An in-depth Introduction to my “Substack Notes”
Great and some not "so great" memories from a meaningful, and mindful life well-lived
A few months back I was diagnosed with Stage 4 Cancer.
I expect to survive all this and prosper.
I spend much of my days meditating, repeating healing, positive affirmations, prayers, and Reminiscing.
There are just so many great memories.
Here is a great one from my childhood, from my Saturday visits to the local Synagogue, the Jewish Center of Highbridge – Now a Seventh Day Adventist Church.
Now I use this simple silly one to help me through the day…
I have been a spiritual seeker for as long as I can remember. I was raised as an observant Jew in the Bronx, in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. I received formal religious instruction in the local synagogue from teachers who as much as I can recall had plenty of information about rites, rituals, and ceremonies but little wisdom concerning spirituality. To be fair to them all, it is possible that they had great wisdom but hid whatever actual wisdom they had from their young students.
From as far back as I can recall I was an outsider of sorts. I was often being reprimanded for asking the “wrong questions” at the “wrong time”, of the “wrong people” in the “wrong places”, for the “wrong reasons”. This was painful for me and in response I acted out in dysfunctional ways. One kind and well-meaning yet “clueless” psychologist diagnosed me as having “behavioral issues”. The correct diagnosis would have been “boredom.”
I attended New York City public schools. In my earliest school days, I was often sent to the back of the classroom where I absorbed the words and ideas I discovered in the encyclopedias that lined the back walls. There I would sit by myself “out of the way”. Even here I would listen to what was being taught and insisted on asking questions. “What is the purpose of memorizing a long poem and reciting it back if you don’t understand what it means”, I would often ask. Many teachers called this “disruptive”. Nevertheless I continued to ask questions and continued to be reprimanded. At the end of the school year they would automatically move me onto the next level no matter how poor my grades or test scores might be.
This attitude of my teachers towards the inquiries of this very “disruptive” young man might have resulted in the shutting down of an inquisitive mind – however, it didn’t.
As I progressed from grade to grade I became deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of subjects, though none of them had much to do with what was being taught in class. I became a very knowledgeable young person with very poor grades. From the time I entered public school until my second or third year of college - a period of about 24 years - I struggled both socially and academically.
Luckily for me, and possibly the result of some divine intervention (if such things exists), there were two great gifts I received in those days of my youth. The first gift was having two loving, unique, and extraordinary parents. My mother was the child of Polish immigrants. My maternal grandfather, Leo Katowitz was a kind man who was “fresh off the boat” from Europe and had found a trade as a tool and die-maker. He would bring me strangely shaped, wonderful “homemade” wooden blocks to play with. They were larger than the store-bought kind and they were uncolored. I would use crayons to make my designs. These larger undefined wooden forms may have been the source of my need to create my reality and color it as I pleased. My mother had a fearless independent streak about her. My maternal grandmother, Celia, as the case with most women at the time, was a homemaker and a full-time parent. My mother, Dorothy, was a rebel always looking to break loose from that “prison” of patriarchal thinking.
My father’s eyes first came upon Dorothy Katowitz at a basketball game in a Brooklyn gym in 1942. She was 24 years of age, stood 5’9’, and was the center for the otherwise all-male basketball team – They soon married.
A dental hygienist by training, she had married late for the times (the early 1940s). As a mother, she spent much of her time “dragging” me to various cultural events including museum openings, the zoo, Broadway plays and musicals, the opera, lectures on natural history, the botanical gardens, and more. We would ride the city bus from the Bronx, through the Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, down through Harlem, and onto Fifth Avenue where all the Art museums were and where the rich people lived.
This very organic learning process was a counterbalance to the trouble I was always getting into in school. When she wasn’t keeping me out of trouble my mother spent her remaining time volunteering to teach children with cerebral palsy to swim at the local YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association). She instilled in me, at a very early age, the importance of serving others.
