Manifestation Through Meditation

A collection of personal observations, questions and speculations about Life, death, consciousness, and what I call the illusion. No one knows the truth about who we are and why we are here, if there is a God and what God is or isn't, which in itself could be considered a clue. Why are we being kept in the dark about these important issues of ourselves, and why do we spend a lifetime learning to be a good person only to die and then perhaps start over again? Who is really learning, and what are the lessons?
Most of these poems were written in the mid to late 90's, during and after a time when I watched my mother pass away. It was a time of great reflection.

Michael Countryman (Aka, Paul Lungust), BA, is retired from 30+ years of research related programming, as a statistical programmer. During high school, Michael studied Auto Body Repair with no thoughts of entering collage. In the Army, as an enlisted soldier, he learned to diagnosis faulty avionics equipment on helicopters. After leaving the Army with an honorable discharge, he went to work for an oil exploration company as an Open Hole Engineer. And then, eventually, during his senior year of college at the University of Texas at Arlington, while studying in the experimental psychology department, he was nominated for senior of the year and was given the honor of participating in a senior's thesis program, where he self-learned the SAS programming language for analyzing statistical data. In 1987 he got his first programming job as a SAS programmer, and from there moved from one company to another searching for some yet to be discovered sense of fulfillment. In 1990 Michael learned to use the Tarot cards and became involved in energy healing - taking classes in Reiky and Shiatsu massage. In his Reiky class he felt for the first time the sense of connection that he had been searching for. He later met a psychic healer from Russia, and traveled with her for more than a year, learning the inside secretes from a life-long practitioner. He had his own clients for a short time, but became skeptical of the true effectiveness of his work as a healer, when his mother died from a long term illness without him being able save her.
In 2000 he studied meditation at Buddha Gate monastery, near San Francisco. Between programming gigs, mostly in pharmaceutical companies, Michael would isolate himself and go deep into meditation. In Eugene, Oregon, he spent six months in a small apartment, meditating for eight to ten hours a day. After the 9/11 tragedy he moved to China and taught English as a foreign language. He lived and taught English in China for over nine years, working in several different private schools and eventually opening his own school, where he taught only during the weekends and only three students at a time. The other five days a week he concentrated on perfecting the message that he would present in his writings. "There is no need to write anything, unless you know that your words are true today and tomorrow," he said.
Now, retired and living in a travel trailer in East Texas, Michael continues to work alone trying to put into concise wo...