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.
.

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.”

.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.”
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

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.

There is a lot of magic in my life. When I was younger, I thought that I was responsible for it, that I made it happen. However, I soon learned that I never made any of it happen. I certainly have never been magic’s author – that is Spirit’s role – but sometimes I have been whom Spirit has wanted me to be, allowing magic to flow through me and into the world.
.

Telepathy and the other psychic powers aren’t magic. We just call them so out of ignorance. These abilities merely reflect the ways our minds naturally work. By their very nature, our minds are telepathic communication centers. But, for most of us, they have become stopped up because we haven’t dealt with our personal shit as it has come up. Instead, we’ve repressed our hurts and fears and angers and the memories of our failures, stuffed and stashed all of them and more into these same communication centers, overloading them and blocking the free flow of inner speech between all of us that is our birthright.

Knowing what’s going on in someone else’s head isn’t magic. Talking head to head isn’t magic. Even causing things to happen in the outer world, like bending keys, isn’t magic. Physicists do the latter every day, creating new particles, annihilating others, all the while knowing that focusing attention on a particle really does affect it. (Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle.) Physicists today are even beginning to consider consciousness and attention to be “forces” that affect reality – whatever that is! – just as much as gravity and the electromagnetic and the other “physical” forces.
.

Much of what we call magic really isn’t, but magic does occur. It’s magic every time God appears amongst us or speaks to us, or through us, or nudges us gently back upon our paths when we have lost our way. It’s magic when two people meet and, looking into each other’s eyes, realize that they have important and transformative messages for each other. It’s magic when doors finally open, just when we have understood why they have been closed. It’s magic when a dream appears in the darkness of our night, telling us what we need to know. It’s magic too whenever love’s around, visiting for awhile.
.

Just being alive is magical. Can you imagine a greater mystery? Can you imagine anything more magical than the birth of a child – a holy, wholly new being coming to live with us for a while? What messages he or she must bring – of wisdom and new and exciting ways that Spirit wants us all to walk.

Jung writes about J. W. Dunne, the author of An Experiment with Time, who, while serving in the Boer War in Africa in 1902, had a dream in which he seemed to be standing on a volcanic mountain that turned out, upon closer inspection, to be an island. He knew that it was threatened with “a catastrophic volcanic eruption.” He was terrified and wanted to alert the inhabitants. Four days later, he received in his mail a copy of The Daily Telegraph from England, with a headline announcing that 40,000 people had lost their lives when a volcano had erupted on the island of French Martinique. (Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p. 444)

When he had had his dream, his unconscious had already known about the eruption and all the deaths. His dream was telling his consciousness something that he had already known at a deeper level of conscious. The eruption, together with the subsequent destruction, was a major event and certainly one with strong feelings. We often receive messages of this sort from our unconscious before they are received by more conventional means.

I had a client once. Years before, she had been about to board an airplane to cross the English Channel. However, just then she thought she saw a newspaper headline saying that a plane had crashed crossing the channel. She refused to board the plane then, although everyone thought that she was crazy. She wasn’t. The plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.

I remember once, years ago, when Karen told me her dream in which an astronomer had just discovered a new comet. The next day, we read in the newspaper that a new comet, called Kohoutek, had been discovered on the very night that Karen had had her dream. Karen had apparently felt and shared the astronomer’s excitement and had thus learned from her dream of the arrival of this comet as it was being discovered halfway around the world.

When Don Juan speaks to Carlos of seeing, he means something quite different from how the word is ordinarily used. He sometimes means one thing, at other times, another, but what is constant in how he uses the word is the notion of witnessing objectively, without putting anything of oneself into it.

Once, telling Carlos of his son’s death, Don Juan said that when he looked at his son’s dying body, he cried and was sad. When, however, he saw, it was different. Then there was wonder at watching the transformation, at seeing the life force leave the body

Sometimes he seems to mean more than this, more like seeing a different reality. However, it is important to notice that Don Juan is extroverted and projects his body of knowledge out upon the outer world, as opposed to Carl Jung, the introvert, for whom there are no different realities, rather different aspects of the psyche each looking differently at the one reality.

When I am within a dream, I live through it one step at a time. I don’t know what will happen next and am only aware of the past and the present of the dream. When I awaken, however, I can look upon the whole of the dream.

Years ago, I realized that I could arrive at a similar viewpoint regarding my life, a viewpoint that transcended my current situation and allowed me to witness my life in its entirety. It was as if I were walking along a trail in the woods, and, by climbing to a higher viewpoint, I could see the entire trail. Similarly, by raising my consciousness, I can look down upon my entire life.

This point of view, I call the witness. By allowing us to objectively see our lives in their entirety, it allows us to see the Story of our lives, to see who we are and what Story we are in. It is essential to steering our lives to know where we have been and where we are going, to see what the next chapter will bring, and how the story will finally end. If we know all this, we have become masters of our fate and need have no fears.

I began while doing yoga in the late 60’s. In the classes, I was taught to systematically relax my entire body by focusing my awareness upon and relaxing in turn each body part until I had gone through my entire body. I found that, once my awareness was spread throughout my body, my mind with its many thoughts had quieted and I was in fact meditating.

Later, after reading The Secret of the Golden Flower (translated from the Chinese by Richard Wilhelm, the translator also of the I Ching, I realized another important aspect of meditation. The Taoists, in this illuminating text, speak of the circulation of the light – light being awareness. They say that one should move the energy of awareness between the two primary poles of the body – the “Heavenly Heart,” which is the point midway between the eyes, and the “place of power,” which is located at the solar plexus. I found that when I did this, I would profoundly deepen my meditation.

