient structuring. I was able to handle and place laminated arches with up to 25 ft. lengths, (7.6 meters), single-handedly.

The whole 42 ft. diameter dome, including the plastic sheathing came to $3,000, (the approximate 1980 prices for materials).

Our poorly controlled darkroom for 35mm film blurred most photos except for a few colored film rolls, sent out for postcard size prints.

By 1990 or so, the patched together image above, (a widened, spliced together view mostly bordering the town road), looked like this (from our dome top). Learning and laboring to restore the soils was gratifying but still needed outside income from jobs to pay for its added expenses.

The energy to work it all out was only more recently, fully appreciated, to come from the emotional world, which can be studied as the motivation and driving power for all human work, which physically sustains human life.

I needed to study a very wide range of explanations to understand human emotions, as its resulting energies are not sufficiently explained by themselves, nor by academia.

Here is where this writing must introduce the inner core of life's motivation, and portray how long it took to humanly understand any of the unidentified human states, which apparently, really are emotions.

A dictionary says: "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others, etc..", all of which presents a super wide range of states of being, which are not yet formalized in psychology.

It took a lifetime to cross examine the thin threads of possible truths, which could be found. Even given a good childhood and an early start of freer, moderate sustenance, even then, the energizing vitality was also susceptible to distracting arbitrariness.

Popular vibrations can easily stalemate the soul, and drown all innate potentiality. The big power trips of careerism are also very distracting, so that learning some humility preserves a little progress for the soul.

A peaceful period with amnesty for U.S. war resisters occurred in 1970s enabling all kinds of freer discourse, to engage the learned of academia, and separately to criticize the abusive authoritarians; however, the emotional world of feelings and attitudes too easily fell into the leisure found with peace.

Meanwhile barbaric forces of unseen powers, never stopped, and instead perpetuated a less noticeable crescendo of perpetual wars to inaugurate the new century, with an effectively stealthy psyops, (which might target anyone). All of which divides and confuses human loyalty, when we need unity first and foremost.

The image above represents an experimental concept of ringed reinforcement. It was gradually realized as valuable principle, applicable to the experimental enersearch list of projects. It was tested in different forms, to help balance the physical scrabble of life.

From youth, alternative paradigms and symbols, as found in spiritual books had strongly motivated my drive to search for knowledge, as did one amazing adventure story, which locates an authentic ancient brotherhood, in the Himalayan mountain range, administered by benign and enlightened teachers.

Tyrannical leadership has always jealously opposed such teaching, so as to maintain covert, if not overt slavery, over a nation or over an empire, by distorting the public emotionality, with uncounted devices.

The nameless influences behind the scenes subdue the zeitgeist of all times, and most insidiously, by complicating the approach to "true knowledge", instead of simplifying this particular approach to necessary knowledge.

The many yous you are, are normally observable emotional changes, where the personality adjusts to the differential contexts, (and the 'yous' means the plural states of you, as the moods or the attitudes change, from one point in time to another).

This is a handy sense of understanding the personal self and is not found in the mainstream. It is a perspective approach to relax the useless internal chatter, and refocus the mind, and disconnect thought from emotional attachments, for those who can entertain or explore the unrecognized states of self.

A particular book "Meetings With Remarkable Men", by G.I. Gurdjieff, was enjoyably understandable both for thought and for emotional drive, as it harmonized the preferable symbols all into one manageable whole.

It advanced some bold ideas addressing the advancing psychology, (leading up to the mid 1900s), providing some options to establishmentarianism.

Gurdjieff's deeper teachings, brought from afar, about the many selves deserving recognition, the "emotional self" and "self-remembering" were initially missed by me due to the busy body passions of the the 1970s and the lack of so focussed a community as the book described.

Only four decades later could I find the closer semblance of guidance, as could barely be recalled from Gurdjieff, through the free exchange of information on the internet. The long endurance tests for rationality could finally find a fit.

The best explanation of human existence was more comprehensively explained by Pythagorean Hylozoics, (finally found here, with gratitude, and only in 2018).

Its long rooted teachings of "true knowledge" are attributed to an internationally hidden brotherhood, long existing throughout history, (and not to be confused with any other link or source.

