28 - 1976 Towson/Baltimore Maryland - Holy Order of MANS

1976 Holy Order of MANS, Towson Maryland

February 15th – spent day in emergency room – University Hospital
May 9 – Self-Realization July 30th moved to Towson
I was in Baltimore sometime in the beginning of 1976 – it did not mean a lot I suppose as I remember very little of that year. From my pay book I received $62.60 for the week of February 26, 1976, March 4th I made $44.11. I was living in a three-story house at 2208 Maryland Avenue at the time as that address is in my pay book. Whatever it was that I was doing to contribute to HOOM’s coffers was nothing to brag about – for the week of March 16th I made $20 – and I have no idea what I did to earn so much. However, things must have changed as I began making well into the seventies by April and into May with my top wage reaching the heights of $77.50 on May 10th but by May 25 I was at $31.28 just in case my ego got to the point of me thinking I was supporting the Order. Everyone was
not making the great amount of money I was making at the time, they were making much more – I have an entry in my receipt book for a Brother Robert Roden who made $270.54 on the same week I pulled in $61.73 and I know others were making more than that so I was definitely a liability for the Order. Two weeks in a row I made $26 then $30 but they kept me though of course there was no choice in the matter as I was a life-vowed brother, for better or worse.

Baltimore was a rough trot for me in several ways – well actually just one way. Sex!

Had a brain scan search for my halo
it had fallen down
the front of my body
and landed on my penis like on a coat rack
a hat rack
a deer’s head
mounted on the wall over the fireplace
blood still spurting out
from where it had been shot

I had finally finished my time as a Brown Brother and even though I was not successful with being celibate, I did give it a shot and had only the one moment were I strayed; the time I believed I was invisible or that I had put up a veil so others could not see me feeling up the girl next to me.
In Baltimore, I had sex with Sister Roberta in the basement of our house and even though I remember it clearly, I have no idea why we did such a thing as we were not friends. I recall going to the basement with her. We both had on our HOOM clothes – she had on a blue robe, and I had on my priest suit. We came across a mattress, and we just went for it and that was it – we never said anything about it after that. We exchanged a few e-mails in
early 2000 – with little more than a ‘hi how you doing?’ We had come across one another on the egroup I had set up for HOOM. After my August 2003 tragedy Roberta sent a sympathy e-mail but aside of that we were just passing by at different times and one of those times we met one another’s needs.

In my diary from that year – and I do not remember much about her, but it seems I was in love with a Reverend Francis, and we spent a lot of time on the phone. I had met her when I was at the Syracuse house, and she was at an Order house in Buffalo. She was from Columbia (South America). We made lots of plans to be together, but nothing came of it. Decades later, during the boom days of the Internet, I had some correspondence with people who had known her and others who were in love with her. I still have a photo of her from when she was a child in Columbia – something I am sure no one else has. Apparently, she was hot stuff in the Order, but she was now settled into being a middle- aged lady somewhere in California. I have a letter from Mother Ruth, the wife of the head of the Order, dated January 20th, 1976, saying it was OK for Rev. Francis and me to be together.

Was this one of those things I was supposed to do in life and never did? It was not common for a brother to hook up with a priest but perhaps Mother Ruth in her wisdom knew it would never come about and said ‘sure go for it you two – fuck your brains out’ knowing we would never meet again, well actually she did not say that but more of a letter implying that the Order would look at stationing the two of us together in the same city type of thing. On January 30th I sent a special airmail letter to the Esoteric Council saying that I wanted to be with Rev. Francis but I do not have any records of a response.

On February 2 I received a turquoise ring from Rev. Francis, so it appears she was keen too. My entry for February 5 is ‘Rev. Francis called, talked over one hour, may be here in a couple of weeks.’ However, for whatever reason love has its quirky side to it. I have written an entry for 12 February, ‘Letter from R.F. – responded to it by writing a fuck you trip’. Gosh darn my shot at a higher ranked spiritual person must have come unstuck.

February 15th – spent day in emergency room – University Hospital

Watching “Sleepless in Seattle”, Christmas Day in Melbourne, which I just spent with my soon to be 24-years old son, Sacha, Saturday, December 25, 2004, I know the only reason I watch this corny movie is to see Baltimore. I can see the block I used to live on and I try to imagine what I imagined then, back in the mid-1970s.
One other little episode from my time in Baltimore stands out in my mind, as it was a bit horrific. A brief encounter I had with a female I met at a pub. All that it says in my diary is ‘overnight at Fells Point’ which is an area of Baltimore. I had gone with a few of the brothers to hear some music on a Friday night and I began interacting with a female – I
do not remember the details except that at some point we went somewhere and had sex – probably her house. A few days later, Sunday morning, I was to give the brother’s sermon. It was common practice in HOOM for a student to give a sermon once a month and suddenly it was my turn. We were not to prepare for these things – we were told shortly before the service began – as we were to speak from the Inner Self. I never cared to give a sermon – I still had no idea why the hell I was in this stupid organisation.
An hour or so before my fateful oracle presentation I had a terrible pain when I went to pee. I knew what it was as I had gone through this many times a few years earlier and I quickly put on my street clothes and took a bus to some general hospital in Baltimore. In the emergency room I tried to come up with some other thing that was wrong with me than to say that ‘I have the clap’.
I was not going to say,

