GUIDANCE

GUIDANCE

GUIDANCE

For more than thirty years I have been asking for Guidance and getting it. Realizing that most folks have difficulty finding that still small voice within, I rejoice that I discovered an amplification system to help me. I use the so-called entheogens, specifically marijuana and LSD, with reverence and sincerity, always asking to follow the Path of Love, and they enable me to find practical and often surprising answers to my questions. How I first got started may be lost in the haze of time, but I can give you a series of examples to show what I mean, and then discuss the specific techniques that work for me. Of course I cannot recommend that anyone do illegal drugs, nor am I encouraging anyone to try them, but people do use them, and I can show how to do so with respect and without abuse. They are a great gift, and it is important that we use them well, if we are to use them at all.

Tuning in to Guidance is not unusual, nor does it require psychedelics. Many successful people can testify to this. For example, in her final show on NBC, Oprah said, “In every move and every decision, I wait, and I listen. I’m still. I wait and listen for Guidance that’s greater than my meager mind. The only time I’ve made mistakes is when I didn’t listen, so what I know is, God is love, and God is life, and your life is always speaking to you.”

As you will see from the adventures that I tell you, Mother Marijuana is a highly beneficial ally for me. That doesn’t mean that I think she is appropriate for anyone else. It’s possible that Mother Marijuana meditations only work for me because during the seventies I spent six years meditating two hours a day totally sober, and I got very used to dwelling in that quiet holy space.

Sometime in the 1980’s, I asked Mother Marijuana, “What can you do for me?”

“I can show you,” she said.

“What can you show me?”

“Anything you want.”

“Can you show me God?”

“Anything you want.”

Later she suggested that my imagination is like a landscape seen thru a window, and she cleans off some of the clouded areas of the window so that I can see more of the landscape. She said she is a representative of Mother Earth, and she is here to give my whole system a smudge – to give it a spiritual cleaning so that I can tune in to the true nature of Nature. She made it clear that altho she can help me, I basically have to do it myself. Those who abuse drugs may want the drug to do it all, and don’t know they have to come into their own power and use it to be whole. The drugs are helps, like road signs, but the vehicle is our intention, and our will is what runs it.

Mother Marijuana acts as a conduit to show us what we are looking for. If you are seeking to destroy your life, Mother Marijuana will oblige. If you’re seeking something to feel guilty about, Mother Marijuana will haunt you. But if you’re seeking to connect to Source, she shows us Source in a variety of ways, altho of course we cannot comprehend Source, as I have discussed earlier. We only get our own personal limited view. But for each of us, that is sufficient to know our connection. So Mother Marijuana is available to anyone who asks. It’s important to ask with respect, to ask with love, to honor this intermediary who serves Source in this way. I give thanks, regularly. Thank you Mother Marijuana for all that you show me. Thank you for giving me wonderful physical experiences. Thank you for opening me to flows of Divine Energy. I offer my praise and appreciation, and at the same time I know this is my individual path and it is not necessarily appropriate for anyone else. A great many would find it inconceivable to invite Mother Marijuana to be their ally. That would be in league with the Devil. But can the Devil show you God? I don’t think so! Of course I don’t think there’s any such thing as a Devil. I have always asked Mother Marijuana to give me Guidance in following the Path of Love, and she has certainly has, as well as shown me God.

I don’t know that it will be necessary or desirable for the coming generations to invite the help of Mother Marijuana in asking for Guidance. I believe that once the door has been opened and the path made clear, asking for Guidance will become easier and easier, until it is second nature. The movie Avatar quite accurately shows the Na’vi doing this. Generally, when confronted with a challenge, folks will figure it out as best they can, and then ask for Guidance. Is there any way the proposed solution can be improved?  Is it fully on the Path of Love? Such questions can elicit deep spiritual answers without the help of Mother Marijuana.

Perhaps for me it all started when my brother Karl was killed in a one car accident in 1962. He was 2 ½ years older than me, and when I was 17 I predicted he would never live to be 30 because he was so wild, altho he had a near genius IQ. At that time I was a passenger as he drove thru a stop sign at 70 mph in a 35 mph zone. He died two months short of his thirtieth birthday.

When Karl died I was devastated. For all his wildness he was my guide, he was my hero. I collapsed on the floor and cried for an hour. It didn’t matter that he was violent and kleptomanic. He was smarter and more knowledgeable than virtually everyone, including my father, who was a professor of political science, well-known lecturer, and author of twenty books and numerous articles.

Karl drove my mother crazy with worry. She was lying in bed reading at the time of the crash. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by a sense of peace, peace, everything is all right. She didn’t understand it until she got the call from the state police two hours later. Then she realized her son had sent her that message, and it changed her life from being utterly paranoid to being quite sane.

Soon after Karl died I started to have imaginary conversations with him, usually after I had gone to bed and before I drifted off to sleep. He would answer me in his own voice, and was a great comfort.  After two or three years I gradually stopped talking to him, but I have always felt I could contact him any time I focused and concentrated.

I think the experience with Karl set me up for what happened in 1971. By that time I had taken LSD perhaps a dozen times. I had seen the white light and a number of times experienced the sacred mystery of the timeless now. I had experienced that God was all the energy of the universe. About ten days before Christmas my step-father-in-law Frank died suddenly of a heart attack. My mother-in-law Kaye thought that she could get more money for Frank’s Ford LTD in Portland than she could in Laguna Beach, so she had me and my wife Bette and our three kids take the train down to Laguna Beach so we could drive the car back to Oregon.  We attended the memorial service and celebrated Christmas, and a couple days after Christmas Grandma Kaye, who was a very good cook, served cheese fondue made with Swiss cheese. My kids refused to eat it. I said, “Look, kids, this cheese fondue tastes really good. It just smells like vomit.” Kaye hit the ceiling. I had called her food vomit. She and I had never gotten along, and we got into a big hassle. I had the keys to the Ford LTD, and to cool off I figured I’d go for a little ride. Driving the freeway toward Los Angeles, I spotted a sign to Las Vegas. My memory says it was only 80 miles, tho it’s actually 140 – or is it 270? I said to myself that’s not very far, I think I’ll go.

