Column: Slice of my life, 1967 -73: One Individual and the Wide World of Events
By Charles Jeanes
This Arc chases a theme I have been circling in various previous columns under different subject heads.
Introduction: inner world, outer world, my world, your world – and The World.
A person’s inner life and the World humans all live in might not be one Reality, a single state that we share. It was once a standard definition of insanity that an insane person did not participate in, and live functionally within, the reality that humans agree is the only one. Shared reality was the normal way to live, when I was a teen. Only in science fiction and fantasy was it otherwise.
In 2026 many doubt there’s only one reality.
The intuition some talking-head intellectuals, visionaries, and mystics articulate in 2026 – I would include Charles Eisenstein and Brian Cox in a list of such public intellectuals – is, that a separation of human realities is happening now in a disturbing, misunderstood, and accelerating manner.
[ Charles Eisenstein: https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/reality-is-breaking and https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/compartmentalization-ufos-and-social-paralysis/
Brian Cox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_VrMvTNvX0 ]
A seven-year slow introduction to Adulthood: on being a Self in a world of millions of selves
My observation about one human lifetime is simple. A lifetime is shaped like a“bell curve” with its shape reflected below — the beginning and end are very thin, and the middle is thickest.
Life begins with the tiny experience of world available to an infant upon its entry to life, and ends with the decrescendo of the very old as one fades toward the exit. The exit time is unknown but is a certainty. The thick middle of life is where one is expected to grow into and possess some coherence and correlation of our personal interior life with the great wide world of the exterior human reality.
It has occurred to me that to illustrate my theme, my own life-experience might be the apt material to put to use elaborating my fascination with what is real for all of us and what is personal and real only to one of us at a time.
How does one break through from the interior world to the wider one, from childhood inwardness to adult outwardness? Well, through being a teen-ager, of course – that wonderful, awful phase of growing up. For myself, the years 1967 through 1973 were fertile for my coming-of-age transformation.
[* I append lyrics to songs I found profoundly meaningful in that time, and still see myself – some of my selves – contained in them.* Please read through this poetry now or when you reach the Appendix ]
Really Real? Elon Musk and Real Power to Make the World
You and I, reader, share a reality where you can read this on a technology neither of us understand nor could likely explain. Your inner world is opaque to me, mine to you, and still we communicate.
Is the reality of a trillionaire in any meaningful way the reality you live in?
Here is the great man Musk in 2018, before one trillion dollars had been officially “earned” by him:
“It is unknown whether we are the only civilization currently alive in the observable universe, but any chance that we are is added impetus for extending life beyond Earth,” he tweeted. He added: “This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a space-faring civilization and extending life to other planets.”
That’s a nice touch, isn’t it? “Light of consciousness.” Puts him in a league with spiritual masters. And, he elaborated on another occasion. “It means that life and consciousness might be incredibly rare. Maybe we’re it, at least in this galaxy,” Musk said. “The light of consciousness seems to me like it could be this tiny candle in a vast darkness, and we should do our absolute best to make sure that candle does not go out.”
What could one trillion dollars do if it was spent to solve some earthly problems before we go to space? I am sure you can think of some. This is the Musk effect – and adding to this mighty capitalist power of one man, don’t forget the other billionaires still accumulating and soon-to-be-trillionaires too.
How can it be said, in a humanly-meaningful way, that these people inhabit the same reality as you and I do? How can it be said that they promote the human WE, that their projects will ensure the candle of consciousness does not go out? Such capitalists neglect people alive now for ‘humans of the future.’
Trillionaires inhabit a strange world; there, they feel they can do anything – any act that money can make happen (which is seemingly a very large number of things). This interior reality in the supremely-successful-capitalist mind has to be made concrete in the real world if they are not insane, right?
They must make things HAPPEN. Launch a spaceship. Put a colony on Mars. Open an A I data center (in the face of fierce opposition from common people who do not want them in their habitat.)
Money makes things happen. That’s a reality we all live inside. You, me, the impoverished, the dying.
1967 to 1969: final years of high school
At the age of 15, I entered 1967 physically a very small person, weighing less than 100 pounds! I know this fact of my weight, for I won the championship in high-school track and field in the “under-100-pound”league. I was crazy for Beatles’ music, Marvel comic books (cost, 12 cents each), and Star Trek and High Chaparral on TV. My inner world was occupied by anxiety about friendships, girls, my status at school, getting good grades, and … dislike of my father. I had a very strict, controlling dad.
I knew I was aligned with youth who opposed Viet Nam and with the civil rights marchers. Pot (marijuana) and booze were banned from my life, but others of my network – not friends, but peers – were definitely into it. Theirs was another world, the freedom-zone beyond dad and home. I was only allowed to quit attending Anglican church after my sixteenth birthday.
I was aware of the Viet Nam war and the war resistance/ peace movement. At 16, I was in the Canadian Army Reserves as ordered by my father. Also, I cheered Israel in the Six Day War and was happy for the great victory. How did my world relate to the big world? Hardly at all. My best friends mattered. What I most wanted from friends was to make me feel cool. The friend I liked best introduced me to Rolling Stone magazine and Lord of the Rings. I am eternally grateful to him for that. I heard about the Summer of Love and Woodstock from my hippest friends.
