Episode 89 - Smells Like Good Stuff

As you may recall, I am currently preparing to release a comprehensive personal growth program called, “The Higher Mind Training.” Its purpose is to help people harmonize their intelligence, which will allow them to transform the prison of self-sabotage into the freedom of self-empowerment.

          We will have programs designed to address specific needs, like smoking cessation, freedom from drug and alcohol abuse, and weight loss.  We will also offer a general personal growth training, as well.

          As I have also mentioned in some previous podcast episodes, as part of the preparation effort, I am reviewing a large portion of the research material I have collected over the years, including some of the journals that I have kept, and I am going to present some of it to you for your consideration.  

Although the material may seem to cover a wide range of topics, it all revolves around one central theme, which is the fact that as human beings, we have a remarkable potential within our intelligence which remains largely untapped and if we choose to, we can connect with it. Even small improvements in this kind of self-knowledge can significantly transform our lives for the better. 

At this point, I’m going to look back at certain dramatic events that led me to explore some of the deeper sides of life, ultimately leading me to become deeply committed to the process of personal growth. Like each one of us, my personal life has been set against the background of the society and culture I’ve lived in, and as it will become apparent, the times, they were a changin’.

To set the stage, I’d like to start out with a short chapter from my memoir, Wilt, Ike & Me. It takes place in March of 1965 and I am beginning here primarily due to the nature of the times. Back then, hardly any of us knew it, but we were on the verge of a massive cultural change that would eventually revolutionize the entire western world. And even though it may not be obvious, in many, the revolution goes on today..

In those days, Wilt Chamberlain had been staying with us in our home for a number of weeks and it was quite an adventure. But this isn’t so much about Wilt, as it is about my sister, Sybil, a college student who had become a bit of what they called at the time, a “beatnik.” So, let’s take a look at a day in the life…

 

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A lot of the times in the late afternoon, Wilt and I would end up hanging out in my sister’s room at the end of the hall, listening to music. Sybil had a nice record player and was never there. She was a sophomore now at Temple University and was out all the time.

Her room was in its own part of the upstairs. Wilt was in my room, and I was in the guest room right next to it. That was on one side of the house, along with the bathroom. Then there was a long hallway that went past a small sundeck on the roof, and Sybil’s room was at the far end of the hall. It was a universe unto itself, and the door to that universe was always closed.

One thing I learned early in life is that you never, under any circumstances, entered her room without knocking first, and then you had to wait for her permission to come in. This was a cardinal rule and we all obeyed it implicitly. Only our homemaker, Geneva had free rein to come and go as she pleased.

Sybil was what was called a beatnik in those days. My mother just called her a vilde chaya, which is a Yiddish term that doesn’t translate perfectly into English, but basically means a “wild Indian.” And that shoe really fit.

She was a lot like the weather in our part of the world—lots of warm, sunny days but some dark, stormy ones as well. And as her little brother, while I enjoyed basking in the sunshine when it was out, I always knew to get the hell out of the way whenever one of those storms blew through.

She was by no means a bad kid, adored her parents and was fiercely loyal to her family. But she had an untamable wild streak running through her. And no matter what was going on, she was always her own boss.

The first time I really saw it was during the 1960 presidential campaign. My father was for Nixon. He was tight with the Pennsylvania Republican party and had met both Eisenhower and Nixon. He had even unsuccessfully run for Congress in 1956.

On top of that, he was no fan of the Kennedys. In his view, Joseph Kennedy had been weak on Hitler and he didn’t trust him when it came to Jewish welfare. And in my father’s world, the apple never falls too far from the tree.

Sybil, on the other hand, fell madly in love with JFK. He was the first candidate who was a real media superstar, and my fifteen-year-old sister was crazy about him. She pasted about five hundred pictures of him on her wall in a massive collage. I think my father got nauseous every time he saw it and avoided ever going into her room. Even after the election, her JFK shrine endured for quite a while.

Now that she was in college, her taste in wall décor had veered off into some new directions. One of her girlfriends was a talented portrait painter, who later became a famous courtroom artist. She painted three large full-color paintings for Sybil, who displayed them prominently in her room.

Two were portraits of Sybil. In one, she was wearing an enormous black-feathered hat. It looked like her head was covered by a dark, foreboding raven. In the other, she was seated on a big, comfortable gold easy chair, with an opened book lying face-down on her lap. From the sour look on her face, she was either the most bored or the most depressed person in the world.

