I was very fortunate when Ramon came into my life. He was an extraordinary man. He always lived life to the fullest. He never let fear slow him down or keep him from being true to himself. His heart was full of love, and he was without guile. I watched him begin to grow into himself and knew that someday he would be a great shaman.

However, like many other extraordinary persons, his life fell short of his promise, and he never made it to his greatness. He died while still young – along with Jesus, Janice, Jimmy, John, and all the rest.
…..

I met Ramon a long time ago. I met him in Lander, Wyoming. He called himself Mexican then. He and his partner Karen and his friend Sunshine were hitchhiking to the ’73 Rainbow Gathering. We stopped and gave them a lift the rest of the way into the gathering.

We stayed connected in the gathering. One day we all tripped together and realized that each of us had found new and worthy friends. We met afterwards in the mountains above Boulder. We camped alongside a little stream together and tripped more there.

After awhile, Karen and I headed east on the rest of our journey across the country and back. We took the rest of the summer and then some, slowly traveling east and then back again to Berkeley. On the way, in the orchards in Emmett, Idaho, where we were picking apples, we got pregnant.
…..

One day, just after Ariana was born. We were in our house on Grant Street in Berkeley. I heard a knock and opened the front door. There stood Ramon and his Karen. They had been living in Mexico and had wanted to find us. So they stopped by to see where we had gotten to.

I wasn’t into traveling at that time, what with a new and beautiful little girl in my life. They heard me on this and decided that they wanted to settle down a bit themselves, especially Karen who wanted to be a mother herself someday.

They went back to Florida, to Gainesville I believe, and went to school. Karen and I stayed in Berkeley for a few more years. But it was getting too scary there, way too much anger for us, especially now that Ariana was with us, so we moved up to the little town of Swisshome, in the Oregon Coast range.

I had a lot of trouble in Swisshome and later in Deadwood too. I am not a country boy at all. And no one there was interested in acid or exploring consciousness. The men there weren’t even interested in a men’s group. After a year there, I left and moved to nearby Eugene. Much better for me. Karen came with me, although she soon left me, taking Ariana with her, after sleeping with one of our old friends in Santa Fe.

After I got over her betrayal and the bummer of losing day to day contact with Ariana, I began to put my life together. Ramon came back into my life then. He was working now. He had a good job. He and his Karen were no longer together either. I guess that Ramon liked the young girls more than being married.
…..

I was tripping with a friend named Drew in Eugene at the time. He and I were close. I really liked him. He was a good tripper. After awhile though, he moved back to Alabama and I didn’t see him for awhile.

Then something uncanny began to happen. Drew would call me from Alabama. Then Ramon would call me later the same day. Drew was still in Alabama. Ramon was in Kansas. They didn’t know each other at all.

Funny things kept happening. They both got into coke at the same time. They both asked for my help. They both overcame the habit with the help of acid; and, what is most weird, both of their coke connections died soon after they stopped using coke.

Their calling me, in unison almost, went on for months. Then one day Drew called and said that he wanted to come and see me. He came soon after that, and we had our visit and tripped together. Several days later, Drew left, and then the very next day Ramon showed up. He and I visited and tripped together too. This new pattern, with each of them visiting me within days of each other, continued for several more months.

Finally I told both of them what was happening and invited them to come and visit me at the same time. They both did and we all had a great time, visiting and tripping. They became good friends too. We all became brothers.

After awhile, Drew settled down with a woman who wanted to own him. At the same time, Ramon became more and more important in my life. He was awesome, magical. We became partners. We traveled, we tripped, and eventually we lived together in the mountains, in Gold Hill above Boulder. Drew’s woman had slowed him down some, but he was still close with us. In fact, he rented the house right next to ours in Gold Hill.
…..

Eventually though, in spite of acid, in spite of our closeness, and in him spite of being Ariana’s Godfather, Ramon got carried away by the Deadheads and the young girls again. He began touring with the Dead, was soon back into coke. He drank a lot too – wine for breakfast.

Before the end, he seriously injured some man by running a stoplight. He was in a jealous rage at the time, thinking that his current young girl was fucking someone else. He did time for that, and later, when he came out, I told him that he had just gotten a wakeup call. I told him that the next one would be heavier. I didn’t know it would be his last.