I breezed thru the night air and found a cheap motel when I got to Vegas. I had some LSD with me, and figured I’d take some the next day and try my telepathic powers at the gaming tables. Very stoned, playing craps very conservatively, I didn’t catch any big waves of luck. After several hours I thought I’d try a different casino. Almost as soon as I arrived at the craps table I was passed the dice. I threw 12, which meant that everybody lost. I threw 12 again. I figured that was a clear enough sign and walked out. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon as I headed back to Laguna Beach. A fabulous sunset unfolded over the Nevada mountains. Suddenly something went Bang! in the engine. Amazingly I was right at the entrance to a rest stop, so I pulled in.

When I opened the hood, I saw that one of the three belts had broken that drove the generator, water pump, air conditioner, etc. In my still stoned condition it looked like tangled spaghetti. I decided I’d spend the night at the rest stop and deal with it in the morning. I was up in the mountains in the evening of December 28, and as it grew colder, I discovered the only item in the car to keep me warm was a totally thin unlined plastic windbreaker. I huddled and shivered. I said, mostly to myself, “Frank, why did you let your car break down?”

Immediately, Frank was inside my head answering me in his own voice. Altho he had been an award winning beautician, he had the appearance and manner of a classic mafia don, complete with thinning hair and thin moustache. “You know how it is,” he growled, “Things wear out, cars break down.”

I was amazed, he was so real. “Look,” I said, “I want to be sure I’m not just hallucinating. Can you tell me something we wouldn’t know to prove you’re real?”

Frank pondered for a moment. “Tell Kaye I love her. I couldn’t tell her when I died.”

That wasn’t much of anything. I checked it out later and discovered that he’d had a bunch of tubes down his throat and couldn’t talk. But that was hardly proof that he was real. I asked him, “So is Jesus there where you are?”

“Sure.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure.” 

I didn’t know Jesus well, hadn’t paid much attention to him. A shadowy, indistinct figure appeared. “What can you do for me?” I asked.

“I can be your mirror.”

Now this was 1971. I had never heard of mirroring as practiced in therapy circles. Several years passed before I realized that we all mirror one another, and since Jesus is a particularly clear mirror, he can mirror particularly well. In part because I didn’t understand his offer, I chose a different path, becoming a devotee of Guru Maharaji from 1973 to 1979. As it was, I was getting really cold and closed down my conversation with spirits to go into the rest room and warm up on the hand dryer. I did that several times during the night, and didn’t go to sleep until the wee hours.

In the morning when I awoke I discovered a beat-up old yellow pick-up next to me. An old man was just getting out. I staggered out and told him I’d broken a fan belt, any chance he could give me a ride to where I could find one? He peered over at my car.

“That’s a Ford, ain’t it?” he asked. “I think I got one.”  He puttered around in the canopy on the back of his truck and came up with a new fan belt. Then he got out his tool box and installed it for me.

I was flabbergasted. “Can I pay you for your help?” I asked.

“That’s all right,” he said. “Just pass it on.”

When I arrived back in Laguna, Bette said it had been all she could do to persuade her mother not to call the police and report a stolen car. But when I told Kaye about the conversation with Frank, that seemed to mollify her. We drove the Ford back to Portland and probably got about the same price for it as she would have gotten in Laguna, but I never would have had the adventure. Years passed before I learned to appreciate what had transpired – and before I truly learned to “pass it on.”

All during the mid-seventies I was meditating two hours a day, and four of five nights a week  I was attending satsang, which is spiritual discourse. How I managed to do all that and carry a full load teaching high school remains a mystery. In 1979 my sixteen year old second son Chuck asked me to take him and his friend Stuart camping. We went up to the Papoose Lakes, which have since become part of the Warm Springs Reservation and are now closed to whiteys. When I first came to Oregon to go to Reed College at the age of 18, I went on the before-school camp-out at Breitenbush Lake, where with some other students I discovered the Papoose Lakes, about a mile to the East. Ever since,  I have considered them the most beautiful place in the state, an area of many small rock-bound lakes at slightly different elevations, warm enough to swim in, with islands and peninsulas and crevasses, and a fabulous view of the great Pahtoo, the second highest mountain in Oregon at 10,497 feet.

I soon discovered that Chuck’s idea of camping with his dad was that we should all take acid together. He proudly held out a handful of microdots, very tiny white pills, perhaps a dozen or two. A sudden gust of wind blew every single one of them out of his hand. Laboriously combing thru the tall grass, in about 45 minutes we finally found enough – if I remember correctly the recommended dose was three or four.

After hiking that felt like floating thru the meadows and woods, we found ourselves sitting on a five or six hundred foot cliff over Harvey Lake, the largest of the Papoose, perhaps 1000 feet across. I was trying to get in touch with the spirit of the lake, with no success. On the other side of the lake another big cliff with a waterfall from the lake dropped down into a mysterious valley. A ridge rose up on the other side of that, extending south a couple miles to join Pahtoo itself. Chuck said to me, “Dad, you see that rock formation on the ridge over there? Doesn’t that look like the head of a dragon?”

Sure enough, it looked very definitely like the head of a dragon in profile, and if gestalted correctly, the long neck of the dragon extended south so that Pahtoo itself became the body and back of the dragon, an immense beast. Immediately the dragon fixed his one baleful eye on me and spoke: “The trouble with you is that you just come up here to enjoy instead of to appreciate.”

What? It took me several days to figure out what the dragon said, tho now it seems so obvious. It was true. I went into nature to take my pleasure rather than to give my appreciation. From that point on I practiced giving my appreciation, and everything changed. When I wanted to take my pleasure, I could be disappointed by a change in the weather or an uninteresting sunset. When I give my appreciation, everything becomes numinous, and whatever happens, it is always perfect. Years later on an acid adventure I experienced the total compassion that God has for all creatures great and small, for bees and butterflies and songbirds and vultures, for trees and flowers and skunk cabbage, an utterly cosmic blissed out transmission – and it was precisely because I was giving my appreciation at the time.

