Motorcycles!
It was a Kawasaki 250; black with lots of custom chrome. It came with a two-cycle engine. Which meant it had a special tank that mixed oil into the gas automatically through signals from the throttle. It also sounded really cool to my 22-year-old ears, sort of like a supersonic popcorn machine. And the other thing, … it was really fast!
I rode it to work in downtown LA where I had my first grown up job working for Pacific Telephone as a residential installer. In those days climbing poles was part of the daily faire and the most enjoyable part of the job; something about getting up out of the craziness for a while that felt really wonderful. I’m still doing that today with periods of mediation each morning and evening.
Heading home from work one afternoon I was sailing along a cross street and coming up to a light at Wilshire Blvd. where the light was just then opportunely changing to green. I was going maybe 40-45 and when it changed I gunned it. I hit the intersection flying.
Exactly at that instant someone ran the red light. There was nothing I could do. It all happened in less than one second. All I saw was the flashing blur of a car going in front of me from left to right. My whole being tensed but before I could react it was gone and I had sailed through the intersection untouched.
I’m still stunned decades later that we didn’t collide. There seemed to be absolutely no space between us at the instant we nearly came together. Memory’s flash camera shows the car exactly in front of my wheel, with no space in between, awaiting impact.
So do you believe in miracles? I do. How about accidents? Do you believe in accidents? Nope, I don’t. I’ve come to understand that that’s not the way the universe works. Rather, I’ve found that everything happens out of the cause and effect thoughts and actions that we all create in our lives. So even the most horrible events and so called accidents have an energetic beginning in our consciousness. It is out of our minds and then with the responses of our emotions and the choices we make that we create both our experiences and our destinies.
In my early days I was also a musician. And for a time I studied with a wonderful man by the name of Ralph Pyle, a long time member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
One sunny afternoon in his Pasadena home, Ralph told me one of the most amazing stories I have ever heard. Ralph had a friend that had a premonition about his own death. So powerful was this feeling that his friend took his wife and new baby up into the high Sierra’s and began building a home in a cave. His wife stayed in a nearby village where he would come down to regularly for supplies.
When one day he didn’t come down as expected, people went up to check on him. They found him there lying in front of the cave dead. A large bolt had fallen off an airplane and gone right through his head.
Four years after Ralph told me this story I found myself in the 25th Infantry Division in Chu Chi Viet Nam. And though the fuller account will have to wait for another day, the salient point for today’s talk is that I’m running across an open field straight into enemy automatic weapon fire. It was like playing cowboys and indians when we were kids. Only this time the bullets were real. Well I made it all the way across and again, I was untouched.
A few months later a friend of mine, a drummer in the division’s Army band, was killed while the band was playing a concert in the recreation room, of all places!
And so from my esoteric studies, along with these influential experiences and my own intuition, I am fully convinced that we come and go from this world exactly at that moment when it is best for us to transition from one realm to another, regardless of the pleas, or howls of our egos.
But more important than knowing when you’re leaving or even where you’re going, is to discover Who is waiting for you when you arrive!
I’m John Johnston. See you next time, here, On The Cosmic Porch!
