The hardest working men that I have ever known were my father and my stepfather. Knowing only their example, I was fated to become a workaholic myself. My earliest recollections of this pattern in my life date back to the time when I was seven. Back then, my stepfather was a plant foreman in a bed factory, and a square-dance caller at night. My mother worked with him at the square-dances collecting money and teaching round-dancing. I shouldered my share of the load by looking after my younger brother and sister until my parents came home, usually well after the three of us had put ourselves to bed. Already, I was learning the responsibilities of an adult, and the loneliness that came with it.

My stepfather's factory made steel bed frames. The frames were held together with metal clamps. Each of the metal clamps was fastened with a single screw that was flattened at the top so that anyone could put their own bed together without tools. The bed factory however, had a problem. Too many loose screws were falling out of the shipping cartons, and the cost of mailing new ones was giving someone in the comptroller's office a headache.

My stepfather decided that someone needed to put the screws in the clamps before the bed was shipped. I eagerly volunteered for the job after my dad told me that I would make $2.50 for each 500 clamps that I assembled, a king's ransom for a seven year old in the 1950's. Each day he brought the parts home from the plant after work. And each day, after I came home from school, I'd dump the screws and the clamps out on the garage floor and work until dinner time putting them together. Later that night, the taillights of my parents' car would recede away down the driveway, headed for the dance hall, and I would spend the rest of the evening supervising my two younger siblings.

After just a few months of assembling clamps for the bed factory, I'd earned enough to buy a new tether ball and a small Dough-Boy swimming pool. The new toys were exciting but equally exciting was the mantle of authority that came with supervising the workers that I had hired to pour cement for the tether ball pole. A seed had been planted within me. I could see right away that there was a clear relationship between how hard I worked and how much money I made. The longer that I stayed out in the garage, the more money I put in the bank. Work harder, make more money quickly became Page's First Law of Accumulation.

Page's Second Law was equally to the point: More money meant more toys. More toys meant more happiness. Any seven year old could have figured that one out. I was a happy guy and before long I had more toys than any of the other kids on my block. I even bought myself a new television, and I knew families that didn't have a television at all. My friends wished aloud, prayed, and sat on the lap of some retired eccentric at the mall for their toys: When I wanted something I divided the cost by my fee per clamp, set my quota, and got cracking.

I never thought too much then about what happened to my old toys once I got tired of playing with them, or about how long they were really capable of satisfying me before I set my sights on buying something else. I just kept on working.

Seven years after I stopped putting clamps together in the garage, I had a summer job working nights at another company my dad helped to run, called General Cable. I was 18 years old. During the day, I was a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California. I did the usual things that college students did at companies like General Cable, mainly working at different stations on the plant floor, filling in for people on vacation and so on. The plant's buildings were 60 years old, dimly lit, and poorly ventilated-a stark contrast to my environment at the college. Most of the men I worked with had never even finished high school, and I worked under an assumed name for fear of them learning my connection to my father, the plant superintendent.

My dad had told me that if you work two hours longer than anybody else, you'll know more than they will and you'll get ahead. It seemed reasonable and it worked. In fact it worked so well that I would write it into my book of laws as Page's Third Law of Accumulation. That summer I asked a lot of questions, worked extra hours whenever I could, and generally kept my eyes open. By the time summer was over I had a full-time night job at the plant and I was still attending college during the day. By then, I thought I knew an awful lot about the cable business, at least enough to sit down and write a report about the division I worked in. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to wait to hear what they thought about my report in the office. I'd heard my class-mates at the college talking about running away to Canada. The Vietnam quagmire was spreading and college deferments were about to become a thing of the past. For the first time in my life, I heard a voice in my head telling me exactly what to do. I stood up, walked out of class, and went straight to the National Guard Armory where I signed up for a 6 year hitch. Only half a year later the National Guard and Reserves were no longer options for anyone, and college students were going to war.

By that time I was already back at General Cable, only instead of pushing a forklift on the manufacturing floor I was upstairs, pushing a desk. The report that I had written caused enough of a stir in the office to get me a new job in management. It wasn't that I was a genius: There were other people that I had worked with on the floor that knew more than I did about the cable business. What made me different was my belief in myself. I thought I could change things and that what I knew was worth sharing. I had energy, ambition, and I liked to work hard. The people upstairs liked that. I know they still do.

