In April of the year 1968, on the occasion of my birthday (see), I went to visit the site of my childhood attempt at manned flight using a machine based on a Leonardo Da Vinci design.
Twenty years before, inspired as a young boy after seeing a 1947 Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie titled Tarzan and the Huntress wherein Tarzan's son Boy builds a glider-type plane capable of flying while carrying him --- and that their chimp Cheetah steals, then hanging on for dear life jumps off some rocks flying quite some distance before eventually crashing into the trees and falling to the ground --- I constructed a similar winged, glider-like contraption my uncle and I thought would easily carry ME in flight over a substained distance as well. Although my uncle never said anything about actually trying out the device, without his sanction I hauled it out of the garage and up to the top of the two story apartment house across the street, and hanging on for dear life, jumped off. On page three of ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT: The Path Unfolds I describe the results of that attempt:
"Initially the flight played out fairly well, picking up wind under the wings and maintaining the same two-story height advantage for some distance. Halfway across busy Arlington Street though, the craft began slowing and losing forward momentum. It began dropping altitude rapidly, eventually crashing into the porch and partway through the front windows of the house across the way. Other than a few bruises and a wrecked machine, nothing was broken, although as it turned out, my dad wasn't nearly as proud of me as intended. I never forgot the thrill of that flight and carried that thrill and Leonardo's dreams into my adulthood."(see)
Please note the mention of "Arlington Street" in the above quote. As a young boy with several years under the auspices of my Stepmother growing up in, or at least operating out of as a base of operations, the so-called Adams District of Los Angeles, of which encompassed Arlington Street where it crossed Adams, there was an exclusive gated area called Berkeley Square and close by, near the corner of Western and Adams, a huge bricked in compound where some guy had his own private domed observatory. When I went back twenty years later seeking out my infamous two-story high Arlington Street launch site, I discovered that the Santa Monica Freeway, which didn't exist when I was a kid, ran eight or more full lanes wide right through the old neighborhood, completely wiping out Berkeley Square and other houses for blocks around.
To find what I was looking for I had to drive all over the place searching out old landmarks. In doing so the most unusual thing happened. As Karma and conditions would have it, on that exact same day as I was circling around in my car trying to find someplace I recognized, I turned on a street called Cimarron. In doing so I accidently came across the official first-day opening of the Rinzai-ji Zen Center, as part of the 61st birthday of Joshu Sasaki Roshi. At the time I was one year away from the events described in Dark Luminosity but heavy into study-practice. Stumbling across a Zen center right in the middle of a now somewhat pretty much dilapidated former shadow of itself crumbling area on the west side of Los Angeles was so unexpected that I had to stop and go in. I had studied under Yasutani Hakuun Roshi a few years before --- without much success I might add --- plus months and months doing hard time in a Zen Monastery high up on the side of some steep Chinese mountain situated somewhere along the southern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau, so I had some experience with Zen protocol, and as an outsider amongst mostly regulars or the uninitiated, noticed quite quickly. In the process I was introduced briefly to the Roshi, then continued on my journey. Actually, although he did not seem to remember it nor did I mention it, I had met the Roshi some years before when I went to Gardena, California with my Mentor to a zendo held in all things, a garage, that he, the Roshi, officiated over.
I only bring it up because years later I was waiting between trains at the Union Sation in Los Angeles and decided to dash across the street to Olvera Street for tacquitos. A man that I knew at one time, who it was quite clear was now homeless and had fallen on hard times, stepped up to me and we started talking. I contacted a friend that attended the Zen Center on occasion to see if he could help the man. He did. Apparently the homeless man turned his life around after awhile. I heard from good sources that he attained a state of immortality. (see)
NOTE: If you go to the "see" link just after "on the occasion of my birthday," at the top of the page and compare the photo of the DATE etched into the cement at the Grauman's Chinese Theater with the birthday of the Zen Center Roshi and the center's opening date listed in the History link of the center, you will get the connection.
Why all the fuss about the ability to fly, flying machines, flying, giant flying creatures, giant birds, giant feathers, et al, and all of it relating back to the Wanderling somehow?
