tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32542970140962885132024-03-08T07:37:32.504-08:00Vintage TripperA hippie grandmother offers her true-life stories for the highest good of all lifeVintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-67486945377011402632011-01-15T14:52:00.000-08:002011-01-15T14:54:04.719-08:00Grandfather David and the Holy Man Jam, 1970<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The year, I believe, was 1970. My kids and I and several other hippies were living in an old mining cabin in the Tahoe National Forest when my friend “Pooh” showed up, inviting us on a trip with her to Boulder, Colorado, to a “Holy Man Jam.” This was to be a several-day event, with spiritual teachers from many disciplines giving talks and leading prayers and meditations. There had been a similar event at the Family Dog in San Francisco, maybe a year earlier, but I had gotten there late, just in time to participate with a huge crowd, all chanting “Hare Krishna” with Swami Bhaktivedanta. That was a very high experience, and I liked the idea of attending a few days’ worth of similar vibes. Pooh had a car and seventy dollars. I threw in whatever money I had – probably not much. We put it all in one pouch for everyone’s expenses on the trip and headed for Hotevilla, an Indian reservation in Arizona, where Pooh wanted to visit an old Indian she knew, Grandfather David Monongye of the Hopi, and invite him to come with us to speak at the Boulder Holy Man Jam. After a brief stop in LA for dinner with Pooh’s parents, we hit the road again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We drove on across the desert in the cool of the night and on to Hotevilla, Arizona, in the Hopi Indian Reservation. I didn’t know much about the Hopi at that time, so Pooh filled me in on some details. She told me that the name “Hopi” means “Peace,” that the Hopi were famous for their Prophecy, and that part of that prophecy spoke of the coming of a generation of white-eyes’ children, who would paint their faces and bodies, wear beads, speak of Peace, and seek out the wisdom of the Native elders. And this generation would be called a name that sounded something like "Hopi." <i>Hm-m-m-m, </i>I thought, <i>hippies paint their bodies and face - albeit with day-glo body-paint - and they wear Indian-style beads, and they do seek Native wisdom. And the term “hippie” certainly sounds something like Hopi. Hm-m-m-m. <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This was my first visit to an Indian reservation, and I had never really had a conversation with a Native American before. My own grandfather, Rufus Moody, was an Indian, but I had never known him, and he was rarely even spoken of in our family. So I looked forward to meeting some real Hopi people, expecting to find a red-skinned version of hippies.</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But Pooh <i>had</i> been there before so she was able to drive down the main road of Hotevilla, turn right onto a smaller road, and stop in front of an adobe house with a flat roof on the left-hand side of the road. We all went in, Pooh first. Grandfather David remembered Pooh from the last time she was there, and he greeted us all cordially. He was a small, thin, frail old Indian man, with a wrinkled face, thick glasses, a big smile, and graying black hair that came down over his ears. His wife, Nora, a heavier woman, sat in a corner. Pooh called her “Grandmother,” so we followed suit. There was also a middle-aged Indian man sitting in the corner but at this point I don’t remember his name or relationship to David and Nora. One of the first things I noticed was the poverty. The adobe home was humble – no electricity, no running water, simple wooden furniture, and not much of that. Pooh had stopped in town and bought some cornmeal, lard, bacon and a few other items, which she gave to Grandmother Nora, who seemed very pleased by it. We hippies were among the materially poorest people in American society, but these Hopi were even poorer than hippies!</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another thing I noticed immediately was that although these folks were very cordial to us, they sure didn’t vibe like hippies. Grandfather David spoke to us in English, of course, but Nora and the other family member spoke only Hopi. They spoke their traditional language, which sounded rather guttural and abrupt to me. The vibes were not really mellow or joyous. I think I was feeling the struggling consciousness of a highly spiritual but seriously oppressed people – something I had never experienced before. How naive of me to expect them to vibe like hippies! </span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pooh told Grandfather David about the Holy Man Jam in Boulder and invited him to come along with us to speak about the Hopi Prophecy. He agreed to go with us, and Pooh was sure she could get him onto the program. But the Hopi were holding their “Home Dance” the following weekend, and he would need to be back home for that. Before leaving he would have to go over to Old Oraibi and talk to Thomas Banyaca, another traditional Hopi elder, to finalize details for the dance.</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David invited us to stay for a day or two, so he could get his responsibilities taken care of before he left.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That evening, after dinner, I sat at the wooden table by the light of a kerosene lamp and talked with Grandfather David. Having had prophetic visions of my own, I was very interested in hearing about Hopi Prophecy, and we talked for several hours. I certainly can’t reproduce the dialogue <i>verbatim</i> for these pages – <i>wish I could!</i> - but here’s what I <i>do</i> remember.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David explained that the Hopi didn’t have a written language – it was against the Original Instructions they got from the Creator when they first arrived in this “world” – what they called the “Fourth World.” He said the Creator had appeared to the people in human form at some time in the distant past and had interacted with the Hopi on a material level. I listened intently. To Grandfather David, this “Creator” being seemed to be a real person of some kind, not the Great “Allness of the All” that I had considered “The Creator” since my awakening in Haight-Ashbury a few years earlier. <i>Hm-m-m-m. Interesting. I wonder what that’s all about.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Without a written language, the Prophecy had to be passed down by word of mouth, from father to son, in the family line designated long ago to be the carriers of the Prophecy. Grandfather David was of that family. As the oldest son, his father had repeated the Prophecy to him, over and over again since childhood until he knew it by heart, and he had taught it to his oldest son in the same way. And part of the job was that he was supposed to tell it to anyone who asked him about it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I asked Grandfather David how old he was. He said he didn’t really know. He was born before the U.S. government started making the Hopi write down birth dates and other tribal information. The writing down started in the year we call 1874 (I think), so Grandfather David knew he was at least 96 by now – maybe older. He went on to tell me how the government had come in and forced the Hopi people to send their kids to white man’s school to learn to read and write, even though it was against the Hopi religion. The government would surround the village and go house-to-house, hunting for school-age children. Fathers who refused were arrested and taken off to jail, and their children taken to school by force. (This was beginning to sound very familiar to me. I definitely knew what it was like to be hassled for practicing my spiritual beliefs, and to have my child hunted by the government to force him into their indoctrination factories called “schools.” I had not wanted to send Todd to public school and had hid him out in our forest cabin, even when local cops came by looking for him. These were the days before the term or concept of “home schooling” was around.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent3" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David laughed a thin, almost sad laugh when he spoke of his people’s misfortunes—a testament to his own high consciousness—but behind that laugh were the tears of severe hardship born by a tribe of humble people trying to follow the Original Instructions of the Creator.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent3" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He told me how his people came up into this world from another world – the “Third World” - beneath this current world, which he called the “Fourth World.” <i>Okay,</i> I think, <i>levels of consciousness, right?</i> <i>From a lower one into a higher one. </i>I was into catching the symbolism here—to listen with expanded ears. (As of this writing in December 2010, I have a different understanding of what the Hopi call “worlds.” At that time I related to them as headspaces, but now I understand them more as long periods of human life on Earth, punctuated by periods of cataclysmic transition.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David’s next story was about some ears of corn, of many different sizes and colors, which Great Spirit and Spider Woman laid out before the leaders of the various groups who had come up into this Fourth World. The leaders were told to pick one ear of corn to be their food in this world. One by one the leaders choose the longest and fullest looking ears of corn until only the smallest ear of corn was left. This smallest ear of corn was picked by the Hopi leader, who had humbly waited till last to take hiss turn. Great Spirit said, “You have shown me you are wise and humble. For this reason you will be called Hopi, which means a peaceful, kind, gentle, truthful people.”</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Next Grandfather told me about two brothers—grandsons of Spider Woman—who were given stone tablets into which the Great Spirit had breathed instructions and prophecies and warnings. The older brother—the “True White Brother”—was told to go immediately to the east, to the rising sun, and as soon as he got there he was to touch his head to the Earth, then return to the younger brother, the Hopi. The younger brother, the Hopi, was instructed to continue searching for Great Spirit and to settle where they found Him. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><h3 style="line-height: normal; text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Hopi found Great Spirit—“the Spirit who owns this world”—living at Old Oraibi over 1,000 years ago. He appeared to them in the form of a man. They asked him if they could live there with him. The Great Spirit said, “It’s up to you. All I have is my planting stick and my corn. If you are willing to live as I do and follow my instructions, you may live here with me and take care of my land.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></h3><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Hopi people said, “Yes, we are willing to live your way.” And they settled in the desert at Old Oraibi to be close to Great Spirit. And that’s how the Hopi lived for many, many years—simply and peacefully, true to the Original Instructions of the Creator.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David said that part of the Prophecy given to the Hopi by Great Spirit was that another race of people would come to this land and claim it as their own. These people would be very clever and would invent many things, but the Hopi were told not to accept anything these people would offer, even though it would be hard to resist. The people were told that these invaders would come in something with spinning wheels, pulled by animals. This turned out to be the covered wagons. The people were told that the land would be crossed by long rivers of stone that would make pictures in the sun, and on these stone rivers would be little boxes on wheels. Grandfather David said he thought this was the highways that produce shimmering mirages on hot, sunny days. The prophecy also said the land would be crossed by snakes of iron—railroad tracks to Grandfather David. The people were also told that the land would be criss-crossed by a giant spider’s web that people could talk across, and this “talking web”, Grandfather said, was the web of telephone lines that crisscross this land at that time. (And now, in 2010, the “world-wide web” criss-crosses the entire planet.