Dream Weaver
This book, originally intended as an historical/anthropological description of my portion of the 60's revolution, evolved instead into an account of The Search: primarily a myriad of personal tales of those traveling on the great ribbons of Interstate that had been built by the American spirit in its never ending quest for speed, distance, and change. As its subtitle says, it is about the dawning of the Aquarian Age, of a new way of thought and perhaps being that began some years ago but sped up tremendously in the 1960's. What we saw in the 60's and early 70's was an alert, a mark, of the coming or being of this age, not its fulfillment. We have no idea yet if this is the age of redemption or destruction, for it holds both, as can be read in the pages of Dream Weaver.
Available now at Amazon in e-print and hard copy.
Enter the New Age.
Dream Weaver. Chapt. 1
Chapter One Gotta Revolution!
It is trite, even comical now to say that it is the beginning or end of an era, for an “era” now is counted as less than the four-year duration of a high school class, with dress and music and ideologies shifting more often than presidential tenures. But, the early 1970s were, really, the end of the type of era that may be counted in generations or even life spans. As other chroniclers of the American Dream will tell you, it was an era of the Big Boot, Metal Heft, Warriors and front lines, monolithic paradigms, and big, big cars. The car was our paradigm in steel, the big boot and monolith of American will, a heavy 442 cubic inch gas-powered rocket that shot us out across new and underused interstates at 130 miles per hour, spitting out an attitude of invincibility for millions of teenagers who found in the front seat the god of might, and in the back, the goddess of night. Big, strong union men with small educations and big paychecks built them for big, eternally dominant corporations who rode the government like their costumers rode their product. Right was white, was might, was clear as chlorinated tap water, pointed with destiny toward progress from small to big to bigger and bigger still. The life force could be manufactured in a test tube, and turned with unerring knowledge into control and money, endless horizons of prosperity for anyone fortunate to be American or of the American Way.
As we all know, the Big Boots stumbled, fell in their tireless march, right then in that time, tripped up by presidential disgrace, a lost war, an oil embargo and, worst of all, the fifth column. Millions of Baby Boomers were coddled with health and wealth in universities that preached the seditious scree of corrupt Europe, the neo-Marxisms, revisionisms, and relativisms that engendered hatred for the Great Way by turning adolescent loneliness and inadequacy into an internalized weapon like ground glass in the gut of a great and powerful giant. The city streets shook with violent revolution, Pigs versus Pimples, The Brothers versus The White Man, Womyn versus man’s Men. For so many of us young, semi-educated, self-righteous kids, it was the beginning of a new power, a new, more just order, and, more than anything, the beginning of a new era where we could do as we pleased, where the insane could run the asylum.
For others, like myself, it was indeed the time of death for the old and birth of something new and greater. But we did not snatch at the laces of the Boot, we did not march for Bobby Seale or throw bricks through courthouse windows or blow up science buildings. We did not even give more than a nod to the chain-smoking intellectuals whose anger at The System made their gaunt and pale souls quiver with fury at their own good fortune of never having to lift more than a pile of term papers for a living.
We just wanted to leave and start over.
Whether in a commune or a cosmic bus, we wanted to fly above the fray, feel the rush of the great wind that blew from the heavens as a force of redemption, a calling for The New Age that would reveal magic and myth and great mysteries. We were not angry adolescents venting against stern fathers and uncomprehending mothers. We were children, babies, life forms yet unborn who would not leave the womb. Our vehicles were not big steely steeds from Detroit, but subtle wings from the ether that fluttered from the great Third Eye of Buddha or the paradoxical poetry of a koan. Our fuel was chemical or forbidden nature herself, pot, acid, mushrooms, peyote, and we flew far faster than 130 miles per hour and far higher than the Gemini rockets. We were, finally, fools, every one of us, saved and preserved for future generations by a god that takes pity on dimwits and little children. This god left us with little sparks that still cry for a new breeze to kindle the flame, little stories in a big anthology that beg to be heard. This is my part of it.
I know, scalding names and all, that I am still being too kind to my sub-tribe of Space Cadets. We were as selfish, as fashioned from clay, as anyone else. But something was in the air, something greater than the sum of us that wafted invisibly into our skulls and led us toward spirit flight. On one of my first chemical trips, I marveled at this. What was this invisible, profuse sense, so urgent and true? Where did it come from and how did it unfold? Certainly, there was the music, as laden with drug advocacy as Rap is now laden with violence and death. And there were the stories about the drug revolution in everything from Life Magazine to Time, but they didn’t even come close to explaining the internal nature of the psychedelic movement. In fact, nothing could. It could only be experienced, just as the community it engendered could only be understood in the experience.
I do not wonder at this at all now. I have become aware, as if it were the ground beneath my feet, that humans share a telepathic connection that makes true culture and religion possible. These forms could not exist through external expressions alone. It is equally clear that the rest of nature also talks to us in its way, constantly informing us of our place and duties in the greater world. But back then, I had to wonder, for I had not learned of these things through books or classes or anything else that was handed to me from the wisdom of our culture. How could something so large, this great subtle stream of communication and interconnection, have been undetected by so many in a society filled with bright and motivated people?
The answer became obvious: we, in our collective thought, had chosen to ignore the deep and permanent bonds we all shared, not only with other people and this world, but with all that lay beyond. We were, in my consideration, operating as intelligent monkeys, aware of the bananas in the tree, but unaware, and unconcerned, with why the bananas were there, and why we were there for them. We had taken a wrong path, big time. It was our job, the turned-on children of Mammon, to find the new way.
For the millions of us who used the poorly named “hallucinogens” (as someone once said, “Why would anyone want to hallucinate? What these ‘tools’ are meant to do is to let us see a reality beneath the surface, not phantoms of delirium.”), our tales of the experiences were often like the war stories told to us by our own fathers who fought in the Big One - while they might be interesting, those who were not there could never understand. Still, we can often learn something great from such stories.
