There is more than one way to create a diamond body. For example, 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. However, the ways of creating them are quite 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 two poles, the one of Spirit that is centered between the eyes 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.

And there are other ways to create a diamond body. I became a diamond body briefly when I died as a young boy, when a voice told me to turn the falling into flying. I did so and flew effortlessly and blissfully towards the Light. I was out of my body then, yet still me and still aware of what I was doing. The voice that told me as a boy to turn the falling into flying, that voice was my own voice from years later when I was a young man, a man who went back in time to help me as that panicked young boy. I remember when I did this as that young man, laying in my down sleeping bag in the high mountains, under the stars.
.

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, however, 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.

I have certainly embraced the joys of life. I have walked in beauty and love, and I have certainly helped to create new life. However. I have still spent much of my life alone, withdrawn from the world. I have turned inwards – dreaming and consulting the I Ching and meditating and of course doing medicine – and I have found my way back to my diamond body once again.
.

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 a 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.

I’m certainly not the monastic sort of Taoist. I’ve always felt that since I was living in this world, in this body, I would be wise to explore and enjoy this world and this body. I have certainly done so. Although I have five children and have been a father for more than fifty years, I have still spent most of my life exploring the depths of consciousness and following the Tao. And now, almost 79 years old, I am still physically healthy and enjoying a long life. And when I do die, I will continue to exist as a conscious diamond body, an unlimited being with all the memories of this life that are worth saving.

I’m scared of falling, not all the time, but certainly whenever I’m at the edge of a cliff or on a narrow ledge. After all, it’s scary; falling is something that can and does happen in physical reality. But if I let it, my fear can become extreme, making me uptight and clumsy, making me more likely to fall.

But most of the time when I say I’m scared of falling, it’s because of what it means to fall psychologically. As a psychological experience, it is one of falling into the unconscious, often symbolized as a return to the womb. It’s a giving up, a surrender.

But I won’t surrender. I won’t just give up and fall into the darkness. I won’t mind my body dying, it’s wearing out, anyway, but I want to continue to exist as consciousness. This is why, like the Taoists, I have spent most of my life creating a diamond body, a consciousness separate from my body that will survive the body’s death.
.

Of course there is another, deeper side to this. Actually fear of falling in physical reality is often mixed up with a repressed desire to jump, a repressed desire to give it all up, to end it all. I have felt this myself. I have stood at the cliff’s edge and have felt the desire to leap into the void. It’s exhilarating and scary, both.

However, on the inner, psychological level of reality, where the desire to jump comes from, we see that it is actually the desire to fall into the unconscious, to regress to an earlier state of being, one where we no longer have to deal with reality and its demands. It is a dangerous and unconscious yearning to be back in mommy’s womb, where all our needs would be met without our having to do anything ever again.

I’m not interested in this at all. I want to continue being an aware being well past the death of this body. And I know how to turn falling into flying.

Although I probably won’t want to return to this reality after my body dies, I have entertained, from time to time, several notions of what I would want to come back as if I were to return.

Years ago, when I was backpacking alone at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras I decided that if I did come back, I would come back as a giant Juniper tree standing alone somewhere in the high mountains.

An ancient Juniper had just spoken to me, telling me to turn off my head and be part of the world around me. I followed his advice that day, and that was when I decided I would come back as a Juniper tree. I liked the idea of standing quietly in the middle of the world. I also liked the idea of not having to move about or do anything. I liked that I could just be.

Since then I have also thought that I might want to come back as a bird, perhaps one that would fly up a river from the ocean into the high mountains and back again. I love both the ocean and the mountains. It would be awesome to be able to fly between them.

I have also thought that I would love to come back as a Water Ouzel, one of those little birds that live alongside creeks and can swim under water. I spent the whole day with one once. I could see that she was having fun swimming in the cold mountain water.

I’ve been thinking of being a bird a lot lately. I hate falling. It has always been very scary to me, probably from my experience of falling into death as a little boy. If I had wings I would feel a lot safer.

Of course, if I didn’t ever return to this material reality, but kept on traveling through the many levels of existence, I wouldn’t need either wings or a high mountain to stand upon.

Actually, when I think about it, I realize that I’ve been flying my entire life.

