A year later his parents divorced and two years later his mother remarried for the second time to a staff sergeant and a veteran of WWII. The consequence for Dennis was a change of elementary school every year through the sixth grade and every two years through middle and high school.  A further consequence was learning the importance of making friends quickly and the pleasure that came with making new friends and the different ways of how to accomplish that goal.

In elementary school he made new friends by writing poetry and sharing it with classmates. After school he   had a walk-around paper route in downtown Monterey where his base was a donut shop with a pinball machine called “Beetle Baum” (inspired by the Spike Jones song), which he played Monday through Friday. When classmates stopped by, he delighted in treating them to donuts of their choice.

In middle school he played trumpet at school assemblies (having begun playing trumpet at the age nine) He parlayed his trumpet talent into school-wide popularity and was elected student body president at 3-year Yosemite junior high school in Fresno (now a 2-year middle school).

At Fresno State College he became a fraternity president by promising to have the best parties on campus, and by all accounts, he succeeded.

In U.C. Berkeley law school, after marrying 22-year-old coed Ramona (called Mona by everyone) Swartley and taking on the responsibility of stepfather to Mona’s 4-year-old son, Jeffrey, Dennis focused on his studies.

Upon passing the California bar exam, Dennis, whose legal goal was to become a criminal law defense attorney, became a prosecutor, believing he would be a better criminal defense attorney if he had more of an understanding of prosecution strategy, tactics, and weaknesses.

Next, he became a grievance arbitration and personal injury attorney for A.C. Transit in Oakland, a public bus company. He was also allowed a small criminal defense practice.

In 1970, Mona decided to separate from Dennis, who, by then, had a small criminal defense and personal injury practice, and worked as an independent contractor for A.C. Transit doing grievance arbitration. He adopted Jeffrey, not wanting Jeff to feel abandoned by two successive father figures.

Dennis was shocked and saddened by Mona’s departure, but, after a few months, he grew bored with his self-pity and joined a Berkeley YMCA encounter group which directly led to heterosexual sexual encounters. He decided the single life might not be so bad after all, and signed up for another round of encounters.

The encounter groups were just the beginning of the six most illuminating and fascinating years of his life.

After quitting a prestigious Oakland law firm and with an ample supply of hashish and psychedelics, he took off on a ten-week solo hiking trip, including sometimes hiking with young hikers he met along the way, in the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, Canada’s high country, the Cascades and Olympic National Park. HE returned to California and began living with Ruth Groves, whom he had met in his 2nd encounter group.

Ruth heard that a new psycho-spiritual group headed by Chilean psychiatrist and his partner, psychologist Kathy Speeth (whose parents had been followers of the mystic and philosopher Gurdjieff in New York in the 1940’s), was beginning in Berkeley and focusing on the Sufi/Ichazo enneagram method of analysis based on 9 personality types. Ruth thought Dennis and she should participate and they did.

Naranjo’s groups were called SAT (Seekers After Truth) and Ruth and Dennis joined group # 3 (the 3rd group formed since Naranjo returned from Bolivia, having studied under Oscar Ichazo) It was very heady stuff and Dennis was amazed at how accurate it was in describing his patterns of behavior as a “7” on the enneagram.

In addition, Naranjo and Speeth recommended a six-week psychological process called Fischer-Hoffman, which added to Dennis’s growing emotional self-awareness and might have precipitated his separation from Ruth. (Strange as it was, after separating from Ruth, Dennis’s first girlfriend was Naomi, who, in the old testament’s Book of Ruth, was the mother-in-law of Ruth, who became the wife of Boaz, and, together, they would become the great-grandparents of David, the revered king of Israel.)

In SAT, Dennis learned that Harish Johari was living nearby in Montclair, and was known for his knowledge of the chakras, a Hindu system of consciousness.  Dennis decided to pay a visit, and for two years, he was a frequent visitor at the Johari residence, accumulating knowledge of the seven chakras as a system of consciousness and desire (and the origin of the 7 rights).

