CONTACT terrell@neuage.org

Hawaii
No matter how many times I go over this next event and I know it is true I cannot believe it. Sometime in the middle of the night the person I was staying with woke me and said there was a phone call for me. Carol Ann said she heard the phone number in her head and that I had to come to the airport right away. She was hysterical. So in the middle of a rainy night – just like in a made up story except this really did happen; ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ and I hitched a ride to the airport.

Once again my intentions were just to calm her down and see if we could get her somewhere. I thought she should go to Illinois, Mokena, and have her parents sort her out. Then I would go to the Rolling Stones concert and after that I would go back to Eugene and college.

When I got to the airport Carol Ann was a mess. I spent the day with her and Desiree. We went into the cafeteria where the pilots and hostess or whatever they were called then, ate. No one questioned us. We obviously did not belong there as we looked quite ruffled. I had long hair, not having had a haircut for years and Carol Ann looked like a once beautiful-flower-girl that had gotten on a bad side of life to become a faded-flower-girl. Our clothes were the worst that the Salvation Army had to offer and we had this baby and a couple of duffle bags with our crap in them. Desiree was still not toilet trained to add to our misery.

At the airport, there was a baby-sitting or baby changing room, so we put something over the window and slept in there. We spent several days at the airport like that then someone came up to us and gives us money. I do not recall the exact amount but we spent hours, probably a whole day arguing about where to go. I wanted her to go to her parents, but she kept saying we had to go to Hawaii and that she had a brother there who would put us up.
In whatever fashion that we finally made our decision we had enough money to get to Honolulu and there was a flight leaving soon after we had decided to go. I was really insecure about the whole thing because I had most of my belongings in Eugene and I wanted to continue with college. The idea of flying to an island and arriving with no money, not knowing anyone, and with Carol Ann, and all that she was, was a terrifying idea but for some reason I went.

At the end of the cycle, mainland cycle Part A, I suppose, it was best that I had not gone with Carol Ann to the Rolling Stone’s music festival.

Whether my life would have been drastically different than the road that I was being rapidly pushed along if I had never gone to the airport that rainy night but instead of had gone to the concert I can no longer even speculate. There was a lot of violence at the concert. Apparently, the Hells Angels were assigned the task of security. There were reports that more than 850 people were hurt, and an 18-year-old man was beaten and stabbed to death in the front row by several bikers as the Stones played "Sympathy for the Devil". There are several things that herald the end of the couple of years of love that was the 60s but probably the Altamont concert had the best symbolism that love and flowers were just not going to cut it. If there was the Internet then there surely would be conspiracy sites telling us that it was all setup by the CIA, the Bilderberg group or the FBI or the shadowy secret government that is so easy to blame for all of the world’s woes.

We first arrived in Honolulu sometime in mid-December 1969. I guess it was the ’69 that got me started there. We, Carol Ann, Desiree, and I arrived; sort of like out of nowhere. Honolulu airport that December day. I remember that day better than I do most other dates that I have retained somewhere stuck in between long and short memory – filed in a spot that does not become dislodged. I think one of the things we had in mind was that we needed to escape California because the world was just about to end. All the signs were there, whether it was told in the churches or whether we witnessed it in the streets of the cities of the world, something was going on and it was going to be big. We believed that, we saw that, and we lived that. However, now some thirty-five years later I am not sure what the hell it was that was so momentous – here in the 04s I am quite disappointed and bored with the shape and state of the world. Maybe the world did end and what we believe that is real now is just another level of existence and we only believe that this is real.

Carol Ann’s brother met us at the airport. He lived quite a different life than Carol Ann and I was living. He and his roommate had a new convertible car and they collected us from the airport and we drove around the island.

Obviously, Carol Ann had gotten in touch with her brother. I was so clueless now that I think about that time, she must have had contact with her family in Illinois and they gave her his number.

Perhaps they sent her money and she lied to me saying someone gave her a $100 at the airport then we flew to Hawaii. The story of my life – I seldom know what is happening around me. But here we are, you are reading this and me grateful to you for doing so.

Thanks mate.