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then Grandfather David told me about how the prophecy spoke of a Great Purification that would take place when the True White Brother returned. There would be three phases of life during which the whole Earth would be shaken up by the True White Brother and his two helpers, and that after each shaking, the people of Earth would have a chance to come together in a circle that would bring peace to the Earth. Grandfather told me about an ancient gourd rattle that the Hopi people use in their sacred Kachina ceremonies that is marked with the symbols of the two helpers who would shake the world. Those symbols are the swastika and the sun. The Hopi elders recognized the flags of Germany and Japan as the symbols on their ancient rattle, and they understand World War I and World War II to be the first and second shaking of the Earth by the True White Brother and his helpers. The third shaking of the Earth is yet to come. Survivors of the Purification will enter the Fifth World of Peace.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Grandfather David next spoke of a “gourd of ashes” that the Prophecy said would “fall from the air” and boil everything for miles and miles around, and nothing would grow on that land for a long, long time. The elders believe that the atomic bomb, dropped near the end of WWII, is that gourd of ashes and, according to the Prophecy, that would be a sign to them that they needed to go to a “Great House of Mica” and warn all the peoples of the need to come together in peace. So in 1948 (or maybe 1949) Grandfather David and three other Hopi elders drove to New York City and right up to the front door of the “Great House of Mica”—the tall, glass United Nations building—but they were not allowed to speak.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There were more signs that the time of the third shaking of the Earth was coming soon. All over the world there would be great winds, fires, earthquakes, droughts and floods, changes in the weather and in the seasons, the disappearance of wildlife, and many famines. Everything would be speeded up. Thhey referred to it as “The Quickening.” Women would start dressing like men. Nature would be out of balance. World leaders would be corrupt, and the people would not know who to look to for direction. When these conditions occur on Earth, the Hopi are to recognize that the Day of the Great Purification is near.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While listening to Grandfather David in his simple home in Hotevilla, I was remembering the visions I had seen on the wall of my Shrader Street kitchen in 1966—earthquakes, tidal waves, fires. I knew then that it was a purification, a cleansing—to be followed by a new beginning. But I didn’t interrupt. I wanted to hear more of the Hopi Prophecy from this humble, down-to-earth Native elder.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When the True White Brother or Purifier returns, Grandfather David said, he will be very powerful and large in population. He will belong to no religion but his very own, he will be symbolized by the color red, and the people will wear red caps or red robes. Grandfather David told me he thought this would be the Red Chinese, and that the final shaking would be World War III.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Prophecy went on to say that when the True White Brother comes back, if there are any Hopi—even only one, two or three—who have remained true to the Original Instructions, the Great Spirit will appear before all, and our world will be saved. The Earth will be restored, flowers will bloom again, all who survive the Purification will share everything equally, they will all recognize the Great Spirit, and they will all speak one language again, as the first people had done. There will be abundance for everyone and peace on Mother Earth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then Grandfather David told me that we could go, tomorrow, over to Old Oraibi, where he would show me a rock on which the Prophecy was drawn. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It was late. I thanked Grandfather for sharing so much with me. Then Grandfather David insisted that Todd, Gentle and I sleep in their home-made double bed, while he and Grandmother Nora rolled out a thin straw mat on the adobe kitchen floor, where they would sleep themselves. I protested to no avail. They insisted they would be fine, that the kids and I should have the only bed in the house. I was overwhelmed by their generosity. Spiritual people, for sure! The smallest ear of corn in action!</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next day we did go over to Old Oraibi, in Pooh’s car, where Grandfather David dropped in on Thomas Banyaca, who talked with David for a while in the Hopi tongue. Grandfather David was telling Thomas about his upcoming trip to Boulder, and they were discussing when to hold the Home Dance. </span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When they were done talking, we drove out to the Prophecy Rock, which was actually the side of a cliff. Carved into the side of the cliff was a diagram of sorts – a line drawing starting with a swastika inside a sun symbol—a circle with rays coming out of it. There was a large stick figure representing Great Spirit, according to Grandfather David, and this figure stood beside two lines or paths—the lower one was the path Great Spirit had given the Hopi people to follow. This path ended with pictures of corn plants, symbolizing abundance. The top line or path showed the journey of the white man (not to be confused with the “Great White Brother”) and his clever inventions—the path of technology. This path ended in a very jagged line, representing the ups and down of turmoil and earth changes. Before the very jagged line starts, there is a vertical line going from the white man’s path down to the Hopi path, indicating that those who had chosen the path of technology could at that point return to the Original Instructions of the Creator, avoid the turmoil, and share in the abundance.</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent2" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I was amazed to see the swastika and the rising sun symbols carved in this ancient rock. How could the ancient Hopi have know this? Does this mean that prophecy really is true? I remembered early experience of clairvoyance and my own visions, and I pondered the meaning of all these things.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> Later that day we left for Boulder. When we got into Pooh’s car, Grandfather David, sitting in the front passenger’s seat, took a pinch of cornmeal out of a pouch on his belt and sprinkled it out the open window and onto the ground beside the car, saying a short prayer in the Hopi language for our safe travels. He continued this practice every time we started traveling again after stopping throughout the whole trip.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We spent the first night sleeping on the side of the road in our sleeping bags or blankets, under the desert stars. In the morning the arthritis in Grandfather David’s hands was bothering him, so Pooh massaged his hands for him. He laughed about his pain. He was such a high traveling companion!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> We stopped to visit drummer Richard and his band, the Anonymous Artists of America, on a piece of land they had bought in the southwest corner of Colorado, near the tiny town of Redwing. Then we continued on to Boulder. The Holy Man Jam had been going for a day or two by the time we arrived. Admission was free. There was lots of grass, a few booths, and many blankets spread with craft items, a stage, lots of earth-loving people, and gurus galore. Spiritual teachers from all over the world were pouring into the United States at that time, hearing there was a whole generation of spiritual seekers here. Some were enlightened; some were charlatans. We wanted to hear them all and decide for ourselves. (This was before the powers-that-be co-opted the hip movement and the concept of a new age into the commercial, materialistic, “New Age”, over-the-counter culture so prevalent today, where people pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for a weekend conference where wanna-be teachers sell their teachings, books, and videos. Tradition says that Henry Kissinger was in charge of derailing the hippies, and this is how he decided to do it—make it a business and thereby seduce many of the newly awakened back into materialistic values, while espousing spiritual truths. And it worked for a few decades. But now there’s a new generation of awakened individuals who can see through that hypocrisy and are looking for something more real and more truly spiritual. Sorry, Henry. Your time is up. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Pooh knew some of the organizers and spoke to them about arranging for Grandfather David to speak. The program was full. The only way he could get any time was if another speaker would give up some of his. A Buddhist monk offered to share his time with Grandfather David. Grandfather spoke for just a few minutes, but later I heard several people say that he was the one they liked best of all the holy men—that he had the most humble vibes and the most sincere message.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stephen Gaskin and a bunch of his students were there. Seems there had been some kind of raggedy vibes the evening before—a candlelight march or something had been planned, but Stephen was not in agreement with the timing or something, so he and some of his students refused to participate. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stephen and Yogi Bhajan, a burly turbaned Sikh teacher from India, were sharing the same stage the afternoon that we arrived, with one microphone between them. Each gave a short pitch for his chosen path. Stephen spoke of the psychedelic path and what he was learning from it. Yogi Bhajan pitched Kundalini Yoga and a breathing technique called “Breath of Fire.” He insisted that psychedelics were not a valid spiritual path. His vibes were self-righteous and disdainful toward Stephen.<i> <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The two holy men decided to answer questions from the crowd. For a while each questioner addressed his question to one teacher or the other, and the teachers passed the mike back and forth between them. Then someone asked a general question about vibrations. Yogi Bhajan grabbed the mike away from Stephen and said haughtily, “I’ll answer that. Vibrations are my specialty.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Stephen looked at the crowd, shrugged, and said to the Yogi, “I vibrate, too.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Egos bristled. I think they each eventually took a shot at answering the vibes question, but for me it had been answered a long time before the actual words came out. It was obvious from the exchange that Stephen knew a whole lot more about vibes than Yogi Bhajan did.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There was a question about sex. Yogi Bajan, manicured and vain, said if you do it “right” you only have to do it once a month. Stephen, informal and unpretentious, talked about Tantric love-making as a tool to cleanse one’s energy field and expand one’s consciousness. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The next morning Stephen and Yogi Bhajan were on a smaller stage together again, but this time there was a Fair Witness between them, mediating the discussion. Seems Stephen was trying to “get straight” with the Yogi about things he had said about the psychedelic path the day before. Both holy men sat cross-legged on the stage with the long-haired moderator between them. I don’t think this smaller stage was wired for sound, and the crowd was much smaller than the day before. I don’t remember the details of the conversation, except that Stephen was trying to get Yogi Bhajan to concede the validity of the psychedelic path, but the Yogi wouldn’t budge from his original position. Nor would he cop to being condescending toward Stephen. Stephen seemed truly to be in a humble, peace-making headspace, but Yogi Bhajan remained haughty and holier-than-thou. At one point Stephen crawled across the stage to hug Yogi B., but the proud Yogi did not welcome the embrace. It was pretty weird, but Stephen came out looking to me like he was carrying a higher consciousness than the Sikh holy man.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Later that day I attended the showing of a film of Sathya Sai Baba, another holy man in India with a big Afro, who appeared to be able to manifest a Shiva Lingam inside his mouth and then spit it out into a white handkerchief or napkin, which he held in his left hand. In the film he did this in front of a huge crowd. His vibes, at least on film, seemed open and loving, and the “miracle” was amazing to behold. This is the first time I had ever heard of Sai Baba, and I was impressed. Could he really be doing this? I remembered the instructions from Spalding’s<i> Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East</i>, and my own successful experiments in manifesting what I needed. I marveled at the powers of human consciousness, but still I wondered about Sai Baba—was it real or was it all a trick?