CARLOS CASTANEDA
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Before Don Juan
When I first met Carlos Castandea I was a newly employed teenager just a few short months out of high school. At the time, Castaneda, while admittedly higher ranking in the overall scheme of things than me, was himself, basically not much more than a cipher of an undergraduate student lost among the hundreds enrolled in the anthropology department at UCLA. He was yet to meet the nearly white-haired Yaqui Indian shaman sorcerer he called Don Juan Matus at the Greyhound bus station in Nogales, Arizona --- the powerful shaman sorcerer that eventually became the focus of Castaneda's dozen or so books and that made Castaneda rich and both of them famous.
Before our meeting little did either of us know we were on a collision course. I had gone to work for a seemingly innocuous little aerospace firm with a huge reputation about six or seven miles north along the coast from the little southern California beach community where I lived. The company was located in what was then not much more than a small oil refinery owned industrial town called El Segundo right next to Los Angeles International Airport. I had been hired as a trainee technical illustrator for an even smaller offshoot of the company that helped design and build the high altitude breathing equipment for the then super-secret U-2 spy plane --- which basically meant I got paid for my drawing ability.(see)
After I had been there a respectable length of time and got to know a few people I began hanging out with a small, sort of loose-knit but quasi-exclusive group of people that fancied themselves artists much as I did of myself. Nearly every Friday after work we would meet in some small out of the way place, order some wine, beer or coffee and talk art, philosophy and politics late into the night just like artists and beat poets did, we thought, in the West Bank sidewalk cafes of Paris.
A couple of miles from my job was the Mattel Toy Company. Some of the people in the group knew some people at Mattel who also fancied themselves as artists and some of them joined us as well. One of the people that used to show up at those get togethers was Carlos Castaneda, who just happened to be working at Mattel at the time. Now, most people, especially those who know little or nothing about Castaneda's pre-Don Juan background, find themselves at a total loss as to why Castaneda would even bother to show up at our small, unprestigious, under-the-radar, and unheralded group of so-called artists. Over and over it comes up: Why would a person in their right mind, of such stature as Castaneda, entertain the possibility of participating in such a group of nobodies? The answer is quite simple. First, as mentioned in the opening paragraphs at the top of the page, at the time of the meetings Carlos Castaneda was NOT the Carlos Castaneda he came to be AFTER he met the mysterious and powerful Yaqui Indian shaman-sorcerer he came to call Don Juan Matus. Secondly and most importantly, in those pre-Don Juan days, Castaneda likened himself as an artist --- and truth be told, our group was openly receptive to artists that had not made it simply because none of us had. As for Castaneda being an artist, it is weaved throughout his early personal history and background. According to his own words, on Monday, July 24, 1961 in a conversation with Don Juan and published in Castaneda's third book Journey to Ixtlan (1972), Don Juan admonishes him for never assuming responsibility for his acts and Castaneda writes:
He (Don Juan) dared me to name an issue, an item in my life that had engaged all my thoughts. I said art. I had always wanted to be an artist and for years I had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure.
Castaneda was a Peruvian. Most people I knew at the time with a Hispanic background were of Mexican descent. For me, to be a person from Peru was kind of odd and the fact that he was piqued my interest. The most of what I knew of Peru circled around the hidden city of Machu Picchu that I had learned from a very good friend of mine who had been there.
Four of five years before those artist meetings, because of an impending divorce, my dad had sent my younger brother and me to live with our grandmother on our mother's side in a small suburban beach town southwest of Los Angeles, California. The summer had just ended and I was just about to enter high school for the first time while my younger brother was starting the seventh grade.
Like many kids in those days we had a number of what my grandmother used to call chores that we were expected to do around the house. One of those chores was cutting the front lawn. My dad, after visiting one weekend and watching me struggling to cut the grass with an extremely ancient and dull push-type hand mower, went to Sears and bought a power mower for me to use. The first thing my brother and I did after our dad left was build a small cart and haul the mower around the neighborhood cutting lawns for money.