Dennis’s old friend Ruth had one more introduction to make that would lead Dennis to some New Age esoterica that would later enable Dennis to create a comprehensive body of rights. One evening in early 1975 she called Dennis and asked him if he would be interested in ride-sharing to San Francisco to a 5-month course in the Egyptian Tarot, taught by the sociologist Angie Arriens, a friend of psychedelic guru Carlos Castaneda. Of course he would.

In the Egyptian Tarot, he discovered that the Egyptians had concluded that the 4 primary components of the human personality were mental (swords), physical (disks), cups (emotions), and wands (creative). With further research he discovered that this pattern of four was repeated in various pattern throughout the ages.

And then, as a preparation for the 200th anniversary of American independence, he reread the Declaration of Independence and discovered  two crucial concepts that that had eluded his consciousness on prior readings: 1) Governments were “instituted ” to secure the rights of the people, and 2) the four categories of rights of which all rights were components (and extensions of the four personality attributes of all humans as depicted in the Tarot) were found in the Declaration.  (Those rights are social [life], cultural [liberty], pursuit of happiness [educational], and safety or security [safety].

Dennis realized, upon reading the Preamble to the Constitution, that the Constitution was not based upon human rights but upon the values of nationalism; betraying the principles of the Declaration. Americans had organized government (the Costitution) upon the wrong values–and the Bill of Rights of (the first 10 amendments) mostly a reaction to British abuses-were woefully inadequate to qualify as a comprehensive system of rights-necessary if a government were to be organized based on human rights.

Dennis came to a further conclusion that within each of the 4 general categories of rights were seven subcategories of rights, derived from the 7 chakras of the Hindus and that when these rights were combined, derived from two ancient systems of consciousness were combined, viewed aerial, they formed a four-sided seven-leveled pyramidal structure, which he named, the seven rights schematic.

The seven rights are, from bottom to top, the right to survive, play, power. love, truth, freedom, and the right to the future. Dennis also discovered that each chakra contains seven levels of consciousness and, therefore, an educational system based on consciousness would have 196 subjects of study.

Dennis then wrote a 70-page tract regarding the failure of government to recognize all of our rights and decided to commit an act of rebellion to gain some publicity for the tract while commemorating the 200th anniversary of American Independence. He would smoke a marijuana joint in the San Francisci Federal Building in January of 1976. He followed through but was not arrested. He failed in his goal to gain publicity for the 7 rights, but the experience was amusing and resulted in his writing a poem; repeated in the book.

Later that year, while representing a union in an arbitration, a strange event occurred which led him to represent Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer, who did not wish to appeal his conviction. Dennis asked Utah’s Supreme Court to remove a stay of execution and Gilmore was executed 3 months later. (Dennis would later admit that he was wrong to support capital punishment.)

The case drew national attention as there had been no executions in the US for 10 years until the US Supreme Court decided, with certain conditions, that it was ok to resume executions. Dennis took the case thinking he could gain publicity for another 7 rights tract he had written. Wrong again. Dennis got publicity, but not favorable.

Norman Mailer wrote a Pulitzer Prize novel on the case and Dennis had some interesting encounters with well-known individuals, such as Gilmore, Mailer, Geraldo Rivera, as well as Tommy Lee Jones, and Rosanna Arquette, when he played himself in the movie based on the case.

In 1982, he met Donna Axelrod, a court reporter. A year later Donna gave birth to a baby girl, Sammantha (2 “m’s” for numerological reasons).

Dennis quit his job at a law firm and they co-parented for a year and one-half until Dennis took a job in Guahan (Guam) in the A.G.’s office Two years later, he became a legislative counsel for the CNMI Legislature in Saipan. Controversy would follow him there as well.

Dennis and his family returned to California after 13 wonderful years in the tropics. He became a continuation high school teacher for 8 years in Ukiah, but not without controversy.  He retired in 2010 and began writing 7RCS, in 2012 and self-published it in 2017.

Samm became a nurse practitioner, lives in Petaluma, and has three delightful children. She is married to Brandon Halter who was recently selected to be County Counsel for Marin County.

Donna and Dennis live in a wonderful retirement community in Santa Rosa.

Upcoming project: The Search for the Temple of Happiness, a young adult book currently in development, featuring illustrations by renowned Asheville, NC artist Elaine McPherson.