The Dream of My Dreaming

 

The story continues (sorry for the typos; reading my own material for editing puts me literally to sleep, as I imagine you already know). Suffice it to say that “becoming a hippie” is a metaphor for opening one’s mind to “the unknown” and to discover life “as a strange trip.” I would add, “a most fascinating trip.” I ended up, after another forty years plus of Zen and Krishnamurti, as one who has had an adventurous, interesting story to tell, to remember. Actually, it’s still happening; it is still utterly strange and wonderful and horrendous. Living in a world run rampant with insanity is a challenge to sane people. I don’t believe it possible to “know thyself” since it is clear to me that “self” is a constantly changing, moving, ephemeral thing, if even that. So what I “do” is to see if I can come to terms with whatever it is I am seeing as “myself” in the moment and my “being in the world,” whatever I am seeing what “the world” is in any particular moment. I have become a bit of a reflection of light on an undulating wave upon the surface of a vast, endless ocean. As “a matter of fact,” I had an interesting dream a few months ago:
 
I awaken laying on the bottom of a small coracle (a round Welsh boat) floating upon a great placid sea. I should be uncomfortable but I am actually quite comfortable as I look up at the blue sky and gaze in the distance at the endless glistening waves. I just sit there placidly myself as the day passes. I have no thoughts but simply see what I see, as if I am the blue sky and the endless waves. As the sky darkens and the sun sets, I lay down and fall asleep. Then I dream I am being born as a tiny baby. I grow from baby to childhood to adulthood to old age and then death. And then I wake up in the warm sun as I lay on the bottom of a small coracle. Every day I float upon the sea and every night I fall asleep and dream again that I am born again. Every single night over endless time. And every dream is wonderful in its joy and utter sadness and profound drama. I see that this particular dream of all my dreaming is more than just a metaphor or a jumble of images in my brain.

HOW I BECAME A HIPPIE ... AND OTHER THINGS

 

HOW I BECAME A HIPPIE: A CHILD OF THE SIXTIES … AND OTHER THINGS

While parked on West Cliff Drive today, I saw what might be described as “hippies” parked nearby in a beat-up old van with a sliding door. Two guys and a girl, probably in their early twenties, trying for the “60s hippie look” though not really hip enough, compared to how it once was. The guys had big hats and they all wore colorful, mismatching, though not raggedy clothes, nor were they particularly naked. The girl had a blond streak in her dark hair and was seriously reading a book. In their midst, sitting starkly on a bench was a large glass hookah. I had the urge to tell them stories of “how it was” but didn’t. I would’ve told them that fifty years ago the whole of West Cliff Drive would’ve been full of parked vans and buses with friendly hippies, in states of colorful, raggedy undress, and running naked down on the little and big beaches. There would have been people playing live music on acoustic instruments and drums, perhaps even a sitar or two, with dancing everywhere. And I would have told them that I appreciate that they are trying to emulate something that once expressed “freedom” as well as “youth.” I would also have asked them to tell me their stories of “how they became hippies.” I was once an absolute hippie in appearance and in lifestyle (though there were definitely different hippie lifestyles). Being able “to become a hippie” was a choice that I made wholeheartedly, though very few of my friends did. This is my story of “how I became a hippie,” and how I have been there the whole rest of my life.

 

It would be fascinating to interview thousands of “old hippies” and find out just how they got there, to what was called “the counterculture.” I was such a hippie by the time Woodstock happened, that I was just “too cool” to go (I lived rather close by in Ithaca) and mingle with “all the teenyboppers from Long Island.” As a “back-to-the lander” hippie, I eschewed such popular, “stoned-out spectacles,” preferring to follow my own band, NRBQ, and read Steward Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, along with a little Nietzsche and Hesse, as well as Be Here Now. My hair was down to my waist and I kept writing materials stashed in my beard. New York State troopers, profiling “hippie druggies” stopped me several times, but neither my wife nor I took any drugs, not even marijuana. We lived in the mountains outside of Ithaca, using oil lamps and hurricane candles, cooked over a fire outside, even in winter, and heated with a woodstove. We were Montessori teachers and then I worked for Tompkins County CPS (Child Protective Services).

               But I have rather plunged into the middle of a story that I believe should be told “from the beginning.” I suppose it would “make more sense” that way. One of the primary reasons I am writing this is so that my life actually might make some sense to me. But for me, and I’m sure many others, “becoming a hippie” was a choice to “not make sense.”

               The great majority of my friends, of whom I actually had two, though I had numerous high school classmates, did not become hippies, but more or less followed in the footsteps of their parents in Albany, New York. I was rather different than the “normal” kids for a number of reasons, as I see it. One reason, that has very recently dawned on me, is that my parents were “mixed,” somewhat racially and definitely culturally. My sense of it is that when people marry (or link up, as it were) with different kind of people, the children may actually “mutate” and bring out the best qualities of each different “side.” My “Italian” father (who was descended from Norman, that is, French descendants of earlier Vikings, Sicilians) was stationed in Paris, Texas early in WWII, where he met my mother, the youngest of eleven children, descendants of Scots-Irish and Native American (Cherokee-Choctaw) blood. Not only racially but also quite different culturally, my mother had an “indigenous,” if you will, perspective on life, quite different from my father’s traditional Italian way of seeing things. Her grandfather had also been a Choctaw medicine man, for whatever that’s worth.

               There is also the fact that I was born six-weeks premature and then kept in incubation, in the same kind of box with a lightbulb that incubates chicken eggs, and without bonding human contact for at least six weeks, which seemingly had the effect of both delaying my development and creating autistic-like symptoms, which my father read as defiance, which led to his abusive treatment or avoidance of me, though much of my childhood.