In my early twenties, I flew for the United States Air Force. I was an officer then, a First Lieutenant. “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sun…”

I flew on various airplanes, mostly as a flight engineer. The last plane I flew on was the giant B36 bomber, with its six pusher prop engines, three mounted on the back of each wing, as well as two jets at the end of each wing. We flew all around the world on our practice bombing missions. Once we flew for 27 hours nonstop, coming back to our home base in Roswell, New Mexico after a temporary duty assignment in Guam,

Later in my life, in the late sixties and early seventies, I flew a different craft, using LSD to fly through the various levels of consciousness. Folks saw me as a flyer then too. And once I began tripping, my dreams reiterated this. They used the metaphor of flying to describe my various acid trips. I would often dream of flying just after I had tripped or just before I was going to take off again for the higher reaches of consciousness.

I wonder if I joined the Air Force and became a flying officer because of my early flying experience, the one when I was that little boy dying on the operating table. I wonder if I got seriously into LSD for the same reason. Maybe I wanted to fly again, as I had as that young boy.

I’ve sure had a lot of practice flying free. I’m certainly going to be ready when I do leave my body and fly off into the future.

.

Still

I was sitting out in our backyard, enjoying the sun and watching all the birds fly free. They seemed so happy flying free – all the Robins and Grackles and Wrens and Ravens and Crows and more.

I flew once. I flew when I was a little boy dying on an operating table. As I went under the ether, I fell into the darkness. I was terrified. But then a voice said to turn the falling into flying. I did so, and suddenly I was flying blissfully towards the light. That was my first taste of flying.

I’m 78 years old now, going on 79 soon. My body is wearing out, slowly but surely. So I’m thinking about death these days and what it means. It’s not scary. I see it as a major transition of consciousness. And I know that, although my body is wearing out, I’m not wearing out. I expect that when I finally do leave this body – and it has been a wonderful body and has served me well – when I finally do leave it, I’ll be flying free again.

I’m not scared of dying, although I’m certainly not ready to die. I do want to stay around until my three boys are grown into men, another 20 or so years would work for me. Both of my folks lived that long.

What I’ve understood from my own experiences, as well as from folks like the Tibetan Buddhists, the Taoists, Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda, is that, after the death of the body, we can continue to exist as consciousness. It all depends on the consciousness we have while we’re living. It depends, as the Taoists would say, on whether or not we have created our diamond body.

Am I ready for this next adventure in consciousness? Am I ready to explore a whole new level of existence? I’m trying not to have any unfinished business, although I am definitely not finished with Aspen and the boys. But living with them is so rewarding that I’m sure I’ll be able to stay around long enough to enjoy it. I’m working on it, and I’m still strong and healthy.

Most importantly, I’m trying to live cleanly so I won’t have to leave this level of existence with any hurt or fear left in myself or in those close to me. I don’t think I could fly if I had any regrets for how I lived my life. I’ve always tried to leave my camp cleaner than I found it. I’ll do the same when it’s time to leave this camp.

Once we have tuned in to ourselves, once we have searched within ourselves and have found wisdom’s light at the center of our consciousness, we will know who we are and why Spirit has given us life. We will know then what is wanted of our lives.

However, most of us, for most of the time, move through life on autopilot, following external directives and never asking what Spirit wants of us. We blindly follow these external directives, fed to us by the propaganda of the one-percenters as well as by our own fears and understandings of what people want of us.

We let others lead us because we’re lost and don’t know our way. In fact, most of us don’t even know that there is a way. Instead, we wander unconsciously through our lives, like lost and rudderless ghost ships adrift on the sea of life.

But once we have tuned in to ourselves and have found the light within us, we can become light bearers ourselves. If so, our consciousness can illuminate the world, waking all life to their light too.

There is immense spiritual power in this light, a power that can change the world. When enough of us become light bearers, we can turn back the greedy and mean-spirited darkness that has threatened to destroy Mother Earth and all her children. We can create a new way of being for all of us, one that follows the light and furthers all life.

And what is this light within each of us that can create a new way of being for all of us? The word ‘light,’ as used here, is actually a metaphor for a higher, spiritual consciousness, that aspect of consciousness that Carl Jung called the Self. It is a part of consciousness that exists within each of us, one that illuminates the darkness of unconsciousness. When the light is found, hidden in plain sight at the center of our consciousness, everything is illuminated and becomes clear.

