It seemed when i was speaking from the rug in my living room the other night that some ideas that i was obsessing on back in my twenties might come to fruition, and so I want to lay out some of those ideas.
Once I freed myself, at least apparantly freed myself, from the clutches of the beast, Martin Roth, in the later part of 1982, I began pondering the world in light of my own urges and instincts. I was very idealistic, I saw the possibility of the human race either succeeding or failing depending upon the choices made by its members. I felt strongly that the best thing I could do was to be true to my instincts. It was a time of restlessness, of moving around gathering bits and pieces of experience and just becoming what I was becoming. The next six years until I started Essential FOods was like a long gestation period. I had a simple vision of how human beings could have Paradise if they wanted it, and I was idealistic enough to believe it was possible. Finding a way to actualize the dream of heaven on earth was the challenge.
I felt that writing was the medium through which I would articulate my vision. I had a simple idea which was that if everyone just slowed down to the point of only consuming what they needed to live we could free up a huge amount of energy being wasted on unnecesary consumption. I was very inspired by the teachings of Georges Ohsawa who recommended "do not take anything that is not essential to your existence."
I saw myself leading a revolution of people reducing their consumption to near zero as a sort of revolutionary strategy in order to harness the saved energy and apply it to the end of taking charge of our destiny.. I wrote a fifty page essay detailing my vision, sent copies to a few people and publications that I idealistically thought might be interested in my ideas, and of course no one seemed very impressed. Later I attempted to write a novel in order to lay out the vision of how a determined minority of the human race could take power simply by coordintating their efforts to live in a good way and strategically coordinate their energies. In a way I wanted to make an overt effort to take power into our own hands. WHat i was envisioning was pretty much the Nation of Israel which of course was already doing the work I was envisioning.
Anyway, the idea was simple. Just minimize consumption down to the bare essentials. Minimize all consumption. I decided that a staple food made from germinated wheat kernals ground into dough and made into a form of bread, much like what is marketed as sprouted wheat bread, would suffice as food. . I figured that for as long as it took the human race to solve its problems we could live on a staple like this. Prayer and fasting, I figured that it could really work to solve the problems of this world.
Oct22 6AM
My GOOBer this morning are simply some thoughts in continuaton of wht i was writing here last night. First is to say that it is not a coicidence that I ended up in the bakery business with one of the most humble and good hearted men I've ever known George De Pasquale. I gotta tell you something about George. I always said this one thing about George in relationship to the bakery, back when he was one of five owners, myself, him, and three fallen souls who were there to mooch and only to mooch, the meaning of which was: "If you think of me as being the Willie Wonka of this bakery business, then George is my Charlie." Last November, when I was thinking that the rapture was taking place, I told George most sincerely that I would give him my majority interest in the bakery - at that time he and I were 80-20 - if the resources that I was expecting came in time to avoid selling the bakery.
I just want to interject something here about the sale of my bakery. The buyers ended up being Arthur Rubenfeld, Peter Miller, Ross Kling, and others who I never met and whose names I dont remember. Basically a little faction of the Babylonian mafia, and the experience has been one of having every steriotype of Jewish businessmen manifest as probably the worst expereince of dealing with people in my entire life. I felt like they were there not for my bakery but for my life. I really think they are agents of a conspiracy against me, just as I now believe this about Ptarmigan Teal and Mary Ann Rossi. I seem to be getting paranoid in m middle age, thinking that so many people around me are out to get me, the guy living in my house, the guy running my chocolate factory, the guys who took my bakery from me, lots of people like the meagerie of Babylonian Brothers who I have been mentioning. Oh well.
There are a few people in my life who have never tried to parasitize me, and one of these is George. He's just a good person doing his best to survive and cope. With a history that clearly has always been leading him to the role he has to play in this story. Grandpa George whose wife is Grandma Georgina to me still as she was last fall, when I saw her parents at Saint James when I as there with the VIrgin Mary, and a few pieces of the story, especially the trip into minus land to retrieve grandma georgina, fell into place. Some people are old and tired, and I think Grandma Georgina is one. The identities or the significance of Grandpa Joe and Grandma Jospephina are more mysertious to me know, as I had been associating Joe W. as Grandpa Joe, who is not looking like someone who will be moving into the chocolate factory after all. On the contrary.
In the context of my sale of the bakery I want to mention Scott Svenson, who was the other possible buyer who I was in negotiations with during this period of time when it became clear to me that I needed to divest myself of the bakery in order to bankroll the chocolate factory. Scott is a man who just radiates light, he's like a high angel of some kind, a very loving and intelligent man. He offered me peanuts so we didint make a deal, but I liked Scott very much, he's very unusual as a business man, more like me in many respects than probably any other successful businessman that i've ever met. Scott had a couple of opportunities to hear me tell him about my experience, and he never flinched. He didint buy into it, but he listened respectfully and with interest. I believe that Scott Svenson will turn out to be a member of our nation, and his testimony as to his experience of me will be of interest. I really like Scott and trust him completely. I can see the possibility of him having a central role of some kind,.
