#41

Subject met with me at his home which sat on a wooded hillside in a neighborhood on the fringes of Fayetteville. Born 1949 in Kansas City, Missouri.

I remember New Year’s Eve of 1959-60 -- a program called the "Fabulous Fifties," that was my first memory, and by 1962, I had discovered Bob Dylan’s first record. There were very few of them out then from Columbia. I was listening to that, I was listening to the folk sampler my folks got. I had read JD Salinger, specifically his Nine Stories, and in ‘62 I can remember being so interested in what aveda vedanta was because of the short story ‘Teddy’ and my mother sharing a news clipping with me from the Kansas City Star about a group of Vedantists of the Rama Krishna order who were meeting in Kansas City, and my beginning to go to meetings there reading the Upanishads at age 13, and starting to meditate and having out of the body experiences. By ‘65 I was subscribing to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, concerned about the nuclear issue.

By ‘66, at age 17, I had my first real mystical experience. They weren’t in any way associated with the use of drugs. I was practicing meditation and was experiencing these things through the agency of developing more lucidity in the hypnogogic -- the state between waking and sleeping when one’s guard is down, and typically people do have experiences. In ‘66, I was given peyote in capsules, which was a very nice way to be given it first, by an older friend, an artist in his 40s, and took that and experienced a more prolonged state of grace, or expanded consciousness. I’m really glad I had the experiences of infinite love that I had before that. I did not come from a religious background.

My parents were atheists, and all this was of great interest to me. I did not know people had psychic experiences. When I first left my body, saw auras, and experienced telekinesis a little later on, I didn’t know that people had those experiences, and it got me reading. By 17, I was president of the liberal religious Unitarian youth group in KC, and I was exploring a lot with old bohemians, old socialists, old nudists, people who were like really happening back in the ‘50s, some old beatniks and old intellectuals, hanging a lot with poets. I was writing a lot of poetry. All this stuff was wonderful to me.

I loved the development of the ‘60s. I had a real mistrust of drugs, because I felt there was a delicacy to my psychic and spiritual experiences that I didn’t want to tamper with. I had always, from age 17, been able to leave my body and travel fairly easily, and I was afraid that if I took acid that I might have trouble getting back in. That didn’t turn out to be a problem. I was given two massive doses of peyote, and I only ever used one, it was so sacred. It was many years before I had any real interest in drugs after that, seven years.

When I graduated high school in ‘67, [my goal in life] was basically what I’m doing. I’m a therapist. I had had a phobia from age 10 to 12, and I went to a very excellent and empathetic female therapist who used very conventional therapy, and I had the great joy of feeling cured of that phobia by the time I reached 13, so I could go on with my life. So the first thing I ever conceived of doing was being a therapist. Prior to that the only thing I ever remember wanting to be was a dog, because it looked to me like a really good situation.

I was writing poetry by age 13, and for four years in a row, I won a five-state poetry contest. But I never thought of trying to be an academician. It seemed like the poetry was such a wonderful thing to do that I didn’t want to mess it up, stake my identity on it, or anything. I never really liked studying psychology. It didn’t interest me. Things like C.G.Jung interested me. I ended up [in college] studying English.

I went to Scotland for a year in my Junior year. That was a very wonderful part of my life. Music was always quite important to me, and there was a ‘60s group called the Incredible String Band -- very ‘60s -- that I hung out with there a little bit, and another part of that experience - 1969, ‘70 -- there were 30 people at that time at the Findhorn Community in Scotland. I went and lived there off and on, got to know the people who started it, and when I moved to Fayetteville with my wife in ‘79, we brought one of the founders, Dorothy McClain, here to Fayetteville. That was a spiritual opener.

From ‘67 on, I had a spiritual teacher who was a lady who grew up in a farming community in Ohio who was very open to the light. She had written a marvelous book, and when I got to Oberlin, I found her book, wrote her, and used to, several times every semester, hitchhiked there and worked with her. It was very important to me to have a spiritual teacher who was more developed than I, and I still do. I would call them spiritual friends, rather than authority figures.

