I remember the day I bought two books by Alan Watts--The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are and This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience--and one by Ram Dass entitled Be Here Now. It was on a spring afternoon in 1970 during my freshman year at Rutgers University. I dropped the books onto the grass and sat down beneath a tree to examine their contents. In those early days of college I was interested in exploring ultimate philosophical, psychological and theological questions. You know the ones--What is the nature of reality? Does God exist? Who am I? What is the purpose of existence? I'm sure there were others. I was also intrigued by what I'd read about LSD and heard from friends who had dropped acid.
As I sat with my back propped against that tree in the middle of the green commons during a break between classes--my mind steeped in the ideas of Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers, in the discoveries of Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, in Spinoza's ontological argument--the world appeared brimming with beauty, mystery and wonder. I recall flipping through the pages of Ram Dass's odd, square-shaped book, the mandala on the cover radiating the message REMEMBER BE HERE NOW. Both Ram Dass and Alan Watts promised a distinctively Western slant on the Eastern metaphysical philosophies I was studying at the time. Moreover, they promised to make the ancient Vedic scriptures more comprehensible to a mind shaped, and at times numbed, by a seventeen year sojourn in the New Brunswick public school system. The authors also offered their own personal take on the psychedelic experience and its mystical implications. I had already read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and was familiar with the work of Timothy Leary. I shared a small off campus bungalow with two friends. I was ripe for experimentation, a vessel ready to be filled with a divine Gnosis.
More than 36 years have passed, a more or less orderly procession of days, from that spring afternoon under the blue sky of of my boyhood home, and the memory of that period in my life is strong still, and resurfaces in my reflections. As I sit in front of my laptop on the porch of a house built on a narrow spit of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Barnagat Bay, observing people pass by on their way to and from the beach and listening to the sounds of summer traffic, I know that the airwaves are filled with a stream of continuosly updated war reports transmitted via satellite feeds and broadcast day and night on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. The news reminds me of the same televised madness of the Vietnam war beamed into our homes some 36 years ago. Tonight I'll walk to the beach, sit upon the sand, gaze off into the night, listen to the waves break against the shore, and REMEMBER BE HERE NOW.
For more on Alan Watts and Ram Dass, visit the following links:
Alan Watts: Lectures and Essays
The New Alchemy (An essay from This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, by Alan Watts. This essay was written in 1960.)
A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? (This essay by Alan Watts appeared in LSD, The Consciousness-Expanding Drug, edited by David Solomon, 1964.)
Breaking On Through Again (Ram Dass wraps his expanded mind around the last of the truly taboo subjects--death and dying)
Ram Dass Interviewed
1 comment:
Traveler, your tale is well told. I too was such an under tree philosopher but I never took the leaps through psychedelic doors of perception.
My questions:
What non-chemical entrance pathways are there to this state that you have discovered?
Why do so many of McKenna's drug trips only get him to understand that drugs are the way, rather than leading him to insights that others can use without the chemicals?
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