Lemurians

My father was a founder of the New Age movement.

In 1951 he moved to San Diego to study with a group called The Lemurian Fellowship

In 1953, having taken all their courses, he founded a splinter group. His goal was to start a new civilization, based on Lemurian philosophy. When the Apocalypse comes (in 2001), his followers will repopulate the planet.

He self-published his autobiography, which was not so much about himself as about his psychotic visions. In it, he explained how the cosmos works, in great detail.

It turns out that my father had learned the secrets of life, the universe, and everything, from a race of disembodied 50,000- year-old Lemurians. They chose, for reasons of their own, to speak only to him.

My mother decided that he was a nutter, and divorced him in 1956.

His cult became rather successful. He had over 10,000 people who sent him money, and about 500 people gave him all their worldly possessions and moved into an "intentional community" he built.

My father spent his time giving free lectures on New Age philosophy, recruiting seekers to his cause, and writing more books about his friends the Lemurians.

After 35 years as founder and CEO, his board of directors deposed him. The rest of the board was trying to run a community. But my father kept grabbing the limelight and the treasury for projects dictated to him by his invisible friends.

My father was inspiring and mysterious. The rest of the board was competent but dull. When his faithful flock heard the news, they freaked out. They quickly reinstated him, over the heads of the board.

A few years later, when all those really big TV evangelists were getting busted for fraud and adultery, my father got ejected again. This time, the board had much more solid grounds for dismissing him. He was convicted of using his vast spiritual powers to worm the panties off of quite a few of his young female recruits.

I'm thinking that he was just testing them, to make sure that only the hottest babes accompanied them to paradise. I mean, c'mon, these guys were planning to repopulate the entire planet!

Ejected, my father took some time off to pursue other interests. Quite a lot of his young female friends went along, to help him.

His new age cult, successfully decapitated, wandered off the road and into a ditch.

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I'd been afraid of my father for as long as I could remember. But when my mother divorced him, the divorce court, in its finite wisdom, required me to spend one day a week with him. So every Sunday, he did his best to load me full of new age rubbish.

I did my best to sit still, be quiet, and pretend 'this isn't happening'. It was fucking horrible.

When I was eleven, my mother remarried. Her second husband agreed to adopt me so I could escape from New Age Hell. My father fought the adoption, but lost because the judge felt that, in all fairness, he was a bloody loony.

Traumatized from years of being force-fed nonsense, I resolved to get even. To counterbalance the bilge in my head, I got a hard-core scientific college education. In the process, I learned all about how real scientists distinguish Truth from Fluff.

Thus armed, I went through my psyche with a fine-tooth comb, purging everything that didn't pass scientific muster.

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So you can see why I might get a little twitchy whenever a well-intended but humorless new-age nitwit tries to tell me that something totally fluffy is Truth.

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After finishing college, and letting my steam-cleaned psyche air out a bit, I still felt a little lopsided. Now, instead of a head full of rubbish, I had a head full of dry dusty facts and self-righteous attitudes.

In search of balance, I spent five years studying spiritual philosophy. A lot of it was fluff, but at least I was forewarned.

In the process of studying theories that, by and large, science had no opinion about, I discovered that science was actually pretty useless. Real-world problems are mostly about emotional and social issues. Only in a rarified artificial universe do intellectual puzzles matter to anyone.

All the real action is in business and politics. Science is just an amusing game for ivory-tower propeller-heads, to keep them from annoying decent salt-of-the-earth types.

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In the last 25 years, I've managed to achieve some degree of inner peace. I still have a little scientist in my head who screams whenever someone tries to tell me that pure Vitamin C made from chemicals is evil, and pure Vitamin C made from plants is blessed by the goddess.

I also have an Eastern mystic in my head that calmly replies that a claim can be both objectively false and useful. And I have an anthropologist in my head that finds all these strange worldviews simply fascinating.

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In 1998, while I was making plans for the original TOTEM camp, I learned that my father had just been sentenced to 222 years in federal prison for bank fraud.

His second career, it turns out, was masterminding a gang of seditionists. It seems that they had somehow created a secret siphon, from the treasury of the State of Texas directly into their own wallets.

Finally, there's something about my old man that I can be proud of.

I felt liberated by his 'retirement' from the New Age movement. Mindful of the importance of radical self-expression, I decided that my new theme camp had to be a friendly, light-hearted new-age cult. Thus, the Eternal Mysteries were unveiled, for your spiritual enjoyment.

It would be an anti-religion, for people like me who'd already had enough blind faith to last a lifetime. It would be for people who took some things seriously, but had a sense of humor about the human condition and the search for Truth.

There are a lot of other ingredients that were thrown into the pot when I first created TOTEM. Maybe I'll write some more essays some day and tell you about them.