I was sitting out in our backyard, enjoying the sun and watching all the birds fly free. They seemed so happy flying free – all the Robins and Grackles and Wrens and Ravens and Crows and more.

I flew once. I flew when I was a little boy dying on an operating table. As I went under the ether, I fell into the darkness. I was terrified. But then a voice said to turn the falling into flying. I did so, and suddenly I was flying blissfully towards the light. That was my first taste of flying.

I’m 78 years old now, going on 79 soon. My body is wearing out, slowly but surely. So I’m thinking about death these days and what it means. It’s not scary. I see it as a major transition of consciousness. And I know that, although my body is wearing out, I’m not wearing out. I expect that when I finally do leave this body – and it has been a wonderful body and has served me well – when I finally do leave it, I’ll be flying free again.

I’m not scared of dying, although I’m certainly not ready to die. I do want to stay around until my three boys are grown into men, another 20 or so years would work for me. Both of my folks lived that long.

What I’ve understood from my own experiences, as well as from folks like the Tibetan Buddhists, the Taoists, Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda, is that, after the death of the body, we can continue to exist as consciousness. It all depends on the consciousness we have while we’re living. It depends, as the Taoists would say, on whether or not we have created our diamond body.

Am I ready for this next adventure in consciousness? Am I ready to explore a whole new level of existence? I’m trying not to have any unfinished business, although I am definitely not finished with Aspen and the boys. But living with them is so rewarding that I’m sure I’ll be able to stay around long enough to enjoy it. I’m working on it, and I’m still strong and healthy.

Most importantly, I’m trying to live cleanly so I won’t have to leave this level of existence with any hurt or fear left in myself or in those close to me. I don’t think I could fly if I had any regrets for how I lived my life. I’ve always tried to leave my camp cleaner than I found it. I’ll do the same when it’s time to leave this camp.

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.

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.

Still thinking about children and personhood, I remembered how Henry Miller, in his book Tropic of Capricorn, talked about the difference between children and adults. In Miller’s opinion, once one becomes an adult, one loses one’s personhood and instead becomes a frightened and calculating being. In his life, Miller says he watched sadly as his friends grew up and stopped being real, stopped being persons.

In Miller’s book, he says: “At seven years, we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists … The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision, From the day we went to school, we learning nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.”

He goes on to say, “What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe, and the life that followed upon it, the life of an adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost, one has a feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated, and everything has a price on it.”
.

Still thinking about the difference between children and adults, I also remembered what Tim Leary once said, lecturing to a crowd of us at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He told us that we should never become grownups, never become adults. He said that we should just keep on growing and reminded us that the word adult is the past participle of the Latin verb adulescere, meaning to grow up.
.

In my life, I have continued to live as I lived as a boy. I am the same person I have always been. I have not left behind the honesty and awareness of my childhood. I have not finished growing. and I have not and never will become one of those uptight and frightened adults.

In my life, I don’t see myself as old. I’m still me, still the same person I’ve always been, just older than I was before And I must say, I’m proud of the seventy-eight trips around the sun that I’ve made so far. It’s been quite a ride, and I’m not done yet.

I just read Orson Scott Card’s introduction to his book Ender’s Game, one of my most favorite stories. Now I’m reading the story itself once again. At first, I though that Jake might want to read it to himself. But he and I have decided that it’s a bit over his head for now. So I’m reading it aloud to the entire family every night.

I have read Card’s wonderful story many times, but this was the first time I have read his introduction. It was beautiful, moving. Orson Scott Card is a beautiful person. In his introduction, in response to critics who said that children don’t talk and think like they do in Ender’s Game, Card wrote:–

“Yet I knew – I knew – that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me … to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along – the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective – the perspective in which their feeling and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s.”
.

I have always known that children are persons. Like Card, I was a person myself as a boy. So were all my friends. However, since I have grown up, I have been criticized by many adults who say that I shouldn’t talk to children as I do – as I did with the other children when I was still a child myself. They say I shouldn’t talk to them as if they were persons. They argue that children are not yet really persons. They are wrong.

Certainly, none of my children have ever criticized me for treating them as persons, for being real with them. They appreciate my respect and my honesty. I think it helps them to be more respectful and honest themselves.
.

