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.
.

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.
.

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.
.

In the early seventies, when I was beginning to work with acid, I began to feel the pull to put more and more of my energy into this work of exploring consciousness. As it usually happened in those days, I soon had a dream that justified my feelings and clarified what I was to do.

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

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

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

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

I began to explore consciousness more seriously. I was already intrigued by the magic I had experienced at our camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras. I was also interested in telepathy. I had been interested since I was a young boy. I began to notice more and more synchronicities in the air.
.

When I would backpack into our camp at Dinky Creek, I would often do acid. I became friends with a large rock. I used to visit it almost every day. I noticed that I would have unusual thoughts when I was with it. I finally realized that the rock – I called it the Old One – was talking to me. I also noticed that it seemed to change over time, becoming more and more endowed with human facial features.

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

Another time at Dinky, I lost one of my contacts while sitting around the fire late one night with some good folks. None of us could find it, not even with a flashlight. Eventually we gave up and retired for the night. I was in my sleeping bag, bemoaning my loss, when a voice told me that it was stuck on the inside of my shirt. And when I looked, it was there. A much deeper part of myself, a part that didn’t rely on my normal perceptual apparatuses, had observed the fall of the lens and had been able to tell me where it had fallen.
.

As I said before, I have always been interested in telepathy. When I was a young boy and recovering from my death experience, I kept hearing these voices in my head. I finally figured out that they were other people’s thoughts and images. I didn’t like that then, not when I was seven years old, so I shut down that part of my psyche by listening to loud music on the radio or else by reading a book all the time.

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

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

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

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

Also, I have often received images that don’t seem to have anything to do with my here and now. Once, I was looking out at the ocean, watching the clouds and the waves come in. When I looked down and saw myself, I realized that I was looking out of the eyes of a little girl, holding a bucket in her hand. I have had many such images or thoughts come my way, and it’s clear to me that they are definitely images or thoughts from someone else’s mind.
.

Although I have long stopped being a therapist, I am still a healer. Most of the time, just being with me encourages folks to open up and dive more deeply into themselves. I have experienced many unexpected changes in these folks. One woman with a tipped uterus came back the following week to tell me that her doctor told her that it was no longer tipped. Another came to me with a serious cold sore on her lip. I watched, as she talked about her husband and became more and more angry with him. And while I was watching, I saw her cold sore slowly and completely disappear from her lip. This sort of healing doesn’t happen by intention. It seems to be activated by a deeper and more compassionate connection, one that works without words and not through ordinary consciousness.

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

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

Steve Gaskin also said something similar. He said that our deeper levels of consciousness, what many have called the unconscious, are actually incredible communication centers that can hook us up to other awarenesses, He suggests that we clean out these centers by dealing with all the psyche junk we have stored there, all those forgotten and repressed and never realized parts of our psyche that we have never had the courage or the inclination to deal with before.
.

Those of us doing acid back in the early days, in the sixties and seventies, found that we would become completely open and honest while we were doing acid. We would share ourselves from our deepest levels. We called it being acid honest. We recognized that acid made us braver, but it was more than that – we became wiser too, as we saw into the deeper and more profound reaches of our encounters with one another. Healing was easy with acid honesty.

Besides the honesty and the healing that acid would usually engender, it also led to some unusual experiences. Once, I found myself floating above the trees – and seeing my body below still sitting under one of the trees. Another time, my partner was sitting in a chair and standing next to herself at the same time. Often, while tripping, I would receive many phone calls, usually from other trippers, but once from two of my ex-wives. They all said that they had called because they had felt my energy.
.

I have also noticed, when leading a group of folks who are sharing their dreams, that often many of the dreams had a similar motif. It was as if we were all working on the same or similar problem or realization. Carl Jung noticed this on the eve of WWII. Many folks shared dreams then of rivers of blood and marching armies and other dire warnings of impending war and death.

On another note, once in a dream group, a woman told me that she was afraid she would leave her body and astral travel if she meditated. I told her she would be all right with me leading the meditation. As we began to meditate, however, I suddenly had an image of her running away into the distance. I grabbed her ankle as she began to run out of sight and pulled her back to me. From across the room in the dream circle, I heard her say “thank you.”
.

