Jack describes his early attempts at awakening during his last years as a middle school teacher.

“We have sold our birthright for the illusion of material power.” J.G Bennett




Moments of Awakening Chapter One





“He teaches the Truth. He teaches the Truth,” Mr. Earl told the substitute teacher. How very difficult to teach the Truth. How very difficult to write the Truth. Especially for me, writing in the autobiographical style of Henry Miller. Just think what my friends, relatives, and co-workers would say if I wrote the Truth. “He’s a God-Dammed Liar.” “What a hypocrite, a user….” “Yea, he fucking thinks he knows everything….” “I can’t believe he’d betray our trust in him….” “I thought he was a better man than that….”

In telling the story of a character who is trying to raise his level of consciousness, and how difficult it is to awaken from his mechanical self, part of the struggle, a large part, takes place in the “real world,” the world of family responsibilities, the world of work. But, to tell the truth about my Mom and Dad, my brothers and sisters, my friends and comrades, to tell the truth about teachers, administrators, custodians and students that I work with, to spill the beans that no one in the entire school system has a fucking clue about what’s going on, that no one knows what the fuck they’re doing, including the Great Mr. Daley. To tell the Truth?

On the other hand, there is the Truth that surrounds us at every moment, for me the vast farmland of the San Joaquin Valley. How describe the acres and acres of almond and walnut orchards, and vineyards that stretch out miles and miles into the foothills, birdsong, white blossoms, new grass, white clouds, gray clouds, patches of blue, the caw of a crow, the buzz from the white bee hive? How can one write the Truth of this beautiful California moment?

My last year of teaching, because of overcrowding, I‘ve had to give up my classroom during prep and lunch and return to the faculty room. With prep. and lunch together; I sit through two and some times three lunches. First lunch when I usually stay in my room working on the computer, is mostly for seventh grade teachers. Second lunch, when the roving math teacher comes to my room, is mostly made up of six-grade teachers. Six grade teachers are a very caring bunch. They think of their students as their kids, and are very mothering, even the men teachers. Some of them give up much of their lunch to work with kids in the classroom. The past few years they have been very team oriented. They eat lunch together, all squeezing into one table where they discuss their kids and the curriculum. They are very into eating and often share pot–luck lunches. This is when I get most of my papers corrected.

Third lunch, brings in several teachers who are new to our school. Most of them grew up in or around the sixties in or around the Bay Area. The oldest of the bunch, Mr. Earl, about six months older than me, is out’a East Palo Alto. I’m thinking he must’a been living there around the time that Alex was managing the apartment complex. His good buddy, Max, who reminds me a bit of Traffic Seven, grew up in the “good” part of Palo Alto with his dad a professor at Stanford. The third guy, Speedo, is an ex-prison chaplain who spent a lot of time in inner city Oakland just after I quit driving cab there. As you might guess, we have a whole lot in common to talk about.

Max dropped out of Stanford and spent a number of years in the Domestic Peace Core in rural Illinois where he was adopted by the black community that he worked with and learned about the blues and soul music in the neighborhood churches. He talks about it as a peak experience in his life. Surprisingly, he says, that through he’s experienced famine and death in India, and the destruction of Beirut, he wasn’t an actor in what was happening. He was just a witness. In the classroom, he’s been on the front lines. The experience has been more awakening than most of what he’s seen around the world.

And the three of these guys being fairly new at teaching may have wondered why I didn’t give them any help. I wondered myself in my very first weeks of teaching why Herb, one of the best teachers I have ever known, didn’t offer advice to me a novice who hadn’t even taken a course in education. Later, he told me that he had not offered to help because every teacher is different, every teaching situation is different, and the really good teacher must learn how to handle each situation.

There is no teaching. There is only learning. And we only truly learn what we love. Anyone who has eyes to see can see that our system is not working. At best we are conditioning our children to habitual attitudes that will fuel our corporate needs.

It’s the last week of school. I’m sitting in my empty classroom with a stack of reading summaries and autobiographies. The last papers I’ll ever have to correct. I figure I’ll correct them in the faculty room after Miss Hall takes my room for her math class. At the computer, I decide to email copies of Mr. Daley’s Promotion Speech to a few of my fellow teachers. I still can’t believe that they wouldn’t let me post it on our school web page. “There might be a conflict of interests,” they told me. A conflict of interests? Can you see a conflict here?

Mr. Daley’s Promotion Speech





When I first started teaching some thirty years ago, I only figured on staying a short while. Two years, three at the very most and I’d have the novel published. This was the novel that I was writing while driving cab. I had put aside the Alaska novel to get some practice on keeping a journal. As I got more into the novel, I realized that the writing was really only a part of my real work, which is trying to understand myself and my reason for being here on this tiny planet. And, I found that there is no better place to work on self-understanding than the classroom.

You all know that I spend a lot of time trying to understand higher levels of consciousness. The classroom is such a good place to work on your machine. I mean, there is that constant bombardment at your thinking, your sensations, and your emotions, especially negative emotions. I’ve never spent a year in the classroom when I didn’t learn more than the students. Gurdjieff says that the harder the job is the better it is for the Work. Provided that is, that you remember to work on yourself. So, I’ve stayed over the years because I’ve discovered that you can’t really teach anyone until you know your self. Now, you guys all know, I’m very serious about my work.