I didn’t think a lot about being a therapist while I was in college, because I was really interested in studying poetry and language. It was just that I didn’t intend to use it. What I did was become a school teacher. And I taught for two years in a free school in KC, from ‘72 to ‘74, after I got out of college. This was a school that the educational theorist John Holt helped some parents start, where we had no grades or classes. That was a wonderful experience. It was in ‘72, right when I joined the work force, and after a romantic disappointment in my life, that I started smoking marijuana. I think it was partly because of the, kind of, the shit hit the fan in terms of affairs of the heart, and I was starting to deal with the workaday world, and I started to deal with different ways of diminishing tension. I was living on Harrison St. in KC, a street fairly near the art institute, where there were just a lot of hippies -- Dennis Gian Grecko, who was the editor of the Westport Trucker at the time, and Steven Gaskin would come through town. It was in the air -- a pun, but true. And I started using it and feeling like, probably for me, and other people who are genuinely of a visionary turn of mind, that both used and abused it. For somebody like me, it shouldn’t be used as much. It’s like, the doors are already open, you know? But for both good and ill, for enjoyment and sort of a diminishing point of returns and feeling less sensitive, I think -- I started using it then.

You know, there’s another strand in all this. All my experiences being outdoors were so important to me. I remember these as a counterbalance to some of this urban -- trying to make my way and develop my independence in the early ‘70s. I would periodically get off and go to the mountains. Generally, it wouldn’t necessarily involve taking a psychedelic, but there was some psychedelic use during that time. I hoped it would further my psychic experience, but I don’t think it did. I think a few isolated psychedelic experiences had some value. My feeling was that there were always some peak moments and there was stress. My feeling was always kind of, humbly, that I had some emotional maturing to do, there was some emotional unfinished business, these things were amplifying that stuff. I didn’t always find it so easy. These agents amplify what’s there.

I’ve continued to use psychedelics. I will take peyote tea in a sweat lodge. I did about two years ago. One sip put me into a remarkably expanded state. There was a period in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when I wanted very much to go to some Native American church ceremonies, because I’ve always felt that one of the reasons it wasn’t so helpful to me was that I hadn’t been in a sort of structured, consensual situation, although I’d always paid close attention to set and setting, with a few exceptions that taught me to really do that. I did go to some Native American church ceremonies, and they were very beautiful, but it was pretty clear to me that I had some sort of more long, slow patient emotional work to do. I have experienced much higher states without psychedelics.

[My cosmic experiences] were mostly without the use of chemicals. And mostly not during meditation, but in that hypnogogic state, or going from a lucid dream. But sometimes, certainly moments of suchness -- I’m talking about experiences where there’s no H--, or there’s a H-- but he’s also appearing as the stars, as the environment, the joyful experiences where for weeks or months afterwards, after a couple of seconds of that, I’ll feel more like who I really am. [The joy that comes with that kind of experience] is titanic, it’s so hopeful. I’ve had a lot of feelings of vulnerability about being in a body. I’ve had a very good life and a very materially secure life. The first six weeks of my life weren’t so easy. I was born premature, put in an incubator, and not touched by my mom for six weeks. That happens to people. My first memory is of my great-grandfather, who died when I was 18 months old. He was a country doctor, and he was allowed, along with the family, to come in and touch me when I was in the incubator. That’s why I remember him. But I also feel that I left my body a lot during that period of time in order to cope and probably out of sheer dissociative trauma. I think that has rendered me somewhat more alert to my own mortality. It’s probably worked very much in my behalf, spiritually. I've had some arrogance, but that experience has always undercut that arrogance somehow.

I didn’t know about this experience in the incubator until about ten years ago, but the manifestation of whatever insecurity was there was the phobia. Then, being helped by this marvelous therapist, who for some reason used to talk with me about a psychic friend, the only person I ever remember talking with me about things like that, and at some length. She might have intuited that I was about to become intuitive, because that started to happen to me. It did not happen to me during my childhood. I wasn’t one of those who went around trailing clouds of glory from whence I came. I remember being a pretty solid, kind of unperturbed kid, for the most part, until about age 10. My grandfather died then -- he was the big guy in my life -- I think that pulled the rug out from under me.

