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.
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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 I have still spent much of my life alone, withdrawn from the world.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.
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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.

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.

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Still

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!

During the 60’s, those of us who wanted to create a more spiritual reality used various paths to become more conscious, loving, and kind.

We used various forms of dream work. This included analyzing our dreams and/or using active imagination, or visualization, to understand their messages. We learned from Jung and Perls and others what dreams are and how we could use them to become more whole beings. We learned that dreams speak in ‘God’s forgotten language.’

We discovered the I Ching, the ancient Chinese holy book, an extremely high spiritual book. We saw that the book was also an oracle that responded to whatever question we might ask by describing the situation that we found ourselves in at the time we asked the question.

Many of us began meditating in the 60’s, influenced perhaps by the influx of the many Buddhists who saw a golden opportunity and came to America to gather disciples. Many of us still meditate, just doing our own forms.

Many of us favored LSD in the 60’s. We weren’t afraid of it then as many folks are nowadays. We liked how it made us more clear and compassionate. We found that we could be completely open and honest with one another when we tripped together. We found that we couldn’t bullshit when we were tripping, not to ourselves or to each other. We called it acid honesty.
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Although I don’t think Stan Grof’s way, his LSD Psychotherapy way, is necessary – many of us have done it on our own, in our own ways – but it does work. The result of his LSD therapy, the sort of person one can become, is described in the following quotes from his bookLSD Psychotherapy (see pages 227 and following if your curious.)

“It (LSD) has mediated a profound spiritual opening in atheists, skeptics, and materialistically oriented scientist, facilitated far reaching emotional liberation, and caused radical changes in value systems and the basic life style.”

“Subjects free themselves from certain idiosyncratic perceptions, inappropriate emotional responses, rigid value systems, irrational attitudes, and maladjustive behavior patterns that are products of their early programming.”

“They suddenly see that their entire concept of existence and approach to it had been contaminated by a deep, unconscious fear of death.”

“The emphasis shifts from pursuit of complicated external schemes to appreciation of simple aspects of existence.”

“A selfish and competitive approach to existences is seen as ignorant, inferior, and ultimately self-destructive.”

“The western life philosophy, which confuses conspicuous consumption with richness of life is replaced by a new emphasis on “voluntary simplicity.”

“Another striking aspect of the psychedelic transformation is the development of intense interest in consciousness, self-exploration, and the spiritual quest.”

“The universe ceases to be a gigantic assembly of material objects: it becomes an infinite system of adventures in consciousness.”

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Those folks ‘in power’ today, those who are still trying to bullshit us so that they can ‘control’ us and the world, all those politicians and other leaders, were so afraid of LSD in the 60’s, afraid of how it was waking folks up, that they made it illegal and those of us who disagreed, outlaws.

Those bad guys are still out there. If we wish to overcome them, we have to be more conscious, more loving, and more kind. We can’t win by fighting them. We have to walk those peaceful spiritual paths again.

In my next note, I’ll share some of the positive results of our efforts in the 60’s, results such as environmental awareness, the growing equality of women and the feminine, the equality of gay men and women in our culture, the health and fitness movements that have led to organic foods and gardening, and the notion that it takes a village. I’ll look ahead too, wondering where we can take the current spiritual revolution.

We don’t need to wait until the current revolution is over before we begin creating our new world. We didn’t wait the last time a revolution was attempted, back in the 60’s. And we don’t need to wait until this one is over either. We can start now.
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In the sixties and early seventies, the counter-culture split into two main factions. Many of us stayed with our anger and fought against the establishment – in the anti-war, anti-nuke, and other anti- movements.

Some of us, however, worked to create a new world – a new way of being, a new way of relating to each other, a new way of living with one another. We became quite creative.

We created communities. We created the Rainbow Gathering, a spiritual gathering that brought thousands of folks together every year. We created the notion of non-hierarchal councils in which everyone had a voice and was listened to. We created men and women’s groups.

Instead of focusing on our anger, we focused on the spiritual. Most importantly, we created a new consciousness, using dreams, meditation, the I Ching, bodywork, and various psychedelics, all for personal and spiritual growth.

