Introduction

In the early seventies, when I was in high school, I began reading spiritual and human potential writings - Hesse, John Lilly, Fritz Perls, Castaneda, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Alan Watts, R. D. Laing, Ram Dass. I had experimented with LSD as early as age 15, but at that time it was strictly about being high, rushes, "laughies", and low-level "hallucinatory" phenomena. I had been aware of LSD from an early age, via articles in Life magazine, the media, etc. -- I was born early enough to remember its career as a 'mind-expanding' drug before Tim Leary and the hippies co-opted it as the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' drug of the counter-culture. I had a great deal of fear and respect for it (appropriate for a 15 year old!). It was only after one of my friends chided me (he had dosed first at Woodstock. I almost went, but that's another story), saying, "David, it's not as if you see God or anything". So my initial 'set and setting' was very tightly bracketed to the material plane. However, in my senior year of high school, another wave of experimentation began, this time informed by a more sophisticated reading of the possibilities. It was a subject of debate as to whether such experiences as described by Castandeda were even accessible by us, white middle class kids that we were. In this phase, the drug and the challenges started getting stronger; we often tripped 'co-ed' (no sex though!), unlike our earlier boy-gang experiences. Prior to the experience recounted here, I had my first trip where I was 'shot', all but completely (but not quite, thank you, John Lilly) unprepared over the 'threshold' of the spiritual world ... or what passes for the spiritual world under the influence of LSD (no debates here, please). This first experience merits a telling of its own someday. Needless to say, I hadn't begun to integrate the meaning of that first experience: but it prepared me for this one, even more horrific in some ways than the first, but also, more glorious and initiatory. I had one or two more or less 'normal' trips between that and this one. After this trip, I was able to move more or less confidently in completely 'other' states of consciousness - sometimes getting in a bit of trouble, but usually able to explore more and more. I would put LSD 'on the shelf' a couple of times, only to pick it up more or less under the influence of social pressure in college, as previously LSD-naive schoolmates (not everyone grew up in such a 'progressive' environment as Staples High School c. 1972) would invite me into their journeys. My last LSD experience was a somewhat sad and lonely one (I had just broken up with my girlfriend) at a Jackson Browne concert in 1975. Between that time and 1983, when my oldest child was born, I had one by one given up my various recreational drug habits and today, I don't particularly recommend any of them, starting with alcohol (which I never particularly liked anyway), to anyone, but I do have to acknowledge that psychedelics have played a huge role in my own path and they remain a challenge and problem for society and spiritual culture. They are incredibly potent. My own experience was that I 'got the message' and decided that the challenge of earth life was how to learn to embody spirit based on the 'normal' mix of food - air - sense impressions that are ours without psychedelics.

In and around the Lake

The plan was conceived at Rick's house the night before. I was keeper of the tabs; Steve would provide the wheels. Rick knew the place. It was during the last week of class during Steve's and my senior year at high school - June, 1972; I was seventeen years old. . .

Early that morning, I spent a few minutes in the playroom of my parent's home, experimenting with some of the hatha yoga exercises found in "Be Here Now," - which I had been reading in fits and starts recently. The gesture was significant, having never attempted to transform or consecrate myself via ritual practice, although I had worked at self-remembering and self-observation as an outgrowth of my reading of Ouspensky.

Steve and Rick were there soon enough, in Steve's red VW bus, ostensibly to take me to school. They sat in front, with Steve driving. I sat directly behind, half-way between the two front seats. Excitement similar to going to a concert or ballgame enlivened our greetings. We departed, but about a half a mile away from my parent's house, as we pulled up the road headed for the country, we dropped - a whole tab each of orange barrels, or orange sunshine. This acid had been around for most of the spring in free supply, and was already known as being of the most excellent quality, from our own experience.

Our ride northwards would take twenty or thirty minutes; we were anxious to be on our way to "getting off," which we knew would take less than an hour, directly upon our arrival. We were headed to an area reservoir, one never visited before by Steve or I, but known to Rick. As we came within a mile or two of the place, we turned down another road heading westward, over a railroad bridge and past the village center. Once past the town, we forked south, and a half-mile down the road turned right down "Huckleberry Lane."

