Chapter 7 – Acid in the City

The Way of Acid

He dreams that he’s visiting Pamela and Jonathan in LA. Pamela is worried that he’s angry with her. When he says he isn’t, he can see her visibly relax. Later, they are in bed together, enjoying each other’s bodies. They like each other. She gives him a set of pictures that Jonathan has drawn for him – faces of different men, Nixon looking human, others.
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He has wanted to do acid but hasn’t felt quite right about it. Somehow though, his dream encourages him to trust where he’s at. So he drops a hit of Clear Light. He wishes he could be up at Dinky now, under his tree watching the clouds drift by.

With him and Pamela, their differences are essentially religious. Her religion, her way to herself, is the Jungian way, the way of the dream and imagination. This way was his too when he was with her, but he has changed since. His way now is acid and is that of the shaman. Hers is legal, sanctioned by the powers to be. His isn’t. His is illegal and is not even considered respectable. His is border town. He understands from his dream though, that when he fully respects his own way, she will too.

His way is simple. He believes in life and the consciousness living in and through everyone. He believes in taking only enough of life to maintain his own. He believes in living in peace with the land, simply, honestly, and lovingly, His heart is in the land and the life he leads when he’s there, listening to the sounds of the world. He’s an explorer of the outlands. He’ll never stop. It’s his life. It’s the life in him to be lived, the dream to be acted upon.
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Today he grabs his ally. He chooses to follow acid and to trust it to give him the power to accomplish whatever it asks of him. It immediately asks him to give up working for money, wanting him to stop selling his time and freedom for money. He listens and does so, trusting acid to always give him whatever he’ll need to maintain himself so that he can continue to explore the outlands of inner and outer space.

He knows that he can trust acid. Money will come one way of another, all that he will ever need. He won’t lose himself to acid either, as some have, and become spacey and untogether. The secret is to stay grounded in his body. This will be easy, because very time he drops acid, it tells him that his body was not permanently damaged by his childhood operations, tells him that he can trust body.

He has his ally. He feels his power. He knows his way.
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Wolf

They have a new dog. His name is Wolf. He’s part malamute and part wolf. He’s a big guy already. He’s black and grey.

They saw an ad for him in the paper the other day. The folks who were selling him lived across the bay in the city. The folks had both the mom and the dad dog. They were both very impressive. Each was a malamute and wolf mix. Seeing Wolf’s parents, he and Karen could see how he’s going to look when he’s grown up. The parents seem very mellow and friendly too. They took to him and Karen right away. More so than Wolf did. He was more interested in trying to steal his mother’s food.

He’s home with them now and really likes being with them. He especially likes that they’re always going on long walks. He really likes the woods too. He has a tendency though, to split when they’re not watching him. He’s not like Gypsy at all. She always wanted to be with them. He’s much more independent and freer than she was. He’s definitely an alpha male. They’re going to have their hands full.

Their cats, Stoney and Sylvie and Smokey, are used to him tripping. When he comes on, they all come and hang out with him. But Wolf doesn’t know what to do with his tripping energy yet. It excites him but seems somehow to make him nervous. When they are out in the woods though, it’s okay. He doesn’t even notice the vibes then. When they’re home though, he’s not sure whether or not he wants to hang out with the acid energy.
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Karen comes in while he’s writing this and says that Wolf has split on them – “speak of the devil,” as they say. They walk all over the neighborhood and beyond looking for him. They’re wearing themselves out trying to find him. He decides to try once more with the van, and then give up on him for now. As the I Ching says, “if you lose your horse, do not run after it, it will come back of its own accord.”

They get the van out and start circling out from their house. After a few minutes, Karen tells him to stop. She has seen him. Actually he has seen them. He has recognized the van and is running up to it as they drive by. He’s upset with Wolf for running away but also very impressed. He’s one smart dog. They’re all high from the game of hide and seek but very tired too. He hopes that Wolf doesn’t keep doing this.
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Tripping with Others

He has done enough tripping alone in the woods for now. He is as high as he can get that way. He needs to drop with others in the city now. The main thing blocking him is fear – of getting too close, as he did with Edie, or of losing his own center and balance to folks, as he did with Joe Shaker.

With his client, Linda, he knows her fairly well from being her therapist. Their relationship being thus defined helps him to keep his balance. It’s the same with Sally, who has also been seeing him in therapy for a while now. Even with Linda and Sally though, he wants them to drop acid by themselves the first time, with him not tripping, instead babysitting them, being ‘ground control.’

Most of the other folks who want to drop with him are too scary for him now. Either he doesn’t know them well enough, or else he sees where they’re being unconscious and wants no part of it. He will always drop acid with Bobby or Abby though. They are high quality folks.

He has turned down five different folks who have asked to trip with him this week. He’s letting fear defeat him here as it has in the past. He recognizes that it’s his fear that would blow it. If he had no fear, he could do acid with anyone and everyone. He realizes that he’ll have no fear when he has no unnecessary ego.

