X-Message-Number: 29879
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:16:22 -0700
From: Andrea van de Loo <>
Subject: Remembering Hara Ra
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Remembering my Beloved Gregory.
Most of us knew him as Hara Ra. He was born as
Gregory Yob on June 18th, 1945. He left his body
and was cryonically suspended on October 13th, 2005.
After five days in diabetic coma at the ICU in
Santa Cruz, California, with the help of his good
friend Ken Weiss, I managed to have him airlifted
to a hospice near Alcor in Scottsdale, Arizona,
where he died that evening. Alcor was present and
started preparations immediately. His dear body
was swiftly moved into the ice bath and wheeled
to the truck within minutes. It seems to have
been the best suspension performed to that date.
New advanced chemistry was used and no cracking
was observed during cool down except for some small ones toward the very end.
The promise, even if infinitesimally small, of
cryonics to transport him into a future where he
might be repaired from the emotional and
psychological damage done to him during his
childhood, is what gave him hope and vision for a
future in which he might experience life and love to the full human potential.
His was such a potent spirit with a far seeing
eye. He truly was a Future Man, a fine artist and
a visionary. Under the grumpy exterior, which
sooner or later almost everyone who knew him
would bump into, lived a brilliant mind, a
compassionate heart and a delightful childlike playfulness.
In his early twenties, he experienced a
spontaneous Satori, a sudden state of awakening,
of being an integral part of the natural
coherence of everything, which lasted for three
days solid. It gave him an authentic foundation
for the pursuit of zen and for non-ordinary states of mind.
Hara Ra's favorite poet was Cold Mountain who
lived in 7th century China. He deeply identified
with him. This must have been his favorite verse:
For the hundred years of human life
the Buddha preached a twelvefold canon
but compassion is like a wild deer
and anger is like the family dog
you can't drive the dog away
the deer meanwhile prefers to run
to tame your monkey mind
listen to the lion's roar.
He was the creator of the very first computer
game, Hunt the Wumpus. He designed interactive
computer art of ever changing mandalas, called
the Fool, intended to entrance the player into
altered states of consciousness. He also invented
the concept and application of Comfort House, a
place entirely wired to sense the visitor's
emotional states and physical movements to
respond in kind, intending to evoke in the
visitor the spontaneous experience of harmony and
of feeling connected with the universe around him.
Expecting future scientific leaps, he wrote The
Anatomy of the Electric Creation, in which he
imagined a seamless interface between human and
machine with the possibility of creating and
experiencing infinite realities and expanding
consciousness to actualize a global mind.
Out of the sheer necessity of his own suffering
and with great determination, he pursued to
understand and heal his condition. No psychiatric
evaluations really fit him, until he came across
LSD Psychotherapy by Stanislav Groff, MD. He
subsequently worked with some of the finest
psychiatrists in the land, exploring therapies
with MDMA, LSD and Ketamine. He knew at the time
that anaclytic work would be his best hope to
heal the injured bonding he suffered in infancy
at the hand of his unfortunate mother. It was in
his search for an anaclytic healer/therapist that he found me.
LSD became his ally. It was during an acid
session that he received his shamanic initiation,
lasered into him, across space and time, from a
place deep in the Amazon. That's when he took his
shamanic name, Hara Ra. The Hara is the Japanese
term for the second chakra, the creative center
below the navel and Ra is the Egyptian Sun god.
He would translate his name as the Belly of the
Sun'. With a gleeful twinkle in his eye, he would
call himself a Neo-Neuro-Cyber-Shaman'!
Gregory definitely was an avowed scientific
materialist. More than anything he wanted the
truth, real, unmitigated, down to earth, about
everything. At the same time, he had to accept
the fact that he and others possessed unexplained
psychic powers and abilities. He had a unique
capacity to tune into a person's hidden processes
and get to the core of things within minutes,
often facilitating surprising breakthroughs.
Having explored altered states of consciousness
and experienced his own occult shamanic
initiation as a psychic reality within himself,
he knew there were realities for us to
experience, which would not fit the scientific
model. He surmised that our psychic abilities to
intuit and to experience the numinous and the
unseen were the results of an evolutionary
process in the software of our brains.
Cryonics was a center-piece of hope and vision in
his life. He was deeply engaged with the future
possibilities for mankind and was determined to
do whatever it took, to be able to participate in
it. One of the highlights in our relationship was
when, on July 12th, 2002, the Santa Cruz Sentinel
published a very positive front page article with
a picture of us walking hand in hand into the
future, entitled Together Forever, Local couple
hopes to be frozen through cryonics and see the future.
It was our dream to be reunited in the future,
when both of us could be psychologically and
physically restored and even enhanced for the
fulfillment and enjoyment of our love for each
other. His aspirations, however, went far beyond
that. In his spirit, he saw himself as a guardian
of the earth. He was extremely motivated to
contribute in the future to humanity achieving
world peace. For his personal satisfaction, he
imagined having multiple manifestations of
himself with at least one of him going off
exploring the stars. He would joke about all of
his many selves meeting at the Hard Rock Caf at the end of time.
In the last few years of his life, he dedicated
himself to establish a clinic in a country with
more liberal and humane attitudes than the United
States, for the realization of Vistasis,
a facility which would offer legal arrangements
for cryonic suspension by appointment, to avoid
the injury of ischemia to the brain inherent in
the natural dying process. It was in that context
that he adopted his new name Gregory H. Coresun.
H. for Herald, Bringer of Good Tidings; Coresun,
the core of the sun' as an adaptation to his shamanic name Hara Ra.
See you in the Future, Love of my Life. Andrea
I am interested to hear from anyone who knew him: <>
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Truth ~ Transparency ~ Trust
Andrea van de Loo
Santa Cruz, California
(831)458-2925
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