The road was rutted and narrow, almost one lane, and crowded by the plants and bushes overhanging upon either side. Down a hill we traveled, past the drives of two or three homes. At the bottom of the hill, the road broadened and smoothed a bit, and veered left onto a causeway that crossed a large pond - almost a lake. This was the "lower reservoir." We crossed in a minute, and then turned left along the far bank, then hugged to the right as the road climbed along what proved to be the far side of the "upper reservoir." The road was rutted again, and dipped up and down through what was now a dense wood. We looked for a place to park, close to the upper reservoir. Quickly Steve pulled in to the right into what was apparently a well-worn parking spot.

We weren't off yet. But we were thrilled. We were free, and we knew we would be traveling in a world unlike that which our youthful lives had accustomed us to. We headed into the thick of the wood; Rick brought with him his frisbee, which we began to toss as we headed in. The wood was too thick to see the water from where we stood, but a few Frisbee tosses in, climbing as we went, we came by the water's edge.

The upper reservoir, smaller, oblong, but wider at one end, where it spills down to the lower, was probably little more than a mile in circumference. Its banks were varied; near where we stood, a small wooded shelf of land jutted into the water, dimpling the reservoir with a slight elbow. To our right, the banks were hilly, with rocks protruding where the weather had washed the land away. Across from where we stood, the face of a tall, stony cliff stood fifty feet or more above the water; such are the traces of New England's glacial past. All around were trees and forest, and though there were homes within the mile from where we stood, for all the eye could see, it was the native wilderness.

Our plan was simple: we would circle the water along its edge. We tossed the Frisbee ahead, as the way narrowed and widened again as we sought or avoided the small rocky ledges.

Playfulness - unremarkable as that of any youths on their last day of hooky before school's end - began, but soon mingled with the wine of the giddy first effects of the drug. A household dog had tracked us, and joined our game of catch. We chattered, our words sliding towards intermixture with gibberish. Somehow this resulted in our christening the dog "Ben Joe Dog." But our companionship with him was short. I was drawn to the water's edge, climbing onto a small shelf upon which had grown a tree, now naked of leaves and branches, but solid leaning towards the open space over the water. Its trunk formed a Y, which drew the focus of the eye down the length of the reservoir, into the sunlight, framing a view of the landscape of trees and water beyond.

I was definitely getting stoned. My head was humming, my gaze transfixed. Suddenly, with an inward breath, I seemed to breathe in from the sky - or cosmos? - a draught of fluid, soul-energizing light, laden throughout with an electric spark, pressing next within as if to escape again through my pores after blending first with all the passions that lay hidden, simmering deep within me.

"Hydrogen 12" I instantly remarked to myself; categorizing the experience according to what I understood of Gurdjieff's teaching regarding the higher psychic elements within man's nature. "Hydrogen 12" is the "element" that feeds the soul in higher states of consciousness, corresponding to what John Lilly described as "satori +12, the blissful sharing body" in The Center of the Cyclone. I thought no more on this, but became momentarily enraptured as the play of soul and world energies stabilized (somewhat!) within and without me - then turning to join my companions as we continued round the lake.

Quickly we were at the far end of the reservoir. A small creek was its source. We could have forded it in one of two steps, but a tree trunk had fallen to conveniently form a bridge across. Although we were fairly stoned, we were not unable to focus: by centering ourselves and trusting our feet and legs to do the work, we all crossed the bridge without a misstep. The centering and effort at self-command combined with the delight in accomplishment; and next I led the way up the broad wooded hill on the other side. The acid was in full rush now, and I began to dream myself as being "at one" with nature around me. Each step, each glance, each breath, seemed in harmony and perfect synchronization with nature around me. Thoughts of the "Tao," as I superficially understood them, sprang up. But at the same time, I knew that something wasn't quite right - "I" was still present, willfully deeming itself the source and center of the ripples of seeming harmony. I could feel the pressure of my inflating ego filling up my soul - disharmonizing the whole with its ludicrous misproportion.

But the distraction of the climb's effort deflated me somewhat, and as I neared the top I was no longer quite so "puffed up" with myself. The broad hill, leading us away from the water, narrowed to a pathway through the trees heading to the crown of the rocky hill back by the water. I hurried, anxious to regain the view of the reservoir now from the heights. The final step was blocked by a branch and a turn up the last step to the top; I pushed the bough aside and lunged forward to the peak.