A person who has become a light bearer illuminates the world through his or her inner light. Such people in the past have so impressed their world by their clarity and wisdom that they are still remembered and revered to this day. Imagine now what will be accomplished when many of us became light bearers.

Years ago, Tim Leary said essentially what I have said in my most recent note, the one called “Wake Up!” And he said it in one famous short sentence – “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” However, I would change the order of his saying. Today I would say that we first have to drop out and get out of our unconscious ruts before we can turn on and tune in.

For Leary, turning on meant doing LSD and the other psychedelics, including marijuana. However, there are many other ways for us to turn on – meditation, dream sharing, yoga, Rolfing, using the I Ching, walking in the woods, sharing ourselves with others, being in psychotherapy with someone more conscious than us, the list goes on and on.

Leary was right though, doing LSD could certainly wake us up, could help us find the light and be more conscious of who we are and our place in life. Unfortunately, it is illegal. And even if it weren’t, most of us are so unconscious that doing LSD could threaten to overwhelm us. That’s probably why we let it become illegal – because we’re all so afraid of ourselves.

For Leary, tuning in meant examining ourselves on all levels of consciousness, meant examining our lives and how we can use them to manifest our inner spiritual light. However, as I have said, there are so many other ways to tune into ourselves, most of which are much more benign, and certainly more legal, than the various psychedelics.

For Leary and the rest of us back in those early days, dropping out meant the natural response of our newly raised consciousness to retreat from the craziness of the world we lived in. It meant dropping out of the system and finding new ways of living our lives, ones that didn’t return us immediately to our previous state of unconsciousness or encourage us to return to the old and worn out ways of the straight world.

Unlike Leary, I don’t think we should drop out of the system and create a separate, counterculture reality. I think we need to drop out of our ruts first so we can find out who we are and become light bearers. Then we can create a new way of being for all of us, one that furthers all life.

We can’t let our freak flags fly if we don’t know who we are. We can’t know who we are if we’re not awake. And most of the time we’re not.

Most of the time we’re sleepwalking. I’m not talking about getting out of bed and walking around our houses in the middle of the night without waking up. I’m talking about how most of us are not really awake and conscious as we go through our daily life. Instead we live out routines and patterns, over and over again, without our being aware of ourselves, our needs, or what’s going on around us. We’re on autopilot, for God’s sake!

And most of our routines and patterns are orchestrated by the one-percenters, routines called work that are designed to keep us all busy being their wage slaves so that they can do what they want to do whenever they want to do it.

In a word, we’re stuck in our ruts, really the ruts the one-percenters’ have given us as our reality, ruts designed to satisfy their needs and keep us safely unconscious and out of their way.

Before we bring down the one-percenters, we need to find our own natural flows. We need to return to the Tao. We can’t do this without knowing who we are. And we won’t know who we are as long as we stay in our ruts.

So, we need to take time, all the time we need, to discover who we are separate from our routines, who we are once we’re out of our ruts. Once we can see who we are, we’ll know what we want to do with our lives – and what our natural flow really is.

We need to take a sabbatical from our routines, our ruts. We’ll never leave them behind as long as we’re unconscious most of our time. We need to spend our time meditating, walking in the woods, sharing our dreams with others, sharing ourselves with others, one way or another raising the level of our consciousness. We need to turn within, to the spiritual wisdom that lives in each of us. We need to see the light and wake up!

I don’t see using firing squads, although I wish the unconscious folks in the world would work on their heads without having to be shot. Then they might become part of the solution and no longer part of the problem.

I don’t see doing mass LSD healing either. Too much information, too fast. Most folks would freak out when they saw, all at once, just how fucked up they really were – and how ignorant they were about the world and other people too.

But we do have to bring those one-percenters down, down to our level of reality. My God. They spend way too much money, and it’s our money really. Rings for millions of dollars, shoes for thousands. We have to stop their unconscious attempts to placate their small, scared little egos by trying to buy up the world.

And how will we do this? I like Howard Zinn’s take on the world. We are all definitely too obedient, too afraid of losing our jobs or other people’s approval. These are the main reasons why we‘re afraid to join a worldwide general strike or stop paying the ripoff taxes that the bad guys have imposed upon us. We admire Thoreau, but when it comes right down to it, most of us have become way too afraid to emulate him.

