Every Sunday morning, a group of free spirits gather at 9 am upstairs in the Yellow Barn at Pebble Hill Church in Doylestown, Pa., to practice mindfulness and be present in silence and nature.  Almost immediately after attended my first session, I proselytized its practice.   (You can read more about that here.)

After a gong was sounded, we would meditate , being careful that if the mind ran away from itself, to come back to the present.  We accomplished this by concentrating on breathing and staying attuned to the diversions nature offers, including the skies above.

When I found out no regular Sunday morning meditation service is offered in the Greater Portland area, I wondered if the Pacific Northwest was as liberated as first imagined.  (A Monday evening meditation practice is held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in downtown Portland, but only to serve as a warm-up to a discussion of Buddhism.  That’s hardly an interfaith observance.  Meditation is not an appetizer; it’s the main course.)

Then last Sunday, Dec. 14, CBS ran Anderson Cooper’s piece about mindfulness on 60 Minutes.  His orientation occurred at a meditation retreat in the mountains of Northern California.  Man oh man, did he receive the right advice, and he now appears to be a convert.  It’s about time mindfulness joined the mainstream of self-awareness in the 21st century.

Cooper’s report is a first-person account.  He presents a full flavor of what meditators undergo.  Therefore, here’s a link to the CBS Overtime website’s full report on what you may be missing.  Enjoy!

And if you want some helpful hints on meditation, there are plenty of websites that will lead you the right way.  Check this one out.

I received a lovely Christmas card yesterday from cousin Barbara Savage.  Enclosed were recipes written by Grandma Grace Johnston in longhand.  After my self-indulgent post of yesterday, I decided to pay penance by creating a Family Album page and posting the recipes on this website.  I scanned some old photographs to create the feel this theme is meant to exude.

My page theme will expand as I create other pages subordinate to the Family Album main page, all as a tip of my figurative cap to the fine heritage with which I was born.  Here’s a link.

I have moments when my writing prowess gets the better of me. That’s the only excuse I can find for yesterday’s post.

It’s been deleted, but not to worry.

I’m rehearsing something meaningful, and I’ll write about it.  If the music is as good as I think, I might be able to resuscitate the Christmas spirit.

From a previous post, you might have gasped as I detailed – in polite terms – how I lost my sexual innocence at the hands of a pedophile.

I remember how women, in person, would react to that disclosure.  There would be a change of countenance, followed by words of, “I’m so s-o-r-r-r-y, Mason,” as if she was responsible in any way.  And the male listeners, they could hardly speak.  Mostly, they turned away.

After observing my share of similar reactions, I learned not to judge others by their reactions to unexpected intimacy.  After all, what could be more unexpected – and intimate – than hearing about someone’s childhood experience of sexual battery, especially when that experience came at the hands of a trusted authority figure who was meant to expose secrets – and instead was hijacking innocence.

I can tell you what I did after it happened.  I picked myself up, dusted myself off and started all over again.  Life is a boomerang; you don’t know what ecstasy is like until first knowing betrayal.

The first step about healing oneself – and transforming into a non-victim – is to realize that difficult experiences are all a part of life.  Let them take you to higher ground.

There’s much to say on the subject, and I shall continue.  But it’s time to relate some adventures in Hollywood, Calif during my hippie years from 1968 to 1972.  You can say enough women had come into my life to turn me into a different animal.

The above photo should give you an idea what I looked like then.

Take a new look at our master bedroom.  It’s a wonder what Alice McCormick can do when she has time and the opportunity.

I’m touting her talents today while she puts in her first day at work taking care of other people’s kids.  Based on her track record at Doylestown’s YMCA and her work history as a special-education teacher, those youngsters are in good hands.

Check out the page dedicated to her and read more about what those gifted hands can do!

Considering the depth of response I received from my last post, it confirms justification to hold varying degrees of skepticism at those who preach the moral high ground.  People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at the rest of us.  Each person rightfully dances to the beat of a different drummer.

Much of the feedback on previous posts found humor in my writing, and there is more of that to come.  But know this, great comedians have a serious side.  I don’t claim to be a GREAT comedian, but the comedian known as Mason Loika can be intensely serious.  Just ask my partner, Alice McCormick.

For anyone who believes my last post was too personal or private to reveal publicly, I submit that privacy no longer exists.  When fundamentalist Muslim terrorists executed heinous suicide missions on 9/11 of 2001, they killed more than almost 3,000 people who died in New York’s twin towers or on the airplanes that crashed into them and other iconic buildings.  Those animals ended our right to privacy.

Good governments have an obligation to protect their people, and our privacy is regularly infiltrated to root out those with criminal intent.  That’s part of the toll extracted from us day after day.  Having secrets is only an illusion.  That’s why legalizing the counterculture’s use of marijuana is important; we’re all in this together.

