I remember when Aspen and I were living in Tucson and Callahan was still in her belly. I remember sitting outside the house on the front porch, looking up at the sky, watching father Jupiter cross the night sky. I felt really blessed then. And I’m still blessed now, what with my three boys.
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I’m flowing more easily with the school’s weird schedule this year. It’s back to “early to bed and early to rise” for me now.

But tonight, I should be going to sleep right now, but I just smoked (I’m medical) and it woke my creative side. “Stay with it,” Ariana would say, did say earlier today. Actually, I am in bed now, with the lights turned down low. I’m writing on a small note pad. Sometimes, when I do this, I can barely read my writing the next morning.

Maybe I’m starting to write a new book now, one about my many blessings, about my wife, my three boys, and my daughter Ariana. It would be another Wanderer book, The Blessings of Wanderer perhaps.
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Callahan is back into skateboarding. He started this afternoon at the skate park. He skated better than ever. He showed a lot more confidence than before. Ric, his skating teacher, said that Callahan had taken it up to a new level, a small but definite quantum leap.

Callahan’s a member of the skate club at the YMCA. We’re all members there. Aspen and I lift weights there, and she and Callahan are in a Karate class. They’ve both earned their purple belts a while ago and are ready to move up a notch next month.

Jake was suspended from school today, and tomorrow too. He got into a fight with another boy on the playground earlier today. The schools today are so uptight. Besides being fearful of boys fighting, they have gotten rid of all the teetter-totters and those little merry-go-rounds. The schools have forgotten that little boys like to be daring, like to take risks and have adventures.

Jake’s friend at school was asking him earlier today, before he was suspended, about his enlarged calves. His friend told him that they looked unusual. They are for most of us perhaps, but for kids with MD, they are quite usual, being one of the first visible signs of the disease. Jake was upset by this. He didn’t want to hear his friend focus upon his unusual calves.

We went with Zane to his school this morning. He’s going to Head Start. It doesn’t start for a week, but he got to meet his new teacher. And Aspen got to fill out more paperwork for the next year. Always paperwork. While we were there, he was shy in a cute way. Both of his friends from last year have moved away. He’ll have to make new friends. He will. Zane blesses all of us with his innocence, his fierceness, and his incredible love.

Later, when we were all home for the evening, the boys, anticipating Halloween perhaps, got out their old masks, their Nerf guns and their light sabers. They costumed up and went running around in the backyard, yelling and having a great time, until I realized it was way past bedtime for a school night. They didn’t want to come in, of course, but eventually they did. They don’t like the school schedule anymore than I do.

My life back in the late sixties and seventies certainly wasn’t boring. When I read what I had written then, The Birth of Wanderer and The Life and Death of Wanderer, and when I remember my life back then, what I had done then, my life seemed to have been very exciting and adventuresome. And every day was different.

I told Ariana the other day that I don’t have anything interesting enough in my life to write about these days. My life seems boring. It’s always the same. I’m living in a rut. I’m up at 6:30. I help get the boys off to school. I do chores, run errands, workout with weights at the gym, and then come home and meditate and write for a while. In the afternoon, I greet the boys as they return from school and help them with their homework. Every day is the same.

When I compare my earlier days as Wanderer back in the sixties and seventies to my life now, I feel that I don’t have anything to write about now. I’m not backpacking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the dead of winter. I’m not traveling around the country, meeting new folks every day. I no longer walk with Coyote. I’m not tripping everywhere I go. I’m certainly not living in a house with other high folks. I’m not one of the spiritual centers of Berkeley anymore either.

My life today is really different now. Except of an overnight this summer with Callahan, I haven’t backpacked in over 11 years. I don’t travel at all, and I seldom meet new folks now. I just used the last of my acid, and there’s no more in sight, although I can always hope. Anyway, I don’t trip as often as I did back in the old days, even when I do have some.

