I never expected to live this long. And at the same time, I thought there would be plenty of time to do and learn all of the things I wanted to do and learn.

I grew up in the best of times, in the 50s and 60s in the US, in a loving family with a very present father and mother. It was an idyllic time to grow up. We weren’t rich, but we never lacked for the things we needed. We lived in a new house, in a decent family neighborhood, near one of the largest and most beautiful parks in the city. The park had a large municipal swimming pool, and as kids, my brothers and I could walk to the park and swim all day in the summer, without supervision or concern.

I coasted through school. It was never of interest to me, yet at home, I’d read all of the encyclopedia and read the dictionary regularly, bouncing from synonym to synonym, exploring context & meaning. I never did homework and was unwilling to work hard enough to do better than Bs & Cs. I rebelled against the system of rote memorization for tests. I entered college like all of my friends, but didn’t settle in. I was uninspired, undisciplined and unguided, and I knew it.

At the time, it was obvious even to the woefully un-self-aware me that university just wasn’t going to work for me. I dropped out of college at 19, and lost my ‘college deferment’, making me eligible for the draft. And then, in the late summer of 1973, the government conducted the ‘Draft Lottery’, assigning random numbers of between 1 and 365 to all birthdates for males born in the US in 1953. My number was 43, which even though the Viet Nam war seemed to beginning to wind down, still put me in the crosshairs of jungle warfare as an Army soldier. Every evening, the nightly news would highlight the number of dead and wounded Americans associated with a conflict that we had no right being involved in. I had lost a good friend a year earlier in the war, and was determined to not get sucked into that horrifying hellhole. I scoped out my options and decided that the most attractive option was to join another branch of the military. I was fortunate enough to test highly enough with the Navy and Air Force that I could qualify for a job that would keep me away from the front lines. After I was called up and went down to Detroit for my physical exam and presumptive intake, it was apparent that I’d have to take action to avoid getting shipped off to the war. After I told my family that I had enlisted in the Air Force, my (always blunt) father asked me: ‘How are you going to survive that for four years? You don’t have the attention span of a gnat.’, or something to that effect.

I breezed through boot camp, where I acquired the nickname ‘doc’ for coaching a couple of the guys who needed help understanding that the apparent cruelty administered us was a form of mental conditioning to accompany the physical conditioning, and the purpose of which was to weed out the people who were simply not a fit for the military, for one reason or another. After boot camp, I departed to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi for almost a year of training in computer school. At the time, in 1972, there probably weren’t more than a couple hundred computers in the whole world, so it was a prestigious career field in the military, and certain to keep us away from bombs & bullets. In the evenings or weekends, pals and I would walk the two blocks down to the Gulf of Mexico beach and sit and smoke pot and talk about life. It was a massive awakening for me to live and work in close proximity with many other guys my own age and to be able to measure myself intellectually against them. In this time, sitting under the Milky Way, with the sounds of the surf and the gulls, I was awakened to the mysteries and the beauty of our strange universe, and it awakened an intense appetite for knowledge about the ragged edges of reality. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I became open to the richness of it.

A year later, I was stationed at Barksdale Air Force, in Shreveport, Louisiana, I lived off base in an apartment in a huge, old victorian house, in a quiet part of town. I went to school during the day at Centenary College and worked evenings on base at Barksdale, as a computer systems technician. Most nights, after getting off work at 11:30 p.m., a few of my crew members and I would collect at my apartment or elsewhere and smoke some pot and try to figure out the world. It was at that time a world that defied understanding. We were in the middle of ‘The Cold War’, and we were at the heart of it. We worked for the Strategic Air Command (SAC). SAC was the division of the military that was responsible for monitoring our borders for ‘radar penetrations’, a euphemism for incoming nuclear missiles or bombers, and then responding by launching a ‘mutually assured destruction’ style counterstrike that would likely ultimately end all life on earth. It was a mission that our group of 20-somethings took very serious, and affected us.

Consequently, we probably lived more fully and we examined life a bit more intensely than most people our age, in college and more sheltered from the larger world. The milestones for us there were mostly related to music. The music of the 60s and 70s were unlike anything that had come before. Fueled by anti-war sentiment, the influence of psychedelic drugs and a recognition of and appetite for the awakening of a very new and different culture, each fresh drop of an ‘album’ by Pink Floyd, The Who, Joe Walsh, Aerosmith, Doobie Brothers, etc., etc. would power a new wave in our collective consciousness.

One night, we checked out of work and went to the cafeteria, as we often did. Midnight breakfast was short-order. It was the only meal of the day in the chow hall where you could order eggs and bacon and it was made freshly for you while you waited. After eating, four of us headed to my apartment, to unwind from the evening and enjoy a little down-time. We set off walking from my home through the quiet neighborhood, by this time, probably 1:00 a.m. A few blocks from my place was a nice park, approximately one quarter mile square and shaped like a bowl. We could sit on the edge of the park under a huge canopy of trees and talk without worrying about waking anyone, or worrying about getting caught smoking pot. After sitting and talking for a bit, I experienced a singular, over-powering vision. My pal, Doug, who had been sitting next to me, said ‘what just happened to you?’. I tried to explain it, but everyone was too stoned to comprehend my attempt to explain in words what defied explanation in language symbols so coarse and entirely unsuitable for the purpose.

In a flash that lasted what must have been a second, I saw a spiraling, unfolding of the future consisting of increasingly convergent, increasingly improbable and increasingly important global events, culminating in a massively impactful set of circumstances so compelling that the rapt attention of the entire world was at once focused on it in wonder or shock.

It was impossible to fully understand the meaning of the vision, and since it was the first vision that I’d ever experienced, it kind of blew me away at the time. Now, since, and with increasing frequency, I experience similar visions that reveal secrets to me about the nature of reality. They are typically brief flashes of insight that arise to direct my attention to a blind spot in my understanding and shine a light on the path.

In any event, the original vision has proven to be eerily accurate. What once I viewed as an unwelcome experience, I now gather like tasty. ripe fruit.