samadhisoft.com

Well, after graduation, I returned briefly to Califoam but that lasted a
very short time. Douglas was hiring then and I went down with another guy
from our class, Dave Leverick, and got a job building DC-8’s. I remember I
worked for a foreman whose name was ‘Pinky’ and he was always drunk. It
was boring work and I was often falling asleep on my feet because I had no
idea what it meant to go to bed at a reasonable hour. I bought a BSA
motorcycle then and that started a love affair with bikes that lasted until
about 12 years a go when I gave them up after realizing I’d been very lucky
for many years.

I remember a couple of girlfriends from this period. Lynne McGinnis who
was a year behind us at Jordan and Sally Henderson who I met at the Airport
Club. My memories are that I didn’t treat either one of them very well.
Sally was the first girl I ever slept with. You mentioned that your
childhood experiences affected your relationships later. That was
certainly true for me, I believe. I wasn’t really comfortable with girls
unless I could see that they were really smitten with me. That put me in
the driver’s seat and fed my ego and made me feel safe because I held the
upper hand emotionally. This was all pretty unconscious and I only gained
clarity on it years later.

I tried to go to junior college after high school but I had no
concentration. I’d graduated high school with a C- average so junior
college was all I had available to me. Girls and cars and partying however
was all I really wanted to do.

Then, the draft and the Vietnam war began breathing down my neck. I went
back and tried junior college again, but the draft folks were onto me and
they let me know that my eleventh hour commitment to school wasn’t fooling
them.

I remember reading the newspapers in those days about the war. I was gung
ho and I thought we should kick their butts then. Ron Johnson, Bruce Ladd,
Elmer Davis (all from my High School class) and I all went down and took the Air Force
tests. The Army had already called me for my initial physical but I still
had time to opt for another service and after discussing it, it seemed like
the Air Force was the best bet. Now that I’ve actually spent some time at
sea, I wished I’d have chosen the Navy. I really like being at sea – but I
digress.

I scored 99, the maximum, in all four test categories and the Air Force
wanted me. I chose electronics and signed the papers for four years. I
had about a month until I was induced on Oct 21st, 1966.

The last month was almost solid beach time with Lynne and I was indeed the
nut brown boy when I left.

Not long after I graduated, Hutch went back east and my Mom moved back out
to Paramount and we reconciled and I moved back in with her so I was living
there when I left for the service.

Six weeks of basic training in San Antonio, Texas. People make basic
training sound tough but I liked it. I was still discovering and
physically and mentally, that I had good advantages. After training,
while they sorted out where to next send us (remember, the war was raging
and the induction system was really straining with the load) we did KP and
watched old service movies that dated all the way back to the 40’s.
Finally, the orders came and I’d been assigned to go to Keesler AFB in
Mississippi to learn how to be an Automatic Tracking Radar Operator and
Repairman.

Oh, Sharon Freeman showed up by complete surprise when I was near the end
of basic training. Unknown to me, her family had moved to Houston, Texas
and she’d inquired for me in California and tracked me down. One day they
told me I had visitors and there she and her mom were standing the hot
Texas sun. It was a shock. I went and spent a weekend with her and her
mom and dad at the end of basic training. It came out that she’d gotten
pregnant by the boy she’s gotten involved with when she’d sent me the Dear
John letter and she’d given the baby up and her family had moved. Her mom
thought it would be good for her to see me to help her get her bearings
again. We had one more very bizarre encounter at Keesler AFB in
Mississippi and then I never saw her again.

Keesler was a long boring time. I thought I’d understood the reasons for
the inane rules in basic training but when they kept up with the same stuff
at the electronics school, I had a harder time keeping quiet. I think the
school was five or six months for my specialty. The town of Biloxi, which
was just beside the AFB, was dwarfed by the base and as a consequence, the
locals hated the Air Force types so it wasn’t pleasant to go off base.

As I said, Sharon came to the base. She rode a bus from Houston with her
mom’s blessings. I’m not sure what her mom was thinking but it was pretty
obvious to us that we were going to sleep together if possible. She got a
room on base in special quarters reserved for visitors and that night she
opened a back door to the building and let me in. We thought we were so
sneaky but I should have realized that we would not have been the first to
think of this scheme. No sooner than we’d taken our clothes off and got
in the bed, there was banging on the door and a major scene. She was put
on the late night bus for Houston and I was sent back to my quarters with
vague warnings of doom and destruction. And that was that for the girl
who’d had such a radical impact on my life.

