Who am I? I was born very prematurely in the outback of Alaska during the endless days of summer to a US Army Sergeant who was known as the youngest member of the nuclear team, and a brilliant mother, who earned her degrees in Education (up to Doctorate in Education) sitting at the kitchen table while I sat in the room. They had a homestead in the Big Delta near Fort Wainwright, where my father served. Life was not easy as my father tells of encounters with “doggies”, my name for the bear just feet away on the front porch, as my father came around the corner of the house to check out which” doggie” was around. The bear saw me tossed into the house by my overalls at the age of 2, followed by a misfired gun, and a wild dash down a dirt road to the neighbors, bear in chase. I thankfully don’t remember this, but I do still have the old Winchester with the broken stock, which resulted from impact with the ground as my father tried to unjam it.
It was this rugged place that was responsible for me living, as it is a fact that sometimes the best doctors in the Military are those found in the remote bases, because they don’t listen well to orders but can save a life, which in more civilized and less remote areas would not happen. I was one of those lives. Born at just over 3 lbs with undeveloped lungs, I was Christened within hours, as I was not expected to live. I don’t know who it was that kept me alive, but I am thankful, even as I now live with the result of weak lungs in the high country of the Rocky Mountains.
My parents divorced a short time later, so I did not grow up with my father and my mother refused to let him into our lives. She was stubborn and judgmental, but she believed in children. It was just when they reached adulthood that she had a hard time letting go. But she was always encouraging us to reach beyond ourselves in our studies and our lives. Her most memorable words to me were, “You can do anything you want to do as long as you want to do it. And you may do anything you want, as long as you do not hurt yourself, others or other things.”
Those words formed much of my educational life, as she never limited what I could know or understand, and never stopped the forward progression of the freight train which would describe my attainment of knowledge, and often stood guard to make sure others did not get in the way as well. She understood when I said, “the word “impossible” does not exist, you just have not figured out how to do it.”
I left high school at 16 to go to a private high school, but was not allowed to enroll, though I was allowed to enroll instead in a private spiritual school, Summit University, in California. My time there formed the basis for the spiritual path in my life, and the experiences there gave me the strength to push on through personal adversity and obstacles, even to today. After a semester there, I moved on to my undergraduate studies, having just turned 17. I was initially a music major, and mostly engaged in the performing arts, until I realized that science was easier than music and changed majors.
After completing 3 years of undergraduate work in under 2 years, at the tender age of 19, I entered Chiropractic College. I call those years 'The Years of Educating Lorrie'. It was a time of tremendous growth, both personally and mentally. I came to understand that my mind had no boundaries, that even when I thought there could be no more room for knowledge or understanding, I always found that there was a horizon beyond the point where I thought the boundary lay. I have often thought that if I ever wrote my biography I would call it, “Not Within the Boundaries of My Mind,” as I don’t believe the mind has boundaries. It’s just a lack of belief in oneself and one’s ability that creates that boundary.
I finished school at the young age of 22. No one had told me I couldn’t do it, and do it I did, and my Mom was always there, guarding against anyone telling me it could not be done. Thankfully, my time in spiritual training had given me an outlook on life that provided natural boundaries without compromising my belief in what I could do, and I have continued to live that way. What I expect of myself, I do not expect of others. My standards are mine alone. But they have served me well as I have gone through life.
I met my husband on my 22nd birthday, and have enjoyed the task of raising five children with him over the past three decades. Each of them is their own master, and full of life and spirit. No two are the same. Saying that being a wife, raising children, having a practice and doing research is easy would be misleading. I have studied many different fields since my time in Chiropractic College from Homeopathy, Internal Medicine, Nutrition, Herbal Medicine, as well as Accounting and Law. The joke in the family is that I have more letters after my name than in it. In reality, it was anything to keep a mind busy with topics to chew on and digest.
I can remember just before my 16th birthday, looking out over the Oklahoma plains from our front porch, just as the Sun came above the horizon, and asking God to show me how the universe worked. Over the years I have felt His gentle hand guiding my mind and soul down a path that has given me the great pleasure of that understanding. I have also cussed at God, and He answered me right back. I have felt the foundations of life shake with His answer to “Why are you putting me through this shit?”, yelled in anger and frustration to Him. I have felt the Strength and Love He gives when he answers, and the helping hand of angels who lift you and gently hold you upright as you gather the strength to continue on. Often times, it was He who held me up when all my soul wanted was to stop.