Then, Joey comes along and messes everything up. I mean, most of the stories told about Mr. Daley are from my twin brother, Joey. He is the one still living in the sixties. I do believe that man can reach a higher level of consciousness. But, Joey, he takes it to extremes. He says that we are all asleep. That we are machines conditioned by external events to act in the only way we can. He says that we cannot do but that our every act is a reaction, that we are filled with negative emotions that lead to violence. But, he admits that there is the possibility for change. He tells me, “First you have to wake up. Then you must die. And only then can you be born again!”

Now, Joey agrees with me when I say that there is no better place to work on one’s self than in the classroom, but he is very critical of the educational system And here he quotes from Krishnamurti. “...In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love... " Joey maintains that we do not teach from love, that we rely too much on fear, that we teach subject matter instead of children.

Even though Joey says that we are all asleep, he agrees with me that there is no place where you will find more ‘awake’ people than here in our school system. Another reason I stayed here so long is the people that I work with. I’ve never worked another job where people are so friendly and supportive as in education. In Willows and Mt. Diablo, at West Park, North, Senior Elementary, the Adult School, and here at Monte Visa I’ve worked with outstanding people. So, I just want to say thanks to everyone. Joey couldn’t make it today. He’s up in Mariposa working a glory hole. But, he’s sending a thank you message by telepathy.

“Where’s the conflict?” I ask myself as Miss Hall’s seventh graders start filtering in.

“Where’s the Truth?” myself answers as I leave the classroom.

It is several months later. I’m sitting with Speedo at a table in the faculty room. Max comes up all excited. He shows us a magazine that is featuring the last chapter of his newly published novel. I figure I should read it since I’ve been so busy promoting mine. As I look through the pages I find that it is heavily illustrated with pictures of animals and outdoor scenes. The illustrations detract from the writing. They’re so good that I find myself looking more at the pictures and unable to follow what is written.

I tell Max that I’d like to see a copy of his manuscript. He tells me that he’ll get me a copy and also he’ll give me some of the paraphernalia that goes with it.

I am trying to set up the paraphernalia that goes with Max’s novel. He has a skeleton in a coffin and a blow up dead body of the main character. I open the coffin to get a look at the skeleton. It’s a gruesome looking thing with raw skin and hair clinging to the bone. Passersby stop and shudder at the exposed corpse. The blow up dead body has to be unfolded and hosed down before it will take air. I feel that this is a lot of trouble to go through, but that I will better understand the novel if I look at these visual aids first.

It’s about a year and a half after my promotion to retirement. Ben and I are sitting at a faculty room table discussing the theory of Recurrence. I’m pointing out some of the difficulties that I find in accepting the theory. Michelle passes our table and stops to listen. “If Recurrence is true , and I go back to the same life time one of the things I would want to change is shipping out with Scandinavian Shipping. I had a chance to take a job on a ship. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t take it. But, if I go back to that time and take the job, I wouldn’t meet my wife, Anne. If we didn’t get married then my son and daughter and grandchildren would not have been born. What happens to their lives if Recurrence is true ?”

“Well, maybe there are parallel universes. Your children might continue to live in a parallel universe,” Michelle tells me.

“Yea, that might be so.”

“Are you saying that you will remember your past life when you repeat it in Recurrence?” Ben asks.

“No, in most cases you remember nothing. However, if you develop essence in this lifetime, all that you learn becomes a part of your essence. And that will be remembered….”

“What do you mean essence?” Michelle asks.

“Essence is that part of you that is real. We are all born with Essence, but as soon as we begin to learn we begin to develop personality. Essence gets covered over with personality and in most cases never develops. That’s part of work effort to die to personality and rediscover your Essence….”

“All this is so confusing. I think I rather not know about things like Recurrence and Essence. It’s enough just to get through the day,” Michelle tells me.

“Well, that‘s the problem. We all get lost in the day and never question our spiritual development. If we don’t develop the spiritual aspect of ourselves then we have to live life over and over again until we start working on our spiritual self….”

“Give me one bit of scientific support for the existence of God and the spiritual realm,” Ben tells me. “Scientific…. It has to be scientific proof….” The bell rings for class to begin.

Saturday morning as I sit in the backyard watching the approach of an early December storm, it comes to me, if not scientific at least historical proof for the existence of the Spiritual realm. Through the whole history of the human race the civilizations that reach the highest level of freedom were those that were in touch with God, the absolute, the spiritual. You can see the rise and fall of civilizations in the rise and fall of the spiritual values of a people. In every decline you see that the fall of the spiritual values of the people come first. The cause of decline always comes from within a nation as it loses the taste for mythical values and becomes more embedded in the materialistic growth. As a civilization loses its spiritual value it becomes less and less creative, more and more, greedy, and violent.

