About the Author

Introduction

“Para llegar a Dios hay que aprender a ser humano.”

(trans) “To reach God, you have to learn to be human.”

– Alonso Del Rio

When I was a young boy, there was a stationery box on the shelf of my grandmother’s closet in her cabin by Lake Winnipesaukee. The box held hand-typed stories by my grandfather of his adventures as an Alaskan explorer and head of the United States Geological Survey there. The one story I remember was “A Canoe Load of Donuts.” Somehow, over the years, that box disappeared, and my grandfather’s stories are lost to the world. I want my grandchildren to have my stories, so I wrote this book.

Here is a collection of stories from my life that tell the tales of two awakenings. The first was a psychedelic-facilitated awakening to a Universe created and maintained, moment by moment, by a Loving Intelligence so vastly beyond human intelligence that it is hard to remember or even imagine. A Universe made of Spirit and populated by it, where everything is known—down to the quantum probabilities in every atom. There is absolutely nothing in this Universe that is separate from that Intelligence, since everything is made of it! I have sometimes wondered why it’s been so easy to believe in the reality of that Universe throughout these intervening years. From where I stand now, I have a felt sense that the indelible stamp of Reality was superimposed on that experience from within. It said, “This is Real… more real than the world you think you live in day to day.” And though I’ve doubted nearly everything else in my life, that experience stands as my one portal to Reality.

In the fall of 1969, for the first awakening, I was one of those hippies who followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on and drop out.” I chose to attempt to figure out how to wake up to reality and live as a true human Being, free from the shackles of the idiocy I perceived to be running the world. I consider it the single best decision I ever made. On the other hand, my father believed, till the day he died, that I had utterly wasted my life. My choice, however, opened my life up to a range of possibilities beyond the imagination of the collective, whose signature song seems to be that the purpose of life is to get a job, to have money, to buy things. When I set out on this journey, I had no idea of the scope of the task ahead of me. In 1970, I remember telling myself that attaining enlightenment would probably take two to three years. Ha! It would be almost two decades before I could even begin to discern the enduring habits rooted in childhood trauma within my own life, let alone attain enlightenment. Another thirty years passed before I began to feel reasonably free from the grip of some of those habits.

Only in the past few years, with considerable prodding and support from my spiritual community, including my children and nieces, have I come to realize how much the privilege of being an intelligent, upper-middle-class, tall, white male has played itself out in the stories of my life. I’ve begun to understand that I was born at the top of the mountain with a silver spoon in my mouth. How many kids get to go to a fancy prep school? How many streets have I walked in a foreign land at night without the slightest fear for my safety? How many times have I been pulled over by a traffic cop without imagining that I might be shot? How many times have I played my Native American drum or my Shipibo rattle without considering the ongoing genocide of those people?

The first awakening happened all at once, and was reinforced in several LSD journeys over the following year, though I’ve never experienced the same kind of revelations that blessed me at the beginning of my path. Longing for union with the Divine, I spent years grasping for that experience in vain. Now I have to wonder whether it was designed to light a fire under my ass rather than take me all the way?

The second awakening unfolded gradually over many years, marked by my internal realization that my deepest desire was to become a true human Being. It became clear, though, that becoming a true human Being requires more than transcendental experience, however exalted. It involves resolving the paradox that, from a non-dual perspective found with psychedelics, each of us is God. Yet, from a human perspective, each of us has to take responsibility for the choices we, as separate beings, make. For me, that paradox started to resolve as I realized that I had a choice of which version of God I wanted to be. I wanted to be a version of unconditional Love. But I wasn’t living as an embodiment of Love. I was living as a reactive, sleepwalking idiot who had a porn-addicted voyeuristic teenager in his shadow realm. I had to acknowledge that I was not in control of my own behavior. But if I wasn’t, then who was? The discomfort with the disparity between how I was actually showing up and how I wanted to be fueled a search that has led toward the second, ongoing awakening, which seems like it will last the rest of my life.

Following this path, I’ve learned that the answer to why I act the way I do lies more within my own neurobiology than my psychology, and certainly is not a compendium of character flaws! I now see that the behaviors that have felt shameful are adaptations of a super-intelligent nervous system to facilitate the survival of a severely traumatized infant. I have come to believe that a nervous system intelligent enough to know how to protect each of us from overwhelming intensity, is also intelligent enough to heal from those deeply embodied protections when we are ready.

Many of us ease our pain through some sort of addiction. Dealing with “personal” addictions, difficult as it has been for me, is orders of magnitude less difficult than dealing with our collective addiction to separation. In my ordinary consciousness, I experience myself as separate from my body, my people, and my world, painfully separate from the Divine. Most likely, so do you. Our collective addiction to separation is so profound that I wonder if we humans will be able to deal with it before it drives us to destroy the Earth’s support system upon which our very lives depend. I have come to believe that it is our trauma that leads us to feel so rigidly separate, not some genetic flaw or original sin. As we heal our trauma, we heal the world.

There is a form of spirituality long embraced by indigenous peoples, yet, until recently, mysteriously absent from so-called civilized cultures. This is a spirituality rooted in direct psychedelic experience facilitated by sacred plant medicines. Having a transcendent experience is not what qualifies this path as spiritual; it is the long, challenging work to integrate what has been seen “on high” with the realities of daily life that makes it spiritual. This path is unique to each individual who follows it. Although there are many threads in common, ultimately, each person choosing to follow a psychedelic path all the way will have to come to grips with the specific traumas that live within them. This is often referred to as “shadow work.” For each of us, the challenge is to understand and heal the consequences of our own and our collective neurobiological adaptations to the abnormal conditions of life.