Tale 20

The Hoha Theory

Carl Jung near the end of his unbelievably productive life

For years Dr. Lorenzo would get skittish when the pundit crowd who loved him for his The Remaking would bring up Tales of Waring. One time he shared with Sammy Martinez some thoughts on this, when he was visiting Sammy in his ancient adobe hovel in San Juan Pueblo.

He had struggled, he said, to understand what it might have been – about the two books – that caused such different reactions. He rarely felt un-comfortable talking about The Remaking with anyone, fan or critic, crowd or individual, and in fact found it invigorating usually for everyone involved, regardless of the amount of disagreement. Yet he often disliked the atmosphere that developed if Tales of Waring came up. The mood stirred by discussion of Tales of Waring would turn sour just as fast with dedicated fans as with critics, which upset him more. It had surprised him at first, and disappointed him. He didn’t like feeling uncomfortable around people who had put as much energy into his writing and him as his fanatical fans, the ‘Remaking pundits’, had. That was why he gave the thing so much thought and came up with a theory about the difference between the two books, he said.

And he hoped, he added, that he hadn’t just invented his theory to make himself feel better, the way he had imagined parts of his Fred Waring fairy tale in order to feel better. But if he had, he grinned, the pundits would point it out to him, he was certain. And he said, still grinning, that with them around all the time, as they had been constantly, ever since 1980 when they had found him finally, he was much less likely to produce anything as difficult for them to stomach as Tales of Waring had been; and he tacked on, “I hope.”

He said to Sammy that he believed the difference in people’s behavior when discussing the two books had come from the difference in the level of heroism he had shown in the two situations. He thought the atmosphere of The Remaking was closer to that of myth or epic, where heroics were grander and more awe-inspiring, or at least more dramatic; while the style of Tales of Waring was closer to fairy tale, where a lead character might turn into a frog. A fairy tale’s heroics were more prosaic and less flattering than those of myth and epic, in other words. Therefore it inspired less awe, and when people talked about a fairy tale, therefore, they felt more free to express a wider range of emotions. People generally, he felt, even harshest critics, tended to treat him and his writing, both, with more respect when discussing The Remaking than when discussing Tales. And that level of respect, which actually approached awe sometimes, curbed any license in showing emotion, even if they hated the book with a passion, as many did The Remaking.

Such people, he said, had often told him they didn’t agree with his conclusions or maybe anything about ‘The Remaking’, but they had gone to the trouble to read it and they respected him for what he had gone through to write it, even if he had been ‘crazy’ or ‘psychotic’ or ‘super-drugged’ as some psych pundits said. They respected him for having ‘gone crazy’ and come out the other side still walking and thinking well enough to look ‘normal’ to millions of people all over the world when answering a TV talk show host’s questions about it. Whereas, he said, he had never been invited to even mention ‘Tales of Waring’ on a TV program of any kind.[1]

But Bill Blackburn had, though, he added, because he was the hero of that story, not mj lorenzo. ‘Young Dr. mj was a fool in that book’, as Dr. Lorenzo put it to Sammy, and that was why the atmosphere sometimes broke down when Tales of Waring came up, especially among his most ardent followers, who thought he should be grandly heroic every minute of his life.      

And later still he told Sammy that young mj had been an ‘intuitively wise fool’, nevertheless, because Tales of Waring, while hugely controversial, had stirred up a lot of the kind of rancorous free-wheeling debate so desperately needed if the human race was to survive.

At any rate, though the pundits begged Sammy repeatedly after 1995 to please find out from Dr. Lorenzo, ‘by hook or by crook’, what part Richard Nixon and the FBI might have played in causing the ‘craziness’ of the young mj’s first interview with the Blackburns, Sammy had never succeeded in getting an answer out of his friend, whether for skittishness or for other reasons.

But when the same group asked Sammy in 2000 to please dig up more about what part the Dr.’s friend Joey might have played in ‘causing the seeming craziness of the first night’s interview, other than maybe drugs’, Dr. Lorenzo, for some reason, decided to email Sammy a well thought out response. And Sammy passed it along to the pundits word for word because the Dr. had revealed things in it none of them had known, most likely. And he knew they always wanted to know everything, of course, that could possibly BE known about mj lorenzo’s works, and about him, mj.   

........................................

Hail Chief Sammy of the San Juan Nation.

Here’s the scoop soup on Joey.