Around the corner and up the street was a house built on a lot that was on a small hill that was at least five feet above sidewalk level. Because the house had a perpetually unkempt lawn that always seemed in need of mowing I thought it was a perfect place to earn a few bucks. However, the other kids in the neighborhood told me a scary old mummified man that sat staring out the window all day long and hated kids lived there and they warned me if I was smart I would never get any closer to the place than the sidewalk.[1]
One day in the need of some cold hard cash to go to the movies or indulge in some other equally important pastime, and, after having gone to almost every house on the block trying to drum up some lawn cutting business with no success, I forced myself to climb the stairs to the porch of the mummified man and knock. A lady barely looked out from behind the door and told me she was just the housekeeper and worked there only a couple of days a week. About cutting the lawn I would need to talk to the owner, but he couldn't come to the door, I would have to come in if I wanted to to talk to him. She took me to a room that was just to the right of the entry way that looked out over the street and sure enough, sitting in a chair looking out the window was the mummified man.
As it turned out the mummified man wasn't mummified at all. Actually he was hooked up to some sort of breathing apparatus attached to an oxygen tank, plus, on-and-off throughout the day he had IVs stuck into his arms and wires attached in various places for monitoring equipment to record his heart rate, blood pressure and other vitals. So said, for the most part, because he was so hooked up to machines and couldn't move he basically just sat there all day long and either read books and newspapers or looked out the window.
The man himself, although seemingly tall, was stocky for his height, slightly heavyset, raspy voice with a short, almost military style haircut. His skin was dry and wrinkly as though he had been badly burned in many places, and he had. He was a onetime merchant marine. During World War II the Liberty ship he was serving on was traveling in a convoy and positioned amongst the other ships in the rear corner on the starboard side that he called "coffin corner," said by experienced hands to be the most easy picking location for submarines in a convoy. Everybody on board was nervous, not because of the position, but because previously another crew member, an able-bodied seaman by the name of Olguin (possibly Holguin) had always been with them. Word had it that any time Olguin was part of the crew and the ship was in coffin corner, because of his karma or good luck or whatever they would not be attacked. The legend was alive because not one of the several voyages he had been on and traveling in coffin corner had his ship been hit or even come under attack. On this trip Olguin was either not in the convoy or assigned to another ship. Partway into the voyage a wolfpack started picking at the edges of the convoy and my friend's ship torpedoed. In order to save himself he had no choice but to jump overboard, landing in an area with oil burning along the surface of the water, the fire scorching his skin as he plunged through and returned for air. He spent months in recovery and rehabilitation. A few years after he was released he moved into the place he was in now. He said in all the years he had lived there I was the first kid in the neighborhood to actually come up on the porch and to the door, let alone come in. He wasn't too concerned about the grass one way or the other, but he could use, he said, a reliable errand boy a couple of days a week to go the post office, pick up and deliver packages, go to the drug store and library and do minor shopping for such things as vegetables and freshly ground coffee. Hence started what turned out to be a very interesting friendship between me, a ninth-grade freshman just into high school and the older, heavily scared, barely able to move ex-merchant marine.
Every wall in the room that he sat in day after day, except for the wall with the picture window, was completely covered with bookshelves, stacked shelf after shelf, row after row, from floor to celing, each shelf stuffed with book after book. Along the floor beneath the window were boxes filled with even more books and on the wall space next to the window was what I would call the only picture in the room, an old movie poster simply thumbtacked to the wall. On the wall space next to the window on the other side was what looked like a few framed certificates or dipolmas and a couple of plaques.
He told me he had been all over the world. He had seen the pyramids in Egypt, the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico and Central America. Easter Island all by itself in the Pacific and Angkor Wat in jungles of Cambodia. He had been to Machu Picchu high in the Andes of Peru by climbing the Inca Trail and explored Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England. Machu Picchu and Peru always seemed to be in the forefront of his thoughts, speaking fondly of both quite often. One reason is because he knew Hiram Bingham, the explorer that discovered Machu Picchu. He claimed they were more than just passing acquaintances, but actually friends. During WWII Bingham gave lectures on the south sea islands to members of the Navy. My merchant marine friend had traveled extensively throughout the South Pacific, including, as mentioned, Easter Island. Somehow the two met along the way and Bingham used him as a source for some of his lecture materials. My friend even had a signed first edition copy --- with a rather lengthy handwritten personal acknowledgement --- of Bingham's book, LOST CITY OF THE INCAS: The Story of Machu Picchu and Its Builders (1948), that Bingham sent him a few years into my friend's recuperation period. Bingham even wrote in the acknowledgement that he hoped the merchant marine would have "a quick and full recovery."
