Chapter 15 – School’s Out

Finishing His Dissertation

He is almost finished with his doctoral dissertation. He has shown that he can stick to a project and finish it, that he can do well at a difficult task. He has a lot of energy for it. He can feel himself about to spring forward, like a runner on the mark – set and ready to go.

He may be eager for the work, eager to finish, but he’s also sick of it. It’s nearly done now though, thank God. In several more weeks, he’ll be a doctor. Hopefully there will be a great release of energy then – energy that is now held as tension in his body. Hopefully all this energy will then become available for his own life and work.

Until then though, he’ll probably still be hurried and harried, acting compulsively, and unable to relax, even with grass – and he’s smoking too much already. He’ll just have to live through this stressful time. It’ll be worth it. He’ll grow from it. He already has.

He is stronger and much more sure of himself now compared to when he began. Earning his Ph.D., he’s becoming a man worthy of a place in society.

It’s nighttime now. He’s feeling good. When he saw Joe Sheehan, his doctoral committee chairman, earlier today, Joe was very helpful and encouraging. He’s going to be a doctor in less than three weeks. He also had his typewriter fixed today and began typing the preliminary pages. He has wisely decided not to go back to the mountains until he is done writing and free of all this horrendous pressure.

It’s five days later now, and he’s done nothing but furiously type his dissertation. It’s finished now. His final orals are scheduled. He knows he’ll pass, but he is still frightened to death! He’s afraid he’ll fail. He has come upon his frightened inner child again. He can see him so clearly now.

He has completely lost touch with himself as a strong mountain man, with all his dreams for his future. He’s completely lost his connection with that side of himself – lost touch with all his strength and courage. He has become a scared little boy again, afraid of being rejected and hurt.

Somehow though, seeing his fears and their source, he’s suddenly less afraid. He goes now, with renewed confidence, to face his future. In the mountains, he knows that he is a different sort of man – one more adventurous and more physical. He is going to go back into the mountains and reconnect to that side of himself just as soon as he’s a doctor. It will be a spiritual celebration of completion and release.
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A Doctor Now!

He’s a doctor now! He has finally done it! This is the first time since the final oral exams ended several hours ago that he has been alone and able to reflect upon the experience. It has been so intense! He’s a doctor now, and he’s here in his lab, in the room where it all happened, where he changed from boy to man. And as Joe Sheehan joked, just awhile ago – now he can look people in the eye!

He thinks that it’s strange how things work out. When he began his work on his dissertation, which, of course, concerns itself with eye contact, he was still very shy and unable to look anyone in the eye. Somehow, in all his work upon it, he has changed. Now he can easily look folks in the eye.

His inner healer picked up on this fear within him and saw that, by researching this area of interest for his dissertation, he might end up – as he has – no longer afraid to look people in the eye. This healing strategy has worked splendidly. He no longer has any trouble sharing his eyes with another. This change has come about largely as a result of all those hours spent looking his experimental subjects in the eye. He saw nothing to fear in any of their gazes. He became desensitized, as some would say.

Along with this change in his outer behavior, his inner life has also changed. His inner feminine is no longer the negative mother. Now she’s supportive and no longer so critical of him and others.

His dreams are more clear now too and much more responsive to what’s going on in his here and now life. The I Ching is teaching him a new way of viewing reality and the importance of meaning in the world. Grass shares her own wisdom and, together with acid, lets him enter into magical reality and become a wise and wild child again.

His inner masculine is much stronger now too. He has been able to let go of the warped image of a man that he learned from his father and his culture, keeping only the best. Wanderer, the carrier of his true inner masculinity, has returned to his life, both as a wise and experienced teacher and as a magical and challenging being who is encouraging him to leave behind his culture and instead go his own merry outlaw way.
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The Party’s Over

Kent has long been one of his best friends. He’s a stoner and into acid, a good guy. He’s also a professor in the Psychology Department at UCLA and was on his doctoral committee. He and Kent have been through a lot together.