He called me at Spring Lake. We had talked a lot on the phone over the years since we first met in ‘69, but now it was the middle of April, 1973, and he had gotten the crazy idea he wanted to remember and honor by celebrating the famous weekend when we had met, The Candlelight Procession in November, ‘69. He wanted to do it on May First, the two-year anniversary of ‘May Day’, the very last of the really big, Vietnam-war-stopping, anti-war demonstrations. I did too, I said, and I insisted he come to the Poconos, but he demanded I go to his guru’s ashram in Washington, D.C., and we wouldn’t give in, either of us. So after an outrageously erudite and ridiculous argument we had to compromise on Philly, halfway between.

He threw his backpack in a locker at the bus station. He was happy Philly was warm so he could dress like he always preferred at that age (21 or 22), everywhere and year round, sandals and no shirt. We got a paper to see what was happening and we went into a dark, rancid art theater near 13th and Arch to see that famous documentary of a BBC reporter interviewing Carl Jung, the world’s second most famous psychoanalyst after Freud, but the better educated and informed of the two, and definitely the greater philosopher and scholar, as Joey and I agreed.

the former campus of the C.G. Jung Institute of Analytic Psychology

Gemeindestrasse 27, Zürich, Switzerland

where mj lorenzo studied (and fell in love) during the spring of 1969

and was psychoanalyzed by Marie-Louise von Franz

whose sub-specialty was fairy tales

Jung was about eighty in it, old but sagely distinguished, with white hair and mustache, and smoking his famous pipe. He still had a few good years left. Toward the end of the interview the BBC man asked him something everyone had been wondering for years: “Do you believe in God?” He puffed on his pipe, sitting in his favorite chair in his book-lined study in Küsnacht, and the smoke floated around his white hair and mustache in a way you couldn't forget. He blinked. (It was a chilling delay.) He puffed again, letting the smoke curl, and squinted at the interviewer: "Yes."

It was shocking!

“He couldn’t have been a Buddhist!” I whispered to Joey.

"Jung was a mystic!" he said too loud for a movie theater. He was as excited as I was: "Jung’s ‘God’ included Buddha because mystics include everything in everything; everything means something else to a mystic!"

I understood this crazy sounding statement as decidedly accurate. A month before, on perfect mystical schedule, I had come across a similarly mind-boggling and mystical notion as I was reading Joseph Campbell: Tat tvam asi. I’d given it thought because I'd been wishing for years I could understand mysticism better: I'd been suspecting more and more, I might be inclined to it in my thinking and beliefs, somehow, maybe even innately. Joseph Campbell had said the expression was Sanskrit for ‘You are that’.[2]

"It makes no sense," I said as Joey led past Wanamaker's, aimed straight for what was left of the anti-establishment hippy bellbottom boutique district. He'd been in Philly for three hours and already knew where the seediest corners were.

"Yes, of course," he blinked his dark eyes standing at 13th and Chestnut, "that's why everyone in India understands it."

"How would you know this shit at twenty-one? At least I can admit I'm thirty and lost!"

“I am too, sometimes,” he admitted with a smile and a lilt in his voice, “but not this minute.” He would say such things warmly, endearingly; playfully; cutely; not arrogantly. At the risk of sounding fay, I’d put it this way: he would say something like this with a cute affection that made you melt. He would look into your eyes, smiling warmly, disarmingly, and talk to you with a voice as loving as a woman’s yet without ever sounding like anything but the man he was. And he was much more like this AFTER he met the guru than before. The intellectuality of 69 had turned into loving intellectuality, thanks to the guru he started following in ‘71.

We watched a lady in a mink climb into a black limo hauling a big Wanamaker's bag; then we swept across eight frenzied lanes of Broad St. right into a pack of chanting Hare Krishnas wafting pink and yellow robes and pumping timbrils like street fairies.

"It's exactly the opposite of 'Either/Or'," he shouted above chanting and traffic, addressing my penchant for existential leaps and the philosophers who made them up and wrote about them in books of such titles.

He steered me across Chestnut through diesel fumes then stopped to study the top of the thirty-storey Philadelphia National Bank building and yelled: "'Make up your mind' is how every banker west of the Jordan thinks."

I shouted, "I know You are that is anathema to most Jews, Christians and Muslims, but the more I think about it, or rather don't think about it but just let it sink in subliminally, the more sense it accumulates; even though Rev would want me to believe like Kierkegaard or, much better, St. Paul, not like some naked saddhu wasting on a mat, thinking this was that, meaning I'm something more – or other – than what I think I am."