Every day I came by we would talk about some place he had been to, Peru or otherwise. Our discussions on any one place could run over a period of weeks or sometimes just last the few hours I was there. Sometimes we would pick up where we left off and other times we would go off on some tangent discussing someplace else right in the middle of what we were talking about and not come back to the first topic for weeks.
Each time we talked he would have me get down several books related to the place and we would look at pictures and go over the differences and the similarities of what different authors had written compared to what he had seen and experienced. He had lots and lots of books on Atlantis by Edgar Cayce, Ignatius Donnelly, and L. Sprague de Camp as well as a complete set of the Lost Continent of Mu books by James Churchwood. He told me when he was around my age he had become driven, actually obsessed with Atlantis and Mu. He began traveling the world to find or substantiate both places. But, the more and more ancient places he visited and more and more educated he became the more and more he became convinced neither place ever existed. In his quest, both pro and con, besides all the Atlantis and Mu books in his library, he had collected reams and reams of books, material, research and explanations that debunked nearly every single aspect of either continent or their civilizations that anybody could ever pose, except possibly one.
Weeks, possibly months after his ship had been torpedoed somewhere in the Atlantic he was found all alone strapped with heavy ropes to a piece of debris floating in the middle of the ocean, and except for being unconscious and heavily scared from the burn marks, which had seemingly healed, he was in pretty good shape. Everybody said it was a miracle, that his burns must had healed by the salt water. How he had made it in the open ocean without food or water nobody knew. Most people speculated he had been picked up by a U-boat and ejected at a convenient time so he would be found, although no record has ever shown up to substantiate such an event, nor did he recall ever being on a submarine, German or otherwise.[2]
The day he told me the story about being found he showed me a delicate gold necklace that had what looked like a small Chinese character dangling from it. He said one day in the hospital while being given a sponge bath he was looking in a hand mirror at his burn marks when he noticed he had the necklace around his neck. He never had a gold necklace in his life. When he asked the nurse where it came from she said as far as she knew he came in with it as it was found amongst the few personal effects he had with him. She said typically they would not put any jewelry on a patient but some of the staff thought that since he was so scared by the burns that he might like a little beauty in his life so someone put it around his neck. He told me he had no clue where it came from or how it came into his possession, but for sure he didn't have it on before he was torpedoed. He said everybody always admired it and it appeared to be very ancient. (see)
I told the story about the necklace in an abreviated sort of way to the artists one Friday, interjecting a strong emphasis on Machu Picchu because it was located in Peru and Castaneda was in the group that night. The mention of Machu Picchu perked up his ears it seemed, so I continued with the only other Peru "story" I was able expound on at any length. I had learned the story from a book given to me by a friend of my Mentor, the person I did study-practiced under. Although my mentor told me he had studied under a maharshi in India he never specifically gave me his name. His friend told me he had studied under the venerated Indian holy man the Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. To fill me in on Sri Ramana she had given me several books on him, one of which had the following story:
A couple from Peru was visiting the ashrama of Sri Ramana Maharshi one day and he was enquiring about their day-to-day life, and their talk turned to Peru. The couple began picturing the landscape of their homeland and were describing the sea-coast and the beach of their own town. Just then Maharshi remarked: "Is not the beach of your town paved with marble slabs, and are not coconut palms planted in between? Are there not marble benches in rows facing the sea there and did you not often sit on the fifth of those with your wife?" The remarks of Sri Maharshi created astonishment in the couple. How could Sri Bhagavan, who had never been out of Tiruvannamalai since a boy, know so intimately such minute details about their own place? Sri Maharshi only smiled and said:
"It does not matter how I can tell. Enough if you know that abiding IN the SELF there is no Space-Time."
