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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

I took my first acid trip in the fall of 1968. It changed my life. Since then, I have done it regularly, sometimes quite often. I have always used it to raise my consciousness and to heal my relationships with other people and the universe. I have always liked it best for talking with God.

I began tripping while still a graduate student at UCLA. In my first year of clinical practice, while also training to be a Jungian analyst, the Jungians found out about my use of acid and asked me to choose between it and their training. I chose acid then because it didn’t ask me to choose. Instead it merely asked me to continue using my Jungian analytic awareness, as I had done earlier with my dreams, but now to help me stay conscious on my medicine wanderings, both inner and outer.

Although I still earned my Ph.D., I soon gave up being a psychotherapist. Instead I dropped out, and moved to Berkeley, where I lived in a house with other high folks whenever I wasn’t wandering in the high mountains or on the back roads of America.

I did act out my inner life, just as the Jungians had thought I would, but I did so with awareness and style. My life itself took on symbolic meaning, and I entered into another, more magical reality – one in which whatever happened was a symbolic message from God, guiding me upon my path. I soon began backpacking in the high mountains, often alone, doing high dose acid and learning who I really was and why I was here. The most important thing I learned was that there was nothing to fear.

I have lived a much different life than I would have had I chosen to give up acid and continue on with my Jungian training. Instead of becoming a Jungian analyst, I have become a Taoist wanderer, living simply and close to the land. Forced by the Jungians to choose, I chose the freedom to be myself and to follow my own path through life. I have never regretted my choice.

I had a vision once. I have lived with it for many years. In it, I see the human race moving towards the edge of a great abyss, inexorably, as if driven by a deep and fearful compulsion. There seems no stopping this rush to oblivion. Imagine all of humanity moving towards this fearsome edge. There would be only darkness and the beating of funeral drums.

With this dark vision, came another. In it, there suddenly appears a great Light, and all of humanity wakes as if from a deep sleep. We look at this edge together, now visible before us, and realize the great danger that we had faced and have now barely overcome, thanks only to the Light. It is the turning point, the Return. We gather ourselves then and turn away from that deep and fearsome edge and follow instead the Light that will lead us home once again, as it did long ago – as it always has.

We have been on the brink of nuclear holocaust for years. We are on the brink of environmental holocaust now. Our air is barely breathable. Our water is no longer pure. Everyday we foul our nest! We have no direction for our lives, moving through them as if asleep. Violence and chaos are increasing everywhere.

We are at that awesome edge right now. Even blind, we can feel it before us. And now a mystery occurs. Just as we are about to enter the great darkness, the Light appears. What is this Light?

This Light comes from the depths of the human psyche, from that deepest place within each of us, where we connect to each other and to Mother Earth. We have long been absent from this place of refuge, from this inner source of wisdom. Our rational minds and our little individual and collective egos have been making too much noise being self-important.

The message of the Light is clear – turn inwards, turn towards the Light that is within each of us. And as more and more of us do so, we will begin to realize just how insane we have been, denying the dangerous reality of our lives as we have lived them.

In the past, Aspen used to just throw stuff into her big, walk-in closet until it was a jungle in there. It had to do with her mood, a lot to do with her moon cycle. Aspen would always say that she did it because she didn’t want to deal with her stuff at the time.

The notion of the personal unconscious that we have received from Freud and Jung and their many colleagues is similar in function to Aspen’s closet. It’s where we put all our stuff that we don’t want to deal with at the time. However, Jung says that if we explore and organize our personal inner closets, we will be able to find our way to ourselves and to the larger transpersonal realm of imagination and spirit.

I had a dream once in which I was on board a large, ocean-going sailing ship. We saw that a big storm was coming, so we gathered everything up and stored it away in the proper places. We didn’t want the coming storm to toss anything about. Afterwards, when I woke from my dream, I realized that it was telling me something important. In my life, when emotional or psychical storms can come at any time, it would be wise for me to keep everything in its place, all the many aspects of myself on my ship of life.

