The Birth of Wanderer is a chronicle of a unique spiritual transformation. When the story begins, back in the late sixties, the young man in question is a left-brained intellectual. He is a graduate student at UCLA, with a promising career ahead of him as a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst. When it ends, several years later, he has found his way back into his body and is beginning a new life as a wandering vagabond, living by his wits and his inner truth in the high mountains of California and on the back roads of America.

The seeds of this spiritual transformation had actually been sown much earlier in his life. When he was almost seven years old, he became seriously ill – with pneumonia in both lungs, with meningitis, with polio, and with an infected mastoid bone. When the doctors operated to remove the infected bone, he died on the operating table. He actually left his body and was heading towards the white light, when they were finally able to bring him screaming back into life and their reality.

His first wife Pamela left him in the late sixties, almost thirty years after this harrowing and physical death experience of his childhood. Her leaving triggered in him yet another death – this time psychological and of the ego – and he soon began a long and dangerous journey towards meaning and rebirth, a rebirth that required that he let go of his mind and trust himself again as a body, a rebirth that insisted that the only way he could ever be whole again would be to bring back into consciousness and integrate into his life that long lost and very frightened young boy still hidden deeply within himself.

His main enemy throughout this time of transformation was his own fear. His various defense mechanisms had taken him over and were constantly trying to run his life, trying to keep him from even feeling this fear.

His inner teacher, who came into being to oppose this constricting fear, used at first the image of Nikos Kazantzakis, the heroic Greek genius, and then that of Ken Kesey, the literary, acid hero. Following the examples of these two men, he soon began to climb out of his gravity well of fear.

However, it wasn’t until he was able to find within himself his own unique and powerful image for his future that he was finally able to break completely free of his fear. This powerful and healing image first came to him in his dreams, in the form of an old and wandering hobo asking for a place to stay. This wandering hobo soon became his mentor and his guide.

Already deeply into his dreams, as well as the I Ching and the consciousness of marijuana, he soon entered the psychedelic world. LSD, or acid as it was called, finally and irrevocably led him past all his old fears – led him to the mountains, to tripping there alone, to discovering his inner teacher – and finally led him to his craziness and, beyond it, to himself.

Acid and the consciousness he could achieve using it became the most important aspect of his new life. However, he was also learning with each and every trip that it really wasn’t the acid itself that was responsible for his changes – he saw far too many acid heads fall along the way – it was him and what he was able to do with the acid.

His friends and family and professional colleagues all thought he was going insane, that he was losing his mind and his connection with reality using these medicines. He was actually – with their reality anyway. But he was following his deepest and most innermost fantasies back to himself, back to when he had last been truly himself. At some level, he did know where he was going. He was going home.

He really did lose his mind when he first became a body again. He had to lose it in order to be reborn. He had to go through the darkness without knowing if there would ever again be light. After all, it was the first time he had been in his body since he had been that little boy, scared and dying on the operating table.

To stay sane, or at least somewhat objective, while he was going through all this, he took up writing. He made a deal with himself then. The Jungian analyst side of himself agreed to let the acid hippie side of himself live as he wished if he would, in turn, agree to write it all down and make sense of it. With this agreement secured, he was able to follow and live out his inner truths, discovered with the help of his dreams and acid. He wrote it all down and made sense of it too –his dreams, his acid trips, his thoughts and feelings and understandings, and everything else that happened to him along his way.

The acid hippie took the Jungian within him into some very strange and heavy places back in those days. You’ll also see though, as you read these pages, that the Jungian kept the acid hippie within himself honest and helped him to find his way through this new and uncharted world. As Dylan once sang, “If you live outside the law, you must be honest” – that is, conscious.

Somehow, in the midst of all this inner and outer turmoil, he still managed to earn his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA in early 1971. He even built up a private practice afterwards, first in LA and then later in Berkeley and San Francisco. However, soon afterwards, he began dreaming that the doctor was dying and that his real work was no longer healing others but was now exploring deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, ones that had been ignored in his own life till then, ones that had, in fact, been long ignored by his entire culture.

He used to fear his writing. His muse was extremely insistent in the beginning and seemed to take him over. He couldn’t stop writing. He wrote all the time. He remembers once writing, as he was driving to work in the heavy traffic of the L.A freeways, and being so involved in what he was writing in his notebook that was laying on the seat beside him that he got onto the wrong freeway and headed to the wrong job as a result – and then writing about that and what he thought that doing that meant too!

Nowadays though, he can see that his writing has never wanted to take him over. In truth, it has never been anything separate from himself. It is who he is. It is his excellence. There’s a flow in him that’s released whenever he puts pen to paper, a flow that comes from the deepest of levels within himself, from the source of all meaning for him.