(source)
NOTE: A second equally interesting incident, cast in in a similar vein, and involving the Maharshi but a little too long to go into here, can be found by going to: THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana.
Castaneda was totally fascinated by the story of Sri Ramana and the Peruvian couple, especially the space-time part, and wanted to know both the name of the author and the name of the book the story came from. I told him I couldn't recall at the moment, but at the next get together I would bring the information. The next time I saw him I gave him a note with all the info on it he requested. He thanked me and except for a brief interlude a year or so later when I saw him from the distance across the seating area at the Nogales Greyhound Bus Station on the exact same day and time he alludes to of having met Don Juan Matus for the very first time, that was the last I ever saw him.
Interestingly enough, unconnected with me or any of the above, Castaneda did meet up with my uncle sometime prior to that bus station meeting while traveling in the desert southwest on his infamous Road Trip with the former Pothunter turned anthropologist colleague Bill during the late spring, early summer of 1960. In Zen, The Buddha, and Shamanism I bring up the relationship between my Uncle and Carlos Castaneda as follows:
In later years, because of that association and my uncle's knowledge of Sacred Datura and peyote as well as other halluciogens, he was interviewed by Carlos Castaneda, apparently on a Road Trip in the process of gathering information for future use in his series of Don Juan books. In 1960 or so Castaneda was an anthropology student at UCLA collecting information and specimens of medicinal type plants used by the Indians in the desert southwest when the two crossed paths. My uncle had field searched thousands and thousands of plants, herbs, and mushrooms, even to having had several previously undiscovered species named after him.
Several years later found me in a red-darkened strobe light lit bar sitting around with a handful of para-military types and close Army buddies in the Cholon district of Saigon gulping down a large amount of a seemingly never ending supply of of alcoholic beverages. From out of the smoky milieu of mostly horny and inebriated GIs, unsolicited, a tea girl attempted to sit on my lap and tried to put something around my neck. Pushing back I could see she held what appeared to be a gold necklace stretched between her hands. Hanging midway along the necklace was a small Chinese character. Basically grabbing the necklace from her hands I asked where it came from and how she got it. She turned facing a general group of barely discernible figures sitting and drinking toward the back of the barroom in the shadows along the darkened wall, telling me that one of the men, a burnt man, had paid her to put it on me. When I asked what she meant by a burnt man, using her hands in a swirling motion in front of her face combined with a snearing facial expression to indicate scars while gasping for air as if the man had a tough time breathing, said in broken english, "burnt man, burnt man." In just the few seconds it took me to work my way through the crowd to the back wall pulling the tea girl with me the burnt man, if there ever was a burnt man, was gone. Nor could anybody at any of the tables remember seeing or talking to a heavily scared man, burnt or otherwise, sitting at any of the tables --- although some of the GIs were fully able to recall the girl.
The necklace, which I still have and continue to wear to this day, from what I could remember, looked exactly like the one my merchant marine friend showed me and said to be mysteriously wearing out of nowhere the day he was found floating in the sea after his ship was torpedoed. The only problem is, by the time the incident in the Saigon bar occurred my friend had already been dead some ten years, having passed away during the summer between my sophmore and junior years in high school. At his memorial service I was told by family members, following a death bed request on his part, that in an effort to rejoin his fellow seamen he wanted to be cremated and his ashes tossed at sea near where his ship and comrades went down, and along with the ashes, the necklace returned to the sea as well. As far as I know those wishes had been complied with.
ALTHOUGH NOT THE EXACT SAME BOOK
HE GAVE ME, A SIMILAR BOOK, WHICH IS
NOW LONG LOST, IS THE ONLY BOOK MY
FRIEND EVER GAVE ME. [3]
THE POSTER TACKED
ON- THE MAN'S WALL
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PEACE CORPS ZEN
Out of the hundreds and hundreds of books my friend owned and had neatly stashed away all over the place in boxes and on shelves there was only ONE that he ever gave to me to keep. That one book was a hardback copy of The High Barbaree by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, the same authors who wrote Mutiny on the Bounty. He handed it to me one day out of the blue without comment, basically telling me to read it and that it was mine.