Some spiritual disciplines teach that our highest moments come when we are the most exhausted. It is because we have no fight left in us. Carol Ann and I had not had a proper sleep for days and we had just disembarked from a long flight, long at that time of my life. I think it is about six hours to Hawaii from California. Since that time I have been on many flights of twelve to fourteen hours but at that time it was a long flight and it was different because for the first time in many months we had not been stoned because we had been living at the airport, not a good place to smoke pot or trip on LSD. We had dumped our drugs before we got on the plane believing we may be checked, and I did not want to be carted off to jail for drugs. While we were racing around the island at 90 to 100 miles per hour, Carol Ann’s brother and flat mate, passed around Hawaiian grown marijuana. I discovered at that point and it would be confirmed many times over the years – Hawaiian grown marijuana is some of the strongest stuff on the planet. I was paranoid and exhausted and stoned and confused and dazed. It was at that moment that I gave myself up to Carol Ann’s vision. I had nowhere to go but to a peaceful pool with water lilies and a master teacher in a white robe.

Carol Ann’s brother4 and friend were waiters at a posh restaurant and even though they would have been our age, early twenties, they had their material world much more refined than Carol Ann and I did. We had a few clothes as representative of our worldly belongings. They had some sort of trendy, I suppose – for that era, bachelor’s pad. They were loud and like in a Hollywood film, they seemed to be living in the fast lane. They were white and black and not at all in a hippy lifestyle, with Carol Ann’s brother being white and his friend being black. They did not like the same music as us or eat the same type of food – we were health food eating vegetarians even though we took enough drugs to destroy any body. I am still a vegetarian fifty+ years later. They smoked very strong marijuana from when they woke up until whenever they stopped partying at night and that was the closest we had of anything in common. But whereas we just wanted to space out when we were stoned and not do a lot of activity they would get stoned and go off to work then off to discos until the early hours of the morning. Because there were only two bedrooms, we camped out in the small living room. It was obvious they did not like us and they asked us to leave within two days of being there. Or at least I was asked to leave, because Carol Ann’s brother was not going to ask his sister to leave, no matter how spaced out she was.

Thirty-seven years later (October 1st 2006) after making contact on the Internet with Desiree I would ask her if she knew the whereabouts of Carol Ann’s brother and she wrote back,” I am guessing you are referring to my Uncle -. He was married and had two children -. About 10 years ago, he killed his wife while in a drug-induced state. He is now in a state prison.

His children are still struggling with the impact of that event “. Looking on the Internet today in 2015 I see that he too is dead. Died in 2010. It is so frustrating; everyone I try to find again is dead.

The last weeks of the 1960s were the end of something for me but I was not sure at the time what it was. Every moment in some way is the end of an era if we wish to get into the measuring game. Are we beginning or ending, are we continuing or doing the same damn thing over again? Time is so made up, yesterday and tomorrow are only divisible in a predefined system, or they would be the same. Whoever is responsible for the western calendar proclaiming that today is, Wednesday, September 22, 2004, at 4:27:41 PM is so long ago dead and molecularly dispersed that there is no one, who has been alive for the past fifteen hundred years, that would know who the poor old chap is or what he felt or thought. I would rather see today being the moment that VENUS Conjuncts my SUN, VENUS at 17 LEO 40. That is surely a better use of my brain waves to pinpoint any significance attached to now. The end of the 1960s, to me, at least, seemed like the end of who I was. This is true to the sense that I would disembark on building a new me which I would spend the next decades, using the western Christian calendar marking of time, to establish only to spend another chunk of time to try and change. I have not determined with my life as of yet whether I am trying to get back to where I was before the end of the ‘60’s or whether I have been headed toward another future; like a crazed aimless projectile made up of tissue and atoms and cells and whatever else makes up this body I struggle to maintain and witness the moment through. Change was in the air but then it always is.

Those last weeks of the 1960’s decade seemed terrible. If it wasn’t that I have gone through so many decades since then, each decade, easily labelled as the worst so far, I would be so pleased to be on the other side of the 1960s but now I look back to that period as one of peace and innocence. I had hope then and lived in the moment thinking how the future would be. The future, I would find, is nothing like what it was in my mind. At the time I did not like what I was going through but now I think back and see that time, or any time before mid- 2003, as being good. The sense of adventure becomes dulled by the sense that what we are going through at a given and defined moment is in fact reality. The bad part of reality is that it is so real, so final, so tangible, and remarkably unchangeable. I hate reality because we have no control of it.