I was early involved with a group called Fellowship House in KC, as soon as I started going to the Unitarian Church, around age 13 or 14. It was meant for young black and white people to come together and work together. And then, coming through the Unitarian Church, I heard people come through who had been south in the early marches. I was interested in that, but I was a fairly apolitical person. Definitely more intellectual, interested in life of the mind. In terms of Vietnam, I did think a lot about being a conscientious objector. I had a friend or two who were. I didn’t feel that I could say that I was unconditionally against all war. I felt there would be some cases where I would want to defend my country or family. And that really hung me up, as far as becoming a CO. Also, I was scared, I was chicken. But I still feel a bit of self judgment about that, because I admired so much the people who stood their ground. I ended up trying for a psychological deferment, but I didn’t need it because I got a student deferment. And then I was 236 in the lottery, so it was cool, as far as I could see. I was against the war. I demonstrated against the war once. The reason I didn’t demonstrate against it more was that there was a violence in the demonstrations, and I was kind of aware of the fact that people who didn’t have as much money as I and couldn’t go to college were getting drafted, and now I’m really glad that I had that awareness, because for the last three and half years I’ve been working with Vietnam vets in the psychiatric unit as a music therapist at the Veteran’s Administration [hospital], and I mean, any little glimmer of compassion I might have had then has been magnified vastly. If I had been able to find a demonstration that seemed to have some love in it, I might have done it. But I didn’t.

What I always did do was hurt, when I heard about people hurting. There was significant consciousness raising that happened to me as a result of going to the Unitarian Church. Going to Oberlin, there were a lot of blacks. I identified some racial bigotry and bias in myself, a kind of distancing. That always disturbed me, because I didn’t want to have it. And in fact, we’d had a black maid in our house -- not a live-in -- and I had felt quite close to her, so I got it kind of osmotically. Every once in awhile, I’ll still encounter some of that conditioning inside myself. Something inside says ‘nigger’ and it’s like, ooh, that’s ugly. But I have some compassion for myself, too, that I’ve picked that one up, and every time I feel that, I’ll acknowledge it, and there it is, and try to look real close at the person. I’m still working on that one a bit.

[My recognition of environmental issues] was visceral, but I didn’t let myself think about it real deeply until the ‘70s. I just didn’t let it in. I knew about it. Then in ‘79, when Three Mile Island happened, it just came crashing in on me. I felt it so strong. I’d had that sense of concern about radiation and the environment from ‘65 on. I’ve been attempting to be a nuclear activist ever since. Just yesterday I was involved in some activities down in Russellville. I’ve been genuinely active -- this has been my chosen area of activity. I’m co-author of a book called "Fighting Radiation with Foods, Herbs, and Supplements" -- it’s not a book about cures or panaceas. It’s a book about all the organic ways in which people have been able to chelate, or create a normal amount of iodines so the body doesn’t take up iodine 131, or strengthen the immune system. Those three basic kinds of preventive dynamics were researched and discussed. I coordinated a group of eight people originally to research all of the abstracts -- chemical, nuclear, biological, up to about ‘81 or ‘82, and then we got into correspondence with people, a naturepath and I, and an editor of East -West Journal wrote the book. I worked for seven years on this project, and it’s in its third printing now. My hope was that we would do something that would lead to a better work, that we would do something that was credible enough that somebody would then take it a step further who had more sophistication, better chops than we do. I’m not especially scientific.

That was an exciting period for me. I would do therapy during the day and be a young father, and then I would stay up at night, smoke dope, and write and edit. I had fun with it. I remember the day the book came out and it was in my hands. I was alone when I received a copy of it. A beautiful fragrance filled the air and I felt spiritually thanked. The way that book was conceived was interesting. It sounds kind of ‘60ish, I suppose. I was living, homesteading with M-- in ‘79, and a neighbor gave me some peyote, which has always been, for me, the most important of the psychedelics. I took the peyote and towards the end of the trip -- it wasn’t a large amount -- I was in a place of white lights surrounded by spiritual beings, and they never say you have to do something, but they said you can work on a book on protection from radiation. I started to think about how I would do it. About 4 to 6 weeks later the author of the book showed upon my land telling me he was already working on something like that, and I just kept pushing him and pushing him to do better, helping him, supporting him, and finally, we put it out. That was an example of a valid use of psychedelic drugs, for me. I totally acknowledge that psychedelics have been important for a lot of people. For me, they’ve had some importance, but not key. I got blasted open in other ways. Kundalini experiences, and other ways. My folks, when I told them about out of the body travel, were remarkably tolerant. I think their concern was, is he happy. They had intelligence, but they were totally only believing in a material plane of existence. Totally. They’re atheistic. Towards to the end of his life, I’d have to say my dad was an agnostic. I just told them a little bit. They were very accepting. There were a few other people in my life who would give me some kind of feedback, yes, this happens to people, here’s a book.