He needs to let go. He needs to do acid with anyone who wants to do it with him, trusting in the process, trusting in the life and the consciousness within himself. He remembers Ram Das saying, “As long as you have an ego, you’re on a limited trip.” Ram Das also says, “As soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.” He hears this and wants to have it all.

His life flow and Wanderer are asking him to take on the city. He needs to use acid to do this. He can’t use it alone in the city. He would be overwhelmed. He needs strong and resourceful allies, folks to drop with.

If he drops with others, all of them dropping together to learn and to share, they would all develop a consciousness together – the relationship of Inner Truth, as the I Ching calls it – a deep and abiding inner connection.
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It’s like he’s having stage fright. He has spent all this time in the mountains alone, doing acid, rehearsing, so that he could overcome his fear, so that he could return to the city and do acid among folks, with the help of others. Now that he’s here though, he’s frightened to go out onto the stage of life and perform.
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Thanksgiving Acid

They’re having a big thanksgiving dinner here tonight. Karen and Abby are really into it. He’s looking forward to all the folks and all the food. His jobs will be making the salad and being a kitchen flunky later. He’s going out to pick the greens now.

He has a lot to be thankful for. He’s making it. He knows as much or more about acid as anyone. He has overcome fear and has completely changed his life, going from being a scared of life and in his head intellectual to being a brave adventurer, a body with a mind still. He has put himself together in a unique way, using dreams, medicines, the I Ching, together with his own common sense. He has knowledge to share and people are picking up on this and coming to work with him.

He’s seeing his mom and dad in a few days, Pamela and Jonathan too. He’s going to them with confidence in himself. He wants peace between him and his parents so he can come back here and work with even greater confidence, without the distraction of that old and still unsettling negativity between him and them anymore.

He has a very strong feeling that he’s on the eve or perhaps even the early morning of something new and strange and wonderful coming through him and into his life. He’s almost reborn. He’s almost there. He can feel and taste it already.
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He just picked the salad greens. And now standing up, he becomes very dizzy. He leans back against the door to the garage. His body begins jerking, convulsing almost, and he slowly slides down the door to a sitting position on the ground. At first, he has no control over his body. His eye is twitching too but otherwise he’s okay. After a while he can stand up, so he goes into the house. He doesn’t say anything about it. Maybe later.
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They have a huge feast, with turkey and all the trimmings. He eats two big helpings and stuffs himself as they’re all supposed to do on this day. Afterwards, they all lay around in the living room in front of their new stove, being warm and snuggy. He’s feeling very good.

They decide to really celebrate, so they all drop acid. They’re all very full, and it’s odd to be tripping on a full stomach, but, other than that, it’s the perfect trip. The fear he has had of tripping with others has no basis in fact. As he comes on, he just wakes up and becomes truly himself.

Everyone else seems to follow his lead. There’s nothing heavy to work on, nothing at all but their full stomachs and the love they are all feeling for one another.
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Chapter 8 – One More Time

Is the Chair a Chair?

That brave and wonderful young woman who wrote about herself in that incredible book, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, tells us how, when she was completely schizophrenic, before she ever began to return to the consensual world, she would be able to see a chair, but for her it might as well have been no chair. It had no meaning or value for her. Seeing the world thus freaked her out. She knew that others saw the chair as a chair, and so she despaired.

On the other hand, Don Juan tells Carlos that, in order to pass by the guardian into extraordinary reality, he has to see the guardian without putting himself into the perception. He has to see it as that young and scared schizophrenic girl saw the chair. He has to see it so that it becomes nothing yet is still there. “If you have no feeling toward it, the guardian will become nothing and will still be there in front of you.” Don Juan goes on, “the guardian was always something you knew, and as long as it was something you knew, you did not see it.”
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To truly see the world, we have to be open and let go of our expectations concerning what we see. As long as we lay our expectations out onto the world, we don’t see the world. We see only our expectations. However, for most of us to see the world thus, empty of meaning, would be schizophrenic. What distinguishes Don Juan and other persons of knowledge from the schizophrenics is that they have prepared themselves to see the world thus, have prepared themselves to enter again into that other reality, called by Jung the collective unconscious, called by Don Juan, extraordinary.

Being in this extraordinary reality with no preparation freaked out that young woman, would freak out most of us. We are not prepared by our culture for this experience. Instead, we are lied to constantly and told that the world of our senses and the collective meaning given to this world is the only reality.

We are told this at the behest of the religionists who know in their fearful hearts that their view is one-sided and incomplete. They are afraid of and closed to all that they don’t know. They want the rest of us to be closed off too.

Yet this way of looking at reality, without preconceptions, is necessary for a person of knowledge, for anyone who wishes to live in the whole world. We have to view reality in its entirety, not just with respect to what the majority are brave enough for.
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Bobby’s Inspiration

Bobby has been living with them for almost as long as they’ve been here. He really likes Bobby, but they are different kinds of people. They have never been very close, although they get along well as housemates. And he really liked backpacking with Bobby at Dinky last year.