One of the highlights of my youth was being old enough (thirteen years of age) to join her in teaching these same children to swim. Through all of this, she was baffled by her “very strange” poorly behaved and underachieving child, and she often cried about it.
She was a spiritual seeker and didn’t know it. She read volumes of biographies of the great, the near great and the not-so-great seeking to learn as much as she could -possibly the secret to greatness? Of course she already had the secret.
My father, the son of Polish-Russian immigrants sold home furnishings to black people from the 1940’s through the early 1970s. His roots in this community came from his father, a lawyer by training who had left Russia in the first decades of the twentieth century to avoid the Czar’s army. Dad’s father Louis, my grandpa, was either seeking to avoid being conscripted into the Czar’s army or abused by it. I never learned which. My father’s father opened a cigar store on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem during the “Harlem Renaissance”. His wife Lily, died in the “Flu” epidemic of 1918 and he quickly married her first cousin, whose only child was born with Down’s Syndrome and sent to an institution. This woman, who I remember as my paternal grandmother “Grandma Rose”, raised my father in the backroom of that Harlem cigar store. When he was old enough, my dad left Harlem and spent a few years living a life defined by an unfocused wanderlust.
He began selling home furnishings to Black people and continued to do so until his passing at seventy-six years of age. He did this at a time when racial segregation was the norm. Bigotry made no sense to him and he certainly had no intention of paying any attention to the practice. His base of operation was a small showroom in the Eastern part of NYC’s Greenwich Village, the home of many Eastern European Immigrants. By the early 1960’s, this area was slowly becoming the center of the new “hippie” counterculture and I got to see it unfold on weekends when I came to his shop and watched him do what he did. He later moved his base to the heart of New York’s “Chinatown”. In both the Greenwich Village location and Chinatown, he brought his network of Muslim Imams, Roma (gypsies), and black preachers who would direct their congregations and families to him. He sold carpets, chandeliers, and mass-produced paintings for a wide range of artistic tastes. He often went to their homes carrying stacks of product catalogs… and me. I got to know the “King of the Gypsies”, and my father sold him a sofa. He knew the Imam of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 7 on 116th Street in Harlem.
They might have taught that white people were blue-eyed devils but my dad was the cool Jazz Jew with the discount home furnishings.
Often we would drive up to the Catskill Mountains and visit with Dad’s good friend Clayton "Peg Leg" Bates, (October 11, 1907 – December 8, 1998), a one-legged tap dancer and acclaimed entertainer. Bates had lost a leg at the age of 12 in a cotton gin accident in the South. He subsequently taught himself to tap dance with a wooden peg leg. Bates performed on The Ed Sullivan Show 22 times and had two command performances before the King & Queen of England in 1936 and then again in 1938. He later opened a resort in the Catskill Mountains that catered to the great black entertainers of the day. My dad introduced me to many of them.
As I passed through my adolescence into my teen years I spent most of my time learning ways to survive school, and metaphorically speaking, swimming off of the mainstream. I went to school every day yet my real life was among Chinese people, American blacks, Caribbean immigrants “fresh off the boat”, Hispanics, Christian Ministers, entertainers, Gypsies, Muslim Imams, Jazz musicians, and a wide range of eccentrics, deep thinkers, and people who lived life on the edge. Many of them made up their own rules for how to not only survive but prosper physically, emotionally and spiritually in “melting pot” America.
From the very beginning, I was instilled with an understanding of “fairness”. My parents always had a deep sense of fairness and compassion toward others, especially toward the disabled, ethnic minorities, and the disenfranchised. They were not political people and yet they were willing to stand up for what they thought was right and fair on a personal level. They both had a natural “edge” about them and there was something about my father that demanded respect without being threatening to anyone. As much as one might sense of a very eccentric Aikido Master.
He was vibrant and alive with a passion for life… and tennis. He took soap showers outdoors in rainstorms and occasionally, indoors listened to old 78s of Caruso and Charley Parker He claimed to have studied violin at the Julliard School of Music and had a violin and a banjo in the closet that he seldom played. It sat next to stacks of old 78 rpm records that he also seldom played.