I learned that I could commune with almost any natural entity. All I had to do was partake of Mother Marijuana and approach the entity with respect, the more love the better. If I asked a question I would get an answer, and soon found it was very helpful to ask the general question, “Is there anything you would like to tell me?” Sometimes an answer would come immediately. Sometimes I would imagine what an answer from this particular entity might be, and my imagination would form a bridge thru which the entity could communicate, giving me answers far more significant than anything I could imagine. Thus the Imagination Bridge was discovered.

At the risk of repeating myself, let me emphasize the importance of this. You can commune thru meditation, simply becoming still and giving your love and respect, with any entity that attracts you, because of course all are parts of God. That entity might be a redwood tree, Mother Mary, Jesus, Buddha, a clump of beach grass, the ocean itself, or the Millennium Gaia, which is a statue of the Earth Mother, pregnant with the Earth. You can ask a question about your spiritual path, dancing the Path of Love, or simply the general question, “Is there anything you would like to tell me?”  Sometimes an answer will appear immediately, rising from the depths of your unconscious, from your inspiration. If no answer appears, imagine what that entity might say to you, applying whatever you know about that particular entity. At first the answer may seem superficial or obvious, just something your mind dreamed up. But stay with the question. Is there anything more? Is there anything deeper? You may very well receive an inspiration which is far deeper than anything your mind could have dreamed up. You may receive an answer that works for you or may later turn out to be true. So this is not just a matter of imagining. It is creating a bridge, the Imagination Bridge, thru which Spirit can speak to you from the depths of your being. Having the Pahtoo dragon tell me, “The trouble with you is that you just come up here to enjoy instead of to appreciate” is an excellent example of receiving something that I would never have imagined. The Imagination Bridge is the secret of how you can commune with the Divine Creator who is manifesting you. Altho I know many others experience Guidance thru whatever formats work for them, they may not ever become conscious of the Imagination Bridge, perhaps because it’s hard to accept that we have such an awesome power that is so relatively easy to use.

When you’re asking for Guidance, always ask, what is the Path of Love here? You may find that just by asking that question, you figure out your course of action, without going any deeper. Of course you always want to remember that the Path of Love includes loving yourself as well as everybody and everything out there. The Path of Love does not demand undue self-sacrifice. If you’re not comfortable with what you’re doing, you’re not really any good to anybody else.

Also, this is not a matter of faking it till you make it. If I ask for Guidance on a particular issue, and I don’t get a deep, clear message, that generally means that I’m supposed to figure it out for myself. After all, Guidance is available to help us exercise our free wills. It is not here to help us every step of the way along God’s path. There is no God’s path, there is only what we determine for ourselves. God has given us free will to see what we can make of it, not to lead to some predetermined destination.

When I pray, I put a limitation on Guidance. I say, “Thank you for revealing that I am part of you, and I can tune in to Guidance whenever I ask, as long as I don’t ask too often.”  Asking too often means surrendering my own judgment. The purpose is to develop my judgment, not to surrender it. Therefore I only want to use the Imagination Bridge when I genuinely do not see an answer, or when I wish to confirm or develop an answer that has already come to me.

The Imagination Bridge to Guidance is not going to solve all your problems. Maybe your mother comes down with Alzheimer’s. You see the road ahead, and you care for her as best you can. Eventually you have to put her in a nursing home. Eventually maybe you think the best thing for her and everybody concerned would be to hold the pillow over her face, but our society does not allow that. So you deal with the situation as best you can, even as it’s breaking your heart. If you ask for Guidance, you may get the message that your mother loves you, and really appreciates what you’re doing for her. In this instance Guidance is not going give you a cure for your mother, altho in time the appropriate researcher may be given a cure for Alzheimer’s. All you can do now is endure, which is one way to develop your inner strength.

One time I asked a young Douglas fir, “Is there anything you would like to tell me?”

“You humans never ask us, never talk to us,” The Douglas fir replied. “You cut us down, and now you’ve planted us here without ever asking our permission, without telling us your plans. We are willing to cooperate with you, but you don’t ask.”

On other occasions this powerful message was repeated and amplified. I was learning the appropriate way to relate to Nature. Once I sat stoned in the middle of a lightning-struck redwood, the blackened bole extending above me to an indeterminable height, and I heard an organ note far lower than any ears could pick up, the resonance of a thousand year old being. I became the redwood, felt what is was like to create this vegetable crystal out of air and water and a little bit of earth, extending thru time and space farther than any other living creature – what a calm joy was there!

In 1982 I attended my friend David’s camp-out birthday party at Todd Lake in Central Oregon. Some of us climbed the ridge on the far side of the lake, where we got an excellent view of Brokentop Mountain. We smoked some, and almost immediately I discovered a rock configuration that looked like the head of a dragon, with Brokentop itself being its spiny back. After greeting it with respect, I asked it if it had anything to tell me.

“I can show you your Akashic record.”

At that time I knew virtually nothing about Akashic records, and I still don’t know much. The idea was such a surprise to me that I experienced considerable fear. Nevertheless, I was immediately traveling up thru the clouds to a Grecian columned library. I went inside to an enormous card catalog, this being long before Google. When I pulled out my card, all it said was “Robert.” Robert is my middle name. I relaxed and pulled back, and then I could see my entire name. A series of images presented themselves. The most powerful was a Greek statue of a man with a grain sack hanging from his shoulder, in the act of casting forth a handful of seeds. “You are a seed sower,” was the message, and indeed I am. That’s why I was a high school teacher for thirty years, and that’s why I’m writing this now.

A second image was a Gandalf-like figure with the message that I am a spiritual adventurer, an outrider who scouts the territory and brings back the news. The messages from both images confirmed my essential nature: I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. When I sailed back to earth I thanked the dragon with genuine appreciation. I asked if he had any more to tell me, but I knew that was just a formality. He had told me plenty. Still, I asked permission to withdraw before I departed.

