I have written a lot about acid. I have always tried to make it clear that it wasn’t just the acid, that it was more how I had used it.

Although I have shared mostly about my own use, about how and why I had used it, I have sometimes made suggestions for its use by others. I have always thought that no one should ever consider doing it unless they were already aware of whom they were. I have always recommended psychotherapy as a precursor to tripping. Anyone trying it without self-knowledge will probably fuck up, as so many did in the sixties.
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Acid is definitely a medicine. I have experienced many positive and healing effects from using acid, such as direct physical healing of both pneumonia and sciatica.

Once, when I had pneumonia, instead of going to the doctor here in town, I backpacked into Rocky Mountain National Park with Aspen and did high dose acid there. I came down from the trip and the mountain feeling great and without the pneumonia.

Another time, I had been suffering grievously from sciatica for over three months before I finally got up my nerve to do acid. During the trip, I cried for hours, but, by its end, the pain had lessened dramatically, and I could walk again.
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I have also shared some of my magical acid experiences and what I have learned from them. Mostly I have learned that synchronicity and other magical psychic phenomenon are real and that God speaks to all of us always if we but listen.

My goal in sharing all this has been to stimulate and renew interest in acid for its more important aspects – those of healing and leading us back to Spirit. The world needs wise users of acid now more than ever. Somebody has to speak up and suggest this.

These days I’m not doing acid. I have gained so much from its use that I no longer need to use as I have in the past.

Years ago I was studying to be a Rolfer. One morning, during my first week of training, I woke up to go to the class. I didn’t notice that anything was unusual until I got in my van. Then I felt as if I were doing high dose acid. In spite of this, I continued on to the class, mostly because I wanted help from the folks there. Somehow the work that we had been doing in the class had triggered something powerful and important in me.

In the class, we had been focused on the chest, and mine had a deep history, much of which I was just beginning to understand. I had had pneumonia as a little boy, but I hadn’t been aware that I was still carrying such powerful feelings from that time.

When I came into the class that morning, everyone knew immediately that something was going on with me. When one of the class leaders began working on my chest, I suddenly burst into terrified sobbing. I felt a great sadness and a feeling of being completely alone. I must have been carrying all these feelings in the muscles and underlying fascia of my chest for years! Finally the teacher suggested that I go home and rest for the day, staying with the feelings and seeing what came up.

On my way home, I remember stopping once at an intersection and getting out of my car. I was too high to drive and wanted to walk. But I didn’t want to leave my car there, so I got back in and somehow managed to drive the rest of the way home.

When I finally did arrive home, I felt so lonely, and the sadness was overwhelming. So I went to work. I spent the next ten hours working on my head, examining my feelings for all the significant people in my life. I soon realized that all my relationships had been skewed by these repressed feelings of sadness and loneliness that had been locked up in my chest muscles for all these years.

Eventually I did return to ordinary reality. I had changed though. I was more conscious of who I was and what I really felt. I was certainly more loving and kind. The experience had been a gift from Spirit, offered and accepted without the use of acid.

Once, while living in Berkeley in the early seventies, I returned from a camping trip in the High Sierras, bringing home spiritual wisdom to share. Unlike Moses, however, I didn’t write it all down on a stone tablet. Instead I wrote in on the bathroom wall, right next to the toilet paper roll. I figured everyone would see it there.

What I wrote was simple and easy – “the higher you are, the higher you get.” I had just been tripping in the mountains, at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras, and I had come to realize that I had been much higher there than I had ever been down in the city.

I figured then that it was the altitude – that if I took off from seven thousand feet, I could fly higher with acid than if I started down at sea level. It might also have helped that most people, with their city vibes, lived below seven thousand feet, making it much easier for me to fly free and undistracted in the high mountains.

I thought of the Hopis up on their lonely mesas, of all the high folks living in all the high mountains of the world. I thought especially of the Tibetans living at the very top of the world. I figured that they knew the secret too – that if you wanted to connect to Spirit, you had to start out as high as you could get.

Time often puts new twists upon old sayings. New meanings gradually emerge. Now I see that it’s not just the higher altitude or the lack of nearby and unconscious people. Now I see that the elevation and quality of my own everyday consciousness is the single most important factor regarding how high I can fly on acid.

If I am centered and conscious before I trip, I will be able to follow acid’s energy to the center of my being. Then, if I am already as conscious as I can be; and if, in addition, I’m in the high mountains while I’m doing the acid, I can get very high. “The higher you are, the higher you get.” It is very important for each and every one of us, especially those of us who are trippers and shamans, to work on consciousness all the time.