               At age seven we moved into a house in which a man had committed suicide less than a year prior to our moving in. He had hung himself in what was now my bedroom. And he initially appeared quite visually in front of me, totally freaking me out, and then toning his visits down to a ghost-like appearance. We commiserated rather frequently for more than a year and I was quite aware of his situation “on the other side.”

               These influences on my early life certainly provided me with a predilection to view life from quite different perspectives even as a very young child. My father was an enigma to me: I did know he loved me but he was also quite physically abusive. I became aware that when he was being abusive, he wasn’t “in this right mind”; I could literally see his thoughts and that he was on the beach (Normandy) in the midst of battle or trapped in a house serving as a field hospital (he was a medic) in a forest (Belgium in the Battle of the Bulge). I was seeing into his thoughts in his PTSD episode.

And he was a very well-respected pillar of the community and looked up to by family and friends. Thus, I was quite able to see through the false social veneer at a very young age. I think those with similar sight were prime candidates to become a part of the counterculture.

               But by the time I was in late-grade school and then high school, I had become quite able to socialize; people liked me and I enjoyed socializing. I had learned to enter into this world well enough. I had good looks and was popular enough to become Vice-President of my senior class (of which the President always had to be a “jock,” which I wasn’t). I went to a Catholic high school with Irish, German, Italian, Polish Catholics and was taught by a Catholic male teaching order, many of whom preferred corporal punishment as well as boys. I was not interested in school and was quite mediocre, though I avidly read all sorts of science fiction. A girl, older than me, from a “high-class” school in a well-to-do area outside of Albany saw me from her school bus and pursued me. As my first real girlfriend (since I was finally ready for such a thing), she was very adventuresome and actually wild. She was absolutely open to sex, telling me that she was not a virgin because she had stepped out of a rowboat and had been impaled by an oar, which sounded totally reasonable to me. She was a parachutist and would also jump upon the railing of a bridge a hundred feet off the ground and gleefully, nonchalantly walk along from there. She brought me into an old cemetery and just as nonchalantly walked into an open mausoleum and pulled open a drawer with a skeleton. She also brought me spelunking into a deep cave (Haile’s Cave, in the Heldebergs) which was full of bats and often flooded, turning off the flashlight and sitting in absolute dark silence for long periods. She ironed her long dark hair so that it would be flat and shiny. In the early sixties, she was what I saw as “kind of a beatnik,” wearing black and black mascara (which later was called “Goth”). Her older brother was a beatnik who did drugs. She invited me to go with her to Bob Dylan’s house over in Stockbridge (MA) a number of times, but I was such a dumbass, all I could say was, “I’m not goin’ to no beatnik fag’s house.” I could have stepped directly into the highest of hippiedom but I was still too much of a "greaser" and had to wait a few more years. She also brought me to Lake George to hang with the Hell’s Angels when they rioted and took over the town until the New York State Troopers invaded in full force. She opened my mind to “the unknown” and made it an utterly interesting adventure.

               About this same time, perhaps as a result of my science fiction reading, which had led me to study astrology and the “occult,” I became a member of the AMORC (Rosicrucian Order) and began “esoteric” experiments like using my “mental powers” to cause a candle flame to waver, increase, decrease, or even go out. I did this in my bedroom. Once my mother poked her head in the doorway and commented that she used to do that same kind of thing with her grandfather when she was very young. (She also told me the story of how Bonnie and Clyde came to her house in the country when she was five or six and gave her mother a dollar to spend the night in their car in the barn; they were done in two weeks later.)

               In my first year in college, when I was in Fenwick, one of the men’s dorms, I actually performed a “black mass” in my dorm room in order to “conjure up a demon.” I studied up on such in the BC library that actually had an archive with original books on spells and such dating from the Puritan era and the Salem witch trials. I had a work-study job at the library and had access to the archives. Then I went to a “witch’s bookstore/center” in Boston, called, interestingly enough, The Coven, where they lent me a “proper black mass crucifix” (which must have been “desanctified”), a book on conducting such, with instructions on drawing a pentacle, the proper kind of chalk, and selling me a gigantic black candle. I went through the process, the room became dark and smoky, my roommate freaked out, I stepped out of the pentacle, and was punched in the face by what appeared to be a cat-like human face with red eyes with an iron fist, seriously bruising my jawbone. My roommate had already fled the room. After this, I was thrown out of the dorms and had to find another place to live.

               When I went to The Coven, the older crones there sent a younger woman, Cassandra, to work with me in my black mass endeavor. We became friends and she invited me to her house, which was more of a “compound,” in Charlestown, an old part of Boston. The house was ancient, built in the 1600s. She told me that her direct descendants were two witches who were hung in Salem in 1692 and that being a witch with certain powers was “something inherited.” She was literally bewitching. She introduced me to the I Ching and showed me how to use it. We talked about the war in Vietnam and I told her that I was not one who would kill people. I hadn’t thought much about the draft (to which I would soon be subject) and, using the I Ching, she said that for me to participate in the war, killing or not, would “destroy my soul,” and that I would, risking prison, not go.

               While in college I began participating with the SDS on the BC campus and eventually parading with the anti-war groups in Boston, particularly on Boston Common where we were attacked by baton-swinging police on horses. We carried North Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho Chi Minh.” It was quite exciting and led me to question “Amerikan” (as we spelled it at the time) society at the time. Many of the people I paraded with were Marxists and carried Mao’s Little Red Book (of which I still have my copy).