It wasn't until after many years of the global internet development, that multiple, independent resources could readily appear, and after that the seeker could compare multiple comprehensive texts, and do this from a remote home.

Excessive reading and overly intense study was easily balanced here by living a physically active life and a modestly sociable life, and that was mostly found in the service industry as a small contractor.

For decades I was stuck with only loose fragments of "true knowledge" borrowed and smudged in between other distractions, which confused the search.

The Philosopher’s Stone by Henry T. Laurency http://laurency.com/, written in a studious form, was preliminarily read at first, to gauge its content and wide extent.

Skeptical for months and accustomed to let downs, new explanations of existence are gradually assessed. A general confidence of validity grew from the likes of the following excerpts:

2 THE ESOTERIC WORLD VIEW " ....Ignorance acquiring knowledge is a search that for eons means a roving, until insight and understanding finally find the way to apply the knowledge of reality and life expediently."

A whole cosmic system promised to make some sense through Larency's distinctive hylozoics. These are much too contextually detailed to grasp quickly. Succeeding reads are required to sink it all in. Next from:

3 ESOTERIC LIFE VIEW "...Consciousness is one, only one, a unity, the unity of all. Development means, as seen from the consciousness point of view, expansion of consciousness through the merging of the individual self – with its self-identity intact – into greater and greater units of consciousness, until cosmic consciousness has been achieved. Unity does not imply any abolition of individual freedom. On the contrary, it means increased freedom. Because the merging into ever vaster units of consciousness means greater insight into the worlds of material reality, greater understanding of life and its expressions, greater knowledge of the law."

For now a comprehensive set of readily downloaded books are available for deeper study. I got permission to convert the digital texts into mp3 audio recordings, (for personal use only). The texts are easily converted by apps or software which has better computerized voices. The options vary as time passes, but computerized texts vocally read to me finally embrace the suddenly available books of truer knowledge.

Rather than revolutionary, these freely available books clarify all of man's involutionary problems of life, which are said to have stagnated too long, in terms of unprogressive incarnations, of rebirths where, by force of bad habits we backwardly developed our societies.

Involution is a long term schedule of repetitive birthing into this world, (for us on this world and for other races on other worlds). It is well worth grasping the mechanics of this phenomena, in addition to grasping the purpose of it all!

Backwardness in society lingers only due to the bad habits, which dwell or which sow too far away from unity. Therefore we reap the consequential repulsive effects. As souls may repel others in one life, and then in a subsequent life, receive the back swing of repulsion as, some sort of matching effect in another life, apparently until tiring and overcoming power trips of repulsion as personalities with bodies.

Thanks to science, some progress is made, and leisure was increased for all, for self developments! Sadly, scientism gets in the way of self developments, with greedy hidden agendas, to the unwary. May science discover the error of supporting glory and power, and instead liberate the scientist from the fetters of glory and power.

"... It is man, who in his almost total ignorance of life fancies that he can judge everything, who so far has all but made a mess of everything. When will he realize that with all his technology and civilization he knows nothing worth knowing when it comes to life? ..." (http://www.laurency.com An excerpt from: Knowledge of Life Three).

Far beyond recited archeology of ancient Greece, hylozoics imparts the Sokratean realization, that as a man, one...

"knows nothing worth knowing, that man on his own is not in a position to acquire a knowledge of the goal of existence and of the method of reaching that goal. He realizes the insufficiency of religion, philosophy, and science in that respect. " http://www.laurency.com Excerpt from Knowledge of Life Two

Consciousness studies have been a touchy subject, due to the rarity of comprehensive, system thinking, which has too long been unimportant to the sponsors of educational institutions.

Laurency's sudden appearance should not be confused with anything found in the pop culture. There are always profiteers and borrowers, misstating and somehow publishing flashy words and claims, at the expense of higher truths, and this can mislead us. I have been mislead many times, but with perseverance got on to better tracks.

I was caught up in various kinds or these mixed vibrations, introduced into our times, which sapped some years, and which delayed self realization, but instead of complaint, I suggest that alertness can be developed and well used.

My work of the 1980s through the 2020s is crudely posted at links behind each thumbnail on my linked index page.

