Chapter 1 – Beginnings

The Beginning

He is doing LSD for the first time ever. Mike and Neal, good friends from school, are guiding him. They have already done it several times themselves. His wife Pamela is here too. He is excited, yet somewhat apprehensive as he comes onto the acid.

Soon however, he is having a great time. Outside in the yard, a beautiful deep red rose entrances him. He stares at it for a long while, watching it pulsate and glow.

He must be having too much fun, because before long Mike and Neal and Pamela are all doing acid with him. It’s wonderful. He’s never been this open and sane in all his life.

At one point he has an image of himself wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, looking very competent and professional. He realizes that this image has come to compensate for his present, one-sided view of himself as a beginning hippie. More importantly, he realizes that this image is encouraging him to continue with his studies and finish school, to do it right.

Soon after this, he looks over at Pamela who’s sitting on their son’s bed. She’s crying, and he knows it’s because she’s realizing how cold and unloving she has been to their son and how much it has hurt him.

At her suggestion, he and Pamela had separated the past summer for several months. They’re back together now. He wants to continue their marriage, but she’s not so sure.

In fact, two months after this trip, just before Christmas, she asks him to move out again, this time for good. He finds an apartment nearby and begins to pick up the pieces of his shattered life. He does continue in school, thanks partly to that powerful image of himself that he had on acid. He changes his major though, from philosophy to psychology. He also continues to work as a skilled programmer with the engineering department. He has a few good friends, and he loves his son very much.

He’s alone in his apartment a lot. More than once, he despairs and wants to kill himself, yet each time he decides not to, as he realizes that he is taking care of himself and that there will still be life after all this hurt.

He struggles to maintain his ties with consensual reality. However, in spite of his work and his studies, in spite of his love for his son, and in spite of being in Jungian analysis, he begins to go over the edge. He draws Mandalas every day, trying to stay centered and sane. He does manage to stay centered and sane, but he still goes over the edge.

The Submarine Captain

He dreams that there’s a long pier out over the water. Several people are standing at the end of the pier. They’re using a radio to communicate with the submarine that is attached to the other end of the long cable running off the end of the pier into the waters below.

On board the submarine, the Captain is talking to the people on the pier. He’s asking them to let out more cable. He wants to dive even deeper. They tell him that there is no more cable to let out, that that’s all of it. He decides to cut it then. The people on the pier are worried. They ask him, “How will you survive without the cable to connect you to the surface?”

He responds, “We will do what every independent nation has always done; we will take care of ourselves.”

They dive always deeper, getting to the very bottom of things. Towards the end of their dive, seawater begins to leak in through the seams. It becomes very scary, although the Captain knows in his heart that they’ll make it.

Shattered by the breakup of his seven-year marriage with Pamela and by the loss of any day-to-day contact with his son, Jonathan, he has been thrown back upon himself. There isn’t much left of him now besides work and school. As a result, he’s going over the edge, into the waters of the unconscious.

He realizes that he is the submarine and the Captain and the crew. He’s severing his connection with his old life and with the few people he does know. Some part of him, represented by the Captain, contains and expresses the impulse to go always deeper, to get to the very bottom of things, so that when he does reenter life again, he’ll do so as a real and whole person.

He knows that this dive into his depths, into the depths of life and consciousness may last awhile. He also knows that he will survive it somehow, just as any independent nation would. He may take in the waters of the unconscious. He may become contaminated and act out some of his unconscious stuff, but he know that somehow he’ll come out of it sane and who he truly is.

The main thing he understands is that he is diving openly and willingly into the unconscious, seeking out that energy and wisdom that lies buried deeply within himself. He also knows that he has to die first as ego – his life has to first fall apart as it is – in order to allow for soul and wholeness to enter into it. He must die before he can be reborn

The Death of Ego

He dreams he’s sitting at a table with this young black man and a young girl. He’s on one side; they are on the other side, facing him. They have just told him that he is infected with a serious disease. The girl is reassuring him, telling him it’s not that serious, that he’ll get well. He doesn’t believe her.

He asks the young guy, who tells him the truth – that he is dying. He tells him how it happened, how a little boy infected him. He tells how they hadn’t wanted it to happen, and how badly they feel.

Now the young black man is taking him south across the ocean. They’re in a small boat, with the young man rowing. There are rocks and islands to the south, and they are heading towards them. He’s thinking of Kazantzakis’ Odysseus, of how he died alone on a rocky, cold island at the South Pole.

They come to a giant, round birdbath sort of thing, floating out here in the water. It’s made of porous rock and has a pool of water at its center. They land and sit together on it, talking and waiting. He tells the young black man how he’s always loved his body, how graceful and beautiful he is, and how he’s loved to watch him move. He tells him that it’s not a sexual thing; it’s just that he’s so beautiful. He’s lying down near the center now, and his friend is sitting at the south edge, facing him.

