Fourteen years ago, I reserved the domain name 'the human realm,' while putting up my first website ever at the Authors Guild in NY, when my book, The Stuff of a Lifetime, was being brought back into print under a new title after first appearing in 1983.
Unexpectedly, that site immediately began to sprout: first, a life-sketch page was added; next, some profile pages were placed here and there on the web, with a few short blogs started at Word Press, followed by book reviews I'd written to accompany the cataloged listing of my home library, which was slowly being lodged at both Goodreads and Library Thing -- with all of these then linked to my longish Google Plus account (useful for the smoother playing of stand-alone media clips and audio files) -- and the whole of it all finally reaching right on up to today.
But this isn't where everything actually began.
That took took place back in 1962, in something
seemingly way off to the side, as a private matter
that I naievely believed would not affect anyone but
me -- my decision to "write things down" and keep a
journal -- which opened with my stated reason for
doing so: "I am sure some people write because
they understand, but I write because I do not."
Now, instead of the quiet deliberation of my study, I suddenly found myself increasingly involved in speaking publicly about timely cultural issues going on in society; so my bishop took the almost unheard of step of granting me special permission to work secularly as a priest while also getting my doctorate. But, when the very intriguing company I'd just begun working with was unexpectedly sold and all of its other employees let go, the new parent company said I would need to move to its home offices in Chicago -- so it seemed my plan for doctoral studies was going to be over before it ever even got underway.
However, an unusual chain of events then took place
that opened a way for me to contract all on my own,
providing a way to keep my doctoral program alive.
I'd designed a race relations training program for the
Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama
that had proved to be effective. Next, they called asking me
to do the same for the headquarters at Andrews Air Force
Base, just outside Washington, DC. When that came out well
also, they immediately whisked me upstairs into a fancy
oak-paneled room and began peppering me with me a host of
questions about what kind of presentation I might make to a
gathering of the base commanders of the Systems Command
of the United States Air Force, which was about to be held in
Albuquerque, NM. Asked to come, I gladly accepted.
On its first day, I watched as one high-powered presentation after another came forth. Mine, with no clarifying slides or graphs whatsoever, was merely to be my words at a chalkboard or easel, and it was to begin mid-morning of the second day and go until lunch. The next day, eighty or ninety colonels and generals (with me as the only civilian present), were all on a short break after the first speaker, as we were milling about in the large banquet room hall, when suddenly the twin doors were thrown open and we heard, "GENTLEMEN, the Commander!" -- and then, striding in strongly and briskly, came the uniformed figure of General George S. Brown, Commandant of the Systems Command of the United States Air Force. It galvanized the gathering and everyone sprang to attention, as my own body instantly did too, trained as a Marine to do that with an immediate about face in the direction of the command, which I executed as a single motion so rapidly that half of the coffee swirled out of my cup and splashed onto the polished cement floor.
(Details on this precipitating event are found in Video 5 at the bottom of the Keleman link page.)
What I had no way of knowing was how starting that journal (shown here, bound in both its blue and its olive green corduroy binders) would forever change my life, because it utterly and immediately plunged me in the mountainous changes then beginning to show themselves in the cultural reaches of our country, as well as those emerging in other countries around the world, so that my engaging in what seemed to be a personal search for greater understanding, turned out to also be an irreversible decision to personally join into and be part of a far greater unfolding of the rest of humankind. This overarching reality is what I soon came to regard as my task and refer to simply as "my work." Its purpose from then up to now has remained: "to develop a fresh approach to human experience."
This was the same originating aim stated in my
doctoral program carried out from 1971-1977,
which materialized earliest and in earnest at the
three week gathering to which I was generously
given a full scholarship by StanleyKeleman,
enabling me to take part in his ground- breaking
endeavor entitled The Life of the Body, held at
the University of California in Berkeley, July 1-19, in 1974. This was the pioneering event at which Stanley launched his annual Summer Institutes at Berkeley, whereby he officially introduced the Formative Psychology he founded and has continued to develop ever since.
~ ~ ~
Without my journal, there would've been no doctoral program; without the doctoral program, there would've been no book; without the book, there would've been no website; and without the website, you would not be reading these words, for they would never have been written -- and our paths would never have crossed in the way they now have.
And now here, with this opening of the human realm site, all of these disparate parts finally emerge as a fledgling network for delving into the issue still standing at its core: How the sense of any life is experienced and lived out by an individual across his or her lifetime.
-G.R.
General George Scratchly Brown was at this time already being groomed for the top position of all branches of the U.S. armed forces, and was soon after appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Gerald Ford, and for a second term under President Jimmy Carter.
A West Point graduate, accomplished horseman and avid polo player, whose father was a brigadier general, he soon transferred to the Air Corps and won his pilot's wings in 1941. Advancing swiftly because of his operational skills and extraordinary performance in combat, he flew both heavy bombers and fighter jets, serving inWorld War II, the Korean War, and theViet Nam War.
He displayed true heroism on more than one occasion in his military career, such as in the WWII raid of B-24s shown here on its famous low-level bombing mission of the oil refineries in Ploiesti, Romania, on August 1, 1943. In the heavy flack and casualties, the lead plane with his Squadron's commanding officer was shot down over the target along with ten other bombers, when Brown, then a major, assumed command from his own aircraft, leading the attack from there on and safely back to their home base in Lybia. Cited and decorated several times for bravery, he received medals from both France and England as well, was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame and buried with full honors in Arlington National Cemetary.