Tripping is one of those words from the acid 60’s that’s more than just a word. It’s a teaching. It suggests more than it signifies. It suggests a way of organizing the experience of doing acid. It conveys the notion of traveling, of taking a trip. It prepares the individual for a journey out of mind and ego and into extraordinary realms of experience.

The domains usually traveled while doing acid are the non-ego reaches of consciousness. We can live again in the still living past. We can relive all of our life, including our birth and even experiences from before our birth, including even the experiences of our past lives. We can be another being. We can hear, in the deep woods, complete symphonies in the air, clearly. We can communicate across vast reaches of time and space and even visit far galaxies. (See LSD Psychotherapy by Stan Grof and the many other books that document such experiences.)

When I first heard the word “tripping,” and was just beginning to use acid, I rejected its use. Because of the Grateful Dead and their followers, I associated tripping with partying and not being serious. But over the years, as I have done more acid, I’ve come to see that Spirit is to be found in the strangest places, and that I do have to trip to get there.

Because of this understanding, I have become a wanderer and have incorporated this sense of tripping into every aspect of my life. I write as a tripper. I have an idea, maybe a title, but that’s usually it. I just start tripping on down the page, letting my thoughts wander and trust that they’ll come together and make a relevant point by the bottom. I live as a tripper too. I have routines, but they are minimal and flexible. When I wake, I rarely know what I’ll be doing during the day. I have no long-range plans either, except to take care of myself and my family, to always be loving and kind, and to die well when my time comes.

I had a vision once of us all riding our Spaceship Earth through a far-reaching yet invisible, cosmic cloud of darkness, one that has kept the Spiritual Light of the universe from ever reaching us in its true brilliance, leaving us only partly illuminated. Because of this, most of us have come to identify with our own inner darkness, with our own petty fears and other negativities.

However, it has always been possible for some of us to maintain our Spiritual Light, even while passing through this great galactic darkness. It has even been possible for some of us who have given over our lives to Spirit to light the way for others. All of us can do this. All of us carry within us a racial memory of a time when we still did know the Light. At some level, we all know that it is our birthright, and that, no matter how deeply we have been caught up in the cloud of darkness, we can always find the Light within ourselves again.

Whenever I am outside of myself and watching Mother Earth move through this cosmic cloud, I see an ending to it, a place and time where and when the cloud ends and the Light begins again to stream freely through our part of the universe, reawakening all life to full awareness and to full realization of its true potential. Right now, we are at the very edge of this cloud. The Light is about to return. As Dylan sings, “The darkest hour is right before the dawn.”

The discovery of acid was a powerfully illuminating event that has convinced me that the transformation from the darkness to the Light will occur soon. Acid itself is pure Light in material form and has come to prepare us for the Cosmic Light. Although that great Light – called by some the Face of God – has been said to be blinding, those of us who have mastered acid will not be blinded. We’ll just think that someone has dosed us – at least until we don’t come down. We’ll be quite at home with this new world bathed in Sacred Light because we’ve been there so often before.

In one of those strange but meaningful coincidences, LSD was first recognized as a psychedelic in April of 1943 when Albert Hofmann took his now famous bicycle ride. This amazing ride occurred just four and a half months after the first nuclear chain reaction was produced at the University of Chicago, and just a bit more than two years before the first atomic bomb was detonated at Almagordo, New Mexico in July of 1945.

It was God’s will perhaps, that we were given a way to save ourselves from our newly discovered means of destroying ourselves. LSD turned out to be extremely useful as a means of releasing great amounts of psychic energy and raising consciousness – just as nuclear energy quickly became a means of releasing great amounts of physical energy and killing lots of people (Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki, Aug. 9, 1945.)

Since those days, thanks to Buckminster Fuller and others, we have learned that we do in fact live upon Spaceship Earth and that what goes on anywhere on Mother Earth really does affect all of us – e.g., potentially deadly pollution from Asia being blown over the United States and Canada almost daily. We have also begun to learn that our leaders really are one-sided and insane and that we do indeed need to rescue ourselves.

Unfortunately, since the sixties, we have not done much with our new knowledge. The changes that LSD introduced into our culture in the sixties were incredible. If we had followed these changes out, had allowed them to grow and mature, if we hadn’t instead believed the CIA and given into our fear of the unknown, we would be living today in a much more conscious and kindly world.

However, just as the various world governments (the United States, England, and Germany, among others) started WWI in order to derail communism and the labor movement (see Jack London’s book, The Iron Heel), so today the various world governments began their war on the psychedelics in order to maintain their own stranglehold on what they have called reality.