I have a writing from my youth where I talk about using music to heal. Never in my wildest thought could I have foreseen that this writing would become the basis for my greatest breakthrough in Gann. I held the answer in my hands at 16, and it took years to finally realize how it all worked. Gann is not an easy topic to master, and not every mind is wired to do so. I had an advantage that many do not. He is a cousin, and we share much, genetics, the same back ground of where we grew up, how we studied, and a general outlook on life.
My family history is one that finds its roots at Plymouth, as one of the first groups of Pilgrims to come to America, to four Irish brothers who left Ireland to settle at the Litton and Sutton Plantations in the east, to those who walked across the Plains from St. Louis into Montana and Idaho in covered wagons, to Baptist preachers in Texas after walking from the East, to a young couple who were doctors from the royal family of Austria who stayed in Galveston after the great hurricane and died from cholera through treating the sick and injured, leaving a young child behind. They are a mix of amazing historical characters who blazed new pathways with the determination to reach a new and better place for their futures, who believed in taking the risk to improve their world. It includes those who served with great pride and honor in the Military, from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, to WWII, to Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.
There were other interesting characters in the story, like the one who discovered the drill bit that drills the oil wells which give the world its fuel. Howard Hughes did not invent it, my great grandfather did. He was a shipbuilder in Beaumont Texas later in life, and his life was one full of adventure. He is in Ripley’s Believe it or Not. He was declared dead four times in his life. Once when he fell off a paddle boat on the Mississippi and ended up on the other side of the river with amnesia. Six months later he remembered who he was and returned home. Then he was electrocuted in New Orleans working on the cable cars, lay in the morgue overnight, and awoke the next day. This resulted in chronic headaches which required a barrel of beer and a 5th of whiskey each day to treat. His daughters, proper Southern Belles and a family of preachers, didn’t like his alcohol consumption, so he shot himself in the head from the pain, only to live thru it, but that did reduce the headaches to requiring only the whiskey to manage. When he finally died at 76 he was held in the morgue for a week to make sure he was dead. His obituary reads, “Beaumont man FINALLY dies.”
His daughter, my grandmother, was the first Baptist female preacher in Texas. She had Bible verses written on the blinds of her home which she would use to teach others the verses. She had one of the first cars in Houston, and even many of the roads there today are named after great Uncles who made their mark on Houston.
It is thru my grandfather, my father’s father, that my connection to Gann originates. The Coles ran the Ice House in Lufkin, Texas. His mother, Dorothy, was the daughter of Mary Lee Gann and Henry Thompson. I never met him as he died before I was born, but he is an important part of my life. He served in WWII as a chaplain in the Army. He joined shortly after the US was drawn in, at the age of 40. He served all the way through the war and my favorite picture of him is of him standing on the wing of an airplane delivering the prayers to the pilots before they took off on D-Day. He was on the beaches of Normandy and cared for those fallen. There is a story told of how, when they were preparing for the landing, his Captain asked “Lieutenant, where is your gun?” He held up his Bible and said, “this is all I need”. His Captain took the pistol from his hip and handed it to him saying, “Just in case…”
Some in my family thought this to be a tall tale, but three years ago my daughter sat in class when a member of the 10th Mountain division from WWII visited her school and told this very story. Her classmates having heard this already from her were astounded finding out that it was true. She learned a lot about her grandfather that day as he was held strongly in the man’s memory for the jokes he told while they approached the landing on the beach. One soldier began to lose it saying, “we are all going to die.” Grandfather’s quick reply, “Good thing I am here, eh?” and a gentle smile calmed him. A very gentle man, from a family of preachers, who ministered to soldiers and commoners alike, who studied at Harvard and Columbia, and who was always ready to learn.
As far as the Gann world is concerned, R. L. Cole of Gann’s Tunnel Through the Air fame is an actual person and a great Uncle of mine. The Cole family is a family of Doctors and Preachers, just as Tunnel implies. They are educated and hard working. My father tells me that my grandmother’s greatest gripe against my grandfather was that he would buy a book every month and then expect her to read it, so that they could discuss it in their evenings together. I have replied to that, “if that was her greatest gripe, she was lucky.” I fear my family could say the same. My desire to learn and experience is so ingrained, that often the books drew me from those I most loved. This is my greatest fault, as my kids say. But they also always knew where Mom was. And if they needed me I was always there…
My family honors those who have gone before and passed down their stories. Most think they are tall tales as their achievements and actions are those of story books but it is this desire to be more than they were that we honor. It is from these ancestors that comes the drive that moves my life and understanding forward. None ever looked back, and only death stopped their treks. I pray that God gives me this as well.