Carol Ann became more depressed and morbid. We had no money, and I could not find much work outside of a few days of unloading trucks at the shipping docks outside of Honolulu. I worked in the harbour of Honolulu, near Pearl Harbour three decades ago. Three decades before I worked near Pearl Harbour the Japanese, apparently with the full knowledge of the US Government, bombed the place. It seems that the Americans needed a reason to go into World War II just like they needed a reason to get involved in Viet Nam and in Iraq (both times) so one was made up and encouraged. If I were to diagram it I would have to say that my being in Hawaii was the midpoint of World War II and now. A totally insignificant equation to anyone else but important enough to me that I just wrote that and spent three and a half minute’s reflection on the significance of it.

Christmas was approaching. There was the usual laughter and mirth everywhere, but we continued to sink. We got stoned from when we awoke in the morning until we collapsed at night. Carol Ann’s brother was continually disapproving. His jet set life was on collisional demolitional course with our own collisional demolitional fractured life wave.

Not to be confused or associated with geological demolitional theories or Quantum non- demolition measurements using Bose-Einstein’s word sputterings but just as it says ‘our life was a process’ of unravellings that collided then was demolished, which is truly quite evolutionary in that only the fittest moment has meaning. All else is destroyed then forgotten unless some dork, in this case, me, comes along and writes about it.

I was unloading a truck load of pineapples into a container on the wharf. I even was able to learn a totally insignificant fact that unfortunately I still know. Hawaiian pineapples and avocadoes are cheaper in California than they are in Hawaii and California orange juice that is sold in Hawaii actually is grown in Hawaii. The pineapples were squeezed in California and sent back to Hawaii as orange juice.

Maybe someday we will be able to delete stupid facts that we have stored in our brain like we can with useless data on our computer.

I continued to throw crate after crate of oranges into the huge truck. For lunch I ate oranges as I had no money to purchase anything else. This was such a disgusting job. My long hair lay damp on my sweaty neck, my jeans were ripping from being sewed up one time too many. Every day in Hawaii is hot but at least most days there are the trade winds to provide some relief but not this one particular day.

Being without is one of the great disgraces of life. It affects everyone differently. Whether it is alcohol or drugs or love or money or any of a variety of things, being without can become a disease. There is probably an area in our brain that creates things for us to be without or perhaps a sense that we are without. I am sure advertisers have found that area and marketing is all about touching that part of the brain that tells us we are without. We are all without something and what we are without is different than
what someone else may be without but we get so obsessed with our without that we begin to perceive that our without is more of a without than someone else’s without. When I was seven years old I was without a good bicycle and at the same time my parents told me that I was not saved, I was without Jesus. When we went to Madison Square Garden in New York City I was able to merge my two withouts. I became saved, gave my heart to the lord, and because my parents were so happy with my newfound seven-year old’s salvation they bought me a bicycle. Two with outs can make a with. But I was without so much when I was living in Hawaii I could not even begin to construct a way out of my withouts. But one thing I was not without was a plan, I had assembled a plan in the inner densest core of my brain – I would escape. My theme as I often say in this little story of my life is “ESCAPE”. Not only would I escape Carol Ann and her baby but I would escape Oahu, the island I was currently trapped on. The plan was that I would collect my wages from unloading and loading oranges, which at the time I think was less than twenty dollars for a day’s work. I would purchase a ticket to another island, I think it was about fifteen dollars to Maui. I knew in the deepest core of my being that whatever was on that island would be better than what was happening in my life on the island I was on. What was left of my earnings I would give to Carol Ann. I had bought a bottle of milk for Carol Ann and I was a block from home when my life was changed once again, this time along Piikoi Street (off of Kapiolani Boulevard).

A white van (strange how some memories retain their vividness for so long) pulled aside of me and out jumped Randy. The same Randy who I met in Laguna Beach, California was now in Hawaii. I did not recognize him but he knew me. The last time I had seen him he had long hair but the excited person in front of me looked so different from the person I used to get so stoned with that I did not know who he was. He had to tell me.
Randy had escaped California because of some drug deal with the Hell’s Angels had gone afoul. He had come across some spiritual occult new age group called the Holy Order of Mans (MANS being an acronym for ‘Master Illuminated Knights of Spirit’ apparently because ever who came up with the name could only spell phonetically) and joined them. I gave him our address and that evening he visited us. He wore Western Clerical garb as a priest would though officially no one in the Order was a priest at least under the Roman Catholic thingy. Twenty-eight years later Randy would write this in a site’s guestbook that I set up online for the Order:

Guestbook - Time: 1998-07-07 21:26:26 Comments: I joined the Order in May, 1969 in San Francisco. In November I was sent to Hawaii with Master(?) Raoul (Eric Fuchs), where he was to start a new center. Terrell and I were good friends 2 years before this but had lost touch. I ran into Terrell in Hawaii. and he joined the Order. I left a year later but re-entered in S.F. after about two months. I was head cook at 20 Steiner (San Francisco) for some time and did time at the Filmore House. I was sent on mission to Nashville, Tennessee, where Terrell, (who had left the Order for some time), hooked up with me. We traipsed off to New Orleans, (April 1974) and I never went back in the Order, although I was married at the Christian Community in San Francisco…
In between all those years seemingly several serial life times have come and gone but in some abstract way I am still in the same body, ageing as it does, and I have the memories but the world views have changed enough times that each one could be representative of its each own life time.

Randy stopped by to visit the same day I saw him jumping out of a white van being someone else. He told Carol Ann and I about some spiritual group he was in and that he been through the metaphysical initiations of Illumination and Self- Realization. The Holy Order of Mans had been set up, according to Randy, to bring the world into the new age.
I was not at all interested and soon after he left Carol Ann and I smoked marijuana. We just saw no way out of where we were. I did not want to join any cult religious group and Carol Ann was just so depressed she could barely move. We decided to end our life and after writing a letter to her brother asking him to take Desiree back to Chicago to let their parents raise her we took a large dose of Hawaiian Baby Woodrose seeds (Baby Woodrose seeds contain LSA, which has an effect somewhat similar to LSD. Take 4 - 5 seeds for a trip of 6 - 8 hours). The seeds are both hallucinogenic and toxic. We were told that if we boiled a dozen or more seeds, they would be toxic enough to kill us. Three to seven seeds are supposed to make one quite high and cause them to trip because Woodrose Seeds contain an LSD-like compounds that creates a feeling of euphoria, stimulation, and exhilaration as well as producing hallucinations. The seeds (in small portions) had traditionally been used as a divination sacrament by the Kahunas ("Keeper of The Secret") of Hawaii and Polynesia. “The Secret” was the power to heal oneself, to perform what Christians refer to as miracles. When the missionaries came to Hawaii, they taught the people of Hawaii that the Kahunas were evil and pushed Christianity on to the locals.

The result was that the Kahunas lost their power to heal and do mundane things like walk on hot coals. Waikiki was their sacred ground and anyone seeing Waikiki today would see one of Christianity’s gifts to the world, unhappiness drowning in materialism. But unlike the Kahunas, we did not see to heal ourselves; we wanted the world to disappear.
P1021#yIS1
I remember coming to consciousness. This was the second time I had done this – the other a couple of years earlier when I took a bottle of my girlfriend’s sleeping pills. I have no idea how long I was gone from the world, there was no tunnel with Jesus or Buddha or any other creature of light at the end of it. Everything just disappeared then reappeared. Randy was doing some mumble jumble thing over us and my mind quickly focused. He put his hand on Carol Ann’s head and she too sat up right quickly like waking from a dream we should not have been a part of. Randy said he was wearing his Master Teacher’s ring and that he had been sent to heal us. I was sure I had locked the door but Randy just walked in. Randy told me that the Master Teacher in charge of the Hawaii centre had told him that a friend of his would be arriving in Hawaii soon and he was coming to Hawaii to be in the Order, however, this newly arrived person did not know he had been called to be in the Order. Randy said he was convinced this person his teacher had been speaking about was me. I told him it most definitely was not me. The fact that I was in Hawaii because of circumstances that seemed almost beyond my control did Some snot seem important. As I looked at my life I could say wherever I am at any given moment is because of a sequence of circumstances beyond my control.

The shape of the galaxy for that matter is beyond my control but it does not make it any more important that I happened to be within the confines of the Milky Way Galaxy at this particular moment in the evolution of the universe. It just is. We could put undo significance onto anything, from the meal we just ate: gosh darn if it wasn’t for the farmer planting that particular seed in that particular paddock at that particular time then harvesting when she did then having the produce sent to the exact shop that I was purchasing my fruit at that Saturday afternoon in that particular shop there in that small town in South Australia then me eating that particular fruit at that moment which made me concentrate on the thing, let us say a watermelon, whilst driving around a bend with a car coming at me just as I looked down at the melon causing me to cross the lane I was supposed to be in, only to crash into an oncoming car and killing the driver who may have been my husband that beat me to death when I was living in the south of France in 1492.