In 1947 a movie version of the book had been made that I had neither seen nor heard of, but, in later years have since seen many times. Set in World War II and following the plot of the novel, the movie starred Van Johnson and June Allyson as childhood friends who get separated when June's family moves away. The story begins in the present (that is, the present then, circa 1943-44) with June and Van now back together again as grown adults. June soon discovers that Van has not followed his dream of becoming a doctor and tries to convince him that he needs to be true to himself or else he will never be happy. Before June succeeds in her mission, although the two find themselves in love, neither can act on it because once again they become separated --- only this time by the ravages of war.
Van, who has now become a Navy pilot, while on patrol in the South Pacific in his PBY 5-A floatplane, is shot down. He and his co-pilot find themselves stranded and drifting without communication and become listed missing in action and presumed dead. Days go by. To pass the time, through a series of flashbacks, Van begins telling stories of his childhood, taking the viewer through his life as a young boy and the close friendship he had with June up until the time she moved away. He talks about his Uncle and various tall tales he used to tell. His uncle, a seafaring man who is now a Navy Captain, told him about a mysterious enchanted and uncharted island that rose up out of the sea that he saw once in his youth, an island called High Barbaree. In his stories he even related to Van the latitude and longitude of the island. The co-pilot charts their position and discovers their location is right on top of the coordinates Van's uncle had given him for the legendary island many, many years ago when Van was just a boy. Before the disabled floatplane is able to drift to the actual location --- 1 Degree North, 160 Degrees East --- the co-pilot dies and Van is left all alone and on the verge of dying himself, adrift at sea having long since run out of food and water. He is eventually located alive and returns to June, but not until after he apparently finds refuge on High Barbaree. Of course when he is finally found --- on his downed PBY --- even though he is no longer dying and in good health, as well as seemingly of sound mind, there is no island or sign of High Barbaree.
Because of the unusual nature of the story, that is, my mechant marine friend being found strapped to a piece of debris in the middle of the ocean still alive weeks, possibly months, after his ship was torpedoed --- and then him giving me the book High Barbaree that aludes to an island that rises up out of the ocean and saves a Navy pilot after weeks of being lost at sea, I told the story to my uncle. Accompanying us at the table that day, and not at all unusual, was a friend of my uncle, a man known to be a well regarded tribal spritual elder. The elder listened intently to my story and, although not interested in the specifics because much of it was foreign to his culture, the overall theme of the story he liked.
However, a few days later he showed up with a truly elderly man. The spiritual elder had been talking to a group of men about my story when a man stepped forward saying he had been a "Code Talker" in the south Pacific during World War II and knew about PBYs. This inturn put the truly elderly man in the group into some sort of trance. The truly elderly man told the Code Talker for ME to beware of PBYs. Because of the unusual nature of the warning, PBYs and all, the elder brought us together. The truly elderly man was somehow privy to a story that it had been said that as a young boy I had been touched by the White Painted Lady (see). Because of such, he felt a connection that otherwise might not have been there. Basically, through translators, because the truly elderly man did not have a full command of the english language, he wanted to know if I had access to a PBY. I told him not only had I never been on one or near one, to my knowledge I did not think I had ever even seen one. The old man slumped back almost as though he had fainted. Within minutes he returned to consciousness. He said that if not me someone from my past, possibly a woman, and if not her someone close to her would be impacted adversely in the use of such a craft. For me to stay away from such aircraft and ensure that any of my friends that might fit the bill stay away from them as well.
At the time I knew nobody that in anyway would be involved with a PBY, especially so since they were for the most part World War II aircraft on the brink of obsolescence.
Somewhere in my writings I mention that I met a woman from my past that I had not seen in ten years. The following relates to that incident:
Now, I do not recall if the above incident between the former model and myself occured before or after the warning by the elderly man, but please note that I say the woman in question was married to the "son of a renowned ocean explorer." She and I never had an opportunity to talk or cross paths again after the aforementioned party. However, some years later --- and with me being in absolutely no position to know of such things --- they, in the mid-1970s, bought a PBY. Four years after the purchase her husband was killed piloting the plane during a water landing.
