In 1973, Karen and I were traveling from Berkeley to the East Coast and back. It began as an incredible trip down the West Coast and through the Southwest, then up the Rockies through New Mexico and Colorado to Wyoming and the 1973 Rainbow Gathering. After that we headed down into the flatlands and the beginnings of the hot and humid east heading first through Kansas and Missouri to Tennessee and Gaskin’s Farm.

Later in our journey, while visiting Karen’s folks in Virginia, Karen’s mother took me aside the first day we were there and told me that she knew I had turned her daughter onto LSD. Hearing this, I was flabbergasted and floored.

I told her the truth. I told her that Karen had called up one day and invited me down to her place in Venice. Once I was there, she asked me if I wanted to do acid with her. I said yes and had a wonderful time. I went on to tell Karen’s mother that I have never regretted it and will always be grateful to Karen for turning me onto acid then.

Now it was her turn to be floored. At first, she didn’t want to believe me. For some mother-in-law reason, she already didn’t like me and wanted me to agree with her expectations. However, Karen heard us talking from the other room and came in. She told her mother that everything I had said was true.

We both told her that it had been one of the most important and meaningful things we had done in our lives. We told her that we still use it and probably always would. Karen’s mother didn’t want to hear this, but she did bring it up. She still wanted to make me the villain in her movie, but I wouldn’t play.

Afterwards, thinking about our conversation – as unsatisfactory as it was – I realized that it still took a burden off both me and Karen to be honest about our use and love of acid. I decided to write my parents a letter, telling them the same. Here’s what I wrote:
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Karen and I are with her parents in Virginia. The subject of marijuana and LSD came up in conversation. I wanted to give them my views on the subject. I realized though, that I want to discuss them first with both of you.

I’ve been smoking marijuana for over fifteen years and using LSD for over five. I like both of them very much. Both have taught me a great deal about myself and about life. I’m a better person for having used them.

People have used various plants and chemicals to change their consciousness ever since we began as hunters and gatherers, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Most have experienced this changed consciousness as being of a holy or spiritual quality.

Ten years ago, LSD was legal and respected and used extensively in psychological research and therapy. At that time I was asked to be in a LSD research project. I refused then because I was too frightened. It wasn’t until five years ago that I became brave enough to finally try it.

I was immediately impressed with how much I could learn about consciousness when I was using LSD. As a trained research scientist and psychotherapist, I could see enormous possibilities for important and exciting explorations into the psyche, into healing ways.

However, soon after this, LSD became illegal. All research and all therapies that used it were stopped. At first I continued to use it in private but not in my healing work. But then I decided finally, a year ago last April, soon after I moved up to Berkeley, to devote all my energies to exploring my own and others’ consciousness and to use LSD in my healing work, even if it were still illegal.

Many great discoveries, important inventions, tools, whatever, were first greeting with fear and skepticism by the general public. Electricity is one such example. At first, it was thought to come from the devil himself.

At times people have been persecuted and hounded, killed even, for their religious beliefs. The persecution of the early Christians is one such example of this.

Today, people are persecuted who view LSD as an extremely important tool, one that mankind has urgent need of at this present time – for both research and healing. Today, people are persecuted who use LSD as a holy sacrament, as a means of achieving communion with God, and through God with all life.

I’ve been afraid to share any of this with you. It has been difficult for me to believe the world is different than I thought. The world is different though. I’ve seen, for example, that folks can be unafraid of one another and can live a life filled with love.

I’m going to continue using marijuana and LSD. They are the main thrust of my work of exploring consciousness. This is important work, and not just for me. I don’t ask you to see this as I do. I just hope you will give me encouragement in my life and in my work. I love each of you and want each of you to love me.

eugene

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Postscript: –

I did feel better after writing and sending the letter off to my parents. I was being honest and open with them and it felt good. However, the letter didn’t seem to affect my relationships with them in any way. My mother never responded to what I had said, not at all. My father did say once that I was okay, but it was too bad that I had listened to that O’Leary fellow.

The Tao of love teaches that we must “conserve the seed.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 48) “The ancients really attained long life by the help of the seed-power present in their own bodies.” (p. 69)

Taoism is spiritually wide and includes many differences, but all Taoists would agree that we must conserve our seed. In The Secret of the Golden Flower, it is written that “every man who unites bodily with a woman feels pleasure first and then bitterness; when the seed has flowed out, the body is tired and the spirit languid. It is quite different when the adept lets spirit and power unite.” (p. 69)

The legend of Old Master P’eng, although ambiguous in this regard, is often recounted to support this view. He reputedly lived to be 880 years old. However, it is also said, as the writer of The Secret of the Golden Flower ruefully admits, that he lived to this age, “because he made use of serving maids to nourish his life.” The author, greatly influenced by Buddhism, says that this must be a misunderstanding – Master P’eng must have lived that long by using “the method of sublimation of spirit and power. (p. 70)

Other Taoists agree that we must conserve the seed so that we can power the circulation of light, but they argue that we can do this without denying lust. They agree that lust in a man, when stirred, desires women and if unchecked would create new life. But they also say that if we retain our energy instead of allowing it to flow outwards into the woman, it “penetrates the crucible of the creative and refreshes and nourishes heart and body.” (p. 35)

Old Master P’eng knew exactly what he was doing with those serving maids, making love often, getting off seldom or never. He knew that making love has little or nothing to do with getting off unless you’re trying to create new life. It’s no wonder that he lived so long, using all his turned on energy from all that love play to fuel the circulation of his light.