"Kierkegaard read his Bible in hard chairs. He ate roast pig off church china. He chose between faith and the flesh," Joey described Rev never having met him. "But faith IS flesh. Trying to choose between faith and flesh will make you crazy like a Puritan. Why do you think Einstein’s theory of relativity, which made us all crazy with its result, the atomic bomb, was dreamt up in two of the most Calvinist of all European cities, Bern and Zürich? Where are we?" We were in front of the Academy of Music.

I turned him around. We had gone past Sansom Street.

"Tat tvam asi is how I feel on brutal days,” I said, “like when I have a cold."

"Pampered people need brutality to feel alive!" Joey cackled as he finally looked down Sansom Street from Broad, quoting himself from the day in ’69 I'd been dumped literally on top of him, running from gas-masked cops at Dupont Circle. He beamed gloriously around his nose, commemorating that moment.

"It's not funny," I said. I'd been in a very vulnerable state by that point, that night in D.C., after war protest, anarchy and tear gas, and he had taken advantage of my weakness in fifteen minutes, implanting his Hoha theory from his superior position, the grassy bench above me where he was sprawled picturesquely while I moped in an ugly lump below, upset about being almost arrested by the U.S. government.

"To stay sane in Washington, D.C. or anywhere," Joey explained to me that evening in D.C., back when he was a month shy of 17 and exploring every kind of spirituality imaginable, "you have to have an explanation for your life. Hoha is why crazy ass things happen, is why things are bigger than they seem. You mix up old beliefs with new; then you find that a queer energy keeps manifesting whenever and however it wants, trying to get you to realize you’re special and blessed."

He called that queer kind of energy 'Hoha', because every one of its old, familiar names – God, Yahweh, Vishnu, Brahman, Atman, Zeus, Allah, The Creative, Manitou, Buddha – and even lesser known names like Norman, or Father Divine, or Nous, every name served only to introduce the kind of wearying ho hum seriousness of which he sensed I wanted to disencumber myself forever. "And,” he said, “not a single one of those perspectives by itself is complete or sufficient or accurate, huh?" He stared me down. He was good at this kind of discussion, the best.

OK, not one of the names fully described what 'we' were after, which was something more comprehensive that included them all and some others too, something more psychologically true-to-our-experience, more like the way Jung thought, in other words. And more true to the actual Higher Power, however one might try to describe that power, and whatever name one might give it/him/her.

"Go on," I had said that night at Dupont.

He sat up more regally on the green embankment, this time in an Eastern meditation pose, knees out and ankles crossed beneath, removing himself higher above me still. He was munching on something, or working his jaw for some reason.

"Hoha is all theologic and anti-theological perspectives rolled into one metaphysical entity that is purely theoretical and not provable; and at the same time rolled into one psychological entity that is actual because verified by personal experience; and all of the entity’s perspectives manifest ad lib separately or together inside you whenever they or you or some other force wants.”

“Give me an example,” I demanded.

“Okayyyyee,” he sang happily, and affectionately, “ferinn-stance:... in your mind Mary might get syncretized somehow with an Anatolian or Sumerian or Egyptian or Greek earth goddess, just for you-oo, just as she did for medieval Christians.”

I stared at him. I’d heard of such a thing before.

“Hoha is a coming and going inside you of combinations of gods and goddesses and demigods and people and bugs and bullshit, depending on the occasion and the need, everything and anything that might help you see your own private crap as special and worth comprehending and appreciating.”

I must have looked less than comprehending.

“It’s the way pagans lived before they converted to Christianity. Hoha is a waking Jungian dream journey, your own unconscious in its vast and varied ocean of manifestation. And, y'know, since Hoha can turn into whatever you are capable of imagining and more, you have got to try to imagine the best and maintain a sense of humor.... Y’know," and he giggled with an affectionate teenage-y cracking voice.

A Black Panther from Mississippi near us grinned with sympathy.

"You make it sound easy," I'd said.

