There is more than one way to create a diamond body. For example, 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. However, the ways of creating them are quite 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 two poles, the one of Spirit that is centered between the eyes 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.

And there are other ways to create a diamond body. I became a diamond body briefly when I died as a young boy, when a voice told me to turn the falling into flying. I did so and flew effortlessly and blissfully towards the Light. I was out of my body then, yet still me and still aware of what I was doing. The voice that told me as a boy to turn the falling into flying, that voice was my own voice from years later when I was a young man, a man who went back in time to help me as that panicked young boy. I remember when I did this as that young man, laying in my down sleeping bag in the high mountains, under the stars.
.

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, however, 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.

I have certainly embraced the joys of life. I have walked in beauty and love, and I have certainly helped to create new life. However. I have still spent much of my life alone, withdrawn from the world. I have turned inwards – dreaming and consulting the I Ching and meditating and of course doing medicine – and I have found my way back to my diamond body once again.
.

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 a 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.

I’m certainly not the monastic sort of Taoist. I’ve always felt that since I was living in this world, in this body, I would be wise to explore and enjoy this world and this body. I have certainly done so. Although I have five children and have been a father for more than fifty years, I have still spent most of my life exploring the depths of consciousness and following the Tao. And now, almost 79 years old, I am still physically healthy and enjoying a long life. And when I do die, I will continue to exist as a conscious diamond body, an unlimited being with all the memories of this life that are worth saving.

Although I probably won’t want to return to this reality after my body dies, I have entertained, from time to time, several notions of what I would want to come back as if I were to return.

Years ago, when I was backpacking alone at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras I decided that if I did come back, I would come back as a giant Juniper tree standing alone somewhere in the high mountains.

An ancient Juniper had just spoken to me, telling me to turn off my head and be part of the world around me. I followed his advice that day, and that was when I decided I would come back as a Juniper tree. I liked the idea of standing quietly in the middle of the world. I also liked the idea of not having to move about or do anything. I liked that I could just be.

Since then I have also thought that I might want to come back as a bird, perhaps one that would fly up a river from the ocean into the high mountains and back again. I love both the ocean and the mountains. It would be awesome to be able to fly between them.

I have also thought that I would love to come back as a Water Ouzel, one of those little birds that live alongside creeks and can swim under water. I spent the whole day with one once. I could see that she was having fun swimming in the cold mountain water.

I’ve been thinking of being a bird a lot lately. I hate falling. It has always been very scary to me, probably from my experience of falling into death as a little boy. If I had wings I would feel a lot safer.

Of course, if I didn’t ever return to this material reality, but kept on traveling through the many levels of existence, I wouldn’t need either wings or a high mountain to stand upon.

Actually, when I think about it, I realize that I’ve been flying my entire life.

In my early twenties, I flew for the United States Air Force. I was an officer then, a First Lieutenant. “Off we go into the wild blue yonder, flying high into the sun…”

I flew on various airplanes, mostly as a flight engineer. The last plane I flew on was the giant B36 bomber, with its six pusher prop engines, three mounted on the back of each wing, as well as two jets at the end of each wing. We flew all around the world on our practice bombing missions. Once we flew for 27 hours nonstop, coming back to our home base in Roswell, New Mexico after a temporary duty assignment in Guam,

Later in my life, in the late sixties and early seventies, I flew a different craft, using LSD to fly through the various levels of consciousness. Folks saw me as a flyer then too. And once I began tripping, my dreams reiterated this. They used the metaphor of flying to describe my various acid trips. I would often dream of flying just after I had tripped or just before I was going to take off again for the higher reaches of consciousness.

I wonder if I joined the Air Force and became a flying officer because of my early flying experience, the one when I was that little boy dying on the operating table. I wonder if I got seriously into LSD for the same reason. Maybe I wanted to fly again, as I had as that young boy.

I’ve sure had a lot of practice flying free. I’m certainly going to be ready when I do leave my body and fly off into the future.

.

Still

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.

We can’t let our freak flags fly if we don’t know who we are. We can’t know who we are if we’re not awake. And most of the time we’re not.

Most of the time we’re sleepwalking. I’m not talking about getting out of bed and walking around our houses in the middle of the night without waking up. I’m talking about how most of us are not really awake and conscious as we go through our daily life. Instead we live out routines and patterns, over and over again, without our being aware of ourselves, our needs, or what’s going on around us. We’re on autopilot, for God’s sake!

And most of our routines and patterns are orchestrated by the one-percenters, routines called work that are designed to keep us all busy being their wage slaves so that they can do what they want to do whenever they want to do it.

In a word, we’re stuck in our ruts, really the ruts the one-percenters’ have given us as our reality, ruts designed to satisfy their needs and keep us safely unconscious and out of their way.

