The 60’s revolution failed. We all know this. The bad guys kept their power and undid almost all of the positive changes we had worked so hard for – all of them that they could undo, that is. However, some of the things we worked so hard to actualize back then did survive. In fact, many of the positive social changes from the 60’s revolution are still with us today.
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We have become much more aware of our Mother Earth, this awesome Spaceship Earth that we all live upon, cruising through the endless space-time continuum. We have learned that she is more fragile than we thought. We have learned that she loves us all dearly – after all, she is our mother. We have also begun to realize that we can help her too.

We have become more aware of the various kinds of pollution that are slowly killing all life on Mother Earth, whether it be in our waters, in our air, or even in our earth itself. We have seen the enemy, and he is not us. He is of the 1 percent that try to lord over the rest of us. If they would just get out of our way, we could still save ourselves and Mother Earth.

We have become more aware of overpopulation, although we haven’t done anything about it yet. In fact, there is a powerful faction here in the United States that is against limiting the population. But Mother Earth can only keep so many of us folks alive and well. Too many folks are already dying of hunger, bad water, and disease. I keep hearing folks saying, “Maybe we should all have to have a license to be a parent.” Good idea, but try telling that to most of the folks on this planet.

We have become more aware of the effects of global warming. This was something we were already very concerned about in the 60’s. It seemed obvious to us then. Now it is obvious to almost everybody, although the many brain-dead folks aligned with the immoral world of greed are still in convenient denial.

It is obvious now though. Temperatures are rising. Animals and even plants are slowly migrating north in the Northern Hemisphere. Most of the world’s glaciers are going or already gone. When we hike in the high country around here, we see that the glaciers we used to play on are already gone.
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Since the 60’s, we have become more aware of our bodies too. Physical health and fitness have become more important. More and more folks are walking, running, bicycling, skating, swimming, working out with weights, playing sports, skiing, climbing rocks, hiking, backpacking, doing yoga, making love, and all the other adventures that we give to ourselves these days. More and more of us folks are not going blindly into couch potato old age.

More folks are now exploring and enjoying Mother Nature in her wilder aspects. We are rediscovering Her as she truly is, as a place of high adventure as well as a place of spiritual renewal. Many of us use Her wild mountains and deserts as spiritual retreats, as places away from the chaotic group consciousness of the city and this sick society that we all live in, a place where we can slow down and listen to Spirit.
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In the early 60’s, it was difficult if not impossible to find organic food in most towns and cities across the country. Most of what we did find was in funky co-ops or vitamin shops that carried only a few organic items. Organic food sure caught on fast though. Look around now. There are at least ten natural food stores here in Boulder, and many more in the nearby, surrounding communities. And most of the big chains, Safeway and King Supers, are carrying more and more organic foods.

Along with this, in the 60’s, came an upsurge in organic gardening. For many of us, gardening has become a new but meaningful endeavor. Today, it is becoming a necessity.

People are raising chickens nowadays too, for the eggs mostly. But some folks are killing the males when they are old enough to be called fryers. At least three of our neighbors here in the city are raising them. No roosters though. Too noisy, too early in the morning.
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The 60’s really changed the status of women. We have finally begun to realize the importance of women and the feminine. We are finally accepting that women are different from men and at least equal to them. They certainly can mellow out the men’s warlike, testosterone induced energy. Without their balancing energy, men would probably have already destroyed this world of ours. Women can create life, whereas men can only destroy it.

Motherhood has become more important and more respected too. Women can now nurse in public. Many women can take maternity leave from their jobs and can even nurse at work now. Since the 60’s, women have gained much in the way of freedom, in so many areas of life.

Blacks are accorded much greater respect than they were before the 60’s. When I was young, we never saw a black person on TV or in movies, not unless it was Jack Benny’s Rochester. The same is true for the other minorities, especially for the Asians and the Latinos. Even the Indians are getting a better press these days.

Gay men and women have become much more accepted in our culture too, even in the military. Now they can honor their love for one another in a sacred marriage, just as those of us who are not gay have always been able to do.

Perhaps we are slowly becoming a more accepting culture. We definitely need to keep moving in this direction. It is in the Tao.
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Most of us are back living in our single-family dwellings, inside our single-family minds. Most of us have given up on community, although we do keep saying that it takes a village to raise a child, almost as if we’re trying to remind ourselves of something.