The house "around the corner and up the street on a lot that was on a small hill" where the so-called mummified man lived was just over the crest and downside toward the north of a hill that rose up a couple hundred feet high from the south with its base along Torrance Boulevard. It was that same hill, from a house on Lucia Street about two blocks away and where I lived as a little kid before my mother died, that I caught the first glimpse of the huge object that came to be known as the UFO Over Los Angeles as it barely crossed over the crest of that hill in a south southeasterly direction and right over my house.
Even though the object basically came straight on and crossed directly over the top of us, being out of the range of the searchlights it's actual shape was hard to discern against the upper night sky. My dad, who had actually watched the Graf Zeppelin land in Los Angeles at Mines Field (now LAX) and even walked along side and under the giant airship, often said the object that passed over us that night was as big, if not bigger, than a Zeppelin.
When my merchant marine friend told me the story about being torpedoed for some reason I just naturally pictured the incident transpiring in the North Atlantic --- and truth be told, he seemed to allow me to believe it, although he never specifically stated so one way or the other in the many times he told me the story. However, I did overhear a conversation between himself and a man that identified himself as a researcher one day. The merchant marine told the researcher his ship had been torpedoed well off the coast of Florida, and after a lengthy back and forth questioning admitted to the researcher it was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. I think what actually happened was the spot where his ship was torpedoed and where he was eventually found floating in the open ocean was two different locations. Sank off Florida in or near the Bermuda Triangle, found in the North Atlantic. The thing is, the merchant marine HATED the Bermuda Triangle and any mention of it, especially in relation to any of the events that surrounded him.
In an extremely interesting twist to the whole being torpedoed off the coast of Florida story is that years later my mentor sent me to study-practice under a mysterious, unhearlded and nearly unknown American Zen master by the name of Alfred Pulyan. As it turned out, Pulyan's most ardent supporter and follower, a man by the name of Richard Rose, had a brother that was a merchant marine who was killed apparently during the same U-boat attack that burned my merchant marine friend so badly that led ultimately to his demise. Regarding the attack, in the Alfred Pulyan link above I write:
When I was first informed by my mentor that the convoy my merchant marine friend was on was a top secret mission it meant nothing. It was only when I started putting together bits and pieces to tell the story of how the merchant marine being my friend forged a connection between Carlos Castaneda and myself that any of it began to take on any sort of significance.
If you notice at the top of the page there is a graphic that appears to be a map. That map is a drawing that indicates where many members of the ancient world thought the continent of Atlantis was located. If you remember from the above, in his youth the merchant marine had an obsession with Atlantis and the lost continent of Mu. There is no direct connection between Atlantis and Carlos Castaneda that I am aware of except for my merchant marine friend's interest in same and his knowledge of Peru and how I used Peru to open and establish a dialog with Castaneda.
As I remember now --- stretching back into the dim, foggy reaches of my onetime teenage mind --- I recall my friend telling me about the Azores, a group of islands in the mid-Atlantic well off the coast of Portugal and Africa and how they related to the torpedo attack and Atlantis. Over a period of days during my regular daily visits my merchant marine friend had me get down a bunch of books and maps, spreading the maps all over the desk and all excited, explaining to me the early importance of the Azores in the myth of Atlantis. In several of the books he pointed out how Ignatius Donnelly, author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), had first proposed that the Azores were the remnant remains of an Atlantean island continent --- and he told me how he always wanted to go to the islands because of it. He thought the convoy he was on was going to end up there. In those early months of the war a highly secret plan was being put into place for an invasion of North Africa. How that invasion was going to work, during the time of the convoy, had not been finalized. One school of thought felt that staging an invasion from the Azores and Canary Islands would be a good idea. The other school of thought felt a direct invasion would be the best as taking over both islands first then building up men and materials would be a dead giveaway of a potential North African invasion. The convoy he was on was doing top secret pre-staging staging of equipment, material, and ships in Puerto Rico for a quick jump either to the Azores and Canaries or directly to North Africa. His ship was sunk before it ever reached Puerto Rico.