As well as asking for Guidance and receiving excellent, practical answers, I also felt that I was in Good Hands, that Divine Providence was watching over me. This manifested in ways large and small. In 1980 I put an ad in the Personals in Portland’s alternative newspaper, Willamette Week: “Spiritual adventurer seeks growth in love ...” My second wife was inspired by a friend to answer the ad, and we spent eight beautiful, happy years together. I think we both felt our connection was a result of Divine Guidance.

I discovered that asking for Guidance was a great help in my teaching. When I was teaching English literature to a class of average seniors, I fortuitously arranged to teach the Romantic poets in the spring. I did a stony meditation, asking what assignment should I give them to help them understand what the Romantic poets were all about. Not surprisingly, a great inspiration struck. I told the class to follow Wordsworth’s advice: “Let Nature be your teacher.” Go out into nature, the farther and more wild the better. Find a natural entity that appeals to you in some way – a spring, waterfall, big tree, rock formation, flower, whatever. Have an imaginary conversation with that entity. Greet it with respect. Ask whatever is on your mind, or just the general question, “Is there anything you would like to tell me?” When you finish, thank the entity. Write up the experience in a 3-4 page narrative essay.

What the students turned in was astounding. Many were 6 or 7 pages, even 8 pages, and every teacher knows that when you ask for 3-4 pages and get 6 or 7, something important is going on. Several began with variations of, “Teach, when you gave us this assignment, I thought it was the stupidest assignment I’d received in 12 years of school.” But these same essays and many others ended with statements of how profoundly life-changing this assignment had been. They talked to rivers, dandelions, mountains, trees, the ocean. They often sensed the pain of what we are doing to the natural world. In many cases the entities gave them insights far beyond what they could imagine, just as had been happening for me, altho I had said nothing about the Imagination Bridge. A number seemed to be discovering Nature for the first time. The results were so impressive that I wrote up an article about the assignment and submitted it to The English Journal, but of course it was way too far out for them to consider publishing.

Here is just one example: “I must admit that at the beginning of this assignment I was very skeptical and frustrated ... The dandelion stem didn’t seem happy or responsive, even tho I had apologized. So I said, ‘Look, dandelion! I am coming to you with an open heart and open mind. I know it’s not often that I do this, but I want to tune in to nature and give you a chance to speak your mind.’

“There was a great change. It understood. So without further stalling I asked my first question. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’

“It replied, ‘I am lonely out here. Your landlord pulled all my friends out of their homes and killed them. I have no one to laugh with, to cry with, to be with. Life is just as important to me as it is to you humans, and now there is nothing to live for. Why do you do this to me?’

“I was speechless. I felt so guilty. I never thought of it in this way. ‘I don’t know’ is all I could say, and I bent my head down in shame.”

Most of the time I was teaching a media course that was an introduction to photography, film making, video production, film appreciation, and analysis of propaganda, otherwise known as advertising. In 1986 we received our first camcorders. Thru a stony meditation I got the idea of having my students make video self-portraits. The assignment was to make a picture of yourself to show to your kids when they are as old as you are now, because by that time you will have forgotten what it’s like. You can interview your friends and/or parents, shoot your activities, show your room, anything you like. The one thing that must be included is to sit down in a room with no one else present, put the camcorder on a tripod, and talk directly to it. I promised that no one would see these self-portraits except me to grade them.

The assignment proved to be perhaps the most significant of all my media assignments. When students talked to the camcorder with no one else present, they became incredibly real. It soon became obvious that those students who had experienced major trauma in their lives were the most mature and had the most to say. Adversity does make us stronger. For most students, these self-portraits became a precious keepsake.

When I got the idea to assign video self-portraits, I did the assignment myself, as I usually did with all my assignments. I made a twenty minute video in which I appreciated the life I was living and highly praised a tantric workshop called “Follow Your Heart”  by April and Nataraj Durham that my second wife and I had just taken at Breitenbush Hot Springs, which is a wonderful hippie remnant where everything is skinny-dip and which hosts a continuous flow of excellent workshops in yoga, herbal essences, meditation, massage, emotional processing, astrology, and all the New Age interests – “A place to bring life into balance.” At the end of the self-portrait I said I was making this to look at in twenty years and remember the good times. Then I totally forgot about it.

In the summer of 2006 I was going thru all the family VHS videos and transcribing them to DVD’s. I discovered the video self-portrait – exactly twenty years later! Even more amazing, in 1997 I went to the Rainbow Gathering over the Fourth of July in the Ochoco Mountains in Central Oregon. There I met a lovely lady named April Windsoar and we spent seven beautiful years together, some of the best years of my life, in part because April loved to get out into Nature, and we did innumerable adventures, ranging from Baja and Canyonlands to Mt. Rainier and Glacier National Parks. Out of the 20,000 people at the Gathering, Divine Providence directed me to her. We didn’t realize until the third time we got together that she was the April Durham I took the workshop from in 1986, now several years divorced from her husband Nataraj.

To return to my earlier adventures, one of the things that LSD made very clear to me is that reality is much more fluid and magical than the laws of physics would have us believe. The most dramatic instance occurred in 1973, and in that LSD was not even significantly involved. That school year contained a clique of highly talented, artistic students, most of whom were in my media class. One of them came to me about a week before spring vacation and said a bunch of them were going to a farm near Astoria. They might make a film there, so I should come along. I considered it, my hunch being that some of their parents thought an adult should be present. I told them I would be happy to go, but I would not be a chaperone.

On the appointed day I picked up a couple of students and an older friend of the group whom I shall call George. George was 26. He sat in the front seat of my VW bug, the two students in back. George was scruffy, vaguely hippie, and he stank. After inconsequential conversation on the way to Astoria, which is a hundred mile trip, we arrived at a very green, partly wooded farm in the country, with a creek running thru it. Altogether perhaps twenty students were taking part. Next to the house was a pasture with a single horse, and George immediately went over to the horse and started whispering to it. George had never been here before and did not know the horse. After a bit he jumped on the horse and started to ride bareback around the pasture. He did loops, figure eights, changes of pace -- an incredible display of horsemanship. He and the horse were one. Only then did I realize that George’s stench was a horse smell.