               But I was not yet a hippie. I had longish hair and a big mustache and LSD posters on my bedroom walls and wore bell-bottoms and flopped, lacy shirts and Edwardian double-breasted suits to class, but “weed” just made me very spacy and put me to sleep. Then I had a series of seven dreams on seven nights in a row. In these dreams I was underneath a heavy wooden door with a small square grating through which I could see. I was in a pit like a grave and people dressed in 18^th century Irish garb were throwing rocks down on the door, crushing me. (The one man, Giles Corey, killed in the Salem witch trials as a “witch/wizard” was “pressed to death” in a similar manner in 1692.) In each progressive dream, I see a red-haired woman standing on the edge of the pit and sternly looking down at me with a slight smile, as if it’s all a joke. In the final dream, I see a small gravestone with a name and the year 1728. Back in the modern moment, I am leaving my apartment and the person who moved in below my apartment a week earlier is coming in the front door. I recognize her as the same red-haired woman who was in my dream! But all I can do is just gape at her; it’s just too mind-blowing for me to comprehend. And then she smiles at me and says, “It’s been a long time, Seamus.” Seamus, the name on the gravestone! She and I become the best of friends, spending at least a year in almost daily discussion and smoking dope and listening to “acid music” and working on the Ouija Board, and amazing each other with what we know. In this time she chewed up so many men but she never chewed me up. We went out dancing all the time and she was this Twiggy-style model who was most sexy but I resisted because I absolutely knew her ferocious power. She was too sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and intelligent to be “hippified,” or labeled in that way. She was wild in her mind and taught me how to be wild in your mind, how to be without boundaries in your mind. We still talk every two weeks, over fifty years later. And she is still a witch.

I am attending a music festival in the wheat fields of Sussex, England, with a British friend I met on a train. Timothy is the lead guitarist for Marianne Faithful, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. We jammed (me playing a pretty decent “harp”) and he invited to his home in St. John’s Wood in London. At the festival, thousands of young people are pushing and straining at the gate as it opens. It is a large meadow surrounded by a high wire fence with uniformed security guards located along the fence and high towers with spotlights. It is dusk, the gate is now opening and the crowd is pressing forward. Suddenly the blinding floodlights on the towers shine upon the crowd, moving over the crowd. When the light hits me, I freeze in terror, as if I am going to die in that moment. Through the dust cloud enveloping me, I see people with shaved heads, wearing rags, some with yellow and black stripes all around me. My stomach is sucked in; I am ravenous with hunger. I am afraid and confused. Then, just as suddenly, I am back in the crowd of young people at the festival. This experience happens one more time when the spotlight shines on me again. This time I realize that I have had a flashback to a past life as a Jew in a concentration camp. More reveals itself to me in due time.

After this, I lived in Amsterdam in the Netherlands with a Dutch woman I “saved” from some predatory American boys at the Van Gogh Museum. Amsterdam in 1969 was the hippie paradise of the world, full of hippies from everywhere in the world, all smoking dope—except me. I was entranced by the magical kingdom around me and was beginning to look the part, but, as always, I was a bit aloof. After being there a while, I abruptly left, leaving my ersatz lovely girlfriend, Derusha, with only a copy of The Prophet. I really didn’t quite know “what to do with people,” and found myself identifying too closely with Harry Haller in Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf. I had discovered the “lost” element of being a hippie.

               By now I had been exposed to aspects of “the unknown,” and I found it to be quite attractive to my nature; I wanted to know more and see more, yet my proclivity was to be isolated and reclusive. I wanted to be able to “see into myself” and “know who I am.” And I had a strong aversion to “authority” and considered myself to be “antiauthority,” though not particularly rebellious or defiant. I did not want to be involved in fighting in Vietnam. I believed that I had no right to kill anyone, especially someone in Vietnam. I thought that I might have willingly fought in WWII, or to defend people I loved, but I had experienced aspects of “the other side,” and now had had more “experienced moments” of a “past life,” and had studied and meditated upon the notion of “the soul being reborn in many lifetimes of many people.” I didn’t know if I believed it or how to contextualize it for myself, but I did know that I did not want to be killing others or supporting others in this. I am aware that I was very naïve, in regards to what happens in the actions of the U.S. in the world, but I still realized that I had to “do something.” In due time, I began to participate in the Friends Service Committee and attending weekly “peace vigils” (in which people threw things at our group, once hitting a girl in the head and knocking her out). I wrote to President Nixon and the IRS, telling them I would no longer pay “war taxes.” I marched more seriously against the war now. I applied for Conscientious Objector status so that, rather than participating in fighting in Vietnam for two years, I could do “civilian service.” I had to gather evidence of my beliefs against killing, which was rather difficult. Mostly I had to “think and articulate” my thoughts. I used my Catholic education (God forbid) and compiled lots of Bible quotes, which gave the appearance that I was actually religious. In fact, the last time I had gone to church which was with my parents and sister at Easter Mass, the Bishop stood in the pulpit and announced to the congregation that the Catholic Church supported the war in Vietnam against the “godless Communists” and that Catholic men (read “boys”) could be soldiers (read “and kill”). My reaction was to stand up and walk out, apparently saying “fuck this” on my way out, as my chagrined and embarrassed parents told me. The Albany Draft Board, consisting of seven men of my father’s age, every single one of whom had been able to avoid the WWII draft, granted one out of eight applicants who sought Conscientious Objector status, with the other seven going to prison for two years. I thought, “Well, if my CO status is not granted, I can go to prison and meditate and read like Gandhi did in prison.” Until I met a Quaker guy who told me he was raped every single day for two years when he went to prison.

