Drifting: An Unforeseen Destination or Evolving Toward Anarchy

By James Harland

What if the common concept of anarchy as a fearful thing has been cultivated as a deception to advance the plans of those who desire above all else to exercise power over others?

Drifting is the story of a lifetime journey toward freedom that goes beyond release from bondage to those who wish to rule in the material world, to the much more important recognition of the sovereign Spirit that exists in a state of anarchy, not in the common sense of the word, but in its most basic and original sense and as the final destination for us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716363726

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 by James Harland

ISBN 978-1-716-36372-6

Dedication

For all who seek truth and the reality

behind outer appearances.

Epigraph

[A] state of perfection is a state where there is

no power of man over man, that is to say,

anarchy.

—Nikolai Berdyaev

an’är·chy

[Greek anarkhia, from anarkhos, without a ruler:

an- without + arkhos, ruler]

Prologue

IT WAS as if my life began somewhere in the middle.

I suppose that sounds like an exaggeration, and I don’t want you to think I’ll be doing that all over the place in this story. I plan to tell it just like it happened, or at least the way I remember it.

What I remember is a sudden moment of realization that was like waking up for the first time to find myself in the body of a five-year-old boy. It felt like I was starting out somewhere in the middle, like a whole lot of important stuff must have happened already, and I began to wonder what I’d missed.

No doubt I came into the world in the usual undignified way and then busied myself for a year or so with little more than mewling, suckling and spewing from one end or the other. I can’t say I regret not remembering all that, but once I was able to walk, the story my mother liked to tell was that I began following my older brother and sister around with the persistence of a puppy. That’s the point where I wish I could remember what went on. The comparison to a puppy never quite seemed to fit, since the feelings I apparently inspired weren’t those normally aroused by puppies. My siblings made it clear in later years that given half a chance they would have pawned me off to anyone willing to take me, and they often lamented that they’d never found anyone foolish enough to consent to the transfer. I had to conclude that tagging along behind someone isn’t the quality that makes puppies so endearing, and whatever those lovable qualities are, I must have been thoroughly deficient in them.

What happened in those early years probably doesn’t matter much beyond the fact that I’d failed to make the transition from unconscious to conscious living. In time I came to suspect my development was being directed by some higher intelligence that finally got impatient enough at my lack of progress to arrange a rapid series of emotional shocks designed to jump-start my awareness.

Chapter One

MY FATHER sat reading in his easy chair as I slipped through the doorway into the living room, crouched low so he wouldn’t see me over the top of his newspaper. I was shaking with fear, and for a fleeting moment I wondered why. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, at least as far as I knew. I only wanted the toy I’d left in the room. Still, I expected a scolding or, at best, a glowering stare if I got caught. That might not seem so bad, but at this point in my life I thought it was about the worst punishment there was.

I’d been on my hands and knees by the door for what felt like a long time, peering around the corner and waiting for just the right moment to make my move. I listened for the newspaper to stop rustling, signaling that my father had found something to read that would hold his attention for a while. At last, he was holding the paper fully opened and steady in front of him, and I rose to my feet while staying as low as I could. I took a deep breath and crept into the room, concentrating on putting one bare foot silently in front of the other, and I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I was pretty good at being silent when I wanted to be. I moved along the wall, taking shallow breaths as I glanced toward my father every couple of steps, willing him to keep reading and not to lower the paper that hid me from his view. My heart pounded, and the sound of rushing water filled my ears so loudly I worried he’d be able to hear it. The cardboard box sitting in the corner seemed a long way off, and I barely resisted the urge to quicken my pace, forcing myself to move slowly so I wouldn’t make any noise. Finally, I reached the box and carefully picked it up, making sure not to slide it across the floor or rattle its contents. I slowly turned around, still bent low, and started my retreat, imagining I was the neighbor’s cat, silent and stealthy.

My mother didn’t like cats. I don’t think my father did either, or even my brother or sister, so maybe liking cats meant I was a different sort of person somehow, and maybe that had something to do with my unpopularity. When you’re five, most anything seems possible. Anyway, when I’d asked if I could have a cat, my mother got a disapproving look on her face, kind of like when she tasted something sour. She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. No, she said. Cats are smelly and they’ll scratch up the furniture. At that time, I couldn’t tell you if that was true. All I knew was that sometimes when I was sitting alone under the big walnut tree in the back yard, the neighbor’s cat would appear and climb into my lap, and it made a rumbling noise and vibrated and got a contented look in its eyes when I stroked its coat that was soft and pleasant to touch, and it sure was nice to have somebody around who liked me.