I certainly don’t live in a house with other high folks. Instead I live in a house with Aspen and the boys. And, to be honest, the boys are not at all high, and Zane’s the only one with any innocence left. They are always arguing and fighting with one another. They are all greedy and selfish and think only of themselves. They’re young boys, what do you expect?. What did I expect? I’m not sure. I’m certainly not a spiritual center here in Boulder. I have enough trouble just keeping my cool with all the anger and conflict going on in the house.
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But I am 77 years old, and I am raising three wonderful boys. That’s an adventure in itself. Relating to each of the three boys is an adventure. They’re all so different.

Callahan was born scared. He and Aspen almost died in childbirth. He was stuck coming out. His head was out, past the cervix, but the rest of him wouldn’t come. We finally rushed Aspen and him to the hospital in an ambulance where she had an emergency C-section. It was close. He has been scared ever since, not of everything though. He’s very brave most of the time. But he’s scared of death, afraid even to let go to sleep, afraid he won’t wake up. We’re working on it.

Jake has Muscular Dystrophy and should be in a wheel chair by now. He astounds the doctors – and me too. He’s still walking and running and horseback riding and jumping and even bounding up the stairs at home. He’s very brave too. He knows what Muscular Dystrophy is. He knows his future. And he keeps on trucking. He’s really smart too, tops in his classes. All his teachers say so.

Zane is still cute. somewhat innocent, and utterly charming. He’s so full of love too. One night Callahan was crying (yelling) because he couldn’t go to sleep. He was keeping everyone up until it was after midnight. I was sitting in the boys’ bedroom with them, waiting for Callahan to calm out. I was beginning to lose it though. I began having “who does he think he is” kind of thoughts, when Zane took my hand with both of his and held me until I felt the love in my heart again. I realized he had given me a love transfusion.

Maybe I can write about all this – about my life with the boys. Maybe it’s not as exciting as my life back in the sixties and seventies, but it’s still an awesome adventure, raising three boys at my age to become kind and loving, strong and capable men.

Several weeks ago, I wrote this:

Today, as I write this, I’m trying something most difficult. In my long life, I have been Wanderer and lived as a wild mountain man, mostly in the woods at Dinky Creek in California. I have been Wanderer and lived and traveled in an old VW van around much of this country. I have been Wanderer and part of an incredible acid traveling family.

Now I’m trying to be Wanderer and be father to three young boys and live in a house in a city and follow their school’s weird schedules for much of the year. I’m trying to be Wanderer and do all this and more. This has become the most difficult journey I have undertaken in my many years as Wanderer. So far, it has been almost impossible to follow the flow, to be in the Tao while having to follow someone else’s schedule.

We have to get up at 6:30 every school morning. I am not an early morning person. For the past four years, this has been my private hell. I don’t sleep well when I have to get up at a certain time. And I almost always wake up too early and then can’t get back to sleep.

I could mention many other ways in which I have had trouble flowing with the rigidity of the school’s schedules. I’m not used to going to bed at a certain time either. Sometimes I have to decide between following a creative hunch or getting enough sleep, all because I have to be up at 6:30 the next morning.

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I was having tea with Ariana the other day and I was complaining about this to her. It’s been big on my mind lately, what with school starting up again. She said something, I forget her words, but what I got out of it was that this was my life now. This was my flow, 6:30 in the morning, even in the dark of the winter, and all.

Ever since then I’ve been thinking about what she said and trying to fit it into my here and now life. Today is, a big day for me, I’m doing the last of my acid. This has made the day special for me. As I came on earlier, I wondered where the acid would take me.

Except for some solitary time during the first few hours, mostly meditating, I did the same as if I weren’t tripping. I found that debriefing the boys when they came home from school, helping them with their homework, helping to feed them, and sending them all off with Aspen to the YMCA for hers and Callahan’s Karate class – all this was in my flow. And doing the dishes and filling the water bottles and taking out the trash while they were gone was too. I realized that I already was in the flow. Being their dad and helping to run a household and getting them where they need to go is my flow.