               The day arrived when I had to present my case for Conscientious Objection to the Draft Board. My long hair was sprayed and plastered down under my collar of the white shirt with the tie and suit jacket I wore. I was not prepared to submit or be a paradigm of sweetness to these cowards. They had in fact invited, illegally, an Army recruiter, Sargent O’Day, to my defense. When they introduced him, I said, “I refuse to acknowledge your military title and will address you as Mr. O’Day.” And when they started calling me a “coward” as well as “unchristian,” I told them that my father had a Bronze Cross for his heroic efforts in WWII (which he did) and that they should be ashamed of themselves for “chickening out,” and reread letters from priests saying how “devout” a Catholic I am (which was total bullshit) and quoted all sorts of non-killing quotes by Jesus, I think my insane righteousness and utter contempt for them may have somehow shamed them. Or else the fact that my father would publicly embarrass them for their cowardliness (which he actually did at the Draft Board as he stood on a desk and absolutely lambasted them later in the day in front of all the secretaries and staff that worked in the building, after I told him what they had said to me.

               Taking the stand as a Conscientious Objector and risking going to jail did change my life. I had gone against the current. I knew people who had escaped the draft by moving to Canada (which was pretty close to Albany, New York), and perhaps that would have been a good choice, but I was proud of myself and how I successfully stood up against “the man,” making myself into a “man” in my own eyes, and my father’s too. My mother, being a “Southern girl” could never wrap her mind around what I did. The guys in my high school had bragged about how they would “go to Vietnam and shoot some gooks”; a few of them never came back. I was absolutely antimilitary. When I was “serving” my two years at a “residential institution for emotionally-disturbed children” (along with my faithful wife who also ended up working there), the FBI knocked at our door with drawn weapons and told us we had committed a Federal offense by not paying our income taxes, and that unless we paid “right now,” they would put us in handcuffs and haul us off to jail. I was almost interested in taking them up on their threats but I did not want to inflict such on my wife, who was terrified. I was still such a punk that I wrote a check to the IRS for $236 (including penalties and fines) and drew a picture of hand with the middle finger sticking up right on the back of the check, though it was quite small and they didn’t notice it.

               At this point I have not “mellowed”; I am more of a “yippie” (see Abby Hoffman) than a hippie. Hippies are definitely mellower. That is yet to come. There are still stories to tell that comprise an amazing lead-up.

               We are living near Millbrook, New York. Several years earlier (1967ish), Timothy Leary, living on the Hitchcock Estate, was raided several times by the New York State Troopers. The estate was a center for LSD research and also a residence for 29 adults and 10 children at the last time it was raided and shut down. I had heard that it had been finally shut down because local teens had become involved in taking LSD there. When my wife and I snuck into the gatehouse which consisted of a large room over the arched stone entrance, the whole area had become very overgrown with jungle-like foliage and was still guarded by State Troopers, some with rifles, around all the buildings. We first fought through the vines which now occupied what had been a garden with all kinds of statues. We uncovered large statues (six feet or so) of Alice in Wonderland, the Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, as well as unicorns, turtles, and other mythological creatures. The entrance to the gateway was guarded so we struggled through the bushes and climbed in a window that opened onto the spiral staircase leading up the room where Leary lived. It was a beautiful room with many small windows, built-in bookcases, and even a built-in bed frame. The room was empty and clean except for one thing: in the center of the room was a size 14 brown leather wing-tip shoe with the tongue out and no shoe laces.

I am working at an old institution, established in Victorian times. It had initially been an Episcopalian orphanage. It had been hit by a cholera or smallpox plague that killed almost all the adults and children. The atmosphere of the institution, which was composed of many “cottages” with up to twelve children, was scattered over many acres in a birch and pine forest. I noticed that when I went outside at night, I felt oppressed, even assaulted, by the darkness, as if something was literally grabbing at my clothes and even shoving me. In fact it was frightening but I didn’t know what it was. My wife actually saw figures in the dark and avoided going outside at night. For a number of years I had been studying the occult as well as Hindu philosophy and teachings. I had read that “ghosts” live on the “astral (or emotional)” level and were attracted to people whose consciousness was astral in nature. Interestingly, at that same time, I started meditating with a Theosophical group, and was able to “elevate” myself to a “mental” level and thus was able to develop a kind of “immunity” to the ghosts, or so I thought. Then a number of events occurred that were very disturbing. First, in broad daylight, I noticed approximately twenty people dressed in black Victorian Episcopalian clothing standing at the edge of a meadow in the dark shade of the forest. Then, one night our little apartment became very cold with an inky smoke and my wife and I were visited by some very malevolent ghosts, who I could not only feel but who materialized right in front of us. We were terrified and had no idea what to do. Eventually they left. About this same time, the young boys in my cottage were also being assaulted by the ghosts, who came to their beds at night and pinched them as they materialized in front of them. The boys would come to my room crying and terrified. My meditation had worked but only a bit. I kept lights on for the kids and we decided that we would “pray to Jesus” to protect us and make the ghosts go away. I told them to tell the ghosts, “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave here and move on.” We practiced over and over until they felt that they could follow through with it, even if they were afraid. They were angry about what the ghosts were doing as well. They called on Jesus to “stand with them,” told the ghosts where to go, and it worked. None of us ever saw or felt another ghost around us again.

               One of my great concerns at the institution was the treatment of the children by their child care workers/house parents. Some of these people were totally unqualified to be caring for children and were physically abusive. I was appalled and wanted to find some way to educate these people in proper child care. The institution was non-union and I believed that if they were unionized they could be properly educated through the union. I research training provided by unions and found that the AFL-CIO would be a good candidate. So I contacted them in New York City and they assured me that they do and would provide such training. I went to meet them secretly and found myself, a quite hippie-looking man with long hair down to his waist and a big bushy reddish beard, sitting at one end of a long oval table. At the other end was a short Italian man literally in a tight-fitting sharkskin suit (who had to be Joe Pesci in another life), with two guys in black suits on either side, wearing white shirts and stylish ties, packing a gun in a shoulder holster. This was like the Mob. At this point he told me what I had to do: I had to organize the house parents in secret and get them to join the union by having them literally sign on the dotted line. If I didn’t do this, he would “send his associates to further advise me.” My heart was in my throat and I had to agree. So I went back and made the rounds among the house parents, a number of whom I discovered were actually German refugees from post-WWII (ex-Nazis). Two other Conscientious Objectors joined me.

