When I was a graduate student at UCLA, studying to be a Clinical Psychologist, I read about the 19th century Introspectionists – Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, Gustav Fechner, William James and others. Although I had thought that psychology was supposed to be the study of the psyche, the psychology department at UCLA claimed that psychologists could only study behavior. It was refreshing and informative to find that these Introspectionists had actually studied consciousness.

They studied consciousness by going inside and by following their thoughts and their feelings, their images and their perceptions, following them to see where they would go, to see how they would interact with other thoughts, feelings, images and perceptions, and, of course, to see how it all fit together.

Later, Carl Jung did similar work with his word association tests and his notion of complexes. However, his research soon led him into the deeper reaches of consciousness.

When I began to smoke marijuana, I would sometimes lose my train of thought and forget what I was saying or thinking. If I wanted to retrieve what I had lost, if I thought it was important, I would go inside, as those early Introspectionists did, and follow my thoughts that I did remember until I came upon the one I had lost. I would usually succeed in doing this, and it was interesting too, to see how it was all tied together in my head.
.

In the early seventies, when I was beginning to work with acid, I began to feel the pull to put more and more of my energy into this work of exploring consciousness. As it usually happened in those days, I soon had a dream that justified my feelings and clarified what I was to do.

In the beginning of the dream, I had decided to stop working as a psychotherapist. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. Then, still in the dream, I was with several people. We were all strangers. We were in an old house in Berkeley, on the south side. I noticed some writing on the floor in the garage there, an old sign that said, “candy, cigarettes, sodas….” The rest was blurred. I was excited. I looked in another room and uncovered a similar sign.

I realized that there had been a store there originally, that the present house had been built over it. The neighborhood must have been really different back then. One of the women there wanted to work with me to explore the old city. A black guy was on the phone excitedly telling his woman about it. He didn’t have it quite right, but he wanted to work with me too.

This dream had a major effect upon me. I decided I wouldn’t be a therapist anymore. I had seen that therapy stayed mostly in the shallows. I wanted to dive deeper. I also began to understand why most people preferred to live in the shallows, on the surface of life. They were afraid to examine the deeper issues of life.

Most importantly, I felt that I had finally found my calling, my new path with heart. I was going to explore the old city – those older and deeper levels of consciousness that existed in the world before this present culture with its here and now overlay

I began to explore consciousness more seriously. I was already intrigued by the magic I had experienced at our camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras. I was also interested in telepathy. I had been interested since I was a young boy. I began to notice more and more synchronicities in the air.
.

When I would backpack into our camp at Dinky Creek, I would often do acid. I became friends with a large rock. I used to visit it almost every day. I noticed that I would have unusual thoughts when I was with it. I finally realized that the rock – I called it the Old One – was talking to me. I also noticed that it seemed to change over time, becoming more and more endowed with human facial features.

I certainly had many intense spiritual connections with rocks at Dinky. Once, while I was still high above the cliffs, with the darkness closing about me, I met up with another rock, a small one this time, I was having trouble finding my way down the cliffs, when this rock called out and told me that it would help me down if I would take it with me. I picked it up and immediately found the way down to my camp. It still serves me in this manner.

Another time at Dinky, I lost one of my contacts while sitting around the fire late one night with some good folks. None of us could find it, not even with a flashlight. Eventually we gave up and retired for the night. I was in my sleeping bag, bemoaning my loss, when a voice told me that it was stuck on the inside of my shirt. And when I looked, it was there. A much deeper part of myself, a part that didn’t rely on my normal perceptual apparatuses, had observed the fall of the lens and had been able to tell me where it had fallen.
.

As I said before, I have always been interested in telepathy. When I was a young boy and recovering from my death experience, I kept hearing these voices in my head. I finally figured out that they were other people’s thoughts and images. I didn’t like that then, not when I was seven years old, so I shut down that part of my psyche by listening to loud music on the radio or else by reading a book all the time.

But later in my life, especially after I had begun using acid wisely, I was able to open myself to the thoughts and feelings and images of others. Once, when I still lived in Berkeley, I tripped with Karen and Bobby and Abby.