But he almost lost it at Kent’s birthday party last night. It wasn’t Kent himself. He and Kent were close and had a good talk about honesty in relationship and other high things. They agreed that honesty is the backbone of the longhair ethic. They also saw that it was the main ingredient in the healing that goes on in the therapeutic relationship. It wasn’t Kent that threw him off, but something at the party certainly did.

He smoked a lot of excellent dope at Kent’s party. There was plenty of loud music, tasty food, and pretty women – all the ingredients for a good party. Somehow though, he came very close to flipping out. He probably would have but for Karen’s help.

He was okay as soon as he left. He saw then that he had been thrown off balance by all the unconscious pleasure tripping. The energy of the party had brought him back to who he had been before he went into the mountains, back to those days when he had been like them and not into Spirit or even into his own work, just into feeling good.

Later, that night at home, he has a dream. In it, he’s at a Rolling Stones concert. It’s supposed to be very special and to last at least ten or twelve hours. Everyone’s doing medicines for the occasion. Kent is here too, sitting with some folks nearby, getting stoned.

The concert never gets going though, and soon people are leaving in droves. It even ends early, after less than six hours, when the last folks finally go home. He and Jonathan and Karen are among the last to leave. They hitchhike north into the city.

His dream helps him to see what it was that bothered him so much at Kent’s party last night, saying it another way so that he’ll get its deeper meaning this time. In particular, he’s upset by the use of medicines just for having a good time, with no concern at all for meaning and growth. He is especially sick and tired of using medicines and focusing energy upon rock and roll bands – when he can be so much higher either alone in his room in the city or up in the mountains talking with God.

Doing medicines up in the high mountains has changed him more than he has known. Until now, he has been too busy with his dissertation to notice that he’s not at all like his old friends anymore. He has changed. He has become a spiritual outlaw.
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Snowed out

He arrived up in the San Jacinto Mountains late yesterday. The sun was just setting when he drove up to the trailhead. Hiking in, he kept losing the trail in the dark. He wondered if he would be able to find his camp.

Actually, he did find it without any problem and soon had a warm and cheery fire going. He couldn’t go to sleep for the longest time afterwards. He felt as if he was coming onto acid. Then in the middle of the night, it began to rain – or so he thought. He got up then and put up his tube tent, a clear plastic tube, held up by a rope tied between two trees and open at both ends.

It’s morning now. He just woke up, and there’s snow everywhere, even inside the tube tent, and more is coming down. It’s very cold and wet outside, and he’s having trouble getting a fire going – the wood is already wet. Just when he’s about to give up, he finally does get it going. Thank God! He’s not sure though that he should stay. He doesn’t want to be snowed in, but he doesn’t want to lose the mountains either – even if they are cold, windy, wet, foggy, and all covered with snow now.

If he stays, he’ll have to fix the tube tent so he can be warm and dry tonight. He wishes he had a real tent. He’ll have to bring in lots more wood and keep a fire going all day too. He could sure use a good gas stove. The weather might be nicer tomorrow. There wasn’t even supposed to be a storm front coming through. It was supposed to be warm and sunny. He just hopes a bigger snowstorm doesn’t come in tonight.

Right now he is here, and he is responding to the challenge. He knows he’ll feel more like a man if he can stand up to this storm and stay in his beloved mountains. It hasn’t been the camping trip of his vision, true, not at all warm and sunny like the last time.

He’s here now though, so he spends time putting his camp together. His bed is still dry and should stay that way, and he has plenty of wood. He decides not to listen to his fearful side. He’s sure he can get out tomorrow if he has to, no matter what, anything short of a full scale blizzard.

He’s smoking grass now, in front of his wet and smoking fire. He’s thinking of doing acid too. To go back without tripping seems as big a cop-out as it would be to leave today with his tail between his legs. Maybe, before this weekend’s over, he’ll be glad it was this hard.

After awhile, he does drop acid, but then the snow begins to come down harder. Everything is getting soaked. He can barely keep his fire going, and the snow is getting deeper all the time. It’s burying his woodpile now and trying to put out his fire.