I lunged, stumbled and was stunned altogether, as my gaze suddenly expanded from the narrow dark of the wood to the ethereal freedom of the sky. A luminous part of me escaped and continued forward as I stopped - spreading out over the lake, over the trees below, into the cloudy bright and blue sunlit sky, out beyond the earth, into the space beyond, till it touched against the end of the world and rippled back again to me. The ripples loosened every thing of the earthly world from heaven's stern grip, and made their finer parts free to breath the now heaven-drenched air.

And suddenly my soul stood forth within me, withdrawn like a sword from the scabbard. A second man, roused from sleep, from the dream-world of his wonted dwelling, young, but older than my birth and native to a land beyond this earth. Sensed, seen, felt, yet unrecognized as might be our childhood friend, long separated, in older age. And thus, though hidden part in shadows of confusion and unknowing, he spread a canopy of unearthly thought before my brain. And now my gaze resettled on the scene below, my comrades having come.

What first had pierced my shell-of-self on the water's other shore, as intoxicating force, now fifty (better seventy five) feet above riddled my brain as thought. Thought cosmic; stern, majestic, all penetrating yet all-profound and unfathomed. And though now suddenly possessed by powers of mind of subtlety of tens by tens-fold normal, I was just as sudden commanded solve the now-remembered riddle of my self. Though glimpsed, my second self submerged within the depths of obscure thought, beyond which dimly dwelled the newly-sensed father-source of all.

My "normal" self-on-acid teetered before me, as within the surge of thought rocked from side to side. With a few words I stayed loosely engaged in the activity of my friends - each of us in our own state of stoned amazement before the view below. The first question was, how did I get here?

I had been here, in this state, once before - an earlier trip a few months ago when the orange barrels first 'rolled into town'. That had been my first step over the threshold, into a terror - and a knowledge - accepted but largely uncomprehended in the intervening months, wherein I had resumed my "recreational" tripping capacity. The intervening time had also been deepened somewhat by a more comprehending reading of various works of such spiritual seekers and teachers as were found in print at that time.

Someone - and it must have been me - had conspired to trick me into "falling" into this state. The intentionality was different from wanting to go the movies, then finding yourself there an hour later. That makes sense. I had wanted to get stoned in the woods (well, really stoned), and now was looking at my brains, as it were, spread out all over the table, trying to figure out how the pieces went back together. Part of me had led my steps to this point - and part of me had played the sucker.

Well there was nothing to be done! I was still two-thirds "materialized" in the here and now - might as well keep moving along. Although our conversation struggled to articulate our situation, we knew we were mostly either dumb struck or babbling. We moved on around the lake. As I turned, looking down the lake again, I sensed the bright sun and imagined behind it was the "shining void" of Buddhism. Like pilgrims, climbing stony peaks such as this, the seekers of the world (all of mankind) struggled and climbed toward it -- towards nirvana, towards moksha, liberation, release -- through numberless lifetimes. Did this life find me closer, or farther, from the goal? And forward towards it tread my steps.

From the top of the cliff, the hilltop broadened below, and we were led into a thicket of short, bushy trees. The Frisbee still seemed to be with us, and could snake its way along the ground ahead as we plowed our way through the branches which whipped at us as we let them loose again. In seeking the path of least resistance along the way, we traveled as if through an invisible maze formed by the thick and thin of the branches. Our playfulness returned, and an animated, luminous picture world, where each sight of earthly form was painted with a living world of pictures wontedly unseen, hovered about each of us, and everything we rested our thoughtful gaze upon. The little wood sloped down, then ended as the hill grew steeper. And so we climbed a short way down, finding ourselves again on the water's edge before a second small shelf of land that jutted into the reservoir.

The pines above formed a tent. Their needles textured the ground below, in earthen browns, and the sky above in forest green. Their trunks served to communicate the above to the below. . . Rick and I sat and talked, our thoughts, words, and conversation flowed between the seen, and gesturing, pointed gropingly at the world of unseen thought overflowing our brains.