Ours, however, are not like our father’s tales in one crucial way: we dare not tell them to our children. Our fathers’ accounts could not enable us to recreate their war, but our stories could cause our children to pop pills and chew peyote. Just as war is dangerous to life and limb, we have learned that the indiscriminant use of mind chemicals is dangerous, even mythically so, to body and soul.
But I can whisper a few of these experiences in the formative pages of this book knowing that, if our children read them at all, they will probably be old enough to know caution and fear and how to weigh the price paid with what may be received. For me, the goods received are what form the remaining bulk of this narrative. The reader may decide if the price was right.
Recalling these experiences, I find it hard to choose a few of the best, but it easy to pick the right time. With a few notable exceptions, the purest and grandest trips occurred in the first two years of use. We can debate why this was so, but others have said the same thing. Maybe it was because the acid was simply better. In those early years, the late sixties and very early seventies, real chemists were still manufacturing LSD. It had only recently been made illegal, and good stuff was still easy to find. Or maybe it was because my earliest experiences were had at a younger age, at a time before adult desires had run their selfish course and reduced much of life’s greater meaning to a ribald joke. But I think most relevant to us all was that this stuff, whether natural or manufactured, was almost certainly intended only as a stimulus, as a jolt to shake us from the world given to us so that we might begin our search for the fork in the road wrongly taken. Further use thus became excess, which was discouraged with increasingly harsh psychic penalties. If this sounds like there was a mind behind all this stuff, so be it. In any event, it became clear that we should take only what had been chosen for us, and leave the rest alone.
For me, it is now obvious that the anointed spirit had mandated only about five or six of my trips. Of those, I believe that the following four have had the greatest relevance.
The first of these was not The First, although that was extraordinary too, for on my initiation, a bolt of lightning raced from the base of my spine to explode in a flash of light in my brain, literally knocking me off my feet. That, I have learned, was the release of kundalini, our primary (psychic) energy source that is normally stored safely in the lower spinal chakra to be doled out slowly for ordinary use. It is strong stuff, and I was very lucky to recover completely. No, this first tale is less theatrical but more instructional. It took place on a cold winter’s day, when most trips seemed to have been (substances were easier to buy while school was in session), and my friend Dave and I had just passed the peak that is common to acid, the point at which fear and ego dissolve in a pure rush of psychic power. It is at the peak when one realizes that the personality is a thin veneer, and that just beneath lie all one’s insecurities, which overlay our primal animal self, which overlays the real depth, the source of life and creation and timelessness that we all carry within. The “just after” time is the best, the calm after the storm when one can safely talk of the profound intensity that has just been, thanks to God, survived, and of the particular truths revealed.
We had come from the woods and fields where we always had these voyages, away from houses and people that can rush around in twisting swirls that pull one into panic, and had emerged on a small country road in the brightness of cold arctic air and a brilliant setting sun. We had not thought of our bodies for a few hours, and now our hands were so numb they could barely roll cigarettes or light a match. I had the bloom of revelation upon me, and talked without pause in a spiral of logic that led to the one shining revelation:
“….and so the ego, the self, is an acknowledged liar, intent only on keeping its position as reality, when it knows it’s not, so it will do anything it can, through fear and through promises of pleasure and power, to have the self deny what IS the truth, our eternal God-nature, our union with the universe. So THEY (the establishment or grownup world) are the servants of this liar, THEY must outlaw drugs, must outlaw anything that exposes the lie, must train us to be liars until we can no longer see the truth and, in our fear, even though we know underneath there is that something else, we will become one of THEM.” And so, in a tumble of words, a great truth exposed itself: that what we were doing was pure, noble, and spiritually ordained; that we were knights of a bold new order who had to fight against the vast inertia of the old gray order, of THEM. What THEY were doing was the work, essentially, of Satan, keeping up The Lie at all costs by throwing people into prison, destroying the environment, perpetuating war, and keeping us from our sanctified destiny. We had found clarity in the shadow of the old social structure, and in it a direction for the new world, all at the age of fifteen.
The second trip was, again, on a cold and bright winter’s day. Dave and I and our friend Jim had heard that a protest was being organized that Saturday afternoon at the New Haven courthouse to protest the trial of Huey Newton, a member of the Black Panther Party who was accused of being an accomplice in the torture and murder of FBI informant Alex Rackley. We happily got ready for the big event by donning our armor against the cold, our trusty winter coats that I still think of with great affection, and stood at the station waiting for the noon train. We did a “tab” each of orange sunshine (heavy-duty bootleg acid) and washed it down at the water fountain. By the time we arrived in the city, we were already flying, and by the time we got to the Green near the courthouse, we were closing in on the peak. Some three blocks away, the crowd was already testy, waving “down with Amerika” signs, screaming obscenities at the “pigs” who were swirling about on their horses, batons raised, shiny black boots dimly reflecting the twisted faces of hate and rage of the protestors. We could feel the danger, the bad vibes, flowing through the crowd that were so intense that it was as if the assembled were becoming one big, evil beast, but we had to keep going and get to the courthouse. We were no longer doing this for fun: we simply were compelled to see the vortex, the heart of the beast. Many others were as transfixed as we were, and we joined in a crushing surge that could not be stopped.
The street before the courthouse was mobbed, packed so densely it could explode simply through fusion. Cops with guns and cameras had positioned themselves on the roof, cops with batons stood on the courthouse steps, and the cavalry continued to break up the crowd density, to keep the explosion from happening. Then I saw it, right next to me: a hand cupping a brick. I saw the head belonging to the hand, the sallow, pockmarked face, the long greasy black hair, the dark eyes gleaming with pure malice. He seemed not at all like the peace protestor I had expected, but like a thug, a criminal in his milieu, using the unrest and anger of the crowd for his own personal evil. I knew what would happen next and started to move against the tide, back toward the Green. My friends must have seen it too, for they moved along with me without a word, if a word could be heard. The chanting, “Free Huey! Free Huey!” became louder, faster, faster and louder when, boom! The first brick hit a courthouse window, then, crash! Another, then another, then they started hurling them at the police on the steps, then at the horsemen, who now all moved with a vicious and angry speed, boom! crack!, batons beating, cops bent low and hard, hitting for keeps, bloody faces appearing for an instant, then falling below the crowd.