Now the story gets particularly weird and then tragic. One of these workers was a follower of Eckankar and claimed to be experienced in “astral travel,” which is kind of like Harry Potter’s “cloak of invisibility” or of being like a ghost. He knew from his girlfriend, who was the private secretary of the CEO of the institution, that the CEO was embezzling funds from the institution, and decided that he would “astral travel” to the CEO’s home on the institution grounds to see what he could find. He asked my wife and to come with him. We had never done this and didn’t think we could, but he said it was easy and to let him guide us, which we did. We moved in our “astral bodies,” which was like not being in the physical body but, rather, being a kind of ghost, in which you are able to “move” and to “see” as you move. We moved though physical obstacles like walls and doors, and could see the rooms in the house as if we were looking through clouds; everything was rather grayish and out of focus. We found nothing in particular but both my wife and I remembered seeing the exact same things and layout of the house. I’ve done this a few times over the years but it’s so strange and dream-like that it’s hard to believe.

The administration of the institution found out our “secret plan” and the institution policeman, who was an ex-cop and did wear a pistol and had a rifle in his truck, did his best to follow us at night. We had to hide fast and then desisted from our attempts to talk to house parents (which probably informed the administration in the first place). I received some intimidating calls from the AFL-CIO guy but, in fact, the campus of the institution was actually guarded, especially at night, by armed officers, both to keep people out and to keep the residents, some of whom were older teens and sought to escape, in. And one night, one of the guys I was working with in the union-organizing was killed in a car accident; it was discovered that his brake line had been cut.

As a house parent, I worked with a group of 12 young boys, aged from 4 to 10, in a cottage setting. Most of the kids were from Harlem and had been removed from their homes for their own safety, due to drug use and to drug-related crimes, or negligence or abandonment. There was an on-campus school with young, inexperienced, white teachers. My kids went to school and were both “uncooperative” and “out of control.” My own belief was that had they been white, such a “problem” would not have arisen. So the psychologists and doctors in the administration prescribed Ritalin for every single kid, which I was to administer to them. After the first day, they came home like zombies and went to sleep. Then the weekend came and the next morning we had a meeting in which we made a deal. I told them that if they cooperated in school and behaved properly that I would give them treats (like ice cream or hot dogs or no vegetables or pizza) every day and that they would be able to stay up late on weekends and watch Creature Features and have banana splits and popcorn and the like. So the deal was struck: they behaved, the teachers and psychiatrists and doctors were quite self-congratulating, and I flushed the Ritalin down the toilet every day for almost two years. After my friend was killed, my time was almost up and one Thursday morning I told them, right after they had once again congratulated themselves, that the boys hadn’t taken any Ritalin but had decided to improve their own behavior. I was immediately threatened with arrest and then reminded them that they might not want to go this route since I could just notify the local press about what they had done (and were doing in other cottages with other children). So they merely fired me (and my wife) and sent us packing.

While at the children’s institution near Millbrook, I had begun participating in a California-based Theosophical group that followed the teachings of Alice Bailey, a more or less “renegade” Theosophist. The group meditated on “the soul level” and studied the teachings of the “Hierarchy” and Djwal Kuhl as “consciously channeled” by Bailey in the 1920s. I was totally up for it and everything resonated with me. Theosophy, started by Helena Blavatsky in the 1880s was a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism, and what was called “esoteric Christianity”; it had a definite air of Jungianism. It also spoke of a “World Avatar” who was expected any time (since its prepared Avatar, Krishnamurti, had left it at the altar). I had a mentor who led me to believe that I might be that “World Savior”—which was quite problematic to a young man who had just married a beautiful Welsh woman who wanted to have children. A part of the Theosophical teaching was celibacy, and since I was planning on being the World Avatar, I believed it to be expedient to go that way. We had a little house in the mountains outside of Ithaca and I slept literally on the mountaintop I owned up in back of our abode. And then I was “moved” to leave on what turned out to be a six-week “soul searching” journey alone. This was not a good move. When I returned my wife ended our relationship and happened to have another man living at my house. I honored her wishes (still in my pride and self-deception) and I was devastated. No longer believing I was the Avatar, I still “kept to the path,” though in deep depression. This “back to the lander” was now alone with the land.

In those days, when a young person ran up against what I now had to face, there was only one alternative: go to California. I went to live in a “growth center/commune” in Berkeley, called the Living Love Center, led by Ken Keyes, author of The Handbook of Higher Consciousness, among others. I learned and experienced every New Age thing there was to learn or experience. Eight hours a day I was taught everything there was to know that was occult or yogic or psychological or magic or artistic. It was far and above Esalen at the time, attended by the Silicon Valley wizards, the Manson crazies, Buddhist teachers, Indigenous shamans, yogis, pre-Scientologists, Silva Mind Control, and then LSD. I went from being a “back to the lander hippie” to being a truly Californian “trippy hippie.” I watched all my chakras open to the very ends of the universe and beyond, watched and heard the earth breathe, saw everything turn into pure atomic energy as it pulsed and throbbed, made the clouds move and the sun shine, walking Telegraph Ave and the UC-Berkeley campus accompanied by either Pan or Mephistopheles. Then, after too long a time taking purple microdot, I stopped eating, lost eighty pounds, started seizuring, and stopped cold turkey. Then, after stealing Ken’s girlfriend, Nicole, I was ejected from the Living Love Center, eventually ending up living with a woman artist on Masonic and Asbury in SF.

