Billy Guilfoyle

Started out as the space that held the egg and sperm that collided happily to form this current space suit, which is growing and will die when it gets to be worn out like an old coat. 

List of cool 'self' history:

My mother was 16 when she began helping my uncle, Clem, as a heroin smuggler by hiring Mexican prostitutes to shove heroin up their crotches and walk across the U.S. border. When she was 18 she became pregnant with me, and a week later my father committed suicide. She found the body in their apartment in Syracuse, New York. She moved to California and, against the wishes and urgings of the family, decided not to abort me because of the guilt the Catholic church had embedded in her since she was in Catholic school. Saved by the Catholic church, a church responsible for the deaths of nearly a hundred million people throughout history. She married a meth addict named Russell who would wake me up around 3AM by grabbing me by the arm from my bed and begin tossing me into walls back and forth like a pinball.

When I was 13 my mother came to my school and we both sat with the school councilor when she said these words: "I never want to see him again." She got up, left, and I didn't see her again for many years. I went to public schools in California, Nevada, Florida, and Minnesota until I was 17 and joined the Army in order to get away from relatives and be independent and free. After a year in the Army I faked insanity to get out. I took a psychological evaluation test called the MMPI and there were questions like: "Do you hear demons or voices?" And I said, "Yes." 

My mother committed suicide 3 years ago, and we never healed our relationship. 

My grandfather sent me a book when I was 12 called 'Tao Te Ching." This book set me free amidst the Chaos. But I have to give credit to Ken's work, as well as that of Emerson and Alan Watts, as being the truly liberating texts that have helped with my psychological healing and transformations. 

I psychologically abused my first two girlfriends. I did crystal meth for a year during 1999. I had sex with a minor when I was 19, she was 17. I burglarized two homes when I was 19 because I was homeless, cold, hungry, and ignorant. 

I had my awakening, or whatever, when I was about 25 and living in Turkey as an English teacher. I was reading a host of western philosophers at the time, as well as Emerson. And all of the sudden I asked, "What am I?" And the answer was not in words. It was obvious that it was my own awareness, and that this awareness is the same behind all eyes, behind all life, within life, behind live, under and above, it is life, etc. I realized that all that occurs within awareness is temporal, and subject to death and change, but that awareness is not. Thus awareness is the necessary nothingness to the every changing, arising, and dying everythingness. All ethnocentric tendencies and ways of seeing things died at this time. All that was and is seen now is simply myself. No division. Awareness is not categorizable, not sectioned, not different behind these eyes, and those eyes. It is one awareness. There is simply awareness, an Intelligence-Presence, the essence of all that is, the thing alluding scientific discovery, for how can the eye see itself?

My teachers have been William Martin, Mokshananda, John Wheeler, and my own experience, which is to say, The Universe. 

Paid actor since 8 years-old, lived in 14 states, over 30 cities, and 4 countries, performed stand-up comedy for years, just finished first non-fiction book, wrote, directed, produced 6 films, just released first solo album, have read almost all of Ken's books, just spent two months living alone illegally in a tent in a redwood forest near Santa Cruz meditating, taught English for a year in Turkey, wrote and directed several theater plays, emceed two fashion shows and a series of other events, owned a local magazine and interviewed Brett Dennen and the Dalai Lama's former assistant Lobsang Samten, part-time revolutionary, philosopher, student of psychology, biology, physics, sociology, art, etc.   

Favorite books: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality,  Tao Te Ching, Emerson's Self Reliance, Will Durant's Story of Philosophy.

Favorite films: The Matrix Trillogy, Fight Club, Good Will Hunting, Forest Gump, Avatar, I Heart Huckabees, Antwon Fisher Story, Star Wars.

After my two month meditation retreat in the woods I came out and got on line and looked up jobs around the country that would be interesting. I took a job as a server for the final two months of a fall/winter season. Currently living in Arizona working as a server for a ranch until May 9th 2010. While here I applied for a job in Bar Harbor, Maine for the summer. I got the job and will begin on may 15th working as a veranda bartender for Balance Rock Inn. I was also offered a job on a tall ship called the HMS Bounty as a deckhand. I asked the 1st Mate, Peter, if I could join the crew after the season ends. It seems like I have a good chance, which is cool because the Bounty is heading to Europe next year. Here's a picture of the Bounty: Not sure what I'll do after the summer season ends on October 31st. But I'll have a lot of money saved, so it looks like travel is a for sure, whether it's on a tall ship, or whether it's catching a boat somewhere in the world. The Universe took itself 14 billion years to get me here, and I aim to adventure forth unhindered.  

I believe that when it comes to comedy, nothing's sacred. A comic has risen above the duality of concepts and thus pushes the envelope for society to be able to move beyond them as well. "People have the tendency to eat the menu instead of the dinner." --Alan Watts

"I'd rather be whole than good." --Carl Jung

"Nothing is either bad nor good but thinking makes it so." --William Shakespeare

"The only time my education was ever interrupted was when I was in school." --Albert Einstein

"A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." Ralph Waldo Emerson

I find it interesting that both the pessimist and the optimist consider themselves to be 'realists.' But the optimist is the one that does what the pessimist says can't be done. The pessimist is suffering from a poverty of imagination. Nobody would have guessed coming out of the dark ages that the Renaissance was just around the corner. Nobody would have guessed that white men would fight to end slavery in the west. Nobody would have guessed that right after World War II America would have its first war when an entire generation cared less about being called 'anti-patriotic' and instead came together in protest against war for the first time in American history. Nobody would have guessed in the 1920's that we would make it to the moon. Nobody would have guessed that apartheid would end in South Africa and that a black president would be elected there as well as here in the United States. Nobody would have guessed in the 1800's that women would some day be able to vote, own property, and divorce without stigma. I could go on. But the point is that world peace is inevitable. 

World Peace Is Inevitable

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