I have a closet. I also have a cedar chest and a chest of drawers. I have places to put things. When I last moved, I went through everything. I know where everything is now, and it’s all useful and worth keeping. I may not use all of it often, but I know where everything is if and when I do need it.

My inner closet is the same. I have places where I store memories and feelings and thoughts, whatever is worth keeping; stored where they’re not on my mind all the time but are easily available whenever I do want to connect to them. And I never just toss something into my inner closet. I don’t repress anything just because I don’t want to deal with it at the time. I’ve had that sort of inner closet. I don’t like what it did to my head, and I’ve worked very hard since to clean it out – to have no loose ends.

In my recent note, “Being an Intellectual,” I wrote about Julian Jaynes and his notion of the bicameral brain. In his book, Jaynes postulates that the two hemispheres of our brains operate independently of one another and with different functions and capacities.

In particular, he locates the gods in our right hemispheres, those so-called higher beings that Jaynes says we project out upon reality, in the form of visions or voices. For him, these gods, both ancient and current, are just these visions and voices created by our right hemispheres, created so that they can talk to us in our left hemispheres and direct the course of our lives.

I’ve been thinking about Jaynes and his notion ever since I wrote about him. I have continued to reflect upon his notion and its ramifications. In fact, the thought just came to me that my right hemisphere (and probably everyone else’s) has a greater relationship with all the many levels of reality than does my left. It may not house the gods but it can see through time and at a distance. It doesn’t need words. It speaks primarily in images. It is the source of our dreams and our visions. It is the source of all that we now call magical or spiritual.

This higher consciousness that is located in our right hemispheres is a result of them being wired, so to speak, wired to be closer to and more connected to the larger consciousness of the Tao. In particular, the consciousness in our right hemispheres is identical with that larger part of ourselves that will continue to exist after the deaths of our bodies.

For most of us though, when we think of ourselves, of who we are, we think of our left hemispheres, teeming with all our thoughts and feelings that consume so much of our time and energy. Most of us identify with our left hemispheres and all that goes on within them. In fact, most of us still think that all of consciousness is limited to what goes on in our left hemispheres.

However, every once in a while a dream will come through, a hunch will catch our attention, a small still voice might be heard, all asking us to listen and perhaps to try a new way, a new path with heart. Even today, identified with and stuck in our left hemispheres as we are, we can still hear if we listen.

The right hemisphere is definitely the place to visit– at least for those of us who would have a Great Spirit to talk with – the place where we will always find a spiritually enlightening conversation. This place is where we will find the Master within us. This is where we will learn to live past our limited personal identities.

I was very fortunate when Ramon came into my life. He was an extraordinary man. He always lived life to the fullest. He never let fear slow him down or keep him from being true to himself. His heart was full of love, and he was without guile. I watched him begin to grow into himself and knew that someday he would be a great shaman.

However, like many other extraordinary persons, his life fell short of his promise, and he never made it to his greatness. He died while still young – along with Jesus, Janice, Jimmy, John, and all the rest.
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I met Ramon a long time ago. I met him in Lander, Wyoming. He called himself Mexican then. He and his partner Karen and his friend Sunshine were hitchhiking to the ’73 Rainbow Gathering. We stopped and gave them a lift the rest of the way into the gathering.

We stayed connected in the gathering. One day we all tripped together and realized that each of us had found new and worthy friends. We met afterwards in the mountains above Boulder. We camped alongside a little stream together and tripped more there.

After awhile, Karen and I headed east on the rest of our journey across the country and back. We took the rest of the summer and then some, slowly traveling east and then back again to Berkeley. On the way, in the orchards in Emmett, Idaho, where we were picking apples, we got pregnant.
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One day, just after Ariana was born. We were in our house on Grant Street in Berkeley. I heard a knock and opened the front door. There stood Ramon and his Karen. They had been living in Mexico and had wanted to find us. So they stopped by to see where we had gotten to.

I wasn’t into traveling at that time, what with a new and beautiful little girl in my life. They heard me on this and decided that they wanted to settle down a bit themselves, especially Karen who wanted to be a mother herself someday.