One of the students distributed LSD in little pink pills he called “Pink Fuckers.” Most of us took one, including me, already familiar with the psychedelic and figuring I might as well be in the same headspace as everyone else. George did not. Some students set up a sweat lodge by the creek with poles and blankets, and heated rocks in a fire. Then around eight of us stripped off all our clothes, girls and guys alike, and did three rounds in the sweat lodge, dipping in the creek between rounds. Needless to say, for high school students to get naked with their teacher was totally beyond my experience, but it was all cool. I had never experienced a sweat lodge, and only much later did I realize that the students had done it just right, in the Native American tradition.

We spent the afternoon in various activities no longer remembered, altho I do remember trying to swing from the rafters in the barn, unsuccessfully, landing in the hay beneath. A girl who was not in my class asked me for advice: was now a good time to surrender her virginity? I told her I had no advice on the subject, and she went off to do I knew not what. Later I wished I had at least said you should only give up your virginity to someone you truly love. But it didn’t occur to me then, and I never saw her again. I don’t think I even asked her if she had protection against getting pregnant. Because of the acid, my brain wasn’t functioning in its normal channels.

We had a magnificent spaghetti dinner and much stony conversation. Around three or four in the morning I was sitting in the living room with one of my students, Brian, talking randomly. More than twelve hours had passed since we all took the acid, and I was pretty well down. George came in. He had drunk a few beers, but as I said, no acid. George said to Brian, “Brian, I want to be your friend.”

“Sure,” answered Brian.

I looked at the scene and thought George was being maudlin drunk and Brian was condescending. “Wait a minute,” I said, “Is anything real going on here?”

They both turned to me. “You bet!” “Definitely!”

Brian was sitting in an overstuffed easy chair, and George sat down on the foot stool in front of him. He took Brian’s hands. “Now pay attention,” he said.

A vibration appeared, not a sound but palpable, in the air, a little like what you feel next to a giant generator, but this was pleasant, soothing. “There! There! You’ve got it! No, your losing it. There!” George said. Brian leaned back in his chair, his mouth half open in amazement. The vibration toned, like nothing I had ever felt before.

“Can you handle any more?” George asked.

Brian nodded, just barely. The vibration grew stronger, or more obvious. Brian blissed out.

“Here! You can get in on it too,” George said to me.

I moved close to them. George took my left hand and Brian took my right. Energy shot up my arms and my brain said what is this? George said, “You’re blocking it.” They tried for a couple minutes, but I was not ready for such an experience. After a bit they stopped.

“What was that?” I asked.

“That’s psychic energy,” George answered. “It’s really dangerous.”

“How can it be dangerous?” I asked. “It’s only us.”

“No, man, it’s really dangerous.”

We went around a few times, since I was not seeing any danger. After all, this was 1973. I had no idea what had happened. Not getting thru to me, George stormed out. I think Brian followed him. I could hear George ranting to the students in the kitchen, “That asshole in there doesn’t think psychic energy is dangerous! How could anybody be so dumb? Just plain dumb!”

Presently George came back. “Look, man, I just want to show you.” There was a Renaissance chess set on the coffee table. George picked up the black queen, a large piece four or five inches high. He stood six or eight feet in front of me, turned sideways to his left, so that he was not facing me. He held out his right hand, which was closest to me, and put the queen on the back of his hand. He held his left hand out in front of him also, quite separate from his right hand. “Now watch!” he said.

I watched. What was I supposed to be watching for? He generated the energy, that I could feel palpably in the air. The energy seemed to coalesce around the chess piece. What was going on? Suddenly the chess piece was not there. George had not moved. No way could he have palmed it or done a cheap magic trick. He raised his right hand, turned it over, waved at me. Then he put his hand back in position, holding it all the way out in front of him. The black queen came back.

Again, the energy coalesced around the chess piece, again it disappeared. Again he turned his hand over and waved at me. He did this three times. He was not looking at me, I could not have been hypnotized. The acid was long gone, I could not be hallucinating. I sat dumbfounded. But I was still the arrogant fool. “Ok,” I said, “That’s pretty amazing. But it doesn’t prove psychic energy is dangerous.”

“What? You don’t understand anything, do you?” George sputtered. I think he actually stamped his foot . He stormed back to the kitchen.

Again I heard him raving about that asshole in the living room. Again he came back. “You don’t believe psychic energy is dangerous? Ok! Ok.”

A cat lay asleep under one of the chairs.  I had not had anything to do with the cat, and as far as I knew, neither had George. He again generated the energy, only this time it was jangly, very unpleasant. He pointed his finger at the cat in a swift, dramatic gesture. “Die cat!” he commanded in a loud voice.

The cat woke up and started to choke. The energy grew more intense, the cat gasped, and I could see the cat was in a very bad way. “Ok, ok!” I said. “I believe you! Stop!”

George stopped. The cat immediately came over and rubbed against my leg, because I had just saved its life. “Ok,” I said. “Psychic energy is dangerous. You’ve convinced me. How did you do that?”

“Six thousand years of Jewish tradition.”

That’s all he would tell me. Brian came in. I don’t believe he had seen any of it. I think I told him what happened. I think I was actually trembling. It was beginning to get light outside.

“Let’s go for a walk by the creek,” Brian said. “You look like you could use some fresh air.”

He and I went outside. I was puzzling over the events, trying to make sense of them. We sat down on some rocks at the edge of the creek. I clasped my hands over my knees. Brian was advising me to take deep breaths, just relax with it. He told me that George had been married, but his wife died of cancer. Another student, Bob Petersen walked by. “Hey teach! Your hands look really weird!” he said.

“That’s nothing, watch this!” I generated the energy, I don’t know how I did it.