Those thoughts were shadows in my mind as I crept along the wall, but mainly I thought about how that cat could be invisible when it wanted to be and then could suddenly appear out of nowhere somehow. Right now, that seemed like a handy skill to have, for sure.

I looked toward my father, afraid he was nearing the end of what he was reading and would lower the paper to turn the page, but my luck seemed to be holding. I continued my slow retreat, listening for the rustle that would almost certainly signal discovery and doom. I bit my lip so hard during the final steps that my eyes watered, and I held my breath, straining against the impulse to make a quick dash for the doorway. Then, all at once, I was there and through it. I started breathing again and licked my lip as I stood up straight, tasting something salty I realized was blood. Never mind. I walked quickly but still silently down the hallway that opened into the new addition my father was building onto the house.

The added space would nearly double the size of our home, and it appeared cavernous in its unfinished state. The framing for the walls of what would be individual rooms was only dimly visible, seeming somehow to intensify the darkness beyond. I thought I was being really brave going through a place like that all alone at night, and I hurried toward the single light at the far side of the expanse. It shone through the doorway of the only room in the new addition that was nearly finished. The dusty plywood floor gave way to the cool feel of vinyl tile under my feet as I reached the new bathroom that had recently become my favorite place to retreat on those evenings when no one wanted me around, which, lately, seemed to be most of them. The room was as far from everyone else in the house as I could get. I set the box in the middle of the floor and turned it on its side, letting its treasure spill out in a jumbled pile.

I settled down beside the mound of miniature notched logs made from lightweight pine and began fitting them together to match the image of the cabin in my mind. I worked steadily while my thoughts drifted, unaware they were focusing on anything unusual until I reached for a green-painted tongue-and-groove board lying close beside me. As I picked it up, a drop of moisture fell on it. The harsh light from the bulb in the overhead fixture that didn’t have a shade on it yet made the drop stand out sharply. I stared at it, not comprehending for a moment. Then I wiped the board on my shirt and hesitantly reached out to put it in place on the cabin roof, my movements slowing as my attention was drawn to the unexpected thoughts beginning to tug insistently at my awareness.

With the set of logs, I could build a simple one-room cabin or one with many rooms and extensions I imagined was the Ponderosa ranch house from the new television show that had immediately become my favorite. Even before seeing that show, I’d decided to go out West and become a cowboy when I grew up. As I played, I saw a future when I would build a real cabin somewhere in the high mountains among the tall pines. The familiar dream had held my attention for many happy hours as I experimented with different cabin designs. It had become automatic that as soon as I began my play, I would be, in my mind, grown up and out in the world on my own, so now it was a disturbing surprise to realize my thoughts had turned away from that dream. I found myself back in the present confronting something much less appealing. Intruding into my awareness was a question I’d successfully ignored before, but that now wouldn’t be denied. It planted itself squarely in the forefront of my mind and demanded, Why doesn’t my family like me?

My hand holding the board for the cabin roof froze in place, and time was suspended for a moment. The world stopped and all was utterly silent as my attention focused entirely on that question. Then it seemed as if the machinery in some unused part of my mind began to move, as if wheels that had been frozen in place suddenly broke free and started slowly to turn. The machinery engaged that question and, hesitantly, denied it was entirely true. Mommy likes me ... most of the time, I insisted to myself. The wheels turned faster as my attention turned to my brother and sister. It was true they didn’t like me, but their rejection didn’t bother me much. I’d long since accepted it as simply the natural order of things and thought it was just because they were older and smarter than I was. That left my father to consider, and his rejection now loomed in my consciousness, producing a growing turmoil.

Earlier that day I’d somehow provoked his impatience and irritation. The exact circumstances are lost somewhere down the dark well of memory, not important except as a starting point for my train of thought. Now I realized the day’s particular incident wasn’t the only reason I’d been so intent on avoiding my father’s notice while I retrieved my toy. Avoiding him had become an automatic thing that had grown out of long experience, and as I focused on his dislike of me, I began to sniffle. My eyes filled with a flood of tears rushing to follow the first drop that had fallen on the board in my hand as I picked it up. The board was forgotten now, and my hand fell into my lap as I asked myself how I’d gotten into the habit of avoiding my father and why the fear of his notice had become such a constant companion. As the wheels of my thought train spun faster, the separate questions blurred and disintegrated, their energy feeding into just one. It took shape and loomed hugely in my mind. It was the same question that had started my mental machinery, but now focused exactly, distilled down to its core as I asked, Why doesn’t Daddy like me?