‘hi, I am Brother Adsit and just before my sermon this morning the angel of the Lord struck me with a venereal disease’,

I waited my turn and said something convincing enough to get me to a doctor. I knew if I had said I had VD or some such thing I would be told to wait until Monday morning to go to a clinic for the likes of me. I got my penicillin shot and made my way back to the Order house in the late afternoon. I knew I was in trouble, but any punishment had to wait as it was the night of registration for people for my astrological class I was going to give at the John Hopkins Free University thingy or the other and the Order had already agreed that it would be in the best interest of everyone if I gave a series of lessons on astrology. I was on pain killers at the time too and I was in a foul mood, but I could not quit the Order as I had no place to go so I went to John Hopkins. More than twenty people signed up giving me a full class and one of their more popular classes.
In mid-February I wrote the council a letter asking to do nursing at Towson State University. I was becoming conscious of my real lot in life. I was 29 years old with very little education; I was still basically a high school dropout though I had taken and passed some high school equivalencies test a few years earlier but overall, my life was a bit of a shit. I had done a semester though I do not recall completing it, at Lane Community College in Eugene Oregon but I did not even bother putting that on my resumes. I had not been successful at a real job and I did not know what I wanted to do in life. The Order was a passing phase for me and something I was doing because I did not know what else to do. I surely did not see it as a long-term thing and in fact I was beginning to not believe some of their teachings, and I surely was not doing the moral thing as they prescribed it. I was interested in astrology, and I was interested in females. I thought a good way to meet females was by being a nurse because there are a lot of female nurses. I was surely not interested in a long-term relationship, and I was beginning to formulate what relationship in my life would mean. I had no intention of having children and it was clear I would not be successful in the Order, which would mean being a priest or even being a teacher – none of which interested me. I was seeing the Order as being a rather big lie in some ways. A brother- teacher who was married and the head of all the Order centres in the Northeast was fucking one of the sisters in our house – we all knew it – he was centred in Boston and would find reasons to come to Baltimore to have a screw. It later turned out that he had a sister in every centre he was fucking and his wife, a sister-teacher, had found out and had told him to stop but he did not. Brother and sister- teachers were quite high in the order of things in the Order as they were the step before becoming a master-teacher or one of the great guru type of people in the Order. I was also smoking pot with several of the sisters and the whole religious thing was falling apart.

My brother came to visit – see photo. I have no recollection of this visit but there he is in the photo. There are even three or four of my girlfriends in the photo though none of them knew I was seeing the other ones.

Dorrie was another girlfriend who joined the Order after a bit of time together in Towson. I was so in love with her for a while.  Guess she would be old now, mid-70s or like me late 70s, I am now 78. I went to her house to show her something in her astrological chart. We spent the rest of the day in bed. I worried for quite some time that I may have knocked her up. I suppose I didn’t as she joined HOOM and I never heard from her again.

My diary shows that I was selling hotdogs by mid-March which does not seem like a very highly social thing to do. I do not recall what other jobs people in the Order were doing but I am sure selling hot dogs from a street stand was about the lowest one could go. I was told that it was a good thing to do to use as a ministry, but I did not feel like I was
doing any type of ministry. Because we gave all our money to the Order it did not really matter how much we made but I was still concerned that somewhere in the future I may no longer be in the Order and that I would have to fend for myself in the ‘real world’. I was still receiving letters from Rev. Francis in April but I have no idea what we were talking about, though I believe she left the Order and wanted me to join her. Of course, this type of behaviour was frowned on by the Order and we were told that to leave would mean that we were condemned for several lifetimes. If a priest would go foul of the Order she would be fucked over by the cosmos for many lifetimes – probably being sent back as a flea on a monkey’s testicle. By mid-April my astrology class had gone from 28 to 11 so I was not meeting my student’s needs. On April 23 I did an I-Ching reading on my future with Rev. Francis. The reading said we were going to get married. This was confirmed by a Tarot and an astrological reading I did whilst in an altered state. Gosh darn.

I still see Janet on Facebook. I tell my interaction with her later.

29. Self-realization
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Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 78.