During my time at Keesler, I began to really read the news. I was
following the war and the discussions pro and con about it. I was also
following very closely what was going on with San Francisco’s Hippies and
the ’67 Summer of Love. And on the east coast, it was Timothy Leary and
the LSD gang at Harvard who were making the news. It was beginning to dawn
on me that there was a wider world out there than I’d been able to see from
down in the blue collar streets of North Long Beach and that interesting
things were going on and I was missing them because I’d given myself to the
government for four years.

At the electronics school, the top graduate in each class got to pick his
assignment and everyone else got pot-luck. I focused and was top in my
class by a ways. In the end, however, I got assigned to the worst of the
fourteen possible radar sites. Turns out that a Mormon fellow in my class
had gone in and asked the base’s Mormon chaplain to help him get assigned
to St. George, Utah so he could be close to home. The chaplain complied
and by luck when they grabbed someone’s orders to switch him with, it was
me and I got sent to Matagorda Island on the central coast of Texas. I
came very close to leaving for Canada at that juncture. My sense of
injustice was outraged. But, in the end, I stayed and went to Texas. It
was such a bad assignment, that people were rotated out after 18 months so
I took some consolation from that. Later, as the war intensified, the 18
month reassignment was revoked so I spent the entire remaining three years
there.

We did get to leave the Island for temporary duty assignments. I had
three of these during my three years there. On one of these assignments,
I met Rose Foss in a small town named Ritzville, Washington. Later, when
I returned to Texas, she and a girlfriend flew down and my friend Brian and
I and the two of them rented a small house in Port Lavaca, Texas and we all
lived together for a few months.

It was at this time that I had my first encounter with drugs. I girl I
knew had been hanging around up in Houston with a psychedelic band and she
got me some LSD which I really wanted to try after reading about it. That
first trip was really a shock because I’d never even smoked MJ before that.

The Air Force wanted to send me back to Keesler AFB four a four month
assignment to train on a more advanced radar set. I had to live on base
if I wasn’t married so Rose and I got married on Dec 27th, 1968, so we
could go to Keesler and continue living together. Not the best reason to
marry. We thought we were putting one over on them. After all, it was
just a piece of paper. Joke was on me a few months later when she became
pregnant and it all became a bit too real.

By now, my feelings about the Vietnam war had turned completely. I was
dead set against it. Unfortunately, virtually everyone in my specialty
had to take at least one six month tour of duty there. We were the guys
that ran the ground based radars that guided the waves of B52 bombers which
went in and dropped thousands of pounds of bombs night after night. One of
us would be looking at a plot of the lead plane’s path and would say over
the mike something like, “come two degrees left … five, four, three,
two, one … drop”.

By now I’d reasoned it out for myself that if a soldier with a rifle shot a
few people, that was bad. If a bombardier unloosed a load of bombs and
wiped out a village, that was worse, so what could we say for the people
running the radars who guided entire flights of B52’s in night after night?
It utterly amazed me that no one I worked with saw it this way. All my
buddies blithely went over for six months of such duty and seemingly never
gave it a thought.

My turn came up to go over when I had about a year left in the service. I
was suppose to go with the new radar I’d trained on. It was the first of
it’s type to be sent. I told them I wasn’t going to go. Turns out that
they cannot do anything to you until you actually refuse the orders and my
orders hadn’t been cut yet. I was the first in the Strategic Air Command
to do this and they wanted to make a example of me so they were waiting and
I was waiting.

In an extreme bit of irony, they restricted me to the island for awhile
during this period because I’d dared to complain about some decision of the
officers and I’d posted my complaint on the site’s bulletin board. They
called it mutiny. No more nightly boat trips back home to Rose and my new
baby Daniel. With lots of time to kill, I waded into some problems they’d
had with the radar sets which no one had been able to crack. One week I
fixed one problem and they thought it was a fluke. The next week, I fixed
the other major bug-a-boo they’d been wresting with for months and they
made me head of maintenance. This at the time when they were also planning
to hang me from a very high tree if I actually refused the orders when they
were issued.