At the moment of asking the question precisely that way, a door that before had perhaps been only slightly ajar seemed to be thrown wide open. A light that was searing in its intensity exploded in my brain, bringing with it a sudden knowing that rushed in to strike with a violence that jolted my consciousness into startled wakefulness.

It was suddenly clear that my father’s rejection didn’t happen only when I did something I’d been told not to do, so I deserved to be reprimanded; it wasn’t only the result of some mistake that would soon be forgiven and forgotten, allowing life then to go happily on once more. His rejection was a constant thing, and only now did I realize he disliked me not because of what I’d done, but because of who I was. Not that the idea formed in my mind in just that way; it was more of a simple recognition that no matter what I did, my father still wouldn’t like me, and I was powerless to change that.

The flash of light that brought that realization came too suddenly and was too strong to be contained by my mental machinery that was still moving too slowly and ponderously to utilize the sudden surge of energy. Instead of driving my thought train onward to ask what it was about me that caused my father’s rejection and why his opinion was more important than that of my siblings, the force of that sudden illumination was redirected along another path that offered less resistance. As if being vented through a relief valve, the energy flowed into emotion, shooting downward to hit me like a punch in the gut. It doubled me over and drove my breath away. The convulsion held me in its grip for so long that when it finally relaxed, my sobbing intake of breath startled me and brought with it a fear that the noise I made might draw someone’s attention. If anyone came to investigate, I expected no sympathy, but only irritation, so I quickly stifled my outburst. I resisted the urge to sink down and lie on the floor, knowing that yielding to that impulse would only make the overwhelming feelings of sadness and despair worse, and if someone found me curled up on the bathroom floor, I’d have some explaining to do.

As the convulsion passed, I looked up and swallowed hard. I forced myself to straighten up and resume work on the cabin, at the same time panting and blinking like mad. My hand shook as I reached out to place the board it still held onto the cabin roof, and then I picked up another piece. I continued placing piece after piece on the building until the roof was finished, and then I started a new extension, pausing only to wipe my eyes when my vision got too blurry. I forced myself to concentrate on the task, accepting my new realization that I was powerless to change my father’s dislike of me, but trying not to focus on it, instinctively knowing I couldn’t feed such an unsolvable problem with my attention, but had to let it recede into the background if I was to keep it from overwhelming me.

It was a good while later when my mother found me. By then, the waterworks and shaking had stopped, but I was still distracted by my inner turmoil and didn’t hear her approach.

There you are, she said, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I looked quickly over my shoulder to see her standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips and an exasperated expression on her face. Time for bed, Willy.

Okay, I said softly, and turned back to my toy, adding the log in my hand to the building that by this time had grown into a sprawling ranch house. But as she continued to stand behind me, I began to take the building apart. Only when it was half demolished did I hear her footsteps retreat. Several minutes later I finished scooping up the pieces and dropping them into the box. I got up and peed in the new toilet before wetting a washcloth in the sink and sitting on the edge of the tub to wipe my feet. I’d be in trouble if I went to bed with dirty feet. When I was done, I picked up the box, managed to turn off the light switch with my elbow, and felt my way carefully toward my bedroom, my mood still so subdued I forgot to be afraid of the dark.

My brother was already in his pajamas when I walked in. Hurry up and change so I can turn out the light, he growled, his irritation seeming almost a physical thing thrown at me. I set the box on the floor next to the clothes chest and took my pajama pants out of the drawer. Then I took off my shirt and shorts and sat naked on my bed to slip my legs one at a time into the pants. When I stood to pull them up, the light went out. My pajama shirt was still somewhere in the drawer where it would be hard to find and put on in the dark, so rather than argue with my brother about turning the light back on, I climbed into bed, even though I knew my mother would frown and shake her head at me in the morning for sleeping without a shirt.

