The Journey

By Brandon T Landeros

The Journey is a subjective and objective adventure into the greatest unknown; the spirituality of self and the Space that is close and trillions of light years away without the use of drugs or hallucinatory mediums. You can watch the book trailer on Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648951619

Brandon T Landeros

The Author, enjoys the beautiful South and North California weather, having attended Ventura College, worked, County, City and Federal positions always pursuing a spiritual freedom in his written material.

Book preview

Introduction

Humanity needs a way out of its current existence; the way out needs to be positive, creative, and spiritual but not in separating human beings. It needs to be truthful and answer all the questions about whom and what we are; it needs to bring equality among all and offer some form of freedom that the old, conventional religion could not answer. It is all about bringing human beings toward a unification where everyone wins and earth is a more productive and secure haven for us all. It needs to come as an awakening of our spiritual nature, an awakening of the celestial within us all.

I claim that human beings (bodies) are the hosts for intelligent spirits and that these intelligent spirits are each and all of us. That we are celestials using these bodies to experience and that we live many lives, that we are multi life spiritual beings who, through a well-worked-out plan are lost to thinking we are one life entities, that it is not our soul that goes to heaven or hell because there is no heaven or hell, that our ability to create, as intelligent spirits, has been smothered down toward a petty existence, that all that ails humanity is but a result of not knowing our true nature and potential as celestials from space and that we live many lives and use bodies to experience sensation that is in life.

Furthermore, that we are basically good intelligent spirits, that this awareness will bring humanity together and form an alliance of all governments and all of humanity toward more common goals.

Before anyone liberates themselves and breaks out from any place, they have to be sure they are being retained in an unwanted condition or situation. Once that is established, a plan needs to be formulated for the break out, and if in fact, this person, group, or society are in such a situation, then there must be someone or something monitoring their existence, and in the case of humanity, there was, there is, and we are in that condition.

That we, as a human species, are not aware that this situation is taking place is just a safeguard. The clues are in that we die wishing we didn’t or in some atrocious way and that we are born not knowing anything, and if we tend to remember, it is very vague and dismissed as nonsense.

The total dismissal of the concept that we are held in this condition of not knowing and understanding is actually an important point to consider for when amnesia set in on any individual, it darkens any memory of any past. Why would an all-knowing spirit not know? Why would an immortal spirit believe it is mortal? Why would an intelligent spirit have a body that is less than perfect? Why would a spirit have a host (the body) that gets sick all the time and susceptible to infirmities? Why would this intelligent spirit partake in wars, crimes, and drugs unless it had gone through some process that induces it toward this condition of existence?

That others feel and believe as I do, now or in the past, makes me happy in that I’m not alone and I dearly applaud them.

* * * * *

We live in two worlds. One is the material word and the other is our spiritual world. Every day, we strive to maintain our sanity about our material world by convincing ourselves that we are whom we are and we have what we have and will achieve that which we wish to achieve. In this real world, some fare great and some poorly, but all live by breathing air and eating food. Every one strives toward a good life where the body enjoys ease of living and exploring the known planet we inhabit. The easier the living, the more we can enjoy getting around, the more one can say he/she is surviving. Opinions will vary such as I don’t really want to live anyplace else or I’m happy the way I am, but in general, one would be happiest having everything one needed to survive and being able to move to any place on earth one wanted to even though one chose not to.

Some live in lives of constant pain by the way of unfortunate illnesses, some live lives without limbs, some live mentally unstable minds, unable to perform basic functions, yet all live the material life.

Some are rich, others poor, while other are criminals and in jail, still others are in mental hospital, yet all in one way or another, strive toward a better living. A physical well-being which seems to tease and ultimately abandon each human being toward the end of each existence and everyone on this planet ends with a big why, no matter how religious the person was. And the big Why? never does seem to satisfy human beings, with morsels of various religions because religions seem to divert into crevices of fairy-tale reasoning. Ultimately, one gets this feeling that there is something amiss.

In grade school and growing up, we’ve all learned the stories of Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, and all those fairy tales, and then wham!, it all correlates with this man that walked on water and this man that was made from mud and this lady from the rib of the guy from mud and it’s all the same inventiveness which we are to believe if we wish to go the good path and live the good life or we too will be cast out of the Garden of Eden, oh and that Garden of Eden sure reminds us of The Secret Garden, but one cannot think like this, one must learn to accept and not question.

Many understand and feel that we are very much more spiritual than we are flesh and bone. This book is about our spiritualism and our indebtedness to knowing that which we truly are and that we are not lost but misguided and abandoned in a desert of questions, inundated with false data on which to survive in a world as beautiful as we’ve made it and of a very special origin.