I’m hoping this weekend to see my friend the landscape artist who’s almost 80 now. He’s one of the most important people in my life. He was born in Kansas in a small town in 1919, and says that he was always embarrassed as a small boy -- he was embarrassed for people, because it didn’t seem like they knew they were part of everything, that they were belonging to everything. He was, much more than I, established in a less separate sort of place. Terribly important person for me. He was interested in Buddhism, which is now central for me, and he was a strong Episcopalian, and he was deeply connected with nature, and he was in a happy family, and from ‘65 on, I regularly visited him in Lawrence KS. The reason I live in Fayetteville is because I saw the happy family in a small university town having a nice time, being close to nature, and I thought, that looks pretty good to me. And the only thing I ever really wanted to do was to marry, have kids, and do that kind of holy family thing that he was doing.

M-- and I did a little agonizing. I didn’t want to keep teaching school. I went back and got a social work degree from ‘76 to ‘78 in Athens GA. That was the wildest period of my life. That was the open marriage. Some of that I had to recuperate from. So did our marriage. That’s another topic. When we were on our honeymoon in Europe, thanks to my lovely and wealthy grandmother, we met some people who said, "we met these people named Gene and Ina O’Neal -- they wrote a book called "Open Marriage" -- well, we met them on Tormalinas, and they were just fighting like cats and dogs" -- I should have known. But when we ended up in Athens, everybody wanted to do everybody else, and I was a nice looking boy, and M-- is a nice-looking woman, and it was interesting what happened. I was questioning all of this, and a Zen priest I had written at Shasta Abbey -- I had spent a very small amount of time at this abbey -- it was said that he was going to go on the road and do some teaching, so I wrote him and said to come stay with us and teach a little in Fayetteville. He came, became our friend -- he’s still our friend -- he is an amazing man. His awareness is truly remarkable. And he encouraged us to get out and get around a little. He said, you know, I think a lot of couples, where they really are viable, have had some period like this. He can’t believe it now when I tell him he said that. But we did some experimentation, and it was ‘78 when I last felt the need to go outside of the marriage. But I would probably still be wondering to this day what the whole thing is, what’s in it for me and all, had I not. I don’t feel like it’s closed to me. I could do it. But the emotional pieces that had to be picked up in terms of trust level were more than we, and I think, more than a lot of people were willing or able to acknowledge to themselves. I think that some people are successful in doing that. I don’t feel I’m emotionally constructed in such a way that I would find it very easy to do it.

I finished my graduate education at Athens. That was one of the more intensive periods of drug use. I think whenever I’ve had extra stress on me I’ve thought I’ve needed it -- I think the lack of the oceanic experience in the womb and with mother afterwards made marijuana more seductive to me because it gave me some of that kind of electric, controllable experience, an experience that I could have when I wanted it. We did a fair amount of mushrooms in GA. We really enjoyed them. We’d go to the fields and pick them. I got a 4.0 average in school. I wrote my thesis on marijuana. I did a wonderful job. It was three times longer than I meant it to be. It didn’t need to be that long, but I was focused. I sat in the same chair for months writing that thing. A young woman sat down in that chair one night after I was finished -- I still have her note -- she says, I sat in the chair and I must tell you that I got the most remarkable feelings of energy all over my body.

That was the beginning of my period of -- the cattle mutilation happened in ‘73. I didn’t know what that was. I began seeing the globes of light, which the Indians see in their sweat lodges, in ‘76 or ‘77. Other people with us saw them too, around this beach where we were living outside of town in GA. I had a night of vastly expanded consciousness in ‘77 where finally, the light approached me, I was respectful, it came onto my bowing hands and then entered my heart three times. I had a number of experiences with these floating lights that the Indians had known about for a long time. Nothing ever metallic, nothing that felt like it was anything other than interdimensional to me. These experiences in various ways have continued, occasionally. Because of my experience at Findhorn, I have known about the Davic, angelic and the elemental levels of life, and have always enjoyed tuning into those levels. Sometimes I’ve had the little being appear to me. Really, they’re not little, but they can appear that way. I’ve seen elves, fairies -- none of this as a child, which is uncharacteristic. That is one area where marijuana has sometimes been an aid to perception, but on Buddhist meditation retreats when I go to the woods, they’ll come around, when I’m more open.

This has been another aspect of my life, one that’s rarely discussed. I only can discuss it with people where there’s some kind of consensual reality to be shared. Cherokee Indians, say. And the Native America thing began when I met a Susquehanna chief in ‘69 or ‘70. He was so nice to me. He was really an amazing dude. That’s also continued. I’ve been a very energetic explorer. I don’t think I’ve been around compared to the people I admire the most -- like Sri Ramana or the great saints, or the unsung people who don’t have positions but who’ve really been around. But I’m a person who has a karma of a lot of meditation, a lot of inner work, that I’ve brought in on me. This is my take on it. It doesn’t mean I’m right. I’ve had some fortunate gifts, and also, I feel, I could classify myself as a young old soul. I have real areas where I just don’t get it yet. There are holes in my sense of stability, security. It’s kind of stupid to try to evaluate myself too much.

