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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like all families, we all have our various ailments and disabilities. Because of this, I ask every day for healing for each and every member of my family – for Aspen, Zane, Jake, Callahan, and myself too.
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For Aspen, I ask every day that she have no more migraines, never again, and no more debilitating colds either.

Lately however, she has shown a marked improvement with her health, thanks in large part to our doctor. He has gotten her to focus more on the health and strength of her immune system. For one thing, she is finally taking all the vitamin and mineral supplements that she needs.
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For Zane, I ask every day that his peanut allergy go away. Thank God that it’s mild and causes him to throw up instead of not breathing. But still! I also ask that his lungs and his immune system keep growing stronger, as he grows older, so he’s no longer so vulnerable to asthma and chest colds. He’s already growing stronger. He only had one asthma attack this year and fewer colds too.

Next fall, we’re going to start him in gymnastics at CATS, here in Boulder. He’s pretty tough and very strong for a five year old. He may be the one to follow in Ariana’s footsteps. She was awesome. She competed and went on to the regionals. If you’ve ever seen and appreciated her dancing, know that she learned to dance while she was at the gym called CATS.
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For Jake, I ask every day for a miracle, for no more Duchene Muscular Dystrophy at all, along with no more of its side effects – especially his depression, and his school problems. I want his DMD to go into remission, a miracle that is possible. It just needs another cosmic particle to pass through his dystrophin gene and set things to rights this time.

Already, Jake is very low on the severity scale. Most boys with
DMD are already in wheelchairs by his age. He’s still running around, sometimes he just can’t sit still. We thought we’d have to move into a one-level house by now because of his DMD, but he still runs up and down the stairs like they weren’t there.
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For Callahan, I ask that he overcome his fear and insecurity that were born of his very heavy, very dangerous, and very scary birth. He was stuck part way through the birth canal for six or seven hours. We finally realized that the midwife was a flake and was bullshitting us. So we called for the ambulance that we had reserved and had it carry us to the hospital where he was finally born.

His fear manifests today mostly in his inability to go to sleep at night. He sometimes lies in bed for hours, with wiggly legs, a nervous energy symptom that probably comes from the incredible fear he came into this world with. He’s still quite insecure and says “I can’t” way too much for an eleven-year old boy. However, in spite of his fear, he’s an awesome boy, soon becoming a man.
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For me, I ask that I be more compassionate, with no more anger left in me at all. It just brings me and everyone around me down. I also pray for no more pain. My shoulders have been damaged by all the military presses I’ve done at the gym. Oh well! But the pain does make it more difficult for me to have a good night’s sleep.

I’d also like to remain as healthy as I am now for the rest of my hopefully long and prosperous life. I wasn’t sick at all this past winter. “Knock on wood.” Meditation really helps.

Tonight I’m home alone. I just smoked a bowl of the good. Now I’m listening to Pianoscapes by Michael Jones. He’s awesome. I’m really enjoying this peaceful space. I love being dad, but the boys are not at all peaceful. They fight non-stop with one another, yelling, screaming even, and mostly arguing over toys, “that’s mine!” sort of thing

I told them they should copy the Merry Pranksters, that acid family from the 60’s, and put all of their things in a pile in the playroom. Then when one of them wants something, he can go get it out of the pile. And then, when he’s done with it, he can return it to the pile. They didn’t buy this at all.
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For now I’m alone and it’s peaceful. And when they do come home from the YMCA and Karate tonight, they’ll be going right to bed. I usually play Pianoscapes or maybe Ecstasy by Deuter for them when they go to bed to calm them out for sleep. I like to end their day in calmness and love.

I’m reading a book now by Scott Westerfeld, a science fiction space opera sort of story, a hard to put down sort of story too. Tonight I’ve read more than I can usually read in several days. Most of my reading, if any, is at night after the boys are asleep.

Sometimes I read when the boys are around too, mostly to distract myself from their energies, but still be there when they need me – with homework or a new drawing by Callahan or something on the computer that Jake wants me to see or listening to Zane tell me that he’s the other dad, that he and I are the dads here.
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So, every day I pray that I will continue to find this peace in my heart. So far, ever since the late sixties, I’ve always been able to find it. I first found it back then when I was alone for weeks at Dinky Creek, in the High Sierras. I found it then when I was vision questing with the help of acid and peyote.