The United States entered World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. By January 1942, a half a world away, the German Navy had unleashed their submarines against Allied ships all along the eastern seaboard of the United States and into the Caribbean Sea. The military services in the southern areas were not prepared to successfully oppose veteran north Atlantic German submarine crews. Naval bases in the area were generally poorly equipped and their personnel poorly trained for submarine warfare.
For example, in March 1942 the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo was at a very low state of readiness with only two subchasers, a few minesweepers, one seaplane, one WWI destroyer, and a few thousand military personnel. Because of that unreadiness, for the first six months after the start of World War II --- up to around late May 1942 --- it appeared that the Allied naval effort in the Caribbean was following nothing but a pattern of self-destruction. With the exception of a few "off the books" top secret convoys nearly every Allied ship sailed alone or unescorted while moving supplies through the Caribbean theater.
Eventually, the War Department directed a naval convoy system similar to that used by the British in the North Atlantic, be set into place in the Caribbean. The system was adopted in June 1942, and had an immediate, positive effect. The 40th Bomb Group personnel moved by ship from Puerto Rico to Panama in June 1942. Their convoy was the first to cross the Caribbean in World War II without a loss to German submarines.(source)
In a footnote to Doing Hard Time In A Zen Monastery, refering to the small gold medalion, the following is found:
I go on to say the purpose of that meeting was to get a better handle on what the Zen master wrote. The Zen master in question was the master at the monastery. However, there was an equally strong if not even more so overriding reason I was in Hong Kong to meet with Lu K'uan Yu in 1977, and it revolves around handwritten Chinese characters given to me by the Zen man far away and high in the mountains above the monastery. Even though we were unable to communicate verbally because of not knowing each other's languages, there was a great nonverbal understanding between the two of us. When he showed me that he too had a small gold medalion just like the one I wore around my neck, through hand gestures, pantomime, and line drawings in the dirt I tried to get him to show me how it was he came into possession of the medalion. He drew a couple of cuneiform characters in the dirt and I copied them as best I could. He inturn, upon seeing how I copied them, nodded in agreement. However, nobody I showed them to could translate them --- hence my trip to Hong Kong. Even Lu K'uan Yu was baffled, alluding to the fact I may have copied them wrong. Eventually he was convinced the characters were meant to mean Gyanganj, a home for immortals said to be hidden in a valley in the remote Himalayas. For those who may be so interested, in the west Gyanganj is known as Shangri-la or Shambhala.
HIGH BARBAREE
FOOTNOTE [3]
"Amongst the crowd was a woman that recognized me, a former Rose Marie Reid swim suit model that I knew as Sullivan, but since married to the son of a renowned ocean explorer. They had a boat in the harbor and since we had not seen each other for ten years or so, after everybody was sure the girl was OK, she asked me to join her for drinks on her yacht, get into some dry clothes and get caught up. As I was leaving later in afternoon Sullivan asked if I would be willing to go to a party she was throwing in a couple of weeks. As I slowly strolled away down the dock I halfheartedly turned back and nodded in agreement that I would attend."
Photograph: U.S. Navy Historical Archives
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FOOTNOTE [1]
FOOTNOTE [2]
"A year or so passed and one day out of the blue my mentor brought up what he was able to ascertain from the facts he found. He told me as far as he could tell my merchant marine friend and the brother of the man he met had been attacked at the same time, albeit under slightly different circumstances. Although it wasn't likely they were shipmates, apparently the ships they were on got hit during the same U-boat attack. My mentor told me my merchant marine friend was part of a top secret convoy. The ship the man's brother was on was actually unescorted, and apparently, having spotted the convoy sometime after leaving Baltimore, under the cover of darkness, began tagging along in the shadow of it's wake for protection."
FOR THE RECORD
"(I)n 1977 I was in Hong Kong to seek audience with the famous translator Upasaka Lu K'uan Yu."