Thanks to The Powers of Acid, we were just beyond the panic zone when it all erupted, just able to escape the cordon of police and the desperate and confused crowd who were screaming now, some hurt, others panicked, many crying. We just kept going, going, down toward the harbor and the station, away from the great mass that could now not join us in exodus, passing reinforcements of police on foot, on horse, in cars, all energy focused on ground zero. After we were free of the Green and among the shops and normal people and a few lucky stragglers from the protest, we stopped and laughed, laughed hard like babies at a strange new toy, and tried, once again with frozen fingers, to roll some cigarettes. The peak had left with our physical removal from the mob, and our minds were coming back to interpret our new revelation. It was so obvious.
Violence, hatred, even the politics of the peaceful protest, all this was part of the “face,” the lying world ego. It too was a trap, the same as the establishment, but subtler still: it let you think you were freeing yourself from the trap, thus ensuring your own self-imprisonment within.
We would have been pleased with this new advice, but we were to get a bonus, not unusual for the workings of acid. As we continued our walk to the shore, periodically trying to relight our cigarettes with our clumped hands, a voice came from behind us, calling out to all who would listen: “Buy a Renault.”
We turned to see an old “hipster,” a type once called Beatniks, an older man with a beard and long hair and a sandwich sign that read, “Buy a Renault.” It was clear that he was not part of the mob. His eyes were peaceful, his face calm with a slight smile, his aura one of content detachment. Why, we had to inquire, should we buy a Renault? These cars were, to us, a joke, little tin cans with no power, mere toys compared to our great American highway rockets.
“Glad you asked,” he said with instant enthusiasm. “The Renault is small and lightweight, needing less materials to build, and so may be sold cheap. That extra money could be spent to feed the poor, or provide money for medicine, or any other good thing. It also gets great mileage, thirty miles to the gallon (this was tremendous back then), thus saving billions of gallons of gasoline. This means more money for good things, and less pollution.”
But they’re lousy cars, we answered, trying to contain our laughter. “You’d be run off the highway.”
“But,” he replied unfazed, “they get you from here to there and are cheap to repair and easy too, so you can do it yourself. What we are talking about here is helping mankind and saving the planet from pollution without giving up the modern comforts. You see, it is possible if we all did it. Small is beautiful.”
Small is beautiful, another lesson within a lesson. We can care for mankind, keep the planet livable and maintain a modern world. One should save the world. It is a worthy goal outside oneself. And one could. Just think smaller, be less greedy, in the material things.
And so we said our good-byes and found our train station. His advice was a little too mature for us. In the throes of the greatest revelatory experiences we had ever known, we instead had visions of perfection that came to our minds from the template of Tribal Living. This was the amalgamation of memories from humanity’s long-past memories of life around the flickering of fire, of community at its most basic and profound level, of living close to the earth, of being part of her and breathing with her and knowing her and her great womb nestled in the infinite star-space. The ideas of the Renault Man were meant for our future, for the life he knew we would live, as Americans. They formed a solution that did not reject our culture as evil, but gently turned our way of life into something viable, a culture able to advance by evolution instead of revolution. We would someday understand that, and begin to agree. The alternative was the wretch with the brick.
The third trip I will relate was not like the other two. For one thing, I did this one by myself, swallowing a big lump of a pill with a deep purple crystal in the center, real, hard-to-find organic mescaline. For another, it took place in the summer, smack in the middle of a heat wave, temperatures so high that they raised shimmering mirages from the roads and highways. It was shorts and bare feet weather, no armor, the body straight out in the elements. Lastly, although it did have lessons, their unfolding was more a demonstration of life and power.
It was a fine Saturday afternoon when I gnawed on that giant pill until it was gone, the last bits giving me shivers of nausea. Then I got on my bicycle to take a peaceful ride around the flatter sections of the country roads by our house.
My peace didn’t last very long. The mescaline kicked in strangely, unlike acid, although it was pleasant enough, by giving me a floating feeling and a buzz in the ears like the murmur of thousands of frogs in the spring mating season. I rode around and around a triangle of dirt at an isolated intersection, listening with increasing fascination to the sound, until I lost the sense of myself on the bike for an instant. That instant allowed my perceptual mind to be snatched from my body and suspended some twenty feet in the air so that I could see myself, with perfect clarity, calmly making circles, my body unaware of the mindful presence above it. A look upward made this perceptive mind ascend so rapidly that in a moment my body became a mere speck in the road. Moving faster still, the curve of the Earth came into view, then all of Earth herself, complete and round, and then she too became a speck that disappeared from view as I was hurdled at unbelievable speed into the stars. A spark of fear burst into panic, and with that, bam! My awareness returned to a body that was still riding around the little triangle as if nothing had happened.
Now, I had had an out-of-body experience before as a child when badly hurt, but this time the meaning inherent in the experience became clear. Consciousness can exist outside of the body. Ultimately, awareness itself is not dependent on the physical being. Ultimately, then, immortality, life after death, was not only possible but also likely.
My little flight gave me another insight: this stuff was too strong for the road. It was time to head into the backcountry.