So rocks have talked with me, have helped me to survive even. And I have shared consciousness with some folks and have been inside other folks’ heads. I have also received many images from God knows whom. All this began to happen when I decided that I no longer wanted to be a therapist, that I wanted to go deeper into consciousness than therapy usually allowed. I also realized then that this way I would be able to explore consciousness through exploring my own. This way, I could go as deeply as I wished.

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

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.

.

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.
.

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.

The Tao of love teaches that we must “conserve the seed.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 48) “The ancients really attained long life by the help of the seed-power present in their own bodies.” (p. 69)

Taoism is spiritually wide and includes many differences, but all Taoists would agree that we must conserve our seed. In The Secret of the Golden Flower, it is written that “every man who unites bodily with a woman feels pleasure first and then bitterness; when the seed has flowed out, the body is tired and the spirit languid. It is quite different when the adept lets spirit and power unite.” (p. 69)

The legend of Old Master P’eng, although ambiguous in this regard, is often recounted to support this view. He reputedly lived to be 880 years old. However, it is also said, as the writer of The Secret of the Golden Flower ruefully admits, that he lived to this age, “because he made use of serving maids to nourish his life.” The author, greatly influenced by Buddhism, says that this must be a misunderstanding – Master P’eng must have lived that long by using “the method of sublimation of spirit and power. (p. 70)

Other Taoists agree that we must conserve the seed so that we can power the circulation of light, but they argue that we can do this without denying lust. They agree that lust in a man, when stirred, desires women and if unchecked would create new life. But they also say that if we retain our energy instead of allowing it to flow outwards into the woman, it “penetrates the crucible of the creative and refreshes and nourishes heart and body.” (p. 35)

Old Master P’eng knew exactly what he was doing with those serving maids, making love often, getting off seldom or never. He knew that making love has little or nothing to do with getting off unless you’re trying to create new life. It’s no wonder that he lived so long, using all his turned on energy from all that love play to fuel the circulation of his light.

Remember that Taoism began with Lao Tzu, a wanderer who had no trips, no routines or goals, nothing at all except his life and his awareness. The only reason we know anything at all about him is that, in his old age, when he was trying to leave China to wander the rest of his life in wilderness, the master of the gate wouldn’t let him out until he had written down his best thoughts. These became the Tao Te Ching, a glimpse into the mind and soul of an extraordinary master.

Although there has been a wide diversity among his various followers with regard to both theory and practice, they all agree upon one key concept, the notion of inaction through action.

All the instructions for the various Taoist meditations focus upon the actions of breathing, quieting the heart with the breathing, inner seeing and hearing, and circulating the attention between the two poles and back again. However, none of these actions are important in and of themselves, and none of them would lead to the goal of the immortal diamond body.

Yet by continuing to perform these actions, there comes a time when they finally become automatic. As the Taoists say, the circulation of the light becomes fixated. At this point, it takes on a life of its own and no longer needs our attention to make it turn and turn again. Once this has happened, we are continually recharging and renewing ourselves. Our physical and our spiritual consciousnesses are continually interacting, with the result that our bodies becomes conscious and our spirits becomes grounded.

The Taoist adept, once his meditation has become fixated, becomes in himself a true marriage of nature and spirit. Because his body has become conscious and pregnant with meaning, he will remain physically healthy and enjoy long life. And because his consciousness has become infused with power and is pregnant with life, he will continue to exist as a conscious being even after the death of his body.

Although Don Juan’s dreaming double and the Taoist’s diamond body are similar, each being bodies of consciousness that are independent of the physical body, the ways of creating them are different.

For Don Juan the dreaming double is created when we are able to be awake in our dreams. Once we can do this, our dream consciousness acquires an independency and a power of its own. It becomes us, although not us of the flesh. But it can operate in physical reality, and it will survive the death of the physical body.