He’s wet and cold – and now his fire has gone out! Standing here shivering, coming onto acid, and with his fire out, he begins to realize just how unprepared he is, especially without a tent and stove. He realizes that he has to leave.

He quickly packs up and heads down the creek to the main trail. It’s easy to find, what with all the fresh tracks on it, all heading out as he is. It’s hard going though. The snow’s already several feet deep, with more still coming down. The acid helps, but it’s really difficult having to maintain.

He finally reaches Skunk Cabbage Meadows, and, after a short break, he leaves there with a man and his two boys. They’ve had it too. Soon though, they’re lost – the snow is really deep here, and the trail’s whereabouts is a complete mystery. Gypsy saves them though, after they’ve completely lost the trail. When he says, “trail, Gypsy,” she smells it beneath all the snow and guides them to the saddle, to where the trail starts down.

As they reach the saddle, a troop of Explorer Scouts come bounding up the steep trail from below. He just knows they’re all well prepared. He vows that he’ll have a tent and a cooking stove too, the next time he comes up into these mountains. He could have easily stayed here today, waiting out the storm, with a snug tent to keep him warm and dry and a backpacking stove to cook with. He will stay next time.

He starts down the other side of the saddle now, down to his car in the parking lot. He’s freezing. His hands are numb from the cold. He has been pushing himself, and he’s running out of energy. His legs ache, but he keeps going. The worst is over, but it’s still miles to the parking lot. He just keeps going. He knows he has to.

When he finally does reach his car, its battery is dead from the cold. At first he doesn’t even care – his heavy pack is off and he is sitting down. But then he starts to feel the cold again – just as these nice folks come by and ask if he needs help. By now it’s almost dark. He has never driven in the snow, but one of them says that a VW is good on snow, with its engine in the rear, its weight there helping with the traction. He’s about to test this out. The nice folks give him a push, and here he goes….

It isn’t that difficult actually, and soon, he’s driving down from the mountain. He’s crying as he leaves, finally feeling his body’s pain. He’s aching all over. The long drive home through the city gives him plenty of time, while still on the acid, to digest his experience. He wishes he were an explorer scout but, short of that, He sees that he did okay, and, more importantly, he has learned what to bring next time so he can do even better.
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Dealing with Fear

He wasn’t at all happy, having to come back early from his solo mountain trip. It was to have been his reward for earning his Ph.D. Ironically, the snowstorm was a local one, centered upon the mountain. By the time he was down in the flatlands, the clouds had disappeared and the stars were out.

Seeing the stars made coming home all the more difficult. Karen was surprised to see him too. It had been such a warm and sunny day at the beach. He felt weird coming into her private space, after she had thought she was going to be alone for the weekend. Mostly he just slept. He was completely exhausted.

Since he has returned, he has done a lot of work. He has written to the state licensing board. He has organized his dream class and gotten it approved by the experimental college. He has seen seven patients, and facilitated his dream group. He has even started on his income tax. He has made plans to visit the Free Clinic in Berkeley too, when he is up that way next. He is planning to start a group there. He has been busy all this week, cruising behind lots of good, productive energy.

He doesn’t think he is going to be afraid much longer. He can feel his fear lessening every day. He still feels it, but that’s because he’s working through it, confronting it directly. Nowadays though, he can feel it without being overwhelmed by it as he always has been in the past.

He’ll free himself of this fear only when he’s able to live completely in the here and now. He was afraid in the mountains, sure, probably should have been, but he’s not afraid now, not even of having to pay a fair amount of money on his income tax, money he doesn’t have. He knows he’ll get it somehow. He always does.

In the mountains, fear was relevant and worth listening to. He was in real danger then, and fear acted as a red light on his mind’s instrument panel, warning him of the possible and serious consequences of his lack of preparation. Once his acid head came on, once he became centered and clear, standing there before his wet and guttering fire, he consciously chose to act upon fear’s red light message. But he wasn’t forced to, as he has often been in his past.