Thought could travel to soul-pictures of those not present. I pondered words of a woman friend. I had tried to share with - or impose upon- her my recent-found interest and conviction concerning a new reality pressing in upon us, and, in part, opened rightly or wrongly by our drug experiences. She knew I had a crush on her, and this played into her distrust. . . Some question had been gnawing at her, which she would not confide in me. Sitting there, stoned on acid, my soul being stripped naked before the universe, I felt I saw either: her better soul abandon her - or abandon her efforts to reveal herself to her earthly soul in this lifetime, gradually to reveal and announce herself - because her earthly soul would not will itself to suffer this; or perhaps, in retrospect, I saw her soul abandoning me as a possible enlightening anima-figure. Something had been knocking long upon her heart's door with troublesome effect. I told Rick I now knew what she had meant when last she spoke with me. I didn't speak it, but what I thought I knew was that she had decided not to "awaken" in this life; or "awaken" to me -- her eternal essence as a "heavenly woman" in my world, her spirit instead resuming its repose in the unborn cosmos.

Meanwhile ... Steve had stripped himself literally naked. He was going skinny-dipping in the reservoir. We saw him splashing around by the shore, and contemplated joining him, but our mood was indolent and we were absorbed in a shared reality detached from the attraction of sport.

Steve had drifted farther from shore without our notice. He was a strong swimmer. Suddenly he called to us. "Bring my clothes across. I'm swimming to the other side."

How long this took to register , I can't say. In the numb instant before it did, Steve had dived ahead, and with a few powerful strokes, was already past the point of recall. When the shock had dissipated and the reality came into focus, my panic was instantaneous, as, it seemed, was Rick's. We were all very, very stoned. Neither Rick nor I would trust ourselves to swim the maybe one hundred yards, and we feared for Steve. I felt I should save him, but would drown myself in trying! And suddenly, every childhood fear of drowning pulsed within me - and carried me back to earliest infancy, and past to the watery womb! The same thought wave that I had projected across the water and into the skies at the peak overlooking the reservoir, now traveled across my life, to birth, and rippled back again. Gathering Steve's things, we ran to the stony water's edge - the shortest route around. With each step, fear, shame (at my lack of courage in rescuing Steve), and confusion scrambled my inner world. My adrenaline pumped. We looked up time to time, now glimpsing Steve, now losing sight but running ahead. A pre-vision bored itself within me: Steve drowning, sinking to the bottom - his body being brought out by divers. Tomorrow's paper: "Youth drowns at reservoir while on LSD." Out of the headline news and into my life.

Two thirds of the way around, we looked to the far shore ahead and saw Steve had emerged onto the land. He had climbed upon a boulder on the water's edge, and sat there, smiling, his face beaming at us like the sun. Relief came, stilling the original forces of agitation, but leaving the turmoil active.

What follows now cannot be place in proper time sequence. A series of vignettes remain in memory, with approximate order linking them together.

I must have been firstfinishing the journey round the edge, when, the immediate cause of panic having vanished, my adrenaline-charged brain refocused on the spot across the lake which we had just left behind us. There seemed to stand my last thoughts of my woman friend, only now platonic contemplation of her extra-earthly soul was tinctured by the amorous longing latent just below the surface. . . yet attainment of such a heart's desire seemed infinitely distant; and as fraught with peril, as the farther shore. My blood pulsed with each step; out of the rhythm, I heard the music calling: a song heard a thousand times before, now echoing through the depths of memory and desire: "Let's spend the night together/Now I need you more than ever/Let's spend the night together now. . . " with all of the Rolling Stones raunch dripping through me, and tugging at my heartstrings like tiny razors shredding me within. The distant shore, the erotic ideal. The ocean between: death.

Steve was still breathing hard when we caught up with him. He was naked, and as he panted, now lying on the grassy bank near the spillway to the lower reservoir, one could see soul-forces pulsing in and out of him, streaming through his body as it gasped its fill of oxygen. He seemed full of vital, sexual, youthful potency. After Steve had dressed and caught his breath, we lay there together in the sun. Rick commented something about being on planet earth - men traveled still to the moon in those times. He may have read something in the paper about some heavenly astronomical event and been remarking it, or just talking in wonder. Again, something within me pulsed for into the far reaches - the farthest sphere, wherein worlds thrilled and echoed in harmonious communication, the perspective where earth is truly one of numberless cosmic worlds - and then traveled to earth again, into the ground, causing earth to quiver with world-life. I looked around at the vibrating world, at the trees standing before me. They quivered with particles of life. I felt them, and conceived them as the atoms of physics. But staring at a tree, I locked my gaze on the smallest particles of life within. The surface of the tree opened like a gate, sliding open horizontally like an elevator's doors, proving a window within. Another gate opened within, top to bottom; another gate within that, each composed of finer and finer tissues of the tree's body. Within each step, I peered deeper into the microscopic structure within the tree, until the last gate opened revealing two or three particles, as small as the atom, but made of pure, vibrating white light, orbiting, dancing, and oscillating beside each other. Entranced one minute, I lost a grip on myself the next, and shook of the vision, dropping to my knees in fear that the fabric of the world would collapse before me into a million particles of light.

