Chapter 5 – New Directions Home

Deciding to Leave L. A.

He just had his yearly physical at Footlighters, the child guidance clinic where he works. Afterwards, the doctor told him that he ought to quit smoking cigarettes, that his lungs had gotten worse in the past year.

He replied, saying that he doesn’t smoke tobacco, that he hasn’t smoked it for years. He did once, years ago when he was in the Air Force. He smoked for three or four years then. He also smoked for a short while after he met Pamela, mostly because she was still smoking.

The doctor thought then that it must be the smog that was affecting his lungs. The doctor thought that he should leave LA as soon as he could, that the smog would kill him otherwise.

He told the doctor he would think about it; but as soon as he walked out of the doctor’s office, he realized that he had already decided to leave LA. What the doctor had said was just the excuse he needed. He’ll leave right after he finishes his Ph.D.

He does wonder about smoking grass, how it affects his lungs. He doesn’t smoke that much, nothing like he did when he smoked cigarettes. He’s not going to stop smoking grass though. He knows that. And he’d rather not subject his lungs to both grass and smog. He feels really good about deciding to leave LA. He knows he’s making the right decision.

Earlier today, he and Gypsy had taken a grand walk on the beach. It had been warm and beautiful. He had felt happy just to be alive. But then right afterwards, he had had to drive into LA and work in this fucking smog.

He will continue fighting against this ugliness and this grayness that is slowly killing him in Los Angeles; but he knows that he’ll lose if he stays. There’s no way to win against this poisonous and deadly enemy except by leaving the field to it, perhaps by going north.

He just had a flash, an almost remembered dream from last night. It was saying much the same thing. In it, he had finished living in LA and was going away, and the feeling from it was good.

He still has to finish his doctoral dissertation, but after that he is free. Deciding to leave LA as soon as he’s done with his schoolwork is an extra incentive to hurry to the finish. He knows he’ll make it. He’s almost ready to do the research now. Then all he’ll have to do is analyze the data, draw the relevant conclusions, and write it up.

After all that, he can be a body someplace where the air and the water are still nourishing and not poisonous. He’ll certainly miss his morning walks on the beach. The beach has been his only place of refuge in this difficult, polluted, and overly straight world called Los Angeles.
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Guardians and Guards

He’s remembering an old dream now, one from back when he was still working with Al Kreinheder. In it, he’s in a castle rising out of the ocean. The castle had been his, but the guardians, whose job it had been to protect him, have taken it over and have imprisoned him, have become his guards instead. For a long while he awaits his opportunity, and, when it comes, he suddenly breaks free and, leaping up onto the parapet, dives headfirst into the dangerous waters below. The guards shoot at him from the walls but miss as he swims to shore and freedom.

These guardians, whose original job had been to protect him from himself and from others, have instead become his prison guards whose job now seems to include killing him if he doesn’t let them completely control his life.

Thinking about it, he’s sure that these guards, really just another side of Granny, were originally a positive force within himself, taking care of and protecting him until he had grown up enough to care for himself. However, this protective side of himself has somehow become defective and now thinks to keep him childish and dependent forever so as to always maintain power and control over his life.

In his life now, these automatic defenses – these guardians who have turned into repressive guards – are still trying to take over and pull him out of any problematic situation, and doing this without even letting him know there’s been any danger. These defenses, perhaps originally necessary for his survival, have become his enemies. He’s become a prisoner of his own fears.

In the past, he has felt secure behind these unconscious and protective ways of staying out of danger. But now they are no longer allies or protectors, and he wants them to leave him to himself. They’re like an insane and destructive machine that has run amok.

He will win his freedom, diving even into the dangerous waters of the unconscious in order to find the necessary strength to oppose them. These guardians want him to think that they are helping him, yet they have been constantly keeping him from being the man he can and will be. They have never let him face his fears so that he could conquer them and then go on with his life.

He will break through these restrictive fortress walls to the outer world and freedom. He will do this by throwing himself into the waters of life, by joyfully taking sides in any and all conflicts. Any action will be better than none. How else will he ever learn?
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The Medicine Bow

Last night, in the early hours, he woke up sick to his stomach, with waves of nausea washing over him. At first it was easy to ride the waves without throwing up, but soon they became more and more insistent. He felt as if he were a bow that someone was drawing, stretching him to his limit. Each time the nausea came, he somehow managed to hold it down – even when the bow itself stretched past its own limit and became a hoop. Then as the hoop began to expand in size, the nausea became almost more than he could bear.