Remember that Taoism began with Lao Tzu, a wanderer who had no trips, no routines or goals, nothing at all except his life and his awareness. The only reason we know anything at all about him is that, in his old age, when he was trying to leave China to wander the rest of his life in wilderness, the master of the gate wouldn’t let him out until he had written down his best thoughts. These became the Tao Te Ching, a glimpse into the mind and soul of an extraordinary master.

Although there has been a wide diversity among his various followers with regard to both theory and practice, they all agree upon one key concept, the notion of inaction through action.

All the instructions for the various Taoist meditations focus upon the actions of breathing, quieting the heart with the breathing, inner seeing and hearing, and circulating the attention between the two poles and back again. However, none of these actions are important in and of themselves, and none of them would lead to the goal of the immortal diamond body.

Yet by continuing to perform these actions, there comes a time when they finally become automatic. As the Taoists say, the circulation of the light becomes fixated. At this point, it takes on a life of its own and no longer needs our attention to make it turn and turn again. Once this has happened, we are continually recharging and renewing ourselves. Our physical and our spiritual consciousnesses are continually interacting, with the result that our bodies becomes conscious and our spirits becomes grounded.

The Taoist adept, once his meditation has become fixated, becomes in himself a true marriage of nature and spirit. Because his body has become conscious and pregnant with meaning, he will remain physically healthy and enjoy long life. And because his consciousness has become infused with power and is pregnant with life, he will continue to exist as a conscious being even after the death of his body.

Although Don Juan’s dreaming double and the Taoist’s diamond body are similar, each being bodies of consciousness that are independent of the physical body, the ways of creating them are different.

For Don Juan the dreaming double is created when we are able to be awake in our dreams. Once we can do this, our dream consciousness acquires an independency and a power of its own. It becomes us, although not us of the flesh. But it can operate in physical reality, and it will survive the death of the physical body.

The Taoist uses meditation to achieve this same end. In meditation, the Taoist circulates the light of awareness between the two poles, the one of Spirit that is centered in the third eye and the one of Earth that is centered in the solar plexus. In this way, awareness begins to circulate between Spirit and body, and from this circulation an inner child is born, a diamond body that will continue to exist after the death of the physical body.

For the Taoist, the life forces can flow either outward into the world or inward where they can be used to power the circulation of light. For most of us, our thoughts and feelings are usually directed outwards to the world, and our life energy, our seed, is used for pleasure or to create new life.

If, however, we focus our awareness upon the circulation of the light and let our life energy flow inwards so that it can power this circulation, “a release from external things takes place.” “The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and, after death, remains alive because ‘interiorization’ has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world.” (p. 17)

Although I have accepted the joys and the limitations of life, I have spent much of my life withdrawn from the world. Instead I have turned inwards and have developed my own diamond body; and I expect that, when I do die, I will return to my unlimited being with all the memories of this life that are worth saving.

Everyone knows that you can calm down by taking a deep breath. “Calm out man, take a deep breath.” We have all heard or said something like this, sometime in our lives. Breathing itself is actually a main focus in many forms of meditation. For the Taoist, breathing is used primarily at the beginning to keep the meditator awake and focused.

After I had been meditating for a while, I noticed that my breathing and my heart rate would both change pace and intensity, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Later on, I figured out that it was my feelings that were responsible for these fluctuations. I also figured out that I could make use of this relationship between my breath and my heart. I could consciously slow down my breathing, and my heart would slow down too.

The Taoists adepts were aware of this reciprocal relationship between heart and breath. They were aware too that both are susceptible to the feelings, and that breathing, by being somewhat under the meditator’s control, can mediate between the feelings and the heart and can help the heart to stay steady and calm.

The Taoists say that they use hearing to help monitor the pace and intensity of their breathing, but it is not the outer hearing that is used, no more than it is the outer eyes that see the light that is being circulated during meditation. This particular hearing is the awareness associated with the ears, turned inwards towards the breathing, and through the breathing, to the heart. “What does hearing mean? It is hearing the Light of one’s own ear. The ear listens only within and does not listen to what is outside.“ “It has nothing to do with actually listening to what is inside. In this sort of hearing, one only hears that there is no sound.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 48)

When no sound is heard, we have left our ordinary world of feelings behind, and with a calm and steady heart, we have opened ourselves to the Light and to the Compassion that is always felt in such a heart.