But she hung the masterpiece of her collection in the center of the back wall, and it really grabbed your attention when you walked in the room. In the rear of the large painting was a blindfolded naked woman hanging from a meat hook by her tied hands. A priest stood in the foreground, dressed in a black suit and a black shirt with a white priest’s collar. He was holding a Bible in his hands with a gold crucifix on top of it. And he was staring daggers at you.

Sybil added her own piece of art to the mix. She made a collage and put it right next to the painting. She covered a large piece of poster paper with cutout photos of every form of human suffering imaginable. It was unbelievably awful. And in the middle, she put a true-to-life depiction of Jesus on the cross.

She was obviously making a statement of some kind, but it probably would have gone over better in a dorm than in her room at home. My father couldn’t stand it.

I was sitting with him in the kitchen having ice cream one Thursday night, while my mother was still in New York doing her charity work. Something seemed to be bothering him. The whole time we ate, he had a weird look in his eye, like his mind was on a slow simmer. Suddenly it exploded into full boil.

“God damn it!” he said and smacked his hand down on the kitchen table. He stood up, went over to a drawer, rummaged through it and pulled out a medium-size carving knife. “God damn it!” he repeated and angrily stomped out of the kitchen toward the steps that led upstairs.

“What the hell is this?” I thought and went running after him. Knife in hand, he went up the steps, then down the hall to Sybil’s closed door. He burst it open without knocking and flicked on the lights. I had no idea what he was up to, but I was glad she wasn’t home.

He walked right over to her human suffering collage, and using the sharp point of the knife, started scraping off the Crucifixion scene. He attacked it like a maniac and kept going until he had gotten rid of every last bit of it.  When he was finished, he stood there and stared at the poster for a moment. Then he turned around and looked at me. I had absolutely nothing to say, and neither did he.

Now, of course, symbols mean different things to different people, and whatever that image meant to him, he clearly didn’t want it in his daughter’s bedroom.  But now it was gone, and everything seemed fine. We walked back to the kitchen together, sat down at the table, and finished our ice cream as though nothing had happened.

My mother was absolutely horrified when she got home later, and he told her what he’d done. Somewhat of an artist herself, she felt he had no right to invade Sybil’s room and inflict his will on her creative expression. She thought it was appalling.

When Sybil got home the next day and my mother sheepishly began to give her the details, my sister made a point of being outraged. But her biggest effort was to hide her deep relief.

When my mother said, “Sybil, Daddy went into your room last night,” her heart sank, and she got really scared. But when she heard what actually happened, she was so happy she almost burst out laughing, but kept a straight face.

She told me years later that she always kept an ounce of grass in the drawer of the night table next to her bed. She couldn’t have cared less about the collage, but if he had found the marijuana, it could have been a disaster. She would have really had to reach into her bag of tricks to wiggle her way out of that one. We both knew she could have done it—she was that good. But it would have been quite a challenge, even for her.

Now, this was still the early days, when marijuana had just started blowing in the wind, and not too many people were smoking it at the time.

When she first started, I could clearly smell a pungent, unfamiliar odor in the air. It definitely was not the same as the normal cigarette smoke that pervaded every other part of our house. When I asked her about it, she told me she had begun burning incense. It was a new thing she had found, a study aid that would clear her mind and help her concentrate. It made sense to me.

One day, during Wilt’s stay, she was home in her room with the door closed. Wilt and I were in my room, and I had to drive him somewhere. As we walked out into the hall, it reeked of that smell of hers. He immediately picked up on it and stopped on the landing before we went downstairs.

“What’s that?” he asked me, taking a couple sniffs of the air.

“Oh, Sybil’s into burning incense now. She does it all the time. It helps her study.”

“Really?” Wilt, sounding impressed. He looked at me like I was five years old. “So, you think that’s incense, huh?”

I didn’t say anything. What else could it be?

“OK,” he said with a chuckle. “Incense it is.”

But before he moved, he took one more sniff and nodded in appreciation.  “It smells like some pretty good stuff to me,” he added, and we left.

 

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Before we close this episode, I want to add one other element to the mix. Behind her closed door, my sister always had music playing and at one point, for some strange reason, she seemed to have gotten into this hillbilly singer who had a high pitched, twangy voice and played a guitar and harmonica.

It was such a weird sound that I figured it must have been some kind of comedy album. I mean, why else would anyone pay good money to listen to someone who sounded like that? It turned out that the hillbilly singer was some kid my brother’s age named Bob Dylan.

Astonishingly, within another few years, he would become a major hero of mine and I would know all his songs by heart. But that was still a few lifetimes away. Again, these were the very early stages of a major, unprecedented change of consciousness that was about to disrupt the entire world, but we’ll pick it up again in the next episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.