And when they come home soon, my flow will lead me upstairs and into helping them get their school clothes out for the morning, helping them go to the bathroom, helping them to floss and brush their teeth, and then sharing hugs and kisses and holding hands and into their beds for the night.

Then I can relax and float into the remainder of the night, reading or writing or smoking or maybe visiting with folks. Maybe I’ll get lucky and Aspen and I will play. But nothing too late, unless it’s really important (like playing.) I have to be up and functioning by 6:30 in the morning.
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Aspen and I have been going through a lot of changes lately, what with being parents and all. One big change has been with respect to our friends.

We’ve been parents for almost 11 years. Now that we finally have time to be more social, we’ve come to see that we have very few friends left.

We have been so busy raising our three boys that we haven’t really noticed our loss until recently. However, this past summer, we had more time to reach outside our family, and we were surprised to find how few friends were left out there.
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We started thinking about what kind of friends we wanted, now that we had felt the need again, now that we had more time for a social life.

We thought we had a new friend, a body worker, but he turned out to be a “call me for an appointment” type friend. We don’t want friends who are still hooked into the straight world like that. We decided then that what we did want were friends who have freed themselves, not just from the 9 to 5 and trying to get ahead system, but from that entire way of relating to the world.

Aspen and I are edgewalkers, and we really like our few friends who are also living on the edge, citizens of Edge City as we are. We want to find more friends who are edgewalkers.

I have also found that friends who use the various medicines for spiritual growth fit us well. I have always found that I have a deep and permanent connection with folks I have tripped with, And I have noticed too that when I sit down with a friend and we smoke a bowl, we both find ourselves becoming more open and friendly – certainly more real.

Aspen and I especially like friends with kids. It’s difficult for most folks to relate to Aspen and me if they don’t be parents themselves. It’s also difficult for most of them to relate to our kids when they don’t have any themselves. There are exceptions; our friend John Bob has always been awesome and understanding with our kids.

Mostly Aspen and I want to have friends we could live with, raising our kids together with. You know, folks we can get along with. We’re not in a hurry to live with others but it is on our minds.

And you know what? Ever since we began thinking about friends, new friends who would fit our new life as parents, we’ve been meeting them.

I’m listening to Joan Osborne singing one of my favorite songs, “One of Us,” in which she’s asking,

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on a bus
Trying to make his way home
Like a holy rolling stone
Back up to heaven all alone.

I remembered Stephan Gaskin once saying something like this too – saying something like, so you’re enlightened, great, but you still have to mind the store and tend to the little things, that sort of thing. For him, enlightenment was not in itself the end of spiritual striving.

I also thought of the Buddhists and their notion of the Bodhisattva, the person who achieves enlightenment but who stays behind with the rest of us in ordinary reality just as long as there’s anyone left here still unenlightened.

Listening to her sing, I wondered if maybe I was a Bodhisattva, like the God that she was singing about, just a stranger trying to make my way home, like a holy rolling stone. The thing is, even if I am God, even if I am enlightened, it’s not that big a deal. I still have to take care of business. I still have to raise and support my family. I still have to contribute to the general welfare and consciousness.

Maybe this is what I was thinking about when I decided that this time around I wanted to be Wanderer right here in the middle of ordinary, everyday reality. I’ve wandered many lonesome back roads and wild forest trails in my day. I’ve wandered in the darker regions of my soul. I’ve wandered to the higher reaches of Spirit. I’ve seen the Light. But I have never wandered and shared myself in ordinary reality. It’s about time that I do.

The other day, someone asked me why I still used acid. He really was asking why do I still need to use it, why can’t I be high without it. His question got me to thinking.

Acid and I have a natural fit. Acid opens the doors to higher consciousness and alternative states of reality. I’ve 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’m also a wanderer and an adventurer. I particularly like 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. Acid opens doors for me that would otherwise be closed. This is why I still use it.

