Sailing on a Japanese vessel, we put in at Honolulu, Japan, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Then on Dutch ships we visited the Philippines, Celebes, Bali, Java, Sumatra, Singapore, Ceylon and Egypt. My experiences at all these ports were unforgettable, but, it was our sojourn in Egypt that left an indelible mark on my life.

My recollections are vivid. We left the ship at the south end of the Suez canal at 10PM and drove some 90 miles to Cairo where we registered at the world famous Sheppard's Hotel. From there we drove another 12 miles to the Giza plateau to see the Sphinx and pyramids, among the seven wonders of the ancient world. We left on foot just southeast of the Sphinx. This was February 27, 1937, about 1:30 AM under a full moon.

Behind the head of the Sphinx loomed the Great Pyramid and its lesser companions. In the bright moonlight, the entire panoply glistened as if the sand and stones were a burnished golden bronze. The air was filled with silence until in the distance a dog bayed. It was magical!

My excitement grew as I was about to mount a camel to circle the Great Pyramid. Suddenly, time seemed to stop. I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of eternity and mysterious beauty that has left a deep and undiminished imprint on my soul.

Following our journey, worldly concerns dominated my life. After all, there was a great war to be fought which found me landing on Utah Beach on D-Day. I married after the war, and fathered a family (three daughters, eight grandchildren now). I've spent 50 years in the oil, gas and geothermal business.

In 1974, the oil business suffered a downturn, which had a calamitous effect on my career and left me in precarious circumstances. Those issues have long since been resolved, but the events actually freed me to pursue a passion that had been smoldering for decades.

Amid the clamors of growing a business and raising a family, I had never had an opportunity to reflect more deeply on the unforgettable moments of serenity and sense of great peace and eternity I experienced so early in life on the Giza Plateau. Free of the all absorbing demands of career, I had, for the first time, a chance to embark on an avocation I had long thought about but could never pursue, an avid and thorough study of ancient Egypt.

Its become my passion. In digging into the history and culture of ancient Egypt, I've formed some conclusions, apart from what experts say, which I believe are remarkable discoveries based on the regularity of astronomy, geometry, mathematics and other disciplines. This was a Golden Age of humankind, stemming from older roots than we conventionally understand. These ancients were cognizant of a very long course of human experience. They were keenly aware that civilization has its ups and downs. It became their overriding mission to preserve ancient cosmic principles and knowledge as a legacy for all humankind far down the river of time.

I've had the good fortune to translate a group of ten hieroglyphs ideographically, meaning as ideas, rather than the phonetic translation of a tongue like an alphabet. This group of ten ideas reassembles as a logos (the creative thought of cosmic Mind and Heart) containing the entire philosophy of the ancient Egyptian civilization.

From this study, I've been convinced that the Ancient Egyptians knew that life's great purpose is character building. They believed that the temporal world was taken into the afterlife in one continuum. And, so, the building of one's character in the here and now was crucial to one's well being in eternity.