Two things about my personal interior world that must be appreciated: internally, I was a rebel because that was the zeitgeist of pop culture, yet my father didn’t allow any expression of rebellion in my life; so I had very short hair, conservative clothing, kept a tight curfew, never touched drugs nor alcohol. Second point – I was extremely shy, afraid of girls, and self-conscious of being physically small.
Still, the year 1968 was a year of progress for the meeting of my personal world with the wider adult world that came to me via news. The Viet Nam War continued to hold attention – the Tet offensive, a horrible cover on Life magazine of a Vietnamese girl fleeing US bombs, naked and terrified, a TV news item on CBC which showed me a Viet Cong prisoner shot in the head in full view by his captor. I was gratified when President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election; I was completely on the side of the hippies and yippies attacked by police at the Chicago Democrat convention, and I was spellbound by rock festivals happening far away — somehow“my peers”were there.
My personal world touched this big adult world when I was enrolled by my father – I had no say – in the Canadian Army Reserves, and trained for the summer in the local militia regiment. I learned to: fire a rifle, drive a jeep, use military radios, keep my uniform immaculate, march, drill, obey orders. Just the right training to make me mature, according to fatherly dictates. I was no longer quite so small. I was resentful of my patriarch for his interference in my life at every turn, but I also made new friends by being in the militia. Having excruciatingly short hair was the worst aspect of being a Reservist.
1969 was the year America put men on the moon; I watched it on TV. It didn’t change me, nor Earth.
1970 – 1973: University and a Grand Journey
“The undergrad’s first purpose is to re-invent his personality” said James Michener, and I set out to do that right away at Trent University in 1970. Then I threw myself into booze and pot for a semester until I got fearful of poor grades and pulled myself off that track. I got turned onto Left politics, I lost my virginity, and I made the choice to be an historian. The FLQ crisis in Quebec happened; I was not interested. The most important fact of being at university was freedom – from dad and ‘straight’ people.
I did feel myself to be very adult after earning my B.A. I hit the Road in my hippie van and got to BC, saw gorgeous places, worked in the Alberta oil patch and in a carnival. In BC I spent 10 days in jail for pot possession; that was an experience but because I got a Pardon soon after, it did not affect me much. I kept that secret from dad for 20 years! Being an historian drove me to night courses, and to read, read, read. I returned to Ontario, however, for friendship called me back. The over-world and my inner world were aligning, yet I spent five more years on campuses – just so I had a habitat ‘separate from the world of ordinary people’. A campus and its life are a sheltered habitat. This became my reality: engaged, yes, but at a remove from the engagement in electoral politics or activism. Briefly, I was in a Marxist Party.
BC had cast its spell, I would return in 1978 — to the thickest section of life, career, and relationship.
Conclusions
Yes, life had its wide middle. I had livelihood, as journalist, then as history teacher – but driving taxi allowed more time for travel and I did that, as much as professional labours. I became a father; I experienced divorce. Big life, integrated with interior preoccupation. Realities touching, not fused.
I’m now in the thinning-out of my life, the other end of the shape whose middle is massed with events. In my 75th year, I see in myself and my peers the conundrum of how to dial down from the so-busy middle. In particular I face the quandary of whether to keep informed about world news or just declare I am done with that – impose a moratorium on it. No longer do I want to fight fights for social justice, political reforms, and the dissolution of capitalism. Idealism is most assuredly dimmed now, and disillusionment with the world – politics, economy, climate, the whole ‘polycrisis’– grows.
Reality, I have learned, is not one thing. The happiest people I have known inhabit both the dreary, dismal realm of news headlines, and maintain also an interior world of peace. I understand their theory* of separation-with-engagement, peace in the midst of struggling life.
I just haven’t experienced it yet.
*“… whatever your aspirations and labours in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”
“be at peace with God, whatever you conceive God to be.”
– The Desiderata. (The Theory: encountered by me for the first time in the home of a friend at university in 1970)
Appendix: lyrical flavours of Youth – 1963- 71
“Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist, in a land called Honah Lee
A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys
One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.” — Peter, Paul, and Mary (1963)
*
“What a pity that the people from the city
Can’t relate to the slower things
That the country brings. Time itself is bought and sold
The spreading fear of growing old
Contains a thousand foolish games that we play, while people planning trips to stars
Allow another boulevard to claim a quiet country lane — It’s insane.
So the subtle face is a loser this time around
Here we are in the years
Where the showman shifts the gears
Lives become careers
Children cry in fear
‘Let us out of here.’ ” — Neil Young (1968)
*
“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking.
Oooooh, it makes me wonder… Ooo-oooh, really makes me wonder.
And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune, then the piper will lead us to Reason.
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long, and the forests will echo with laughter.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now –
It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run,
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
Dear Lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know? Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.”
— Robert Plant, Led Zepplin (1971)