Weeks went by in this way. After a few weeks, they let me go home in the
evenings again and they got over the mutiny charge. On the Vietnam issue,
I was committed to refusing the orders when they came so it was a long
tense waiting period. But, every time the new radar was almost ready to
ship, it would have another technical problem and they’d delay and the
orders would still not be cut.

It got down to six months left in the service and still they would not
remove my name from the list of people slated to go. Strategic Air Command
really wanted to make an example of me. Finally, with four months left to
go, they took me off the list. In the end, I avoided Vietnam and left the
service with an honorable discharge.

After I got out of the service, Rose and Danny and I moved to Long Beach,
California. My intent was to go right to college because the service had
really pissed me off and I (a) never wanted anyone to be able to boss me
around again because they had a college degree and I didn’t and (b) I had
some idealistic notion that I was going to study philosophy and find out
what was wrong with the world. Sheeez, how naive all that seems now.

However, I found out that I had nearly five years of seniority at Douglas
because of my service time and the pay was so good, I decided to try it
again for awhile so college got put off for a year. I worked night shift
and I remember a lot of nights coming home and finding my place full of my
NLB friends smoking grass and listening to Jesus Christ Superstar over and
over and over. To this day, I can hear most of it just by thinking of it.

Douglas was still boring and I got scared that I’d never go to college if I
didn’t just do it so I did. I still remember the feeling of utter freedom
and self empowerment as I quit Douglas and started on what would become
five great years of college.

I ran through nearly the whole catalog of classes and majors trying to
decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. In the end, I think most of
what I learned that was really important to me was from my own reading
rather than the actual classes. I was a philosophy major, then psychology,
then Microbiology, then pre-Pharmacology and then back to Microbiology.

I met a new set of friends beyond my NLB crowd and my horizons were
expanded at a furious rate during those years. I delved into myself
externally with encounter groups and internally with psychedelics. I
changed from being an atheist to being someone who believed that existence
had meaning and purpose but I was completely unsatisfied with the
explanations conventional religion offered. I spent a lot of my college
time in very competitive classes full of pre-meds and I got caught up in
the grades race and ultimately graduated Magna Cum Laude.

I tried a brief fling at the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) when I
first got to college but their rhetoric was paper thin – just an emotional
pitch to whip people up. I was looking for something with more substance.
I looked at philosophy and psychology and they were both unsatisfying. I
majored in science because I was good at it but it wasn’t what I was really
seeking.

I got caught intellectually in existentialism. The pointlessness and
meaninglessness of everything began to oppress me because everything was so
relative. I.e., we all became Catholics or Democrats or Communists or
whatever for the most part because of where we were born and who our
parents were and not because any of these things had anything of deep
intrinsic merit to recommend them one over the other.

Then I began to be curious about what people meant when they talked about
attaining “enlightenment”. The claims seemed wild and unlikely but as I
read, I noticed something quite uncanny. The people who wrote about such
things down through history had done so from different eras on different
continents and from within completely different cultures and for the most
part, they hadn’t known a lot about each other given the distances and poor
communications and etc. But, in spite of that, if you read carefully, you
noticed that ultimately, they were all writing about the same core things.
Ideas and points of view which were very much the same even though they
had all started out from such different places. This smelled to me like
something might be going on here that wasn’t relative. Something that
might be revealing a deeper absolute fabric behind all of the transitory
relative foreground stuff. This started a life long quest that continues
for me today.

I graduated in ’76 and started work at The Nichols Institute which was a
biomedical testing and research laboratory which specialized in a technique
called Radioimmunoassy. It was OK but it didn’t really light my fire. We
all wore white lab coats and did assays and experiments and handled little
test tubes with minute bits of radiation in them all day. After all my
idealism in college, I felt like I’d graduated into a desert.

Rose and I were still together but we’d had a rough time with several
separations. I loved her but I was also addicted to her and my insecurity
without her. And I was convinced that our marriage wasn’t enough. We went
back and forth for years and years. Some were very good and some quite
bitter. We both cheated and played hardball. We finally divorced in ’78
but even then we weren’t through. In ’80 we intentionally had another
child, Christopher Brian Gallagher. We didn’t really let go of each other
until ’85.

I ‘discovered’ computers in my last year at college and I was never the
same afterwards. The first year after graduation, I practically lived in
the computer center evenings and weekends. They satisfied something in me
and I became obsessed for well over a decade. After a little more than a
year working as a research chemist at Nichols, I talked the management into
letting me take over the day to day management and programming of their
data reduction computer system. I dropped biology and became a computer
jock. Now, many years later, I can see it was a good career move.