General Cable and I finally parted ways five years later when they asked me to go to Memphis to manage a plant that had just been segregated. I didn't make a big deal about it, even though I felt like they were asking me to manage a prison. I had already played quarterback when the company had finally decided to meet its affirmative action quotas, and I was tired of carrying the ball. Carrying the ball meant making apologies for policies and attitudes that I didn't believe in. Having been in the National Guard during the rash of arrests at People's Park in Berkeley had taught me the importance of living my own truth, instead of someone else's. I left the cable company to join forces with my parents, who needed my help with their travel business because of my stepfather's recent stroke. I had already achieved my goal at the cable company, which was to become a plant superintendent just like my father. At 25, I was the youngest one in the company's history. After seven years in the cable business, and 14 promotions, I was restless and ready for some-thing different.

By then I had also experienced my first divorce. I had only liked my wife Linda when we married and expected love was something that would arrive later. Our first child, my son Kenny, was born with a life-threatening birth defect that would require three surgeries over three years to finally correct. Soon I was working seventy hours a week, and traveling constantly to other manufacturing plants that the company had charged me with reorganizing. We had two children by then-the youngest was Amy, and my wife had been complaining about the amount of time that I was away. I left the cable company, expecting that my having more time would be the key to resolving the growing differences between Linda and I. When this turned out not to be the case, I decided upon divorce.

I had been willing to marry someone that I only liked instead of loved, because of the other marriages I had seen and because my previous attempt at marrying someone I truly loved had gone sadly awry. Margaret, my first love, and I had met in high school and fallen hard for each other. Only a year after we graduated, we decided to be married. Two days before the ceremony, everything fell apart.

Margaret still lived at her mother's, which is where she told me she would be that evening, putting the finishing touches on her wedding dress. We had already found and furnished the apartment that we were going to live in after our honeymoon. I phoned Margaret during one of my breaks-I was working a swing shift at the cable company, and her mother answered telling me her daughter wasn't at home. I tried several more times. Soon her mother was as worried as I was. At midnight when my shift ended, I drove home full of foreboding. I tried to put my worries out of my head, but it was hopeless. At 1:30 a.m. I tumbled out of bed, put my clothes on, and ran to my car. I had to wipe my palms on my pants at every stop light. I shook my head to try to clear it. I moved in perceptible increments, like a weapon. I couldn't deny what my body was telling me. Something was terribly wrong.

All of Margaret's windows were dark when I pulled up. I saw an unfamiliar car parked just up the street, on a gentle rise just beyond where you might see it from the house. Not wanting to disturb anyone, I climbed up on a fence and hauled myself up to the second story roof, and knocked frantically on Margaret's window. A few moments later a light came on. Margaret's mother hadn't been able to sleep either. She opened the window for me. I stood staring at the neatly made bed. Plainly, Margaret had not been home that evening.

My head swam with the kinds of terrible images shown in driving classes, as I thought of what might have happened to the woman I had planned to marry. Her mother and I talked for a few moments, each of us trying to reassure the other, and then I left. There was nothing further for me to do there, or so I thought.

Then, I saw Margaret as I walked down the steps toward my car. She was only ten yards away. I knew she wasn't happy to see me. She had come from the unfamiliar car that I had seen parked up the street when I pulled up. It slid past on the street behind us like a float in a grotesque parade, its windows still opaque with steam. I stared at Margaret in shock. I could see the muscles in her throat working. "He didn't mean anything," she blurted lamely. "I'm sorry." I didn't say anything. She kept walking towards me. Everything slowed down. I saw my hand snake out to grab Margaret and throw her against the garage door. Her mother ran towards us, screaming and waving her arms. I looked back at Margaret. Seeing in her contorted and twisted face something I had known all along, I turned and walked back to my car. I never saw her again.

That Saturday, the church where I was to be married was empty but for Margaret's maid of honor, who no one had remembered to call. After the priest finally told her that my wedding was a washout, she made her way to my parents' house to find out what happened. Her name was Linda and she was to become my first wife.