They went back to Florida, to Gainesville I believe, and went to school. Karen and I stayed in Berkeley for a few more years. But it was getting too scary there, way too much anger for us, especially now that Ariana was with us, so we moved up to the little town of Swisshome, in the Oregon Coast range.

I had a lot of trouble in Swisshome and later in Deadwood too. I am not a country boy at all. And no one there was interested in acid or exploring consciousness. The men there weren’t even interested in a men’s group. After a year there, I left and moved to nearby Eugene. Much better for me. Karen came with me, although she soon left me, taking Ariana with her, after sleeping with one of our old friends in Santa Fe.

After I got over her betrayal and the bummer of losing day to day contact with Ariana, I began to put my life together. Ramon came back into my life then. He was working now. He had a good job. He and his Karen were no longer together either. I guess that Ramon liked the young girls more than being married.
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I was tripping with a friend named Drew in Eugene at the time. He and I were close. I really liked him. He was a good tripper. After awhile though, he moved back to Alabama and I didn’t see him for awhile.

Then something uncanny began to happen. Drew would call me from Alabama. Then Ramon would call me later the same day. Drew was still in Alabama. Ramon was in Kansas. They didn’t know each other at all.

Funny things kept happening. They both got into coke at the same time. They both asked for my help. They both overcame the habit with the help of acid; and, what is most weird, both of their coke connections died soon after they stopped using coke.

Their calling me, in unison almost, went on for months. Then one day Drew called and said that he wanted to come and see me. He came soon after that, and we had our visit and tripped together. Several days later, Drew left, and then the very next day Ramon showed up. He and I visited and tripped together too. This new pattern, with each of them visiting me within days of each other, continued for several more months.

Finally I told both of them what was happening and invited them to come and visit me at the same time. They both did and we all had a great time, visiting and tripping. They became good friends too. We all became brothers.

After awhile, Drew settled down with a woman who wanted to own him. At the same time, Ramon became more and more important in my life. He was awesome, magical. We became partners. We traveled, we tripped, and eventually we lived together in the mountains, in Gold Hill above Boulder. Drew’s woman had slowed him down some, but he was still close with us. In fact, he rented the house right next to ours in Gold Hill.
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Eventually though, in spite of acid, in spite of our closeness, and in him spite of being Ariana’s Godfather, Ramon got carried away by the Deadheads and the young girls again. He began touring with the Dead, was soon back into coke. He drank a lot too – wine for breakfast.

Before the end, he seriously injured some man by running a stoplight. He was in a jealous rage at the time, thinking that his current young girl was fucking someone else. He did time for that, and later, when he came out, I told him that he had just gotten a wakeup call. I told him that the next one would be heavier. I didn’t know it would be his last.

At the New Year’s Eve Dead show in the Bay Area, he left his friends to score some coke. He had ten thousand dollars on him. He was shot that night and died shortly afterwards in the hospital. The story that his friends got from the police was that he had tried to rob a taxicab and an off duty cop had shot him.

Not true, of course. He had a lot of money on him. He didn’t need to rob anyone. Ramon wasn’t a thief anyway. He was an honest man, right up to his end. No, he was set up.

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The Birth of Wanderer – the spiritual adventure story that is now appearing here in the Weekly Reader – is the first of two books that I have been writing (and editing) for the past forty years. Now that I have grown older and can be more objective about the events that occurred back then, I have recently been able to organize both books around a central theme, that of birth and death and the short but glorious life between.

I began The Birth of Wanderer when I was first introduced to LSD. As I lived out my life afterwards, I wrote down all my dreams, all my acid trips, and all the other important and significant events of my life. The Birth of Wanderer records the journey that I undertook then to become my true self. It ends with me defeating fear and becoming Wanderer.

The second book, The Life and Death of Wanderer then goes on to record everything of importance that occurred when I became a high acid wanderer. It also records the end.

Below is the preface to The Birth of Wanderer

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 acidheads 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.