It was this heritage of striving that drove me to find my father. It took a decade of going into libraries and looking through phonebooks as the Internet did not exist then. Every town I went into I would go to the library and look for his name, or else I would think of where to find him and call 411 looking for his listing in a new city or area. Somehow, I knew that he would use his full name so that we could find him. Eventually fate helped me out, and a call to 411 gave me his phone number, and shaking with fear that he would not accept the call, I dialed. He was shocked to finally hear my voice, but he had told his family about us and we were welcomed with open arms.
Some might ask why I share this story, but it is in answer to a question often posed to me. Why did you get into stocks when it is not who you really are? It was for him. I wanted to build a relationship with him, so I picked an area that he was interested in and learned. He was a day trader when we met again, having retired from the Army. He is also a very contrarian investor. He owned AOL before it was AOL. He had a great instinct about the markets, and could bottom fish very well. He also was an environmental clean-up expert and made his millions by bringing his company to the market. So, for 14 years, I studied the markets and listened to him telling of trades and experiences he had.
I was never a powerful trader, but I understood charts and formations and the key fundamentals of the markets. But I continued learning about the markets. I took small trades and slowly built confidence. I followed my father’s trades and at one time had made over 250K on one trade. We would go to stockholders’ meetings together. This had been my intention in learning about the markets, having a reason to enjoy my father’s company. Once we went to a stockholder’s meeting during which I handed my father a pair of earrings to put in his pocket, as they were too heavy to continue wearing. Shortly after his return home, I got a phone call from his wife inquiring if I had lost anything. She had found the earrings and knew they were not his and not what I would usually wear, so she called. Thankfully they were mine and Dad was safe from the dog house. But it showed me how truly welcomed I was in his world when her response to “yeah, they are mine” was “ok, I will send them home.”
As I gained confidence I took trades I found, and studied them as I could, but I was searching for something else about the markets though I didn’t know what. I first found Gann when I took a trade in a stock, sold it for a nice profit, only to watch it quadruple two weeks later. I decided then that there had to be a way to know when that would happen, how to forecast the moves. The next day I discovered Gann on the Internet. I purchased my first set of books from Lambert Gann for my 40th birthday in 2003. Over time I have added to my collection, so that today, I have a library of topics that spans the esoteric to the technical to the way out there. The study of these books tied into my knowledge of esoterics, astrology and the Tarot cards from my youth. It helped to increase the understanding of how the universe worked that I had been seeking since a young age. The quest to understand the markets helped satisfy the need to understand the world.
That is where Gann came in. His work is full of riddles, mystery, confusion and gobblygook, that required tremendous application of mental energy to understand. It was just the right mix for a brain searching for the answers to life. From every book I took a gem, and over time, I put those gems together to build an understanding that allows me to READ Gann. Was it easy? No. Was it hard.? No. But it did take persistence and curiosity. Each week, as I went through the task of treating patients, cleaning house, and raising kids, I would consider what my topic of study would be for the weekend. What question would I have to answer in my study? That is how it works… Ask and you shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you.
I found a kindred soul in Gann. Within the pages of Tunnel, I found the poem that had become the self-talk of my life at the age of 12, 'IF' by Rudyard Kipling. I also found a riddle, and within 'Magic Word', a mystery, that kept my mind searching for the answers. My youth provided many of the clues required to break Gann. From the memory of a teacher explaining what was meant to “Sound the Mississippi,” which allowed me to crack Magic Word, to the colloquial sayings that were echoed in the pages of Tunnel, to the times when Gann would sit in the chair next to my desk, nodding as I found an answer to a question. The times when the one I call “Little Shit”, Sepharial, would grin as I related joy in finding the reasoning to something he had written, a deep truth that was literally written in the pages before me.
The solution to Gann’s Magic Word came early one morning as I got ready to go to breakfast with my husband. Taking the moment, I had I flipped open Magic Word and read Sound, Song, Singing. Sighing I began to close the book when I realized that Gann was reaching across my small desk, his hand touching the title, and the memory of “sounding the Mississippi” floated thru my brain. I looked down surprised, sat down, and it was my husband closing the book that finally drew me out of the moment in time. I grabbed the book as I stood, shoved it in my purse and blindly followed him out. Silence met him in the car, not from anger, but from my thoughts still turning over what I had just realized. And I began to laugh. I can only tell you the look that accompanies the outburst of laughter from having a glimpse at the solution to a puzzle, as one of “she’s lost it”.
Breakfast was an event of me talking, turning pages and my husband’s eyes eventually rolling back in his head. He continued to nod though I knew I had lost him, but I had found a roadmap to the path I needed to take. Gann’s solution tied to his upbringing in the South. It is for this reason that in Paris in 2005, when talking with one who is considered another master of Gann, Alan Blackstead, that in response to his comment that it would be an American that broke Gann, I replied, no, not just an American, but an American from the South. Little did I realize that person would be me. Little did I realize that it would require the understanding of how the South spoke, how they thought and how the very environment was seen that would be required.