The Taoist uses meditation to achieve this same end. In meditation, the Taoist circulates the light of awareness between the two poles, the one of Spirit that is centered in the third eye and the one of Earth that is centered in the solar plexus. In this way, awareness begins to circulate between Spirit and body, and from this circulation an inner child is born, a diamond body that will continue to exist after the death of the physical body.

For the Taoist, the life forces can flow either outward into the world or inward where they can be used to power the circulation of light. For most of us, our thoughts and feelings are usually directed outwards to the world, and our life energy, our seed, is used for pleasure or to create new life.

If, however, we focus our awareness upon the circulation of the light and let our life energy flow inwards so that it can power this circulation, “a release from external things takes place.” “The ego withdraws from its entanglement in the world, and, after death, remains alive because ‘interiorization’ has prevented the wasting of the life-forces in the outer world.” (p. 17)

Although I have accepted the joys and the limitations of life, I have spent much of my life withdrawn from the world. Instead I have turned inwards and have developed my own diamond body; and I expect that, when I do die, I will return to my unlimited being with all the memories of this life that are worth saving.

Everyone knows that you can calm down by taking a deep breath. “Calm out man, take a deep breath.” We have all heard or said something like this, sometime in our lives. Breathing itself is actually a main focus in many forms of meditation. For the Taoist, breathing is used primarily at the beginning to keep the meditator awake and focused.

After I had been meditating for a while, I noticed that my breathing and my heart rate would both change pace and intensity, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Later on, I figured out that it was my feelings that were responsible for these fluctuations. I also figured out that I could make use of this relationship between my breath and my heart. I could consciously slow down my breathing, and my heart would slow down too.

The Taoists adepts were aware of this reciprocal relationship between heart and breath. They were aware too that both are susceptible to the feelings, and that breathing, by being somewhat under the meditator’s control, can mediate between the feelings and the heart and can help the heart to stay steady and calm.

The Taoists say that they use hearing to help monitor the pace and intensity of their breathing, but it is not the outer hearing that is used, no more than it is the outer eyes that see the light that is being circulated during meditation. This particular hearing is the awareness associated with the ears, turned inwards towards the breathing, and through the breathing, to the heart. “What does hearing mean? It is hearing the Light of one’s own ear. The ear listens only within and does not listen to what is outside.“ “It has nothing to do with actually listening to what is inside. In this sort of hearing, one only hears that there is no sound.” (The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 48)

When no sound is heard, we have left our ordinary world of feelings behind, and with a calm and steady heart, we have opened ourselves to the Light and to the Compassion that is always felt in such a heart.

The place of power is an important focal point for the Taoists. It is located physically at the solar plexus, the spot just below the navel. It is one of the seven chakras.

For Castaneda’s Don Juan, it is a place of mysterious power that can directly affect the outer world. Once Don Juan was being attacked by a mountain lion that had him cornered on a large rock. Focusing his attention upon his solar plexus, Don Juan rubbed the big cat’s belly with his will until it laid down and went to sleep. Then he climbed down from the rock and quietly hurried away.

I remember doing acid in Berkeley with Joe Shaker. He was standing too close to me, so I focused on my solar chakra and pushed him away from me with my will. He bounced backwards, as if I had struck him in his belly with my fist. But I hadn’t touched him at all physically. I had just used my will.
.

The place of power is especially important for the Taoist, but not for its effects on the outer world. For the Taoist, any energy spent on the outer world is wasted energy. Instead, it should be conserved and used to fuel the circulation of the light.

In meditation, the Taoist first focuses his attention upon the space between his two eyes. He attends to his breathing with his inner hearing. Then he allows the “light of the eyes” to descend to the place of power, to the solar plexus. The mediator’s attention, his directed awareness, once focused between the eyes, now moves down to the solar plexus. By bringing his attention from his eyes to the solar plexus, it becomes energized.

The essence of Taoist meditation is the circulation of the light, by which is meant the circulation of the focused attention. This attention, begun at the eyes, descends to the solar plexus, stirring up energy, which further increases the intensity and power of the attention. This enhanced attention is then returned to the focus at the eyes and back again, a continuous circulation of attention, building in power and light.