Five years and several relationships came and went in the wake of my divorce from Linda. I kept right on working. By then I had my own travel agency. I was also an executive for McDonalds, a promotions director for a regional shopping center, and a consultant to two other companies. I was well on my way to becoming a multi-millionaire.

In accordance with Page's Second Law of Accumulation, I had been trading houses during that same period, and had worked my way up to a huge five bedroom house in the bay area suburb of Pleasanton and a cabin at Lake Tahoe. We had our own tennis court, a pool, a Mercedes and a Corvette in the garage. "We" was me, my second wife, Rhonda, and my little girl, Tara. Rhonda came into my life as a result of one of my jobs as promotions director for a shopping mall. She won the "Maid of Fremont" beauty contest-hands down. She had won many other beauty contests before that, in addition to the hundreds of trophies she had earned in baton twirling contests before retiring from the sport at age 16.

I had a gorgeous wife, a small mansion, and an abundant income. Most people would have looked at my life then and said that it was perfect. I didn't know why but I thought it was too perfect, like the cowboys would say it was too quiet just before the bushes started moving.

I'd catch myself staring out the bathroom window in the mornings as I got ready for work, and wonder what was wrong. It felt like there was a hole inside me, a hole so deep that all of my fancy cars and other toys couldn't come close to filling it. I didn't know what the solution was, only that something needed to change.

In those days, when I thought of change I didn't think about looking inward or changing myself. I thought instead about altering my external reality. I thought about buying new houses, airplanes, and faster cars, and finding new and more interesting ways to make money. The newest and most interesting way that I'd thought of to make money was to get into the resort business.

I'd been doodling on napkins and running ideas past my wife for several months. My plan was to find an older property with dwindling receipts and use my talent for organization to fix it up. I knew about an older resort town in northern California called Clear Lake where they had just the kind of property that I was looking for. After several scouting expeditions I made a real low-ball offer on a place called Oakes Waterfront Park, a combination mobile home park and marina. Even though the bid was only a preliminary to a serious offer, the owners accepted immediately. I was about to get my feet wet in the
resort business.

Later that same day, the man I'd worked for for three years at McDonalds, formerly the third-in-command under Ray Kroc, called me into his office. He explained, in a parade of euphemisms, that they were trimming fat, thinning the ranks, to make the company leaner and more competitive, and well, my services would no longer be required.

"Best of luck, Ken," he said, shaking my hand with a far away smile, like he was sending me off with a penknife to assassinate the Ayatollah. Boy, I thought to myself, he had no idea how lucky I really was. I was spared the trouble of resigning.

I went straight home and jubilantly told my wife that we were moving North to Clear lake. It was all happening so fast. "So," she asked hesitantly, "we're going to sell the house?"

"Consider it done," I announced confidently. I knew I was on a roll. I called someone who had already expressed interest. They bought it that same afternoon. I had completely altered our reality in less than one day. It seemed as though all I had to do was have a dream and it would become real. I would soon learn that it was just as easy for me to create my worst nightmares.

Six months later, I bought another property named Wiseda Resort. Like my first purchase, Wiseda came at a firesale price because it was in rough shape. I also found out after I bought it that every weekend a hundred surly bikers pounding back store-bought beer in the big gravel parking lot. They came with the place like the employees, some of who had worse histories than the bikers did.

I requested an audience with the bikers' leader. He was about 225 pounds, dressed in greasy denim and leather rags, and sat regally on a spit-shined Harley softail. His dark sunglasses were about as expressive as two camera lenses. Speaking to the two tiny reflections of myself in his sunglasses, I told him about the $3,300 I had to ante up every month for the mortgage. "As long as you're going to be on my property," I reasoned, "why don't you come in out of the sun and drink my beer."

"Okay," he said. That word was the beginning of a long and troubled relationship, one of several in my life that didn't end until one or the other of us left town. In this case, our divorce would became final the night that I spent on the roof of my hotel with a gun and nearly killed a neighbor kid.