Back in the early 1950s when television was still black and white, there wasn’t even a hint of today’s everyday computers, much less cell phones; a third world wasn’t much different from the United States in technology, though the industrial revolution placed us ahead in transportation and we had the atom bomb, we had even used it on Japan.

On my birth certificate, it says I was born on March 20, 1956, in a small town outside Matamoros Tamaulipas, Mexico, which is not far from the Brownsville, Texas, border. Since it was a home birth, the registration day for the birth certificate was done on a different, so I could have been born on a different day or hour from what it says on it. I imagine, once done, it sets a legal precedent. Back then, the only language I spoke was Spanish, as did my mother, father, and brothers. Matamoros was to be remembered for the same weather as Texas. The weather is cold with strong gusts of wind that tend to develop into tornadoes.

Of Humble Beginnings

Born in a wood floor house that was no bigger than six hundred square feet, there was no doctor to tend the birthing, just a midwife as was customary for the poor folks in that area. With a big storm brewing outside and winds that put the fear of God, as the saying goes, deep in your heart, it was quite a birthing experience. Soon, there would be a lot of running around by myself on dirt roads all around and in heavy competition with my older brother. Soon, my brother Max would be born, followed by Manuel and then Nancy, who was a lovely female addition to the four waiting brothers. She grew very tomboyish, quarrelling and fighting among us like a good sister ought to.

The memories of childhood fit in as pieces to a puzzle that would eventually develop later in life. Tapestries of life that instill well, ensuring a phenomenal confirmation that yes, life is life and there is nothing else, as such I treasure the memories within this life. Childhood, I remember at seven years old, I went to this Plaza de Toros in Matamoros, Mexico, selling chewing gum. The funniest thing in reminiscing this is that I’m this red-haired kid with freckles fitting in to what is a world of mostly brown-skinned (if we can associate the Mexican skin tone to a color) Mexican kids. But at the time, I didn’t see that I was a bit different in skin tone and hair color, but looking back, I can imagine how strange it was to see me in Mexico selling gum to tourists for the most part. Mexico is notorious for child labor. Since the government is not fair with the people in paying wages and people leave the country to look for a better way of life, those that remain have to find some form of living. Children, from poor homes and that is well over 70 percent of Mexico, have to go out and work to make ends meet for the family or they soon end up without a family, as the father takes off or goes into some manic depressive state, and we all know how that can drive anyone bananas.

Well, there I was selling chewing gum to make ends meet, at seven years old and with my older brother to lead the way, we would soon graduate to shoe shiners, which entailed quite a bit more knowledge and the benefits where a bit more but so was the investment. My brother and I would travel from a suburb named Colonia Popular to downtown Matamoros, which is the big city to work. We’d take the bus and, at times, come home after dark.

There were times when we’d go all the way to the border town in the United States which is Brownsville, Texas, and there we’d wait for a truck to take us into the working field where we’d spend the hot Texas day picking cotton. Now that’s a job! I remember the long sacks made strapped around the shoulder and dragged along the rows of cotton. I remember how my older brother and I would work the rows, picking cotton to fill them up and take them back to be weighed before being emptied into the back of a waiting truck. My father worked for months in Texas and Mother waited in Matamoros for him to return home; he worked with government permission under the Bracero project provided at that time to bring in labor from Mexico for agricultural work in the United States. At one time or another, either the permit expired or he just didn’t have it and my father would brave that Rio Bravo in Texas, swim across it to work for the money that couldn’t be made in Mexico. In the months that my father worked, most of us went to school and Mother would tend to us while he was gone. Since money ran low before Father came back home, it pushed us to go out and search for work. Life! Seems everything tells you, This is it! but there is always more.

There was this one day that I made one dollar and twenty five cents. Bought a hamburger for ten cents and I had my first ice cream drumstick, which to this day is my favorite ice cream, and thinking back, it seemed to whisper, This is it, best at it gets, this is life! but it was definitely not. Converse! The damn shoes were all there was, for the most part. I remember wearing them down until my toes where sticking out and the soles had holes in them. Who would have guessed that they would last as long and go from a necessity to a seeming fad for kids? Nice shoe, nice promotions.

If I had pictures, you’d see exactly what I mean in regards to the Converse. I will share a couple of pictures of childhood, but in a time of black and white, it was better to buy food than spend on what would be a very expensive camera at the time.

Instilled was the Catholic religion. The Apostolic Roman Catholic brew that is digested haphazardly and without question and brands children through a baptism before they grow up to know any better. You are committed through the baptism but only until you grow to make a more personal choice. I do love their social groups very much and met some very nice people within the Catholic congregation, still do once in a while. The inquisition of many people by the supposed intelligent few is clearly seen in the conquest of Mexico and the Philippines. Anyone from those countries is just professed to be Catholic and a good assumption it is.