The place of power is an important focal point for the Taoists. It is located physically at the solar plexus, the spot just below the navel. It is one of the seven chakras.

For Castaneda’s Don Juan, it is a place of mysterious power that can directly affect the outer world. Once Don Juan was being attacked by a mountain lion that had him cornered on a large rock. Focusing his attention upon his solar plexus, Don Juan rubbed the big cat’s belly with his will until it laid down and went to sleep. Then he climbed down from the rock and quietly hurried away.

I remember doing acid in Berkeley with Joe Shaker. He was standing too close to me, so I focused on my solar chakra and pushed him away from me with my will. He bounced backwards, as if I had struck him in his belly with my fist. But I hadn’t touched him at all physically. I had just used my will.
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The place of power is especially important for the Taoist, but not for its effects on the outer world. For the Taoist, any energy spent on the outer world is wasted energy. Instead, it should be conserved and used to fuel the circulation of the light.

In meditation, the Taoist first focuses his attention upon the space between his two eyes. He attends to his breathing with his inner hearing. Then he allows the “light of the eyes” to descend to the place of power, to the solar plexus. The mediator’s attention, his directed awareness, once focused between the eyes, now moves down to the solar plexus. By bringing his attention from his eyes to the solar plexus, it becomes energized.

The essence of Taoist meditation is the circulation of the light, by which is meant the circulation of the focused attention. This attention, begun at the eyes, descends to the solar plexus, stirring up energy, which further increases the intensity and power of the attention. This enhanced attention is then returned to the focus at the eyes and back again, a continuous circulation of attention, building in power and light.

Here is the story of the Rainmaker as I’ve heard it from Jung and others:

The village had had no rain for a long while, and the inhabitants were desperate. They sent for the Rainmaker. When he came, he asked for a hut off a ways from the daily life of the village, where he could meditate. For several days, nothing happened and the people wondered. But then finally the rains came. When the Rainmaker emerged from his hut, the people asked what he had done. He said that, when he had arrived, the village was not in the Tao, so he sat and meditated until he was in the Tao. Then the village was in the Tao too, and the rains came.
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I was traveling east in the early 70’s. I headed first to the southwest and eventually found myself in the Mogllon National Forest in New Mexico. There was a drought there and a friend needed healing. I did a four-day purifying ritual involving the four directions and my place in the universe. At the end of this time, the rains came, and the trees and all of us were glad. The rains came too in my friend’s heart, as he came to love himself again.

I’ve noticed since then that when I’m centered, the weather centers itself. If it is dry and arid and not at all beneficial to life, I can help bring the rain. If it has long been cloudy and cold or raining, I can help clear the skies and bring back the warmth.

I believe that each day in every locale there is a weather person for that day and that place, someone who determines, by his or her centeredness, what the weather will be like for that day. Most of the time we don’t even notice this.

Partly this is because of our culture’s narrow-mindedness regarding the psyche and its relationship with the world; partly it is because the weather has become less important to all of us living in our artificial cities. But some of us do notice. The common ingredient for being a weather person is being in the Tao. The Tao determines the weather; all we actually do is allow it to happen through us by being one with the Tao.

I always dread the first snowfall of the season. It tells me that winter is almost upon us. I’m usually depressed. My awareness is scattered. My body feels awkward too. Everywhere I go, people say they feel the same. We are all profoundly affected by the weather. We all retreat into ourselves when it starts being cold and would probably hibernate if we remembered how.
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Our present culture tends to see everything as separate and distinct. It’s difficult for most of us to see our connection with the weather. There is the weather, and there is us. Separate. Other cultures, however, have understood this profound connection. They have imbued the phenomena of weather with consciousness and personality. The clouds, the thunder, the winds, and the storms were all seen as alive with intelligence and purpose.

Giving consciousness and purpose to weather phenomena is one way of doing it. However, the point isn’t whether they have consciousness or not, it is rather that the weather affects our consciousness and is affected by our consciousness in turn.

Most of the time that I’ve done medicine, especially out of doors, if it has been at all cloudy when I have begun, the skies themselves have become clear as I have become clear. However, if the land has needed rain and I have felt the healing moisture within, it has rained.

I remember once when a group of us from UCLA drove into the nearby mountains to camp for a few days. On the way, my car overheated with a stuck valve, and I almost didn’t make it.

At our camp, it was very hot and dusty, so we all decided to do a rain dance. We got out our drums and rattles and other makeshift noisemakers and began to dance around in a circle. At first there were only a few little white clouds in the sky, but within a very short while, it was raining hard. And when we left the next morning, my car ran perfectly all the way home – and for a long while after that too.