Now I was a full-fledged hippie and was supposed to be enjoying it. There was a difference between “East Coast hippies” and “California hippies”; the East Coast people were far more intellectual whereas the California people were more hedonist. In Berkeley I had begun to “sit,” that is, to practice Buddhist meditation, at Dharmadhatu, Chogyam Trunga’s group, a strange bunch that smoked and drank, just like him. And then somebody took me down to the Tassajara Zen Center in Carmel Valley, behind Big Sur, and I liked that. These people were clean and bald and quiet and tranquil, or so it seemed in comparison to myself. My “out of this world” experiences were becoming much rarer. Then along came est and Werner Erhard. For me, this took the cake. I not only “got enlightened,” the women lined up at my door, so to speak. I got all cleaned up and discovered that you didn’t need to be a hippie to have “free love” (though it was much the same in my college years, to be honest). One just had to be “present” and “forthright” and so I learned well how to be a “sensitive male” and perhaps even was somewhat. But in working at the est Center in SF, I discovered the emotional and physical abuse that was glorified as “honesty” and exited as quickly as I could, moving back to Berkeley, where I was literally pursued and harassed by est, as if I could not be allowed to leave the cult. But, matching nastiness with nastiness, they finally laid off me. However, that said, I had learned how to “be in the world” and play that game properly, thanks to est. It was Werner who said, “Understanding is the booby prize.” Such a trickster, Jack Rosenberg, like the the rabbit in the briar patch. I understand and appreciate hard lessons.

 

I had changed. I no longer looked like a hippie. I realized at this point that “being a hippie” was more truly a state of mind, a worldview. On my “honeymoon” in Colorado and New Mexico with my new wife, we got into a heated argument in Manitou Springs, and I, as I had done once before to “gather my wits, took off into what was literally the wild blue yonder. I ended up becoming a monk at the Bodhi Om Mandala Zen Monastery in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. They shaved my head and I sat in my black kashaya robe for four hours at a time in the outside zendo built over the mountain stream that ran down to the desert below. I learned to cover my bare feet so that the tarantula-like spiders would no longer creep out from under the floor to bite my toes. It was a most solitary Zen sangha; the monks were silent and kept to themselves. I “sat” for eight hours a day all tolled and worked at the monastery most cleaning. Only once was I sharply and loudly stuck upon my shoulders by the jiki-jitsu with the long hard keisaku, which had the effect of altering my state of consciousness, not unlike the effects of peyote, which heightens the senses and instinct, creating an intense state of awareness of and connection with the natural world, as if one was a rabbit. One day, during kyogyo, the walking meditation, in which we walked in single file following the jiki out on the pavement in front of the monastery, some local yahoos stopped in their pick-up truck, climbed in the back, and started laughing and throwing empty beer cans at us. In a split second, the jiki, with fourteen of us black-robed monks walking as one unit, within inches of each other, turned on a dime directly facing the locals and began speeding towards them. In a nanosecond, their eyes bugged out of their heads and they zoomed off, never to return. Weeks flew by, summer became fall, but no rain so close to the desert. I had become a bona fide Zen monk. There was a natural hot springs at the monastery. Every evening, all the monks and nuns met there, stripped naked, and bathed absolutely silently in the springs, watching the black sparkling dome above us. In time, I got food poisoning and was extremely sick and weak. After a few days, no one even noticed or did anything to help me; I left in the middle of the night and drove back to California where my wife was waiting for me at a Hindu ashram, Kayavorohana, (where we had been married) outside of St. Helena in the Napa Valley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

as waves upon an endless sea...

That I could know that I have lived for 74 years and know because I actually remember, I actually have clear memories in my body, my mind, my heart, my soul. I have equally clear memories of lives I have lived before, though I have doubt because I cannot prove it was “not just my imagination.” But, considering what I’ve experienced this lifetime and can prove, I actually no doubt about the ones that came before and most likely will come in the future. The soul is on the ride and plunges into this form and that, hopefully with some forethought as to “getting there” and “being here to get there.”

 

I sit with certain intentions, with an open mind of sorts, “waiting on the Lord,” as it were. Now I’m more willing let thoughts come and “let them be”; the computer has to catch up, has to reboot itself, make sense of what has arisen and been absorbed. Then to digest, to organize, which is to have a sense of comprehension in the face of utterly overwhelming complexities. One still must ride the crest of one’s existence. Then the wave rolls over and crashes, one is thrown down, smashed, drowned; then to rise up again to the next crest of the next wave of one’s own existence. And the waves come until the ocean itself fades and vanishes. We are as but waves upon the endless sea. 

MY MULTIDIMENSIONAL LIFE

My life has been tempered by numerous experiences of “the other side(s).”

I begin by listing events with approximate age. I am now in my mid-70s.

I should note that there was no use of drugs in these occurrences.

 

1.     Ghost, age 6-7. A man who had hung himself in what was my bedroom approximately 6 months to a year before my parents bought the house, appeared materially to me initially but because I was so frightened by his appearance, changed to more a ghost-like foggy figure and visited me regularly for more than a year, almost every night. There was a record of a news article in the Times-Union of such a suicide at the address of my home.

2.     Ghost, age 10. After my grandfather died, I saw him the next morning puttering around in his garden in his backyard. I was looking out a second-story window. I found fresh footprints from his Italian rattan pointed shoes in the fresh dirt of the garden.

3.     Ghosts, age 16. My girlfriend lived in a refurbished old 17^th century schoolhouse in which the children and teacher had taken refuge in the cellar from the local Indians. They had planned on escaping through a tunnel with a trap door. The Indians, however, came in through the tunnel and killed them all. From the first floor above the small door in the floor that led down a ladder into the cellar, I heard furniture being moved and children’s frightened voices. When we opened the door into the cellar, it was untouched and empty.