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I didn’t get to hear very many of the holy men. I was busy keeping track of my two little kids, but I fully enjoyed our few days there. Soon it was time to pile back into Pooh’s car and return to Hotevilla for the Hopi Home Dance, which Grandfather David had invited us to attend. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When we arrived, Hotevilla was alive with preparations for the Dance. An eagle had been captured for the ceremony and was chained to the roof of one of the adobe houses. Folks were busy making corn husk dolls for all the little girls of the village and toy bows and arrows for all the little boys.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Hopi Home Dance was held in the Plaza. No photographs were allowed to be taken on the Hopi reservation (Hopi’s believed that taking someone’s photograph stole their soul, which I interpreted to mean that a photo of someone was a dead image—that soul or spirit existed only in the Here-and-Now, the present, living moment.) Very few outsiders were ever invited to the Home Dance.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We stood at one end of the rectangular plaza and watched as Kachina Dancers in elaborate costumes danced before the people. We were told that they personified spirits that lived in nearby mountains. The Kachinas filed into the Plaza. Masks, feathers, rattles, drumming, dancing—sounds that first resembled frogs, then rain, then a full thunderstorm. They were calling in the rain so their crops would grow, so their people would be fed, so their Home would be safe. It was an amazing spectacle—the real thing, not just some Indians dancing for the entertainment of white men. We scraggly hippies were truly honored to get to attend. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">After the Dance Grandfather David kept looking at the sky and pointing out the small clouds that were beginning to gather. We left without ever knowing if the rain actually came, but we carried the memory of that very special experience with us as we headed back to California.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-23656794287026046812011-01-02T23:29:00.000-08:002011-01-02T23:29:15.175-08:00DOGMAPOLIS<div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Happy New Year! Today I want to share an excerpt from a book I published in 2008. It’s about two siblings, Luke and Lucy, who take a trip to the high country and find themselves in a strange land called “Symbolia”, where they have to walk the Sacred Path to get back Home. In this episode, Luke and Lucy have become separated at the Gulf of SimonSez, and Lucy is trying to find her way back to the Path<b>:<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> Lucy walked along the trail that Brownoze had insisted that she take, but she still wasn’t sure it was the one she wanted. Even though she was sick of having Luke boss her around, she didn’t like being all alone in this strange world, either. She knew it wasn’t safe for her to go back to the Gulf of SimonSez, where Luke was. <i>Those bullies would get me for sure!</i> she thought. <i>Oh, dear! What am I going to do now?<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">After a while she noticed that the terrain was changing. It wasn’t so much like a dessert any more. There were more plants now, and even a few small trees. Soon Lucy came to a crossroads. There were no signs, and she had no idea which way to go – maybe straight, maybe the path to the right. Then she saw three figures approaching on the path to her right. They wore long dark robes, tied around the waist with a rope. They seemed to be chanting something, but Lucy couldn’t quite make out the words. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">As they got closer, Lucy could hear the words of the chant. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Du,” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">the three robed men droned on in unison. <i>Funny words, </i> Lucy thought to herself. <i>Must be in some foreign language. Wonder what they mean<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">One of these chanters was very tall and thin, with a stern, narrow face, thick, dark eyebrows, and intense eyes. He was carrying what seemed to be a piece of wood in one arm. Another was medium height but with a massive physique, a squarish jaw, and a rather forlorn expression on his face. The third was short and rather pudgy and almost bald. A ring of short brown hair encircled his shiny dome, above a round, shiny face and big, wide, blue eyes. He smiled blissfully as he chanted, “U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, U-Shuud-Doo-Wah-Ty-Zay-Tu-Doo.…”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">All three of the chanters looked harmless enough – and this pudgy one even looked friendly. Lucy decided to ask directions. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Excuse me,” she said politely to the wide-eyed chanter. He stopped walking and chanting. His two companions stopped walking, too, but they continued to chant: “U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah….”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Can I help you?” the wide-eyed chanter asked. His voice was soft and kind.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> “I think I’m lost,” explained Lucy, feeling she could trust him. “I was trying to get away from some power trippers at the Gulf of SimonSez, and I seem to have lost my way. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get back on the Sacred Path?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> “Just follow us,” U-Shuud Sayer Gul continued. “We will show you the way. May The Roolz be with you, my child,” he replied. “Let us introduce ourselves. We are the U-Shuud Sayers of Dogmapolis. I am U-Shuud Gul. This is U-Shuud Matt and U-Shuud Ritt.” The other two men nodded pleasantly enough at Lucy but never stopped chanting. “But what’s a U-Shuud Sayer?” asked Lucy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“A U-Shuud Sayer,” began Gul, “is one who has dedicated his life to serving The Roolz. We are protected by The Roolz. We are taught how to live by The Roolz. We <i>worship</i> The Roolz!” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> “What’s The Roolz? A person or a god or what?” Lucy wanted to understand, but U-Shuud Sayer Gul had already turned toward the other two U-Shuud Sayers and joined them in their chant. <i>I guess I’ll find out later,</i> Lucy thought as the three men began walking again, away from her, through the crossroads and on to the left. “U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Du. U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Ty-Zay-Tu-Du…”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy followed them, glad to have someone guiding her, but she didn’t feel really settled inside. <i>Cheer up,</i> she told herself. <i>You’ll be back on the Sacred Path soon.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">They were walking out of desert terrain now, and through fields of growing crops and small farms. Occasionally a farmer with a horse-drawn cart full of vegetables would pass them, travelling in the same direction. The farmers always waved a greeting to the U-Shuud Sayers and Lucy. Lucy always waved back. The U-Shuud Sayers nodded devoutly to each farmer as he passed, but they never stopped chanting their U-Shuud-Doo-Wha chant.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Before long Lucy could see a huge form glistening in the distance, towering above the rest of the landscape. It seemed to be some kind of very large building, far taller than any of the trees that they occasionally passed. As they drew closer, Lucy could see that the form was a massive stone pyramid, nine stories high. Each story was smaller than the one below it, giving the appearance, from a distance, of huge steps, each about ten feet tall, leading up to a temple-like structure on the very top.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“What’s that?” asked Lucy, pointing at the imposing structure rising before them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“That, my dear, is the blessed City of Dogmapolis,” Gul answered, pausing briefly in his chanting. “That is where we are going.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Why are we going there?” asked Lucy. “Is Dogmapolis on the Sacred Path?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Oh, yes!” U-Shuud Sayer Gul answered. “Not only is Dogmapolis <i>on</i> the Sacred Path; Dogmapolis <i>is</i> the Sacred Path.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“But it looks like a pyramid!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“It <i>is</i> a pyramid,” the U-Shuud Sayer replied. “It’s a <i>step</i> pyramid. A ziggurat, to be exact.” Then he resumed his U-Shuud chant, and Lucy sensed that he didn’t want to answer any more questions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Hm-m-m-m,</span></span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> she thought, <i>that doesn’t exactly sound like the Sacred Path that Morningstar was talking about, but these guys seem pretty sure about knowing the way. I’d be lost without them</i>. So she kept following the U-Shuud Sayers toward the layered structure in the distance. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The closer Lucy got to the City of Dogmapolis, the more details she could make out. She could see that each story or level of the step pyramid had evenly spaced, square windows or doorways all along it, leading out to a walled walkway that appeared to go all the way around each level. The whole thing seemed to be built with large slabs of cut stone, each with a shiny surface that reflected the sunlight. She noticed that the bottom level itself was surrounded by a very high wall, also made from gigantic rock slabs. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">As Lucy got closer still to the step-pyramid city of Dogmapolis, she began to notice that at each corner of each level there were stone statues of some kind, looking out over the Desert of Avariss and the Pink Mountains in the distance. These statues appeared to be only half a person—from the hips up, as if it were growing right out of the stone. Then Lucy could see that they weren’t really <i>people</i> either. They had heads and faces and ears and eyes and arm and bodies, but they weren’t really people. At least not like any people Lucy had ever known. Some of them had large, pointy ears, or horns, or fangs, or tails, or scales, or claws. When Lucy got close enough to see the expressions on the statues’ faces, she noticed that they were not very friendly. In fact, they looked downright nasty. <i>That’s weird,</i> she thought, but she kept right on following the U-Shuud Sayers toward the great walled city of Dogmapolis.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Eventually the three U-Shuud Sayers led Lucy up to the main gate of the walled, pyramid-shaped city. The gate was guarded by two tall guards dressed in black-and-white spotted jumpsuits. They looked really silly to Lucy, and she almost giggled the minute she saw them. <i>They look like Dalmatians,</i> she thought to herself. But then she noticed the very serious expression on their faces, and even though that, too, looked funny to Lucy, she could tell that it definitely would not be okay to laugh at them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy and the U-Shuud Sayers paused just before they got to the gate. Matt, the massive, square-jawed U-Shuud Sayer, stopped chanting, and turned to Lucy. “Before entering our glorious city of Dogmapolis,” he said, “you must put these on.” He pulled a cloth bag out from under his robe. He took two items out of the bag and handed them to Lucy, one at a time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The first item was a pair of goggles. The second was a sheepskin coat with an attached sheepskin hood. “Put them on,” U-Shuud Sayer Matt ordered.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The other two U-Shuud Sayers were chanting, “U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Du….”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">By now Lucy was somewhat mesmerized by the continuous chanting. She took the goggles and put them on first. The band that went around her head and held the goggles in place was extremely tight and uncomfortable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“No thanks,” Lucy said politely, handing the goggles back toward the massive U-Shuud Sayer. “I don’t want to wear these.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">At this point it was the tall, thin U-Shuud Sayer Ritt, who stopped chanting and took a step toward Lucy. He was now holding the piece of wood on his left arm, and Lucy could see that there were lines of carved symbols on it. His narrow eyes blazed as he shouted at her. “According to The Roolz,” his voice boomed, as he pounded the piece of wood with his right fist, “everyone residing on Level One must wear these goggles at all times. You are new here, therefore you must reside on Level One. And if you do not obey the Almighty Roolz, you cannot enter the safety of the City of Dogmapolis. Do you want to remain at the mercy of the barbarians, or do you agree to obey The Roolz?