In spite of all the love and energy that we put into it, the 60’s revolution failed. The Rainbow Gathering eventually turned itself into a party, most of the communes failed, and folks stopped trying to be more conscious. Instead they began to focus on making more and more money. Most tellingly, over time we all stopped saying “have a good day” and began saying “take care.” Will “take cover” be next?

If the current revolution succeeds, and we wish to move on to new ways of being human, we need to create and share new visions for our collective future, visions that we can begin to actualize now. It’s so much easier to focus our spiritual energy if we know where we want to go with it.

In my next note, I’ll share some of the spiritual paths we took in the 60’s, as well as where they took us.

I am a writer, but until recently I have never given my talent the time and energy that it deserves. But I am writing now – and I’m finally publishing my Wanderer stories too. I guess I had forgotten for a while that I have to write down what’s going on in my life. Otherwise I lose my way, living out here at the edge.
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Back in the early nineties, I had a dream in which a friend of mine, a writer, helped me fix this broken sled that I needed to use. He showed me how to fix the third wheel that was broken and keeping the sled from moving. As soon as I fixed it in my dream, I was able to use it to go where I needed to go.

I understood from this dream that I needed to use all three of my talents. I needed to start writing again in order to make my way through life. True, I was an acid wanderer, a healer too, but I was also a writer. And I needed to write in order to go on with my life.

Soon after this dream, Aspen’s dad gave me my first computer and I began writing. I saw that his act of kindness was Spirit’s way of giving me an opportunity to write again. I began slowly, but soon I couldn’t stop.
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I am a writer. I’ve known this for years. I’ve known this, but I have never tried to support myself with my writing. I have always supported myself as a therapist, or else I have lived outside the law, wandering in the wildlands. I have never attempted to make money off my writings.

I was talking to a friend once about Ariana, about how she went to college but never used her degree. My friend and I agreed that Ariana had become an awesome singer and songwriter. We also saw how she began to be successful just as soon as she decided to focus entirely upon her singing and song writing.

In the midst of our conversation, I realized that we could have been talking about me too. I went to school, as Ariana did, but I’ve never really taken advantage of my PhD in Clinical Psychology. Also, like Ariana, I have a creative side. I love to write, as she loves to sing.

It struck me then that yes; I’m a writer, just as Ariana is a singer. Maybe I also have something unique and creative to share with the world. I know that she does. It’s so easy to see it in her. Sometimes it’s easier to see myself by looking into a mirror.

I decided that I would do the same as she had done. I would devote my energies towards being a writer, and I knew, as she must have known, that my efforts would, as Thoreau once said, “meet with success unexpected in common hours.”

I also remembered what W. H. Murray had once written – that “the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

I throw the dice. . . .

When I was a graduate student at UCLA, studying to be a Clinical Psychologist, I read about the 19th century Introspectionists – Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, Gustav Fechner, William James and others. Although I had thought that psychology was supposed to be the study of the psyche, the psychology department at UCLA claimed that psychologists could only study behavior. It was refreshing and informative to find that these Introspectionists had actually studied consciousness.

They studied consciousness by going inside and by following their thoughts and their feelings, their images and their perceptions, following them to see where they would go, to see how they would interact with other thoughts, feelings, images and perceptions, and, of course, to see how it all fit together.

Later, Carl Jung did similar work with his word association tests and his notion of complexes. However, his research soon led him into the deeper reaches of consciousness.

When I began to smoke marijuana, I would sometimes lose my train of thought and forget what I was saying or thinking. If I wanted to retrieve what I had lost, if I thought it was important, I would go inside, as those early Introspectionists did, and follow my thoughts that I did remember until I came upon the one I had lost. I would usually succeed in doing this, and it was interesting too, to see how it was all tied together in my head.
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In the early seventies, when I was beginning to work with acid, I began to feel the pull to put more and more of my energy into this work of exploring consciousness. As it usually happened in those days, I soon had a dream that justified my feelings and clarified what I was to do.