Lately, however, I have been hearing folks wishing that they could share the childcare, preferably without everyone having to live together in one house or on one farm. These folks are just beginning to wake up. At this time in history, we all need to remember (with a slight change) that old 60’s saying, “People (originally ‘dope’) will get you through times of no money better than money will get you times of no people.“

Dope helps too, helps community. Remember the circles and folks saying, “What goes around, comes around.”
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I wonder where we will take the world with this revolution? All these gains from the 60’s were just baby steps, mere beginnings on our way to a higher future. Wherever we do take it, it will help us if we remember that we are all here together on Spaceship Earth and that to keep it livable, we all have to work together.

In my next note, I will begin to share my vision for our collective future.

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.

Still thinking about children and personhood, I remembered how Henry Miller, in his book Tropic of Capricorn, talked about the difference between children and adults. In Miller’s opinion, once one becomes an adult, one loses one’s personhood and instead becomes a frightened and calculating being. In his life, Miller says he watched sadly as his friends grew up and stopped being real, stopped being persons.

In Miller’s book, he says: “At seven years, we knew with dead certainty, for example, that such a fellow would end up in prison, that another would be a drudge, and another a good for nothing, and so on. We were absolutely correct in our diagnoses, much more correct, for example, than our parents, or our teachers, more correct, indeed, than the so-called psychologists … The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision, From the day we went to school, we learning nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.”

He goes on to say, “What I am thinking of, with a certain amount of regret and longing, is that this thoroughly restricted life of early boyhood seems like a limitless universe, and the life that followed upon it, the life of an adult, a constantly diminishing realm. From the moment when one is put in school one is lost, one has a feeling of having a halter put around his neck. The taste goes out of the bread as it goes out of life. Getting the bread becomes more important than the eating of it. Everything is calculated, and everything has a price on it.”
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Still thinking about the difference between children and adults, I also remembered what Tim Leary once said, lecturing to a crowd of us at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He told us that we should never become grownups, never become adults. He said that we should just keep on growing and reminded us that the word adult is the past participle of the Latin verb adulescere, meaning to grow up.
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In my life, I have continued to live as I lived as a boy. I am the same person I have always been. I have not left behind the honesty and awareness of my childhood. I have not finished growing. and I have not and never will become one of those uptight and frightened adults.

In my life, I don’t see myself as old. I’m still me, still the same person I’ve always been, just older than I was before And I must say, I’m proud of the seventy-eight trips around the sun that I’ve made so far. It’s been quite a ride, and I’m not done yet.

I just read Orson Scott Card’s introduction to his book Ender’s Game, one of my most favorite stories. Now I’m reading the story itself once again. At first, I though that Jake might want to read it to himself. But he and I have decided that it’s a bit over his head for now. So I’m reading it aloud to the entire family every night.

I have read Card’s wonderful story many times, but this was the first time I have read his introduction. It was beautiful, moving. Orson Scott Card is a beautiful person. In his introduction, in response to critics who said that children don’t talk and think like they do in Ender’s Game, Card wrote:–

“Yet I knew – I knew – that this was one of the truest things about Ender’s Game. In fact, I realized in retrospect that this may indeed be part of the reason why it was so important to me … to write a story in which gifted children are trained to fight in adult wars. Because never in my entire childhood did I feel like a child. I felt like a person all along – the same person that I am today. I never felt that I spoke childishly. I never felt that my emotions and desires were somehow less real than adult emotions and desires. And in writing Ender’s Game, I forced the audience to experience the lives of these children from that perspective – the perspective in which their feeling and decisions are just as real and important as any adult’s.”
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I have always known that children are persons. Like Card, I was a person myself as a boy. So were all my friends. However, since I have grown up, I have been criticized by many adults who say that I shouldn’t talk to children as I do – as I did with the other children when I was still a child myself. They say I shouldn’t talk to them as if they were persons. They argue that children are not yet really persons. They are wrong.

Certainly, none of my children have ever criticized me for treating them as persons, for being real with them. They appreciate my respect and my honesty. I think it helps them to be more respectful and honest themselves.
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The public school system certainly does not treat children as persons. They definitely don’t want to see who my boys really are. And, because of that, they don’t encourage them to be real persons.

We have sent our son Callahan to a middle school noted for its artistic focus. But Callahan still has to take all the typical academic courses, none of which really interest him, except perhaps for science. He has to take these academic courses just because they insist he does so. And they have offered him only one course, a course in beginning art, that speaks to who he is as a creative person.

I watch the school system fill my boys with collective bullshit – as if they were empty and needed filling – trying to make them fit into the system’s way of thinking about the world. I watch them judge my boys negatively if they don’t conform to the system’s collective way. It’s obvious that they don’t want to know anything about, let alone further, the person who already exists in each one of them.