We need to do something about this. But I’m not into any sort of physical revolution, not even against a corrupt and debasing government. I’ll leave that to others. I’m into spiritual revolution instead, into changing people’s heads.

I keep coming back to notion of the hundredth monkey, to the idea that you or I might just be the one, the hundredth one that would turn the tide, the one that would be enough to return goodness and sanity to this world gone mad. Maybe you and I really are the very last ones needed to open ourselves to the new, to the new path that Spirit wants us to go on this time around. Personally, I’m going to open myself to this new world that’s coming by using LSD wisely.

Zane is our youngest son. He is four years old. He’s still innocent – but he’s not at all a baby. He’s tough. He holds his own with his big brothers.

He’s my last kid, and this makes him special to me. He’s my last chance to go through the innocence and awesomeness that exists in the beginning years of life.

It’s sad when we lose our innocence. Callahan was innocent when he was younger. Jake was too. Now when Aspen and I look at their old pictures from those innocent days, we are really sad. They’re not innocent now. They’re caught up in all those trips that seem to plague the human race. They have trouble sharing. They want it all. They play folks for attention. They need to be the center of it. They say what they think we want them to say, that sort of thing. Oh well.
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Zane has red hair. He’s the first redhead in our family. Neither Aspen nor I have any redheaded ancestors. Actually I was what they call strawberry blond when I was really young. But Zane isn’t strawberry blond. He’s a redhead.

Zane has a peanut allergy. We suspected this was true for awhile without being sure. But we finally took him to an allergy specialist. He told us that Zane is definitely allergic to peanuts.

On the way home from the doctor that day, we stopped at the store to buy some food and get some donuts to take with us to the nearby coffee shop. Two bites into his donut, Zane hurled all over himself, Aspen, her knitting, her daypack, and the floor. Yes, he does have a peanut allergy. The words of the doctor came back to me then. “You have to be very careful and read all the labels before you let him eat anything.” He had been eating donuts from that store for years, but that day we found out just how lucky we had been all those years. We learned never to trust our luck again.

After we knew he had a peanut allergy, we got all the emergency things he might need – the Benadryl strips and the Epi-Pen Jr. (an epinephrine injector in case he goes into anaphylactic shock.)

One night, he and Jake got into the bag that contained the Epi-Pens and played with them. Jake stuck himself with one of the pens and, before it was all over, his finger had started to swell and turned blue. Too much epinephrine in too small a part of his body. We had to take him to the emergency room, where they gave him something to counteract the epinephrine. Otherwise, the doctor said, he would have lost his finger.

Kids are definitely hostages to fate. Between the three boys, we have visited the emergency room dozens of times. Callahan and Zane have both been hospitalized with serious pneumonia. Jake’s future continues to loom over us. We’re fortunate so far. All our kids, including my older ones too, are still alive and healthy. Knock on wood.

All in all Zane is a charming little innocent rascal. I wish we could all be like him. As I’ve said about my other two boys, I really want to be around when Zane is a young man. I am almost seventy-seven now and will be in my nineties when the boys reach young manhood. I can do it. I want to live to be one hundred and eleven anyway.

Once, in the old days, I was tripping with some friends in Oregon. My friend, the traveling dentist, was playing music and showing us these film clips that were synchronized with the music. He was projecting them onto this sheet that was hanging down in the middle of the room. At one point, I swear, he had stopped the projector and was rethreading the film, yet the images continued to appear on the sheet.

At another point in our trip, a helicopter was rescuing a man in one of the film clips, and the music had become triumphant. I realized that the man being rescued was myself, that this acid trip was really a way for a secret organization called Acid Rescue to pull me out of my present assignment, debrief and then reassign me.

I was told that whom I had thought myself to be was merely my cover identity. I was done with all that, with my old life. The relief at realizing that I was free of being the person I had thought myself to be was astounding. I cried then, realizing that I was home.

Those of us who are members of Acid Rescue could not be attached to our cover identities, only to being clear and conscious. Anyone doing acid in a spiritual manner was a member. We were dedicated to maintaining acid as our sacrament. We were dedicated to waking up the entire crew of Spaceship Earth.

The goal of Acid Rescue was to wake up of as many folks as possible in the kindest and most conscious manner. Our main job was rescue. The basic premise was that everybody was a good person at heart. Everybody was worth saving.

To rescue folks, we would enter a community and do acid. There would be those who would feel the energy and approach us. These we would encourage to break free of the addicting and unconscious trips that had kept them prisoners of the dying culture. We would encourage them to see the larger picture and their place within it. We would encourage them to become Acid Rescue themselves. Eventually we would all be Acid Rescue.