A couple of years prior to finally selling my business I had been approached by the Mani Brothers, very successful former bakery operators from LA, who had recognized in my business the potential to build a west coast wide bread empire. They wanted to partner with us in building a much larger company and offered a price for the bakery that was about twice what I got from the eventual buyers. We came very close to going in to business with the Manis, we bailed on the deal because neither George nor I really wanted to be involved in something of a scale envisioned by teh Manis. The Manis are Egyptian Jews who landed on these shores, I believe, as immigrants from France. I imagine that their family has an interesting story. They built a bakery from humble begnnings making and selling pita, and eventually their business became the core of what became Sara Lee's bakery division. These guys are rock and roll businessmen and they saw something in our business, having looked at every other noteworthy bakery on the West COast, as the wholesale bakery with the potential to become what they envisioned.
Though they are of "Jewish" ancestry, the Mani brothers are from a different sector fo Jewry that is not connected with the Babylonian Brotherhood. Though I am not sure I approve of their choices of motor vehicles - we got picked up at the hotel where they put us up in one of the two brothers' hummer- i feel that the manis have great integrity and I believe that the Mani Brothers may be agents of the Nation of Israel (if so, they probably would not have known this at the time) and they may give testimony as to what they saw in me and George and our bread business. They own real estate in LA, and the building where they have their own offices is the most beautiful office building I have ever been in. There guys are like kings, there know quality, and they recognized quality in the Essential Baking Co. If anyone on Earth is qualified to give testimony to the true value of what George and I created from a purely businessman's perspective it's teh Mani Brothers. And Scott Svenson. The Manis shared with us all of the information that they had regarding typical valuations of bakeries, all of their plans, their way of doing business, they were absolutely IMPECCABLE in their dealings with me and George, and they were willing to bear substantial expenses in their courtship of us, putting us up in a 4 star hotel in Beverly Hills, wining and dining us there and twice in Seattle. Their assistant who was our contact person was likewise very respectful. Though we did not consummate a deal, the Manis were respectful and pleasant, really quite enjoyable, to the end and beyond, as Michael, their assistant, continued sending me friendly e mails from time to time, just to stay in touch. When I had reached the point of finally selling, I contacted the Manis to see if they were still interested, but Michael reported back that they were consumed by other dealings.
I cant say that selling to the Manis would have been the right thing to do, but i can say that being in business with them, had i shared the same scale of vision of what it could become, would probably have been a rewarding experience. As would have been working with Scott Svenson. The latter would have been a much better choice than the Babylonians who actually bought it for the sake of the company, but the bakery people got Arthur Pete and Ross as their new masters, for better or worse.
ALong the way to launching myself into business, I ran into the "Essene Gospels" published by Edmond Bordeaux Zekely's organization, which is based in COsta Rica, to which I traveled, believe it or not, with this vague sense of doing a pilgrimage to the ideas put forth in these books, if not the actual place or persons associated today with the organization that exists to further his ideas of healing.
These books are myserious to me, in pariticular whether the claims made regarding their origins are legitimate or not. I am actually a little bit dubious about the name "Essene" at this point, as I came to associate this word with Prince Reuben and the Shine/QUmran connection. Essene began to be a code word for Babylonian CONspiracy against teh Christ in my mind. I also note that the name of my businesses comes in part from the inspiration I got from the basic ideas put forth through "The Essene Gospels." (The other inspiration was this quotation from Georges Ohsawa, who I believe had some important things to say about health, sickness and healing: "Do not take anything that is not essential to your existence." Ohsawa's an interesting guy, a see a lot of myself in him, his passionate search for truth and a way of expressing the truth that he believed he had found.
The Essene Gospels had a MAJOR impact on my thinking and direction. The idea seemed so simple. There is a particular idea that is prominent in the Essene Gospels, and its the idea of a way of making bread that really appealed to me, and that, because of its implications actually became a major obsession for several years. It's simply the idea of hydrating (and therefore begining the germination proces) wheat before rather than after grinding it. I had a lot to say about the implications of this idea combined with a will to bring truth and health into this world, I saw in it something completely revolutionary in its implications - a way that sincere people who wanted to take power and make this world according to a vision of health, peace and happiness, just success, really for the human race. I actually wrote a fifty page manifesto about how i could see a complete rvolution and transformation in this world using this idea of bread made from hydrated wheat kernals as a sort of communion wafer/staple that people would tkae as their only food as a way of fasting without starving that people could subsist upon for the duration of whatever time it took to stop the machines of destruction and complete revamp the human race. JUst a common sense approach to dealing with the impending self-annihilation of the human race.