In the beginning of the dream, I had decided to stop working as a psychotherapist. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. Then, still in the dream, I was with several people. We were all strangers. We were in an old house in Berkeley, on the south side. I noticed some writing on the floor in the garage there, an old sign that said, “candy, cigarettes, sodas….” The rest was blurred. I was excited. I looked in another room and uncovered a similar sign.

I realized that there had been a store there originally, that the present house had been built over it. The neighborhood must have been really different back then. One of the women there wanted to work with me to explore the old city. A black guy was on the phone excitedly telling his woman about it. He didn’t have it quite right, but he wanted to work with me too.

This dream had a major effect upon me. I decided I wouldn’t be a therapist anymore. I had seen that therapy stayed mostly in the shallows. I wanted to dive deeper. I also began to understand why most people preferred to live in the shallows, on the surface of life. They were afraid to examine the deeper issues of life.

Most importantly, I felt that I had finally found my calling, my new path with heart. I was going to explore the old city – those older and deeper levels of consciousness that existed in the world before this present culture with its here and now overlay

I began to explore consciousness more seriously. I was already intrigued by the magic I had experienced at our camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras. I was also interested in telepathy. I had been interested since I was a young boy. I began to notice more and more synchronicities in the air.
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When I would backpack into our camp at Dinky Creek, I would often do acid. I became friends with a large rock. I used to visit it almost every day. I noticed that I would have unusual thoughts when I was with it. I finally realized that the rock – I called it the Old One – was talking to me. I also noticed that it seemed to change over time, becoming more and more endowed with human facial features.

I certainly had many intense spiritual connections with rocks at Dinky. Once, while I was still high above the cliffs, with the darkness closing about me, I met up with another rock, a small one this time, I was having trouble finding my way down the cliffs, when this rock called out and told me that it would help me down if I would take it with me. I picked it up and immediately found the way down to my camp. It still serves me in this manner.

Another time at Dinky, I lost one of my contacts while sitting around the fire late one night with some good folks. None of us could find it, not even with a flashlight. Eventually we gave up and retired for the night. I was in my sleeping bag, bemoaning my loss, when a voice told me that it was stuck on the inside of my shirt. And when I looked, it was there. A much deeper part of myself, a part that didn’t rely on my normal perceptual apparatuses, had observed the fall of the lens and had been able to tell me where it had fallen.
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As I said before, I have always been interested in telepathy. When I was a young boy and recovering from my death experience, I kept hearing these voices in my head. I finally figured out that they were other people’s thoughts and images. I didn’t like that then, not when I was seven years old, so I shut down that part of my psyche by listening to loud music on the radio or else by reading a book all the time.

But later in my life, especially after I had begun using acid wisely, I was able to open myself to the thoughts and feelings and images of others. Once, when I still lived in Berkeley, I tripped with Karen and Bobby and Abby.

I remember, at one point in our journey, I had a strange experience. These four beings entered the front door. Three of them immediately went to Karen and Bobby and Abby and easily merged with them. The fourth milled about for a while, and then approached me, not knowing quite what to do with me. It finally touched me, and, all of a sudden, I felt like Steve Gaskin said he felt one time when he had first connected with his psychic abilities.

I felt then as if everyone but me had always been awake, patiently waiting for me to wake up too. I felt as if Karen and Bobby and Abby had always been telepathic and in each other’s heads. I remember looking at them and knowing that they know I had finally woke up.

I remember too, later in the trip, when Bobby and Abby were in Abby’s room, hanging out and getting to know each other. The two dogs were with Karen and me in the living room, romping around and playing with our acid energy. Karen and I were cracking up watching them. They were really funny. Right then we heard Bobby and Abby laughing also, in tune, so to speak, with us. I realized that Bobby and Abby had been watching the dogs play through our shared consciousness. Just then, Bobby hollered in – and this totally blew me away! He told me not to think about it, or else I’d break our connection and lock us all back into the silence.