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Who are the barbarians?” asked Lucy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“The barbarians are those who do not follow The Roolz,” replied Sayer Ritt, sharply. “We learn the One and Only Truth from The Roolz. Those who do not follow the Roolz do not know the One and Only Truth. They are barbarians.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Du,”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">chanted U-Shuud Gul and U-Shuud Matt.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Okay, okay,” said Lucy to the U-Shuud Sayers, somewhat dejected. “I do want to be safe from the barbarians. I’ll wear your stupid goggles.” And she pulled the mask-like goggles over her head. Suddenly she felt like her brain was in a vice. She pulled them off immediately. “I need a bigger size,” she said. “These are too tight.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“They are the correct size,” U-Shuud Sayer Ritt replied, sternly. “It’s supposed to be tight.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Reluctantly Lucy once again put on the tight-fitting goggles. They really squeezed her head uncomfortably, but she figured she could stand it for a while. She could see that there was no arguing with the U-Shuud Sayers, and besides, she really wanted to follow them and get back on the Sacred Path again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">When the goggles were securely covering her eyes, Lucy noticed something peculiar. <i>Hm-m-m-m,</i> she thought, looking around. <i>This is strange. These goggles take all the color out of everything. Everything is black and white, like it’s all a really old movie. And I can’t see anything on either side. But I guess I’ll get used to it. And it’s better than being lost and alone.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Then Lucy put on the hooded sheepskin coat. She felt really silly in it. “I don’t want to wear this coat either,” Lucy said. “It will make me look like a sheep.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“You’re supposed to look like a sheep,” Sayer Ritt replied sternly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Why?” asked Lucy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“To show your place, of course,” answered the uptight U-Shuud Sayer. “In Dogmapolis everyone has a place and stays in it. Your place will be here on Level One of Dogmapolis as a sheeple.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“What if I don’t want to be a sheeple?” Lucy asked. “What are my other choices?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“You have no other choices,” replied U-Shuud Sayer Ritt Thumper. “According to The Roolz...” His voice was starting to boom again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“I know,” Lucy interrupted. “According to The Roolz, I have to be a Level One sheeple.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Exactly,” beamed Ritt. “You’re beginning to catch on. And you <i>do</i> want to be here, don’t you?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Yes,” answered Lucy weakly. “I do want to be here. I’ll be a sheeple.” She <i>really</i> wanted to get back on the Sacred Path again, and the U-Shuud Sayers said they knew the way. Reluctantly she pulled the hooded sheepskin coat around her.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">As soon as Lucy had the goggles and the sheeple coat on, with the hood up around her head, the three robed U-Shuud Sayers, still chanting, moved up to one of the Blakkenwite gate guards. “A new sheeple,” U-Shuud Sayer Gul said to one of the jump-suited guards, nodding toward Lucy in her goggles and hooded sheepskin coat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The guard looked Lucy over and then nodded solemnly to Gul. The three chanters and Lucy moved forward, past the guards, through the gate, and into the city of Dogmapolis. U-Shuud Gul Abull motioned for Lucy to follow them, which she did, grateful to be inside the walled City of Dogmapolis, safe from the dictators at the Gulf of SimonSez<i>. </i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoPlainText" style="text-align: center; text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">‘U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Doo,” chanted the U-Shuud Sayers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy was now inside Dogmapolis, and the heavy gate slammed shut behind her. The tight-fitting, goggles that U-Shuud Sayer Ritt Thumper insisted she wear, made everything look black and white, without even any shades of gray. And it took her a while to get used to the tunnel vision imposed by the goggles, which forced her to look straight ahead, unable to see anything on either side of her, or above, or below. But she could see a line of people directly in front of her, all wearing goggles and hooded sheepskin coats, and all carrying bags of something over their shoulders. Lucy couldn’t see what was in the bags, but the sheeple carried them as if they were quite heavy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“This is your level,” U-Shuud Sayer Matt Terbound told Lucy, somewhat gruffly. “Get in line over here.” He pointed to a space in the carrying line, behind a short, rather stocky sheeple.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“What do I have to get in line for?” asked Lucy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“In Dogmapolis everyone has to get in line,” Matt explained, and his voice sounded like he was losing patience with Lucy. “And see that you stay in line!” he added, harshly.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“U-Shuud Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, Doo-Wah, U-Shuud Doo-Wah Ty-Zay-Tu-Doo,” droned the chanters, and they walked through one of the square doorways in the bottom level of the pyramid, turned a corner inside, and were out of Lucy’s sight. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy took her place in line, as ordered, behind the indicated sheeple. Another sheeple, wearing goggles and a sheepskin coat but no hood, handed Lucy one of the large, heavy sacks. “Welcome to Dogmapolis,” he said. “Your job is to carry this burdenbag.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy hoisted the bulging sack over her right shoulder. She still carried the fire kit and canteen on her left. The burdenbag was heavy, and Lucy had to hold it firmly with both hands. “What’s in these sacks, anyhow?” she asked the sheeple in front of her.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The short, stocky sheeple had to turn all the way around in order to see Lucy, due to the restrictions of the hood and goggles. The sheeple did this very carefully, being sure not to step out of line. “You must be new here,” the sheeple said.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Yes, I am. I just arrived here in Dogmapolis. My name is Lucy.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Hi,” said the sheeple. “I’m Patsy.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy was surprised to discover that the sheeple in front of here was a girl. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“There’s mostly gold in these burdenbags,” Patsy continued. “And sometimes jewels.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Who does it belong to?” asked Lucy in surprise.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Oh, it’s all for the Grand Nimroodi and the Grand Kolumbooti,” the stocky sheeple answered. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Who are they?” asked Lucy, but just then one of the Blakkenwite guards bounded up to Lucy and Patsy. “Stop talking, turn around, and carry your burdenbags quietly!” he barked.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Lucy wanted to giggle again, but again she knew that it wouldn’t be appropriate. Besides, that bark <i>was</i> pretty scary. Sheeple Patsy turned back around quickly, and Lucy couldn’t tell if she was also amused. Lucy had many more questions for Patsy, but for now they would have to go unanswered. She stayed in line, silently carrying the heavy burdenbag, contributing to somebody else’s wealth, like all the other sheeple in line in front and in back of her. <i>But at least I’m safe here</i>, she told herself, as she shuffled along, shifting the burdenbag from one shoulder to the other to avoid pain.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText" style="text-indent: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">~~<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Please let me know how this grabs you and if you want more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Peace and Love,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoPlainText"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Sylvia</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-84129914882578061342010-12-20T02:30:00.000-08:002010-12-20T02:30:26.797-08:00Return of the Light<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This convergence of Winter Solstice, Full Moon, and Lunar Eclipse is a powerful time for creating the world we want. The energy around solstices and equinoxes is always potent for about three days before and three days after the calendar moment itself. The Winter Solstice celebrates that moment in Earth’s orbit when greatest darkness of the year is over and the light is starting to return—a time to seed the incoming light with our highest intention for ourselves, our species, and our planet.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The full moon and eclipse add even more creative energy to the 3D field that we experience and participate in. It’s my understanding that during a lunar eclipse, as Earth’s shadow covers the moon, our moon-driven, reflective, subconscious dumps all its previous programming and comes out the other side of the eclipse as a clean disk, cosmically formatted and ready to be reprogrammed. Consciously. Intentionally. By you and me. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In addition to the Whirling Rainbow Prophecy (previous post), Jamie Sams also presents the Cradleboard Prophecy, in which she says, “Those who cannot accept the new Cradleboard of Creation will be removed to the body-double of the Earth Mother, which will house the memory of the devastation of her scarred and abused body.” When I first read that, in the early 1990’s, it didn’t make any sense to me. How could there be a body-double of Earth? That just didn’t fit into my understanding at the time. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Then I read some channeled teachings saying that the earth would “split” into two Earths, one housing those who were into peace and the other housing those who were into war. Hmm-m-m. Interesting concept, but still beyond what I could honestly believe.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Years later I learned that there are quantum physicists who theorize that this quantum field that we live in is like a great ocean of conscious energy, with areas of “quantum foam” or bubbles of energy called “probable worlds” (PrahBubbles in Symbolia). It seems that what we experience as third-dimensional reality is simply the most probable—the most likely to happen--of the probable worlds in the surrounding quantum foam. And the degree of probability is dictated by the frequency and amplitude of human consciousness—the wavelengths and emotional intensity of our thoughts. That means that if enough of us feel strongly enough about creating a new probable world that we agree on, and focus out intentions and efforts on that new PrahBubble, we can energize it to manifest in our lives. We don’t have to worry or even think about how it’s going to manifest. The Field of Oneness will take care of that. All we have to do is energize what we want and become the world we want to live in.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I use this understanding in my daily life. Most mornings I sit quietly for a few minutes and tune my consciousness in to the Great Ocean of Awareness. When I’m in that expanded space of unity with all life I say, silently, “I now step into the PrahBubble world where everything in my life goes smoothly and gently and playfully today, for my highest good and for the highest good of all life everywhere. Thank you. I know this can happen.” If I’m having a problem, I get more specific. Then I forget about it and go on with my day.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And miracles happen. Circumstances in my life shuffle themselves around in ways I couldn’t even have imagined to bring about exactly what I intended. (Sometimes I get caught up in the daily swirl and forget to start the day by choosing the PrahBubble I want to step into. Those days don’t go so well until I remember to tune in and drop my intentions into the Cosmic Ocean.)