Part of the drift of the times, the zeitgeist -- I was there. I have some kind of an awareness -- how much it’s imagination I don’t know -- of hovering above the world prior to my conception or birth, with a number of other beings who had some degree of accomplishment and consciousness, and coming in at that time. Now, my daughter is much more evolved than I was. She’s already had a deep satori experience at age 13, and wrote a poem about what three rajayana teachers have said, that’s basically the essence of their teaching. I can’t tell you how proud I was. It wouldn’t have had to be that. I think there’s a new generation of children -- but I think they are heavily conditioned -- I wouldn’t want to be a young person right now. It looks pretty bad if you’re sensitive. I heard a lot about the environment. I don’t know what it would be like. My daughter is a very positive person.

We chose this area. We found magic in this land. I think that had something to do with bringing Dorothy here. In fact, she helped alert me to something magic in the land. She said, first tune into the formless spirit and then hold a very gentle intention to tune into any aspect of it. She gave us a key there, and we would practice it, tune into the dava of the insect that we would like to have leave our house, or one time M-- and I very dramatically demonstrated this attunement. We were on our land, sitting up in our field, and we say, let’s attune to the dava of the land, kind of the overlighting presence of the land. What the hey. So we just closed our eyes, did that, then opened our eyes, and standing in front of us was a ten or twelve foot tall whirlwind. So this was stuff that was very impressive to us. I call these things confirmatory experiences. They help one to see that there really is a spiritual side to life.

The UFO thing -- I was interested in that as a kid. I think a lot of kids were interested in the ‘60s with books like "Stranger than Fiction" -- Ripley’s -- I read the Hobbit -- I knew about UFOs. I did not know about cattle mutilations, but in ‘73, I came out of my door of the farmhouse where M-- and I were living, and there was half a bloodless, skinned calf. All I could think was that somebody was trying to scare me, so I put on some gloves, buried it, prayed, and put up a Tibetan prayer flag. This was in ‘74, near the Richards-Gabour AFB in KC, for what that’s worth. I do believe that in the annals of this stuff, ‘74 was a big year for Midwestern cattle mutilations. Later I found out about this. And then came one experience in Athens, where one of these globes of energy came down and kind of merged with me, and I felt a distinctly insect-like presence. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. But since it wasn’t there on my ok, I kicked it out. And it left.

I was at times aware of black magic. Like the time that all four people in the house had bad dreams on the same night. I got up and walked around the house praying. They were just having bad dreams. I was, please, Great Spirit, -- it hasn’t been easy, that part of it. I have wondered whether that kind of uninsulated feeling that I have, that very naked feeling that premmies get, might not have contributed to making me feel vulnerable. And still can. But I began studying Vasnuyama Buddhism, at least in terms of doing a mantra that’s the one I still do now, partly because of a couple of these scary experiences. I thought I needed some big guns behind me. I needed some help. And I needed, basically, some mediating help. God was just a little too formless for me, and so I needed some saints. I’ve always had at least one or two saints that I could appeal to, so in that sense I’m very old fashioned.

Two episodes come to mind. One, in ‘79, on our land -- one night I was lying out on the deck when M-- had gone to sleep, and I was most definitely stoned on pot. You would have found me that way a lot of the time back then. I mean, I still smoke. I’m just more selective and careful about when I do it. Then, it was wake up in the morning and roll a doobie, you know. So anyway, I was lying on the deck and all of a sudden the whole woods were illuminated. There were no lights around. Every leaf on every tree was evenly illuminated by golden light. My first thought was, boy, is my third eye really open. And then I thought, wait a minute, it hasn’t turned into a head light. When it opens, I see the inner light, but I don’t see everything else lit up. Then I realized that there was a colossal light source behind me and it wasn’t a car. I felt like if I looked I’d be scared, I’d be shocked. I was pretty sure of that. M-- mentioned later on, ‘have you ever seen that light that travels through the woods at sunset?’ Well, I’d seen that, but I thought that was one of those nature manifestations. This could have been some dava coming on in all its glory. But I don’t think so.