 

My parents both worked all day, so I was left alone to explore outside instead, (from a very young age). I tried to escape school indoctrination but was fortunate to have some good teachers, who also found ways to call me back from cloud nine. They did try, but I was more interested in nature of the outdoors, like the valley between my school and my home.

I left home to find my independent way in 1967 at age 18, officially a graduate from The Overseas School of Rome, (OSR, an expat high school). In my childhood explorations, I found a washout in this valley pictured below, and the erosion had revealed triangular shaped bricks, rare even for ancient Roman archeology.

I had a childhood mystical experience possibly to show the impermanence of life. I have since learned, that the larger area became a nature preserve, according to google maps.

Before digital cameras existed, this clear print was hand made with wet chemicals and manual dial settings, (by our classmate- photographer).

This particular valley was a regular hangout for the nature boys, and childhood friends, forever lost in the human shuffling of changing times and locations.

I situationally avoided the 50th reunion with my old, (twelfth grade) classmates, held in 2017. I had chosen a low maintenance life style instead, far removed from the status quo.

This detachment liberates the mind and soul. Considering that the earth is like a sinking ship, could not fit such proud reunion ceremonies, as proven by private emails which could not approach deeper subject matters.

The Club of Rome, with its activities of 1967 could never be imagined at OSR, in 1967, nor anywhere until more recent internet disclosures have been reported in the mainstream.

The international implications seem impossible to discuss very rationally, even when its long hidden agendas are partly revealed, because the power struggles and factions are forever shuffled to confuse the observer. There are observers in our world.

Parents may try their best to find constructive environments for their children, but the psychopathically dominated world forces work at selling "fake truths".

The lies are well concealed inside corner stones, of otherwise sturdy foundations. This fakery ultimately instigates class warfare, which sets back the family of man. We need peace.

Alternative Schooling

To temporarily find a better fit for me, away from bad influences in my youthful acquaintances , mom had sent me to The Mountain School in Vershire, Vermont, (TMS, in its 2nd scholastic year, with 14 students total, in 1965), a school which was actually building itself!

The required construction and other job activities were excellent attractions for me, but the physical labor was not academically credited.

We began renovation of the old dairy barn that year, gradually transforming it into classrooms, followed by gutting out hay loft, to open up the ceiling of a library room. These work jobs involved a couple of hours in the afternoon.

I suffered a key classroom discussion, never to expect much from schooling again. I challenged the teaching, that life was defined by the condition of self-replication.

I proposed that a case of a factory which replicated an identical factory within itself would fit that official definition. Was that not a condition of self replication?

Robots were usually considered an unacceptable fantasy, in the 1960s, apparently. Yet today it is more or less an acceptable subject for discussion. There were no such factories at that time, so the student was duly invalidated.

Academics lost hold of me there and I was to be kicked out of TMS for the graduating year, (twelfth grade). Memorized lessons with boring content were ignored, while other legitimate and keen interests were not available to engage with. The social education was excellent, however.

Thanks to my mother, I was given a rare chance to experience an unusual British school, in the fall of 1966, (Chilton Cantello School, in Somerset , England). Again the curriculum was strictly memorization outside of my interests. Students were of mixed international origins, which at least expanded the global perspective, but no stimulus for memorization occurred. I had to bicycle my way for hours each way, to attend the SAT examinations, (for US Students), which ranked me in the lowest score range.

Fond memories.

I was motivated by some aspects of the English culture, but returning to OSR in January 1967 placed me under an Irish poet, for an English teacher. He disliked my major essay, where I wrote about Bob Dylan's lyrics. I graduated with the lowest possible grades that year, but was very glad for the release.

Thankfully, a benefit could be found concerning disqualifications from formal schooling. This nurtured some rationale to avoid the robotization of indoctrination generally. Yet with imperialism dominating in those years, male youths had either to join "the draft" with its blinding patriotism, or else to capitulate with rote memorization of schools.

As a U.S. citizen, I had been accepted by a new, short-lived college in Brattleboro, Vermont– A student deferment from the draft was here legally obtained, as I wanted to repatriate to my homeland at any cost. This small startup college needed students, and it was not that my high-school records were acceptable. I worked in a nearby, antiquated and bygone paper mill for most of that preceding summer.