Our own civilization is a prefect example of this. Joseph Campbell writes that anyone who doesn’t believe that America has lost her spiritual values need only read the daily newspaper. There is corruption and greed at every level of society. Nicoll states, “The Flood, understood in its internal or psychological meaning, is not a flood of water, drowning the earth, but a flood of evil. The Flood refers to a period of time when all right understanding was dying among a particular division of humanity” The violence of the mass media from music to cartoons to movies is reflected in our national policy towards other nations. If one does not value the spiritual aspect of life one places all values on the material. Instead of trying to understand our inner self, we put all our energy into getting more. And, it doesn’t matter how we get it. Cheat, lie, steal, run over your competitors, no matter, the bottom line is all that counts. When the spirit dies in man, we are flooded with greed, corruption, and barbaric destruction of all that is truly human.

Didn’t Bergson say that science only deals with facts, with matter, with that which can be weighed and measured? He also said that there has been no progress, no evolution in the spiritual realm of man because of our reliance on science to solve all of our problems. All of the great advances of the past two thousand years have been exclusively in the realm of matter. One must go beyond science, beyond time-thought to understand the spiritual.

It is several days later. I’m sitting at one of the round tables in the faculty room. It’s third lunch and I’m chewing on a cheese and turkey onion roll sandwich, reading the editorial page of the Press, and thinking about the fifth period class full of SDC kids and other behavioral problems. I read about the starvation, death, and brain washing that happened to ten year olds in the 1990’s in Iraq, and how that created the twenty some year old terrorists of today. “You know,” I tell Mr. Earl who is sitting to my right. “Our Middle East policy has been wrong for the past fifty years…. If we spent half the money on education and improving the lives of the people in the Middle East that we spent on bombing them, would we have created as many terrorists?”

“Yea, you’re right about that,” says Speedo from the next table.

“You know, what gets me about the Christian Right, the wing that supports weapons of mass destruction and ‘Shock and Awe,’ is that they forget that Jesus taught that you should love your enemy. If you love your enemy, you sure don’t drop bombs on them. You don’t let them get away with murder and destruction, but you try to find out why these people hate us so much that they are willing to die to kill us. You want to stop their destructive behavior, for sure. But, you want to stop it forever by getting to the source of it. Seeing that we are all of us human, they are not the evil ones. They are stupid… they think that violence will bring about positive change….”

“You have to teach that your enemy is evil… not human. A man can’t kill another human being….” Speedo tells us.

“They teach you that in the service. Bayonet drill… left foot kill, right foot Gooks…. They weren’t human they were Gooks. They taught you to hate the enemy. You have to hate him to kill him….” Mr. Earl says.

“How many years will it take us to learn that violence never solves world problems? It doesn’t with countries, it doesn’t with grown ups, it doesn’t with children,” I tell the other teachers.

“What do you teach?” asks a middle aged substitute who is sitting at our table.

“He teaches the Truth,” Mr. Earl says with a big grin.

“The Truth? “ the lady asks.

“The Truth,” Mr. Earl replies.

I get a rush of excitement and think of an earlier story I told Speedo and Mr. Earl in the faculty room before school started. “You know,” I told Speedo, “Mr. Earl and I grew up about ten blocks away from each other in North Philly in the 1940’s. I didn’t even know that until I started subbing last year. We were talking about Billie Holiday, and Mr. Earl said he had met her one time in her apartment in North Philly. I learned that he grew up across Broad. A dozen or so blocks away. It’s really amazing that the two of us would end up in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley here in 2004.”

“Yea, it is some coincidence,” Speedo says.

“Do you remember the Baptist Temple on Broad and Berks?” I ask Mr. Earl.

“No, I didn’t get over to Broad too often. Didn’t pay much attention to Churches either….”

“Yea, we went to Sunday School and Church every Sunday. It seemed a little strange to me even back then. Most of our neighborhood is colored, but everyone in the Church is white. And, they seemed to be a lot better off than we were, wealthy. I figured it had something to do with being on Broad.”

“Well, I know they weren’t from my neighborhood. Even the few white families left in our blocks were poor. Working class poor…. And prejudiced? That’s why I had to fight my way to school and back. They thought they were better’n us.”

“Yea, I know what you mean. My Uncle Lee was from the South. Pretty Boy Lee, they called him. This one time me and my brother, Joey, got a job with the colored iceman up on Sixth and Berks. He gave us a buck each to watch his ice while he was out delivering. He showed us where to cut a ten cent piece, a twenty cent piece, a fifty cent piece.”

“Yea, I remember the ice man bringing in the blocks of ice on his shoulder. Big bulging muscles.”

“Yea well we didn’t do any delivering. Anyhow, after we’ve worked there a week or so, Uncle Lee comes to visit. We’re all excited and tell him we have a job with the iceman up on Sixth. He asks how much we get paid. I tell him a buck apiece.

“Well, no nephews of mine are going to work for a colored,” he says and pulls out a couple bucks. He gives us a buck each, and we quit the iceman. I don’t ever remember him giving us another dollar after that,” I tell Earl and Speedo as the bell rings for class to begin.