I remember, at one point in our journey, I had a strange experience. These four beings entered the front door. Three of them immediately went to Karen and Bobby and Abby and easily merged with them. The fourth milled about for a while, and then approached me, not knowing quite what to do with me. It finally touched me, and, all of a sudden, I felt like Steve Gaskin said he felt one time when he had first connected with his psychic abilities.

I felt then as if everyone but me had always been awake, patiently waiting for me to wake up too. I felt as if Karen and Bobby and Abby had always been telepathic and in each other’s heads. I remember looking at them and knowing that they know I had finally woke up.

I remember too, later in the trip, when Bobby and Abby were in Abby’s room, hanging out and getting to know each other. The two dogs were with Karen and me in the living room, romping around and playing with our acid energy. Karen and I were cracking up watching them. They were really funny. Right then we heard Bobby and Abby laughing also, in tune, so to speak, with us. I realized that Bobby and Abby had been watching the dogs play through our shared consciousness. Just then, Bobby hollered in – and this totally blew me away! He told me not to think about it, or else I’d break our connection and lock us all back into the silence.

Also, I have often received images that don’t seem to have anything to do with my here and now. Once, I was looking out at the ocean, watching the clouds and the waves come in. When I looked down and saw myself, I realized that I was looking out of the eyes of a little girl, holding a bucket in her hand. I have had many such images or thoughts come my way, and it’s clear to me that they are definitely images or thoughts from someone else’s mind.
.

Although I have long stopped being a therapist, I am still a healer. Most of the time, just being with me encourages folks to open up and dive more deeply into themselves. I have experienced many unexpected changes in these folks. One woman with a tipped uterus came back the following week to tell me that her doctor told her that it was no longer tipped. Another came to me with a serious cold sore on her lip. I watched, as she talked about her husband and became more and more angry with him. And while I was watching, I saw her cold sore slowly and completely disappear from her lip. This sort of healing doesn’t happen by intention. It seems to be activated by a deeper and more compassionate connection, one that works without words and not through ordinary consciousness.

I have studied Stan Grof’s healing work with acid. His approach to therapy is to have the patient dive deeper and deeper into his or her consciousness. He basically says that if you get to the bottom of things, if you have cleaned out all the unconscious debris in your psyche, then what is left is healthy consciousness and you are who you are supposed to be.

The hexagram The Well in the I Ching, says much the same – that one needs to get to the very bottom of things: Otherwise one may fail “to penetrate to the real roots of humanity and remain fixed in convention” … “or he may suddenly collapse and neglect his self-development.”

Steve Gaskin also said something similar. He said that our deeper levels of consciousness, what many have called the unconscious, are actually incredible communication centers that can hook us up to other awarenesses, He suggests that we clean out these centers by dealing with all the psyche junk we have stored there, all those forgotten and repressed and never realized parts of our psyche that we have never had the courage or the inclination to deal with before.
.

Those of us doing acid back in the early days, in the sixties and seventies, found that we would become completely open and honest while we were doing acid. We would share ourselves from our deepest levels. We called it being acid honest. We recognized that acid made us braver, but it was more than that – we became wiser too, as we saw into the deeper and more profound reaches of our encounters with one another. Healing was easy with acid honesty.

Besides the honesty and the healing that acid would usually engender, it also led to some unusual experiences. Once, I found myself floating above the trees – and seeing my body below still sitting under one of the trees. Another time, my partner was sitting in a chair and standing next to herself at the same time. Often, while tripping, I would receive many phone calls, usually from other trippers, but once from two of my ex-wives. They all said that they had called because they had felt my energy.
.

I have also noticed, when leading a group of folks who are sharing their dreams, that often many of the dreams had a similar motif. It was as if we were all working on the same or similar problem or realization. Carl Jung noticed this on the eve of WWII. Many folks shared dreams then of rivers of blood and marching armies and other dire warnings of impending war and death.