There is a lot of magic in my life. When I was younger, I thought that I was responsible for it, that I made it happen. However, I soon learned that I never made any of it happen. I certainly have never been magic’s author – that is Spirit’s role – but sometimes I have been whom Spirit has wanted me to be, allowing magic to flow through me and into the world.
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Telepathy and the other psychic powers aren’t magic. We just call them so out of ignorance. These abilities merely reflect the ways our minds naturally work. By their very nature, our minds are telepathic communication centers. But, for most of us, they have become stopped up because we haven’t dealt with our personal shit as it has come up. Instead, we’ve repressed our hurts and fears and angers and the memories of our failures, stuffed and stashed all of them and more into these same communication centers, overloading them and blocking the free flow of inner speech between all of us that is our birthright.

Knowing what’s going on in someone else’s head isn’t magic. Talking head to head isn’t magic. Even causing things to happen in the outer world, like bending keys, isn’t magic. Physicists do the latter every day, creating new particles, annihilating others, all the while knowing that focusing attention on a particle really does affect it. (Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.) Physicists today are even beginning to consider consciousness and attention to be “forces” that affect reality – whatever that is! – just as much as gravity and the electromagnetic and the other “physical” forces.
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Much of what we call magic really isn’t, but magic does occur. It’s magic every time God appears amongst us or speaks to us, or through us, or nudges us gently back upon our paths when we have lost our way. It’s magic when two people meet and, looking into each other’s eyes, realize that they have important and transformative messages for each other. It’s magic when doors finally open, just when we have understood why they have been closed. It’s magic when a dream appears in the darkness of our night, telling us what we need to know. It’s magic too whenever love’s around, visiting for awhile.
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Just being alive is magical. Can you imagine a greater mystery? Can you imagine anything more magical than the birth of a child – a holy, wholly new being coming to live with us for a while? What messages he or she must bring – of wisdom and new and exciting ways that Spirit wants us all to walk.

For some folks the ultimate source for the fulfillment of their material and spiritual needs is experienced as being outside of themselves. Unable to see this source as a part of themselves, they project it out onto what they call God. Experiencing fulfillment, they say that God has blessed them. Otherwise, they say that God has damned them.

However, for other folks, this ultimate source for fulfillment is rather a state of consciousness, one that can be attained by anyone.

I know that this issue is the old argument between the relatively unconscious West, that has had to project its neglected and repressed spiritual life out onto the gods, and the more conscious East that has found these states of consciousness within. There is truth in each viewpoint. We can call it God and see the effect as coming from outside of ourselves, by the Grace of God as we say. We can call it the Tao and see it as the Way, the spiritual path that we are on as a result of our spiritual work. Whatever we do call it, it is powerful, transformative and enlightening.

For me, whether I say that I am one with God or that I am in the Tao, what I mean is that synchronicity is occurring. Meaningful coincidences abound. Magic is alive. Actually, synchronicity occurs each and every moment of our lives. There is never a moment when our souls are not in a meaningful dialogue with the outer world – even if we seldom or ever notice.

The words may vary, but the feeling is the same whether you feel blessed by God or are in the Tao. It is a feeling of joy and quiet confidence. You are one with the universe and know that all your needs are being met and always will be.

Carl Jung, by introducing the concept of synchronicity as an acausal ordering principle based upon the inherent meaning of a situation has created a conceptual bridge between West and East. He has given all of us involved in this old argument a conceptual middle ground and perhaps even new understanding.

In his article “On Synchronicity,” Carl Jung observes that synchronicity is enhanced by affect. Addressing the work of J. B. Rhine on telepathy and other synchronistic psychic powers, he states that “the psychic factor that modifies or even eliminates the principles underlying the physicist’s picture of the world is connected with the affective state of the subject.” (Jung, CW, volume VIII, p 524.) Jung notes that when a psychic task is new and challenging, there is more affect and hence more synchronistic phenomena. But after the task has become routine and boring, the synchronistic abilities tend to decrease or disappear.

Albertus Magnus, the great seer and wizard of the fifteenth century, knew this too. He said that “a certain power to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love or hate or the like.” (Quoted by Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p 448.)

People also speak of sexual magic, whereby the great passion of sex is used to influence reality. All these folks are saying the same thing, that when there are strong feelings or passion within an individual or between individuals, magical and synchronistic phenomena are much more likely to occur.

We had a medicine group here in Boulder once. We called ourselves Synchronicity. We had all met at a Leary workshop and had decided to continue as a tripping group. In our beginnings, we were all open, and synchronistic phenomena did abound. We were all inside each other’s heads constantly, and startling and meaningful things did happen to all of us almost daily.

But then several of us began to pull away from the group, as they got in touch with events and feelings from their past that were too scary to share with the group. They kept their strong feelings to themselves, no longer sharing their real selves with the group, and magic and synchronicity stayed away, became only a name.