I didn’t like to wear clothes in the summer when they just made me hot, but my mother said it was the civilized thing to do and was always telling me to go put on a shirt when I forgot to wear one. And if I neglected to wear pants, well, how that missed being on God’s top-ten thou-shalt-not list is a mystery. My mother seemed to think it should be the 11th commandment for sure, and I guessed I should count myself lucky He didn’t send a lightning bolt right down through the ceiling to fry me to a crisp when I didn’t have pants on, except when I was changing my clothes or taking a bath, of course. And boy would I really be in trouble if my father had to fix a big hole in the roof because I didn’t wear pants.

I lay awake a long time that night as the newly ignited awareness that had suddenly flashed into existence indelibly imprinted what were to be my earliest memories.

For the next several days I was preoccupied with my new realization and kept mostly to myself. No one questioned my uncharacteristically subdued mood, apparently happy to be relieved of the burden of my usual demands for attention. The intensity of my moment of awakening gradually faded, yet the fire that had been kindled in my brain continued to smolder, awaiting the fuel that would cause it to flare up again. The shock of waking up had been like the first explosion in one cylinder of an engine as it coughs to life. It would take more such explosions before the engine of my awakening consciousness would be running smoothly on all cylinders, and the starter was still engaged, ensuring that the next explosion would soon come.

THE MORNING was getting hot as I played alone on the front lawn while sparrows chirped loudly and flitted in and out of the bushes that lined one side of the yard. The grass felt cool as I idly brushed my hand across it, and I wondered how it could stay that way on such a hot day.

At the sound of footsteps on the street sidewalk, I looked up to see an elderly man approaching. Hello, he said with a smile as he stopped and faced me. What’s your name?

Starved for some sort of friendliness and approval after the experience of a few days earlier, I smiled back, suddenly elated that I knew the answer to the man’s question. I was eager to boost my injured ego by displaying the full extent of that knowledge, so I scrambled to my feet and formally announced, William Walnut Menger, sir.

It seems that for some time my brother and sister had been insisting my middle name was Walnut, not Walter, like my mother said it was. They claimed I wasn’t named after my grandpa, but after the walnut tree in the back yard. Since I liked that tree, I wasn’t particularly offended at being named after it. It was a big, strong tree, after all, and I confess that in my little kid’s mind I took the name to be something of a complement and readily answered to it, which only encouraged its use. As my brother and sister persisted in calling me Walnut, I’d apparently come almost to believe it was really my name. On occasion, the more authoritative Willy Walnut was employed when for some reason my siblings were especially peeved at me, as in, Willy Walnut, stop asking so many stupid questions! I would increasingly provoke that particular response in the coming months, and eventually I came to realize the longer moniker was intended as a reference both to my dimwittedness and to the hangy-down parts of the male anatomy. I had to admit then that the name was decidedly not as complementary as I’d previously imagined.

Upon hearing what I proudly declared to be my name, the man’s smile morphed into a bewildered look. As it did, I realized my mistake but became so fascinated by his transformation that I didn’t correct myself. I could almost see the questions forming in his mind: Did his parents really name him that? Does he actually believe that’s his name? Could this small child be deliberately mocking me? I knew what mockery was, if not the proper word for it, since I was often the object of it myself.

After a moment, the man turned away and walked on without another word. Only after he was gone did regret at causing his confusion and embarrassment at my mistake begin to take hold in my mind. Even worse, knowing how it felt to be mocked, I was saddened to think I might have made someone else feel that way. In the days that followed I watched for the man to walk by once more, hoping for a chance to explain my mistake, but I never saw him again.

The more I thought about the encounter, the more my embarrassment and regret grew until they were almost a physical pain nearly as jarring as the shock of a few days earlier, but there was an important difference. This time, I eventually realized, there was something I could do to fix the problem and keep similar things from happening in the future. The solution was so simple that I have to admit I should have thought of it a whole lot sooner, so I suppose it was fitting that when I finally asked myself how I could prevent such mistakes, the voice that gave me the answer sounded a bit impatient and exasperated, sort of like my mother’s voice when she’d found me in the new bathroom on the night of my awakening. But this was a man’s voice, and it was pretty loud when it said, Stop being so gullible!

It should have struck me as odd that I heard that voice like it came from somebody standing right behind me, and I even looked over my shoulder, but when no one was there, I didn’t question any further where the voice came from and instead just accepted it. You might think it would be hard just to dismiss the strangeness of something like that but, like I said, when you’re five, most anything seems possible, and it’s easy to get distracted when the next new thing comes along.