On another note, once in a dream group, a woman told me that she was afraid she would leave her body and astral travel if she meditated. I told her she would be all right with me leading the meditation. As we began to meditate, however, I suddenly had an image of her running away into the distance. I grabbed her ankle as she began to run out of sight and pulled her back to me. From across the room in the dream circle, I heard her say “thank you.”
.

So rocks have talked with me, have helped me to survive even. And I have shared consciousness with some folks and have been inside other folks’ heads. I have also received many images from God knows whom. All this began to happen when I decided that I no longer wanted to be a therapist, that I wanted to go deeper into consciousness than therapy usually allowed. I also realized then that this way I would be able to explore consciousness through exploring my own. This way, I could go as deeply as I wished.

From all this and much more, I have found that we are all tied together in a group mind, called by Teilhard de Chardin the Mind of God. I have also found, unfortunately, that most people are afraid to acknowledge the existence of this group mind. Instead, they believe that they are alone and isolated inside their heads, afraid to plumb even their personal depths. This is so sad. Each of us could be a fully conscious being, as I’m sure Spirit intended.

Webster defines farfetched as being “brought from a remote time or place.” As a name then, Farfetched would refer to someone who had been fetched from afar. Such a person might have been called from afar by Spirit. This happened to me.
.

I didn’t understand any of this for the longest time, but when I was still in LA, working on my PhD in Clinical Psychology, I worked at a child guidance clinic in Hollywood. A patient of mine there, a young boy of eleven years, liked me a lot. Once, when we were out walking, he called me Farfetched. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that I was really far out, someone he wished he could be more like.

Somehow his comment stuck in my head, and sometime later, I told my son Jonathan what the boy had said to me. I asked him what he thought of Farfetched as a name. He liked it as a name, said it was okay, but then he laughed and added that I should never call myself Outrageous. I never did. I knew my limitations.
.

When I was with Karen, during my early wandering days, we took Howlingwolf as a last name. We used to howl at the moon when we were out of doors, which was most of the time in those days. During that time in my life, I was Farfetched Howlingwolf and proud of it. Looking back from here and now though, that name seems more than a bit outrageous in and of itself.

Later on, when I was spending time with the Rainbow Family, going to their gatherings and becoming friends with many of the folks, Farfetched was my rainbow name. Most of the folks in the Rainbow Family knew me as Farfetched, know me by no other.

It’s odd; I have never called myself Wanderer, although in my heart and soul I am Wanderer. I have used Wanderer as a name only in my books. I’m tempted again though, as I was once in Flagstaff, a long time ago, when Wanderer came to me in a dream and asked me to take Wanderer as my name. I refused then, feeling that I could be Wanderer without calling myself that. Now I’m not so sure.
.

I’ve always felt that the reason I was fetched back from afar – fetched back to life when I died as a young boy – was because I had something important to do with my life. As I grew older, I identified with Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, and others who had died as young boys and who had been returned to life for spiritual purposes. Like them, I too was brought back from death to share a message from Spirit.

When I was a young boy and died on the operating table, when I was falling into the darkness and about to panic, a voice called out to me, told me that there was no bottom, to turn the falling into flying. Somehow I did this, and, shedding my fears, I flew blissfully towards the White Light that waited for me.

I realize now that the message I was brought back from death to share was what the voice had told me as I was freaked out and falling – that there is no bottom. There is no ending to our lives as conscious beings. Our consciousness doesn’t end with the death of our bodies. We go on.

Remember this when you are leaving your body: There is no bottom. You are not falling. You are flying. Fly blissfully to the Light.

We take Jake to Children’s Hospital in Aurora twice a year. This is our third year. It’s always on a Friday, and we have to be there by 9 in the morning. It usually takes us an hour to get there.

It’s intense on the freeway today; everyone is in a hurry, as we all hurtle through space in our metal boxes. Fortunately the traffic is light this morning. We actually arrive at the Hospital in 45 minutes.

Usually all of us go with Jake. We make a day of it somewhere in Denver. This time we’re going to visit the 16th Street Mall and eat at Johnny Rockets.
.