I had no clue how college would help with life, nor where else to develop knowledge. Just as the school year began, a new friendly student arriving there, Chris, inspired me to drop out of college and go to New York City with him.

His sophistication and his self confidence intrigued me much more than the college staff, or other students. He seemed to discuss systems of knowledge, outside of standardized matriculation. That sounded like a welcome possibility.

Alternative To College

A loosely guided adventure seemed very promising. I went tentatively at first but never actually returned to attend the college. I wanted to learn the ropes of human independence.

His stated purpose at the college was simply to get the standard, legal Draft deferment, from the ongoing Vietnam War (as this happened in the fall of 1967).

I was intrigued by Chris' adventurous enterprising and by the cultural awakening, of my generation, which resisted war. This view of world peace and youthful idealism, was motivating and deserved closer examination. Sorting out the finer ideals were not clear, but New York City promised to engage me.

NYC was overwhelming at 18. Chris was my best contact there, and he was looking into a specific opportunity of "consciousness expansion", a possible life purpose which was then popularized in the alternative media, and which was all too easily exploited, and it was distorted as well. Decades of searching and unravelling followed.

We met with his wealthy friend Steve, a son of a Madison Avenue mogul, whose family contacts could find a low cost apartment to rent, in the lower east side of NYC, and one which had been abandoned and misused for years with dusty, rifled remains of the former tenant, but this particular find included a most remarkable, leathery looking, etched, plastered wall, a relic left behind by the long departed, previous tenant.

This was increasingly inspiring. Hard adventure seemed like a better education. They had no cash in their pocket being city-wiser, and so I was asked to pay out some scarce cash dollars for the down payment, to rent the very interesting, small apartment on Bowery Street, (E 3rd street).

The apartment had been abandoned and disused for decades. We started to haul trash out, but... I also needed to get my few belongings from Vermont and first do a small carpentry job elsewhere, plus resolve my life plans.

By the time I got back to NYC, after a month or so, my new friends convinced me to study this Scientology thing, which they had been trying out during the previous year, at its international head quarters in England.

This enigma sounded promising as it offered immediately practical exercises which were boastfully promoted. At that time my new friends were admiringly speculating about the higher realms of attainment, which were claimed. These of course would cost thousands of dollars, which would super charge one to live very well, with newly found powers, (and money).

I found some parts of books interesting to scan through, and some of the exercises were immediately helpful, but the overly zealous behaviors of its staff members had to be avoided.

The older e-meter and its processes were intriguing and the preliminary course materials actually taught a few readily usable pointers, mostly about effective communication skills, and a tiny bit about self healing.

An advancing teaching and practice focussed on emotional-resolution skills, all of which were mapped out in a chart of human emotions, from the lowest up to the higher emotions. The big lesson here, was that contemporary psychology had not bothered to technologize the emotional scale numerically, but rather only this boastful source knew it all.

Academic teachings seemed to lack any chart for scaling through anything like emotions. These several preliminaries affirmed the sense that one needed this kind of advanced information, to live a productive life.

The stylish attributes of my older friends captivated my interest. One incident even cured a flue like condition for me at one point, (when an uplifting job was offered to me, at a low emotional point, of boring employment).

This incident was promising, as it surpassed conventional practices of medicine, which required longer convalesce and were therefore inferior. I had actually dissolved a flu in one instant, as a sudden moment's outcome.

I became fascinated with the inducements like "total control over matter, energy, space, and time" or "being at cause". Practical routines helped me overcome shyness and to use bolder communications skills, but the higher level claims were untouchable.

Boastful elitism was red flagged, and I struggled with that atmosphere of profiteering. I was working at a minimum wage job, thanks to Steve's family connections, but we soon lost touch, and suddenly my next job promised some sort of advancement.

Chris handed me his job position at a nutritionally advanced food company, recommending that I take his place. At that time in the late 1960's, this revolutionary food company occupied two floors of a warehouse at 171 Duane St, (very close to the WTC site, then just beginning construction of its first few floors).

The neighborhood was wall to wall warehouse-commerce by day, with big trucks docking and straddling the streets crosswise, and deserted by all but some homeless men at night. Pay would depend on performance, and that was OK for a start.