At this point, however, something within himself finally accepted the hoop, accepted even its stretching him past his limits. He relaxed then and let go to it, and the nausea stopped immediately – and he slept.

Later in the morning, he woke feeling well enough to trip.

He’s tripping now. He’s remembering the conversation that he and his friend had last night – about Mother Earth being in a life or death struggle with modern man. He can relate this to what happened when he was so sick in the night. When he was resisting the nausea, he was doing more than trying not to throw up. He was trying to contain something within himself that some other part of himself wanted to reject. He realizes that he must have taken in something in that conversation that Granny just couldn’t stomach.

His friend and him had also talked about the hippies and their ways, and he was remembering this when the nausea was a bow. They had also talked about the life or death struggle going on in the world today, and he was remembering this when the nausea became a hoop and began to expand.

Until now, he has always accepted the collective’s shadow without question, as if he has deserved it being laid upon him just for being different. No longer though. He has finally come to realize that his new way of life has value for him and especially for the world. He’s one of the heroes in this struggle, certainly not one of the villains. His new way of life, as opposed to the destructive ways of his parents and the rest of the straight world, is healing for the planet.

Last night, while he was sleeping, Granny tried to force him to reject these new values and ways of the hippies and instead to continue to think as his parents and others of the straight world still do. Somehow though, he knew, even as he woke from a deep sleep, that he couldn’t let her win, that he had to defeat her by not throwing up, by not rejecting this new and more positive image of himself and his way.
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The Turning Point

He’s still realizing the implications of living in the collective’s shadow. For so long now, he has let himself be seen as a long haired scum by all those straight people, with their fear of the child and the animal and the God within themselves. For so long, he has bought into their unconscious projections and has been unable to see himself except through their accusing eyes.

But he’s not scum. He has come to realize that he is actually a hero in the movie, choosing to consciously live a life that will let us all survive on this planet. He’s a part of God’s healing force, sent to cleanse and renew the world.

The straight people are the villains in the movie now, still blindly living out their old, destructive ways and completely out of touch with Mother Nature and Spirit. The only way to save our Mother, and ourselves along with her, is to stop these people from continuing on their destructive path and instead to follow the way that so many of us have learned from acid, the way that is now being lived by many of the hippies.

He knows that he may lose this certainty sometimes. That old, straight movie is still powerful and pervasive – persuasive too. There are so many things still going on in his life that could pull him back into it. He’ll just have to keep taking acid in order to stay in touch with the new. It is easier to feel good about himself now though, when he sees that he’s being the person that God wants him to be and is following the new way that God wants for all of us in the world.

The world may be saved or destroyed in his lifetime, and he knows that he can make a difference. Saving himself, he can help save the world. And by helping to save the world, he can save himself. He can do this by being a living example of how to further and fulfill Mother Earth and all of us living upon Her.

Today he sees himself through new eyes. “If you can see with innocent eyes, everything is divine.” (I Ching, Hexagram 25, Innocence). Looking about with his new and innocent eyes, it’s obvious that he and his friends are the ones who are following the way best for themselves and for Mother Earth.

They are the ones who are embodying Spirit’s new message—”Honor and love thy Mother and live in peace and harmony with one another, innocently and wholly, as children do.” And they and their seed are the ones who will live to inherit a cleansed and renewed Earth. Those following the old ways, however, will pass.
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Chapter 6 – Insights

No More Depression

Lately people have been telling him that he’s overly sensitive and defensive and is always looking to see who is putting him down. They tell him that he’s always depressed too. He knows that all this negative energy comes from the scared and lonely child within himself. “But who has scared him – and when?” Karen asks. He asks this of himself too.

When he tries to answer this, he always comes back to his parents. They certainly didn’t love him. His father never loved anyone. His mother may have loved him, but hers was a demanding love, asking from him all that she never received from her husband, his father. She never loved him for himself.