Suddenly he feels that death is near. He can’t open his eyes. He can’t move. He tells his young friend that death has come for him. He knows that he is dying. He tries to sit up. The man supports him, calms him. Yes. It is the end for him. He’ll just go to sleep. It won’t hurt at all. It’ll be easy.

But no, this isn’t his way. He wants to be conscious right up to the end. He wants to stay awake. That’s who he is. He has to fight this to the very end!

Jung once said that the job of the ego in a death and rebirth experience is to do just that, to fight to the very end. He’s doing his best. He’s keeping his job. He’s continuing at school. He’s showing the world and himself that he can still function, can even complete difficult tasks. But he’s still dying as ego, no matter what he does, without even knowing if he’ll ever wake up – or if he’ll ever be sane again.

The clues, the directions to his future, are here. A child infected him, so he will have to heal the child within him. He loves his companion’s body, so he’ll have to come to love his own body. He dies in the south – where Kazantzakis’ Odysseus died – so he’ll have to become someone like Odysseus, a wandering seeker of life and wisdom. He will have a future.

The Young Boy

In this, the beginning of his transformation from ego to soul, he often dreams of the young boy, of the lost child within himself.

He dreams of being with his young son, Jonathan, of loving him, of tousling his hair and hugging him.

He dreams that he has found a young boy who has been sealed up within this wall and forgotten for a long time. He is letting him out now. He’s going to help him. He even says, in a formal manner, “I’m going to care for this disadvantaged child.”

Later, he dreams that Al Kreinheder, his old analyst, is visiting at the child guidance clinic where he works. Al is looking through some very old records. Our hero finds his own records there too, from when he had almost died as a young boy. Although he had come back to life then, he had been seriously damaged. The records state that he had been fairly disturbed, psychotic, and probably brain damaged too. He shows these old records to Al.

Al is embarrassed that he has seen them. He says that the best way to write clinical reports is to express the progress without saying anything personal or negative about the patient. He shows him examples, written by a man who had been schizophrenic himself. He had been very sensitive and a good healer because of this. This man and Al had actually worked together to help heal him when he had been that young boy.

When his marriage with Pamela failed and his life was shattered, he needed to grow. He needed to understand and to heal what was wrong within himself that had led to this failure. His old ego had to die so that he might be reborn and go on living.

So now he’s diving deeply into the psyche, going way back in his life, seeking to heal the child within himself. Now, with the help of his dreams and acid, he’s continuing the work that he began with Al Kreinheder. Now he’s connecting to his own inner schizophrenic healer, and together they will heal this hurt and rejected young boy within himself. Only then will he finally become whole and sane.

When he was a young boy, he became seriously ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, with meningitis, with polio, and with an infected mastoid bone behind his left ear. His parents got him to the hospital just in time. The doctors had to operate on him twice to remove the infected mastoid bone. They had to cut into his head, behind his left ear, each time using ether.

He remembers waking up after the operations in the hospital bed, screaming and gripping the bars of the headboard with all his strength. He was terrified by what he had just experienced while he was supposedly unconscious. He felt the bandages covering his head. He believed that he had somehow been mutilated by mad doctors.

Then he actually forgot all about this part of his life for the next twenty or so years. He just couldn’t handle it then. Finally though, with Al’s love and acceptance, he found the courage to re-experience these old and powerful feelings, this time as a more conscious being, as one who could understand and transform these old feelings into positive and healing energy.

A Touch of Two of Madness

He meets a woman. Her name is Karen. One night, while they’re sleeping together, he dreams that they’re captured by a band of outlaws. He tells them that he wants to join them. They’re surprised and pleased by this. They all sit around the fire together, and they tell him about their life and times. He becomes more and more interested.

He realizes that he really is becoming an outlaw. Becoming one involves more than just doing illegal medicines. It involves dropping out of the collective and becoming a free individual, someone able to care for himself, like the submarine captain. It involves leaving behind the laws and the ways and the consciousness of his parents and the straight culture.

He hears Dylan singing, “If you live outside the law, you must be honest.” He figures that Dylan means being honest with yourself. He tries to stay honest with himself. He listens to his dreams. He writes in his notebook. He tries to understand and to stay conscious throughout it all.

One evening, alone at home, he sees a large, white, shining light surrounded by many people. Now the light itself changes to pure energy, like stars twinkling. Now the energy is in his body, and he’s full of the power and capable of great feats. Now his body itself is pulsating, and he has become pure energy.