By 1985, I owned three lakefront resorts. I had also purchased a Montgomery-Wards catalog store, which came with a small shopping center. My new three story house on Clear Lake presided over the development. At the same time I held down top-level executive partner positions with two companies in the San Francisco Bay area, and I still owned my travel agency in Dublin, California. The resort bars were cash businesses, and the only trips I made to the bank were to put money in. I had more toys than I knew what to do with, including a sailboat that never left the dock, and a Cessna 150 that sat on the ground for months at a time. I now had three beautiful girls-Tara, Kendra and Paris-and a wife who loved me to distraction. I was still following my father's maxim, working seven days a week, running two companies from Monday to Wednesday, and then working at my resorts Thursday through Sunday. Everything seemed even more perfect than it had when I had lived in Pleasanton, except for one small nagging problem.

Page's second law, the one that described the relationship between things and happiness, was breaking down. I had more things than almost anybody I knew but I was restless and bored. I was beginning to suspect that what I thought were laws had only been theories all along.

The loneliest place I knew of was my bar at Wiseda, where I spent evenings working security. It was a cowboy place, with live music seven nights a week, and it did great business. I spent countless evenings in there, looking for answers in my coffee cup, while the crowds of sweaty drunken dancers ebbed and flowed all around me like fish around a shipwreck. The truth that I was searching for was hidden behind the scenery. It didn't look like scenery to me, even though it was my own creation. It looked perfectly real.

One memorable night when I was working security, I caught someone smashing up a picture frame in a hallway. We had some real art on the walls at Wiseda, stuff that I'd bought at auctions as part of a $750,000 dollar renovation. Since I'd bought most of it myself, I took vandalism very personally.

We ended up in a tangle on the floor; I held the vandal down while he cursed a blue streak. To me that was an acceptable outcome. All that I had to do was just keep him pinned there until the cavalry came. Unfortunately, his cavalry got there first. She weighed about 200 pounds, dropped onto my back like a huge rouged buzzard and alternated between yanking my hair out and beating my head like a piñata.

Enough was enough: I reached up, wrapped a handful of her hair around my fist, and pulled. She landed in a drunken, bawling heap in front of me. I staggered to my feet with all of my white hair standing on end just as the guys from security pounded around the corner like a herd of buffalo. None of them wanted to look at me. I didn't blame them. I didn't want to look at myself either. That was the problem.

Suddenly those antiques weren't worth so much to me anymore. I went straight back to my office and changed out of the red security T-shirt that I'd designed myself. I had co-created one of the most vile scenes imaginable, demeaning myself and two other people, solely because of my concern over my "things." I never worked security again.

The first cracks in the foundation of my reality had already begun to appear the year before. In 1984 I had two memorable appointments with a hypnotherapist by the name of Fred Liedecker. After the second appointment, I grew so enamored of Fred's work that I sat in on more than 200 of his sessions. I was beginning to discover that there were many more worlds than the one that I had invested so much time and energy in constructing
for myself.

At about the same time I developed an intense interest in crystals. It began with a business meeting at a restaurant called the Nut Tree, located midway between Sacramento and San Francisco. After the meeting I wandered through the restaurant's extensive gift shop. Almost before I knew it I had filled a basket with hundreds of dollars worth of crystals. Then, as I approached the cash register, I found the source of the strange force that had originally pulled me into the store-a huge smoky mountain quartz crystal, so large that I could only pick it up with two hands. It had a phantom pyramid shape inside of it, and seemed to pulsate with a strange energy. I didn't even bother to look at the price: I had to have it. We had a history together, that crystal and I. I had to take it somewhere, and I had no doubt that it felt the same way about me.

Then came a remarkable trip to the Yucatan that same year with my Uncle Drunvalo Melchizedek, who I'd grown up with in the late fifties in Oakland. Drunvalo had been given very specific instructions by his guides and angels to visit eight different sacred sites in Mexico and Guatemala, and to leave a crystal at each site. The crystals were carefully chosen by Drunvalo and his friend, Katrina Raphael, the author of the book Crystal Enlightenment, and each one of the crystals matched the color of a specific human chakra. We had to visit each of the sites-Uxmal, Labna, Kabah, Chichen Itza, Tulum, Kohunlich, Palenque, and Tikal-in order. Each site fell upon the curve of a fibronacci spiral, and Drunvalo had been given instructions to place the crystals within the accuracy of a single atom, if possible. According to Drunvalo's guides, placing every crystal correctly could permanently change the earth's vibration.