I pedaled like mad in the piercing sun to a path by my house and dropped the bike by the side of the road. The path led me through some dense cedar forest and brush to an overgrazed field where the grass had been chewed down nearly to the soil. Beneath, the cracks of dry earth radiated out from view like an uneven honeycomb. Pausing, a huge surge of energy welled up from my midriff. It was now time to settle in. I took off my sneakers and shirt and sat, cross-legged, on the crackled earth, naked to the elements save for my gym shorts. I took a deep breath and noticed that the earth expanded with my chest. On exhaling, the earth contracted. It had become alive, like the back of a giant lizard, and I was intimately part of it. Its movement revealed its soul, its profound, mute majesty that was as slow and deliberate as eternity, wise beyond words. Above me, the great blue afternoon sky was painted with staccato clouds that looked like the scales of a giant fish. This great sky also breathed with my breath and lent me its soul, as vast as the earth but different, pointing outward from physical nature with an expansive, even playful wisdom, a feathery counterpoint to the somber mass of the earth. The earth and sky moved with me, through me, all being radiating ecstasy.
I sat at the center of the universe. I was god. Not the God, but a god-in-sharing, one of billions of centers of the universe, one of billions of gods, living in only one, now, me. Infinite gratitude surged for the God, humbling and glorifying all at once, filling me with the sheer joy, the marvel, of life. After sitting for some time in reverential bliss, it became time to go. I got up, put my clothes back on, and walked with bounding step to the bike, then rode home with peace and joy.
A wonderful time then followed. I played electric guitar for hours, resonating “OOOMMMM” through the chords, on and on. I had a real talk, a communion of words, with my mother, saying little, nothing unusual, but feeling our connection. I walked outside and perched on a hill to watch the setting of the sun and feel the cooling of the day and fell into humble reverence, thanking God for life, for Now. Later in bed, sleep came quickly, and the next day was good too, and gratefully normal. I had lived through a presentation of pure being, a “be here now” demonstration of the heaven that we all have, that was meant for us if we could see it, on Earth. It was obvious that we were not destined for suffering or death or misery, that we made those things ourselves. God was, indeed, just and loving, a radiant mystery in everything that could be seen and felt by those with clear hearts and eyes. It was no one’s fault but our own that we had become clouded by an original sin made from our collective will. It was obvious to me that this could all be amended, not in some distant future, but now. I knew that I would find The Way.
I was soon to find that The Way was not a walk in the park.
A respected guru once gave some advice regarding the personal journeys that many have had in their search for truth through meditation. “At first,” he said, “it may appear easy. For many, their first months of meditation are filled with rapture and revelation. This is the Spirit’s way of getting you hooked, giving you that initial shot that hopefully will take you through the dry times, and these come for everyone. You see, the journey to truth has to weave through your entire being, rooting out bad ideas or philosophies or karma or experiences before it can truly bring you to lasting wisdom. After those first thrills it may take years, or even decades of work to achieve them again. But this time they will be a part of you, not just fleeting sparks.”
These words might have been comforting in the years to come, for events would prove that a mountain of karma lay before me. So they would prove for us all.
The last trip I will recount was in the summer of ’69, the time of Woodstock, the public apex of the Aquarian Age of Consciousness. It was a great summer, for it seemed inevitable that the New Beginning was here, unstoppable through sheer numbers. We all knew that Woodstock was going to be something special, and all the trippers from my area who could, jumped into a vehicle and headed to the New York Freeway. My friends and I were too young to drive, and, as the older kids would have nothing to do with us, we had to celebrate in our own way. While the mud puddles grew larger up in Woodstock, Dave and I did some acid on a bright evening, and as the peak neared and the stars appeared, we lay on our backs in a small clearing in some woods to watch the constellations twirl and dance for our simmering minds. Suddenly, the jumble of lights took on shape and color, illuminating nearly the entire sky with a huge, sparkling American Flag. A shower of meteors rained around it like fireworks from a vast space station.
After a few moments of awed disbelief, I stuttered, “Do you see what I see?”
“You mean that big American Flag? Yup.”
Group visions: another lesson on the true reality of Mind. I think our Woodstock was better than the big kids’.
This, however, was not to be the point. What happened after Woodstock, the slide of an entire generation into sensory titillation and selfish gratification, was writ small in my own devolution. For one thing, with age came elevation to the varsity leagues and senior status. It was then that some of the nastier traits of young manhood were nourished, as the jock arrogance ran riot with the help of another tool: the driver’s license. The car gave us the place to have jock sex and drink jock beer that we could buy with our doctored new credentials. Sweat, sex, and beer: the combination was too powerful to overcome, too elemental, and just plain too much fun to resist. The once-sacred “entheogens” (bringers of the inner gods; tripping drugs), were used as mere backdrops to vacation binges.
Things were changing for everybody. Drug use quickly sank to its lowest common denominator, becoming a way not for spiritual illumination, but for getting fucked-up and making money. The quality suffered and the providers, once spacey hippies with a mission, now became skanky, longhaired gangsters with guns. It would have been easy to predict, then, the rise of the cocaine culture a few years later, one that embodied all the worst aspects of the drug world: instant gratification, money, and crime. The dark side of our society’s karma became deeply entrenched in the world of youthful drug use. The light soon became hard to find.
In hindsight, this collapse seems to have been not only inevitable, but also inscrutable. It is obvious to me that a greater power was at work at that time, and that the explosion of mind-expanding drugs was a major part of this divine plan. Although LSD had only recently become available, other equally powerful natural entheogens had been around since the beginning of humankind. Why, if not for some divine plan deemed necessary, did their use in the modern era become so prevalent? I believe the Plan also knew that the only large group that could be recruited for this scary work would be the adolescents and young adults, too healthy and naïve to understand the deep and frightening nature of the task that they were undertaking. This is the inscrutable part. The young did not have the maturity and the intellectual tools to adequately understand their own experiences. They were bound to throw caution to the wind and cause new fractures in society, ones that we are still dealing with today.
But I think Spirit knew all this. For one thing, not only had the adults of our time not been raised with the attitude necessary for this adventure, they also no longer had the openness and blind fearlessness that is the trait of the young. It simply had to be the kids who would carry out this first great phase of whatever new pattern was being woven.