He also comes back to the operations, to the near death experiences, the nightmares afterwards, and all those terrible fears that he suffered when he was a young boy. That experience was too much for him when he was that boy. He couldn’t begin to deal with it then. And ever since then he’s been too frightened by what happened then to even begin to relax and trust himself or his body, let alone feel that the universe might actually not be trying to kill him.

When he was a young boy, the other kids in school always put him down, but that was because he had already been put down and made to feel small by his parents at home. Almost dying and having to lie in bed for a year didn’t help either. He was already defeated by the time he first met those kids. By then he had always expected the worse. He already knew that any of them would be better than him at anything. His parents and life itself had already taught him to see himself that way.

Growing up with his unloving parents and going through such a severe and life-threatening trauma, he ended up always expecting the worse and always looking around to see who was putting him down.

Over time, this overly sensitive and defensive attitude evolved into Granny, a semi-autonomous part personality. Over time, Granny became extremely powerful and overly protective of him, a guardian who had become a guard. And until she is checked, she will continue to reinforce this negative and self-defeating attitude forever.

He’s been in a depression and afraid because of his parents and their fears and because of his operations too. He wants out of this fear and depression. He wants to follow his new path of heart, and he wants plenty of sunshine and mountains and medicines and loving companions along his way.
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His Temper

He has been really pissed all day. When he looked out the window earlier today, he saw his clothes lying all over the ground. Gypsy had torn them off the clothesline where they had been drying. When he went outside, he saw that she had completely ruined one of his favorite shirts and all of his socks. He lost his temper then. He got really angry. He yelled at her and even hit her once with his fist.

And later, when he came back from picking up Jonathan for the weekend, she had done it again – and he yelled at her and hit her again. He really upset Jon and Karen then, and probably all the neighbors too. He certainly upset himself.

So here he is, still really angry with Gypsy, yet also really depressed and busy putting himself down for being such an asshole. He doesn’t feel so bad about punishing her. She certainly deserved it. But he does feel really bad about how much his anger scared her.

When he loses his temper, he’s always scared and depressed afterwards. Then he become discouraged too, feeling he’s made no progress in all these years – not if his temper can still take him over whenever it wants. He really does want to heal himself of this. He doesn’t want to scare anyone ever again.

The psychology texts say that anger is a secondary phenomenon, resulting from either unconscious fears or hurts. He knows that his temper is tied to Granny and her fears. His negative anima, to use Jung’s term, is definitely insecure, out of touch, and uncomfortable with people.

Granny reminds him of his mother here – cold, shy, insecure, frightened, defensive, and bitchy, yet very aggressive and explosive too. If he can help Granny with her fears rather than letting her put them out through him onto the world, maybe he won’t have to worry anymore about losing his temper.

Walking alone in the canals now, still trying to calm himself out, he meets a small boy. They stop to talk, sitting there on the edge of the canal, their feet in the water. The little boy is very sad because his daddy was mad and just kicked him.

He tells the boy how sometimes we get so angry that we forget our love. He tells him about himself and Gypsy. He tells the boy that he knows his daddy still loves him, even if he forgot while he was angry. He realizes now that he has to go home and tell Gypsy that he still loves her, that he just forgot for awhile when she destroyed his clothes. Then maybe they can be friends again and go running together on the beach.
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Saying No

He and Karen are on the road, traveling north to the Bay Area. They were married at their home in Venice the day before yesterday, and they’re on their honeymoon now. The wedding itself was overwhelming, what with so many people and all, and they are both still totally blown away. Last night, after driving all afternoon, they camped near the ocean and walked along the beach until they felt a bit more centered.

They’re back on the road today. They woke up early this morning, shook the sand off, and headed out. He’s stoned now, and, as he continues to drive their VW bug north, his mind keeps flashing upon all sorts of ideas and realizations. In particular, he keeps noticing that he can never say no, not even to Karen. He’s always been this way, although this is the first time that he has noticed. A lot of folks can say no. Karen can. She just did in fact. That was when he began to realize that he couldn’t.

Figuring out why he hasn’t been able to say no and then changing himself so that he can say it seems to be an excellent way of becoming who he really is. He does seem overly sensitive and concerned with making a good impression and with pleasing others all the time. When he meets someone new, for instance, he usually has on his ‘please like me’ face, even before he first reads their expressions to see where they’re at with him. He really doesn’t want to see that they’re angry with him.