Not only were we wildly successful in finding the perfect spots for each one of the crystals, but when we placed the eighth and final crystal at Tikal-representing the crown chakra-something happened to me as well. There, climbing up a pyramid in the midst of a driving rainstorm, I suddenly felt more alive than I had ever felt in my life. I stood on the side of the pyramid, shouting for joy in the pelting rain like a madman. Then the squall passed and I was left staring at my hands.

I could feel energy pouring through them like they'd been charged somehow, like the key on the end of Ben Franklin's kite. When I breathlessly showed them to Drunvalo, he nodded and raised his eyebrows. He had been traveling the world, searching for spiritual knowledge, for nearly as long as I had been a businessman, and had seen many strange and wonderful things. My own journey was just beginning.

I found out what had really happened to my hands when I got back to California. They could heal. All that I had to do was touch people and they changed. I began by working with Fred Liedecker's clients. Word spread quickly. Sometimes, when I arrived at Fred's office I would find people lined up to see me. If I had any doubts as to whether I was now a different person than I had been before my trip, I just had to look at Fred's clients. The way that they looked at me made me feel different, and it was honoring in a way that being a millionaire businessman never was.

The bell tolled once more for the old Ken Page one memorable rain-soaked night on the Silverado trail, the stretch of highway that connects Clear Lake to Napa. It was late, about 11:00 p.m.; I was about thirty miles away from my home and there were very few other cars on the highway. The remainder of the road was arrow-straight, and so I opened it up a little bit to make time. I held two of the crystals that I had bought at the Nut Tree, nestled in the palm of each hand. Somehow it felt better to drive that way. A glint of light sparkled in the drops of water on the windshield. The glint grew larger, separating into two flickering balls of light, and then into two brilliant headlights. They were on my side of the road.

I panicked and stomped down hard on the brake. All four wheels locked up instantly. The oncoming headlights now filled the driver's window as I slid sideways toward them at fifty miles per hour. Everything began to slow down, becoming surreal. I could hear the tires sliding helplessly on the rain-slicked asphalt, and see the blurred orange parking lights between the brilliant flaring headlights of the oncoming car. My heart pounded like a pile driver. The flaring headlights grew steadily larger, until it seemed as though I were sliding into a brilliant white wall. This is it, I thought to myself. This is what it's like to die.

The next thing I knew I was rolling down the road, in my own lane, at about five miles per hour. I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw the red tail lights of the other car shrinking behind two fans of water in the distance. It hadn't even slowed down. What had just happened?

I pulled over on the narrow shoulder. The crystals fell to the floor. My hands were shaking so badly that the ignition key felt like a live minnow between my fingers. I fell back in my seat. Everything was strange and new. I was picking up scents that I had never noticed before. The rain on the roof over my head boomed like thunder. My car felt completely alien, like an UFO.

Somehow, someone or something had reached down and altered my reality, just enough to keep me alive. I had no idea why. Much later, I would come to believe that in the moment when I should have been killed, a higher aspect of myself from another dimension took advantage of that momentary ripple in time to become part of me. All I knew when it was happening was that I felt very different.

Gradually, the reality of who I was becoming, and of the other realms I was beginning to see beyond the physical, started outshining the world that I had lived in so comfortably for more than thirty years. This process was the working of an alarm clock that I had set long before I was born. The problem was, I liked the bed I'd made for myself-my houses, my businesses, my life. I didn't want to get up.

The first shot across my bow came in 1983 when Clear Lake flooded. The last flood in that area had been more than one hundred years ago. Oakes Waterfront Park, which was on a creek which drained from the lake, sustained the most damage. I set out to sandbag the general store, which was awash in eighteen inches of water. After six hours of filling sandbags and pumping out water, little boxes of jello were still floating around the floor of the store, so we changed our focus to salvaging merchandise. The water stayed for six weeks, which was unheard of for flash floods in that part of California. When the waters finally subsided, we dove right into to rewiring, patching, and painting the mobile homes which had been on submarine patrol for a month and a half. Although I had sustained considerable losses, I had survived, and I did not vary my course.