</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So let’s use this magnificent window of opportunity to co-create the world we want to live in. Let’s see if e can connect the InnerNet via the internet, and have a virtual Ritual of Evolving Light. Right here, right now. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Imagine us sitting in a Circle, in the darkness, but around a small fire. A tree branch is being passed from person to person around the circle. The branch has many smaller branches or twigs growing out of it, and it is being used in this ritual as a Talking Stick. As each of us in turn holds the Talking Stick, we tell the group about our Heart Dream—our vision for the world we want to create and inhabit. The rest of the Circle listens intently. When each of us finishes telling our Heart Dream, we break off one of the twiggy branches on the Talking Stick and toss it onto the small central fire. Others in the Circle shout or murmur their agreement and the fire blazes up with this new Heart-Dream fuel. In this way our Circle of Awareness adds its energy to the New PrahBubble, and the Talking Stick is passed to the next person.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You are sitting in the Circle. The Talking Stick (comment space) is now being passed to you. It’s your turn to tell us your Heart Dream and add your fuel to our InnerNet Fire of Creation. What is your vision for a New PrahBubble world and your personal role in it?</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Happy Return of the Light! Peace on Earth. Good will to All.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sylvia</span></span></div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-32489129191743411972010-12-20T02:29:00.000-08:002010-12-20T02:29:10.833-08:00Whirling Rainbow Prophecy<div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">You guys have probably heard a lot of prophecies by now, but you might have missed this one. It talks about the Flower Children and the generation following the Flower Children. It’s from a book by Wolf Clan member, Jamie Sams. This is Jamie Sam’s story as she tells it:</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“The Whirling Rainbow is the promise of peace among all National and all people. The Rainbow Race stresses equality and opposes the idea of a superior race that would control or conquer other races. The Rainbow Race brings peace through the understanding that all races are one. The unity of all colors, all creeds working together for the good of the whole, is the idea that is embodied in the Whirling Rainbow. When all pathways to wholeness are respected by all cultures, the prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow will be completed.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"></span></div><a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“When I lived in Mexico and worked with the Grandmothers, the Dreamtime Buffalo Society, or Sisterhood, had many prophecies derived from Seers and Dreamers that had come down through the ages. The prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow was very specific. When the Time of the White Buffalo approaches, the third generation of the White Eyes’ children will grow their hair and speak of love as the healer of the children of Earth. These children will seek new ways of understanding themselves and others. They will wear feathers and beads and paint their faces. They will seek the Elders of the Red Race and drink of their wisdom. These white-eyed children will be a sign that the Ancestors are returning in white bodies, but they are Red on the inside. They will learn to walk the Earth Mother in balance again and reform the ideas of the white chiefs. These children will be tested as they were when they were Red ancestors by unnatural substances like firewater to see if they can remain on The Sacred Path.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“The generation of Flower Children have moved through this part of the prophecy and some have remained on The Sacred Path. Others were lost for a while and are now returning to the natural way of being. Some were disillusioned and have forgotten the high ideals that gave the life when their hearts were young, but others still are waking up and quickening into the remembering.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Grandmother Cisi would look at me with her obsidian eyes piercing my soul when she spoke of the Whirling Rainbow Prophecy, and I would feel my heart skip a beat and then fill with promise and love. She would tell me about the return of the Buffalo to Turtle Island and how the heard would once again be numerous. After the time when the Buffalo returned, the generation following the Flower Children would se that dawning of the Fifth World of Peace. Grandmother Cisi called the beginning of this Fifth World the wobbly pony that on being born would try to use its legs. She said that the wobble would be felt by the Earth Mother and changes would occur in the soil and waters. Inside the Children of Earth, the wobble would create rolling emotions and feelings that would bring the quickening and remembering. Colorful dreams would be brought into the Sleeptime and Dreamtime dreams of these newborn Warriors of the Rainbow and they would begin to learn how to Walk in Balance. The changes in our Earth Mother would create fear in her children, which would later lead to the understanding of unity of One Planet – One People.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Grandmother Berta would giggle when we came to this part of the prophecy because my eyes would be round as saucers and I could not sit still. Grandmother Berta would urge Grandmother Cisi to stop for the day and leave me hanging on the edge of the cliff just to tease me. Cisi would finally begin again and slap my knee to make me pay attention to the rhythm of the prophecy because my mind would be spinning with probabilities and my own projections. I wanted to ask so many questions about how, when where, and why. I wanted to know details, details, details. I was twenty-two and very impatient, but I kept my silence so she would continue.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“The Whirling Rainbow will appear in the form of a Sun Dog to those who are ready to see. The Sun Dog is a full Rainbow Circle around the sun that has bright white lights at the Four Directions. The Sun Dog is a rare natural phenomenon that was named by Native Americans. The name is now used by scientists all over the world. Many Sun Dogs will be seen around the Time of the White Buffalo, which will be the Sky Language sign that the Secret and Sacred Teachings are to be shared with all races. Enough of the Children of Earth will be awakened to carry the responsibility of the teachings and the healing process will begin in full swing.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Grandmother Berta would smile with a faraway look in her eyes, knowing that she would be on the Blue Road of Spirit when the time of the White Buffalo came. Grandmother Cisi would also be in the Other Side Camp, but both promised they would be assisting me in bringing out the things they had taught me when the time was right.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Both Grandmothers spoke of the change in feelings the Children of Earth would have during the wobble or healing process as the Whirling Rainbows permeated their dreams. They said, ‘Many will remember their purpose for being on this Earth Walk and will learn to develop their gifts to assist the whole of humanity. Truth will shatter the bonds of separation and goodness will prevail. Some details of Earth changes will come into the dreams of those who are being warned to move where they will be safe. Others will be told that their talents will be needed in areas where the changes occur. Everyone will have to trust their personal vision and follow their hearts in order to assist the whole. Each person will be able to use their gifts with joy and share equally in the bounty created by all those working together. The other teachings of the prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow will be released at a later time when more have awakened to the potential they carry.’</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“In our Seneca tradition, Grandmother Twylah has taught us many uses for the Whirling Rainabow of Peace. When we are having difficulty in any situation, we visualize the Rainbow of Peace encircling the situation, the people involved, and the disharmony. Then we twinkle our eyes with joy, sending ur inner-peace to the situation. In using this technique and following it with ceremony, we place our intention inside the Whirling Rainbow of Peace.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“Our intention follows the Iroquois Peace Confederacy Tradition that uses the Twelve Cycles of Truth to bring peace. The Twelve Cycles of Truth are: learning the truth, honoring the truth, organizing the truth, observing the truth, presenting the truth, loving the truth, serving the truth, living the truth, working the truth, walking the truth, and being grateful for the truth. When we invite total truth into our Sacred Space, we shatter the bonds of separation and illusion that create discord. The Whirling Rainbow of Peace destroys the lies that have make the Children of Earth mistrust one another and replaces the illusion of separation with the truth of unity.</span></div><div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue-Light, 'Helvetica Neue Light', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Bitstream Vera Sans', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">“When the Whirling Rainbow Woman of the Navaho and Hopi brings the cleansing and regenerative rains to the Earth Mother, her children are also cleansed and healed. When the Rainbow of Peace of the Seneca encircles each person’s Sacred Space, all will walk in truth, respecting the Sacred Space of others, and the harmony of living on Earth will be restored. These Knowing Systems are the teachings of the Warriors of the Rainbow, who are Sisters and Brothers uniting the Fifth World and working for peace.”<br />
~~<br />
[From The Sacred Path Cards: The Discovery of Self through Native Teachings, by Jamie Sams, Harper, San Francisco, 1990.]</span></div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-86606416081899269892010-12-09T21:18:00.000-08:002010-12-16T04:34:17.806-08:00Living On God's Land part two<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">[continuing from God’s Land Part 1]</span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Gentle learned to walk at Wheeler’s Ranch. I remember her taking her first tentative steps on our uneven, grassy, floor of our tent home, and how frustrating it was for her. But she had a god sense of humor, and we laughed a lot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Todd was thriving on the freedom at Wheeler’s. He loved back with his pals Josh and Ellie again, and in the country, where he could roam the land to his heart’s content. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">These were the early days at Wheeler’s Ranch, and other than tolerating each others’ trips, and individual acts of sharing, there wasn’t much community happening there. There was a community garden. Only a few people worked in it, but many wanted to eat out of it, including people who just came to visit and didn’t even live there. There were no agreements about who could harvest the veggies – everyone just took what they wanted. Often those who had worked hardest in the garden all season didn’t get much of the produce. (I later learned that making strong agreements as a group is a real necessity for community living. But none of us knew that then. We were the pioneers, blazing the trail and making plenty of mistakes along the way.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">We never had any community meetings or get-togethers that I recall. Sometimes a bunch of us would hang out together and make music around an evening campfire, but it would be a spontaneous gathering, not everyone would be there, and we never talked about any community business or anything.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">It was great to be in the country, great to be living close to the Earth. And slowly, over the weeks, in this new atmosphere of freedom and tolerance, I began peeling off more layers of cultural conditioning. Everything was so much more direct. It seemed so wonderfully direct to gather some wood and build a fire in the stove to cook a meal—so much nicer than working for someone else to get money to pay a utility company for the energy to cook with. (No one was aware of environmental, wood-burning issues at that time.) Although physically challenging, this was a very satisfying way of life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that there might not be enough to go around, so I should grab what we could for ourselves and to hell with anybody else. Here, living in community on open land, I could practice my new belief in Oneness and share with an open heart, without being misunderstood or hassled by those fearful of change.