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.
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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 I have still spent much of my life alone, withdrawn from the world.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.
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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.

Years ago, Tim Leary said essentially what I have said in my most recent note, the one called “Wake Up!” And he said it in one famous short sentence – “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” However, I would change the order of his saying. Today I would say that we first have to drop out and get out of our unconscious ruts before we can turn on and tune in.

For Leary, turning on meant doing LSD and the other psychedelics, including marijuana. However, there are many other ways for us to turn on – meditation, dream sharing, yoga, Rolfing, using the I Ching, walking in the woods, sharing ourselves with others, being in psychotherapy with someone more conscious than us, the list goes on and on.

Leary was right though, doing LSD could certainly wake us up, could help us find the light and be more conscious of who we are and our place in life. Unfortunately, it is illegal. And even if it weren’t, most of us are so unconscious that doing LSD could threaten to overwhelm us. That’s probably why we let it become illegal – because we’re all so afraid of ourselves.

For Leary, tuning in meant examining ourselves on all levels of consciousness, meant examining our lives and how we can use them to manifest our inner spiritual light. However, as I have said, there are so many other ways to tune into ourselves, most of which are much more benign, and certainly more legal, than the various psychedelics.

For Leary and the rest of us back in those early days, dropping out meant the natural response of our newly raised consciousness to retreat from the craziness of the world we lived in. It meant dropping out of the system and finding new ways of living our lives, ones that didn’t return us immediately to our previous state of unconsciousness or encourage us to return to the old and worn out ways of the straight world.

Unlike Leary, I don’t think we should drop out of the system and create a separate, counterculture reality. I think we need to drop out of our ruts first so we can find out who we are and become light bearers. Then we can create a new way of being for all of us, one that furthers all life.

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

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

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

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

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

When I was a young boy, Christmas was my favorite time of year. I could hardly wait for it to come around again. We always had a family gathering, with me and my brother Ned and Granny Bird and Granny Marks and Uncle Ken and my mom and dad. Uncle Ken was always Santa Claus. Being our only uncle, he was easily our favorite.

We all always had a great time together too, with plenty of presents for all. Later in the day, we always had a special and wonderful family dinner, with more than enough homemade cookies and candy for afterwards. We usually ended the evening with some sort of card game. Sometimes we even got serious and played bridge. Granny Marks was really good at it. She played in tournaments and always did well.
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But I haven’t been into Christmas for a long while now, not since my Berkeley days in the early seventies. The last great Christmas that I remember was from those days. In the Grant Street house, we had a tree with Karen’s candles for lights and rolled joints for decorations, maybe a hundred or so of them. We didn’t do acid together that night, as we had done at Thanksgiving, but we sure smoked a lot of those joints.
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I still celebrate Christmas. After all, I’m a dad and I have three young boys. They are greedy little Christmas monsters, but remembering how I was as a young boy, I cater to their greed. I got over it. They will too.

This year, Callahan will be getting a laptop and some toys, and Zane will get Callahan’s old computer. Zane will also be getting a kid-sized kitchen and some toys too. He really likes to help with the cooking. Jake has a list. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I know that he likes to make things out of Legos. He’ll probably get some LEGO City sets. He was really into transformers a while back, and probably will be again after Transformers 3 comes out this summer. Right now though, he’s more into playing games on his school computer, the one he has because he’s being home schooled this year. Maybe he’ll get a game or two for his computer.

I do tell the boys that Christmas is supposed to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, not be a day of getting. I also tell them that it’s just another version of the Winter Solstice, a time of death and rebirth, a time that is celebrated by nearly all cultures. I tell them that it marks a time when the light has almost left us. After all, the Winter Solstice is the shortest day of the year. I also tell them that, after the Solstice has come and gone, the light will begin to return – in the northern hemisphere anyway.
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Aspen and I aren’t much into Christmas ourselves except for the boys. I usually do make a list of things to buy for myself this time of year, probably a holdover from when I used to receive gifts. This year, I’m going to buy myself a pair of socks and an astrological calendar. I’d also buy myself new shoes and some good acid if I had the money.

If it were just me – and thank god, it isn’t – I probably wouldn’t even notice Christmas. I think it’s a really fucked holiday. For one thing, it’s all about greed, very little about Spirit anymore. For another, it’s the wrong time of year to celebrate as we do with Christmas. The I Ching calls this time the resting time of year. We should all be hibernating.

I do celebrate the Winter Solstice. I usually do it alone and with consciousness. I always ask the I Ching what my situation is going to be for the year that is coming. I stand on the cusp. I say goodby to the year that has just passed, and I welcome the one that is just beginning.

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.

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.

In addition to the causal relationships found in nature, which are the basis of our science – that is, event A causes event B – Carl Jung showed us another equally important and useful relationship. This relationship is acausal, based rather on meaning – that is, event A and event B occurring at the same moment in time, share in the meaning of that moment. He named this acausal relationship synchronicity.

This relationship underlies the use of the I Ching. The results you obtain from the yarrow stalks or the three coins tell you which particular hexagrams are relevant for you at that particular time. They do this by themselves being events that share in the same moment and meaning as do your present situation and state of mind.

Jung saw many examples of synchronicity in the dreams and the lives of his patients. He spoke of it as a meaningful coincidence. He defined it more formally as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” (Jung, CW, Volume VIII, p. 441) He sites an interesting example in this same essay, one that he had gotten from Camille Flammarion, the astronomer. I quote it here in full:

“A certain M. Deschamps, when a boy in Orleans, was given once a piece of plum-pudding by a M. de Fortgibu. Ten years later he discovered another plum-pudding in a Paris restaurant, and asked if he could have a piece. It turned out, however, that the plum-pudding was already ordered—by M. de Fortgibu. Many years afterwards M. Deschamps was invited to partake of a plum-pudding as a special rarity. While he was eating it he remarked that the only thing lacking was M. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old, old man in the last stages of disorientation walked in: M. de Fortgibu, who had got hold of the wrong address and burst in on the party by mistake.” (p. 431)

The I Ching translates and is also known as the Book of Changes. The Chinese word “I” has three primary meanings. These are the easy, the changing, and the constant. The easy requires no effort and there is no need of thought. It is simple and without error. It is doing what comes naturally. The changing is that which is always occurring, the only constant. If we look at our lives and at nature, we immediately recognize this constant change. The constant aspect of “I” is embodied in the Tao, the way through life that combines the opposites of yin and yang, the receptive and the creative, into a constant and meaningful whole.

The I Ching says that change is the only constant, that all else is ephemeral. It is like the water of a river, nothing is ever the same. The only constant is the movement of the water flowing on. The early pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclites, in an example of cultural parallelism, declared in a surviving fragment of his writings that “everything flows.”

As we used to say in the early hippie days, change is the flow. Everything does flow, and being in the flow is easy and the only way to a healthy and fulfilling life. Being in touch with the flow, the Tao, was and still is considered the true path to wisdom. As the I Ching says, the task for the superior person is to flow through each change as it occurs, staying always centered and aware, learning from each change, and growing in wisdom.

The I Ching assigns to man a place in this. He is not powerless. Change is not chaos. Man can influence change. He cannot work against it; he has to work with it, going with the grain, the flow. He has to recognize the beginnings of change. Knowing the beginnings, he can introduce a seed, an influence, into the flow. Further, he can influence the development of this seed.

Man thus has a large role in the course of events, both in the natural and in the social spheres. He is not only master of his own life and fate but is in a position to influence events far beyond himself.