Within two years I had covered all of my losses, and my businesses were thriving once more. Financially, everything looked wonderful. I was glad that we had gotten that flood over with. The chances of another flood in a hundred year flood plain were almost non-existent.

When my wife called to tell me that the lake was rising for the second time, I was staying with her mother while I worked at my two businesses in the San Francisco Bay area. I stared out the window, overcome with dread. Two years earlier, the rains had stopped before Cache Creek had overflown its banks and flooded my mobile home park. Now the flooding had already started and the rain showed no signs of relenting.

I turned immediately to prayer. While my mother-in-law watched television downstairs, I kneeled for hours in my room repeating the phrase that had become my mantra, over and over, until the words themselves didn't make sense to me anymore.

Stop raining. Stop raining. Stop raining, God, please make it stop raining. I prayed over and over again. I had never prayed so hard for anything in my life. I could almost feel the muddy water lapping at the footings of the properties that I'd worked so hard to buy, the properties that I'd almost killed for. Stop raining, I implored. Stop raining. I threw every ounce of my intent, every fiber of my being, into those prayers. I almost felt myself
washing away.

By the morning of the second day I was begging. I could see the error of my ways, I could see that I was like a madman that had bet everything on the roulette wheel, I could see how I could change and do it all differently, if only it would stop raining. If only it would stop.

On the afternoon of the third day my mother-in-law knocked on my door. I levered myself up on my sore knees and swung the door open. She took a step backwards. I was a sight, but I didn't care.

"What is it?" I demanded wearily. She stared at me. "What is it?" I asked again.

"Ken," she said, "have you looked outside?" I tore open the curtains. Sunlight streamed in. Birds were hopping about amidst pools of water on the back lawn. I whirled to face my mother-in-law.

"How about Clear Lake?" I demanded hoarsely. "Has it stopped in Clear Lake."

Her hand flew to her mouth. "It stopped yesterday," she said.

When I drove back to Clear Lake that weekend the sun was shining. My lakefront house was miraculously still dry, although the concrete retaining wall over the beach had vanished and half of the roof had blown off of my Montgomery-Wards store. The water had crested at less than an inch below my back door. All it would have taken was a weak breeze to turn my house into a fish hatchery. I felt blessed enough to make a few weak jokes about it all before I pulled out to inspect the resorts.

Wiseda, my favorite of the three, had fared the best with only a few thousand dollars worth of wind damage. Oakes Waterfront Park had flooded, but it could have been worse. The general store was underwater, as were twelve of the fifty-three mobile homes that I had taken over and operated as rentals. Worst hit was the last resort that I bought, Lotowana Village. The lake ran right through the main building.

I immediately got to work. The restrooms inside the bar and restaurant were canoe-only but I still had restrooms outside for the mobile home park, which looked like a refugee camp. Some of my tenants were grimly salvaging their belongings in hip waders. Those people, I thought to myself, could use a drink. I installed a noisy gasoline-driven pump, built a false-floor up around the bar with sandbags, and propped the door open. It wasn't long before people were wading in for a beer.

I had sustained around $300,000 in total damages. None of my property was insured. The insurance companies considered all of them high-risk. Insuring Wiseda alone at $42,000 a year would have bankrupted me. All of my disposable income had gone into the initial $750,000 renovations, and the repairs after the first flood.

I immediately applied for state disaster loans, and had every reason to expect that they would be granted. In the meantime, I had several mortgages to pay and a large payroll to meet. It was March, and if we weren't open for business by Memorial Day we'd go all the way under, like Atlantis. I had $75,000 in credit lines at the bank which I exhausted. From there I went into my personal savings, and my credit cards. My father and I worked around the clock, doing most of the repairs ourselves. I was tired all of the time but I didn't mind. The harder I worked, the less I had to feel.

We managed to get the resorts back into operation by Memorial Day weekend and then it was business as usual again. People rented our boats, used our mechanics, and ate at our restaurants. Everything looked fine, although I was so over-extended financially that it wouldn't have taken much more than a late beer delivery to take me out. Almost every penny that the resorts and travel agency were pulling in was going to debt service, and the resorts still urgently needed repairs that I couldn't afford to give them. I was reeling but still on my feet.