What is happening now in his spiritual life is that he is separating himself from his unconscious identification with fear. Now he can consciously face his fear signals and make his own decisions, from his own center, as to how or even if he wants to respond to them.
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Chapter 16 – Coming into His Own

Fever Visions

He has known now for the past several days that he was going to be sick. He has felt tired, low energy, and depressed. He has ignored all these signals though, planning all along to go with Karen to Berkeley and even to trip there. He has been sure that was to be his future.

He didn’t make it though. Instead, he has become very sick, the worst illness he can remember. This high fever is like a bad acid trip, and he aches all over. This morning, when he woke from his fevered and troubled sleep, he was crying from the hurt. An hour later, Karen left, going to San Francisco by herself.

Both trips that he has been really looking forward to since he earned his Ph.D. have gotten fucked up. He was snowed out in the high mountains, and now he has come down the flu just before he was to leave for the Bay Area. Why is this happening to him?
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He hasn’t dreamt much lately, but he does hear and see the following….

Two brothers in the desert night, fighting and trying to kill one another. An old Native American man steps into the circle of their camp fire, saying “brothers must not fight thus.”

The two brothers suddenly become sick and fall to the earth. The old man tells them, “the sickness will kill the farmer but will spare the hunter and gatherer.”

At first he thinks that this means that one of them will die and the other will live, like Able and Cain in the Bible, but the old man means that the farmer in each of them will die in the fever’s fire of purification, leaving behind only the hunter and gatherer in each.

He sees a man sitting alone now, weeping. A voice is speaking – “and his tears shall water the ground, forming a lake beneath him….”

This fever is the fire burning away the farmer within him – the doctor is dying. When he returns to the living, he’ll be more truly himself than ever before. This sickness is his rebirth into new being. His tears of pain will create the lake, his new spiritual reservoir.

He’s lying here now, still half asleep and watching the same old Native American man teach a younger man everything he knows. They are in the desert, and the old man is showing the young man how to make a water container out of plant fibers – perhaps to contain and carry the waters of the spirit.

Compared with the European, the Native American culture is truly the older, the deeper, and certainly the more spiritual. Maybe he will have to leave his old culture completely behind in order to find wholeness of being, in order to find his true self as a hunting and gathering wanderer.
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Further than He Thought

He dreams about buying this house out in the country. He likes that it’s further back from the road than any of its neighbors. He likes that it’s on thirty-six acres. He likes that it’s four stories tall. He likes that its owner is unique and built it only to please himself. It is quite unusual. He goes inside and looks about, upstairs and down and in and out of all the rooms. The stairs end at the third floor, and from there he has to climb through a hole in the ceiling to get to the fourth floor.

He goes back outside now to look over the land itself. He sees the woman of the house down by the creek. She’s watching her cat swim in the water. The creek is full of goldfish too, but the cat is just playing amongst them. There are lots of other cats around, lots of kittens too. The whole place is weird. The man and woman are each wonderfully strange and unique. He does like it there, but he feels it might be too crowded for his taste. There’s just not enough land. Maybe that’s why they want to sell. They must have had a lot more free land around there for themselves before all their new neighbors came.

Now the dream changes, and it’s announced that there’s an important meeting in the big upstairs dining room, to be followed by a special dinner. They all troop up the stairs together. There are lots of professors and professional boss types around. In front there’s a big stage, and they’re all standing in a straight line facing it. As more and more people come in, he finds himself being pushed further and further to the left.
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Later, when he shares this dream with Mary Nunn, his therapist, she surprises him by saying that maybe he has to go further out even than he has thought. Maybe he has to be really far out to be himself. Maybe he is wonderfully strange and unique himself.