The public school system certainly does not treat children as persons. They definitely don’t want to see who my boys really are. And, because of that, they don’t encourage them to be real persons.

We have sent our son Callahan to a middle school noted for its artistic focus. But Callahan still has to take all the typical academic courses, none of which really interest him, except perhaps for science. He has to take these academic courses just because they insist he does so. And they have offered him only one course, a course in beginning art, that speaks to who he is as a creative person.

I watch the school system fill my boys with collective bullshit – as if they were empty and needed filling – trying to make them fit into the system’s way of thinking about the world. I watch them judge my boys negatively if they don’t conform to the system’s collective way. It’s obvious that they don’t want to know anything about, let alone further, the person who already exists in each one of them.

Aspen and I met in late January of 1985. We were engaged by the middle of March and married by late June. We have never looked back, have always loved one another and have never thought of ending our marriage.

With half of all marriages in the United States ending in divorce, we have decided to share our love story and how and why it has lasted for more than 26 years. So, if you are at all interested in a serious relationship with another person, especially if you want to have children some day, it will certainly be worth your while to read about how we have done it.
.

The other day, while Aspen and I were out walking, we came upon a man we knew. He saw us and blurted out, “You’re holding hands.” Yes, we were. We do so whenever we can. We snuggle together every night too, and we make wonderful love. We’re still loving, after all these years. It has always come natural to us.

How did this happen, when it is so rare in the world? Well, when we met that fateful January, we were medicine folks. Every Friday night, we did Ecstasy and acid, first the Ecstasy and then several hours later high dose acid. We did this every Friday night for several months. Doing so, we opened up to each other completely. We came to know each other more deeply in that short time than most couples do in a lifetime of marriage.

The night we decided to get married, we were doing medicines. I asked Aspen if she wanted all of me. She said yes, and she has had all of me, all of my love and support and understanding ever since.
.

After our courtship and our marriage, we began to spend more and more time backpacking and traveling. We did some climbing with a friend here in Boulder and in Joshua Tree. We went to more than one Rainbow Gathering too. We lived outside the law, and we were honest. We started in Boulder, of course, but we also lived briefly in California, in Mammoth Lakes, and in Arizona, in and around Tucson. We lived on the West Slope of the Rockies too, in Paonia, on an organic fruit farm.

When we were still living in Tucson, before we moved to Paonia, we wondered what else we could do with our love. We had been married for over 14 years. We had done almost everything we had wanted to do. What else could we do? The decision seemed to be made for us. Aspen was in her mid-thirties and was beginning to realize that she would have to have children soon if she wanted to be a mother.
.

Although I had thought that I was done raising children, I was more than okay with us being parents together. I knew she would be a great mom. And I have always enjoyed being a dad. Being parents together would be our new life adventure. I certainly enjoyed actualizing her desire for children, and soon the babies began to come.

When they started coming, with Callahan being the first, we moved back to Boulder, and we now live just two blocks from where we started out 26 years ago, back when we first realized that we loved each other and wanted to share a life together. Since then we have come full circle in our life and our love. And now our love is actually stronger now than it was when we left Boulder all those years ago – way more than enough to nourish our three young boys.

The boys are 5, 8, and 11 years old now. They are more than a handful. They are all high maintenance, extremely loud, and overwhelming argumentative. They are also heartwarmingly loving and extremely interesting. It’s awesome watching them grow up and become people. They are my sons. God! What an obligation! What a responsibility! I love it.

I sure have to work hard to keep myself strong and healthy. I have to do yoga every morning and then, three days a week, lift weights at the gym. I have to walk or else hike in the woods somewhere around here nearly every day. I have to ride my bike as much as I can. I have to meditate every afternoon. I have to watch what I eat, how much pot I smoke, how often I get off, things like that. I have to take conscious care of myself as body.

I get really tired of having to do all this all the time – especially the yoga every morning while the rest of the family is breaking their fast. But the truth is, I am much more supple than most folks in their late seventies.

Aspen and I lift weights at the gym three days a week, I am really tired of working out. I’ve been working out with weights for almost sixty years now, ever since I was 19 years old. However, once we’re there, actually doing our leg presses and pulldowns and bench presses and curls and all that, I almost enjoy it. Although I sure am glad when I’m finished for the day.