Then came the knockout punch. When the floods hit, I was in the midst of a mandatory remodel, spending thousands of dollars to create a new prototype Montgomery- Wards store. They had been in the catalogue business for one hundred and eight years. In August, I received a registered letter from the head office. They had written to tell me that they were closing every one of their catalogue stores in the United States. It was completely unexpected. Those stores had been an institution for me, my parents, and my grandparents. They might as well have told me that the Catholic Church had gone bankrupt.

Two weeks later we sued for 9 million dollars. I was confident that any jury would find that Montgomery-Wards had defrauded me when they knowingly sold me a store that they were going to close three months later. In suing them I was butting heads with Mobil Oil, their owner. I still had to honor my end of the bargain, which meant that I had to keep the store open through the end of the year. Meanwhile, Montgomery-Wards closed their distribution center in Oakland. There was no way for me to get stock. Customers would order from the catalogues and I'd have to tell them that we couldn't get their item. Any profit that I had from my other businesses was going straight down the Montgomery-Wards toilet. I saw this clearly but I had my eyes on the nine million dollars that I was sure any reasonable jury would give me. An award of nine million dollars would solve all of my problems overnight. I would be back in the black, bruised but still a success. My identity would be intact.

I managed to forestall the reality of my situation until the end of the summer when the boats that normally buzz around Clear Lake like water striders disappeared, and the seasonal visitors who swell the population of Clear Lake by a factor of ten each summer, closed their cottages and went home. The cash flow, which had been barely adequate to meet my obligations, dried up. For the first time in my life, I had to choose which bills I was going to pay each month. I called the state's disaster office over and over but never got any answers. Finally, in December, they called me. I remember it as one of the worst days of my life. My application for $300,000 in disaster loans was declined. They were concerned about the length of time I had been in business, and the slim profit margins that my businesses showed. I explained how I had plowed $750,000 back into the resorts since I bought them and how that made them worth much more than the appraisals, but my appeals fell on deaf ears. I put down the phone and stared off into space. I had no more cards to play. That evening I made the decision to put my businesses into bankruptcy.

My identity began to break down just like my resorts had. I had constructed my identity in the external world, basing my sense of self on my signature on expensive cars, airplanes, and property. When I started to lose my toys, I started to lose who I was.

Losing your identity and dying are very similar experiences. You can die easily or you can die hard. I chose to die hard. The gun enthusiasts had bumper stickers about how they'd give up their weapons only when their cold, dead fingers were pried loose. The unspoken corollary is that the longer you cling to things, the more cold and dead you become. I was desperately holding onto what I had left, and I felt I was dying inside-slowly and painfully.

The physical or material expression of the way that I was feeling internally was bankruptcy. I went from being an independent, proactive businessman to being almost completely reactive and dependent. I should have gotten an honorary law degree for the hundreds of hours I spent in court and with lawyers, burning up more than $300,000 on legal fees so that the bankruptcy system could treat me like a criminal.

I had been doing a pretty good job of convincing myself that everything would somehow be okay until my house was finally foreclosed on. It happened just after I completed my obligation to Montgomery-Wards and closed the store, which with its papered windows and empty shelves seemed to have become a Taj Mahal-sized monument to personal failure. By then the only phone calls I got were from lawyers. All of the people I thought were my friends had vanished. I felt like I wore an invisible brand that labeled me as a societal failure and there was nothing I could do to remove it. Meanwhile, knowing that I was in Chapter 11, a battalion of Mobile Oil and Montgomery Ward's lawyers were using every stall tactic in the book to keep my lawsuit out of court, and in the process, the suit was moved to Philadelphia. The bank took my house away, leaving my family and I with no place to go. My identity as a provider was shattered.
I had failed.

Nothing in my prior life experience prepared me for the grim reality of four simultaneous bankruptcies and a major lawsuit. I tried as best I could to protect my wife and children from what I was going through, and the result was that we lived in separate worlds. I had no one to talk to. I spent what little spare time I had sitting alone on the back porch of my soon-to-be repossessed house, watching the wind and the lake and the stars. Even then I still believed that there was some way out, that my ship could still come in and that everything could be as it once was. Of course, my ship never showed: Clear Lake was landlocked.

