Learning from Drugs--LSD

My first and only acid trip of lifelong significance happened on the 19th or the 20th of June, 1965, on a boat in Seattle.  A little before nine in the morning, Hugh Tinling gave Deacon and Margo, and me, each a sugar cube with  an estimated 500 micrograms of  LSD in it, originally provenient (Hugh believed) from Dr. Timothy Leary, which Hugh had kept frozen for about a year in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator.  Deacon and Margo went to their bed in the foc'sle and had sex, and had--judging from Margo's afterglow--a wonderful time.  I went aft and lay face-down in my briefest of cut-offs on the hatch-cover over the main cabin for a couple of hours, soaking up the morning sun.  Having already acquired my tan for the year, I was not at all sun-burnt.  First, with my eyes closed, I began to reflect on the sermons of Meister Eckhardt that I had been reading the day before; how, if Truth could be separated from God, it would still be preferable to God. Then, ecstatically, I felt my Mind rise up from my body like a balloon on a tether, and while I looked down at myself (from about a dozen feet above my prone body), I suddenly saw that I was seeing all consciousness, all life--and death--like a river flowing.  I came down around noon, went for a swim, called Bill Weaver in Spokane and told him I was coming to visit. Which I did for several days, then returned to the boat for the rest of the summer in Seattle.  

The ecstasy has come and gone, but the basic point of view has stayed with me throughout my life: This/that is what the plenum of life/death is--and I, like a balloon on a tether, am its non-agential observer.

On a rainy evening in Seattle in October, in a spectacular instance of divinely guided serendipity, I walked into a used book store on First Avenue on my way home from work, and, without selecting them--barely looking at them--bought Vivekananda's Four Yogas, the fourth of which, 'Raja Yoga,' which is a commentary on the Aphorisms of Patanjali, became my meat and drink for the next year, till I had fairly memorized it.

A couple of years ago, reading the Wikipedia article on Ionesco (whose plays I had grown to love), I found this:  "Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, Ionesco was profoundly altered by the light.  He was struck very suddenly with a feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an overwhelming feeling of well-being. When he 'floated' back to the ground and the 'light' left him, he saw that the real world in comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action.  This also coincided with the revelation that death takes everyone in the end...." It's the only thing like my own experience on my first acid trip that I have ever heard of.  But you'll notice that, woven through Ionesco's floating, luminous experience, is an element of gratuitous (presumably Christian) dualism, and an inability to grasp the fundamental truth as I saw it:  That life and death are in essence the same cosmic force flowing into one another ceaselessly.  Poor Christians.  They will starve in the midst of plenty.