For another, the mess that was to come was, and is, in concordance with Natural Law. After the hook of a better way was firmly implanted, we all had to swim through the bad stuff in our background, starting at the individual level and returning through our long, collective unconscious back to Original Sin. There could be no other way.
All that being said, it should come as no surprise that I became imbued with all manner of idiocies. Some of these led to bad decisions that had grave consequences. The worst probably was my choice of college.
Available now at Amazon in e-print and hard copy.
Enter the New Age.
Dream Weaver. Chapt. 1
Chapter One Gotta Revolution!
It is trite, even comical now to say that it is the beginning or end of an era, for an “era” now is counted as less than the four-year duration of a high school class, with dress and music and ideologies shifting more often than presidential tenures. But, the early 1970s were, really, the end of the type of era that may be counted in generations or even life spans. As other chroniclers of the American Dream will tell you, it was an era of the Big Boot, Metal Heft, Warriors and front lines, monolithic paradigms, and big, big cars. The car was our paradigm in steel, the big boot and monolith of American will, a heavy 442 cubic inch gas-powered rocket that shot us out across new and underused interstates at 130 miles per hour, spitting out an attitude of invincibility for millions of teenagers who found in the front seat the god of might, and in the back, the goddess of night. Big, strong union men with small educations and big paychecks built them for big, eternally dominant corporations who rode the government like their costumers rode their product. Right was white, was might, was clear as chlorinated tap water, pointed with destiny toward progress from small to big to bigger and bigger still. The life force could be manufactured in a test tube, and turned with unerring knowledge into control and money, endless horizons of prosperity for anyone fortunate to be American or of the American Way.
As we all know, the Big Boots stumbled, fell in their tireless march, right then in that time, tripped up by presidential disgrace, a lost war, an oil embargo and, worst of all, the fifth column. Millions of Baby Boomers were coddled with health and wealth in universities that preached the seditious scree of corrupt Europe, the neo-Marxisms, revisionisms, and relativisms that engendered hatred for the Great Way by turning adolescent loneliness and inadequacy into an internalized weapon like ground glass in the gut of a great and powerful giant. The city streets shook with violent revolution, Pigs versus Pimples, The Brothers versus The White Man, Womyn versus man’s Men. For so many of us young, semi-educated, self-righteous kids, it was the beginning of a new power, a new, more just order, and, more than anything, the beginning of a new era where we could do as we pleased, where the insane could run the asylum.
For others, like myself, it was indeed the time of death for the old and birth of something new and greater. But we did not snatch at the laces of the Boot, we did not march for Bobby Seale or throw bricks through courthouse windows or blow up science buildings. We did not even give more than a nod to the chain-smoking intellectuals whose anger at The System made their gaunt and pale souls quiver with fury at their own good fortune of never having to lift more than a pile of term papers for a living.
We just wanted to leave and start over.
Whether in a commune or a cosmic bus, we wanted to fly above the fray, feel the rush of the great wind that blew from the heavens as a force of redemption, a calling for The New Age that would reveal magic and myth and great mysteries. We were not angry adolescents venting against stern fathers and uncomprehending mothers. We were children, babies, life forms yet unborn who would not leave the womb. Our vehicles were not big steely steeds from Detroit, but subtle wings from the ether that fluttered from the great Third Eye of Buddha or the paradoxical poetry of a koan. Our fuel was chemical or forbidden nature herself, pot, acid, mushrooms, peyote, and we flew far faster than 130 miles per hour and far higher than the Gemini rockets. We were, finally, fools, every one of us, saved and preserved for future generations by a god that takes pity on dimwits and little children. This god left us with little sparks that still cry for a new breeze to kindle the flame, little stories in a big anthology that beg to be heard. This is my part of it.
I know, scalding names and all, that I am still being too kind to my sub-tribe of Space Cadets. We were as selfish, as fashioned from clay, as anyone else. But something was in the air, something greater than the sum of us that wafted invisibly into our skulls and led us toward spirit flight. On one of my first chemical trips, I marveled at this. What was this invisible, profuse sense, so urgent and true? Where did it come from and how did it unfold? Certainly, there was the music, as laden with drug advocacy as Rap is now laden with violence and death. And there were the stories about the drug revolution in everything from Life Magazine to Time, but they didn’t even come close to explaining the internal nature of the psychedelic movement. In fact, nothing could. It could only be experienced, just as the community it engendered could only be understood in the experience.
I do not wonder at this at all now. I have become aware, as if it were the ground beneath my feet, that humans share a telepathic connection that makes true culture and religion possible. These forms could not exist through external expressions alone. It is equally clear that the rest of nature also talks to us in its way, constantly informing us of our place and duties in the greater world. But back then, I had to wonder, for I had not learned of these things through books or classes or anything else that was handed to me from the wisdom of our culture. How could something so large, this great subtle stream of communication and interconnection, have been undetected by so many in a society filled with bright and motivated people?
The answer became obvious: we, in our collective thought, had chosen to ignore the deep and permanent bonds we all shared, not only with other people and this world, but with all that lay beyond. We were, in my consideration, operating as intelligent monkeys, aware of the bananas in the tree, but unaware, and unconcerned, with why the bananas were there, and why we were there for them. We had taken a wrong path, big time. It was our job, the turned-on children of Mammon, to find the new way.
For the millions of us who used the poorly named “hallucinogens” (as someone once said, “Why would anyone want to hallucinate? What these ‘tools’ are meant to do is to let us see a reality beneath the surface, not phantoms of delirium.”), our tales of the experiences were often like the war stories told to us by our own fathers who fought in the Big One - while they might be interesting, those who were not there could never understand. Still, we can often learn something great from such stories.
Ours, however, are not like our father’s tales in one crucial way: we dare not tell them to our children. Our fathers’ accounts could not enable us to recreate their war, but our stories could cause our children to pop pills and chew peyote. Just as war is dangerous to life and limb, we have learned that the indiscriminant use of mind chemicals is dangerous, even mythically so, to body and soul.