Being around my mother and father, two extraordinary individuals as well as my older sister, Lily, created a foundation of inquiry, independent thinking, and the willingness to ignore authority in the quest for truth. My parents did not suffer fools lightly and I was raised by them to think the same way. This also made me appear very strange to what the Chinese philosopher/poet Lao Tzu refers to without any sense of elitism or irony as “ordinary” people.
My Mentors
A strong foundation for my personal development came with what I would describe as the second invaluable gift I received - visionary, out-of-the-box thinkers who were willing to mentor me.
From the moment I entered public school at five years of age, there was always some generous stranger who would recognize that there was something unusual, unique, and possibly extraordinary about me and they would take me under their wings.
This happened consistently and still does to this day. It might be the porter at the synagogue, a teacher at school, a wealthy businessperson for whom I may have served while working as a waiter, or a psychologist I met while driving a taxi cab (Dr, Daniel J. Weiner).
One of my earliest mentors was Ella Davis, a Georgia-born domestic worker who came once a week to our home and planted many important seeds of wisdom in me just by being who she was. She and my mother became close friends and just before her passing around 1999, she flew to NY to attend my wedding to my extraordinary wife Lilia. This was soon after I turned 47 years of age and close to forty years after she entered our family.
As I slowly edged into adulthood I met Vincent Collura in 1969. Vincent was an “old school” Italian mystic, and shaman barber in the small Southern Catskill Mountain town of South Fallsburg. I was out seeking a haircut one evening and stumbled into his shop. I got the haircut and did not see him or even think about him for another three years as I flailed aimlessly through the last of my teenage years. When I did reconnect with him through Dan Novak, a mentor in college, Vincent took me under his wings, and over the next twenty years he planted most of the seeds in me that have endured throughout my life.
I have studied and spent time with many great committed and generous mentors, and teachers - Some in greater depth and for greater lengths of time than others. At this stage of my life, I am still being mentored, both formally and informally.
Over the years I have produced close to 20,000 pages of material on personal development, human potential, human behavior, and spirituality. One afternoon, while speaking with one of these mentors about this material the suggestion was made that I organize it and post it all with stories from my life as “Notes” in Substack.
So these “Notes” are drawn from the 20,000 plus pages I have spoken of.
Little of this is original work - I have explored what I have gathered through the years from many mentors and teachers and short personal stories and created a synergy of sorts from them. These notes cover a wide range of subjects: Asian philosophy, natural healing, cultural anthropology, systems theory, aboriginal shamanism, quantum physics, theoretical mathematics, economics, body-mind studies, holism, Pattern Language, Multiple Intelligences Theory, Behavioral Game Theory, theology, Somantics, Somatics, Semiotics, the teachings of the Bal Shem Tov, Rumi’s Sufism, metaphysics, Zen, Taoism, humor, pleasant memories and more.
By organizing this work as a series of diverse notes, I hope to be a portal for the visionary, innovative, creative thinker, and outsider who seeks to merge love and ruthless introspection with a life of joy, celebration, generosity, compassion, wisdom, and service to others.
I have few fantasies in my life, but one that I enjoy exploring occasionally, a type of simple pleasure, is that long after my bones have turned to dust some seekers will come across these “Notes” and enter the portal to a new way of being because they have applied what was passed on to me and from me to them.
To these individuals I say “Welcome” and thanks for reading my Substack “Notes”.
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You are entering a portal to personal transformation, financial freedom, and self-assessment
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Isn’t it time to break out of your mind prison? SO SOMETHING. Reading this is certainly a start. WHAT’S NEXT?
© 2024 by Lewis Harrison. All rights reserved.
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About the creator of this series: Lewis Harrison, is a public intellectual and has been mentoring and coaching visionaries, spiritual seekers, world-class athletes, thought leaders, billionaires, and individuals seeking to become more effective, efficient, productive, and self-aware for over half a century.
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