I’d always had to scramble to stay on top of my crazy mind. Half the time I hadn't scrambled fast enough. Typically for me, in ‘74 I wouldn’t scramble fast enough in the Blackburn living room either; and it would turn out I would need the Hoha theory, just as Joey had said I would. Eventually it enabled me to see, on the one hand, Hoha-as-Moses-as-Dionysus-as-Fred as having been present that night, and on the other hand, Hoha-as-Pharaoh-as-Hercules-as-Bill, and on the third hand, Hoha-as-Isis-as-Demeter-as-Betty-Ann, and without forgetting that all these rather different perspectives were equally emanations of whatever that energy was that the human race had always called the ‘divine’, emanations of a ‘higher power’, in other words: of an Inexplicable Energy at work with a force greater than that of just a human, or a million humans. It pulled all seeming contradictions into a nifty package, or a wooshy-wooshy set of packages, so I was grateful for it, even if it should turn out to be not quite right in the end, a little too wooshy, maybe, for me, anyway. But all the same, Joey had done a better job in a few minutes than Jung had done in twenty books of his, to help me organize my understanding of complex and maybe-divine immensity, just a little bit.

“God is a spirit,” I quoted the King James New Testament, trying to believe I was keeping up with him on the green embankment, when I was not.[3]

Maybe that’s why he ignored it. "Don't get attached to any one manifestation, though, of your ‘complex maybe-divine immensity’," Joey had looked down under his dark eyebrows at me, still working his jaw like he was chewing something.[4] "As soon as you do, Hoha will change form." That was the hardest thing on the path of Hohaism, he said, the price you paid for leaving your parents' comparatively much simpler and more strictly structured religion in the first place. Unless you were deeply and inexorably entrenched in a certain fixed religious outlook, Hoha would shift metaphors when you least expected it, so you had to keep looking beyond the metaphor to the real thing, like Jung had said.

My parents had armed me with good solid Christian belief, but I’d stopped going to church in medical school, and was drifting spiritually.

Then armed again, this time by Joey in late 69, with little more than the Hoha theory as some kind of New-Age, quasi-Jungian quasi-religion, I met Bill in the summer of 1972, that fateful day Bill and Betty Ann and Becky and Docka moved in next door at Spring Lake. And by a year later, spring of '73, tramping up and down block after block of Sansom Street with Joey, I came to understand Hoha even better. I could see by then, for instance, that from a Hindu perspective Tat tvam asi made perfect sense. Everything MIGHT JUST AS WELL BE everything else, even yourself, you, might be somebody else, or something much more than you thought, because what difference did it make when you were dying? Even if you were in perfect health, that was the special perspective of Hinduism, if I had understood it right from Joey, who had derived it from the Indian guru he had started following around the globe in ‘71, Guru Garland: to be able to look at life HUMBLY, i.e., WITH LESS EGO THAN EVER, as one would look at it if one were about to die, knowing, as Hindus did, that your having been born in a human body was the most fortunate of all possible incarnations, especially if you compared it to coming to live on earth as a cucaracha instead of a Homo sapiens, or something; but: at the same time knowing, as Hindus did, that the privilege and blessing of being human wasn’t going to last forever, because in five minutes you could be hit by a Mack truck crossing 17th St. in downtown Philadelphia (and come back in your next life as a cucaracha, living in an underground pipe in Manzanillo, Mexico, spending every day trying to come up through somebody’s shower drain to the light, and not get stomped on).

And, as Joey explained for the thousandth time, walking down Sansom St. toward the Schuylkill: "When you look at life as if you're forever about to exit stage left any second – and in India it's like that every day all day, because there is so much unbelievable bullshit tripping you up in the streets, literally – then every misery becomes a delight because the sense of impending death helps you remember to appreciate the life you have remaining, y’know? to humbly enjoy the rare and very special fortune of getting to remain alive as a human still a few minutes more, undistracted by concerns like staying alive or by any other bullshit. All you need to remember,” he said, “is how to keep on remembering that you are constantly dying slowly and that the end could come any moment, even quickly, and use this awareness to heighten appreciation of your life itself, the rare gift of your being alive, and focus on that and nothing else. Hinduism focuses on this life, not the next, see. They don’t pamper themselves with the idea of heaven very much, the way that Christians and Jews and Muslims do." Joey could – and did – talk in such an erudite way routinely, though he was only a child of 20 in May ’73, and only a baby of sixteen when I first met him at Dupont Circle in ‘69.

And that could be his excuse, of course, if he got any of it wrong.

Though I don’t think he did.

And then he had qualified this, looking sideways at me on the curb at 18th and Sansom, as if he'd known something I didn't. "A perspective like this doesn't work for suicidal types, though."