One day as a young boy I wandered off into the desert unescorted. When my Uncle found me missing he went searching for me. Years later he told me the distance I traveled that day, from the point I started to the location he found me, was way to far for me to have covered given the time, especially considering the level of my own abilities, the terrain, heat of the day, etc. He told me he had tracked me some distance quite clearly, then my tracks suddenly just ended as though I had disappeared into thin air. Knowing I didn't have a large supply of water or any at all he continued to look in areas he thought I might seek out and just happened across me --- many, many miles from where he had last seen my tracks. How I got there he couldn't say with any amount of certainty. However, he told me, and he kept it a secret from his wife even to the point of burning my shirt, that my shirt below both shoulders as well as part way down the back and along my sleeves were punctured in spots and appeared to have what he called grip marks on them. So too, my skin had red abrasions almost like minor scratches as though my arms had been clutched by something. He told me he was sure I had been carried off and if he hadn't happened across me I may had been carried off even further, maybe even never to be found.
In that my uncle was not able to get me to tell him verbally --- OR I was unable or unwilling to put into words my experience of what happened that day --- my uncle suggested I sit down and draw whatever pictures came to mind that related to the event. All of those drawings are long gone as are any finite memories of same, except for one. I remember it clearly as if only yesterday because of the striking comparison my uncle made between one of my drawings and an ink and watercolor drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci. They were nearly identical, desert landscape and all. The major exception was that where Leonardo's drawing depicted a lake with a shape similar to a bird, my drawing, although having a similar shape, was instead, a SHADOW of a giant bird.
Leonardo Da Vinci: Bird's-Eye View of a Landscape. 1502.
Pen, ink and watercolor on paper. Windsor Castle, Windsor, UK
Basically, my uncle stated many times that he felt the reason for my destiny and fascination regarding all aspects of giant flying creatures went back to an incident that involved the fly over of a giant airborne object that I witnessed as a young boy. The object, of an unknown nature and an unknown origin, was seen by literally thousands of people along the coast of California barely three months into World War II. Eventually to be called the Battle of Los Angeles or as I call it the UFO Over L.A., the incident is mostly forgotten now except by maybe myself and a major chronicler of the event C. Scott Littleton whose critiques of my eyewitness accounts of the event are explored in Littleton Vs. The Wanderling. Anyway, as the story goes, during the early morning hours of February 25, 1942 the whole city and surrounding communities were in an uproar as thousands of rounds of anti-aircraft shells were expended in an attempt to pull down whatever it was in the sky that night. The slow moving object, said to be as big or bigger than a Zeppelin, was caught in the glare of the searchlights from Santa Monica to Long Beach and seemed impervious to the the constant barrarge of shells. It eventually disappeared out over the Pacific after cruising along the coast and cutting inland for a while. The huge object was never clearly explained and was basically hushed up without response from the authorities.
BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES, 1942.-- 800 FOOT ZEPPELIN-SIZE UFO
FLEW DIRECTLY OVER THE TOP OF THE WANDERLING'S HOUSE.
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As to the whole Leonardo Da Vinci flying thing, in the end it was basically a huge metaphor for things to come, of which I get into somewhat more throughly in Codex Atlanticus. As it was, my mentor, either before or after his stay at the ashrama of Sri Ramana Maharshi, and I believe it was before --- even though it is not mentioned by William Somerset Maugham in his book --- traveled to Bijapur to meet with another Indian holy man, Siddharameshwar Maharaj. The Maharaj taught that the only way one can reach Final Reality, that is, Enlightenment, is through what he called Vihangam Marg, the bird's way. For me, at the time, of course, I knew nothing of such things. I only know who the holy man is now because I was able to put together bits and pieces of information such as time and place with such clues as "the bird's way." The holy man had related to my Mentor that only by hearing and practising from the teachings of the Master and thinking over it, just like the bird flies from one tree to another, can one attain Awakening very fast. This is the shortest way to achieve the Final Reality. In that initially I had made little or no progress toward Enlightenment my mentor told me of Siddharameshwer's method.
DID THE WANDERLING FLY?
TARZAN AND THE HUNTRESS
Howard Hughes, Da Vinci, and Flying Machines
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
(PLEASE CLICK)
AWAKENED TEACHERS FORUM
ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL
GASSHO
(PLEASE CLICK)
CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT
ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE
DA VINCI
RING
SITE