I worked at Nichols from ’76 until ’80. Then I took a job with a company
which installed computer systems in medical laboratories (they’d put one in
at Nichols so they knew me). The company was based in Dallas, Texas but
they had a large installation going in up in British Columbia and I went to
work there, in Vancouver. For the next two years, I lived one week in
California and two in Vancouver. In ’80, I bought a condo in San Juan
Capistrano because Nichols had moved there from San Pedro. Rose, Dan and
Chris lived in the condo and I was there one week out of three. I liked
Canada a lot.

By the beginning of ’83, the constant travel was wearing on me and Ii took
a position with a computer company, Pick Systems, which made the operating
system used on the computers I’d been working on for years. This took me
into a deeper level of computer programming, i.e. operating systems and
assembler. Pick was in Irvine. I rented a place near where the 5 and the
405 fwys join south of Irvine and then I just saw Rose on the weekends.

We had what we called an ‘open’ relationship for a long time – actually
starting back not long after graduation. At the time it seemed so
cosmopolitan but in actuality, it just kept both of us linked to the other
and prevented us from forming deep bonds to anyone else even though we had
many relationships over the years. I was rather manic about all of this.
I think my insecurities from my childhood and feelings of abandonment made
me think that if I was in several relationships and multiple women cared
about me, that I was ‘safe’ or ‘ok’ somehow.

In the late 70’s, I came in contact with some followers of Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh. You might remember him. He was the guru who setup a commune in
eastern Oregon and made big news in the early 80’s. I read his stuff
before he came to the US and I liked it. When they came, I went to the
commune for three years for the summer world wide gatherings. It was a
wild place. A mix of sexual hedonism and, in most cases, genuine
spiritual seeking. When you were there with 20,000 of his followers, it
created a reality unlike anything I’ve seen before or since. I stayed
deeply interested in Bhagwan and his movement for years but I never
actually joined and became one of his Sanyasins. For awhile, I seriously
thought he might be an enlightened being. I got over that later when the
commune fell apart.

During all of these years, LSD is a companion which I’m taking several
times a year to explore inner space. I’m also reading widely in the
scriptures of the various world religions.

At the end of ’85, I realized I had to really let go of Rose. I’d been
seeing a woman named Lise with whom I’d really become attached but I was
doing my usual straddling the fence thing and my relationship with both
Lise and Rose was open and loosely defined. Lise dumped me for another
guy and it shocked me into deeply realizing that I was never going to find
what I wanted unless I began to give it.

I dated and then lived with a woman named Joan for three years from ’86 to
late ’88. I really liked her but she was nearly 15 years younger than I
was and way too conservative and unadventurous to ever really make it with
me permanently. Now, I think I fell into my time with Joan because I
wanted a safe place after the debacle with Rose and Lise.

Rose and I remained friends and were cordial with each other. Like the
divorce, which we handled ourselves and spilt what little we had up
equitably, our relationship in the years since ’85 has been good. That
made it nice too because I was able to see a lot of both my boys during all
those years. Rose, Chris and Dan lived in my San Juan Capistrano condo
until ’89 when I sold it. In late ’89, she remarried a fellow named Mike
with whom I’ve become good friends. When I see all the pain couples put
each other through with lawyers and such, I thank my stars that Rose and I
kept it sane and simple.

During my time with Joan, I began to have a deep feeling that my life was
blessed somehow. That I had been fortunate and gifted in so many ways that
I couldn’t see I deserved. It made me feel like I wanted to get involved
somehow and give some of my blessings back to existence.

My involvement took the form of political activism. In ’87, I went to what
was still then the Soviet Union for three weeks and visited Moscow,
Leningrad and several cities in the Central Asian areas of the USSR.
These were the Gorbachev years and change was in the air in Russia even
though it was still deeply communist. The group I went with was into
Citizen Diplomacy – I.e., they felt that if the governments couldn’t figure
out how to get along, we citizens could try to work it out ourselves,
directly. It was a great time. We met many ordinary people, party
officials, people who were anti government intellectuals, saw Lenin’s tomb
and about a thousand other things. I realized deeply during my time there
that America’s fear of the Soviets was overstated. Not that they weren’t
our bitter enemies for a long time but because in spite of their rhetoric,
they were and are a shabby society. Most places I visited in the USSR
looked like a slightly fancier version of Tijuana. About the only places
where you saw anything that looked nice or was built well was in their
space and sports programs. The rest was schlock.