The last part of his dream is a commentary on his professional life. It’s a bit crowded, and the line, the professional line, is too straight, and he is being pushed further and further to the left. He remembers a recent dream in which he and another man poisoned the doctor. The doctor within him has to be poisoned, has to die, so that he can move on, past anywhere he has ever thought he would go.
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He’s remembering what Ken Kesey once wrote – about sometimes not even knowing “you tripped off at all because you never get back to know you’ve left….” He wants this. He wants to arrive at a completely new perspective, one from which he will never return.
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Sessions with the Master

He’s up at Boney Ridge today with Karen and Gypsy. His legs are still weak from having been sick for so long, ever since Karen went to San Francisco without him. Actually, this is his first day out in over two weeks. He is slowly getting his strength back though. Right now, he’s just sitting on the rock formation that they call oasis number one. He may go further in later, but for now it’s sunny and warm enough for him to just lie around here like a lazy old dog in the sun.

He’s stoned now, lying here still, warming himself in the sun. He’s watching everything – the clouds, the hills, the wild flowers, and all the happy birds flying about, all singing especially pretty today.
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He’s thinking about his class next week – maybe coming back here just before the class. He thinking about dreams too. He’s understanding how all of our inner images – our nighttime dreams, our unconscious fantasies, and even our more conscious day dreams – all come from the same source and all interact with one another.

He’s also seeing how they all work together to stir up our conscious life – giving us goals and ways of achieving them, encouraging and warning and waking us up, getting us back on track whenever we’ve lost our way, and generally showing us the meaning and the direction of our lives.

He sees that a dream is like a session with your master, with your own inner teacher. In his class, his students will work with their dreams and learn how to connect with these powerful teachers that exist within each of us. To accomplish this, they will ask each of their individual dreams to show them how to work with dreams in general. Doing so, they will find that each of their individual dreams contributes to the combined meaning of all their dreams. They will find that there actually is a shared, collective meaning, concerning where they’re all going together and what God is up to with all these changes going on within each and every one of them.
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What he has to offer the folks in his class is his vision, his ability to see deeply into the dream, together with his years of experience with change and with understanding the language of the unconscious. He’s excited to be getting back to work. He sees the potential in his class for a very high level exploration of both personal and collective inner space.
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Strange Sensations

Ever since his near death experiences as a little boy, he has had these strange sensations that would come upon him at odd times. Each time, he would almost lose consciousness. If he were standing, he would have to sit or lie down. His body would feel very heavy, and it would be difficult for him to lift his arms. He would feel very large too, as if he were a giant, and time would slow way down.
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He actually felt all this only moments ago, as he was sitting here at his writing table. He has just now come back to himself enough to realize that he had been gone again. His hands still feels very large and heavy, and it seems to take forever for him to reach for his pen to write this down.

These sensations have been with him for years, and yet they have never seemed dangerous to him. He has always known that he could just sit or lie down and eventually they would leave. They always have too, and usually within a short while. He has never told anyone about them, not even his folks. He knew they would think he was crazy. He has always thought, whenever this has happened, that these sensations were effects of the brain damage from the meningitis or from the infected mastoid bone – but now he’s not so sure.
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He has been reading Jung on dissociative personalities, hoping to better understand himself. From his readings, he has come to see that these peculiar sensations of heaviness and largeness and slowness could be indicators of an ego-alien complex, one that is gradually becoming conscious. According to Jung, the bodily sensations arising from such a complex are generally felt at first by the ego to be weird and alien.

He thinks about all this. If what Jung says is relevant to his particular situation, these strange sensations should gradually disappear as he continues to open up and accept more and more of himself, not just those parts that the ego complex has heretofore deemed normal. Someday soon, there may even come a day when he’ll realize that he hasn’t had these odd feelings in a long while, that they are finally gone for good.
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Maybe God Himself is behind these feelings. Maybe when he is able to let go to these sensations and accept them as a part of himself, God will enter more fully into his life. This is why he is reading Jung now, for help in understanding himself so he won’t be afraid to go on. It’s difficult to live his life now, knowing that he is incomplete, knowing that there is much more of himself waiting in the wings, so to speak, waiting for a chance to bust out and play out its life in this body.