But I can whisper a few of these experiences in the formative pages of this book knowing that, if our children read them at all, they will probably be old enough to know caution and fear and how to weigh the price paid with what may be received. For me, the goods received are what form the remaining bulk of this narrative. The reader may decide if the price was right.
Recalling these experiences, I find it hard to choose a few of the best, but it easy to pick the right time. With a few notable exceptions, the purest and grandest trips occurred in the first two years of use. We can debate why this was so, but others have said the same thing. Maybe it was because the acid was simply better. In those early years, the late sixties and very early seventies, real chemists were still manufacturing LSD. It had only recently been made illegal, and good stuff was still easy to find. Or maybe it was because my earliest experiences were had at a younger age, at a time before adult desires had run their selfish course and reduced much of life’s greater meaning to a ribald joke. But I think most relevant to us all was that this stuff, whether natural or manufactured, was almost certainly intended only as a stimulus, as a jolt to shake us from the world given to us so that we might begin our search for the fork in the road wrongly taken. Further use thus became excess, which was discouraged with increasingly harsh psychic penalties. If this sounds like there was a mind behind all this stuff, so be it. In any event, it became clear that we should take only what had been chosen for us, and leave the rest alone.
For me, it is now obvious that the anointed spirit had mandated only about five or six of my trips. Of those, I believe that the following four have had the greatest relevance.
The first of these was not The First, although that was extraordinary too, for on my initiation, a bolt of lightning raced from the base of my spine to explode in a flash of light in my brain, literally knocking me off my feet. That, I have learned, was the release of kundalini, our primary (psychic) energy source that is normally stored safely in the lower spinal chakra to be doled out slowly for ordinary use. It is strong stuff, and I was very lucky to recover completely. No, this first tale is less theatrical but more instructional. It took place on a cold winter’s day, when most trips seemed to have been (substances were easier to buy while school was in session), and my friend Dave and I had just passed the peak that is common to acid, the point at which fear and ego dissolve in a pure rush of psychic power. It is at the peak when one realizes that the personality is a thin veneer, and that just beneath lie all one’s insecurities, which overlay our primal animal self, which overlays the real depth, the source of life and creation and timelessness that we all carry within. The “just after” time is the best, the calm after the storm when one can safely talk of the profound intensity that has just been, thanks to God, survived, and of the particular truths revealed.
We had come from the woods and fields where we always had these voyages, away from houses and people that can rush around in twisting swirls that pull one into panic, and had emerged on a small country road in the brightness of cold arctic air and a brilliant setting sun. We had not thought of our bodies for a few hours, and now our hands were so numb they could barely roll cigarettes or light a match. I had the bloom of revelation upon me, and talked without pause in a spiral of logic that led to the one shining revelation:
“….and so the ego, the self, is an acknowledged liar, intent only on keeping its position as reality, when it knows it’s not, so it will do anything it can, through fear and through promises of pleasure and power, to have the self deny what IS the truth, our eternal God-nature, our union with the universe. So THEY (the establishment or grownup world) are the servants of this liar, THEY must outlaw drugs, must outlaw anything that exposes the lie, must train us to be liars until we can no longer see the truth and, in our fear, even though we know underneath there is that something else, we will become one of THEM.” And so, in a tumble of words, a great truth exposed itself: that what we were doing was pure, noble, and spiritually ordained; that we were knights of a bold new order who had to fight against the vast inertia of the old gray order, of THEM. What THEY were doing was the work, essentially, of Satan, keeping up The Lie at all costs by throwing people into prison, destroying the environment, perpetuating war, and keeping us from our sanctified destiny. We had found clarity in the shadow of the old social structure, and in it a direction for the new world, all at the age of fifteen.
The second trip was, again, on a cold and bright winter’s day. Dave and I and our friend Jim had heard that a protest was being organized that Saturday afternoon at the New Haven courthouse to protest the trial of Huey Newton, a member of the Black Panther Party who was accused of being an accomplice in the torture and murder of FBI informant Alex Rackley. We happily got ready for the big event by donning our armor against the cold, our trusty winter coats that I still think of with great affection, and stood at the station waiting for the noon train. We did a “tab” each of orange sunshine (heavy-duty bootleg acid) and washed it down at the water fountain. By the time we arrived in the city, we were already flying, and by the time we got to the Green near the courthouse, we were closing in on the peak. Some three blocks away, the crowd was already testy, waving “down with Amerika” signs, screaming obscenities at the “pigs” who were swirling about on their horses, batons raised, shiny black boots dimly reflecting the twisted faces of hate and rage of the protestors. We could feel the danger, the bad vibes, flowing through the crowd that were so intense that it was as if the assembled were becoming one big, evil beast, but we had to keep going and get to the courthouse. We were no longer doing this for fun: we simply were compelled to see the vortex, the heart of the beast. Many others were as transfixed as we were, and we joined in a crushing surge that could not be stopped.
The street before the courthouse was mobbed, packed so densely it could explode simply through fusion. Cops with guns and cameras had positioned themselves on the roof, cops with batons stood on the courthouse steps, and the cavalry continued to break up the crowd density, to keep the explosion from happening. Then I saw it, right next to me: a hand cupping a brick. I saw the head belonging to the hand, the sallow, pockmarked face, the long greasy black hair, the dark eyes gleaming with pure malice. He seemed not at all like the peace protestor I had expected, but like a thug, a criminal in his milieu, using the unrest and anger of the crowd for his own personal evil. I knew what would happen next and started to move against the tide, back toward the Green. My friends must have seen it too, for they moved along with me without a word, if a word could be heard. The chanting, “Free Huey! Free Huey!” became louder, faster, faster and louder when, boom! The first brick hit a courthouse window, then, crash! Another, then another, then they started hurling them at the police on the steps, then at the horsemen, who now all moved with a vicious and angry speed, boom! crack!, batons beating, cops bent low and hard, hitting for keeps, bloody faces appearing for an instant, then falling below the crowd.