At this point, I had lost all but the last shred of a "reality principle" and wandered puppet-like through promptings of fantastic visions and gestures of my two friends. The reservoir was alive with churning life, desire, soul, wherein one's self could drown. It was laden with overtones of birth, of death, of rebirth, and sexuality.

And then I sensed I was being silenty urged by Steve and Rick to cross. I could feel their thoughts coming towards me. My turn was next to suffer the initiation Steve had won. Yet as before, I trusted not my strength to bear me across. . . should I wander down into the water, I would surely drown at the first depths.

The sense of urging persisted. Go, they seemed to say. You will be reborn. But first you must die. Suddenly lost, forlorn, I felt that my soul had broken its winding-spring: the contents of my life were overflowing, spilling into the world around me, floating away, drowning in the greater life. I must reemerge from the world-ocean, the world-womb. I would be driven out, across, by the father god. He would rebind the world into a properly enclosed seed of a human being . . . he would pierce the world with a thrust of his spear, a formative poke of his finger In the shattered sands of my world, a needle-injection into my head of enfolded human life, to ripen in the ocean-womb of the lake before emerging again. He must penetrate into the womb; I become the seed again.

Panic was intense. I would not submit. I faced the water, and looked back across my life to a now-remembered birth seventeen years ago, and across beyond that into a world of soul and spirit, a world of divine origin: left behind but still present. This world I was still parted from, though glimpsed; even as suddenly, deeply, longingly, I felt the world of woman was parted, across a gulf, which suddenly had divided the world into two chambers. On my shore was the world of men. Opposite stood, shrouded and drenched in glowing warmth and comfort, was the world of woman. Images of all my woman (they were girls then) friends their souls and spirits - seeming now as all the beauty in the world - looked out across, as through a window, at us, at me, and my soul recoiled in anguish thinking never these two worlds were to unite; never would I penetrate to the bliss and warmth on the other side.

Having shunned the test, my worth diminished. No longer was I fit to be reborn, only to die. Laughing, Steve and Rick pointed to a horse turd we suddenly came upon as we resumed our circuit around the lake. It was rich and steaming with life in the sunlight, yet rank and low. . . it was I, fit now only for cosmic manure. . . worthy of death because my life cost the world more than the value it received. On we moved, somehow fording the spillway.

I contemplated the prospect of exiting this world. Suddenly each little life seemed surrounded by a shell, a world of its own, an egg, wherein, all-interpenetrating, our various lives were shared yet shrouded in solitude in the face of the spiritual world. To leave the life of those, my family, mother, friends, with who I was inter-grown -- I would outfold myself from each dreaming life. Their world would continue. Mine would spread out over all, beyond, into the periphery of theirs.

We were nearing our starting point, yet there were many paths in the woods between where we stood and there. Before entering the woods, we lay on the grass again and surrendered ourselves to the sunlight. Rick melted into the sun. To me, its piercing rays were all-seeing, all penetrating into my soul, into the darkness of all my deeds of weakness and petty greed and selfishness. I turned from it, inviting the clouds to interpose. In gentle compassion, the light would withdraw, leaving us to the cooler dark of the clouds.

The wood broadened, the way was only somewhat hilly; the tress hung overhead. I was not coherent. I needed minding. Rick resumed his companionable role as we wandered: Steve explored further ahead.

The trees were alive with spirits. We were near a gap between worlds. Beings from worlds of light and color would peer at us between the naked lower branches of the pines, and we would peek at them. Was there a vehicle, (a rocket ship - ?), was there a cosmic guide, to take us wholly to these far yet seeming familiar worlds? Yet still, I felt chained to the earth, to myself.