When I came back, I got involved with a group based in San Francisco,
“Soviets, Meet Middle America”. They sponsored groups of Soviets to come
over to the US and tour around. In ’88, four Soviets came over under the
auspices of this group and visited the US for a month and made stops in
four cities. One of the stops was Irvine and I headed the group which
organized to provide housing and tours for them. We had them for a week
and took them to schools, colleges, ordinary homes, Laguna Beach, super
markets, Disneyland, etc., etc., etc. All during this period, I spoke
before a lot of groups talking about what I’d seen in the USSR.

These activities introduced me to a wide circle of liberal activists in
Orange County including Larry Agran who was the mayor of Irvine at the
time. This circle was also involved in central American politics. If you
recall, the thing with the Sandinistas and the Contras was raging in
Nicaragua then. I went down for two weeks to Nicaragua with an
organization named, “Witness for Peace”. The idea was to go to the
conflict and meet with the people on both sides and come to our own
conclusions about what was really going on. At that point in time, the US
press was all pro-Contra/anti-Sandinista because the Sandinistas were
socialists and had overthrown the dictator, Somoza, who the US had backed.
Witness for Peace felt that if ordinary people would go down and just
meet the people and see the situation, they would realize what was really
going on. They were right. I came away convinced that the Sandinista’s
revolution was popularly supported and that the Contras were a lot of US
paid mercenaries who were committing terrible atrocities. When I came back
from Central America, I began to give talks about the war there to
interested groups.

But, things for me were about to undergo a big change. I’d known Sharon
Ronsse for sometime. We were both loosely in the same social circle which
was organized around the computer companies we worked for. Joan and I were
breaking up. We’d begun to realize that we were not a good match. About
then, I realized that I was interested in Sharon and one of our mutual
friends told me that she was interested also. All of this happened as I
was on the brink of leaving for Central America in late ’88. When I
returned, Joan and I made our final break and I moved into Sharon’s condo
with her in San Juan Capistrano.

It was obvious to me that this was really it for me. Sharon was an
excellent match for me in every way. I knew after only living with her
for a month or two that I wanted to marry her. When we got together, she
was the Directory of International Sales and Marketing for a company that
sold software to international hotels. She had the bright red sports car
and the corner office and she was one of the up and coming business women
in Orange County. She was also deeply spiritual and a mediator of long
standing. She’s been traveling the world for 15 years on business and her
place was full of art work that she’d collected overseas.

It amazed me then and it still amazes now, that she saw anything in me.
When I moved in with her, everything I owned was in a few cardboard boxes.
I was spiritually focused but more as a dilettante – a collector of
information rather than as a practitioner. I was a big city boy who had
cheated on every woman he’d ever been with while she was a completely
honest and incredibly intelligent Kansas farm girl who had made the world
hers. She’s been married once before to a Vietnam war vet, a helicopter
door gunner who’d gone crazy a few years after they’d married and she’d had
to divorce him.

We were married on Dec 31st, 1989, New Year’s Eve. We both sold our
condos and converted our corporate jobs into remote consulting positions
and we moved up here to Snohomish County in Washington onto a very private
and rural 2.5 acre property about 40 miles NE of Seattle. We made a
completely new start.

We both worked for our respective companies for several years and did quite
well. Eventually, her job dried up and she refocused on our property and
converted it into a virtual arboretum. The farm girl fully reasserted
itself. In about ’92, I could see that the Pick industry, of which I’d
been a part for over a decade, was drying up so I taught myself how to
write C and C++ and I’ve been writing Windows programs ever since. Most of
the time I’ve been up here, I’ve been an independent software contractor
but 2 1/2 years ago, I took a permanent position with Motorola and I’ve
been there ever since.

Sharon got me to advance from collecting information about spiritual
practices to using the information by meditating. This has become a
central part of my life now and scarcely a day passes when we don’t sit
down for 45 minutes of inner reflection. The inner landscape has expanded
far beyond anything I could have imagined before I began and many things in
the world’s scriptures are now beginning to make deep sense to me. I’ve
dropped political activism while I work out the things inside of me.