Thanks to The Powers of Acid, we were just beyond the panic zone when it all erupted, just able to escape the cordon of police and the desperate and confused crowd who were screaming now, some hurt, others panicked, many crying. We just kept going, going, down toward the harbor and the station, away from the great mass that could now not join us in exodus, passing reinforcements of police on foot, on horse, in cars, all energy focused on ground zero. After we were free of the Green and among the shops and normal people and a few lucky stragglers from the protest, we stopped and laughed, laughed hard like babies at a strange new toy, and tried, once again with frozen fingers, to roll some cigarettes. The peak had left with our physical removal from the mob, and our minds were coming back to interpret our new revelation. It was so obvious.
Violence, hatred, even the politics of the peaceful protest, all this was part of the “face,” the lying world ego. It too was a trap, the same as the establishment, but subtler still: it let you think you were freeing yourself from the trap, thus ensuring your own self-imprisonment within.
We would have been pleased with this new advice, but we were to get a bonus, not unusual for the workings of acid. As we continued our walk to the shore, periodically trying to relight our cigarettes with our clumped hands, a voice came from behind us, calling out to all who would listen: “Buy a Renault.”
We turned to see an old “hipster,” a type once called Beatniks, an older man with a beard and long hair and a sandwich sign that read, “Buy a Renault.” It was clear that he was not part of the mob. His eyes were peaceful, his face calm with a slight smile, his aura one of content detachment. Why, we had to inquire, should we buy a Renault? These cars were, to us, a joke, little tin cans with no power, mere toys compared to our great American highway rockets.
“Glad you asked,” he said with instant enthusiasm. “The Renault is small and lightweight, needing less materials to build, and so may be sold cheap. That extra money could be spent to feed the poor, or provide money for medicine, or any other good thing. It also gets great mileage, thirty miles to the gallon (this was tremendous back then), thus saving billions of gallons of gasoline. This means more money for good things, and less pollution.”
But they’re lousy cars, we answered, trying to contain our laughter. “You’d be run off the highway.”
“But,” he replied unfazed, “they get you from here to there and are cheap to repair and easy too, so you can do it yourself. What we are talking about here is helping mankind and saving the planet from pollution without giving up the modern comforts. You see, it is possible if we all did it. Small is beautiful.”
Small is beautiful, another lesson within a lesson. We can care for mankind, keep the planet livable and maintain a modern world. One should save the world. It is a worthy goal outside oneself. And one could. Just think smaller, be less greedy, in the material things.
And so we said our good-byes and found our train station. His advice was a little too mature for us. In the throes of the greatest revelatory experiences we had ever known, we instead had visions of perfection that came to our minds from the template of Tribal Living. This was the amalgamation of memories from humanity’s long-past memories of life around the flickering of fire, of community at its most basic and profound level, of living close to the earth, of being part of her and breathing with her and knowing her and her great womb nestled in the infinite star-space. The ideas of the Renault Man were meant for our future, for the life he knew we would live, as Americans. They formed a solution that did not reject our culture as evil, but gently turned our way of life into something viable, a culture able to advance by evolution instead of revolution. We would someday understand that, and begin to agree. The alternative was the wretch with the brick.
The third trip I will relate was not like the other two. For one thing, I did this one by myself, swallowing a big lump of a pill with a deep purple crystal in the center, real, hard-to-find organic mescaline. For another, it took place in the summer, smack in the middle of a heat wave, temperatures so high that they raised shimmering mirages from the roads and highways. It was shorts and bare feet weather, no armor, the body straight out in the elements. Lastly, although it did have lessons, their unfolding was more a demonstration of life and power.
It was a fine Saturday afternoon when I gnawed on that giant pill until it was gone, the last bits giving me shivers of nausea. Then I got on my bicycle to take a peaceful ride around the flatter sections of the country roads by our house.
My peace didn’t last very long. The mescaline kicked in strangely, unlike acid, although it was pleasant enough, by giving me a floating feeling and a buzz in the ears like the murmur of thousands of frogs in the spring mating season. I rode around and around a triangle of dirt at an isolated intersection, listening with increasing fascination to the sound, until I lost the sense of myself on the bike for an instant. That instant allowed my perceptual mind to be snatched from my body and suspended some twenty feet in the air so that I could see myself, with perfect clarity, calmly making circles, my body unaware of the mindful presence above it. A look upward made this perceptive mind ascend so rapidly that in a moment my body became a mere speck in the road. Moving faster still, the curve of the Earth came into view, then all of Earth herself, complete and round, and then she too became a speck that disappeared from view as I was hurdled at unbelievable speed into the stars. A spark of fear burst into panic, and with that, bam! My awareness returned to a body that was still riding around the little triangle as if nothing had happened.
Now, I had had an out-of-body experience before as a child when badly hurt, but this time the meaning inherent in the experience became clear. Consciousness can exist outside of the body. Ultimately, awareness itself is not dependent on the physical being. Ultimately, then, immortality, life after death, was not only possible but also likely.
My little flight gave me another insight: this stuff was too strong for the road. It was time to head into the backcountry.
I pedaled like mad in the piercing sun to a path by my house and dropped the bike by the side of the road. The path led me through some dense cedar forest and brush to an overgrazed field where the grass had been chewed down nearly to the soil. Beneath, the cracks of dry earth radiated out from view like an uneven honeycomb. Pausing, a huge surge of energy welled up from my midriff. It was now time to settle in. I took off my sneakers and shirt and sat, cross-legged, on the crackled earth, naked to the elements save for my gym shorts. I took a deep breath and noticed that the earth expanded with my chest. On exhaling, the earth contracted. It had become alive, like the back of a giant lizard, and I was intimately part of it. Its movement revealed its soul, its profound, mute majesty that was as slow and deliberate as eternity, wise beyond words. Above me, the great blue afternoon sky was painted with staccato clouds that looked like the scales of a giant fish. This great sky also breathed with my breath and lent me its soul, as vast as the earth but different, pointing outward from physical nature with an expansive, even playful wisdom, a feathery counterpoint to the somber mass of the earth. The earth and sky moved with me, through me, all being radiating ecstasy.