Infinity Foods belonged to a bold innovator, Howard Rower who calmly guided and managed those of us who would do the labor of milling grains and packaging imported foods from Japan, like miso and Tamari soy sauce, both of which came in real wooden kegs, and to primitively distribute these unadulterated foodstuffs.

I worked hard in this ware house, and learned to publish the catalog, get them quickly offset printed and sent off, take and deliver orders by phone and letters, process grains and bottling, deliver around NYC by our severely dented Citroën station wagon, and receive arriving deliveries, fix up the warehouse, and manage the dry good storage on the second and third floors. The blue faced building was the headquarters at 171 Duane Street,NY.

A half caged freight elevator, (accessible on the side street), connected the upper floors with street access. The fourth floor had Howard's remarkable collection of curiosities and the lager part of the floor was an open airy space used for silk screening and artistic operations. A couch provided my sleeping quarters. It seems he rented the fifth floor to a painter of giant, inspiring canvasses, as all these floors were interconnected without internally locked barriers.

I worked without a paycheck, drawing just enough cash to fuel the company car, with little change left over for anything, but there was a very vague promise of eventual profit sharing, were I to have stayed indefinitely.

I worked there from the spring until the fall of 1968 , because it was educational about all life. It was at the forefront of whole-food marketing, of that time, but just half a generation too early to broadly expand its reach, because "the baby boomer generation" was yet to establish families and to pay higher prices for healthier foods.

In the 1960s, depleted foods were completely dominant and the whole or unprocessed foods were unheard of, or considered backward or silly. Sadly, these depleted foods just continued getting worse, with passing time.

The popular antiwar paradigm had ushered in the ordinarily ignored health lore of all times, and was now just barely finding support from risk taking businessmen. This felt uplifting.

I loved the company logo which boasted "nothing added, nothing removed", (way ahead of the times!) We once picked up a directly imported Japanese shipment directly from the docks in Brooklyn. (I doubt those lovely wooden kegs of soy products are to be found any more). We also specialized in whole grains like brown rice, etc..

I gladly learned about Scientology's "Org Board" as a business technology, but I never did see how these things could serve small business.

Howard's main dedication was to his Scientology franchise, during that time, so I would phone him regularly for instructions, and his west village office felt like a hub of advancement.

That summer, Howard or Howie and his wife Mary, had reached the advanced "Operating Thetan" state, an alledgedly supernatural state. I got to chauffeur them to and from the airport for this short termed eventful happening.

However evidence was lacking of supernatural advancement and feats, and on reflection, some of his business tricks seemed possibly questionable. I was just nineteen and had so much to learn about what is really right.

Howie owned his own franchise on 10th Street, just a few paces from 5th Ave, and it nevertheless felt rewarding to work with him, in an old fashioned, undocumented style, as the sole worker, for most of my time there, (from the spring until fall of 1968).

Howie had operated with an attractively calm, knowledgable air, allowing me a wide latitude of freedom at Infinity Foods, but the promotional and sales operations had lacked the needed force of huge, initial investments, to pay for introductory discounts and widespread advertising.

Little could I realize back then that Howie was to expose the fallacy of Scientology Organizations, by exposing the absurdity of their higher offices! (See this PDF, which I discovered in 2020, where it entertainingly describes his interesting life and associates).

While my new found community in NYC promoted a total freedom from disease and drugs, the rest of the world appeared backward with their inferior dependencies. Even today in the 2020s, the monopolies of commerce and industry, appear to promote disease care rather than promote healthy living.

There were a dozen small health food stores in NYC and only one restaurant to which we delivered our products-- It was called The Paradox Restaurant, on East 7th street, of that time. I could afford healthy dinners there when delivering orders all about town.

I loved The Paradox Restaurant and its tiny New York backyard, with an advanced, handmade, structural framework, an actual geodesic dome, all hand bolted together, when slide rulers were used for the math, even before hand held calculators were commonly available.

The menu was mostly macrobiotic with deliciously fresh vegetables cooked with Infinity's dry goods and its Japanese Imports. A couple of times I earned my meal by washing dishes, to save money.

The Paradox patrons quietly affirmed mental acuity, amid a melting pot of a big city. There were some alternative thinkers discussing eastern meditations, and western mysticism, to contrast subjects of the cultural revolution.