Now I can find it by just turning my head off, by stopping my world, as Don Juan would say. Although, sometimes these days, I do have to isolate myself, maybe going upstairs to meditate or taking a walk or a hike in the nearby woods. But whatever I have to do, I have always been able to find the peace in my heart.
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However, finding the peace in my life has always been much more difficult for me. What I really need now for peace in my life is more money for my family. We’re living on the edge. And it’s scary, and it’s certainly not at all conducive to peace. I have always done poor well, Aspen has too, but I can’t ask this of the boys, not until they’re old enough to make their own choices.

And come to think of it, maybe having more than enough money would be interesting too, as interesting perhaps as it was traveling on the fly, finding work in one town in order to buy enough food and gasoline to move on to the next.

So yes, I do need more money. I also need more medicine for my work of exploring consciousness. I need more friends too, friends with whom I can share my life and my work, friends like Ramon and Paul and the many others I’ve had in the past. When these very real and important personal needs are met, then I’ll have peace in my life as well.
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Of course, I wish that there would be peace in the world too. But I don’t expect it. After all, look at what’s happening right now in the world these days, in the United States too, what with the right wing Christians and the mega-corporations at war with the rest of us and trying basically to enslave us in their subtle webs as they overthrow our democracy.

Don’t take my word for it. As Michael Moore says, ”Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.” He goes on, “Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer “bailout” of 2008, now have as much loot, stock and property as the assets of 155 million Americans combined.”

The first time I smoked marijuana was in the city jail in Roswell, New Mexico. Really! I was in the jail for drunk and disorderly conduct. I had been trying to hit on these two women in a restaurant, and I had been so drunk that I couldn’t take no for an answer. While I was in the jail, one of the other prisoners gave me a couple hits off his joint. It sure made it interesting, being there in jail

I’ve smoked off and on ever since then. Without it, I have found that I have a lot of trouble slowing down. I can’t even slow myself down with meditation. Once, when I had quit for a while and was getting speedy again, I had a dream in which the two dogs I was out walking ran away from me. I couldn’t keep up with their energy. I understood from the dream that when I wasn’t smoking, my physical energy would get out of control and run away from me.

Of course, during the sixties and early seventies, before it got uptight again, almost everybody smoked, even a president. I’d go to a UCLA party and everybody there would be stoned, professors and lawyers and doctors and students and all. And when I lived in Venice and later in Berkeley, smoking was almost a political statement, one that went like this – “if only everyone would smoke marijuana instead of drinking alcohol, the world would be a better place, certainly more peaceful and caring.”

The Rainbow Gathering was another place where almost everybody smoked. And, at least in its early days, it was a safe place to sit outside in nature, smoking the peace pipe, so to speak, with your friends. I made a lot of friends there, sitting around a circle and remembering that what goes around, comes around.
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These days, I have a medical marijuana card. I’ve had it for several years now. In addition to using smoke to slow down and to raise my consciousness, as I always have, I also use it these days to deal with my chronic pain, especially the pain in my shoulders. Sometimes I use it for headaches too. It helps.

I’ve heard it said that coffee makes you smarter than you really are. I know that smoke makes me wiser than I really am – which is really good for my writing.

If I smoke in the daytime, it’s mostly while I’m writing. But I usually smoke at night, after the boys are finally asleep and I’m done with all my household chores. I want to be off duty when I smoke.

Interestingly enough, I’m smoking less and less these days. Over the many years that I’ve smoked, I’ve found, paradoxically, that the less I smoke, the higher I get.

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.
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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.

Times are tough these days, and getting tougher. Gone are the days of plenty, even here in the United States. More and more folks are becoming poor these days. We are living in an age of the rich getting richer and the poor (the rest of us) getting poorer

Aspen and I have always done poor well. We have lived on very little money for a long while. Perhaps, with our wealth of experience, we can help all you folks out there who are new to the being poor game.
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I’ve been poor several times in my life. The first time I was poor, I was a student at UCLA, living on the G. I. Bill. I didn’t mind it much then because students were supposed to be poor. I saw it as somewhat romantic and as only temporary.

I was poor again in the late sixties and seventies, when I was a wandering acid hippie. That time, I was poor on purpose, wanting to separate myself from the system that was based upon violence and greed. In those days, I made everything I could for myself, grew food whenever and wherever I could, traded often, and lived very simply.

I remember leaving Berkeley once to go across country and back with five hundred dollars for gasoline and van repairs, forty dollars for spending money, some good smoke, and a decent food stash. On the road, I traded when I could and worked when I had to. I worked as a waiter in a natural foods restaurant in Columbia, Missouri, and as a carpenter in Nashville, Tennessee. I picked apples in Iowa and Idaho and Oregon.