I have come to see that I will have to meditate, do yoga, lift weights and keep on walking or hiking for as long as I live. However, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the walking part. And I do love my daily meditations.
.

It’s worth it all though. It’s like when I’m hiking along a trail in the woods; there’s always something new I want to see just around the next bend in the trail. And when I get there, there’s always something new I want see just around the next bend, the one up ahead. Sometimes I feel I could hike on forever. There’s always something new to see.

It’s the same with my life. There’s always something new I want to see just around the next bend of my life. So I keep on meditating and doing yoga and lifting weights and walking. I know that whatever is coming up around the next bend will always be worth the hard work.

Actually, I can see from here that there’s a new bend ahead in the trail of my life, and it’s coming up soon. And, being almost up to this coming bend, I can already see more money coming, some good acid too. I can also see from here more high and conscious friends coming into my life.

As I approach this next bend in my life, I’m looking forward to seeing how I’m going to support this wonderful family of ours on a higher level. I definitely have my preferences.

Looking ahead to this next bend in my life, I want to see that I’ll have more loving time with Aspen, lots of it. I’m hoping for another 25 years or so. I also want to see my boys become men. I think they will be splendid, definitely worth all the time and effort that Aspen and I have and will have put into raising them.

Looking ahead to this next bend in my life, I want to see how long I can stay strong and healthy. I want to see how long I’ll be able to rassle and hike with my boys, how long I’ll be able to play with Aspen too. Mostly, I want to see if I can live to be 111. When I was a young boy, a voice told me that I would live that long.

Looking ahead to this next bend in my life, I guess I’m sort of interested in what will go down on the collective level too. I don’t have much confidence in the human race, but I do continue to work for our collective rescue, hopefully moving us all away from the brink of disaster where we have placed ourselves.

These days, I’m walking. And, as I walk, I stop often, and I stay slow, because I don’t want to be a part of the ongoing and speedy war machine that’s destroying this country of ours.

Walking, I’m not part of the problem, the need for wars because of the need for gasoline. Walking, I have time to think and feel and notice how the clouds move across the sky. Walking, I meet folks and hear how they feel and what they think. Walking, I am much more a part of everything, in harmony and sharing.

If I didn’t walk, it would be difficult for me to stay centered these days, difficult for me to even find my center! There’s an incredible amount of anger and negative energy being manifested by the collective. There is an equally incredible amount of denial – folks acting as if the various wars we’re involved in don’t even exist and life is normal.

The truth is that life will never again be what we have called normal. Actually, for most folks in the world, it never has been what we Americans have called normal anyway.

If we are to survive long range, I suggest that folks would be wise to put their trust into friends and family and not into institutions, especially not into those that have brought us to this brink of disaster. We need to come together and take care of each other. It is time.

We also need to balance the terrible and potent darkness that is being generated by the various wars with something equally awesome and potent of the Light. So, let us enjoy the good fortune we have, living here in this world of beauty. Let us radiate joy and love. And remember; lets not be angry, even with ourselves. Anger feeds the Dark Tower. And we’re trying for the White.

We take Jake to Children’s Hospital in Aurora twice a year. This is our third year. It’s always on a Friday, and we have to be there by 9 in the morning. It usually takes us an hour to get there.

It’s intense on the freeway today; everyone is in a hurry, as we all hurtle through space in our metal boxes. Fortunately the traffic is light this morning. We actually arrive at the Hospital in 45 minutes.

Usually all of us go with Jake. We make a day of it somewhere in Denver. This time we’re going to visit the 16th Street Mall and eat at Johnny Rockets.
.

We park and walk into the hospital. It feels really good being here. We’ll be here for several hours. We elevate up to the 4th floor and wait to be called into the Muscle Clinic. Once there, we see the main rehab doctor, a Neurologist, and a Neuro-Psychologist. We also see a Social Worker, a Physical Therapist, and a representative of MDA. On the way out, we stop at the lab downstairs, and Jake has his blood drawn to check for his vitamin D level and his thyroid functioning.

By the time we leave, four hours and some minutes later we have heard that his muscles are still doing much better than expected. And everything else is okay too – except for the DMD of course. Jake’s a healthy little guy. We also began the process of hooking him up with other boys with DMD. He needs friends who are going through what he’s going through. They also gave us a script for a new lightweight stroller for when he gets tired walking.