Also, I have often received images that don’t seem to have anything to do with my here and now. Once, I was looking out at the ocean, watching the clouds and the waves come in. When I looked down and saw myself, I realized that I was looking out of the eyes of a little girl, holding a bucket in her hand. I have had many such images or thoughts come my way, and it’s clear to me that they are definitely images or thoughts from someone else’s mind.
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Although I have long stopped being a therapist, I am still a healer. Most of the time, just being with me encourages folks to open up and dive more deeply into themselves. I have experienced many unexpected changes in these folks. One woman with a tipped uterus came back the following week to tell me that her doctor told her that it was no longer tipped. Another came to me with a serious cold sore on her lip. I watched, as she talked about her husband and became more and more angry with him. And while I was watching, I saw her cold sore slowly and completely disappear from her lip. This sort of healing doesn’t happen by intention. It seems to be activated by a deeper and more compassionate connection, one that works without words and not through ordinary consciousness.

I have studied Stan Grof’s healing work with acid. His approach to therapy is to have the patient dive deeper and deeper into his or her consciousness. He basically says that if you get to the bottom of things, if you have cleaned out all the unconscious debris in your psyche, then what is left is healthy consciousness and you are who you are supposed to be.

The hexagram The Well in the I Ching, says much the same – that one needs to get to the very bottom of things: Otherwise one may fail “to penetrate to the real roots of humanity and remain fixed in convention” … “or he may suddenly collapse and neglect his self-development.”

Steve Gaskin also said something similar. He said that our deeper levels of consciousness, what many have called the unconscious, are actually incredible communication centers that can hook us up to other awarenesses, He suggests that we clean out these centers by dealing with all the psyche junk we have stored there, all those forgotten and repressed and never realized parts of our psyche that we have never had the courage or the inclination to deal with before.
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Those of us doing acid back in the early days, in the sixties and seventies, found that we would become completely open and honest while we were doing acid. We would share ourselves from our deepest levels. We called it being acid honest. We recognized that acid made us braver, but it was more than that – we became wiser too, as we saw into the deeper and more profound reaches of our encounters with one another. Healing was easy with acid honesty.

Besides the honesty and the healing that acid would usually engender, it also led to some unusual experiences. Once, I found myself floating above the trees – and seeing my body below still sitting under one of the trees. Another time, my partner was sitting in a chair and standing next to herself at the same time. Often, while tripping, I would receive many phone calls, usually from other trippers, but once from two of my ex-wives. They all said that they had called because they had felt my energy.
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I have also noticed, when leading a group of folks who are sharing their dreams, that often many of the dreams had a similar motif. It was as if we were all working on the same or similar problem or realization. Carl Jung noticed this on the eve of WWII. Many folks shared dreams then of rivers of blood and marching armies and other dire warnings of impending war and death.

On another note, once in a dream group, a woman told me that she was afraid she would leave her body and astral travel if she meditated. I told her she would be all right with me leading the meditation. As we began to meditate, however, I suddenly had an image of her running away into the distance. I grabbed her ankle as she began to run out of sight and pulled her back to me. From across the room in the dream circle, I heard her say “thank you.”
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So rocks have talked with me, have helped me to survive even. And I have shared consciousness with some folks and have been inside other folks’ heads. I have also received many images from God knows whom. All this began to happen when I decided that I no longer wanted to be a therapist, that I wanted to go deeper into consciousness than therapy usually allowed. I also realized then that this way I would be able to explore consciousness through exploring my own. This way, I could go as deeply as I wished.

From all this and much more, I have found that we are all tied together in a group mind, called by Teilhard de Chardin the Mind of God. I have also found, unfortunately, that most people are afraid to acknowledge the existence of this group mind. Instead, they believe that they are alone and isolated inside their heads, afraid to plumb even their personal depths. This is so sad. Each of us could be a fully conscious being, as I’m sure Spirit intended.