The New Palestine

Human beings are the most beautiful of people. Always looking for the truth, and the truth hides in every crevice under every object around. The truth is in every single palpable object in this planet, it’s in the air itself, but it eludes people, and it eludes people because people like to be eluded. There is this game that can only be played if one doesn’t know the truth. For truth does liberate a person, it will transition a human being from a belief to a firmer level of existence.

The truth doesn’t even hide. One would say that The truth for one person is different than the truth for another person, but not really because we are all basically the same. In the flesh, we all have bodies, and though our appearances differ in attributes, we are composed flesh and bone. If anyone ever realized the truth, it would be very hard to swallow, to believe. So we fabricate and fabricate life and beliefs, norms, traditions, and oh yes, we fabricate gods and we must have those—that is a must. It’s in the Book of the Dead, read it!

So there I was, a kid born in Matamoros Tamaulipas, ha, even the words sound so Greek to me. This geographic allocation, how interesting it was. I was born knowing zilch, nada! Like people are customarily birthed, but I don’t wish to get ahead of myself here. Speaking Spanish as a primary language, I was indoctrinated into life by a few spanks courtesy of midwife. I was a crybaby that is for sure. Lots of tradition, culture, scary stories, and oh, those nights in Mexico with winds knocking over branches and everything loose outside. There were stories of witches being loose, of duendes, these little fellows that were imitations of one’s self walking at night, La Llorona is the tale of a lady that drowned her children in a river because she had no food to give them and she howls at night, Mis niños! which means my children, then there is grown-up saying that the devil is loose when the wind was the harshest and that was frequent. Childhood was a bit scary at night in the Mexico I grew up in; if you inquired of people from Mexico, they will tell you tales of night lore that is very scary.

Matamoros, geographically adjacent to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, has shrewd weather with winds up to and in excess of fifty miles an hour and storms that drop more rain in an hour than it can rain a whole day in California. California weather is mellow in comparison and heavenly to live in by climate comparison. Even the heat of Texas and Matamoros is harsher, perfect for cotton and watermelon harvest. So as a kid, I wore beat-up Converse and walked barefoot the rest of the time. Walking to school barefoot was more enjoyable than with the shoes especially during rain time because mud would just go in through the bottom holes. Walking the dirt streets to school with dogs chasing me every other block until one day, a good-sized Labrador came right up to me and bit me right on my left hip. Reached me nice and easy because being a kid, I must have been around eight years old. I cried my pain away and distinctly remember my brother’s intentions to go out and kill that dog. My brother was always so very protective, always the nicest brother one could have.

There was the time two kids started fighting my brother at this empty lot we played soccer in. They started rolling on the ground, and I was truly scared until necessity made me jump into the fight, taking one boy off him. The boy I took off him ended biting me in the struggle, but in the end, we won the fight. I could almost hear the wind say, This is it, this is all there is to life! It wasn’t. The streets of dirt would get very muddy during the rainy season, and Matamoros is notorious for the same weather as Texas, the same geographical area. The streets were full of mud and puddles, making walking a hard situation. One would walk to a bus stop or into town where streets were paved for the most part.

While the United States was changing at the speed of light, Mexican politics didn’t permit the right growth to happen. Moneys for construction and advancement would always end up in the politician’s pockets, and this is true to present time. It was because of this structure of politics that people like my father had to search for work in the United States. It has always been a sad state of affairs for Mexico: as beautiful as the people are, the powers that be won’t allow a commendable wage.

Father and the New Land

My father was born in September of the year 1927 in Michoacan, Mexico, approximately eleven years later a mishap would separate his mother from him for about thirty years. He survived by working his way into manhood, going through various states in Mexico until sometime in the late 1940s to early 1950s.

As it happened, one day, Grandmother (on my father’s side) went on an errand with my father’s two sisters, Carmen and Amparo, leaving my father home. She apparently was gone a bit longer than anticipated and my father went out to look for her. When he left her and his two sisters came back and they missed each other, then they left again, and upon his return, there was no one there.

By the time my father and grandmother were reunited, he had gone to quite a few places throughout Mexico, worked in the Texas area as a bracero (legal migrant worker); it was one of those times that he met our mother in the crop fields of Texas. In 1966, my grandmother was living in Los Angeles with her two daughters, Carmen, Amparo, and her new husband Eddie. She was a business owner in Los Angeles, California. Someone told my grandmother that this man by the name of Maximino Palomarez Martinez, fitting her description was living in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico at this Colonia Popular (the town) and no sooner did she know that she takes off to find him.