The people we saw at the Muscle Clinic must be really frustrated. There is nothing they can do about the DMD, nothing at all. All they can do is make it more comfortable for the boys who have it and slow down its progress so that it takes longer to kill them.
.

After we leave, we drive all the way into Denver on Colfax, the longest city street in the world. We don’t start at its eastern beginning, and we don’t go all the day to its ending in the west. We just take it from the hospital to the center of town and the mall. Colfax is not your typical city street. On the way, we see lots of naked dancing places, lots of pot shops, lots of tattoo parlors, and lots of darkness. I wouldn’t want to be there at night, not with my family.

The 16th Street Mall, on the other hand, is full of light and fun. The boys love the free buses that take us from one end of the mall to the other and back. When we get tired of riding the buses, we eat at Johnny Rockets. We all have burgers and fries. Good food, although no one sings to us this time. The food is bit expensive, but what the heck.

Back in our box, on the freeway again. I think we all feel the same. We just want to make it home safely. Hurtling through space again, we keep going, thankfully watching the traffic thin out as folks turned off into their own little cities on the way to ours.

Finally we leave the freeway, drive down Table Mesa, and then turn into our street and park in front of our house. We’re home.

Halloween is very important to our three boys. Callahan will be a large, black, scary demon with widespread wings and a hideous red mask. He’ll look awesome.

Jake will be Mario of the Mario Brothers. He’s going to look great. He has the overalls, the red hat with a big white M on it, the mustache, and Mario’s white gloves. He tried to get Zane to be Luigi, Mario’s brother, but Zane insisted on his first choice.

God Knows, how he came up with it, but Zane has decided that he will be Freddy Krueger – the youngest Freddy Krueger I know of. Maybe Freddy as a five year old. Zane even magicked a great Freddy Krueger costume from a family friend, complete with Freddy’s metal-clawed brown leather glove. He’ll be styling. They all will.
.

Halloween is important to them for another reason. They like candy. Usually we get enough from trick or treating to last the entire year, from one Halloween to the next. This year we ran out a month ago. Terrible tragedy! We all suffered,

To remedy this misfortune, we are going onto the Boulder mall this year, Ideal Market and the various stores around it, as well as the various King Supers. And, of course, we will cruise the neighborhood for our final candy collection.

We also want to show off their costumes and scare lots of folks.
.

A late bulletin, just in – Zane is now considering being a ghost pirate. He does look great in his pirate hat. Maybe he will be both, depending on the venue.

We’re excited! We’re home schooling Jake now. Before the boys were born, I wanted to home school all the kids we would have. But somehow we ended up in the Boulder Valley School System.

But then Jake started having more and more trouble in school. It was never easy for him there. Over time, he became very unhappy.

He’s out now though, and is enrolled in COVA (Colorado Virtual Academy.) He likes it a lot. He did three days worth of schoolwork today in just a few hours. The lessons are on the computer, and COVA has just sent him his own computer to use.

Aspen has done a tremendous amount of work setting all this up. She had to learn a lot of new stuff about her computer and the Internet. It has taken her days and has been very stressful. But she did it. And now, along with the computer’s help, she’s Jake’s teacher.

Jake has been happy these first few days of home schooling, happy for the first time since the public school started eight weeks ago. I wish we hadn’t taken so long to decide on home schooling, but we’re doing it now.

At first, when Jake was having so much trouble at school, I thought that he was bummed by his dawning realization that he has muscular dystrophy and what it’s going to mean for him. Now I’m thinking that he was more bummed than we knew by his school. Since we pulled him out, he has been so much happier and certainly less angry.

However, muscular dystrophy is still a major issue for Jake, He is just beginning to deal with it. But it’s hard for him to get a handle on what’s happening. After all, he’s only eight years old, really more like six years old emotionally because of the muscular dystrophy.

Jake needs help with this. In particular, he needs to be around more boys with MD. He’s so isolated now. We almost sent him to the MD camp last summer. I wish we had. He will go next summer. We’re also going to plug into the MD community in and around Boulder. There are a several MD boys living nearby, demonstrating the various stages of the illness.