Before we bring down the one-percenters, we need to find our own natural flows. We need to return to the Tao. We can’t do this without knowing who we are. And we won’t know who we are as long as we stay in our ruts.

So, we need to take time, all the time we need, to discover who we are separate from our routines, who we are once we’re out of our ruts. Once we can see who we are, we’ll know what we want to do with our lives – and what our natural flow really is.

We need to take a sabbatical from our routines, our ruts. We’ll never leave them behind as long as we’re unconscious most of our time. We need to spend our time meditating, walking in the woods, sharing our dreams with others, sharing ourselves with others, one way or another raising the level of our consciousness. We need to turn within, to the spiritual wisdom that lives in each of us. We need to see the light and wake up!

I don’t see using firing squads, although I wish the unconscious folks in the world would work on their heads without having to be shot. Then they might become part of the solution and no longer part of the problem.

I don’t see doing mass LSD healing either. Too much information, too fast. Most folks would freak out when they saw, all at once, just how fucked up they really were – and how ignorant they were about the world and other people too.

But we do have to bring those one-percenters down, down to our level of reality. My God. They spend way too much money, and it’s our money really. Rings for millions of dollars, shoes for thousands. We have to stop their unconscious attempts to placate their small, scared little egos by trying to buy up the world.

And how will we do this? I like Howard Zinn’s take on the world. We are all definitely too obedient, too afraid of losing our jobs or other people’s approval. These are the main reasons why we‘re afraid to join a worldwide general strike or stop paying the ripoff taxes that the bad guys have imposed upon us. We admire Thoreau, but when it comes right down to it, most of us have become way too afraid to emulate him.

But, that’s not the best way to bring them down to our level of reality anyway. It’ll take more than just not doing what they want us to do. Instead, we have to do something positive. We have to start doing what we want to do.

Back in the 60s, we didn’t call ourselves hippies. We called ourselves freaks, and we were proud of it. We developed and lived a unique and fun life style, one that the establishment frowned deeply upon. We didn’t care. We were right, and they were wrong.

We did it then, and we have to do it again. We are still right, and they are definitely still wrong. And it’s coming to a head now. Once again, we need to let our freak flags fly. Let them fly folks.

Let us live the life that Spirit gave each of us. Let us be ourselves, showing the one-percenters who we really are. And let them envy us our profound joy of life.

We must stop plodding and start dancing along our way. We must stop moaning and begin singing as we go. When we part, we must stop saying, “take care” and return to “have a good day.” And, most importantly, we must free ourselves from the one-percenters’ almost out of control and way to speedy system of routines and schedules. Then we can play and dance and sing and enjoy our lives.

Actually the Indian’s Ghost Dance turned out to be a failed response to the overwhelming assault upon their world by the Europeans. It was doomed to failure from the start, although the US army was scared enough to attack many of the dances and kill hundreds of the participants.

In the late fifties and early sixties of the last century, the counterculture, fueled by LSD, looked at the world through acid clear eyes and decided that they wanted out. They tried to escape what they called the straight world by buying islands, by living full time on ocean going ships, by living deep in the woods and deserts, and by starting communes that isolated themselves from the mainstream culture.

These attempts by the counterculture to escape the straight world all failed, as had the Ghost Dances. There is no other world; there isn’t even any room left on this world for a person to be real. The only strategy that has had any sort of success has been that of the individual living quietly and alone while pretending to be like the rest of his neighbors.

However, this strategy hasn’t really worked for any of us. It certainly hasn’t worked for me. Over time, our faith in our spiritual way became eroded by our loneliness and by our attempts at pretending to be like all the unconscious, frightened, and now insane and suicidal folks – the ones who seem to be in charge of destroying this planet as well as the entire human race.
.

Something has to be done. We’re actually going backwards now. Our freedoms are being taken away from us again, one after another. We’re being boxed in, tighter and tighter. And we have already lost much of what we have gained since the sixties. Human rights are rapidly being taken away from all of us, especially the rights of women. Our privacy is already a thing of the past. The rulers are tightening their grip upon us daily.

The mainstream folks, that is, the polluted stream folks, are steering us in the wrong direction. If we let them, they will kill us all. I can no longer say that I can’t do anything to stop them, that I’ll just focus on living my own quiet life. This has been my strategy until now. But it just gives the folks in charge permission to continue leading us into the abyss. No, they have to go or else change – and now! They cannot be allowed to continue on their destructive course.

When Mao was faced with folks like this, he gave them two choices – to be part of a self-criticism group, learning to change their heads and hearts, or be the target for a firing squad. Some actually choose the firing squad.

However, as much as I admire Mao, I’m more like the early acid folks, feeling that if everyone did LSD in a therapeutic, Stanislav Grofian way, they would, of course, come to see the errors of their outdated and unconscious ways and began to care for one another and the world they live in.