I sat at the center of the universe. I was god. Not the God, but a god-in-sharing, one of billions of centers of the universe, one of billions of gods, living in only one, now, me. Infinite gratitude surged for the God, humbling and glorifying all at once, filling me with the sheer joy, the marvel, of life. After sitting for some time in reverential bliss, it became time to go. I got up, put my clothes back on, and walked with bounding step to the bike, then rode home with peace and joy.
A wonderful time then followed. I played electric guitar for hours, resonating “OOOMMMM” through the chords, on and on. I had a real talk, a communion of words, with my mother, saying little, nothing unusual, but feeling our connection. I walked outside and perched on a hill to watch the setting of the sun and feel the cooling of the day and fell into humble reverence, thanking God for life, for Now. Later in bed, sleep came quickly, and the next day was good too, and gratefully normal. I had lived through a presentation of pure being, a “be here now” demonstration of the heaven that we all have, that was meant for us if we could see it, on Earth. It was obvious that we were not destined for suffering or death or misery, that we made those things ourselves. God was, indeed, just and loving, a radiant mystery in everything that could be seen and felt by those with clear hearts and eyes. It was no one’s fault but our own that we had become clouded by an original sin made from our collective will. It was obvious to me that this could all be amended, not in some distant future, but now. I knew that I would find The Way.
I was soon to find that The Way was not a walk in the park.
A respected guru once gave some advice regarding the personal journeys that many have had in their search for truth through meditation. “At first,” he said, “it may appear easy. For many, their first months of meditation are filled with rapture and revelation. This is the Spirit’s way of getting you hooked, giving you that initial shot that hopefully will take you through the dry times, and these come for everyone. You see, the journey to truth has to weave through your entire being, rooting out bad ideas or philosophies or karma or experiences before it can truly bring you to lasting wisdom. After those first thrills it may take years, or even decades of work to achieve them again. But this time they will be a part of you, not just fleeting sparks.”
These words might have been comforting in the years to come, for events would prove that a mountain of karma lay before me. So they would prove for us all.
The last trip I will recount was in the summer of ’69, the time of Woodstock, the public apex of the Aquarian Age of Consciousness. It was a great summer, for it seemed inevitable that the New Beginning was here, unstoppable through sheer numbers. We all knew that Woodstock was going to be something special, and all the trippers from my area who could, jumped into a vehicle and headed to the New York Freeway. My friends and I were too young to drive, and, as the older kids would have nothing to do with us, we had to celebrate in our own way. While the mud puddles grew larger up in Woodstock, Dave and I did some acid on a bright evening, and as the peak neared and the stars appeared, we lay on our backs in a small clearing in some woods to watch the constellations twirl and dance for our simmering minds. Suddenly, the jumble of lights took on shape and color, illuminating nearly the entire sky with a huge, sparkling American Flag. A shower of meteors rained around it like fireworks from a vast space station.
After a few moments of awed disbelief, I stuttered, “Do you see what I see?”
“You mean that big American Flag? Yup.”
Group visions: another lesson on the true reality of Mind. I think our Woodstock was better than the big kids’.
This, however, was not to be the point. What happened after Woodstock, the slide of an entire generation into sensory titillation and selfish gratification, was writ small in my own devolution. For one thing, with age came elevation to the varsity leagues and senior status. It was then that some of the nastier traits of young manhood were nourished, as the jock arrogance ran riot with the help of another tool: the driver’s license. The car gave us the place to have jock sex and drink jock beer that we could buy with our doctored new credentials. Sweat, sex, and beer: the combination was too powerful to overcome, too elemental, and just plain too much fun to resist. The once-sacred “entheogens” (bringers of the inner gods; tripping drugs), were used as mere backdrops to vacation binges.
Things were changing for everybody. Drug use quickly sank to its lowest common denominator, becoming a way not for spiritual illumination, but for getting fucked-up and making money. The quality suffered and the providers, once spacey hippies with a mission, now became skanky, longhaired gangsters with guns. It would have been easy to predict, then, the rise of the cocaine culture a few years later, one that embodied all the worst aspects of the drug world: instant gratification, money, and crime. The dark side of our society’s karma became deeply entrenched in the world of youthful drug use. The light soon became hard to find.
In hindsight, this collapse seems to have been not only inevitable, but also inscrutable. It is obvious to me that a greater power was at work at that time, and that the explosion of mind-expanding drugs was a major part of this divine plan. Although LSD had only recently become available, other equally powerful natural entheogens had been around since the beginning of humankind. Why, if not for some divine plan deemed necessary, did their use in the modern era become so prevalent? I believe the Plan also knew that the only large group that could be recruited for this scary work would be the adolescents and young adults, too healthy and naïve to understand the deep and frightening nature of the task that they were undertaking. This is the inscrutable part. The young did not have the maturity and the intellectual tools to adequately understand their own experiences. They were bound to throw caution to the wind and cause new fractures in society, ones that we are still dealing with today.
But I think Spirit knew all this. For one thing, not only had the adults of our time not been raised with the attitude necessary for this adventure, they also no longer had the openness and blind fearlessness that is the trait of the young. It simply had to be the kids who would carry out this first great phase of whatever new pattern was being woven.
For another, the mess that was to come was, and is, in concordance with Natural Law. After the hook of a better way was firmly implanted, we all had to swim through the bad stuff in our background, starting at the individual level and returning through our long, collective unconscious back to Original Sin. There could be no other way.
All that being said, it should come as no surprise that I became imbued with all manner of idiocies. Some of these led to bad decisions that had grave consequences. The worst probably was my choice of college.