I wanted to write something today but couldn’t think of anything to write about. So I asked the I Ching, asked what I should write. I received the Hexagram Modesty and that changed to the Hexagram Gathering Together. I understood then what I was to write about. And I also understood why I was to write about it at this time.

First, here’s what the I Ching says:

In Modesty: “It is the law of heaven to make fullness empty and to make full what is modest.”

“This heavenly law works itself out in the fates of men also. It is the law of earth to alter the full and to contribute to the modest. High mountains are worn down by the waters, and the valleys are filled up. It it the law of fate to undermine what is full and to prosper the modest. And men also hate fullness and love the modest.”

When “the superior man establishes order in the world, he equalizes the extremes that are the source of social discontent and thereby creates just and equable conditions,”

In Gathering Together; “When men are to be gathered together, religious forces are needed.”

“Only collective moral force can unite the world. Such great times of unification will leave great achievements behind them. This is the significance of the great offerings that are made. In the secular sphere likewise there is need of great deeds in the time of Gathering Together.”

And in its fourth line of Gathering Together, the I Ching says: “This describes a man who gathers people around him in the name of his ruler. Since he is not striving for any special advantages for himself but is working unselfishly to bring about general unity, his work is crowned with success, and everything becomes as it should be.”
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And here’s what I say: This man described in that fourth line of Gathering Together is of course each and every one of us who are working to establish peace and harmony in the world. We’re not working to further ourselves, but rather to heal our world. Knowing full well that it is “the law of heaven to make fullness empty and to make full what is modest.” Knowing that God is on our side, knowing that God is helping us now.

The laws of the universe are on our side. Those overly full, and certainly overly rich, folks are definitely heading for a fall. It is inevitable. It is made of their one-sided and insatiable greed, a natural but destructive consequence of their constant, yet always unsuccessful attempts to fill their empty lives.

And we do not have to do anything to make it happen. They will fall. We can just stay modest and work always to heal the divisive conflict that has been destroying our world, beginning, of course, with our own hearts.

We can’t heal a conflict if we’re a part of it, if we have taken sides. So a big part of our healing work will be for each of us to become free of our attachments to one side or another of the many political, social, economic, and moral issues. Let them sort themselves out. God is working on them right now.

And if it helps, we can remember that it is the law of fate to prosper the modest.

I am a writer, but until recently I have never given my talent the time and energy that it deserves. But I am writing now – and I’m finally publishing my Wanderer stories too. I guess I had forgotten for a while that I have to write down what’s going on in my life. Otherwise I lose my way, living out here at the edge.
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Back in the early nineties, I had a dream in which a friend of mine, a writer, helped me fix this broken sled that I needed to use. He showed me how to fix the third wheel that was broken and keeping the sled from moving. As soon as I fixed it in my dream, I was able to use it to go where I needed to go.

I understood from this dream that I needed to use all three of my talents. I needed to start writing again in order to make my way through life. True, I was an acid wanderer, a healer too, but I was also a writer. And I needed to write in order to go on with my life.

Soon after this dream, Aspen’s dad gave me my first computer and I began writing. I saw that his act of kindness was Spirit’s way of giving me an opportunity to write again. I began slowly, but soon I couldn’t stop.
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I am a writer. I’ve known this for years. I’ve known this, but I have never tried to support myself with my writing. I have always supported myself as a therapist, or else I have lived outside the law, wandering in the wildlands. I have never attempted to make money off my writings.

I was talking to a friend once about Ariana, about how she went to college but never used her degree. My friend and I agreed that Ariana had become an awesome singer and songwriter. We also saw how she began to be successful just as soon as she decided to focus entirely upon her singing and song writing.

In the midst of our conversation, I realized that we could have been talking about me too. I went to school, as Ariana did, but I’ve never really taken advantage of my PhD in Clinical Psychology. Also, like Ariana, I have a creative side. I love to write, as she loves to sing.

It struck me then that yes; I’m a writer, just as Ariana is a singer. Maybe I also have something unique and creative to share with the world. I know that she does. It’s so easy to see it in her. Sometimes it’s easier to see myself by looking into a mirror.

I decided that I would do the same as she had done. I would devote my energies towards being a writer, and I knew, as she must have known, that my efforts would, as Thoreau once said, “meet with success unexpected in common hours.”

I also remembered what W. H. Murray had once written – that “the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.”