A couple of years later when our son was born, conceived out in those woods very joyfully, we were in our new house and a feeling came into the room. I had been doing this mantra some, but what really got me more hooked on it was when this very bad feeling came into the room –I’ve always been quite analytic and willing to acknowledge that it might have been my bad feeling -- could be my projection -- I know how imaginative I am -- but in his sleep and without our touching him, he went ugghhh! So the feeling was hovering in the room. I started doing this mantra in my head -- it’s an intercessory mantra, the one I still do every day -- and my son in his sleep at one and a half years old, and I know wasn’t even subliminally saying it, said "Ahhh, buddha," There was this feeling of liquid light around us, total sweetness, and I’ve been doing that mantra ever since. I thought, well, since you’re sort of susceptible to both the good and the evil -- now I know something about evil -- also, from being a therapist, I know something about evil -- why don’t you go to some of the spiritually mature people on the planet, you know, make a connection to give yourself some insulation. So I’ve tried to do that. I’m a team player. I’ve tried to work with people who I felt were my contemporaries and peers, and they’re into these things. We’ve formed meditation groups, not just to protect myself, but to grow. But I’ve also reached out at times because of this labile, kind of diffuse, psychic quality in me.

From reading, clearly, some of the UFO experience is quite positive. Nobody really knows what the cattle mutilations are. I’m the only therapist in AR, as far as I know, who is a member of John Mack’s organization -- he’s a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School -- I generally have not worked very much with people on this -- I do hypnosis -- the reason is, it scares me. And I have a young girl child of childbearing age. When I started reading, say, Swami Wontananda’s book back in the early ‘70s,, the blue pearl that he wrote about would come and stand in front of me, or I would have visions of the things he talked about. When I read the Secret of the Golden Flower, my karma is such that started to experience the circulation of the light, the golden light -- so I felt that it was probably a good idea for me not to concentrate too much on this. Let other people who are more pragmatic than I -- now I can be very practical and pragmatic, but it’s an effort. I’m coming from an emotional more than an intellectual or physical moving center. They’re all nicely developed, but the emotional is kind of a lynch pin. So I have a number of books on the subject [of UFOs] but I don’t read them at night. It wouldn’t be any problem for a lot of people to do. Some of the other interesting books I’ve read on the subject, one of them is by Credo Mudwah, medicine chief of the Zulus. He has some very significant things to say about this subject. He’s been studying indigenous people and their perceptions, which is a very good idea. Jacques Valle’s work has influenced me. He draws connections between the fairy faith experiences of missing time, changling babies, etc. When I was in Ireland with M--, I had a number of visions that came easily in the British Isles. We had gone over the Knackmael Mountains to a bed and breakfast. Later on, I discovered -- last year -- in reading a book about Ireland, that exactly where we were was the region in which the queen of the fairies was supposed to have her stronghold under the mountain. But I didn’t know that at the time. I went to sleep and heard a rushing of winds, and found myself impelled down a long corridor under the earth, a stone corridor. I didn’t like it because I wasn’t in control. I got down to the bottom and I had my astral eyes closed. It was one of those deals where I went, here I am and my body’s back on the bed. I’ve had some experiences like that, which have allowed me to understand what psychosis might be like. I kept my eyes closed but then I got curious, so I opened them. There was an extremely complicated silver city there, all somewhat miniaturized, and a sense of being watched. It was kind of like the most populated empty place I’ve ever been. Except maybe Dacchau. Now my sense is that maybe I never saw a silver city, that maybe I was seeing stalactites and stalagmites that were enchanted. But I prayed. I had to pray like hell. And then got sucked back up into my body. And then I thought, boy for somebody who had been drunk or was just weak-willed or simple minded, they could have just found that person’s body there. And that exactly a template for all that. I became very open to the possibility that these may be pissed off subterranean entities who are just pissed because we’re screwing with the environment, or whatnot. Many possibilities. It’s a very small part of my experience. Many people have a few experiences like this, but they’re so far out of the context of their normal lives that they forget about them or discredit them.

I always sought out the weirdos, theosophists, beatniks, early ‘50s and ‘40s people who went to India, natural mystics. Not only did I seek them out, but they would somehow or another find me. There was recognition. And there were very beautiful encounters with each other. Very beautiful.

I’m a member of ORI, what Harold McCoy does - dowsing. I like what they’re doing. I think it’s very interesting. He’s a very altruistic person, doing good work. I love this community. It’s a wonderful community. People are being good to each other here.