A palette of thought and experience

She has survived two world wars, seven marriages, the red scare, tuberculosis, an LSD trip, the death of two children, a few metaphysical experiences, the celebrity of Paris Hilton and, most recently, her 104th birthday.

Surrounded Tuesday by birthday balloons and flowers, Laura Bowen, founder and minister of the currently defunct World Catalyst Church, lit up when asked to speak her mind.

"We're all together," she said, "and we don't need to be picking on one another."

It was a brief summary of what she's learned — thus far — during her century-long quest for spiritual intelligence.

"I want to talk to the world just the same way as it wants to talk to me," she explained, her small girlish hands reaching out pleadingly for emphasis.

Dressed in pink and adorned with pearls, Bowen received cards and well wishes from several visitors during the course of the day. She smiled radiantly from the comfort of an armchair in her southwest Yuba City home.

Her hearing is not what it once was, and a hip fracture a few years ago left her in a somewhat fragile state. But her mind still works overtime.

"She knows the world is full of unseen things," said Charles Capps, 52, Bowen's foster son and live-in caretaker.

Capps met Bowen several years after she had founded her "church of the road" in Paradise, and soon after she had moved to Roswell, N.M. — unofficial headquarters for ideas both metaphysical and extraterrestrial.

Both wear their hair long — below the shoulders — with bangs that accentuate animated facial expressions.

Capps, who sports a Van Winklish beard, recalled Tuesday that during some recent banter with Bowen, "I said, 'I'm not as dumb as I look.' She said, 'Well, you couldn't possibly be.'"

He let out a burst of laughter.

The last thing Bowen is ever likely to lose, Capps said, is her sense of humor.

Among the centenarian's strongest influences was a grandfather who was 18 at the start of the Lincoln presidency, and who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

At 3 or 4 years of age, "I saw — and I still see — Grandpa for the first time. That was the first time the visual impression of a human being made a lasting imprint upon my conscious memory," Bowen wrote in 1976.

The resulting book, "Asa's Place," was not widely distributed.

"But if you start reading it," said Capps, "you won't be able to put it down."

Bowen also authored the book "Wells of Inner Space" under the pen name Helen Muschell. The book, published in 1970, contains heady psycho-spiritual chapter titles like "Personal Bondage," "Why We Grieve," and "The Oneness of Man."

"She is very mystical," said Capps, "She's like the Dalai Lama. She really is."

Capps laughs again about the woman who has been at the center of his own life for the better part of 36 years — since he was a teenager.

A physically abusive father drove him out of his home then, and into that of Bowen, his new spiritual mentor.

In the late 1970s, soon after Capps and Bowen came to the Mid-Valley, his mother retired from her job, "and came here to be with us," he said. She died in 2001 at age 83.

"We miss her, don't we?" he asked Bowen, who nodded thoughtfully.

Bowen's own childhood pain — a subject about which she still speaks openly — sent her on a lifelong search for a sense of connectedness to the world.

"I had a mother that was very brutal in her own way," Bowen said. "My father seemed to think I had something to give, but didn't have time to talk. So I had this numbness. I didn't tell anybody, but it was eating me up. I was the most lonely person in the world."

Capps thinks it was her high level of innate intelligence that kept her alienated from people in the impoverished Michigan farming community in which she was raised.

The dogma of her mother's Seventh-day Adventist Church and conventional churches to which she was exposed failed to answer her questions about human nature and the nature of the universe.

"I wanted to get ideas for myself," she said. "I felt blighted all the time and couldn't rise above the people around me."

She spent her early teenage years in a sick ward because of a long bout with tuberculosis. Her parents would not visit her there, she said. The fact, as evidenced by her facial expression, still hurts.

Once recovered, she traveled far from home and took work in a cigar factory.

She married at 20 and had three children. One of her two sons died of heart failure in 1992. Her daughter died a year later from ovarian cancer.

Along the way, Bowen divorced their father and married five more times.

Six, "if you count the one she married twice," Capps said.

She remembers a hurricane during World War II in Miami, where she worked guarding a munitions facility. The storm left a ship in the middle of the city.

Bowen also worked as a mechanical draftsman in a wartime shop outside of San Jose.

"She did anything to support her kids," Capps said.

Later, during the drug-happy 1960s when she herself was in her 60s, she participated in an experiment under a physician's supervision in San Francisco.

The experiment involved the hallucinogenic drug, LSD, and an audio tape to record her descriptions of what she experienced.

"It was like a different world," said Capps, "She said it gave her insight into a deeper reality."

Thinking independently and freely, he said, has been at the core of what Bowen espoused during her years as a minister and lecturer.

"And she's always had a positive message," he said.

The key to longevity, Bowen said, before she turned to a 24-year-old former caretaker who had come to visit her on her birthday, "is a yen to help your fellow man."

"You're going to have to find out by yourself," she said, "and you're going to be surprised when you find out what's in your heart and in your mind is the important thing."