At one point, I was hitch hiking in Connecticut on a weekend break from Infinity. My long hair and woven basket full of my clothing, made me fit the moment. A young and happy couple with two very young children were just returning from Maine.

The mom was driving at that point and said she liked my travel-basket, so that is why she suddenly decided to stop their converted school bus, with its antique school insignia. They said they were starting a commune up north.

I asked if I could qualify and was essentially promised acceptance. It took a longer than expected delay for them to write a reply which said they were still preparing their rural property, in Appleton, Maine, (which had the feeling of this photo). Even after duly giving notice to Howie of my departure, I got stuck, adrift in NYC for some long additional months of other less compelling experiences.

Around June or July of 1969 I finally moved to Maine. I was graciously notified upon arrival, that the commune plan had just been cancelled. That I could fix up an abandoned shack on their property, with their support for materials and possibly some food, in exchange for the physical labor, but none of the hippy-commune image should be mentioned to anyone, as this label was complicating neighborly relationships. (Thanks to big media for defaming peace lovers who opposed the raging Viet Nam war).

Without today's internet, I had only paper publications and no TV, no FM radio, and no telephone, (driving a half hour to a pay phone). My host's copies of The Whole Earth Catalogue and printed media allowed me to examine the perspectives of our cultural revolution, as there was barely any other contemporary resources to learn from.

Rural isolation was both helpful avoiding the delaying influences, and for attempting self disciplinary and self inventive habits. Other than those disciplines, the emotional world with all of its irresistible influences was ever ready to distract and entice at the off balance moment.

Only much later in 2018 could I find the ancient hylozoic knowledge which aptly formulates a higher knowledge, the basis of which was too early to release in Plato's time. Plato's own deeper sources reserve and release teachings gradually to our world, and currently it remains for us in the early 2020s, to look at the vulnerability of our democracy.

An interpretation can be made, that Sokrates was sentenced to death for "impiety towards authority", by freeing and opening minds to ask penetrating questions. Could covert fascism of the 2020s, wrongly condemn a minority, for their peaceful resistance against medical tyranny?

Plato's freely available books can be downloaded, by copy-pasting this title, "Apology Also known as The Death of Socrates by Plato", and pasting it into your search engine, or Google. The deeper lesson of this book sheds needed light on the problems of today.

Back to my story of settling in Maine...

During the fall of 1969, and by extraordinary chance I found another unpaid job of chauffeuring two striking heirs (of my age), around the Camden Maine social scene. The older brother was a listless, recovering drug addict. The younger one had smashed up a lavish sport car, and had lost his driver's license. They didn't object to the temporary arrangement.

Their gracious mother trusted me and primarily my affirmations against drugs, (which still hung with me in those years). Yet, as the officially promoted tradition insists, alcohol was their boring focus and hopes of business sponsorship proved ineffectual. I was grateful though, to meet my age group.

I was soon shingling houses and framing 2X4s along the snowy, windy Maine coast, soulfully avoiding the mandatory patriotism of that day, which glorified the war against tiny Viet Nam. Providing one did right by others, there was no conflict regarding this attitude.

The priority was to find tradesmen jobs at better than minimum wage, or to find bartering arrangements, to enable settling somewhere on the land. In our twenties, the available jobs were fewer than our suddenly increased numbers of job seekers, (of the WWII baby boom). Job opportunities were not always immediately available and creative or experimental building ideas were far less in demand.

The ensuing phase of life is at the beginning of this writing, (click here).

Failure of society to evolve beyond the dependencies on systematized- destructiveness, (which is commodified hate), is edging the physical and emotional worlds towards annihilation.

There has always existed the simpler solution of prioritizing unity over all proceedings, but instead mankind has accepted resolutions rooted in forms of hate.

Getting over hate universally can solve all problems in the long run, and may this writing commiserate with laborers in the innovative fields of our time.

Thankfully, a ruralist decentralization could potentially provide a detour around the system constraints.

Mankind could work on a friendlier side of life, as all life is one.

Decentralizing from hateful situations is an effective form of emancipation, for one and for all.

 

 

 

Bo's Home Page 'Index' which contains more of my projects dating from the 1990s up to the 2020s. New pages are occasionally added there.

Copyright 2010- 2022, by Bo Atkinson