4.     Demon, age 18. When I was in college I was interested in “black magic” and wanted to “conjure” a demon. With several witnesses present, I performed a “black mass” in my dorm room and a demon did appear, looking rather like a child-sized black cat with a human face and red eyes.

5.     Past Life, age 20. I lived in an apartment in my later college years. This event began with a repeated dream that unfolded over seven nights. It occurred in 18^th century Ireland (1728 appears on a gravestone with my Irish name engraved on it). I am in a gravelike hole with a heavy door on top of me with an iron grating through which I can see out of the hole. People are throwing rocks down upon the door, crushing me (which is how male witches were dealt with at the time—which was repeated in the Salem witch trials which occurred a bit North of where I was living). The same woman appears in each dream, standing above the hole and looking disapprovingly down at me with a steady gaze. On the eight day I am going down the stairs from my apartment and see that the new tenant who has moved in is the SAME WOMAN as in my dreams! However, I do not make the connection, having no belief or awareness of anything such as past lives. The woman stops when she sees me, smiles, and says, “Seamus, it’s been a long time.” I have no idea (at the time) what she is talking about. But more awareness does come to me in due time.

6.     Past Life, age 22. I am attending a music festival in the wheatfields of Sussex, England, with a British friend whose house in am staying at in St. John’s Wood in London. There is a crowd of thousands of young people pushing and straining at the entrance to the festival, which is a large area surrounded by a high wire fence with uniformed security guards located along the fence and high towers with spotlights. It is dusk and the gate is now opening and the crowd is pressing forward. Suddenly the blinding floodlights on the towers shine upon the crowd, moving over the crowd. When the light hits me, I freeze in terror, as if I am going to die in that moment. Through the dust cloud enveloping me, I see people with shaved heads, wearing rags, some with yellow and black stripes all around me. My stomach is sucked in; I am ravenous with hunger. I am afraid and confused. Then, just as suddenly, I am back in the crowd of young people. This experience happens one more time when the spotlight shines on me again. This time I realize that I have had a flashback to my past life as a Jew in a concentration camp. More reveals itself to me in due time.

7.     UFO, age 24. I am walking in a country lane near when I worked, and feel as if I am being watched. I look up between the trees and see what appears to be a small black cigar-shaped object hovering above me. I cannot tell how big it is because there is no reference point behind it. I makes no noise but follows me for perhaps a half-hour before it just flies off at an angle and disappears.

8.     Ghosts, age 25. I am employed as a child care worker and houseparent in an institution for “emotionally disturbed” children. It is an old institution, established in Victorian times. It had initially been an Episcopalian orphanage. It had been hit by a cholera or smallpox plague that killed almost all the adults and children. The atmosphere of the institution, which was composed of many “cottages” with up to twelve children, was scattered over many acres in a birch and pine forest. I noticed that when I went outside at night, I felt oppressed, even assaulted, by the darkness, as if something was literally grabbing at my clothes and even shoving me. In fact it was frightening but I didn’t know what it was. My wife actually saw figures in the dark and avoided going outside at night. For a number of years I had been studying the occult as well as Hindu philosophy and teachings. I had read that “ghosts” live on the “astral (or emotional)” level and were attracted to people whose consciousness was astral in nature. Interestingly, at that same time, I started meditating with a Theosophical group, and was able to “elevate” myself to a “mental” level and thus was able to develop a kind of “immunity” to the ghosts, or so I thought. Then a number of events occurred that were very disturbing. First, in broad daylight, I noticed approximately twenty people dressed in black Victorian Episcopalian clothing standing at the edge of a meadow in the dark shade of the forest. Then, one night our little apartment became very cold with an inky smoke and my wife and I were visited by some very malevolent ghosts, who I could not only feel but who materialized right in front of us. We were terrified and had no idea what to do. Eventually they left. About this same time, the young boys in my cottage were also being assaulted by the ghosts, who came to their beds at night and pinched them as they materialized in front of them. The boys would come to my room crying and terrified. My meditation had worked but only a bit. I kept lights on for the kids and we decided that we would “pray to Jesus” to protect us and make the ghosts go away. I told them to tell the ghosts, “In the name of Jesus Christ, leave here and move on.” We practiced over and over until they felt that they could follow through with it, even if they were afraid. They were angry about what the ghosts were doing as well. They called on Jesus to “stand with them,” told the ghosts where to go, and it worked. None of us ever saw or felt another ghost around us again.

9.    Ghost, age 25. I visited a friend in New Bedford who lived in an old house where the wife of a whaling ship captain had died. I was sleeping on the couch and noticed a woman leaning over me in the dark. I thought it was my friend. I talked to her and then she just vanished.

FIGMENTS OF OUR OWN IMAGINATIONS

 

We live our lives. We follow our stories as they unfold and unravel. The story of oneself is the web we weave, like the spider, from our body, from our notions of ourself. Our living is the very path we make of ourselves. It a circle that continually flows from itself into itself. And we spin seemingly eternally. It is the story of ourself, of our life. We follow it, we are it; it flows from us. It reflects us to ourselves and we reflect it back as ourselves, like two mirrors reflecting their images back and forth perpetually, but the images arise only in the reflecting mirrors, reflecting nothing but the mirror image which has no actual substance. We are images produced as such in our own imaginations, which go so far back as to be solidified, substantialized as memory, even as experience. We attempt to define “ourselves” as “something,” as a substantial thing. As we either fail in that, if we are honest, or invent a character to star in our story, we may also find that we can be satisfied with “an idea of ourselves,” as if such an idea were actually real rather than imagined. And we find others who think similarly and with similar kinds of images, and then “imagine a greater image” agreed up by a group, which provides a solidity, a path, a story one can sink one’s teeth into and gather sustenance from it as if it were real. And this is what we do, even who we are: figments of our own imaginations.

