Little Read Hand Book

―Joe, don‘t come Monday.‖ I was too exhausted to even argue. I could have sued, but why bother; if that was the best they could do why would I want to work for them.

A job, however, was imperative. The one I found was quite unlike anything I had ever done before and I ended up feeding the masses, literally, as I became an assistant-manager for a world-wide fast food company. As this job developed I became involved in training, something I had done for other employers also. Having been employed by this company for about eighteen months I was asked if I would become their management training officer for the lower half of the North Island. This would require that we shift to Wellington and open a brand new store there. This was a major challenge and I needed to discuss it with Lydia Anne, particularly as we had just sold our house and put an offer on another one into which we were due to shift in about six weeks. There was much debate between us as Lydia Anne was upset and unsure mostly because her younger son would not be able to go with us as his schooling was at a critical stage. It was finally decided that he would stay on in Christchurch with his father but would come to us for all the school holidays. He liked the idea of aircraft trips to and from Wellington and, and for his age, became an adept and confident traveller.

So we accepted the job, put the new house back on the market, and changed real estate agents after about three weeks because there had been no progress with the sale and we were becoming quite stressed by this lack of results. Almost overnight a buyer was found, but not soon enough for Lydia Anne to go to Wellington with me when I made the initial move.

Politics didn‘t get us to Wellington but my job did.

I arrived in the capital with six long, lonely weeks to wait until Lydia Anne arrived and I had time to think about many of the things we had experienced and where my life had taken me to this point. On reflection I was amazed at how much of my life over these years since Lydia Anne and I had met reflected a lot of the reading and research I had done on my own prior to meeting her and from that time onwards. We were both avid readers and we were both very interested in ancient history and the roots of the world‘s religions. From a very early age I had read history, middle eastern antiquities, archaeology, religious history, physics and some psychology and together we continued in this vein. I recall one period of about three months when we did our best to read all the works of Carl Jung, not quite succeeding because we became overloaded with his imagery even though it paralleled much of our own experience, and so had turned to Maslow for a little light reading! It was in those days that we began to study the Dead Sea Scrolls also, little though there was at that time and reading books by authors such as Yigael Yadin, John Allegro and others who had inside information about the scrolls and other archaeological information associated with them. We read about Masada, both the history and the archaeological dig, and it was during this time that I read the works of Josephus Flavius and as a result re-read the apocryphal books of the Maccabees.

The main message that came out of all our reading, our receiving experiences, the ‗sofa‘, the radio, the things that had happened to us from the time we went away together, when looked at as a unit seemed to be that our former concepts of reality, the universe, religion, God and spirit were incorrect. We didn‘t know what might be right but we did know that they were wrong and had to go and even though much of the Stephen material is now in doubt there are still some things that stick in our mind and one of Stephen‘s messages was that to understand ourselves in relation to the whole, we should drop our concepts as they were like hanging on to the tail of a donkey which was dragging us along hither and yon in its wake.

Another of his images was that we were like the fly on the surface of the river being swept along by the current not knowing to where we were bound. We might thrash and flail and think we were making progress when all the while the current was taking us where it would. On reaching the point of dropping our beliefs in God, in an after-life, in heaven, hell, angels or spirits of any description – in fact in letting go of 77