In 1973, Karen and I were traveling from Berkeley to the East Coast and back. It began as an incredible trip down the West Coast and through the Southwest, then up the Rockies through New Mexico and Colorado to Wyoming and the 1973 Rainbow Gathering. After that we headed down into the flatlands and the beginnings of the hot and humid east heading first through Kansas and Missouri to Tennessee and Gaskin’s Farm.

Later in our journey, while visiting Karen’s folks in Virginia, Karen’s mother took me aside the first day we were there and told me that she knew I had turned her daughter onto LSD. Hearing this, I was flabbergasted and floored.

I told her the truth. I told her that Karen had called up one day and invited me down to her place in Venice. Once I was there, she asked me if I wanted to do acid with her. I said yes and had a wonderful time. I went on to tell Karen’s mother that I have never regretted it and will always be grateful to Karen for turning me onto acid then.

Now it was her turn to be floored. At first, she didn’t want to believe me. For some mother-in-law reason, she already didn’t like me and wanted me to agree with her expectations. However, Karen heard us talking from the other room and came in. She told her mother that everything I had said was true.

We both told her that it had been one of the most important and meaningful things we had done in our lives. We told her that we still use it and probably always would. Karen’s mother didn’t want to hear this, but she did bring it up. She still wanted to make me the villain in her movie, but I wouldn’t play.

Afterwards, thinking about our conversation – as unsatisfactory as it was – I realized that it still took a burden off both me and Karen to be honest about our use and love of acid. I decided to write my parents a letter, telling them the same. Here’s what I wrote:
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Karen and I are with her parents in Virginia. The subject of marijuana and LSD came up in conversation. I wanted to give them my views on the subject. I realized though, that I want to discuss them first with both of you.

I’ve been smoking marijuana for over fifteen years and using LSD for over five. I like both of them very much. Both have taught me a great deal about myself and about life. I’m a better person for having used them.

People have used various plants and chemicals to change their consciousness ever since we began as hunters and gatherers, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Most have experienced this changed consciousness as being of a holy or spiritual quality.

Ten years ago, LSD was legal and respected and used extensively in psychological research and therapy. At that time I was asked to be in a LSD research project. I refused then because I was too frightened. It wasn’t until five years ago that I became brave enough to finally try it.

I was immediately impressed with how much I could learn about consciousness when I was using LSD. As a trained research scientist and psychotherapist, I could see enormous possibilities for important and exciting explorations into the psyche, into healing ways.

However, soon after this, LSD became illegal. All research and all therapies that used it were stopped. At first I continued to use it in private but not in my healing work. But then I decided finally, a year ago last April, soon after I moved up to Berkeley, to devote all my energies to exploring my own and others’ consciousness and to use LSD in my healing work, even if it were still illegal.

Many great discoveries, important inventions, tools, whatever, were first greeting with fear and skepticism by the general public. Electricity is one such example. At first, it was thought to come from the devil himself.

At times people have been persecuted and hounded, killed even, for their religious beliefs. The persecution of the early Christians is one such example of this.

Today, people are persecuted who view LSD as an extremely important tool, one that mankind has urgent need of at this present time – for both research and healing. Today, people are persecuted who use LSD as a holy sacrament, as a means of achieving communion with God, and through God with all life.

I’ve been afraid to share any of this with you. It has been difficult for me to believe the world is different than I thought. The world is different though. I’ve seen, for example, that folks can be unafraid of one another and can live a life filled with love.

I’m going to continue using marijuana and LSD. They are the main thrust of my work of exploring consciousness. This is important work, and not just for me. I don’t ask you to see this as I do. I just hope you will give me encouragement in my life and in my work. I love each of you and want each of you to love me.

eugene

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Postscript: –

I did feel better after writing and sending the letter off to my parents. I was being honest and open with them and it felt good. However, the letter didn’t seem to affect my relationships with them in any way. My mother never responded to what I had said, not at all. My father did say once that I was okay, but it was too bad that I had listened to that O’Leary fellow.

I still do acid, even today at the age of 77. I’ll probably do it as long as I’m in this body. There’s always more to explore, more to discover.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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