But, that’s not the best way to bring them down to our level of reality anyway. It’ll take more than just not doing what they want us to do. Instead, we have to do something positive. We have to start doing what we want to do.

Back in the 60s, we didn’t call ourselves hippies. We called ourselves freaks, and we were proud of it. We developed and lived a unique and fun life style, one that the establishment frowned deeply upon. We didn’t care. We were right, and they were wrong.

We did it then, and we have to do it again. We are still right, and they are definitely still wrong. And it’s coming to a head now. Once again, we need to let our freak flags fly. Let them fly folks.

Let us live the life that Spirit gave each of us. Let us be ourselves, showing the one-percenters who we really are. And let them envy us our profound joy of life.

We must stop plodding and start dancing along our way. We must stop moaning and begin singing as we go. When we part, we must stop saying, “take care” and return to “have a good day.” And, most importantly, we must free ourselves from the one-percenters’ almost out of control and way to speedy system of routines and schedules. Then we can play and dance and sing and enjoy our lives.

Lets see what Howard Zinn, the famed historian, has to say that’s relevant to what I have been saying in my last two notes:

You are saying our problem is civil disobedience, but that is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience.

Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience.

Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty.

Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.

That’s our problem.

Maybe we all need to be disobedient. Maybe we need to follow Spirit and stop following the dictates of those idiots in charge of our world. All they do is rip us off, and they certainly don’t have a clue.

Maybe we need to arrest those grand thieves, as Zinn calls them, stop them from continuing their gross mismanagement of their responsibilities as leaders of the human race.

Actually the Indian’s Ghost Dance turned out to be a failed response to the overwhelming assault upon their world by the Europeans. It was doomed to failure from the start, although the US army was scared enough to attack many of the dances and kill hundreds of the participants.

In the late fifties and early sixties of the last century, the counterculture, fueled by LSD, looked at the world through acid clear eyes and decided that they wanted out. They tried to escape what they called the straight world by buying islands, by living full time on ocean going ships, by living deep in the woods and deserts, and by starting communes that isolated themselves from the mainstream culture.

These attempts by the counterculture to escape the straight world all failed, as had the Ghost Dances. There is no other world; there isn’t even any room left on this world for a person to be real. The only strategy that has had any sort of success has been that of the individual living quietly and alone while pretending to be like the rest of his neighbors.

However, this strategy hasn’t really worked for any of us. It certainly hasn’t worked for me. Over time, our faith in our spiritual way became eroded by our loneliness and by our attempts at pretending to be like all the unconscious, frightened, and now insane and suicidal folks – the ones who seem to be in charge of destroying this planet as well as the entire human race.
.

Something has to be done. We’re actually going backwards now. Our freedoms are being taken away from us again, one after another. We’re being boxed in, tighter and tighter. And we have already lost much of what we have gained since the sixties. Human rights are rapidly being taken away from all of us, especially the rights of women. Our privacy is already a thing of the past. The rulers are tightening their grip upon us daily.

The mainstream folks, that is, the polluted stream folks, are steering us in the wrong direction. If we let them, they will kill us all. I can no longer say that I can’t do anything to stop them, that I’ll just focus on living my own quiet life. This has been my strategy until now. But it just gives the folks in charge permission to continue leading us into the abyss. No, they have to go or else change – and now! They cannot be allowed to continue on their destructive course.

When Mao was faced with folks like this, he gave them two choices – to be part of a self-criticism group, learning to change their heads and hearts, or be the target for a firing squad. Some actually choose the firing squad.

However, as much as I admire Mao, I’m more like the early acid folks, feeling that if everyone did LSD in a therapeutic, Stanislav Grofian way, they would, of course, come to see the errors of their outdated and unconscious ways and began to care for one another and the world they live in.

But most of the time, I have hoped for some outside, science fiction sort of intervention. Imagine our part of the galaxy, as it goes around the center, finally coming upon a more enlightened part of the galaxy, one who’s energy would further higher consciousness, even in the fundamentalist religious folks. Or imagine that Mother Earth tires of waiting for us, her children, to grow up and so begins to communicate with us, guiding us into our future.

Besides that, I’m not yet sure what I am going to do. This is all new to me. I just know that something needs to be done – and now. Maybe I’m already begun to help, by using my writing to wake myself and others up.