Beyond The Adams Family

I first met Thane Walker at a meeting for witches and warlocks—for that was my impression of those dark people and that dark, out-of-the-way house. He claimed to be a teacher, lecturer, actor, psychologist, author and astrologer.

I went on a serious quest but found, instead, a family reunion of the Adams Family. Though Mr. Walker did not seem to be a kindred spirit to these strange and silly people, I left the meeting feeling foolish and disappointed. He was lecturing about a book he wrote called, “I Saw Hitler Practice Black Magic”. A title like that was bound to have problems in Oklahoma.

Three months later, long after I had forgotten the elegant speaker with his dubious following, I received a notice that representatives of his had returned to conduct a week-end seminar.

Being highly encapsulated in the closed-mindedness of mainstream America, it took nothing less than a miracle to land me right in the middle of this seminar. My heart walked my feet to the car and put my hand on the ignition switch, while my mind was sure its logic would save the day. My mind was still squawking when my heart sat me in a chair and the seminar began.

That was the day my heart took off and left my mind behind, and it has been trying to catch up ever since.

Far from being a warlock, Thane was a man of great vision engaged in the liberation and evolution of the human personality. If he cast a spell, it was the magic of revealing to people their real nature—a wondrous nature more enchanting than fairy tales and stranger than science fiction.

Coming from a fundamentalist environment in the backwoods of Missouri, Thane, as a child, was in conflict with the drab, austere propriety practiced in the name of religion. His eyes saw the brightly colored birds and his ears heard their joyful melodies. Surely, God did not intend man to be involved in the spirit any less enthusiastically. Consequently, Thane’s attire always expressed the joy and flamboyance of nature—red Hawaiian shirts, glasses with frames of blue and red and bright colored Kimonos.

A shock of silver-white hair crowned a florid complexion and pale blue eyes that looked out on a world that seemed to have no effect on him. I thought of him as a sphinx, staring into eternity, free of the pettiness of the moment. If my suspicions were right, he had shed most of those prejudices, projections and pre-formed opinions that build up to form our identities. Nothing blocked his penetrating gaze—not fear or guilt, shame or doubt.

Whenever he spoke, the velvet richness of his voice disarmed anyone who heard him. Its deep and cultured tone had a tendency to soothe and slip past the beast to an inner well of sanity.

Whenever he lectured, he always held a cigarette in his hand as a prop. He delighted in making a show of noticing his cigarette then staring out at the audience with feigned innocence and saying, “Well, you should smell what I have to smell from here. Cigarette breath is far superior to halitosis!”

Eventually, I saw the need to leave my home to pursue this man’s instruction.  “Life is too big for you”, said my timid self. “Stay in your lane. It’s safe. You will be crushed. You’ll be lost. You will sink midstream. Don’t go.” But the power of Mr. Walker’s message pulled me out of the holler’ of quicksand I had mistaken for home. It stripped me of all protection as I stepped into the rushing river of “life-not-yet-lived”. And yes, it crushed me. I became lost. I sank in midstream and met my new home with the beat-up and battered awareness of life reaching me through a long dark tunnel. 

Coming from Oklahoma to Denver, I was thrown into a life with strangers. The city, itself, laid out a kaleidoscope of undreamed human activity and sights that were totally foreign to me, and this was as close to turning back as I ever reached.

A loosely-knit philosophy of life, full of half-beliefs and wells of doubt, had never given me the courage of my beliefs. In fact, I was certain of nothing. But now my ears heard the words of well-placed bombs, ideas that spun confusion, disbelief, even fear. So what words could destroy everything human beings consider themselves to be?...The Truth, of course. But not my truth or your truth. Those are distorted truths, relative truths. The sounds I heard now were destroyers of relativity. They were well known words presented in radically new patterns—deliberate patterns meant to search, destroy and set loose.

Not until the night after this seminar did anything coalesce out of the jumbled pieces of myself that lay in ruins. Because that’s the thing. Thane never taught me anything. His message added nothing to me. It didn’t require memorization or study or proficiency. He simply cleared the way for the real message to come erupting out of myself. Once it did, I no longer felt uncertain. I knew, at last, what I was about—what I was, who I was, where I was going and where I had been. And I discovered that certainty is not possible when you become something you are not—thus the feigned confidence and cocksure self-righteousness that uncertainty so easily breeds.

Thane returned me to the self I was when I arrived on this earth, gleaming and glistening and real. I was still in there. I recognized the feel of me as I filled all the spongy holes of a self I was never meant to be. As the skin of this false self has flaked off, I have gone where I was led and in every instance, have been met by the “light-at-the-end”.

I never noticed witch-like groups around Thane again. They simply disappeared. Or was it the Adams Family had only existed in a wary imagination full of shadowy figures—an imagination that in the middle of one night, went beyond the Adams Family, and never looked back.