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that I had to conform, to try to fit in, to distort my outward expression into some grotesque caricature of my true self. Here I could be myself without fear of judgment. We were all seeing the world and each other through new, non-judgmental eyes, and it was beautiful. I saw each of us as a soul-in-progress, a beautiful flower, opening to the Light. Here I could be myself, let my light shine, and it would not only be accepted but even be appreciated by those around me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The mainstream culture had conditioned me to believe that nudity was shameful. I had made some strides in overcoming that lie by doing nude modeling in art schools in New York, and by visiting a nudist colony, Eden West, on my prior visit to California a few years previous. But living at Wheeler’s Ranch gave me my first real opportunity to <i>live </i>naked for an extended period of time .The summer was hot and most of us went naked most of the time. Sometimes I would go for many days in a row without ever putting clothes on. It was wonderful. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Our nudity expressed a level of consciousness with no hang-ups about body parts or sex, but at the same time, a consciousness with great respect for each other. Living naked is a great, liberating experience. To be able to do your daily work and socializing nude, overcoming your fears and self-consciousness regarding such complete exposure, is a definite step on the spiritual path. Even Jesus said so in <i>The Gospel According to Thomas</i> from one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “His disciples said: When wilt Thou be revealed to us and when will we see Thee? Jesus said: When you take off your clothing without being ashamed, and take your clothes and put them under the feet as the little children [do] and tread on them, then shall you behold the Son of the Living One and you shall not fear.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Our nudity also reflected our openness with each other – our ability to “let it all hang out” on all planes – to be comfortable with who we were – to have no secrets from each other, no pretenses, no masks, no disguises. “This is who I am, and I’m okay with it.” On all planes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The summer days blended into one another timelessly, without name or number. No reason to know what time it was. No reason to know what day it was. No reason to know what date it was. No reason to know what month it was. It was always NOW. I found that living in the present moment relieved me of two major sources of stress – worrying about the past or worrying about the future. Here and now it was always okay. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I learned to tell by the sun when it was time to start cooking dinner. I learned to scan the sky for signs of rain in time to cover the wood pile. I learned to dig a hole and shit in it. (Hand-washing was not part of the ritual, however, and Josh got hepatitis.) I learned to take a shower, out in the open, there beside the main ranch road, in the cold water of the garden hose—and to somehow get my kids clean once in a while in the process. Another wonderful thing about Wheeler’s was that I never looked in a mirror. I don’t think there was even a mirror on the land except maybe at Bill and Gay’s studio. Physical appearance was not a big deal there. We were much more focused on physical survival and personal freedom to be whoever we were. No mirrors necessary. How liberating!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I learned to carry a five-gallon jug full of water up the dusty road to my tent with Gentle in a baby-carrier on my back. I learned to push a wheelbarrow full of cedar rounds through the bushes and over the hillocks from the fallen tree to my tent-home with Gentle in the carrier on my back. I learned to split the rounds with an ax into pieces that would fit my stove, with Gentle playing nearby.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I learned to cook simple, basic foods – beans and whole grains. I was a “new” vegetarian and had never really cooked this simple, natural way before. Carol bought the food and Ellie taught me how to cook it on a wood heating stove. The kids and I often had diner with Josh and Ellie, at their tent or ours. I liked to make a big pot of hearty soup—lentils, barley, vegetables and spices, with dumplings on the top—a complete meal in one pot (which was all I had room for on the stove). Another favorite was pinto beans and chapatis. Chapatis are the Indian version of what Mexicans call tortillas—flour, salt and water mixed into a soft dough, rolled into thin circles, and cooked lightly on both sides. We rolled out the chapatis with a clean quart-sized soda bottle and cooked them directly on the lid of the wood stove. Then each person would fill a chapati with beans and add his or her favorite condiment and some tomatoes, lettuce, sprouts, or whatever veggies were available. I discovered that if I put mustard and relish on mine, it would almost taste like the hot dogs I loved in my youth. After a while someone willed me their sheet-metal box oven, which I sometimes placed on top of the wood stove for baking bread. It worked okay but, of course, required keeping a fire going for several hours on a hot sunny day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I learned to maintain kerosene lamps – fill them, clean the globes and trim the wicks every afternoon, before it got dark.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I learned to live without money – eating through the generosity of saintly friends and the power of community, and living simply and creatively, close to the earth, making what we needed out of whatever materials were available, valuing every scrap of usable material and making something we could use out of it or carefully saving it for a time when it would be needed.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The shadows were getting longer now. Fall was approaching and I was beginning to wonder how it was going to be, living on the ground, in a tent, for the winter, with two young kids. Just then Joe Rosenthal, who had lived with us on Shrader Street, arrived at Wheeler’s. He crashed with Todd and Gentle and me, and in return for “room and board”—or just out of the goodness of his heart—he built a wooden platform for our tent down at the bottom of the meadow, under a big old cedar tree. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Perfect! Now we would be up off the bare ground for the winter, and Gentle could walk on an even, wooden floor for the first time in her life! Joe left shortly after finishing the platform, and Todd, Gentle and I settled into our cozy new, improved digs for the rainy season.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">New people were arriving at Wheeler’s all the time – many with no means of providing food for themselves. There was soon a group gathering at my tent every morning and every evening, knowing that if they were there at meal time, I would feed them. Sometimes they split a little firewood for me. Sometimes they did a few dishes. Sometimes they brought a little marijuana to share.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">A fairly frequent visitor to Wheeler’s was an elderly gentleman named Carl. I had met Carl in San Francisco when he came to the Shrader Street pad with drummer Richard, after hearing him play a drum solo at a Love-In in the panhandle.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Carl was in his late sixties, a short man who had had polio in his youth, which had stunted the growth of his legs. He had long white hair and beard, and an elfish grin in his intelligent bespectacled eyes. He drove a cab-over camper and whenever he came to visit many of us would cram into it and get high with Carl.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Carl, who had always had an interest in metaphysics, took LSD for the first time when he was 65 years old and had a trip that changed his life. He saw the light and started hanging out with hippies, helping them however he could. He and I had lots in common and we became good friends, having long theological discussions after the others had their fill of smoke and left the camper.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Gentle and I went to San Francisco to visit Carl once in a while. Todd usually opted to stay at Wheeler’s with Josh and Ellie.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">In the city we would live in Carl’s camper, often with several other young friends of Carl’s. Carl was married and had an apartment on Divisadero Street. His wife, Elka, was a certified schizophrenic, who had been institutionalized at times but was then living at home with Carl. And Elka didn’t like hippies. So Carl’s hippie friends lived in his camper, parked somewhere on the street – hopefully near a gas station with unlocked restrooms (for bathing and hair-washing purposes, as well as for that early morning poop). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Sometimes Carl would drive me to Jamestown, where I would visit a man named Gridley Wright, a SoCal hippie guru who had gotten busted for pot in LA. I had written to him in jail and asked if there was any help he needed on the outside, and we had become friends and “penn-pals.” I wrote and visited him as often as I could.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">During those days, as I walked around the city streets, I became aware of how my life at Wheeler’s had changed me. Now, as I walked along, I would often bend down and pick something up off the sidewalk or gutter and put it in my pocket, thrilled by the find. What were these treasures? A safety pin, a rubber band, a plastic bag – all very valuable to those of us living on the land with no money. One of the finest things about living without money is that you learn to appreciate very simple things that others take for granted and even throw away. The challenge of life becomes <i>not</i> how to get and keep a job and buy lots of stuff, but rather how to create your survival, comfort and pleasure from whatever is around you that is free. And I brought my goodies back to Wheeler’s, where they were gratefully used.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">After several months, some folks of questionable values moved onto Wheeler’s Ranch. When I returned to the land from one of these excursions to San Francisco and Jamestown, I discovered that my not-running van, Morning Glory had been stolen by some folks I had let stay in our tent while I was gone. They had had Morning Glory towed her off the land to a garage in town, where she was repaired. Then the “grateful” crashers had split the area in my van. They also took some of my spiritual books with them. They were dope-smoking, born-again Mormons, heading for the geographical center of the United States to start a new Mormon civilization. This is the first time I had experienced “spiritual” people who felt they themselves and their calling were so high and holy that they had the right to rip other people off. (I’ve learned since that this headspace is not really uncommon. In fact, I see it now as major trap on the spiritual path. I’ve observed many guru-types fall into it since then.) A few days earlier I had stopped one of their group from taking off with Jason’s twelve-string. (Ellie’s sister, Mary, was part of this small group—that’s why I let them stay in our tent.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Before that time there had been no theft at Wheeler’s that I ever heard about except by these would-be founders of a new Mormon civilization. Contrary to media propaganda, most “flower children” were developing strong values and were highly ethical. We didn’t steal. We didn’t even lie. The only law we broke was regarding psychedelic substances that we felt were mistakenly classified with truly hard drugs like heroin or meth. We were not “junkies” or “dope fiends.” Taking psychedelics did not lead us into taking hard drugs. This may have happened to a few who people who, like the government, lumped all illegal substances into the same category. They had decided that if the government was lying about marijuana and other psychedelics, it was probably lying about all the other illegal substances, too. But the problem was with the misclassification marijuana and other psychedelics in the first place. And there were those who smoked marijuana and grew their hair and beards long and copied hippie dress and hippie jargon, but who hadn’t had their own awakenings—and they were likely to have different values than the truly awakened flower children. Squares considered anyone with long hair to be a “hippie”, so all hippies eventually got a bad rap due to the behavior of a few who hadn’t really caught the wave of new consciousness. True understanding of the Oneness of All eliminates the need to lie, cheat, steal, or harm anyone. What I do to another, I am really doing to myself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Whenever someone at Wheeler’s realized it was Monday, a bunch of us would pile into the back of a pickup truck and head for San Francisco to attend Monday Night Class, taught by Stephen Gaskin, at the Family Dog, a rock hall across the street from the ocean. (Riding in the back of a pickup was not illegal at that time, and it was a favorite form of hippie transportation.