That back porch had been the stage of one of my great epiphanies. It was there, in 1986, when I first heard the faint sounds of Native American voices. As I strained to listen, I could only make out one phrase, chanted over and over. The phrase was "Blue Lake." I knew that it meant that I was supposed to take my magnificent smoky mountain quartz crystal there. Blue Lake was high in the Sangre de Christo mountains and very sacred to the Taos Indians. I knew about it because my mother had been instrumental in the campaign to win Blue Lake back for the Tribe from the US government. Listening to those voices at Clear Lake would almost cost me my life.

In the meantime, I was still bankrupt and homeless. With the help of family and friends, I loaded up everything we had and we moved to a much smaller home in Livermore, California. An old friend and business partner loaned me the money to make my down payment.

My father had always said that if you work two hours longer than anybody else you will always succeed because you will know more than any of your competitors. His maxim had always worked for me, just like the way I had assembled clamps when I was seven had always worked for me. Then, when I needed more money I just put together more clamps. Now, I was putting together clamps as fast as I could, night and day, and it made no difference. I was bewildered, frightened, and angry.

I lost my stake in my nine million dollar lawsuit when the proceedings dragged on beyond the time allotted me for my business reorganization and the lawsuit became the property of the State of California. Although it had been established that I had lost 2.6 million dollars, the bankruptcy lawyers that I had hired settled for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the exact amount required to pay the major creditors. I'd spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees so that I could be recompensed for an act of fraud, and it had all come to ruin as a result of a sidebar conference between two teams of disinterested lawyers that I had never even met in a city I had never visited. All that I'd ever wanted was my day in court and now even that had been taken away from me. Everything that I had created, my hopes, dreams and my pain had been reduced to a mere file number by an indifferent legal system.

While I was suing Montgomery-Wards, I came under attack from yet another quarter. Like a scrappy stray dog, the IRS joined the fray and frivolously sued me for thirty thousand dollars, claiming that I had neglected to file necessary paperwork more than seven years previously. If I really hadn't filed the paperwork that they were talking about, they would have closed me down in a month. As soon as it was clear that I would receive nothing from the resolution of my suit against Montgomery-Wards, the IRS lawsuit was downgraded to a lien, and I was subject to a humiliating interview in which I had to prove that I was absolutely financially worthless.

The only sources of income that I had left were an import company and a company that I had started to make holograms. One of my partners in both businesses, a man named Bill, was having some health problems. I could tell from my training and his story that the pain and illness that he was experiencing was a product of something that happened to him when he was a child. I suggested that he go to see my mentor, Fred Liedecker. Fred visited my partner at his house. My partner insisted that his wife see Fred first. Bill watched in horror as his wife became a three-year-old before his eyes, holding tightly to the old Teddy Bear that Fred used for regressions, and sobbing as she remembered an incident from her past. It terrified him. He interrupted the session, angrily insisted that Fred leave, and bolted the door behind him. I shouldn't have been too surprised. It had been my first reaction to hypnotherapy as well.

The next day, Bill called a closed board meeting to demand that I resign from both companies. An old friend on the board tried to dissuade me from leaving. We went to see a lawyer. Bill, it turned out, had very deep pockets. It was a small matter for him to spend a quarter of a million dollars on legal fees to harass a single adversary. Reeling from the effect of the four bankruptcies that I was already dealing with, I tendered my resignation. In my overzealousness to facilitate healing I had destroyed my last hope of financial salvation. It was one of the most expensive lessons I've ever had. I would never again try to help someone without first being asked.

By the end of 1990, the curtain had finally fallen on the play that I had written and starred in for the first forty years of my life. From that point on, I could only stand and watch while all of the scenery and props were taken away to be repainted and reused in someone else's production, until finally I was left standing on a bare stage. Soon the actors and the actresses would leave as well, and I would be just as powerless to stop them. My marriage was in as much trouble as my resorts, and when it foundered it would take my children away from me. It would also spawn another lawsuit.

Eventually I grew tired of being sued and I left California altogether. By then all that was left of my empire was a ten year old motorhome and my American Express gold card.

It was all that I needed.