Gnostic Odyssey Novels

Author Statement

I have been a seeker my entire life. At age twelve I read the Bible and studied the Protestant Reformation to join the Methodist Church. I experimented with LSD beginning at age fifteen. In 1973, at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, I was introduced to zazen sitting and absorption. At Windham I studied philosophy, as well as Dante and William Blake. From Antioch College West, in San Francisco, I received my BA degree in philosophy. I completed my Masters Degree in Integral Counselling Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1982. I was a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (License No. LMFT28121) and worked for more than 25 years for Solano County Mental Health as a Clinical Supervisor.

For sixteen years I was the Clinical Supervisor for the 24-hour Psychiatric Emergency Services for Solano County, which had a population of 400,000 residents. I studied Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing with Doctor Shapiro, who developed this treatment modality. I was trained and fully certified in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, in Moral Reconation Therapy, and in Motivational Interviewing. For nine years I was the Clinical Supervisor of the Forensic Assertive Community Treatment program, working with mentally ill offenders.

In 1975, I began my studies with Oscar Ichazo and the Arica School of Knowledge, a mystical school, and have kept up with the trainings and practices throughout my life. From 1995 to 2000 I served on the Arica Ethics Council. Nothing in my life experience has had a greater influence or provided such profound transformation as the meditation and contemplation trainings developed by Oscar Ichazo, and the lectures and books he has presented.

In 1975 and 1976, while living in Alexandria, Virginia, I studied with a Gurdjieff group which met in Georgetown. In 1977, I began studying T’ai Chi Ch’uan with Benjamin Pang Jen Lo in San Francisco, who was a senior student of Mater Cheng man-ch’ing. I have also studied T’ai Chi with Ben Lo’s senior student, Lenzie Williams, and with another student of Cheng man-ch’ing’s, Brad Louie.

Through a friend I was introduced to Baba Muktananda at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Emeryville, California, in 1977, and received shaktipa from him. I continued to meditate at the ashram whenever Baba Muktananda was in residence there. Also in 1977, I met Doctor Stephen T. Chang, who became my acupuncturist and herbalist. Eventually I studied Taoism with him, and with one of his Senior students, John Lindseth. I had already learned the oval Heavenly Cycle channel breathing meditation from some Aricans I lived with in San Diego in 1976, who studied Taoist Nui Kung.

I began studying the Naro Chodrug, or Six Yogas of Naropa, in the 1990’s with a number of teachers, including Lama Pema Dorje, from whom I received initiation, empowerment and instruction for the Pho-wa practices (Transference of Consciousness). Also, during the 1990’s, I was in a men’s group focused on pacification of karma, which periodically went into the wilderness to do psylocibin mushrooms and meditation together. I have experienced a number of Ayahuasca Medicine Circles with authentic South American Shamans who would prefer to remain anonymous.

In 2011, due to a relationship I had with a Buddhist woman from Thailand, I began a daily practice of Vipashyana (insight) meditation and Shamatha (tranquil abiding) meditation which I continued for several years, For the past twelve years I have been doing exclusively Arica meditations as my daily routine, and Arica individual and group meditation trainings, with the goal of embodiment of the entire curriculum. 

I am well read and familiar with the works of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Darwin, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Plank, Heisenberg, Nobert Wiener, G. Spenser Brown, Buckminster Fuller, Erich Jantsch, Ilya Prigogine, Watson and Crick, Fritjof Capra, and a number of other contributors to science. It was the genius Richard Milton’s book, however, Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, which inspired me to start writing science fiction novels.

The main point in all of my novels—fantasy saga, historical fiction series and science fiction series—is that technology is no indicator of human evolution. Only love and unity can measure that! In my novels I express the most progressive and objective values of love, equality, freedom, reciprocity, tolerance, and true justice. I employ true and very real mysticism and spirituality, for which my practices and studies have rendered me an anthropologist of.

Throughout my life I have enjoyed Chinese martial arts movies, and during the years I lived in San Francisco, I went weekly to the Pagoda Theater in Chinatown to watch poorly dubbed classic martial arts movies (sometimes in Mandarin or Cantonese with English subtitles). All of my novels contain hard and soft styles martial arts battles.

I am definitely not a Creationist, and I’m radically critical of “belief” as a spiritual stance, advocating instead direct experience and gnosis. In my novels I present an Emanationist Model, founded upon the Zend Avesta, demonstrated by the Pythagorean tetractys, exhibited by Plato’s pure forms or ideas, clarified by Proclus in his Elements of Theology, diagramed in the Tree of Life in the Spanish Kabbalah and teaching of the Tetragrammaton, the structural basis of Dante’s Divine Comedy; and explained by Papus (pen name of Gerard Encausse) as the Martinist Trinitarian Law of the Absolute and higher and lower Octaves. The Russian mystic Gurdjieff advocated the emanation model with his Law of Three Forces and Ray of Creation. Oscar Ichazo clarifies both the emanation model and the human psyche through his presentation of the Scarab, with its eighteen spheres of wisdom and knowledge. Oscar Ichazo proves the emanation model through the laws and axioms he discovered of the new logic he calls Trialectics, which offers great advancement and revision for the sciences. Like Richard Milton, I do not accept the contemporary standard model of science. Pretty much all major contributors to the sciences prior Darwin and after him, saw a teleological process. As Thomas S. Kuhn reminds us in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science is not the linear continuous acquisition of knowledge, but rather a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions, replacing one world view with another, and not necessarily as a progression towards objective truth.

My novel writing career, begun May 2014, following my retirement (and burnout) from Solano County Mental Health, is an extension of my pursuit of Right Livelihood. It is my hope that I can reach more people as an author of fiction, than ever I did as a psychotherapist and social worker. I have felt led, and as if I was merely a scribe of the muses through this process. It is my service to humanity.

Sincerely,

Lawrence L. Stentzel III