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">As I understand the story, Stephen had been teaching English at San Francisco State when he began to notice that his brightest, most interesting students were all growing their hair long and starting to drop out of school. He asked what was up with them, and in response they turned him on to psychedelics. After a while he dropped out of teaching and began exploring psychedelics more deeply. At one point he had a trip in which he saw “how everything works.” A while after that he went back to SF State and asked if he could teach a course in the new “experimental college” there. The administration agreed. He taught courses with titles like, “North American White Witchcraft” and “Einstein, Energy and God.” His classes got too large for the college so he started holding them at Glide Memorial Church, then at the Strait Theater on Haight Street. That’s where I actually attended my first Monday Night Class, back when I was living in San Francisco. By the time I was at Wheeler’s, Stephen was drawing about 1,500 to 2,000 psychedelicized seekers to the Family Dog every Monday Night to hear him speak.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">On these Monday nights, I didn’t always hear everything that Stephen said since our Wheeler’s wheels usually arrived late, and the kids and I would be out on the fringes of the huge crowd, with the crying babies and barking dogs. But I heard enough to know that he, too, had experienced this New Consciousness and—miracle of miracles!—he could actually <i>talk</i> about it! Many of us were having these experiences, with the help of psychedelics, but were unable to express what we were experiencing in words. There <i>were</i> no words yet for these experiences—at least not in the English language. Maybe in Sanskrit, but not in English. The books that talked about consciousness were mostly ancient texts from the eastern religions and were just beginning to be published in paperback English translations. And they were not always helpful to twentieth-century westerners. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">But here was this guy—this Stephen Gaskin—who could talk about all this stuff in down-home, colloquial American hippie jargon. Like the rest of us, he was eagerly reading spiritual texts from around the world, and he had this way of explaining them in terms of recent discoveries in modern physics. He talked about Einstein, and the Holy Spirit, and the subconscious, and Christ Consciousness, and the Vow of the Bodhisattva, and truth, and telepathy, and energy fields, and sex, and attention, and satori, and the astral plane, <i>and </i>considered marijuana and psychedelics the sacraments of his religion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Stephen’s teachings had a lot to do with attention, and when he arrived for class, he would just silently sit cross-legged on a low platform until everyone in the whole hall noticed that he was ready to start class and would stop rapping with each other and give Stephen their full attention. Stephen wouldn’t begin to speak until he had the everyone’s attention, and then he would speak to the group without a microphone. Everyone’s attention on Stephen amplified his voice, but it was hard to hear everything he said out there on the fringes where I was. Eventually some of his students talked him into using a microphone so they could record what he was saying. These recordings were later transcribed and published in a book called <i>Monday Night Class</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">I was certainly not one of the “in-group” of students who copied Stephen’s dress, speech, and lifestyle – I only made it to a few classes, and was very eclectic in my spiritual studies. I read or listened to the teachings of many spiritual teachers and learned from them all, but didn’t consider any of them “my guru.” My most important teacher was within – my own Higher Self. But when Stephen said one night, “Someday we’ll put all our money together and buy a piece of land and do a community on it,” I thought, <i>Now, <u>that’s</u> the community I’d like to live in! <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">One Monday Night Class that I attended was also attended by a bunch of Methodist ministers. They were from all over the country, in SF for a national convention of Methodist ministers, and had heard about this guy who drew huge crowds every Monday night when he talked about Spirit. The ministers were curious. They sat in the balcony at the Family Dog and listened intently. Some of them asked Stephen questions, which he answered with great sensitivity and awareness. By the end of class some of the ministers were so impressed that they invited Stephen to come speak in their churches. He agreed to do that and started setting up an itinerary. This was the beginning of what came to be known as “The Caravan”, in which Stephen, his four-marriage family, and many converted schoolbuses full of his hippies caravanned across the US and back, stopping in cities and college towns, where Stephen shared his teachings with the locals as well as his travelling students.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Meanwhile, life at Wheeler’s was physically difficult but worth it for the freedom, closeness to nature, and like-minded friends. I felt safe there. I went to town as seldom as possible and liked it that way. But as the colder weather set in, I began to really look forward to my trips to San Francisco and Jamestown with Carl—and not just because I wanted to see Gridley. I also enjoyed the respite from chopping wood and carrying water. It seemed amazing to me that in the city I could just turn on a faucet and out would come <i>hot running</i> <i>water!</i> Oh, my! What a luxury! What a miracle! I even <i>loved</i> to do dishes wherever I crashed in the city – just to get to play with the plumbing.. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">After a while word about open land at Wheeler’s spread, and a few more of those not-yet-awakened folks moved in. And it was “open land” so we let them. We thought that our love and the freedom would help them de-condition and see the light. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">All hippies had long or growing-out hair in those days. The men didn’t shave and the women didn’t wear make-up. It wasn’t a style; it was a statement. It said, “I’m okay with the way God made me. I’m not willing to distort my natural self any longer just to fit into a society based on distorted values.” And when you saw someone with long hair, you knew you had a kinshp with them, even if you had never met them before. Eventually, however, folks started growing their hair long so they could look “hip” without the requisite consciousness. And people in the dominant culture, not being attuned to reading vibes, couldn’t tell the difference. They lumped all longhairs into the same category—outlaws, political dissidents, and drug addicts. In 2010, long hair seems to have become popular again, but now it’s a style that you have done in a hair salon. The Morstuffians have usurped many traditional hippie concepts and customs and figured out how to make money off of the superficial, materialistic aspects of them, while distorting their original essence. But back in 1968, growing your hair long meant something.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">One day a short-haired father and teenage son moved into a big army tent on one end of the land, near the gate. They didn’t hang out much with the rest of us. Then one day the police <i>did</i> arrive and found their tent full of chain saws, canned hams, and other items that had been stolen from the local stores. Father and son got busted, and the police now knew about Wheeler’s. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">A while later a group of “Hell’s Angels” began stopping by some evenings and invaded our campfire. They brought wine, knives, guns, and harsh vibes. But we felt we <i>had</i> to let them stay—it was <i>open</i> land, and they had as much right to be there as any of the rest of us did. But it was becoming land that I didn’t enjoy being on so much anymore. Gentle and I took more frequent trips to the city and stayed longer. Todd always preferred to stay on the land with Josh and Ellie.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">At Christmas time Carl, who had received a small windfall, wanted to do something for the folks at Wheeler’s, who were living so frugally for the sake of their ideals. So he took me around to various thrift stores in San Francisco, and I picked out winter coats and rubber boots and warm blankets and sleeping bags and pots and pans and other items I knew would be useful to folks there. Then we went to a food co-op in Berkeley and bought fifty-pound bags of brown rice, pinto beans, lentils, split peas, whole wheat flour, sixty pounds of honey, some dates and raisins and other dried fruit. Carl paid for it all. The next day we drove to Wheeler’s and spread the stuff out on blankets on the ground. Folks who lived there came and took what they could use. With his long white hair and beard and his short stature, Carl did looked like the “jolly old elf” himself! And the folks at Wheeler’s had a warm, happy holiday season.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Happy Holy Days,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Sylvia</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-4183721309171385582010-12-09T21:15:00.000-08:002010-12-10T18:05:50.847-08:00Living On God's Land part one<h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large; font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></span></h1><h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple; font-size: 16px; font-weight: normal;">[Continuing from previous posts]</span></h1><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><b><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Summer, 1968:</span></span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"> My children and I had spent several months in the LA area. Todd was five-and-a-half now, still wild, bright, and inquisitive. Gentle was ten months old, a beautiful and mellow baby. We were on the road – just the three of us and Morning Glory, our heavenly blue van, now painted to look like a telephone truck– heading for a piece of “open land.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">At this point I was dedicated to group living. It was obvious that people needed to get together and learn to share and look out for each other, and I really wanted to raise my children in a situation where that was happening, a situation where the implications of our Oneness were being lived on a daily basis. I believed it would be good for Todd and Gentle to grow up in an environment of very high consciousness. To me that was way more important that providing them with material goodies and the competitive, fear-based, dog-eat-dog, brain-washed consciousness of square America. But the concept of “open land” was new to me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">It made immediate sense—land that belonged to no one and to everyone – land where anyone who wanted to could go and live—<i>for</i> free and <i>to be</i> free—a material manifestation of the spiritual truth that no one can really own a piece of the Earth – that we all have to learn to share it, to live on it together, in peace and harmony. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Josh and Ellie, part of our Haight Street extended family, had sent directions to Wheeler’s Ranch and had told me that everything we needed would be there, thus reinforcing another of my spiritual beliefs: if your heart is pure and you are trying to live your life for the good of the All, your needs will be covered.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The entrance to Wheeler’s was via an access road, about a mile long, through an adjacent piece of property owned by Mr. Kelly. I remember feeling a flood of relief upon passing through Wheeler’s gate, knowing that I was on open land – <i>free</i> land – a place where I had as much right to be as anyone else did. It was an exhilarating feeling just knowing that I was on land dedicated to such a high principle.