Once having cracked the door to Magic Word, I knew that I needed more knowledge. That is when I found Baumring. I needed a roadmap of how to navigate the footpath before me. I asked the question of whether anyone had found the answer, and it was his work that helped to bring more knowledge and understanding. It would be Baumring’s work that told me I had found the answer, as buried within the pages of notes on his lecture materials was a section discussing the DOW. It was 2007 and the market was going strong. I had found a number span in Magic Word that I didn’t know where to put. I read the notes for the umpteenth time and saw the number. It was not just written but a quick calculation showed it. That was the moment I saw the 4th dimension for the first time. It was a blazing Sun that exploded through my head! And I knew it was right…
I had been working on faith that I had the code in Magic Word correct, and to find it in Baumring was the confirmation I needed. It was a few days later when I found the same number in the DOW. And WOW! We were at the end of the time! I knew the top was coming very soon. I shared it with people only to be laughed at and ignored. I sent it to someone who had worked at Janus Funds. He ignored it, then lost millions in the collapse…
One person did listen, a patient that would travel from the East Coast to see me. Excited by my discovery, I had told him what was going to happen, since I knew he traded. He listened and as he told my daughter some time later, he was able to retire because “I had saved his ass” by telling him the top was in. The fall in 2008 confirmed my numbers and I knew I had them. I didn’t have it all, but I knew how to find the key numbers using planets from Magic Word, I knew some of the key cycles as well as many of the rules he related in Magic Word. I didn’t give up, but I did change course.
Having discovered some amazing things in Gann’s writings, I moved on to Mundane Astrology and World Events to prove out the knowledge. My thought was if it works in other fields as much as it works in the Markets, then it is true. Over the next seven years I slowly proved it out. I developed a new Astrological System for evaluating World events, earthquakes, storms and any other events that were not market related. I needed to see it working anywhere else but in the markets. Then, three years ago, the voice of understanding sounded again, and a deeper realization came. In a flash of understanding, I knew what Gann meant about the numbers, and the full answer to the LOV became real.
It has taken three years to pull the rest of the understanding from his courses and other writings. I continue to read Tunnel, Magic Word, and all the courses, working to tie things together. But I knew! I also learned that knowing and using were two different creatures. Over the course of these years I have learned how to apply all the knowledge into a systematic process. How to tie numbers to planets, how to tie the tools in the courses to the charts, and what the tools in Tunnel could do and how to apply them. I could finally say that I understood Gann, that I had cracked what he wrote and could use it. It was similar to the feeling of relief that the difficulty was over when I found my father. I had the answer and could catch my breath. But having the answer then led to the need to use it and now to teach it.
I have spent many years on Yahoo and Google group boards searching for other kindred souls to share with what I know. I have found some that became fellow journeyman and I have found others that became a thorn in my side. It is these thorns that have caused me to write. So often I would put up a secret of Gann only to have it shot down or to find myself dismissed from the board. Being a non-confrontational person, I quietly went my way. And often it was for my own betterment. Why? Because on the day that my father found out about Gann he called laughing and asked if I knew where my Grandfather was from. I had to admit no, not a clue. He continued laughing only to relate that Gann was from Lufkin as was my grandfather, and he related the ties to Gann.
It was this moment when I put aside all the garbage from the boards and the efforts to solve what they said and followed my own mind. I learned to trust in myself and my own interpretation of what Gann had written, and its meaning. This was the moment I became free of the red herrings and misdirection so prevalent in the world of Gann. Now after another 12 years of research I can ask why do they do this? What is gained? What purpose does it serve to create confusion and illusions that are not true?
This is why I am writing the series before you, to share this most wonderful knowledge and wisdom of the Law of Vibration, while also clearing the path of all the idiotic obstacles that so many have placed to prevent others from finding the truth. The semester I did at Summit University was Pallas Athena’s quarter. She is known as the Goddess of Truth. It is that flame that I have followed in the countless hours of research and the times I have walked the path of my life. That is why there is no attempt at confusion, illusion or misdirection. Truth must come out! I am honor bound to tell the Truth by my duty to the Truth!
May my books give you the guidepost to follow my path until you can blaze your own way. May you take comfort that there are those who have traveled the path and know that it can be done. May these books shine a light into the morass of knowledge and understanding until you can see the wonderous threads that tie all of Life together.
Lorrie Van Bennett
BS, MS, DC, DNBHE, DABCI, CCN, DABCN, MH