 

 

I Like the Idea..

I like the idea that there is a God who rules the world and the heavens. I like the idea that bad people go to Hell -- forever. And that good people go to Heaven. I like the idea that God is punishing me for my sins. This makes all my pain purposeful, meaningful. I like the idea that God is vengeful enough that he actually thinks about ME and MY sins enough to give me extreme, tortuous pain to make me pay for my wrongs now while I'm still alive. That's compassionate rather than sending me to Hell with its eternal pain. I like the idea of angels and demons, of right and wrong, of honor and dishonor, but mostly of the fact that stories are MEANT to be told and heard. Because for some reason I am just FULL of stories; utterly melodramatic stories that make me laugh and cry and inspire me. 

I have been doing Buddhist zazen for forty years and I am now realizing that I DON'T LIKE ZEN OR BUDDHISM because they don't appreciate melodrama or good or bad people and really don't tell stories. For them it is all just phenomena and illusion and samsara. So when I die, I just vanish. Buddhism does teach reincarnation, which makes total sense to me and which I can attest to as being real and true. But Zen is very unconcerned with reincarnation or time or being, leaning more towards none of that, Emptiness. 

Can I possibly swallow the B.S. of belief and superstition and stories and melodrama as presented in good religious traditions? You're darn tooten' I can! I can enjoy a good pretending that makes me happy, a nice story that Jesus loves ME! I may know it's absurd but life is absurd, humans are absurd as well as insane (though a real Believer doesn't think such things or even hold those opinions). Can I even pray to Jesus? I may always have to preface my prayer with, "Lord, I'm not a believer but I can pretend well enough. So perhaps, even though you don't exist and God doesn't exist, you can still listen and answer." 

I like the idea of being "righteous" and feeling it. I know someone who has completely duped himself into believing his own B.S.. He quotes from the Bible as though he personally knows God who wrote it and believes he does. I don't think I could deceive myself so well as that, but I can play along and feel good and be good and go to Heaven when I die. I like the idea of a God who punishes my ass for my sins and makes me whole again after I suffer. And, believe me, I do suffer in this poor old body. And, what's more important, I count my fucking blessings.

What If the Southern States Had Seceded from the Union? What would have happened?

The southern states were allowed to secede from the United States in 1861 without causing a Civil War with its immense loss of life. The Union tried to bribe the border states who had slaves not to join the southern Confederacy but failed. Most of the Western states and territories who had slaves also seceded and joined the Confederacy, though the northern states still had twice the population of the Confederacy and almost all of the heavy industry in America. The Confederate States of America still had cotton and tobacco, and traded primarily with Britain who profited from its own cotton-weaving mills throughout England.

The North had its heavy industry and its population largely of European immigrants. Some Western states, such as California and Oregon, with few slaves, sided with the North, whereas the mid-western and southern states with slaves sided with the South. The Confederacy planned on invading and occupying its southern neighbors, such as Mexico and the Caribbean, though there were few resources in those areas, and the Confederacy would have to purchase all its machinery and weapons from England or from the North, though the North would sell them no armaments. However, the South did have some shipyards to construct a navy and merchant vessels. The South held its millions of slaves for the production primarily of cotton. The South did not thrive; they had to support their slaves and they possessed a large population of poor, uneducated, unemployed and often unemployable whites numbering up to five million. These whites were not allowed to migrate across the borders to the North, so many of them began to move to the mid-west and western areas, putting great stress on those economies in addition to the stress they created in the South. The North continued to thrive with its well-established industries, which included cloth mills which were sold much of the cotton from the South. So the North as well as Britain were profiting from slavery which lowered the cost of cotton to them.

The North didn't want the slaves to come North; they didn't want to support them and were themselves racist. Lincoln had proposed to the Blacks in the North that they have their own country to be purchased by the United States somewhere in South America to which all the free Blacks would be sent, but the Blacks had balked at this, stating that they were more American than the white Americans, for their families had been in America for three hundred years. Lincoln knew that the slaves of the South were its primary resource and that cotton would die without their labor. The North sent Blacks into the South to preach rebellion among the slaves and also secreted arms to be used in such a rebellion.

But very soon, within five years, the Southern production of cotton began to fall drastically due to overused land that was no longer productive and also to drought, as well as a restive slave population that had on occasion turned on its masters and burned plantations. The Confederacy was imploding. And then the border states of the Confederacy petitioned for reentry into the Union. And states in the Confederacy began to rebel against their government led by Jefferson Davis and the plantation owners. The plantation owners began fighting among themselves. As their need for slaves diminished as their cotton diminished, they tried selling their slaves, whose value became nil. But they were afraid to send their slaves to the North, rightfully fearing the vengeance and violence of hundreds of thousands of slaves freed from their plantations. Within five years the Confederacy folded. Britain, with no reason to support them without cotton, rekindled friendships with the North. The South became worse than a third-world nation: deadly family feuds, religious wars, culture wars erupted everywhere; people starved. The mid-western states became battlegrounds for these same warring groups. Every southern state now turned to the North for help, for food.

The North eventually allowed all the Confederate States back in the Union. The slaves had all found their own freedom when the plantations failed and they became obsolete as human property. The North broke up the plantations and gave land to the Blacks, which was greatly resented by the large population of poor southern whites, who were eventually coopted by the old powerful families of the South, and were willingly used to "put the Blacks in their place" via the Jim Crow laws. This became much easier as the southerners again took control of the American Congress and Senate and pushed their racist policies. And so it remains to this day as is evident in the Republican Party.