His consciousness, freed of its ego moorings, is now wandering throughout the various realms of reality. Captured by the collective shadow (the outlaws), he accepts this and chooses to live within this shadow, as the wandering awareness he is now becoming. In the outer world, this involves joining the counter-culture, the outlaw, shadow side of the straight world. In the inner world, this involves, among other things, experiencing the white light and its pure energy.

He’ll go through a touch or two of madness, true, but at least he won’t be acting it out on the world as some have. He’s going to be a very cool and mellow outlaw. Also, he knows that he may have seen the white light, but he knows that he hasn’t seen the burning bush. He certainly won’t bother people by trying to be a spiritual teacher as some have. Instead, he’ll just wander through it all, staying detached, enjoying the ride, and trying always to make sense of what is going on.
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Chapter 2 – Challenges

The Power Plant

He dreams that he’s in a building. Someone runs by and yells at him to get out, that the power plant is about to explode. He sees people running for the exits. He starts to run too.

When he wakes, he doesn’t focus much upon this dream. It doesn’t seem very significant, certainly not touching upon what’s been most on his mind these days. He does think about it though. He tries to get into all his dreams. He figures they’re all trying to tell him something. He knows that he’s in some sort of explosive situation, but he doesn’t know what it is.

He’s seeing a new analyst. He’s seeing him now for the first time. He tells him this dream along with others, and the analyst blows him away. He asks him, how’s his heart? He immediately makes the connection – Oh, that power plant! He realizes that the therapist may have just saved his life.

He thinks of the beach in Venice where he lives. He can walk or run there every day. He can get himself a dog too. Walking is always more fun with a dog along.

On his way home from seeing his new therapist, he actually stops by the dog pound and takes a liking to a young dog, a handsome shepherd mix. He takes him home and calls him Strider, after the character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

He and Strider hit it off, and soon they’re taking long walks every morning. It’s fun for both of them. He’s usually calm and centered after their walks and has a good day later working in the city. And if the city does trash him, they can always walk together again later.

One day though, he comes home, and Strider is in convulsions, frothing at the mouth, trying to bite himself, and in obvious agony. He tries to take care of him, but he’s in terrible pain. He finally takes him to their vet, who tells him that Strider has distemper and there’s nothing they can do.

He feels that Strider took the death for him, that if he hadn’t gotten him from the pound that day on impulse and hadn’t become so close to him on their wondrous walks, Strider might still be alive today, romping his way through life – and he would probably be dead! Strider’s life won’t have been in vain though. He decides that he’ll become Strider himself. He’ll continue their walks every day. He thinks that he may even start running soon.

Racing with the Black Man

He dreams that he is walking with his dog on an unknown beach. They’re heading north. A black man is walking with them, down closer to the water. They come to a boundary marked with stones stretched across the beach. Beyond the boundary, the country is wild and unexplored. At this boundary stands an old wise man. He warns them that going further is not to be taken lightly. There are deadly perils. They look at one another and decide to continue on together.

They are racing now. After awhile, they cross paths, and now he is running down by the water. The black man is the fastest runner in the world, and he’s excited to be running with him. He’s keeping up with him too, his dog at his side. He’s giving the man a good race.

As he comes onto the acid today and feels his body again, he realizes just how simple it really is. He has only one body. If he wants it to last and be enjoyable, he has to take good care of it. It’s like a dog. It needs to be well fed, allowed to sleep all it wants, and exercised a lot.

Ever since he was that little boy, terrified by his experience of death, he’s been hiding from his body, staying mostly in his head, especially since he began graduate school. It has been easier for him to stay with his books and his thoughts and fantasies than to actually be the body he is. Acid’s making a difference though, as a catalyst that’s giving him the courage and the wisdom to find his way back to his body.

In his dream, he’s not yet body and whole. His dog is still carrying the animal for him. He does have a great deal of physical potential though, as shown by the black runner. In his life, he has always sold himself short. All those years, he has failed to realize that in hiding from his body, he has actually been hiding from his strength.

In time though, with acid’s help, in the many years he hopes to still have, he’s going to find his way back to the innocence of body. He’s going to become a body with a mind, no longer a mind with a body.

The Lighthouse

Still coming onto the acid….

His greatest fear is that people will find out that he’s crazy. He worries about this so much that he’s never really himself.

It’s stronger now….

Can he bring any of this back? Whatever it is in himself that has lured him here to this uncanny world of acid, his goal should be to bring it back to the ordinary world. He doesn’t know if he can do this alone.

It will be a colossal task just to map this new world, this new level of awareness. But maybe he is crazy. Maybe he has always been. It would make an interesting story; how the seeds were planted, how he was led to this point of believing that there is a new state of awareness and that he was to be a bridge between the old world and the new.

This is where he’s at in his deepest reaches. He’s a therapist himself, and he doesn’t even know whether he’s crazy or not. Can he function with this?