We had arrived at a fork in the path. I sat dismayed, not knowing which way to go. Rick was unconcerned with whichever path we took, he felt in harmony with his feet and the path before him, felt grounded in his own value and merit. I was in despair. I felt I was returning to a decision I had faced again and again, always returning to it. I looked at Rick and at the scene. . . I saw myself as if from without. Rick commented something casually about reincarnation: "... I guess we just keep coming back until we get it right ... ". Suddenly behind us both stood selves of earlier lives, dozens, as layered, interpenetrating shadows behind our figures, the texture of each skinned with glints of light and color that seemed they could form into windows on the experiences of past lives. These lives had driven us (again. . . ?) to this crossroads. I experienced this a curse, as doom. . . incarnation itself as doom.

Steve returned. He could be seen strolling peacefully through the woods, the shepherd boy, playing on his recorder. He was quietly radiant and calm. Turning to us he smiled and said "Everything's dying," and truly, even as the lush green of springtime was just ripening into summer around us, Steve had perceived the autumn-death of the world. And perhaps his own autumn: for Steve's destiny was to die at the age of twenty four, six short years later.

Together, we turned toward the lake. A rocky ledge, a small hilltop, weather eroded pathways between, we found on the banks two or three younger high-school kids, long haired and likely stoned. Our state was instantly transparent to them. Stoned again. Theirs was simple boredom tinged with despair for their generation, lost without a map. Teenage wasteland.

Each time we approached the water, my self-reproach and the silent urges of what seemed a higher part of my friends had prompted me to the brink of certain self-slaughter in the reservoir. Looking down at the water side again, the pathway down seemed a reverse birth-canal into the womb of the lake.

Somewhere, from some upper perch, I had glimpsed the roadway around the reservoir and thought I saw heavy, yellow-painted earth moving equipment - with powerful hydraulic "arms" and "legs" (as on a back hoe), with strength to tear at the flesh of the earth. I now heard the snorting of such machinery, just down at the water. In my vision, a gate was formed of such hydraulic, crushing limbs - a gate that formed a maw of death, at the top of the birth canal, before the womb of the lake: a vagina of head-crushing power I was bidden to pass through.

I was at the ultimate extreme; it was do or die; my steps faltered downward. I took stock of myself and questioned, all in a flash, but suddenly rational: is this body mine to destroy, unworthy though its carriage (my self) may be? Did I create it? Was I not about to fall into the greatest sin of all? My youthful readings of Dante, the damnation of self-slaughter; sunday-school thoughts, Milton: was my human form but a creature, a created thing? Dimly on high, for my mind was almost blackened with clouds of doubt, despair, self cursing, it glimmered through: you life is not yours to destroy. In that moment, I willed that even should life's savor be lost to me, I would suffer my body to serve its destined task in the world.

I stood now at the zero point. I was empty of impulse. Still the clouds of darkness and unknowing filled my head. I was waiting for a new impulse. The world within and without was ready to respond for good or bad as I would bid it, could I but see the source of darkness and light was within myself.

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky, and they stand there. . .

So sang the words of the song "Roundabout," in my head, and here before me was the lake, and the mountains were hanging out of the sky before me, earth's foundation having vanished. And the band who sang the song called themselves "Yes," and like a river of light there poured into me the positive energy that I would wield to rebuild the world upon this affirmation. The thought sounded within me: "Yes!" and I could sense the presence, close yet as from afar, of what I suddenly felt to be a group of musicians who, likewise, had sensed this truth, and were reflecting its inspiration in their music. I captured for my own ,the recognition that I must be responsible for the positive or negative, good or bad, yes or no, of my world.

All was not done. Forces immense and powerful struggled still without me, struggling for my soul, for my destruction, but now in the world without and not within me. No longer prey to death through earthly self-destruction, raging above me in the spiritual was the world-all battle itself. Terrible forces rent and twisted at the web of creation: all ensnared were many my absent friends; they were seen in spirit, drunken, dancing to the tune of thousand toning beings., first seen in strife and disharmony. Our lives, the lives of all humanity, were as tunes inscribed on a cosmic music-machine - the songs engrooved, spinning our lives to the recorded tune, but wafting heavenward as a sacrificial god-intoxicating smoke or air, each dancing either to the inscribed score, or to the higher, freer tune that danced in the air above the music-machine, rippled into the air by the gestures, the downward gaze, of the dancing Krishna.

