"Going Down that Road Feelin Bad, Lord, Lord."

You know that feeling when you say, “hmmm, I think it’s just about time.”? There’s a sense that whatever it is that you are about to do it’s almost about time to do it. Then there’s that feeling when you’re lying in bed and you say to yourself; “Well, I’d probably better get up now.” And we rouse ourselves from the residue of dreams and go forth to do the work of our hands and our hearts; though often enough our hearts aren’t in it. It’s probably true that most people are doing things they would rather not do and not doing the things they really wanted to do. It’s also true that many people think their station in life is not appropriate to their talents. I chalk this up to going to bed as Donald Trump and waking up to shake a cup on the avenue. I’m not sure if it was F. Murray Abraham who first said, “Payback’s a bitch.” But he’s the guy I remember.

Although early on I wasn’t sure if I would even survive (and given the option of not surviving I likely might have taken it), there was a point later when I thought it just couldn’t get any finer. Life was a carpet of rose petals on the path before me. Then I remember the day, I was in Philadelphia (smile) studying at the Guru Bawa Fellowship and I realized that I was going to have to walk this so called path of rock and roll. I could see the uncertain stretch of highway before me. I went to Michael Green (now a famous author) and I gave him the wedding rings I have bought and told him that he should marry Sally instead. I knew she wasn’t going to come out a happy lady going the way I was headed. I left off my plans to continue on at Swarthmore and the idea that I would go to The University of Iowa after and I headed off into the brambles and thorns.

Twenty years later I woke up among the swine and thought of my father’s house. The climbing out was somewhat more problematic than the slow descent. The terrain you passed going in was viewed less than attentively; subsequently one doesn’t recognize much of it going back.

“Put a coin in the jukebox
I remember this floor
I remember I climbed up from it several times before.
There’s the road that I slept by,
There’s the cars I crashed in
And there’s the dream that unraveled
On my way back again”

“I’m Coming Back,” LV

One of the biggest perks about an extended insane frenzy; should this be the reality of the affair, is finding out that the only person you really hurt was yourself and that the damage just put new holes in the flute, thereby expanding the musical range. I’ve come to believe that a life lived, though plagued by mistakes and errors of judgment, is far superior to a life avoided.

I remember a vast extent of empty highway through a haunted Indian burial ground somewhere outside Palm Springs. It looked so small on the map, not at all like 35 miles. I had a companion but a state trooper came out of nowhere and took him away. Funny thing is that the trooper remembered me from an arrest several days before but left me; stranger than fiction. I was in the aftermath of an intense acid trip and so, when night fell on the desert all the ghosts and hobgoblins came out to play. They swirled in the air and crept in from all sides. The intensity of those hours cannot effectively be described here. A wonderful thing occurred. In the shivering trembling tension of the moment I turned and said, “How are you my friends?” And so I spoke to them all the way to the big highway where I sheltered in an underpass for the hour before dawn. An anthropologist picked me up and ironically smelled just like an ape; I’m not kidding... Still, thinking back, when I said, “How are you my friends?” that is just what they became.

Another time in a desert waste in Palm Springs, fully tripping and passing through the aggregate lower astral of those creatures made from the thoughts and lifestyles of the rich and decadent, a voice came into my head and said, “Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there can be no fear.” In the instant everything changed and every time it threatened to go back, Love came back in. Things like this made it possible for me to take large amounts of psychedelics and go anywhere with impunity.

Another time in Joshua Tree on about five hits of Orange Sunshine, Richard Yerxa and I, along with a fellow named Mark were standing near a mountain range when enormous holographic cobras appeared; twenty, thirty feet high (trust me, I was higher, heh heh). They sucked sand up into their forms and then blew it, through their nostrils, down to the Earth and dust dervishes appeared followed by some of the most outrageous matador work one could imagine. At one point Richard said (this tells you a lot about Richard), “I’m going to see what happens when one of them hits me. The dervish hit him and took him some feet into the air and then deposited him about fifty feet away.

Events like this would fill a book. Of course there are those who would say it was all a hallucination. I’m always amused at the experts who have zero experience that tell me why things are or were the way they are or were. I know what a hallucination is, I’ve had them. However the large majority of all of these experiences simply involved forces that exist outside the bandwidth of the senses clogged by materialism.

The downside is that whatever you see and experience in a heightened state will not remain. It hasn’t been earned in the normal state. And so, you either repeat it with assistance, or you go there over the route of determination and concentrated effort. You can’t storm the gates of Heaven. I’d rather it hadn’t taken me so long to grasp this. But I do find that I am moving rather more rapidly than I might have expected and such things will sooner, rather than later, be a part of my ordinary life. It was a tease from the future.

All this leads me to wonder whether I ever had any options at all. Yes, I’ve arrived where I am by a most peculiar route- but that is far less important than the location you arrive at.
I have found that if Love and a sincere spiritual drive fuel your progress you won’t go far wrong, regardless of the mistakes. Unfortunately for most people, a real zeal for spiritual awakening isn’t the primary drive of the effort. Only a few people have a determined intention toward the real goal. And it often takes a wagonload of pain to bring it on. The cost isn’t worth it to the majority. What’s strange in all this is the amount of pain they endure for no good reason at all.

No, I’m not suggesting you go out and take a big acid trip. Those days are gone. But I assure you it is an acid trip regardless. Why people will fill their lives with meaningless objects and expend such incredible efforts to impress people who don’t even like them anyway is beyond me. I understand you appear to be a fool by pursuing eternity; off on a quest for the secret heart of the universe but, I submit, it IS there. And it has the inclination that you should find it. It’s not impressed with half-hearted suitors however. You’d be better off trying to bang the waitress down at the pub than exposing yourself to the risks of your own insincerity. My advise, STRIVE HARD. You will surely succeed.

Right inside this moment, at right angles to everything else, is a doorway. It leads to a land that human imagination is not sufficient to describe. Not only are you welcome because it is his good pleasure to give you the kingdom, but you yourself ‘become’ a door and gain the power to bless and save humanity. Where you are, is moving inevitably toward a particular moment; you can’t escape it. One of these days will be the day. Can you really afford to be unprepared? You have no duty in life that exceeds this and any righteous duty is a part of it. Why disappoint yourself because you were afraid to look like a fool when the whole time you were a fool?


Unrelated footnote= Mr. Smarmy Powell says from Asia, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I think he’s holding some big-eyed orphan during the photo-op. My question is, “Hasn’t he seen what he helped create in Iraq?” The Tsunami came and went, Iraq on the other hand... and the Dance of the Crocodile-Eyed Hypocrites continues after this message from your sponsor; see local listings for time.