But most of the time, I have hoped for some outside, science fiction sort of intervention. Imagine our part of the galaxy, as it goes around the center, finally coming upon a more enlightened part of the galaxy, one who’s energy would further higher consciousness, even in the fundamentalist religious folks. Or imagine that Mother Earth tires of waiting for us, her children, to grow up and so begins to communicate with us, guiding us into our future.

Besides that, I’m not yet sure what I am going to do. This is all new to me. I just know that something needs to be done – and now. Maybe I’m already begun to help, by using my writing to wake myself and others up.

What sort of world do we want to live in? Certainly not one like the one we’re living in now. Where should we take this current revolution, this chance for a new and brighter future? If we don’t know where we want to go, how will we ever get there?
.

I envision a world where there is complete acceptance of all human beings by all human beings, regardless of gender, race, nationality, religion, or sexual preference, a world where there are no outsiders, no untouchables, not in any sense of that old and ugly word.

I envision a world where there is equality, on all levels for all folks, a world where there are no leaders or followers, no hierarchies at all. Where there are no privileged folks, not in any way.

I envision a world where there are no bosses, no one telling anyone what to do. This is a Rainbow Family concept. At the gatherings, everything is always decided by consensus. The entire idea of leaders and followers puts most of us down. Also, it should be obvious by now that all the leaders, throughout history to these present days, are always stupid, greedy, power seeking assholes.

I envision a world where there is no money, where everything is free. This is another Rainbow Family idea. Earlier though, back in the early 60’s, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took it one step further, putting all their possessions in one room. When one of them needed something, he or she would get it out of the room, use it, and then return it to the pile.

James Redfield had a similar idea in his book, The Celestine Prophecy. He sees a future in which “Our needs for survival – foodstuffs and clothing and transportation – will be totally automated and at everyone’s disposal. Out needs will be completely met without the exchange of any currency.”
.

How will we ever get from where we are now, mired in prejudice, inequality, greed, and evil bosses with their stupid power games? It will never happen with protests or revolutions. Anger and righteousness will kill any change for a higher future.

It will never happen unless we change our consciousness, and I definitely do not mean just our thoughts. I don’t even mean the consciousness that seems to live in our heads, the consciousness that we think comes from our brains Actually, each chakra has it’s own consciousness, and, if we let it, it will contribute to the whole.

We will need to change our consciousness from our present day and very limited left-brain ego consciousness – that very small bit of consciousness that we are able to accept today with our closed minds – to one more whole, one without fear, one more open to both masculine and feminine consciousness, and especially one that is more connected to Spirit.

I liked what Grof said about the results of his LSD Psychotherapy. I like that he showed us that we can all be fully conscious, as he describes it. This is certainly a goal worth achieving. If we can do this, we will have a future, otherwise, probably not.

I don’t care how we get there, to this new and higher consciousness. If we can get there without acid, fine. But if we can’t find our way to this higher consciousness otherwise, please remember that acid as therapy can take us there. We could just make acid legal for psychotherapy, as it once was. It would sure help. I think that’s why it’s here, to take us into our future.

According to Grof, with the guided use of LSD, we can overcome our fear of death, the source of most of our fears. We can give up our head trips and learn to appreciate the simpler aspects of existence. We can give up being selfish and competitive. And, of course, we can realize how exciting the exploration of consciousness can be. As Grof says, “The universe ceases to be a gigantic assembly of material objects; it becomes an infinite system of adventures in consciousness.”
.

I envision a future that would satisfy all of us. This is so because no one would be prejudiced against another person, not after becoming conscious of that side of him or herself that is like that other person. I envision a future where we are all equal, where we know that no one is better or worse than we are. This is so because we have seen who we really are. I envision a future where there are no bosses, no leaders and followers. How could a fully conscious being think that they knew another’s path through life? I also see a future where everything is free, where we finally realize that we are all family.

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

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

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

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

Many of us favored LSD in the 60’s. We weren’t afraid of it then as many folks are nowadays. We liked how it made us more clear and compassionate. We found that we could be completely open and honest with one another when we tripped together. We found that we couldn’t bullshit when we were tripping, not to ourselves or to each other. We called it acid honesty.
.

Although I don’t think Stan Grof’s way, his LSD Psychotherapy way, is necessary – many of us have done it on our own, in our own ways – but it does work. The result of his LSD therapy, the sort of person one can become, is described in the following quotes from his bookLSD Psychotherapy (see pages 227 and following if your curious.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

We don’t need to wait until the current revolution is over before we begin creating our new world. We didn’t wait the last time a revolution was attempted, back in the 60’s. And we don’t need to wait until this one is over either. We can start now.
.

In the sixties and early seventies, the counter-culture split into two main factions. Many of us stayed with our anger and fought against the establishment – in the anti-war, anti-nuke, and other anti- movements.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.