I throw the dice. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have had many friends in my seventy-seven years of life. My early school years were long ago; so I don’t remember most of my classmates from then. However, I do remember Bob Smith. He and I grew up together and went to the same elementary school together,

Later, in high school, he was our star pitcher. We called him the Iceman. And after high school, I enlisted in the Air Force and became a flying officer, while he enlisted in the Army and became an officer in the Paratroopers. Later on, after going to UCLA together, I became a clinical psychologist and he became a psychiatrist. I haven’t heard from him in years now, not since I dropped out and began doing medicine.

I have no friends left from my days in the Air Force and only a few from my early days at UCLA. My two best friends from UCLA are both dead now. Richard Taurek drank too much and died of liver failure, and Ken Dallett killed himself by turning on the gas in his psychology lab. Another friend from UCLA, Norm Fogel, later married my ex-wife Pamela, leaving me to wander if he had been one of her lovers when she and I were married.

I had lots of friends in Berkeley, although I don’t see many of them anymore. I lived with Ariana’s mother Karen, Abby Minot and Bobby Keeler in a house in the flatlands of Berkeley. A lot of good folks hung out with us there. And then there was Jim. I really loved him. He was easily as far out as I was. I don’t think I ever knew his last name though.

I made many friends in the Rainbow Family too. I used to travel to the gatherings almost every year just to see my friends. I don’t travel as much nowadays, and I’m not planning on ever going to another gathering. Some of us are still in touch though.
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My best friends have always been those folks that I’ve tripped with. Not having done any acid these past few years, I’ve lost touch (for now) with most of them. But there still remains the acid connection, as we used to call it, that psyche tie that remains forever between two folks who have seriously tripped together.

Ramon Landero, or Mexican, was my all-time best friend. I met him back in 1973 at the gathering in Wyoming. He’s dead now, murdered in the Bay Area outside the Dead’s New Years Eve concert. He was trying to score. Too bad. He was a beautiful soul. He would have become a great wizard if he had lived.

Then there was Paul Borne. I was camping alone at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras once, and I saw this guy jump off a cliff above the creek. I rushed over to where I thought his body would be and saw that he had jumped into a pool, one that I later saw you couldn’t even see from where he had jumped. I was tripping and gave him a hit. He deserved it. The next morning, when I woke up, he was squatting by my sleeping bag with a big smile on his face. “Got more?” He’s a stunt man in Hollywood now. He’s also Ariana’s godfather.

There were a lot of folks at the gatherings who were great trippers. Mitro, who was Chastity when I first met her, turned me onto teepees, turned me onto her too. We were together for a few years, tripping and raising our kids together. I had a high house with Ramon and her and our kids up in Gold Hill, above Boulder.

Then there were Brett and Lee from Minneapolis. Aspen and I planned on meeting them somehow at the gathering in Missouri, We didn’t know how or when or where. We finally arrived there, after flying into St Louis, taking a bus south, and then hitching a ride to the gathering. When the driver stopped to let us out in the gathering’s parking lot, Brett and Lee were standing there, as if waiting to lead us to their camp. Synchronicity!

There were many others high folks from the gatherings too – Spice and Jimbo and Rex and Felipe and Hoot and Motorcycle Michael and all the others, all very high brothers and sisters.

Here in Boulder, Aspen and I had friends too, until our boys came into our lives. Most of our friends dropped off then, when they realized we had become boring, in their eyes anyway. And most of them didn’t really like kids anyway, except maybe for an hour or so. And, for our part, we were always exhausted from having to put so much of our energy into our boys

We didn’t make friends with other parents either. Not many of the couples with young kids that we have met have a 31 years age difference between them, as Aspen and I do. Aspen was friends with some of the mothers for a while, but most of the men just couldn’t relate to me. I was as old or older than all of their fathers.
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In my life now, I want grownup friends, friends of the same high quality as those of my past. I want friends who are interested in what I am interested in and doing now – which is primarily writing, doing kitchen table holy work, and being a holy medicine man. Besides having been a father for most of my adult life – for the last 50 or so years – I have spent the rest of my time either writing or healing or tripping. And I have found that this is what I like to do and do well.

I want friends who have created their own unique life, who value being conscious and loving, and who are daring and wild and live outside the law (so they must be honest, hey Dylan?) I want friends with whom I can really share my interests and hear theirs. And, when we stare, I want to be with them in person, either outdoors somewhere or else sitting together over coffee or tea and maybe a pipe and talking about what’s really going on with ourselves.
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Aspen and I were driving by all the big houses on the Hill here in Boulder earlier today. She said she’d like to live with other folks in one of the big houses. I told her that I didn’t like the neighborhood. I see rich people as greedy and selfish and too uptight – not folks I’d want to live near. But I told her I did like her idea.