I kept my needs simple in those days. I could put all my belongings into two small wooden boxes and my backpack, all of which then would fit, along with myself, in my van. When I wanted to read, I borrowed books from the library. I didn’t go to movies or watch television for years. I didn’t go out to dinner either except for community potlucks, which I liked better anyway. I always ate simply and off the land as much as I could.

This was a spiritual trip for me. I came to find great beauty and wisdom in simplicity. Once a year, I would buy a pair of Levi’s and wear them until the knees wore out. Then I’d make them into cutoffs and buy myself a new pair. I wore the same blue work shirt all year, washing it whenever it became dirty, and then putting it back on. I wanted to see how little I could use, when there were so many in the world with nothing.
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I remember reading a book once called Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, in which the heroine’s whole life was a letting go of attachments to people and things, until one day she finally stood naked and alone. It was only then, when she had let go of everything, that her life truly began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several weeks ago, I wrote this:

Today, as I write this, I’m trying something most difficult. In my long life, I have been Wanderer and lived as a wild mountain man, mostly in the woods at Dinky Creek in California. I have been Wanderer and lived and traveled in an old VW van around much of this country. I have been Wanderer and part of an incredible acid traveling family.

Now I’m trying to be Wanderer and be father to three young boys and live in a house in a city and follow their school’s weird schedules for much of the year. I’m trying to be Wanderer and do all this and more. This has become the most difficult journey I have undertaken in my many years as Wanderer. So far, it has been almost impossible to follow the flow, to be in the Tao while having to follow someone else’s schedule.

We have to get up at 6:30 every school morning. I am not an early morning person. For the past four years, this has been my private hell. I don’t sleep well when I have to get up at a certain time. And I almost always wake up too early and then can’t get back to sleep.

I could mention many other ways in which I have had trouble flowing with the rigidity of the school’s schedules. I’m not used to going to bed at a certain time either. Sometimes I have to decide between following a creative hunch or getting enough sleep, all because I have to be up at 6:30 the next morning.

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I was having tea with Ariana the other day and I was complaining about this to her. It’s been big on my mind lately, what with school starting up again. She said something, I forget her words, but what I got out of it was that this was my life now. This was my flow, 6:30 in the morning, even in the dark of the winter, and all.

Ever since then I’ve been thinking about what she said and trying to fit it into my here and now life. Today is, a big day for me, I’m doing the last of my acid. This has made the day special for me. As I came on earlier, I wondered where the acid would take me.

Except for some solitary time during the first few hours, mostly meditating, I did the same as if I weren’t tripping. I found that debriefing the boys when they came home from school, helping them with their homework, helping to feed them, and sending them all off with Aspen to the YMCA for hers and Callahan’s Karate class – all this was in my flow. And doing the dishes and filling the water bottles and taking out the trash while they were gone was too. I realized that I already was in the flow. Being their dad and helping to run a household and getting them where they need to go is my flow.

And when they come home soon, my flow will lead me upstairs and into helping them get their school clothes out for the morning, helping them go to the bathroom, helping them to floss and brush their teeth, and then sharing hugs and kisses and holding hands and into their beds for the night.

Then I can relax and float into the remainder of the night, reading or writing or smoking or maybe visiting with folks. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Aspen and I will play. But nothing too late, unless it’s really important (like playing.) I have to be up and functioning by 6:30 in the morning.
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I’m listening to Joan Osborne singing one of my favorite songs, “One of Us,” in which she’s asking,

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on a bus
Trying to make his way home
Like a holy rolling stone
Back up to heaven all alone.

I remembered Stephan Gaskin once saying something like this too – saying something like, so you’re enlightened, great, but you still have to mind the store and tend to the little things, that sort of thing. For him, enlightenment was not in itself the end of spiritual striving.

I also thought of the Buddhists and their notion of the Bodhisattva, the person who achieves enlightenment but who stays behind with the rest of us in ordinary reality just as long as there’s anyone left here still unenlightened.

Listening to her sing, I wondered if maybe I was a Bodhisattva, like the God that she was singing about, just a stranger trying to make my way home, like a holy rolling stone. The thing is, even if I am God, even if I am enlightened, it’s not that big a deal. I still have to take care of business. I still have to raise and support my family. I still have to contribute to the general welfare and consciousness.

Maybe this is what I was thinking about when I decided that this time around I wanted to be Wanderer right here in the middle of ordinary, everyday reality. I’ve wandered many lonesome back roads and wild forest trails in my day. I’ve wandered in the darker regions of my soul. I’ve wandered to the higher reaches of Spirit. I’ve seen the Light. But I have never wandered and shared myself in ordinary reality. It’s about time that I do.

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.