Webster defines farfetched as being “brought from a remote time or place.” As a name then, Farfetched would refer to someone who had been fetched from afar. Such a person might have been called from afar by Spirit. This happened to me.
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I didn’t understand any of this for the longest time, but when I was still in LA, working on my PhD in Clinical Psychology, I worked at a child guidance clinic in Hollywood. A patient of mine there, a young boy of eleven years, liked me a lot. Once, when we were out walking, he called me Farfetched. When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that I was really far out, someone he wished he could be more like.

Somehow his comment stuck in my head, and sometime later, I told my son Jonathan what the boy had said to me. I asked him what he thought of Farfetched as a name. He liked it as a name, said it was okay, but then he laughed and added that I should never call myself Outrageous. I never did. I knew my limitations.
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When I was with Karen, during my early wandering days, we took Howlingwolf as a last name. We used to howl at the moon when we were out of doors, which was most of the time in those days. During that time in my life, I was Farfetched Howlingwolf and proud of it. Looking back from here and now though, that name seems more than a bit outrageous in and of itself.

Later on, when I was spending time with the Rainbow Family, going to their gatherings and becoming friends with many of the folks, Farfetched was my rainbow name. Most of the folks in the Rainbow Family knew me as Farfetched, know me by no other.

It’s odd; I have never called myself Wanderer, although in my heart and soul I am Wanderer. I have used Wanderer as a name only in my books. I’m tempted again though, as I was once in Flagstaff, a long time ago, when Wanderer came to me in a dream and asked me to take Wanderer as my name. I refused then, feeling that I could be Wanderer without calling myself that. Now I’m not so sure.
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I’ve always felt that the reason I was fetched back from afar – fetched back to life when I died as a young boy – was because I had something important to do with my life. As I grew older, I identified with Black Elk, the Lakota holy man, and others who had died as young boys and who had been returned to life for spiritual purposes. Like them, I too was brought back from death to share a message from Spirit.

When I was a young boy and died on the operating table, when I was falling into the darkness and about to panic, a voice called out to me, told me that there was no bottom, to turn the falling into flying. Somehow I did this, and, shedding my fears, I flew blissfully towards the White Light that waited for me.

I realize now that the message I was brought back from death to share was what the voice had told me as I was freaked out and falling – that there is no bottom. There is no ending to our lives as conscious beings. Our consciousness doesn’t end with the death of our bodies. We go on.

Remember this when you are leaving your body: There is no bottom. You are not falling. You are flying. Fly blissfully to the Light.

The other day, someone asked me why I had needed to use acid, why couldn’t I have been high without it. His question got me to thinking.

Acid and I had a natural fit. Acid opened the doors to higher consciousness and alternative states of reality. I’d always been interested in consciousness and magic. When I was a young boy, I wanted more than anything to be a Druid when I grew up. This is why I earned my PhD in psychology from UCLA. This is why I became a healer. This is why I started using acid

I have always worked to raise my consciousness. I have always listened to and tried to understand my dreams. I have been consulting the I Ching for more than 45 years. I have done yoga and meditated for almost this long. When I first did acid, in 1968, I saw it’s enormous potential for my work with consciousness. I immediately added it to my consciousness raising tools.

I was also a wanderer and an adventurer. I particularly liked to use acid and wander about in consciousness. There’s always something new and exciting to find and explore. Understanding this, I soon began to use acid to explore the many realms of consciousness.

For example, there is a level of consciousness that is always in the here and now. There is also a level where one is in all of time at once, a level where one can see from the beginnings to the ending. I found that I could go back and forth between these two realms at will. I have found others just as interesting.

I was sitting under a Juniper Tree in the High Sierras once. I was doing acid. Then I suddenly found myself high above the tree looking down at my body that was still sitting under the tree. Ever since then, I have known that my consciousness is not tied to my body and I can leave my body whenever I wish.

Another time, again in the High Sierras, I saw the world of rocks and trees disappear, replaced by a grey nothingness. I asked for the world back then, the world of beauty that had surrounded me. The grey nothingness vanished and the rocks and trees returned. Ever since then, I have known that the world of rocks and trees is no more real than the grey nothingness.

I’m extremely interested in this sort of thing. I always have been. I always will be.