When I began my work as a psychotherapist, I found people arguing as to which was best, meditation or psychotherapy. They are different, true, and they each do produce different results. Meditation can produce calmness and centeredness without necessarily increasing understanding. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, can produce increased understanding of self but often without ever leading to a calm and peaceful center.

Eventually, I came to use both meditation and psychotherapy in my own healing work. I would begin each healing session, either individual or group, with a meditation. This brief meditation centered my clients and me in the here and now and gave us a chance to slow down and see what was most important to work upon during our time together. It also led to greater empathy and awareness on everyone’s part.

Sometimes dreams are prophetic, sometimes talking about events that will exist far in the future. I had one such dream. It came to me long ago. It has only become relevant and meaningful today, fourteen years later.

In this dream there is a circle, one that I have to go around again. I am to carry my old book with me this time. I had almost thrown it away once. I’m glad I didn’t. It contains much of beauty and wonder.
.

This circle has special meaning for me. I have tried to go around it twice before. Each time I have failed to complete it. This may be my last chance.

The first time I attempted to travel around this circle began after I had just finished my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, when I dropped out and moved from Venice to Berkeley. This was in the early seventies. Over time, I took the name Wanderer and became a wandering acid holy man. I did a great deal of acid in those days, and it was a time of magic and wonder in my life, a time when everything flowed, a time when I made a difference.

In those days, I spent a great deal of time by myself, hiking and backpacking alone in the mountains of California. I also traveled around the country, living in my VW van and staying to the back roads. I wrote it all down too, in my book that I called Wanderer’s Notebook.

Unfortunately, I never completed that circle. I never completed my book either. Instead, as I was completing the circle and returning to ordinary reality, my wife betrayed me. She cheated on me and then left, taking our baby daughter away. Thrown off center by this betrayal and loss, my life faltered, then failed. I lost the circle.

When I had finally found the circle again, years later, this time traveling and gathering with the Rainbow Family, I soon became Wanderer again. I did a lot of acid this time too. With my best friend Ramon, I left the West Coast and moved to Colorado. Together with some other brothers and sisters, we had a high acid house in the mountains above Boulder.

However, I never completed that circle either. Instead, I became inflated. I began to think that I was someone special. Soon enough, I crashed and burned.
.

Since these two failed attempts to achieve wholeness of being, I have regressed to an earlier and more one-sided version of myself. I have become much less physical, more in my head, more introverted, and yes, more negative too. I have gone back to the beginning. And I have long hesitated to attempt the circle again. But it has now been fourteen years, and I am beginning it again.

The main thing I have come to understand about my life now from my old dream is that I still need to carry my old book along with me as I journey around the circle. Synchronistically, this past year, I have been rewriting my old book. This time, I have divided it into two books – The Birth of Wanderer and The Life and Death of Wanderer. The first one, The Birth of Wanderer is being published at this time in the Weekly Reader section of The Caldron (www.thecaldron.com.)

Rewriting these two books – and reliving those times as I do so – has let me see who I had been during these two previous attempts to complete the circle. Both times, I had been much more alive – more physical, more enthusiastic, and much more out there in the world of people and adventure.

Rewriting these books has also let me see how I failed to complete the two circles. The first time, I failed and lost my way because I had come to feel that my strength depended upon my relationship with my wife. When she betrayed me, when she left me, I lost my center. Over time, ever since then, I have learned to find the source of my power within myself, not in a relationship. I won’t make that mistake again.

The second time I failed because I began to think I was special. I became inflated and when the inflated ego bubble popped, I lost everything, even my connection with acid, a connection that had never failed me before.
.

The goal of completing the circle has always had the deeper meaning of completing the path to wholeness of being and then bringing this wholeness back to share with the here and now collective world.

However, as a result of two serious operations and a death experience that I underwent as a young boy, I have a serious split within me. Because of my brush with death a part of me was lost. Before the operations, I was a normal healthy boy, physical and full of life. Afterwards I became very quiet and shy, very afraid of almost everything. My goal of completing the circle has always been to bring these two sides of myself together again.

Sometimes I am completely in my head, just sitting around and reading and thinking all day. Sometimes I am very introverted, focused almost entirely upon my inner life. Sometimes I am quite negative. And for the past ten years, I have been closer, probably too close, to my feminine side than I have ever been, being the mommy-daddy for our three boys. This quiet and introverted and overly feminine side of myself is one extreme.

Sometimes however, especially when I was doing a lot of acid, I was very physical, hiking and wandering about in the woods and climbing all the trees and rocks I come upon. Adventuring on my bike a lot too. Sometimes I was very extraverted, wanting to surround myself with high friends and fellow trippers. Sometimes I was very excited about my life. Seeing it as an adventure. Maybe I can let go of my introverted side and be this person again.
.

This time around the circle, I want to stay in the middle, falling to neither extreme. I want to be both mind and body. I want to be able to be either introverted or extroverted, whichever is appropriate to the circumstances. I want to find a middle ground between being overly enthusiastic (inflated) and being overly quiet and subdued. I just want to be real, in touch with whatever the moment requires.

This time around the circle, I want to find my balance, my center. This time I want to complete the circle and actualize the wholeness of being that I find there – and then bring it back into the world in which we all live.