“Your hands!” Bob exclaimed, “They’re turning red!” I don’t know if Bob was still on acid, but I knew I was generating the energy.

For the next three or four days I could ask anybody to put their hand up an inch or two away from mine palm to palm, and I could generate the energy strong enough that they could feel it. But I was sure I couldn’t keep such a magical power, and it gradually faded away.

As it turned out, even in the wild seventies, this was the only time I ever did a psychedelic with any of my students, and I thank Grace that I was not discovered and fired.

A few weeks later on an acid adventure I asked God to give me such magical powers. A resounding “NO!” thundered out of the heavens. I got that we humans have too much power already, and since we’re abusing the powers we already have, we certainly don’t need any more. From then on I did not seek powers. Today if I really focus, you may be able to feel the energy if you raise your palm an inch or two from mine, but it’s not important to me.

Since the experience with George, I’ve had a number of adventures that have shown reality to be far more complex and magical than we may imagine, and I have come to see life with a clarity that offers endless exuberance. One time four of us stoned on acid all focused our attention on a crystal, and the crystal came alive, sending beams of dazzling energy throughout the room. We all experienced it.

In 1983 I was managing a big old house in southeast Portland. My first wife Bette and her husband Clyde bought it in 1980 when interest rates were hitting 18%. Clyde was eligible for a 6% veteran’s loan that was about to expire, and it seemed sensible to use it. My older son and his friends lived in the house for a couple of years, but then all but two of them moved out. The house had seven functional bedrooms, three kitchens, and four bathrooms. We decided to rent it out by the room, and invited the present occupants to choose who would move in with them. Very soon we had seven young people living there who formed a very compatible society. One of the young men claimed to have become totally enlightened by magic mushrooms, and was growing mushrooms in his room. One evening when I was over there he invited me to have a cup of mushroom tea. I didn’t have anything in particular on the agenda and so agreed. The tea was absolutely delicious, so good that I asked for a second cup. “No, no, you don’t want a second cup,” he said.

“Yes I do,” I answered. “It’s delicious.”

“No, really, one cup is quite sufficient.”

“I don’t care,” I said recklessly. “May I have a second cup?”

He reluctantly agreed, and the second cup was just as good as the first. For reasons beyond my comprehension, about twenty minutes later I decided to drive home. As I drove over the Hawthorne Bridge, reality began to shift and dissolve. I drove the few blocks south to get onto I-5. While waiting for the traffic light, I could see I was having serious trouble functioning. “I better get in touch with the spirit of the mushrooms,” I said to myself. “I need some help getting home.”

Immediately Maharaji was inside my head, despite the fact that I had formally broken my tie of devotion to him four years earlier. “Leave this one alone,” Maharaji said, evidently addressing the spirit of the mushrooms. “He’s mine.”

I instantly sobered up. The effects of the two cups of mushroom tea simply vanished. I drove home completely safe and sober, and remained sober for the rest of the evening. It’s possible Maharaji saved me from running off the road or even saved my life, but how he did so is beyond me.

Another time my second wife and I visited Shi Shi Beach on the Makah Reservation at the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. The beach has remarkable rock formations, and we thought it was a good place to take acid together. We did so and explored the rocks. Then as we walked down the beach we grew groggy, and decided to go into the woods and lie down for awhile. We clambered over a considerable debris of driftwood and then discovered that the underbrush at the edge of the forest seemed an impenetrable barrier. I was about to force my way thru when my partner said, “Wait! Let’s ask.”

I asked, and got the clear message just to go to our right. We did so and very soon discovered a trail that had not been visible, leading into the woods. We came to a little clearing and each chose one of the big trees and hugged it for awhile. Then I started to stroke the aura of a daisy growing in the middle of the clearing. I was admiring, loving the daisy. As I stroked the air, the petals moved up and down. This was not a result of any breeze I might have been creating. “Partner!” I called. “C’mere! What do you see?”

She came over. “The petals! They’re undulating!” This was confirmation. We may have been stoned, but we were not hallucinating. We hung awhile longer, and then decided to go back out on the beach.

“Wait! You haven’t paid any attention to me!” a voice appeared in my head. It seemed to come from an undistinguished broad-leafed plant. I stared intently at the leaves, and discovered I could see right thru them. Solid leaves, I could see right thru them!

“Partner!” I called. “C’mere again! What do you see?”

“I can see right thru the leaves,” she said. So again we had confirmation. But the leaves were unquestionably solid, in no way translucent or transparent.

We went back out onto the beach and discovered a buoy that had been washed ashore. I asked the buoy, particularly the metal in the buoy, if there was anything it would like to tell me. I got the same answer I had gotten earlier from the little Douglas fir: “We don’t mind being a buoy, but nobody asked us. We’d like to be asked.” So again, a clear direction on how we ought to be treating the natural world, while the daisy and the broad-leafed plant showed how mysterious and magical this natural world really is.

Twenty-five years after George and the chess piece, in 1998, I experienced another true miracle. I had an opportunity to participate in an ayajuasca ceremony in southern Oregon. Ayajuasca is what Brazilian shamans take. It consists of one plant that contains psychoactive DMT, and another that contains a lot of tryptophan, which prevents the body from digesting the DMT so that it remains active. How the Brazilian shamans discovered to combine the two plants remains a mystery. I was invited at the last minute, so I was racing down I-5 about as fast as I dared to go, since it is heavily patrolled. I hit a 55 mph construction zone south of Eugene where I was in a long line of cars. We were all going about the same speed, but when we passed the radar cop, I must have been going 66 instead of 64. He pulled me over and began writing a ticket. All I could think of was how much of a hurry I was in to get there on time. Another motorist pulled up and started talking with the state trooper. More delay! I thought. The motorist was reporting an accident at the last freeway exit.

“Was anyone injured?” asked the trooper.

I don’t know,” replied the motorist. “Quite a few people were gathering around.”

The trooper turned to me. “Today’s your lucky day,” he said. “Gotta go.”