Each vision was glimpsed, through a crack in the worlds. The yellow paint of the earth moving equipment was now seen again as the sound of school children boarding their yellow bus was heard. This was the vehicle to school! The school of higher life, the school of wisdom, which now I was free to board, which I had boarded in pre-earthly life! Gratefully, I saw that I was being taught.

Looking out again over the womb-world of the lake, my awareness was sprayed, shattered, across the sky. Colored bits and pieces of my world welled like walls of ocean-waves, covering the sky with thousands of shards of light and color. My body was now (In a dream) a giant human skeleton, its spine laid down, bridging the length of the water, as if the keel of a huge ship under construction. Like gunnels, my ribs were formed above, embracing the sky. The creation of a new human form awaited the crossing of the lake, the crossing the will-of-gods, up the length of my spine, weaving the out-spread forms and forces of the surrounding sky into earthly, shrunken human form.

Still I wandered. Still my grip on the earth was slight. Upwards away from the water my friends guided me, up a path. As I mounted, I felt my life dropping away from me. Not violently, only left behind, as I ascended, dizzily, into new heights. My journey through to the new existence would lead me through my head, through my forehead. The dark clouds were gone, and a bright light shone in my forehead, illuminating my forebrain - a vast unused organ of higher thought. A band which previously had bound my head, constricting it to narrow thought, was loosed or broken, and light poured in as my presence massed before my head, standing again before my second self. My life and each of my steps today had been guided here, by him. The promptings of my friends, their thoughts, their lives - they now fore gathered there in unison, one being, one higher I to bid me godspeed. Their voices spoke within me, my voice within them. The solitude of the separate life-shells gave way to unity as each of our spirits deeply interpenetrated the other. I thought 'I' was dying, but now not by terror and destruction, but by slipping away, passing in to the unity within me, experienced in the communion with my friends, whose souls were present within me as close as my own thought. It was as if they had been living inside my head all my life, only now I could see them within me.

Yet I turned from there before the final step. The battle still waged without. Doubt still could chill my heart, and yet within were dark passions welling. I lay down, weakened, supplicant, worn down? My will was struggling forward. I lay down with head in hands, and buried my face in the earth, suffering myself to bury in the earth the darkness that now overwhelmed me, blotting out my sight, yet persisting in my will to bear it all. With roar and in deafening waves I was submerged, descending.

And then, in sideways, upwards glance, I beheld the majesty that stood beyond it all. Beyond the earth, beyond the stars, standing in infinite splendor and infinite might, stood the pure white column of the pillar of the universe. The world tree from which all worlds were hung like boughs. Spiraling round it, in sacred service, watching over the world of worlds, were mighty beings forged of the same light. IT was the spine, the axis, round which all revolved, through time immeasurable. The progress of the worlds was measured here.

Though prostrate, I could not worthily dwell but for a moment before it, although but a glimpse is to see the seeming all of eternal time and space.

And soon I was led away by Rick and Steve. Turning back across the lake, I saw the spirit-countenance of my woman friend, Beatrice-like, smiling full of promise and future greeting in the land of spirit that was to come.

Restored to my seat in the back of the bus, we departed. I was shattered. Gravity was being restored, and the pieces of my daily self were slowly sorting into place. The radio played a rock anthem as we left: Hold your head up, -- exhorting me to go forth again in to the world.

Driven home, I was fallen from the world of vision, though spirit poured and echoed through the world, reforming itself again into the land I had dwelt within so seeming comfortably that morning. As we retraced our path, the road let into town and nearer and nearer to my family's home, were I greatly feared I was to be left, still incoherent, on the front lawn. However, we just scraped my neighborhood in passing, driving by the familiar "Corner Spirit Shoppe" sign, which now seemed to betoken a new sense. We traveled to the beach. The hazy sky seemed to both mask, and dimly reveal in masking, the wondrous world that lay beyond ours. The Frisbee now spun through the sky as if solar-powered. The grains of sand on the beach, which I embraced, sifted , shoved, and poured trough my hands, was now the primal mother-stuff of the world.

At last, there was nothing to do but to head home, exhausted, on edge, but passable a self-possessed human. Sleep would not come, nor would the echoes of the drug silence, until fourteen hours had passed since I had begun.

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