Saying no would be a way of defining himself. When he would say no to all that needs saying no to, he would all that is left. Saying no is also a way of defining his limits with the world. By not being able to say no, he says to the world that he has no limits, that he’s willing to be all things for all people. Yet, soon after knowing him, people find that he does, in fact, have limits, the same as everyone else, and that he cannot possibly be all things for them. Realizing this, they then become disappointed in him, probably without even knowing why.

He does want to be able to say no. He wants this to be an important part of his marriage with Karen. He wants to be able to say no as easily as she can. For starters, he’s going to watch himself and see what happens when he gets scared and begins to say yes, when what he really wants to say is no. He wants to catch himself doing this and then say no instead. He wants to see what happens then, especially how the universe responds to his saying no.

Just now, when he realized that he was having trouble saying no to Karen, he took a big chance and did so anyway. And she didn’t get angry or reject him. She just said okay.
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Alan Watts on Psychotherapy

He’s doing acid again, celebrating all the new that has been coming into his world. While he’s coming on, he’s reading Alan Watts, who’s saying that when “people go to a guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the unconscious: – ‘You know…. You know’.”

For Watts, healing is just patiently sitting there being open and humoring the other person until he comes to remember who he really is.

Watts also says that we all tend to identify with the controlling will within ourselves. He warns that “To the degree that society teaches the individual to identify himself with a controlling will, separate from his total organism, it merely intensifies his feeling of separateness, from himself and from others.”

He suggests that, in addition to using medicines to free ourselves from unconsciously identifying with this controlling will, we can also meditate, give ourselves time to be quiet, and let go of being a grownup all the time. He also suggests that the togetherness and unity of the group experience can help us to overcome our unconscious identity with this separating and controlling will.

The question then naturally arises in our hero’s mind – “who are we when we’re not the controlling will, the controller – when we’re not Granny? Who are we then when we’re the rest of ourselves, when we’re no longer separate from either ourselves or the rest of the world?”

He suddenly has a clear image of Alan Watts, sitting across from him right now, looking at him with that twinkle in his eye, as Alan watches him struggling in his mind with all this.

That twinkle seems to be telling him that he’s on the right track but that as long as he’s still thinking about it and trying to figure it out he hasn’t gotten it yet. Words themselves, especially words that attempt to define or delineate experience, actually come from the controller and are an attempt at separating ourselves from the experience itself. Words do this by fitting the experience into pre-digested and limiting verbal molds.

The answer he wants to his questions isn’t in the words anyway; it’s in what he does with his day now, after having seen that merry yet challenging twinkle in Alans’ magical eye.
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Brain Damaged

They have regular staff meetings at the child guidance clinic where he works. Usually they discuss topics relevant to their work with the children. Several weeks ago, they were talking about brain damage, and he felt something begin to stir deep within himself. He began to wonder then – had he been brain damaged himself from the mastoid bone infection and the meningitis when he was a young boy?

In that first meeting, they talked about brain damage and what it means to the child psychologically. Usually, the child becomes terribly anxious, not knowing what he’ll do next, what he’ll say, or even how it’ll come out. This would certainly explain a great deal of the fear and anxiety that he has felt all his life.

They said that a major symptom of brain damage is a strong aversion to be touched. This is certainly true for him! Most of the time, he does not like to be touched. It makes him feel strange and sometimes is even quite painful. Yet, at the same time, like all of us, he hungers for touch and affection. He does know that if he doesn’t deal with this, he’ll end up alone with no one ever wanting to touch him.

He’s going to be more conscious from now on of how he responds to touch. He’s going to try to notice exactly how he feels whenever he is touched. Maybe he can overcome this automatic reaction by being more conscious of it. He hopes so. Otherwise, he’ll eventually doom himself to a life alone. He’s also going to tell Karen and others about this, tell them that it’s not personal whenever he flinches, that it’s just an unconscious, physiological reaction. He wonders what else he doesn’t know about himself yet?