That was not the miracle, tho it sure felt like one. I eventually gathered in a large room with about thirty other people. I was given about a third of a cup of greenish brown thick liquid that tasted pretty much like vomit. It took about two hours to take effect, and all the time we were standing up and singing hymns, sitting down and praying. I found it very distracting. Soon every thought that went thru my consciousness became a waking dream. I was stoneder than I ever want to be. I couldn’t focus well enough to direct my thoughts. I experienced a long sequence about a leak in the plumbing under my kitchen sink. I had just built my dream house in Portland, using continuous Wirsbo plastic piping that does not leak. I was so sure I didn’t have any leaks that I didn’t even bother to look under the sink for a month or two. When I did, I discovered that where the Wirsbo connected to the faucet there was a very slow drip, drip, drip.

That was amazing enough, but much more amazing, at the beginning of the ayajuasca session, I asked the spirit of ayajuasca to take away my hay fever, since my hay fever season was about to begin. I had been allergic to grass pollen all my adult life and I was generally miserable from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July. The ayajuasca trip was a pretty awful experience for me, particularly when some folks took seconds and started throwing up, and a few even took thirds. But when I got home, I discovered that my hay fever was completely gone. I could drink a couple beers, which used to make my hay fever worse, and then go out and cut the grass. Nothing. Nada. Zip! I have not had even a touch of hay fever since, and I give most heart felt thanks to the Spirit of Ayajuasca. How is it possible? I have no idea.

Another way I have asked for Guidance is thru the Motherpeace Tarot cards. I see the tarot as a way of projecting our unconscious contents onto the cards, and then reading our projections back thru the cards. But it is more than that, with the capacity to tap into deep strands of the Collective. I started using the Motherpeace Tarot along about 1978, and consulted it from time to time about relationships or events.

In September of 1988 I lost my second wife to another woman, which was a major shock.  About six months later I began to wonder if  could find another relationship. I was 54 and feeling definitely old, another relationship not likely. I searched the Personals in the Willamette Week and found two that looked interesting. After all, that’s how I found my second wife, and it was great for eight years. I decided to consult the Motherpeace Tarot, and drew two cards for each ad, and then two cards for should I stay by myself? For each ad the cards were not significant, but for should I stay by myself I drew the Sun, which is God consciousness, and the Ace of Wands, which is the birth of creativity. Evidently I was supposed to stay single.

However, the following week I looked again through the Personals in Willamette Week. This time I found seven ads that appeared interesting, and again I drew two cards for each ad, and two cards for should I stay single. For each of the seven ads the cards were not significant, but for should I stay single I drew the Sun and the Ace of Wands. What are the odds in an 80 card deck for drawing exactly the same two cards in answer to the same question? I concluded that if I was supposed to be in relationship, she would have to come to me.

She came the next day. Janice was 27, exactly half my age, and she came back to school for a meeting of her tenth reunion committee. She had been a very good student in my media class, the editor of the yearbook, and I had had her father as principal for a couple years. She made a point of looking me up and telling me about her horrible cocaine ridden marriage. She had burned all her bridges and even her parents wouldn’t help her. I asked her if she’d like to stay with me for awhile, and after considering it for a day, she said yes. In the meantime I asked the tarot what the prognostication was for this relationship, and I drew Lovers. I drew a card for her too, and when I saw her again and told her about my card, I said I had drawn a card for her, and she said “World.” She knew almost nothing about tarot. The card I had drawn for her was World, which means that you will get to know yourself in all ways -- the world is opening up before you. I rescued her from the cocaine addiction, and we spent a tempestuous fifteen months together, during which she reformed her life and taught me very definitely that love is not possession. We are still good friends, and the world opened up for her in some very nice ways. So the Guidance here was clear and exact, and I am most appreciative.

Back to 1997. The first two years with April were a totally idyllic time. She was working as a massage therapist at Breitenbush Hot Springs a hundred miles away, and I was first writing the Great American Novel – which I couldn’t find very many Great Americans to read – and then building my dream house in Portland. Every time we got together was an intensely beautiful celebration. But in 1999 she was completely swept off her feet by a stone mason who was working at Breitenbush. He promised her everything she had ever dreamed of, and furthermore had muscles like a competition weight lifter.

When I drove up to Breitenbush to celebrate the Summer Solstice, immediately I knew something was wrong, but it took her a couple hours to confess to me that she had to leave me to follow her new passion. I was completely devastated. The last two years had very clearly been the best years of my life. I partook of Mother Marijuana and started to drive the forest road back to Portland. I knew there were some very sharp curves ahead of me, including one complete hairpin turn. I thought that the best time to leave life is at a high point, no reason to wait till things get really bad to leave. I figured life wasn’t going to get any better than it had been these past two years. I was 64, what did I have to look forward to? If I didn’t fasten my seatbelt and sped up nice and fast, one of the big trees on the curves would take me.

No sooner did that thought cross my mind than April’s ex-husband Nataraj appeared inside my head. “You don’t need to do that,” he said. This was beyond belief. A couple of years after they had divorced, Nataraj married a woman with a seven year old son. He wrote April a card telling her about his new marriage, apologizing for any hurts he had caused her, and expressing hope that they could get together again sometime. As Nataraj and his new wife and son were driving back to Eastern Oregon, on a perfectly straight road the car left the highway and all three of them were killed. A friend of April found the card in the wrecked car. So Guidance came unsolicited, and this time saved my life.

During the following year, three times I received very specific Guidance that April would come back to me. The third time a grove of trees spoke to me and essentially said, “You dummy! Quit your whining! She’ll come back to you.”  Even so, each time I said to myself this is just my attachment talking. I have to let go of her.

In August of 2000 my best friend Bob Irelan and I went to the Ralph Nader rally at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland with 10,000 other folks. We randomly chose an entry, walked down a few rows, and picked a couple of seats. I looked around, and April was sitting in the row behind us. She had broken up with her Great Promiser. He was a Viet Nam vet, and carried a heavy load of unprocessed baggage. We got back together and spent another very good five years together. Once again, the Guidance I received was right on.  