We park and walk into the hospital. It feels really good being here. We’ll be here for several hours. We elevate up to the 4th floor and wait to be called into the Muscle Clinic. Once there, we see the main rehab doctor, a Neurologist, and a Neuro-Psychologist. We also see a Social Worker, a Physical Therapist, and a representative of MDA. On the way out, we stop at the lab downstairs, and Jake has his blood drawn to check for his vitamin D level and his thyroid functioning.

By the time we leave, four hours and some minutes later we have heard that his muscles are still doing much better than expected. And everything else is okay too – except for the DMD of course. Jake’s a healthy little guy. We also began the process of hooking him up with other boys with DMD. He needs friends who are going through what he’s going through. They also gave us a script for a new lightweight stroller for when he gets tired walking.

The people we saw at the Muscle Clinic must be really frustrated. There is nothing they can do about the DMD, nothing at all. All they can do is make it more comfortable for the boys who have it and slow down its progress so that it takes longer to kill them.
.

After we leave, we drive all the way into Denver on Colfax, the longest city street in the world. We don’t start at its eastern beginning, and we don’t go all the day to its ending in the west. We just take it from the hospital to the center of town and the mall. Colfax is not your typical city street. On the way, we see lots of naked dancing places, lots of pot shops, lots of tattoo parlors, and lots of darkness. I wouldn’t want to be there at night, not with my family.

The 16th Street Mall, on the other hand, is full of light and fun. The boys love the free buses that take us from one end of the mall to the other and back. When we get tired of riding the buses, we eat at Johnny Rockets. We all have burgers and fries. Good food, although no one sings to us this time. The food is bit expensive, but what the heck.

Back in our box, on the freeway again. I think we all feel the same. We just want to make it home safely. Hurtling through space again, we keep going, thankfully watching the traffic thin out as folks turned off into their own little cities on the way to ours.

Finally we leave the freeway, drive down Table Mesa, and then turn into our street and park in front of our house. We’re home.

As I wander down the page, I leap from rock to rock, from thought to thought – from ‘tonight I finally have some time to myself’ – to ‘I’m up so early every school day, getting the boys up and off to school, and it never lets up until late at night.’

By the time we have fed and entertained them, have hung out with them, have helped them with their homework, and have finally got them into bed, it’s 8:30 or 9 at night, later if it’s not a school night. By then all I want to do is read for a while and then go to sleep.

So, as I said before, tonight I finally have some time to myself – and it’s not late at night either. I’m alone this night because Aspen and Callahan are in their Karate class at the Y, and Jake and Zane are in the nursery there.
.

The path down the page forks here. Should I take this fork and say that my body is finally beginning to wear out, finally beginning to die? It’s interesting, watching it happen. I don’t mind leaving my body. I’m not afraid to die. I know that I’m not my body. I have left it twice before, and, both times it has been blissful.

However, I plan on staying here for another twenty or more years. I want to be here to see my boys become men. I want to be here for Jake at the end. Once, I said that I wanted to leave with him. Maybe I still will.

Or should I take the other fork and say that I really want some good acid, preferably liquid. I really do want some, and soon. I want to fly free once more before I leave this body. I want to dance on the edge of life once again.

I want my boys to see who I am at my best. So far, all they have seen is a mommy-daddy who sits around much of the day, either here at the computer or else with a good book in his hands. I have really been much more fun and potent and out there when I have had good acid. I’d like them to see that side of me too.

The two paths converged. Did you see that? It’s the urgency of my body’s aging that compels me to set off on this admittedly dangerous endeavor. I want to become Wanderer again while I still have my energy, while I can still walk the trails of life, and still enjoy the ride.

Also, acid has always been good for my body. Acid would really help me actualize my goal of living another twenty or so healthy and strong years. Twenty-five would be best. This way, Aspen and I would be able to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Callahan would be thirty-six then. Jake would be thirty-three. And Zane would be thirty. They will be men, beginning to mature, men I know I’m going to be proud of. I want to be there for them then. I can do it. I will do it!