When I heard that voice tell me not to be so gullible, I silently asked right away how I could do that, and then a picture of a door with writing on it popped into my head and grabbed my attention. The writing said, Ask, why? and underneath, it said, Ask, how do you know?

Now, I should explain a couple of things about all this because, first, you might wonder how a little kid would know what it is to be gullible. All I can tell you is I did and I can only guess I knew the word because someone had accused me of it in the past and told me what it meant, so I knew it meant being easy to fool.

Then you might ask how I knew what was written on the door when I was only five and couldn’t yet read. Well, the fact was I could read a little. It seems I’d learned the alphabet from hanging around my brother and sister when they were playing with some wooden blocks that had letters and numbers carved on them. Those had been passed down from my sister to my brother and then to me, and by this time I’d learned to put the letters together to form a few words. The words on the door were some I knew, except for the word know, but it was written as no on the door, and that was a word I was more familiar with any of the others, probably because it had been thrown in my direction a whole lot. Even though the meaning was different from the way it was spelled on the door, the context made the meaning clear enough.

Anyway, there was the door, and I knew that behind it were the answers I needed, and all I had to do was to open it by asking, Why? and either the answers would be there behind the door or there would be a path to lead me to them.

So, that was really the start of learning to exercise my mind. When it came to not being so gullible, the solution was to be more attentive and aware and to ask the, How do you know? question if there was any doubt what someone said was true. I could try to make sure there were good reasons to believe what I was being told before accepting it.

I decided right then not to believe anything my brother or sister said anymore unless I could verify it was true, and my skepticism soon extended to other people. It turns out, though, that asking people why they say the things they do, especially when it comes to beliefs like religion and politics and other philosophical stuff that gets passed along from person to person as being from some supposedly unquestionable authority, can make you pretty unpopular. I was already unpopular with my brother and sister, so I wasn’t making the situation much worse by challenging what they said, but with other people I eventually learned that most of the time it was better to question what they said in my mind instead of out loud. People could get awfully upset when they were asked why they said things that didn’t make much sense and they didn’t have any reasons for believing what they believed except somebody had told them it was true or they’d read it in some book. But all that came quite a bit later, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

It wasn’t long after I decided to stop being so gullible, which in part meant I had to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, that the third jolt arrived to show how much work I had do.

My mother was on her knees in the living room with a scrub brush and a bucket of soapy water. She was cleaning the dirt out of the narrow gaps between the oak floorboards while my brother and I crawled around the floor playing with our cardboard trucks and making engine noises. In those days the boxes our favorite breakfast cereal came in had patterns for the trucks printed on the back, and my mother had helped us cut them out and fold them properly to make our toys.

I decided my truck was going to back up really fast, so I stood up while still holding it to the floor and started to shuffle backwards. Naturally, I ran into my mother’s scrub bucket, tripped, and sat right down in it, a perfect bull’s-eye. The bucket was deep and heavy, made of galvanized steel, and just big enough at its base to accommodate my little butt snugly. And by snug, I mean I got wedged in there tight. Before I realized what had happened, I’d been swallowed and stuck in place like someone had aimed a giant industrial-strength vacuum hose at my caboose. The rim of the thing was at the back of my knees and almost up to my armpits.

As the engine noises I was making were suddenly replaced by a splash, my mother and brother both stopped what they were doing to look in my direction. With one glance at my predicament and what must have been a wide-eyed look of shock and surprise, my brother collapsed onto the floor and commenced to roll around howling and clutching his belly, while my mother managed to stay on her knees but laughed so hard she couldn’t catch her breath, and her face pretty quickly turned the same color as her favorite roses in the front yard.

Meanwhile, I was trying to extricate myself from the trap I’d fallen into, and having no success at all. I could reach the floor with my hands, but only with my arms nearly fully extended, so I couldn’t push myself up out of the bucket, and if I grabbed its rim, I didn’t have enough leverage to pull myself out. I tried rocking from side to side, hoping to tip the bucket over and spill myself out of it, but I was wedged in so tightly I couldn’t get enough momentum going to unbalance the thing. All the while, I was yelling, Get me out of here! which only made my audience laugh harder. Finally, I stopped struggling, crossed my arms and silently glared at my mother until she recovered enough composure to come to my rescue. She stood behind me and lifted me by my armpits, but the bucket came along with me, and she started laughing harder again as she shook me a few times in an