Then there is of course the whole story of the other person and how they got to be going around that particular bend at that moment in time. We are always where we are because of everything that went before that moment and all the choices that were made, not only on our part, but on everyone else’s part as well as such things as the weather: it could have been a rain burst that made the road slippery when I crashed. We could go back further to when the road was built, if the road builders had made the road wider, or less curvy then I would not have had the event cross the horizon of my life at that time. What about the car I was driving? The history of the automobile should be taken into account to answer the question to why it swerved so quickly or so slowly or the other person’s car.
My brain used to work like that. I would get so much into why events happened to me. The little paragraph above was made up, however, I have had so many things happen in my life that I could break down in the same manner and try and put significance to it that any example is the same. My track meet, with my dick falling out of my shorts, got me away from Clifton Park and out into the world. Would my life have been different if that had not happened? If I had not met Carol Ann, if I had not broken up with the person before, or left LA, or had not met Randy or had not gone to the airport and spent three days with Carol Ann before flying to Hawaii would I still be going to the Holy Order of Mans in Hawaii for whatever reason it may have been? I tried to tell Randy that my world view was quite simple; we are where we are because we are there and for no other reason. That is really the only belief that I have maintained throughout my life though I have added one more line; and we are not where we are not because we are not there for no particular reason except for the fact that we are not there. In other words, I am writing this on Sunday, October 03, 2004, at 9:20:26 AM in Round Lake, New York, in the living room, for no other reason but that I am here at this time. I am not writing it in a villa in the south of France as several voluptuous young females are dancing naked in front of me making sensual sexual seductive smiles in front of me simply because I am not there. Nothing cosmic about it. What it is it is and what it is not it is not and possibly nothing ever has been preordained about anything? Shit happens. This moment is nothing more than the resultant of the moment before and the future is the resultant of what we do with now.

Whether it is Nostradamus or the great soothsayer Mary or the book of Revelations no one or nothing can truly predict tomorrow but they can all safely say what happened yesterday truly did happen. That said; The Holy Order of Mans and I were on course to meet.
Randy had left the phone number and address of the Order’s house with us along with instructions regarding what buses to get to the house and bus tickets. We were told we were welcomed at any time and there was an open invitation for dinner. Carol Ann and I had only been in Hawaii for about two weeks and we were at a loss what to do. We could not even kill ourselves. Life in our apartment sucked, it stunk it was shit. It was Christmas time and there were no ships or trucks for me to unload and I could not find any other work.

Carol Ann’s brother seldom had food in the house as he worked at a restaurant and ate his meals there. Sometimes he would bring us something but not often. The simple matter was we were hungry, and we knew where to get a free meal. The day before Christmas we took a bus to the Order’s house on Skyline Drive in Alewa Heights.

The order centre was a huge white house. We were ushered in by bright eyed happy young people our age. Sitting in the living room was Master Raoul the head of the centre. He was listening to the Beatles on headphones and said “welcome home, Terrell”. I do not recall him mentioning Carol Ann’s or Desiree’s name but that could be from the layered-fogs which sits on the outer prism of the lenses of my memory that so often, in unison, permeates and prevents, leaving me with a creative self-reflection of assumed possible truths. Not to worry, the truth is he did mention my name and he did not turn around in his chair to see me. For some reason, at the time, I thought this was quite cosmic. In hindsight he no doubt saw us walking up the hill in front of the house whilst he sat there listening to the Beatles and he knew my name because Randy said we were going to come there because our life was shit.

It was all very depressing. The living room had a large Christmas tree in its midst surrounded by presents. Carol Ann and Desiree and I had nothing, except an unwelcoming home to return to. I do not recall the dinner but I was impressed by how happy everyone was and we vowed to return in a couple of days.

We did not return for a couple of days because we did not want to infringe on someone else’s Christmas. Being in Waikiki was bad enough. Everywhere everyone was doing the Christmas thing because Christmas is really about sales. Here we were in lovely hot weather, far from snow at sea level, and there were pictures and replicas of Santa and his sled and fake snow was abundantly evident to support the illusion that snow and reindeer and Santa and buying a lot of crap was the thing to do. Piped music and carolers proclaimed that baby Jesus was born on this day, that the angels were quite pleased about it all, and I just felt rotten and did not believe anything I heard and there was nothing I could think of to be blissful about.

 

22. THE ORDER
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About Dr. Terrell Neuage

Terrell Neuage at Kerala beach, February 2025

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.