I revere the new generations who will function in our brave new world and make it work for people whose skin color, gender, religion, age, sexual orientation or national origin is different.  All these differences make up the organic stew that will constitute the society in which we love and can thrive.  We must stand guard against creeping gentrification too.

Therefore, with all due respect to our citizens of the future, I will continue to speak openly and honestly on this website.

My family, friends and curiosity-seekers, as well, deserve nothing less.

A mother hears an unexpected noise in her daughter’s bedroom, and her husband interrupts a kidnapping in progress.  A child is snatched on a suburban street, and an Amber Alert is posted electronically across interstate highways.

Whenever we turn on the TV, radio or check out news on the Internet, we’re regularly exposed to sordid encounters involving a suspected pedophile.  With each encounter, we’re shocked by the boldness of such perpetrators and share our alarm with young children.  Certain societal conditions cause these animals to breed, and the time is right to institute changes that eventually expose and root out this evil.

I state my premise because of personal experience.

Almost 60 years ago, I had an unwanted encounter with a pedophile posing as a guidance counselor at an internationally acclaimed boychoir school in Princeton, New Jersey.  Over the years, this perpetrator had accumulated credentials from well-regarded schools in the Northeast, and had won the trust of school administrators.  Deep inside, though, he harbored a secret obsession: young, musically gifted boys.

After he was hired at the school in the fall of 1954, he started to focus on me once the Christmas holidays were over.  “You appear to be suffering from too much tension,” he chided thoughtfully.  “You need to work on that.”

“Oh, really?” I thought.  At 11½ years old, I became self-conscious about possible physical affectations, but didn’t concern myself with anything more.

My parents lived in Miami, Fla., so I had become a resident at this distinguished Ivy League preparatory school for boys.  The halcyon atmosphere and architectural splendor matched the school’s academic excellence, but did little to shield me from an imminent dark force.

I slept on the bottom rack of a double bunk bed in a small dorm room that housed five other boys, but one middle-of-the-night February morning around 2 am, I was roused by the guidance counselor, who put a forefinger to his lips cautioning me not to awaken anyone.  Dutifully, I followed him out of the room, and he led me down the long hallway to his room.

It took the pedophile less than 10 minutes to pull down my pajamas and accomplish his dirty deed of sodomy.  I never made a sound, afraid to anger or encourage my newfound nemesis.

Fortunately, he quickly reached an orgasm, which ended the encounter, and he told me to go back to my room and keep quiet.  After obeying his instructions, I wondered what just happened.

Three days later, while going to breakfast, I was startled to discover each and every choirboy in tears, sobbing over an announcement that caused shockwaves.  School officials had said the popular guidance counselor was resigning – “for personal health” reasons.  He routinely shook hands with each boy, and as was his custom he used a furtive forefinger to scratch suggestively against each young hand customarily offered.

Later in life, I theorized one of the boys in my dorm room had silently awakened, feigning sleep to safely note what was happening.  Almost immediately afterward, he related his eyewitness account of alarm to an authority figure.

Subsequently, the guidance counselor was confronted, and once he confessed was offered the chance to quietly resign.  Since that time, I felt gratitude toward my anonymous savior, and learned to respect the secret world of children, because good kids need an outlet to look after their peers.

Whom did I blame for my betrayal?  Was it the school?  Was it the miscreant pervert?

No, it wasn’t the school, because the school acted appropriately when the misdeed was exposed.  What wasn’t appropriate, though, is how it hid the cause of his dismissal.  And strangely, I didn’t blame the pedophile, although I continue to view him as a predator, albeit a sick one.

I blame the society of the mid-1950s, where homosexual predators of the young proliferated because such occurrences were only whispered about, never discussed in public.  Those were the days of the McCarthy era, when women were ostracized if they weren’t subservient to their husbands or, heaven forbid, flaunted themselves in public.

The “Father Knows Best” blindness of the mid-20th Century was responsible for the attack on my innocence, and my consistent kneejerk response thereafter has been to rail against censorship.

A short two months after I suffered the ultimate betrayal, the boychoir school embargoed broadcasts of the 1939 movie, “King Kong,” starring Fay Wray, claiming it was too violent for our young minds.  The decision was reached once WOR-TV in New York City began telecasting the classic film twice a day for a full week on its “Million Dollar Movie.”  Each television was monitored to make sure no one was watching at each of the 14 showings.  What a waste!

I believe censorship lays the groundwork as a breeding ground for pedophiles.  If any attire, look or behavior can be banned for being “inappropriate,” such dress code creates an atmosphere that eventually works to conceal aberrant behavior.  “The Bill Cosby Show” was exalted for its clean, wholesome approach.  Look at the awful truth now being revealed.