He has wanted to be closer, so the other day, he knocked on Bobby’s door and asked to come in and visit. He had never been in his room before except for a few minutes here and there.

This time he notices a sheet of paper with some writing on it, centered on the wall above Bobby’s desk. When he asks him about it, Bobby says it’s something he found in a book once that has always inspired him. It’s a handwritten copy of a quote by Thoreau, along with a smaller quote by Goethe written below it. He reads it:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of being. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, poverty, nor weakness, weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. (Thoreau)

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. (Goethe)

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He’s inspired reading these two high men. They speak exactly to what he is doing now, advancing confidently in the direction of his dreams, endeavoring to live the life he has imagined. This is why Wanderer and acid have told him that he doesn’t need to worry about money, that all he has to do is continue being himself and doing acid, exploring the Old City and connecting on a deep level with others of like mind.

Now in his life, he expects success that was unexpected in those common hours that he shared before with most of mankind, those common ways of looking at reality he shared with others before acid and Dinky.
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Heading South

He and Karen are on their way south to see Pamela and Jonathan in LA. After that they’re going on to Fallbrook to see his folks. It’s morning now. They’re at Franz and Bernice’s, in Castiac on the Ridge Route, just north of LA. They hesitate to enter the city.

All day yesterday, on the way down, he was rapping in his head with Pamela, practicing for their visit tomorrow. He just needs to remember that he’s studying to be a man of knowledge just as she’s studying to be a Jungian analyst.

Finally, they can’t put it off any longer and plunge into the cesspool of LA. The smog in the San Fernando Valley has them coughing and stuffed up before they reach Venice and breathable air again.

Everyone has been telling him these past three or four weeks that he doesn’t need to hold himself back from Pamela and his parents, that he can be himself with them too. He’s free now of that oppressive self-hater. He can be his stoney self. He can play. He doesn’t need to make this visit an ordeal. He’s going to have fun and make friends with Pamela and his mom and dad, just as he’s doing in his life now with everyone else.
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The next day, when he does see Pamela, it’s easy. He has freed himself of his old fears and of who he was when he was married to her. Now he’s generous and open and honest. He stays centered and is himself. They come to a good agreement regarding Jonathan.

He and Jonathan have their usual good time together, walking on the trails up at the old Will Rogers estate. At first, they are shy and clumsy with each other. There’s so much love between them, yet so much sadness at being separate. So many feelings. . . .
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Seeing his parents isn’t fun. With his new awareness and openness, he can see that they don’t want him around but think that they should. He stays himself only with effort. Being honest with them, letting them see him as he is, however, rouses them to defensiveness and anger.

When they’re leaving, his mother draws him aside, for her usual last minute dump, and says that Karen is a bad influence on him, and begs him not to be led astray any longer.

Pamela and Jonathan are open, and willing to accept him as he is. His parents never will. They become very angry when confronted with the reality of his changes. They’ve never accepted him before and are even less willing to accept him now. He still doesn’t like it, but he’s used to it by now.
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Return

As usual, he becomes sick from all the LA smog and from his mother’s last minute personal attack on him. She can still hurt him. He hasn’t been able to get warm since he was with her. Somehow she took away his body’s warmth. He may be sick, but he feels really good being home in Berkeley again. He has an amazing amount of energy. He’s really in the world, living more in the here and now than ever before. He’s much more balanced and centered.

He notices that he enjoys being with folks more now, is into himself less. He does more, keeps moving more, acts more, and thinks less. He’s more body now, less mind; more extraverted, less introverted. He’s becoming centroverted, as Eric Neumann would say.

He’s more focused on his and Karen’s relationship as a result of his mother being so cold to them and badmouthing her to him. He knows they’ve had their troubles, but he’s realizing now that his and Karen’s hassles are their growing pains. They’re becoming new together.

He dreams of being with his family, with his new family really. He feels warm again and loved. He wakes out of his dream feeling so much love. He realizes after awhile that he’s warm again. He’s almost well.
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From heading south and confronting Pamela and his parents – as Bobby said he should do all those weeks ago – he is much clearer about himself and his life. Until then, he hadn’t been himself, had instead been caught up in his own and other people’s fears. He has either been afraid of being broke, afraid for his body, afraid of insanity, afraid of losing his woman’s love or of losing his son. Until recently in his life, one or another of these hydra-headed aspects of fear has always been operating upon and through him.

From being with Pamela and his parents, he sees that he has defeated these many faces of fear – by getting behind each face to the fear itself, and then to the basic fear of death that lurks behind all these other fears. He has done so by doing acid alone in the mountains, by listening to spirit, and by living his own life fully and courageously.

All that is important to him now is using acid to explore consciousness and reality, together with helping people to see and hear Spirit and, of course, to know the magic of themselves.