Tobe Terrell

The Gamecaller Tobe Terrell

Back in the 1960s and 70s something changed in America. People began to awaken from an American dream that suddenly had become unfulfilling. They dropped out of the mainstream, thought differently, looked different, talked different and tried new ways of being in the world. Some of them moved to the country where they formed communes; some remained in the city and grouped themselves with others of like mine or aligned themselves with gurus and yogis; some began traveling the country and forsook the settled life. Many still travel. They were called Hippies and freaks and were seen as a threat to the mainstream. This book is about some who lived their lives as unorthodox experiments in an effort to reject the values of their culture and create a new ones. Their leader, M. D. Pettie, The Gamecaller, inspired a group of these drop-outs to see their daily lives as a series of wide-ranging "games." From this perspective the author, one of those game-players, began to understand that his decisions and actions were not being made as he believed by his rational mind, but were dictated by the culture that he increasingly understood to be unhealthy and dangerous to future generations. The players of the games became known as "The Finders." The purpose of the games according to Pettie was to "smoke out the unconscious." What the players saw when some part of the game revealed itself as a habitual self-destructive habit they were on the path to consciousness-raising. They lived a day-at-a-time, shared their money and other property in a life that was also sometimes called the pressure-cooker. It was never dull. The idea of "Consciousness-raising" has today become commonplace and even spawned an industry in the world that has not yet examined itself. Pettie, who was deeply immersed in history and in social experiments from the past, directed his players toward re-centering themselves in principles drawn from ancient wisdom while embracing each new technological innovation. One of these principles was not to threaten the powers that control the culture into which you are born, but to conduct your evolution in secret. When The Finders were discovered by the media in 1987, fear-mongers began inventing an existence for the group that could only be described as paranoid. This book is an effort to describe the actual life within the group and to inspire new adventurers to see their lives from a different perspective.