At the New Year’s Eve Dead show in the Bay Area, he left his friends to score some coke. He had ten thousand dollars on him. He was shot that night and died shortly afterwards in the hospital. The story that his friends got from the police was that he had tried to rob a taxicab and an off duty cop had shot him.

Not true, of course. He had a lot of money on him. He didn’t need to rob anyone. Ramon wasn’t a thief anyway. He was an honest man, right up to his end. No, he was set up.

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The Birth of Wanderer – the spiritual adventure story that is now appearing here in the Weekly Reader – is the first of two books that I have been writing (and editing) for the past forty years. Now that I have grown older and can be more objective about the events that occurred back then, I have recently been able to organize both books around a central theme, that of birth and death and the short but glorious life between.

I began The Birth of Wanderer when I was first introduced to LSD. As I lived out my life afterwards, I wrote down all my dreams, all my acid trips, and all the other important and significant events of my life. The Birth of Wanderer records the journey that I undertook then to become my true self. It ends with me defeating fear and becoming Wanderer.

The second book, The Life and Death of Wanderer then goes on to record everything of importance that occurred when I became a high acid wanderer. It also records the end.

Below is the preface to The Birth of Wanderer

The Birth of Wanderer is a chronicle of a unique spiritual transformation. When the story begins, back in the late sixties, the young man in question is a left-brained intellectual. He is a graduate student at UCLA, with a promising career ahead of him as a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst. When it ends, several years later, he has found his way back into his body and is beginning a new life as a wandering vagabond, living by his wits and his inner truth in the high mountains of California and on the back roads of America.

The seeds of this spiritual transformation had actually been sown much earlier in his life. When he was almost seven years old, he became seriously ill – with pneumonia in both lungs, with meningitis, with polio, and with an infected mastoid bone. When the doctors operated to remove the infected bone, he died on the operating table. He actually left his body and was heading towards the white light, when they were finally able to bring him screaming back into life and their reality.

His first wife Pamela left him in the late sixties, almost thirty years after this harrowing and physical death experience of his childhood. Her leaving triggered in him yet another death – this time psychological and of the ego – and he soon began a long and dangerous journey towards meaning and rebirth, a rebirth that required that he let go of his mind and trust himself again as a body, a rebirth that insisted that the only way he could ever be whole again would be to bring back into consciousness and integrate into his life that long lost and very frightened young boy still hidden deeply within himself.

His main enemy throughout this time of transformation was his own fear. His various defense mechanisms had taken him over and were constantly trying to run his life, trying to keep him from even feeling this fear.

His inner teacher, who came into being to oppose this constricting fear, used at first the image of Nikos Kazantzakis, the heroic Greek genius, and then that of Ken Kesey, the literary, acid hero. Following the examples of these two men, he soon began to climb out of his gravity well of fear.

However, it wasn’t until he was able to find within himself his own unique and powerful image for his future that he was finally able to break completely free of his fear. This powerful and healing image first came to him in his dreams, in the form of an old and wandering hobo asking for a place to stay. This wandering hobo soon became his mentor and his guide.

Already deeply into his dreams, as well as the I Ching and the consciousness of marijuana, he soon entered the psychedelic world. LSD, or acid as it was called, finally and irrevocably led him past all his old fears – led him to the mountains, to tripping there alone, to discovering his inner teacher – and finally led him to his craziness and, beyond it, to himself.

Acid and the consciousness he could achieve using it became the most important aspect of his new life. However, he was also learning with each and every trip that it really wasn’t the acid itself that was responsible for his changes – he saw far too many acidheads fall along the way – it was him and what he was able to do with the acid.

His friends and family and professional colleagues all thought he was going insane, that he was losing his mind and his connection with reality using these medicines. He was actually – with their reality anyway. But he was following his deepest and most innermost fantasies back to himself, back to when he had last been truly himself. At some level, he did know where he was going. He was going home.

He really did lose his mind when he first became a body again. He had to lose it in order to be reborn. He had to go through the darkness without knowing if there would ever again be light. After all, it was the first time he had been in his body since he had been that little boy, scared and dying on the operating table.

To stay sane, or at least somewhat objective, while he was going through all this, he took up writing. He made a deal with himself then. The Jungian analyst side of himself agreed to let the acid hippie side of himself live as he wished if he would, in turn, agree to write it all down and make sense of it. With this agreement secured, he was able to follow and live out his inner truths, discovered with the help of his dreams and acid. He wrote it all down and made sense of it too –his dreams, his acid trips, his thoughts and feelings and understandings, and everything else that happened to him along his way.