I’ve been reading about the Indians of the southwest lately, and they all have large extended families. They honor the family. It’s the center of their life and their most important social world. Most white folks don’t. People move away from family for work. Children don’t stay and live near their parents. The white folks’ nuclear family is exploding.

I’ve lived in communities. I lived in the Grant Street house in Berkeley for several years. Only four of us paid rent, but there were a lot more folks there every day, going home only to sleep. It was a very high, a very fun house.

I lived briefly in the community in Deadwood, Oregon. In fact, I helped start it. I’ve lived with the Rainbow Family too, although there has never been a place for the family to live. I have had to just follow them around, going to thanksgiving and spring councils and some of the regional gatherings too.

I’ve also visited other communes or families. There was Stoneybrook in Missouri, Gaskin’s Farm in southern Tennessee and another, unnamed one in Nashville. There’s also my friend Wayne’s White Buffalo Farm in Paonia, out on the West Slope.

They’ve all been interesting, but I’ve come to see that I’m more interested in a looser family, one that comes together naturally and evolves without rules or any hierarchy. I not at all interested in any sort of formal community.

I haven’t lived with others in years. But I agree with Aspen. I would like to live with others again. I want a large family too, one bound by love and common interest. Actually, I want a family made up of all of my friends.

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.

As I wander down the page, I leap from rock to rock, from thought to thought – from ‘tonight I finally have some time to myself’ – to ‘I’m up so early every school day, getting the boys up and off to school, and it never lets up until late at night.’

By the time we have fed and entertained them, have hung out with them, have helped them with their homework, and have finally got them into bed, it’s 8:30 or 9 at night, later if it’s not a school night. By then all I want to do is read for a while and then go to sleep.

So, as I said before, tonight I finally have some time to myself – and it’s not late at night either. I’m alone this night because Aspen and Callahan are in their Karate class at the Y, and Jake and Zane are in the nursery there.
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The path down the page forks here. Should I take this fork and say that my body is finally beginning to wear out, finally beginning to die? It’s interesting, watching it happen. I don’t mind leaving my body. I’m not afraid to die. I know that I’m not my body. I have left it twice before, and, both times it has been blissful.

However, I plan on staying here for another twenty or more years. I want to be here to see my boys become men. I want to be here for Jake at the end. Once, I said that I wanted to leave with him. Maybe I still will.

Or should I take the other fork and say that I really want some good acid, preferably liquid. I really do want some, and soon. I want to fly free once more before I leave this body. I want to dance on the edge of life once again.

I want my boys to see who I am at my best. So far, all they have seen is a mommy-daddy who sits around much of the day, either here at the computer or else with a good book in his hands. I have really been much more fun and potent and out there when I have had good acid. I’d like them to see that side of me too.

The two paths converged. Did you see that? It’s the urgency of my body’s aging that compels me to set off on this admittedly dangerous endeavor. I want to become Wanderer again while I still have my energy, while I can still walk the trails of life, and still enjoy the ride.

Also, acid has always been good for my body. Acid would really help me actualize my goal of living another twenty or so healthy and strong years. Twenty-five would be best. This way, Aspen and I would be able to celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Callahan would be thirty-six then. Jake would be thirty-three. And Zane would be thirty. They will be men, beginning to mature, men I know I’m going to be proud of. I want to be there for them then. I can do it. I will do it!

I really don’t like having to nag at my boys, although folks tell me that it’s part of being a parent. I have never liked to tell another person what to do.

When I was an officer in the Air Force, I lived off the base in town. I lived with two enlisted men. I didn’t like most of the officers I know. They thought they were special. They weren’t. Even as an officer, I didn’t like to give orders, to tell others what to do. In fact, I refused to do so.

Most of the time, I didn’t have to tell Jonathan or Ariana what to do, maybe because each of them was the only kid I was raising at the time.

As a therapist, I have always focused on showing the client how to become his or her own therapist. Then they could heal themselves without my help, without me telling them what to do.
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I certainly don’t want anyone to tell me what to do either. I wrote a letter once to Jonathan when he was a boy and I couldn’t be with him for his birthday. The relevant part of the original, written in the mountains above Yosemite Valley went something like this:

There is no one who can tell me what to do. There is no one I can tell what to do. When I know this, I am free. When you know this, you are free too.

Everyone is doing the best he or she can. Everyone is trying to be a good person. When I know this, I am free. When you know this, you are free too.

I don’t need government. You don’t need government either. Government is telling people what to do. You and I don’t need to be told what to do. You and I don’t need to tell others what to do. Freedom and government don’t go together.

Be free!