I wasn't suicidal. I needed some kind of Hoha-type theory to get me through the incomprehensible things in life, that's all. All through '72 and '73, for example, I knew there was some big Hoha-type thing behind Bill’s Fred Waring stories; I'd felt it out there in the boat at times. The Big Story was lurking where I couldn't see it, a big sacred mythological divine fish on the bottom, under rocks. I'd nab it if I could cast perfectly and hold on for the ride. The cast was in. It was well placed, I would just need to hold on; but I didn't know exactly how to hold on, or how long to hold on. Joey had forgotten to tell me that; and to a temporarily ex- Calvinist like me, mystical polytheism, or however you classified Hoha as a religion, was downright dizzying. It spun like a nightmarish merry-go-round, and I couldn’t see how to climb on and hold on.

Joey and I had walked and talked all the way down Sansom St. by now, and had finally found one of the last remaining clusters of New-Age Aquarian hippy-life boutiques in the USA, ‘underground’ music shops, dope paraphernalia ‘head-shops’ and ‘occult’ bookstores left from our own unique and very special radical sixties generation’s era of cultural revolution, the revolution in values and tastes we had spawned in the late sixties without even trying, not even knowing what we were doing, other than being ourselves and doing whatever we felt like. Accordingly, he entered a jeans boutique and bought a white gauze-y dhoti and took off his sandals and bellbottoms and stood naked but for one left earring in the center aisle. People did this in special neighborhoods like lower Sansom in the late sixties and early seventies, especially the really out there people like Joey, even though it was just a few blocks from City Hall, the Liberty Bell and Rittenhouse Square. You could get away with it, if you felt so inspired, because special neighborhoods like lower Sansom were ‘cool’, they were little extensions of Woodstock. Everybody in the neighborhood was ‘cool’. To prove I was right about this, two practically bare-breasted friz-blonds in matching frontier jackets just then checked out Joey in the altogether as he danced like a lanky young healthy Shiva trying to wrap himself up in seamless third-world cotton, and having done so, they went straight back to rummaging T-shirts. Once wrapped, he looked like a Hindu god-pirate, if there was such a thing, with a tiny gold cross dangling from his pierced left ear, and all that black tight-curly hair on his spiritual-genius head and not a stitch of western clothes or shoes, just a white Indian muslin loincloth wrapped as gracefully as Mahatma Gandhi’s on hunger strike, only drooping down his legs a little further than Gandhi’s.

I carried his jeans in a handled bag and we walked up and down narrow Sansom amidst leftover New-Age Aquarian hippy-types of all social levels for hours while Shiva the Pirate sounded like he was on drug-less Hindu speed.

"Wow!” he went. “In India, bullshit is sacred, unfuckingbelievable, not bullshit that comes out of your mouth; in India you have to mean what you say, and say what you mean, and anything not real is bullshit, that kind of insincere bullshit is never revered in India; I mean the real bullshit you have to walk past on the street!"

"Yeh, like the creep we just passed," I said.

"No, I mean the gooey cow excrement that flops and goes plop on the dusty street in Delhi, that's sacred in India!"

"No," I said, "the bullshit that plops out of your mouth is sacred. Not for the reasons you think, though. And so is the sleazebag we just passed."

"You've come a long way in a few years," he offered.

It didn’t surprise me a bit when I found out years later that Joey was descended from a line of rabbis going back to medieval Troyes, France.[5] He’d been thinking about stuff like this since he’d been a little pre-pubertal kid living with his parents in the heart of black Africa, sincerely trying with great effort to understand the neighbor lady’s African tribal animism and another neighbor lady’s Christian Science. We were a lot alike, descended from Judeo-Christian clerics and convinced that everything everywhere was sacred, even things that seemed to most Christians and Jews least likely to be, like bullshit of every kind and of every dictionary definition.                

And Joey’s Hoha theory did help me get through some of those years, to some extent. I don’t want to knock Hoha altogether. It was a big help at times. But it was a terribly revolutionary break from the extremist Protestantism of my upbringing. When you were washed away by the flood waters of maya, completely pulled here and there by the world, extremist Protestantism would have been a much bigger and solider tree trunk, it seemed to me, to grab onto and hug for dear life until the floodwaters went down again and you could make it to solid land, than Hohaism ever could be; because, though Hoha was perhaps technically a more complete and accurate representation of Higher Power and Energy than the Trinity could ever be, Hoha was nevertheless slippery and inchoate and constantly changing, as tangled a web as the one encountered by theoretical physicists trying to get to the bottom of the exact substructure of the universe. It was an inchoate mess to a dog’s mind, of course, but only a little better than that to a human mind. It was impossible to sort out. Every time they uncovered one new subatomic particle, fifty more mysterious things popped up. Every time they found a new scientific paradigm to end all science paradigms, like Newton’s Mechanics, or Einstein’s Relativity, the science of Theoretical Physics up and changed one more time into a totally different paradigm discovered by a new genius scientist in a new generation. And understanding God was like that.

