under my mother's influence and because there were so many of them around the house, I started reading books on metaphysics, "mysteries," and the new age at an early age. books by charles berlitz, madame ellen blavatsky, erick von daniken, jeanne dixon, katherine kuhlmann, anton levay, edgar cayce, hugo stiglitz, brad steiger and others were constant companions who explained much of the world's secrets to me. on my own I discovered alan watts, jawahrl krishnamurti, chongyam trungpa, sun bear (winona laduke's father), and the late peter tompkins, whose the magic of findhorn left an incredible impression on me.
tompkins is best known for the seminal book of counterculture kinda-science, the secret life of plants, and I'm currently reading paradise fever: growing up in the shadow of the new age, the memoir of his youngest son, ptolemy tompkins. if the younger tompkins is to be believed, it's good to know that the search I found myself a part in wasn't just going on in the homes of muggles like me but among the young of the masters themselves.
"I noticed that [my father] always seemd to be talking about secrets of one sort or another and how knowing those secrets could set you free. Sometimes...the 'great secret' would be that you and God weren't really different, but on some mysterious inner level one and the same. But at other times it would be about something else--that love was the engine that drove the universe, or that everything possessed consciousness, or that all things good and bad that happened to a person came from actions committed in a past life.
"In addition to the various 'great secrets,' there was any number of lesser ones. Who built Stonehenge? Who wrote the plays attributed, by the dull-witted academicians, to Shakespeare? Who ran the banks in America? What were the ancient Egyptians really up to? Gradually it became clear to me that if there was, in fact, any real 'great secret' to life, it had to do not with any single, specific secret but with the nature of secrecy itself. Life was essentially a carnival of misleading appearances--a papier-mache landscape set about with hints and inconsistencies, which, when examined closely enough, pointed the way to a realm beyond. The mass of humanity, it seemed, chose to ignore these little openings and inconsistencies with which the world was strewn..."
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