It comes down to whether he’s insane or someone ahead of his time. Can he trust his visions or not? When he looks into the mirror, he sees an anguished prophet of old. The cross that tortures him so is this very question – is he insane or a man of vision? He cries out, “God, where are you leading me? Is it even you leading?”

Later, walking on the beach, he sees the Lighthouse. He sees how the ocean will win, how it will eventually undermine the Lighthouse’s foundations and bring it down. He’s glad. He wants it down. He walks between it and the angry sea now. The sea isn’t his enemy. It is his friend, and it will be here long after the Lighthouse is gone. The sea is with him, as are the people coming with the sea – half animals, half gods. Myth? Fantasy? Perhaps not.

The Lighthouse is like his ego, his light in consciousness. He wants it to come down, undermined by the world of the unconscious. He wants room in his life for the rest of himself – for both the animal and the spiritual sides of himself. His vision is myth and fantasy, sure, but it’s his myth and his fantasy.

He’s going through a death and rebirth experience now – a psychotic break in consciousness, the professionals would say. He’s doing so to allow for new growth, trusting in the essential wholeness of his being, trusting that whoever emerges from the darkness within himself will be a better person than he has been able to be so far in his life.

His Father

Still tripping, he realizes that his relationship with his father is one of his main problems. He realizes that he has fought against his father and his fearful ways all his life.

He has acted out this conflict that he has had with his father with everyone in authority – especially with each of his commanding officers in the Air Force during his years as a flying officer in the Strategic Air Command. Later, he did the same at UCLA, fighting with the chairman of the Philosophy department.

He’s done this with every male boss he has ever had. Even today, he’s still fighting his father, either directly or indirectly through others. However, he’s finally beginning to realize that he needs to grow up now and be a man himself, honest about who he is, without worrying about what his father or other men might think of him.

The single passion still lurking in his heart, still obscuring his reason, is his anger at his father. It goes way back. He has to reclaim and own this anger. Then he can forgive his father and move on. He’s especially angry with his father for never accepting him for himself, for always wanting him to be just like he was. Until he’s dealt with this old pattern between his father and him, he’ll continue to be unconsciously forced, over and over again, into fighting with men in authority. In fact, this pattern is going on right now with the Jungians, who certainly are not encouraging him to be himself.

He’s back home now, reading the Hexagram “Breakthrough” in the I Ching. He sees that his father is “the inferior man in a high position,” the one to overthrow – or to leave behind.

At this time in his life though, it’s not so much his father who needs to be left behind as it is those ways in which he has become like his father, either because of his early imprinting upon him or else because of the trips his father laid upon him as he grew up.

When he has finally left all this behind, when he no longer needs to feel such strong anger against a man who is no longer central to his life, then he’ll be able to be his own man, free to be himself without worrying about what others might think.

The Inferior Man

“The inferior man in a high position” – the embodiment of all those ways in which he has been unconsciously identified with his father – is still with him today. But he knows him now. He’s a part personality, a semi-autonomous content of the psyche. When he doesn’t watch out for this inferior man, he takes over and trashes whatever he does.

Today, the inferior man within him wakes up and immediately begins to worry about work, about how to undo all the courageous things he did at work last week, standing up as he did to the clinic’s director on behalf of his patient and all.

“Well and good,” this scared and inferior part of him says, “to be so brave, but you must think about your job. You do need the money.”

He does need the money, but more than the money, he needs to be himself. But the inferior man within him gets scared when he is being himself. He counsels manipulation and deceit instead. The inferior man is obsessive-compulsive, always planning and controlling, always concerned with what others might be feeling, never with what he is feeling. The inferior man acts to please others, never himself.

He realizes that he has to stop this inferior side of himself or he’ll never be free.

What Nikos Kazantzakis writes in The Odyssey is relevant here. “Whoever says salvation exists is a slave, because he keeps weighing each of his words and deeds at every moment. ‘Will I be saved or damned?’ Whomever hopes is afraid both of this life and the life to come: He hangs indecisively in the air and waits for luck or God’s mercy.”

He dreams that the conservatives are starting a war so they can declare martial law and imprison people like him. A barber friend is telling him this and that he won’t be allowed to cut his hair then. The barber says that the conservatives are going to be in control soon, and they’ll put him away if he still has long hair. He tells the barber he’ll never cut it.

The inferior man in a high position is not without psychic resources and cunningly creates conflict so he’ll feel this ambivalence about his long hair and then project it outwards, so he’ll be afraid to let his “freak flag fly,” as the song goes. He’s becoming conscious of this self-hater though, as he has come to call this inferior aspect of himself.

He owns his fears now, trying always to be conscious of them without being taken over by them. Now that he’s no longer running from them, they’ll soon lose their power over him.