She went and she found him and all of us; she was like an angel that just scooped us up from one world into another. I remember riding in a taxi with her, my mother, father, and another brother. Clearly, I remember the taxi driver telling her that the ride to where we were going was long and she might not have enough to cover for it, at which point, she took out this wad of money (dollar denomination) and said, I can buy this taxi from you if I wanted to, so just take us to where we need to go. The taxi man hushed up and just drove.

Now Grandmother wasn’t rich, but she had just prospered in her business and she was determined to bring her son back to the United States and she immigrated all of us, the ones that needed to be processed.

She did things proper, and paperwork was drawn at the immigration department border of Texas. Within three months, if not sooner, we moved to Oxnard, California. As life would have it, we ended up at this four- to five-trailer workers camp for a farmer. One of my father’s newly met brothers-in-law was a truck driver for that rancher and had got him the job and the place to live.

From August of 1966 to August of 1971, we lived surrounded by row crops and hundred feet away from Pleasant Valley Road in Oxnard, California, which is long known for its fantastic agricultural products. At the time, I was ten years old and went from third grade in Mexico to third grade here. I was submersed into the English-speaking world that is the United States, but it wasn’t that bad; there were people that spoke Spanish, just not in class.

In Oxnard, California, my father was always with us as he never had to leave. He worked all day mostly six days a week, and on his days off, sometimes the whole family would go to a restaurant to eat. There was this place called El Nopalito close to Oxnard Boulevard and dad used to take us there among other places, including parks in the area, and we were being driven around which was amazing in itself.

It was during life at the Pleasant Valley Road home that my sisters Maria and Rosa and brother Miguel were born. So there were three natives of California, two from Texas, and three from Mexico. Growing up around row crop fields and lemon orchards was healthy and good for us. There was not much danger, much less predators, to hurt us as kids so we made the best of it and took off on long, long walks throughout lemon orchards and crop fields. We took on the lizards, birds, fish in the irrigation creeks and adopted wild dogs that ran around stray. We saw life that the normal person passing by doesn’t. We saw crashes in the middle of the night and cars abandoned by the roadside. My sister Nancy was one year old when we came to the United States, My older brother was eleven, Maximino (Jr.) aka Max was eight or so, and Manuel was about five or six. There we were and my father was busy. He had always been a tractor driver and irrigation specialist when working in Texas so the work here in Oxnard, California, was perfect for him.

My father was a very hard worker who loved his job. He’d be out there in the middle of the row crops irrigating or driving the tractor and whistling or singing. He loved to whistle and sing and anyone could see that he loved the land.

Still remember one of those songs, Los Laureles. My father showed his love for work and love for our mother and caring for us all.

At one time, a few years ago, I wrote an inspiration after my father had passed away; it went like this:

* * * * *

In the 1930s, a young boy, fatherless and without a home, went out in search of life. Limited in schooling and without a trade, his greatest weapon was his will to survive. With honesty and integrity his natural characteristics, he fought poverty, discrimination, and loneliness. Hardworking and bold of spirit, his survival was our survival; his song was our song.

Mino

He toiled the land

With integrity and pride

Of a luscious land his birth

The grand state of Michoacán

Leaving at an early age

With two Angels by his side

Like a cub without his mother

To Matamoros or bust!

Waters of the Rio Bravo

How many lives have you claimed?

This one was not for your taking,

He was not part of your game.

To Texas, his fortune took him

Where his bride-to-be he met

A beautiful señorita

From the State of Potosi.

Matamoro’s winds are heartless

But they did witness three births

While Texas came in on second

Because it weathered two.

Tall and handsome, strong of will

Caring not about bad vices

Set examples through his work

And the sweat upon his brow.

On a stormy thunderous morning

To the Golden State

One angel a heart went to touch,

Loving hands soon reached to Mino

(A mother’s love to be exact).

California land of freedom

Ocean breeze and desert bloom

Views that take one’s breath away

You would think that you’re in heaven

(That’s because God sketched this land)

Eucalyptus trees and row crops

Witnessed three more gifts he had

While two angels watched in silence

A very hardworking man.

Michoacán land of enchantment

Where the pepper trees attest

That two angels circled nearby

Before his birth was declared.

Ocean waves that reach for freedom

Washing all prints off the sand

Murmur constantly of Mino

And of his love for the land.

September of 27 to April of ’96

Reads a stone in Camarillo,

Under a large pepper tree,

Maximino P. de Martinez…married for 43 years

Eight nuggets he left behind,

One diamond and two bright jewels

And the star that bore his birth

Soon departed from this world.

Don’t cry for him California, Matamoros, Michoacan,

For his soul lives on forever

Don’t you know?

Souls, they can’t

Die!

Elementary School

I went to elementary school and had one first crush on third grade teacher, Miss Schoenfeld, all apologies extended if I’ve misspelled that last name.