Some statistics unequivocally state that one out of three females have been sexually molested, most by a family member or authority figure.  The same source adds that one out of four males encountered the same violation.  Why aren’t these victims talking about it?  Is there truth in these numbers or is there a conspiracy of silence in the guise of political correctness?

A preacher’s recent admonition about blue jeans personally raises a red flag.  Underneath it all, I want to shout from the rooftops, “Pedophiles are like cockroaches.  Turn on the lights, and they’ll scatter.”

As an adult, I don’t view myself as a victim.  I see myself as an advocate for meaningful change, and when something causes me to react in disgust, there is usually a good reason.

Humor is our best defense against the serious times in which we live, and I will continue to cause consternation toward those advocating censorship.  We need to keep the lights turned on, because it costs too much to turn them off.

At a recent choir rehearsal, I heard an admonition – which was instituted as a ban – regarding sexually suggestive appearance.

To honor the ridiculousness of that moment, I shall seize the opportunity and continue writing about sex.

I have another good reason to do so, too.  But let me start with a topical segue:

A couple of years ago, I asked people I just met, or regarded as desirable, the following question, and prefaced it by saying it was personal, “What’s the most erogenous zone of your body?”

Invariably, an alpha female would assert unashamedly, “Oh, I believe, it’s my clitoris.”  Or “vagina.”  Or a sweet lovely thing would coo, “the back of my neck.”

Plenty of mind-massage material, I admit, but eventually someone taught me there was only one right answer.  And I realized my informal poll had become, in reality, a riddle.  The reason why: There is only one correct response.

“The mind.”

What a concept, yet it’s true.  Would you want someone else touching your sensitive body parts before your mind ran in that direction?  You’re not amenable to anyone who walks down the pike, right?

Or are you?

Experience teaches us who floats our boat – and who doesn’t.

As I said, I have two good reasons to continue talking about sex.

For one thing, a preacher started it, and I’m not going to let it drop.   What’s your opinion?  You can either email me privately or add a comment to be seen publicly.

In my memory banks are stored the free love I associated with the West Coast while going through my hippie years in Hollywood, California.  That was the era of rock music’s explosion and free-form rock radio – the late 1960s and early ’70s.

There’s more to come.

While rehearsing a litany of denomination-approved music to be performed during an upcoming Unitarian Universalist church service, our choir director mouthed words urging certain restrictive behavior to be taken to heart: making sure we understood not to exhibit or express ourselves in a way that is “sexually suggestive.”

That same advisory was put a different way by the church minister in early November, a time when Alice’s and my wardrobe were extremely limited due to our belongings held in captivity.  Consequently, we each only had a few pair of jeans to wear.

One morning after service was over, Rev. Christine Riley of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Washington County (UUCCWC) advised the service’s dress code discouraged wearing blue jeans, because “some people” were inclined to wear pairs with stylish tears and holes worn into them.  That kind of behavior inspired some to wear tops revealing “an unacceptable amount of cleavage.”

“Oh, really?” I wisecracked later to myself.  “I should attend church more often.”

Nevertheless, the admonition prompted Alice to stop attending the church’s functions.  And for me, it raises the issue of whether churches have a proper role toward inhibiting provocative behavior.  And if so, how should it be addressed?

In what way should a tax-exempt institution ban anything – behavior, clothing, cologne, aftershave, even lipstick –deemed sexually suggestive?  And who makes this determination?  Are we advocating the establishment of thought police?

For church leadership to bring up this subject raises all sorts of red flags.  We know Catholics never discussed sex in church.  What role did that play in allowing priests to have full reign with altar boys?

In terms of the UUCC church, what sort of problem used to exist for such a prohibition to be addressed?  Taking the admonition a step further, could the transparent loveliness of a couple’s demonstrative behavior – straight or gay – be adjudged “sexually suggestive?”  Shall we tell women to wear only loose-fitting shifts?  Maybe we should tell them to cover their face and hair?

At what point do we pander to alternative lifestyles because that’s the chic thing to do, yet experience feelings of revulsion and condemnation because of their “public displays?”

Looking at the issue yet another way, if we ban overtly sexually suggestive clothing, how shall we do it without causing impressionable people to find fodder for a later mind massage?

I’ve become relatively old in terms of years, but you’re never too old to feel the pang of desire.  Oh, and one more thing: As last Sunday’s service ended, the pianist played as a postlude Jim Morrison’s “Light My Fire.”

What’s up with that?  Or don’t the thought police realize they have to ban that too?

It’s not every day that I find something worth mentioning on the page “Media Matters,” but a recent film offering on IndiePlex deserves to be highlighted.

In September 2007, the late Roger Ebert was ecstatic in his praise.  Read how I discovered it here!