Transcendent Experiences
Anniversary presents
-- 1983
June 2, 1983 my dear wife forgot our 4th anniversary.
For the record, especially now that I have many years of perspective, my heart really does go out to Donna. She married me, essentially, on faith. She was convinced (or at least hoped) that it was God's will for her to marry the Christian philosopher and musician she had so much in common with, instead of her high school boyfriend cocaine addict who still lived with his mother. The problem was that she never loved me in the way a wife is "supposed" to love her husband.
Nearly 2 decades later it's all rather humorous in a human-pathos kind of way. But at the time I was very, very angry. This "Mark1, Mark 2" thing was constantly a plague. And I knew she did not really find me attractive. There was, shall we say, plenty of evidence (or the lack thereof!) to support that conclusion. But still and all, to forget the 40th or maybe 14th anniversary was one thing, but the 4th?!? I was quite affected.
So, I went out and bought myself a present. I bought a Texas Instruments TI994A "personal computer." I paid $95 for it, which in those days of $800 a month gross income was quite an indulgent sum. I plugged it into the back of our black and white TV set. You saved your programs on cassette tapes. And for the next 3 months spent most of my free moments teaching that machine how to do things.
It seems that, between my mathematics and logic, I have always have an innate ability to program computers. Except for a few week introduction to what computers are back in my 8th grade class, I have never (even to this day) had a course in computer programming. I have often referred to myself as an idiot savant, not entirely inaccurate.
But the math and logic were only half of the equation. The other half was that I was creating things. Making it do things that I wanted it to. The experience was very left-brain and right-brain intensive, in a way that few of my activities in life ever have been. Many nights, as I tried to sleep after a particularly intense session, I would have wildly cascading geometrical images coursing in and around my mind's eye. Amazing, really. And no drugs.
Come September 1983 my Dad got a promotion, where he was in charge of the entire investment division for a financial group. He bought an IBM clone, and for an hour talked into a tape recorder describing what he needed the program to do. He needed to be able to track every stock and bond that was bought and sold, by customer, broker, and security, on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. And compute the commissions, and the firm's overrides. Which would change as the broker's commissions changed for the year. Fairly standard stuff these days, but it was 1983.
And the IBM PC was way, way beyond anything I had ever imagined. It was faster, deeper, and much more complex than anything I had ever imagined, let alone worked with.
Well, what I did not know, and what Dear Dad had mercifully left out, was that there was a very specific reason why he was asking me to try this program. The people who ran the $5,000,000 mainframe computer in Los Angeles had just completed a 6 month feasibility study, and determined that the program was too complicated, and they could not do it.
A week later I gave him a working copy. And it happened...just...like...that. Oh, not without struggles. The truth is that what happened that week was, for me, a living miracle. I could not write that program. And this is not false humility. I needed a special, miraculous Word of Knowledge to make the thing work at all. I've told the story (in the context of the Gifts of the Spirit) here.
His boss's boss took notice. Little ole me, professional toilet scrubber, had gone from housecleaner to the "computer expert of the Hansch Financial Group" in a week. I was brought in to help move their core mainframe program to the PC. They wondered if, instead of me making $6 an hour cleaning houses and playing with the computer in my spare time, if it would be OK for them to start paying me $25 an hour to make the machine do what they wanted.
I said "sure."
At present I have approximately 100,000 users of my software, nation-wide. I've seen and done many amazing things through the computer industry. In the 18 years I have been doing this I have made well over $1,000,000 programming computers.
Little ole me.
Housecleaner.
A friend even gave me this memorial:
CP, as in Computer Programmer. As in Commode Polisher.
And my familiarity with computers and religion combined in 1996 to start YHWH.COM, aka Yesod HaShem, aka The Foundation For The Name, aka The Church of Yahweh.
All because Dear Donna was still in love with Mark #1.
-- 1985
Dear Donna's never ending struggle with herself and her 2 Marks remained unresolved until just after our 6th anniversary in 1985. She left her diary out one day (a real cute Middle Earth Hobbit Trails diary I had gotten for her), wherein I found love poems and accounts of enthralling episodes I had no recollection of. Yes, she admitted she had been having an affair with him. She couldn't figure out why, if King David had 1,000 wives why she couldn't have 2 husbands. Well, maybe she should, but I was tired of being #2 (in more ways than one!) in her life. So, we split up permanently.
I was, Dear Reader, a proverbial basket case. Full of immense self pity, I made this "horrible thing" the center of my life. Most of my thoughts, and nearly all my conversations, focused on "How could she do this to me?"
Well, that went on for about 3 months. Then one night, I was sitting in my living room alone, feeling sorry for myself, when all of a sudden...the world shifted a bit...the room looked fuzzy and strange...and it was like Yhwh had reached into my brain, took it out, and held it in front of me so I could have a good, hard look at myself.
This was a remarkable, transformational event. I saw that my victimization and boo-hoo-hoo-is-me attitude was a CHOICE! It did not "have" to be that way. I could decide to make my divorce the center of my life, or I could shake it off with no more concern than a stubbed toe.
It was up to me.
Over and over I kept saying to myself, "I am not a victim!"
From this experience I gained one of the greatest gifts in my life, and there have been many, many. But through my 1985 "anniversary present" and subsequent divorce I learned that I have complete dominion over all aspects of my life. The old saying is so true, that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we choose to react.
Our society is obsessed with the idea that we have no control over ourselves. All the popular 12-step programs start with the erroneous statement that the user is "powerless" over the substance or habit that is destroying them. And then, of course, spends the next 11 steps telling the powerless how to get control(!) Murderers have a murderer gene. Rapists are the victims. You simply cannot watch one single movie or TV show where you are not asked to have sympathy for the criminal. The government forcefully redistributes more than a $Trillion every year on the strength of the self-fulfilling and self-sustaining victimization model. Even in the Church we are regularly told we cannot control how we feel, or what we think. Often we are told we cannot help what we do.
All of this is wrong. Entirely, totally wrong.
Actually, this attitude is so all-pervasive that we don't even notice it anymore, and it certainly deserves much more extensive treatment than I can give it here. (I think it's book #23 on the list.) But I am deeply, passionately involved in this.
 | You CAN control how you feel. |
| You CAN control your thoughts. |
| You CAN control your desires. |
| You will be what you WILL to be. |
And athletics stands as the great indictment against the victimization models in our society. How? Well, we honor and worship those athletes who have the finest, strongest, and most absolute control over their bodies. Yet when they beat their wives or rape a woman we assign them a 12-step program to get them to admit they are powerless. AM I THE ONLY ONE PAYING ATTENTION HERE!?!?!??!?
We are more than body. As I have stated so often we are body and emotion and desire and thought, all of which is ultimately controlled by Will.
Yes, disease exists. But perfect health consists in gaining (through spiritual strength) as fine control over our emotions and desires and thoughts as the athlete has over his or her body.
I caught my first glimpse of this through Donna's 1985 anniversary present.
So let's see...in 1983 she gave me a million dollar business, and in 1985 dominion over my own soul.
I am forever grateful.
Thank you, Donna.