Idealistic? yes. Brilliant? yes. Capable of succeeding if people were willing to participate in teh human race's salvation of itself? yes. I made meager attempts to prmote this idea, but I made a lot of effort to articulate it. Perhaps somewhere there remains a draft of what I called "A Peace Proposal." My mother deserves credit for spending many hours helping me type this manuscript - this was about 1985. I sent a copy to Mother Jones Magazine, not necessarily something that had any realistic hope of leading to publicatin of a fifty page manifesto, but I figured that peopel who rant and rave about the lack of power that the people have ought to be interested in an idea of what to do about it.
I sent a copy of my manifesto to one or two people, the only one I can recall at this time is Joel Wollner, who I met through my work with Martin, a guy who had been quite impressed with me, who had openly told me that he saw in me someone special. (Another person who confessed seeing something powerful in me is a guy named Richard France, who was involved in the Macro scene in Boulder and whose macro roots are in the early Brookline days of the Kushis.) I never heard anything from Joel. I also shared my manifesto with Martin, who rejected it as being too something, I forget what, and the other person who read my manifesto was Jack Mannheimer, who is one of the premies who refused to hear about my recent experiences. Jack read my manifesto while I was with him in his home. He didnt exactly jump up and down with glee at having seen my ideas in writing.
Well that's about as far as i got with the manifesto, which was the expression of an obsession that had ruled my life for several years. SOmetime later, after becming distracted by a two or three year relationship with Deb Carson, the daughter of an embezzeler father and a totally neurotic mother who i met through Martin in the immediate aftermath of completing my manifesto, I took another approach to articulating the vision. There's more to that story, but not now.
In the months leading up to starting Essential Foods in 1988 I was working on this other idea I had for articulating the vision of how, if they were willing to stop consuming and turn their exertion of energy toward solving the problems of excess consumption, human beings could turn this world around. This idea was to write a novel (with a protagonist named Daniel Baker) that told the story of how this revoluaiton I envisioned could unfold, and I was working on exactly this when I started E Foods, basically because I was broke and needed some dental work done, as my first employee Tim King would recall, he having recorded this in his own diary - that my reason for starting my first company in the midst of trying to write a novel about saving the world was because I needed some dental work. I was broke. I had $200 to my name and a beat up volvo station wagon in which I had recently been living. And I started the company that eventaully led to the bakery. I never sold a share of stock in my company to anyone until I sold my whole stake, and I never borrowed money that I didn't have probably until we moved the bakery from its original location to its current one, or possibly even later. The whole thing was bootstrapped from that $200.
Its a long complicated weaving together of ideas here, but here is an important piece. George had earlier been involved early on in what had become the biggest seller of bread made from sprouted wheat in the USA, the ALvarado Street Bakery, a worker owned busiess started by hippies in Somona county. . ("germinated" is the word I would use to describe my idea of what happens to the wheat, the wheat kernals are not "sprouted" to teh point of sweetness, as in the so called sprouted wheat "Essene" bread made in Canada, but just germinated to the point where the germ is just beginning to look pregnant with the possibility of sprouting. )
My passionate dream of transorming tthe world with sprouted wheat bread somehow led me to a having a friendship with someone who had devoted many years to advancing the cause of sprouted wheat bread, he was by then married to Deb Carson who I'd met through martin in the days after I finished my manifesto. George was a baker and we talked of possible collaboration, and indeed, a few years later he became my partner in my flour-based and yet pioneering in other ways bread bakery. There is a future for the ideas that I had that were the inspiration to be in the bread business called Essential, and everything looks like its lined up perfectly... the very idea of transformation and empowerment through simplification using this bread as a staple may be implemented.
I have said many times that water needs to be the only beverage for anyone wishing to overcome the diseases of mortality, and I believe that this bread could become a staple for those who wish to cure themselves of these diseases. There is much more that I have to understand about teh Essene gospels, zekely, and teh plans as they have always existed, but i've realized in my clearest moments that I may not have been spinning my wheels for all those years of obsession on this idea after all.. There will be this bread, because it makes perfect sense. This is about fasting, and this bread is the simplest and most nutritious fom of the most abundant food staple on earth, wheat.
There will be much more on this, but I wanted to lay out the basic history of the scenario that I see coming into focus. Everything I've ever said or done from a place of sincereity that has seemsed futile and overly idealistic will, it seems, be validated. My whole life has been the pursuit of teh vision of Heaven on Earth, and this sprouted bread and revolution idea was my greatest obsession in this life until the one that began on a fateful saturday night in 2003 at some property that I associate in my mind with the merry prankster Ken Kesey, the Oregon Country Fair.
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try drinking water and just getting a handle on undertanding WHERE your attention is going while you are drinking... people are afraid of water. its amazing. focus on the sensation of the water as deeply in your body as you can, not on the water that you feel afraid of that has not even entered your body yet.
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