God in the early days of the Age of Aquarius was a very tangled web apparently, more so than we realized at the time. Which was exactly my experience during the first two of the three Blackburn interviews: I could barely keep my head above water those first two nights of interviewing the Blackburns. The transition from monotheism to mystical polytheism was not proving easy. It was overwhelming at times in fact.

No wonder God, The Eternal One, told Moses, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”[6]

Joey’s Hoha theory, to tell the truth, like Jung’s theory of the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, for a lapsed Calvinist Methodist was so mystically rich and complex to explain to anybody or live with, that any effort to do so could easily come off like senseless drooling. That was maybe why the Freudians rejected Jung, they just didn’t have the patience to wade through all of that sacred bullshit, so they just went for id-ego-superego. It was a lot simpler. And likewise, in India, most people focused on just one narrow angle of the whole big inscrutable God-mess. They focused on just one of their many gods, or better yet, just one living guru, actually physically alive and nearby enough to kiss his feet, in order to calm themselves down and keep it simple: and, simpler yet, they would concentrate on just one simple meditation of that one guru’s instruction. Maybe Moses and the Israelites were the smartest of all, therefore, to focus all of their attention on just ONE God and just one set of sacred laws. But in the early seventies Joey and I and a lot of other people had combined various traditional and New Age beliefs and were trying to be fair and democratic to all of the gods and incarnations of gods at once, magnanimously, just as psychotherapeutic Jung had been, and as Joey’s guru, Guru Garland, had, as Joey claimed, until some of us had lost track of who had said what about what and who was doing what about it. I was in a very suggestible state, as a result.

But if Joey and I and the rest of our generation were producing collective craziness, it was best to get it out on the table to be examined fast, so we could find a corrective procedure to perform on it quick before it festered to the point of doing us in, every last one of us. That was why I made my crazy fantasies, hallucinations, visions, analogies and metaphors, or whatever they were, public in Tales of Waring, including Hoha. It helped me study and evaluate them, in case there was something better around; and I was hoping it might get other people reflecting on such things seriously too, so that I might eventually find and accumulate a team of collaborators to help me work on understanding such things.

On the other hand, if our ‘collective craziness’ was actually the best approach to Truth, then we needed to figure that out.

Sammy, I hope this answers your friends’ (and my friends’) questions. Give my best to the after-school reading club at Española. Hope to see you soon,

mj

P.S. I think it would be only fair to add that in his later years Joey, before he died – I think he died in 2014 – while he retained affection and a sense of devotion toward his guru – who was still alive (he was about four or five years younger then Joey) – was also involved in, or continued to practice, several other somewhat related spiritual disciplines. He went to a kind of New Age quasi-Christian church service on Sundays in San Francisco led by a woman he liked who was into psychic/spiritual healing. And he would get out his guru’s satsang[7] video tapes and watch them with a friend, any time of the day or week. Or he would attend a Sunday morning service that was some kind of cross between Christian Science, Unitarianism and psychic healing; or so I assumed when he dragged me to a Sunday service one time; and after the service I bought a book they sold there, The Roads to Truth, by Sherry Evans, explaining it was called 'New Thought'. He would also use the Tarot to help himself on his spiritual path. He would consult the Qabbalah and the Tree of the Sephiroth to the same purpose. And likewise the i Ching. And he would use all or any of these with a friend to help them on their path. He said he talked to God every day, and for that reason knew that God existed. He often used his abilities at psychic healing to help others. One friend named Matthew lived for several years under his attention after doctors told him he had only three months to live before his cancer killed him. “I can give you four!” he whined at Matthew in a sing-song tone that said, in effect, “What kind of death sentence is that, man, that’s bullshit man, I – we – can beat that,” meaning he didn’t buy ‘three months’ one bit from those crazy creep ‘physicians’ and would give Matthew all of the caring and psychic healing attention he possibly could, for the next four months, and probably more, because ‘those poor philistines had their heads in dunghills so couldn’t see shekels from Shinola’ and, consequently, ‘they were physicians but not healers’, and didn’t know what they were doing 'on a planet as spiritual as ours’.[8]^,[9]