The acid hippie took the Jungian within him into some very strange and heavy places back in those days. You’ll also see though, as you read these pages, that the Jungian kept the acid hippie within himself honest and helped him to find his way through this new and uncharted world. As Dylan once sang, “If you live outside the law, you must be honest” – that is, conscious.

Somehow, in the midst of all this inner and outer turmoil, he still managed to earn his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA in early 1971. He even built up a private practice afterwards, first in LA and then later in Berkeley and San Francisco. However, soon afterwards, he began dreaming that the doctor was dying and that his real work was no longer healing others but was now exploring deeper and deeper levels of consciousness, ones that had been ignored in his own life till then, ones that had, in fact, been long ignored by his entire culture.

He used to fear his writing. His muse was extremely insistent in the beginning and seemed to take him over. He couldn’t stop writing. He wrote all the time. He remembers once writing, as he was driving to work in the heavy traffic of the L.A freeways, and being so involved in what he was writing in his notebook that was laying on the seat beside him that he got onto the wrong freeway and headed to the wrong job as a result – and then writing about that and what he thought that doing that meant too!

Nowadays though, he can see that his writing has never wanted to take him over. In truth, it has never been anything separate from himself. It is who he is. It is his excellence. There’s a flow in him that’s released whenever he puts pen to paper, a flow that comes from the deepest of levels within himself, from the source of all meaning for him.

I’m reading aloud to the boys now. I began reading The Hobbit early last September, soon after we killed the TV. I generally read about 10 to 15 pages a day, although I don’t always read every day. Reading The Hobbit, we followed Bilbo all the way there and back again. We all really enjoyed his adventure.
…..

I have noticed a big difference between reading aloud and watching a movie. In a movie, the camera describes the scene that surrounds the action and/or the dialogue. The surroundings don’t have to be put into words. We see it all at once. In a book, however, a lot of time has to be spent describing the surroundings, In addition, a book has to describe each and every character in some detail; something we are immediately shown by the camera.

It generally takes me up to a week or so of reading almost every night to cover what the motion picture camera can show in just a few minutes.
…..

After finishing The Hobbit, I wondered briefly what I would read to the boys next. It soon became obvious – The Lord of the Rings of course. In general, I wanted the boys to learn to use their own imagination to form the images that went along with the words of a story. More importantly, I wanted them to see how ordinary people, like themselves, could rise to a challenge, could persevere throughout the adventure and could even come out of it successfully. Most importantly, with respect to The Lord of the Rings, I wanted them to live through one of the greatest stories ever written.

Right now, reading The Fellowship of the Ring and adventuring along in our imaginations with our Hobbit friends, we have just left the Inn of the Prancing Pony. The black riders have attacked in the night. But thanks to Strider, who appeared just in time to help us, we have survived.

Last night we climbed to the top of Weathertop with them. We saw that Gandalf had been there, just three days before. We also saw, below us on the road, the enemy, five of the black riders. Tonight, we will see what will happen on Weathertop.

I know already of course. I’ve read these books a half dozen times to myself, and three times aloud. I read them aloud to Jonathan, Ariana, and Aspen. I may have to read them again for Zane. At three, almost four years, he enjoys the reading and the energy we all generate, but he probably doesn’t understand all that is going on. Callahan and Jake do though.
…..

One of the best things that is happening as we follow the Hobbits on their adventure is all the side trips that we take, all the discussions we get into – in the middle of a sentence even. We are constantly going off on very interesting and informative discussions, ranging from why do Elves live so long, almost forever it seems, to who are the rangers and what it must be like to be that close and knowledgeable with the land.

In the book, we are constantly being reminded of the early days of Middle Earth, of all that happened before this story. Maybe we’ll have to read The Silmarillion next. A great deal of the ancient history that is being brought up in the story so far is leading up to the realization that Strider is Aragorn the King.

And of course, there is the perennial question – who is Tom Bombadil? He’s the master and he has his boundaries, but outside of that, who is he? Who is he in the larger story? He doesn’t figure again in either of the other two books of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t remember reading about him in The Silmarillion either.