He and Karen got stoned together earlier tonight. Talking with her, it became clear that all his major freakouts lately have come from those recent talks at the clinic. All that talk about brain damaged and schizophrenic children has been stirring up the hurt and scared child within him.

Earlier this week, when he began to panic, he assumed it was from smoking too much grass. Yet from here and now he sees that grass was not only innocent then but was actually trying to show him the true source of his panic – that scared and brain damaged little boy within him.
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Eye Contact

He has been studying eye contact for his doctoral dissertation in large part because, for most of his life, he has been unable to look another person in the eye. He has either looked away or not looked at all. He has always been afraid of what he would see in the other people’s eyes. Actually, he has been even more afraid of what they would see in his!

To a great extent, he got into smoking grass because of this, noticing that when he was stoned, he was no longer afraid and could look other folks in the eye. He liked what he saw in their eyes too. He liked seeing that they felt good about him. Over time, this has helped him to feel better about himself.

But he wants to be able to be himself with people all the time, not just when he’s stoned. Without grass, he still feels like a bug dancing on the end of the other people’s gaze. He feels stuck, unable to look away and yet unable to really open up and look back either. Because of this, he imagines and reacts to all sorts of projections, based entirely on thoughts and feelings about himself that come from his fearful side Granny.

He has to end this. He has to be brave enough to be able to meet another’s gaze whenever he wants. Otherwise he’ll never be able to see another’s true feelings about him.

When he’s unable to look another in the eye, he doesn’t receive any feedback. He doesn’t see that his perceptions of himself are often skewed in an inaccurate and usually very negative way. When he doesn’t receive any positive and corrective perceptions of himself from outside, he stays locked away in a solipsistic dialogue with his inner self-hater, with Granny herself, always having to defend himself from her unrealistic and unwarranted attacks.

Interaction with other people – and this means primarily by way of eye contact, because we can lie with our tongues but not with our eyes – is a major way for him to break free of his prison of fear and become who he really is.

Lately, he has outgrown many fears and perceptions which may have once been relevant for him but which no longer are today. Yet many still persist. No matter how strongly he opposes these remaining fears and misperceptions, he’ll never prevail without help from outside of himself. When he is able to share himself through his eyes, he gains a better understanding about himself than from any other source. Eye contact continues to give him essential feedback from others that he’s okay, even loved. Perhaps soon he’ll even know this himself.
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Shining too Bright

Towards the end of the day, on their way to visit friends in Malibu, he and Karen are pulled over by the police. The police officers make them get out of their car. They even search them. They say that someone was shooting on the highway with a rifle. They say that they’re searching everyone. They’re bullshitting. No one is stopping any of the other cars streaming by. They really stopped him and Karen because they’re hippies.

They even look in his daypack and the glove compartment, although he tells them that a rifle wouldn’t fit into either. When he says this, they give up pretending to be looking for a rifle and tell him to shut up or else. Then they continue searching all through the car, obviously looking for grass.

They don’t find any though and have to let them go. As he drives away, he realizes that he’s scared, but he’s really pissed too. He’s pissed that the police can do this to them, especially using a phony excuse. He’s really pissed that the police can get away with picking on them just because of how they look.

They’re both still upset when they arrive at Ed’s house in Malibu. Ed’s a professor in the Psychology department at UCLA, a member of his doctoral committee. Ed’s done a fair amount of acid himself. Once they’re in Ed’s safe and welcoming space, he realizes just how freaked out he has been. He’s glad he wasn’t holding. But he’s gladder when Ed pulls out some really good grass and gets them all righteously stoned.

He and Karen hang out with Ed and his girlfriend Jovi for the rest of the evening. He and Ed play some chess, and it gets very interesting. Ed’s really good and easily beats him their first game. In their second game though, without really knowing that he’s doing it, he beats Ed – exactly the same way Ed had beaten him – and without Ed even noticing it until it’s too late. He had unconsciously learned the winning combination of moves from Ed in their first game and had then been able to play them back past Ed to win their second. He’s impressed again by how his inner mind works.

Later, safely back in Venice and out walking with Gypsy on the beach, it finally sinks in just how dangerous it is for him out there in the straight world these days. He wonders too if perhaps his acid vibe was what attracted the police. Was he shining too bright? Is it against the law to be that high and happy?