As well as these major events, I have used Mother Marijuana meditations in various other ways. I did Mother Marijuana meditations extensively when I wrote my novel and designed my dream house. When visualizing the scene I was working on for the novel, the dialog and all kinds of extra details and relevances would come to me. I used about 80% of the material that came to me thru the meditations, and I was very pleased with the way the novel turned out. Likewise, for the dream house I would visualize a room and ask where should the windows be? How big should they be? What will be the traffic pattern? The house turned out to be quite magical. It was a small two story house, 1280 square feet. At noon on the winter solstice the sun would stream thru the clerestory windows, cross the upstairs hall and circular stairwell, hit the four stained glass windows on the south wall of the north bedroom, and create as many as fifty sunbows on the walls and ceiling of the north bedroom. The house thus celebrated the Return of Light. I was completely satisfied with the dream house. I feel that the Guidance I receive thru Mother Marijuana deepens my creativity and my capacity to visualize so that I am able to produce more and better than what I can when I am totally sober.

By now the methodology should be fairly obvious. It is good to view all life and all aspects of reality as miraculous. Appreciation is very important. Every morning I give thanks for life and for this day, and actually sing a little mantra: “Rejoice, rejoice, it feels good to be here! Rejoice, rejoice, it feels good to be!”

I can take any one of three different paths to ask for Guidance. For any of these paths, you may choose to ask the assistance of Mother Marijuana or not. If you choose to ask Mother Marijuana to be your ally, it is very important to treat her with respect. For me this means moderation. Doing a marijuana meditation not more often than twice a week is reasonable for me, and only consulting the sacred herb on special occasions is even better. I think smoking every day is an abuse, because we build up a tolerance, and magic is not so likely to happen. It is possible to commune directly with Mother Marijuana to determine if she is an appropriate ally for you.

The first path is that you may choose to set up an altar in your home. I have had some powerful conversations with the Millennial Gaia (www.MythicImages.com) on my altar. Among other things she has told me to stop trying to win the Powerball Lottery. She said if I actually won, it would set me back three or four lifetimes – and as I  discuss elsewhere, I don’t even know as I believe in reincarnation. But I stopped buying the ticket a week that I had been.

Second, you can go out into Nature and pick an entity that attracts you in some way. You may find that it picks you. Address it with the utmost respect. Say that you only want information that is helpful on the Path of Love. Ask a specific question or the general question, “Is there anything you would like to tell me?” If an answer does not come immediately, imagine how this particular entity might answer you. Open your mind to all possibilities. You thus create the Imagination Bridge, which may enable the entity to communicate information that you could not possibly imagine.

Similarly, you can consult Jesus, the Virgin Mary, any of the saints or traditional holy figures. Using the Imagination Bridge, you can simply imagine how that Spirit might answer. You may find that you frequently receive answers far beyond what you might imagine. Does this mean that you are truly communing with that Spirit, or are you simply projecting Divine Inspiration out of your own unconscious? Personally, as long as I get an answer that works, I don’t care. Reality is far subtler and more mysterious than I can grasp, and there is no point in trying to understand more than I am capable of.

Third, you may choose to commune directly with the Great Mystery, or as I like to say, the Great Holy Mystery, since I only want answers that are on the Path of Love. I say elsewhere that our intuition is a direct link to the Great Mystery, so that when I commune directly, answers rise up out of my intuition. You may need some practice to clean out your intuition so that you get reliable answers. It is always good to verify that an answer is really on the Path of Love, as sometimes a dysfunctional program may insert an inappropriate answer. The Abraham and Isaac story comes to mind, because in no way can God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac be on the Path of Love. Obedience, yes; love, no!

In all cases, be sure to give thanks for what you receive. Ask if there is any more to be communicated. Ask permission to end the connection. Take joy in what you have been given. The more I discover what is truly holy, the more I realize the extent to which humans have desecrated Nature and themselves, and the more clearly I see the work that has to be done. We symbolize our enslavement of Nature by surrounding our houses with regularly mown lawn, an obviously artificial condition. We murder trees and put their corpses in our living rooms to celebrate the birth of the Lord of Love. When do we appreciate the grass as it naturally is, or honor the living tree?

One last note: How is it that Guidance works? How is it that no matter what religion you follow, when you pray or ask for Guidance, sometimes you receive very clear and useful answers? It seems that on the one hand we are God’s experiments in free will, given a world full of wonders and horrors, beauties and beasts, powers and pestilence. God seems dispassionate, and it is entirely up to us whether we succeed or fail, live or die. But it also seems that God loves us, loves this experiment he has created, and wants us to succeed. Hence God offers Guidance, and furthermore may occasionally steer us in fruitful directions. We are babies with a very powerful tool, this free will, with which we can do great good or great harm. So like any good mother, God gives us Guidance until we learn to handle this potent tool in a responsible manner. At that point we will generally know how to act without having to ask for Guidance. We will be the nervous system of the planet. Guidance is simply a most blessed part of our education.

Truth is what works. What I have works. How does it work? Because God is in everything, I can commune with any part of this reality and have a seeming dialog with that part and get valuable answers to my questions. After definite direction from Guru Maharaji, I received my enlightenment largely thru marijuana, and I got bolts of light in all kinds of ways from LSD. For me all this knowledge is pure and given in love, and has given me such understanding of who I am and my place in the world that I am entirely comfortable, and that’s why I offer it to others. You get to accept it because it makes logical and emotional sense to you or you get to doubt it – “He got this by drugs! We can’t imagine there is serious truth here, this isn’t an enlightened guru, this is just some hippie druggie!” I give you that option, so you get to choose which is your higher light – to go by your logic about what we need in this world and what works, or to go by your judgments on how one should or should not receive knowledge. I say try the Imagination Bridge, you’ll like it!

For comments or questions, contact

donangelo@spiritualadventurer.com

Dancing the Path of Love