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The land was originally owned by Bill Wheeler, who had deeded it to “God” and proclaimed it “open land” following the example of his friend Lou Gottlieb, bass player for the Limeliters and patron saint of Morningstar Ranch, a piece of open land a few miles away, in Graton. Josh and Ellie had lived at Morningstar for a while, until the scene was hassled by local authorities for zoning violations, Lou was arrested, the county came in before dawn one morning and bulldozed all the little hippie shelters, and everyone who lived there had to find another home. I believe it was at that point that Bill Wheeler opened his land to Morningstar refugees and others. Bill and his wife Gay lived in Bill’s art studio, the only close-to-traditional structure on the land.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The kids and I found Josh and Ellie in their tent in a grove of young evergreens. They took us to a larger army tent someone had vacated that morning, leaving it for whoever needed it next. That was us. Welcome Home, Sylvia, Todd and Gentle!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">It was a good-sized army tent – maybe 12’ by 16’ – and it was pitched at the top of a gently sloping meadow. We moved in, unpacking the few belongings we had. There was, of course, no furniture—we sat and slept on the ground. And for a while we didn’t have a stove, so we ate with Josh and Ellie in their tent. Later we inherited a sheet-metal wood stove. We didn’t need it for heat—it was summer—but I figured out how to cook many meals on it. It wasn’t the material accommodations that made Wheeler’s Ranch a special place—it was the people who were there, and the freedom, and the tolerance of others promoted by living the ideals of open-land philosophy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">When we arrived at Wheelers, most of the people there were beautiful flower children, infused with Spirit, exuding love and inner peace. I don’t remember all the names, but a few names and individuals do remain in my memory.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">The one I think of most often was a single mom named Carol and her baby daughter, Morningstar. They lived in a beautiful, simple, natural structure, which Carol had built herself, but the thing I remember most about Carol was her generosity. She received food stamps for herself and the baby, and she used them to buy food for several families at Wheeler’s who had no other means of getting it. We would all go shopping together to a little natural foods store in Petaluma, and Carol would say to us, “Just pick out what you need, and I’ll pay for it.” What a saint! With all of us eating mostly brown rice, beans, and alfalfa sprouts, Carol’s food stamps fed many.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">One of the people who had moved to Wheeler’s from Morningstar was Alicia Bay Laurel, a very creative young woman, who was working on a notebook of earthy living that later became a published book on this emerging, simple, natural way of life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">And there was Jason, who had the widest eyes and purest gaze I had ever seen.,He lived in a tree house and made beautiful music on his twelve-string guitar. I liked Jason a lot. He looked totally mind-blown all the time, and talked so slowly but with such a high vibe that just looking into his eyes and listening to him was like dropping about 300 mics.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Errol and Sarah, an interracial couple and their kids, also lived at Wheeler’s. And O.B. and Donna. And Mystery, one of the few black hippies around in those days, always grinning mischievously and usually living up to the mischief his grin announced.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">Most of all, I remember the freedom, the freedom, the freedom! At last I could be my total self and would be accepted or at least tolerated by everyone else there because they wanted to be free to be their total selves, too. We all knew that the freedom you give is the freedom you get, so we all learned to tolerate each other. For the first time in my life I was free to be exactly who I was and to do exactly what I wanted to do—within, of course, the context of being a single mother of two. And for quite a while all I really wanted to do was to be able to let Todd run free and to hold Gentle. And that’s what they both wanted, too.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;">~~</span><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0in;"><br />
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</div>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-69535454474374304062010-12-09T13:01:00.000-08:002010-12-10T18:05:26.113-08:00Flashback Download: Giving Birth on LSD (1967)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"> Disclaimer: These blogs are simply a sharing of my personal experiences and are not meant as recommendations for anyone else to follow. Please do not use me as a role model. Consult your own Teacher Within.</span></i><br />
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[Continuing from previous posts] It was the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, September 3, my due date, and I was awakened about 9 a.m. by a contraction. Labor was starting, right on schedule! I waited for a couple more contractions to be sure this was for real. When I was convinced that I was really in labor, I ate the purple wedge with a simple prayer for a holy delivery.<br />
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Then Richard-the-drummer stopped by, knowing it was my due date. When I told him I was in labor, he offered to take Todd to the park for a while. I told him to give it to bring him back home in a couple of hours so he could watch his sister be born.<br />
<br />
Yes, his sister. I knew the baby was a girl. These were the days before ultrasound. How did I know? I just knew she was a girl, and I had already picked out her name. It would be “Gentle” – eldest daughter of the I Ching family of trigrams. The eldest son in that family was “Chen” – Thunder – and I figured I had already done that one with Todd, who could be very thunderous at times.<br />
<br />
Richard and Todd left for the park. Josh and Ellie, the two family members I felt closest to, sat with me in my bedroom, smoking joints, as my labor progressed. Things were moving along fine. The contractions were pretty regular and getting stronger and more frequent, and Ellie had gone to the laundromat across the street and done laundry the night before, so we had plenty of clean sheets and towels.<br />
<br />
Pat, the landlord upstairs who had bailed me out of jail, had been a medic in the army and had once delivered a baby. A few days before the birth he had told me how to tie off and cut the umbilical cord. I felt ready. The acid was coming on, and I was starting to feel loose and groovy.<br />
The contractions were getting stronger, however, and my style of baby-having is to make a lot of noise in the process. It just feels good to yell. So I yelled with a couple of contractions, and this freaked Josh out. He was nervous about this unattended home birth anyhow, and after my second hearty yell, he rushed off to the Haight Street Free Clinic to get a doctor.<br />
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The contractions keep coming—same sensation as with Todd’s birth—but this time, on LSD, I did not interpret the sensations as negative—“labor pains.” They were just what my body had to do to move the baby along. Everything flows.<br />
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Now the second stage of labor starts—time to push with the contractions—so I move over onto the bed. Pushing, yelling, grunting, groaning. Yet rejoicing in each contraction that brings my baby closer<br />
to being born.<br />
<br />
Rock music on the radio, frankincense smoke curling in the air, ancient Egyptians on the ceiling welcome in this New Age child. (Were we together before—this baby and I—in Egypt?)<br />
<br />
Ellie leaves the bedroom. Another contraction surges through my body. I push. The baby’s head is crowning. I’m alone.<br />
<br />
Peggy, seventeen and from Seattle, walks past the open bedroom door. “Peggy,” I say, “come on in here for a minute. The baby’s coming.”<br />
<br />
Peggy darts in, followed by Kathy and Ellie. Then, in synch with Great Perfection, Todd and Richard return.<br />
<br />
One-twenty p.m. I push. Richard is holding my hand. Peggy, Kathy and Ellie, (teenagers, and inexperienced in birth) catch the baby girl. Todd, with wide eyes and open mouth, is at the foot of the bed, watches his sister enter the world.<br />
<br />
I sit up, tie and cut the cord, as Pat, my landlord, had taught me. Then deliver the placenta with one final, mighty contraction.<br />
<br />
I direct as the girls clean up the baby and flush the placenta, after placing newborn Gentle Mary in my arms.<br />
<br />
Sheer ecstasy! Home, in my own bed. Home, in my own Higher Consciousness. Just where I most love to be. Beautiful, healthy baby in at my breast. No glass boxes, no rude doctors, no commissioned anesthetists. Just me and my family, at home, welcoming new life into this world.<br />
<br />
The Dance of Life swirls around us, through us, with us. Great Perfection rules!<br />
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Heart chakras, mother’s and baby’s, are open wide, and Love unites old friends in the bliss of Here and Now.<br />
<br />
Friends stop by. Richard’s band, “Triple A—Anonymous Artists of America.” They bring Scotch to toast the baby.<br />
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Then Josh returns, still worried, with two good-hearted doctors from the Haight Street Free Clinic. Antiseptic vibes, shiny metal instruments. Stiff, cold, mechanical, unnatural.<br />
<br />
But I appreciate the wonderfully selfless service they are offering us. They examine Gentle Mary, say she’s fine. They retie the cord with their own, more professional supplies, and want to see the placenta. Flushed. Too late. Oh, well.<br />
<br />
“Where do you keep it?” one asks, holding Gentle Mary.<br />
<br />
“We keep her here in bed beside her mother, where she belongs,” I tell them. They hand me the baby, pack their shiny metal tools, and leave.<br />
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We go on celebrating the Birth of Gentle.<br />
<br />
Josh, joyously shouting “We just had a baby up here!”, tosses joints out the second-story bedroom window to passing strangers on Waller Street,<br />
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One young couple—strangers who happened to be passing just in time to catch a falling j—come up off the street to smoke it with us and see the newborn babe.<br />
<br />
After a while everyone else leaves the room, and I’m alone with my new baby. I feel so blessed. I silently thank Spirit for the gift of this precious new being who nuzzles gently at my breast. And my heart swells with love and joy and gratitude.<br />
<br />
The next day I took Gentle up to the Safeway supermarket on the corner of Haight and Shrader Streets and weighed her on the produce scale. Seven-and-a-half pounds, and priceless.<br />
<br />
My friend Mary, and her son Christopher had left the city by then, but I later learned that Mary did a large painting, from her imagination, entitled Birth of Gentle, and sold it in a Marin art gallery.<br />
<br />
Gentle Mary was a sweet, alert baby. Skip, who had given me the purple wedge, also gave me a rocking chair in which I sat to feed and cuddle my beautiful new daughter. I was much more relaxed with her than I was with infant Todd. My extended crash-pad family was now in the habit of doing most of the housework and helping out with Todd, so I could sit back and enjoy being the mother of a newborn.<br />
<br />
Gentle was a month old when we decided it was time to leave San Francisco. The scene at home was more together—more cooperative—than it had been before I created the vacuum with my vacation, and the vacuum was extended by the fact that I now had to spend several hours a day sitting and nursing the new baby. More people were pitching in and helping out with the cooking and cleaning, and we had a couple of somewhat older and more experienced guys in the family now, so that helped out.<br />
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The Haight Street scene was changing for the worse – heroin brought in by the CIA – and we all agreed that it was definitely time to get out of San Francisco.<br />
<br />
I was never at all interested in hard drugs. Psychedelics were plenty for me – they were mind-expanding, Spirit-affirming, non-addictive substances, unlike the speed and smack I saw some very kind, sensitive using to escape their pain. Psychedelics were not an escape – they brought you face to face with your inner issues, presenting you with the opportunity to understand and heal them. Meth just put folks on a hard-edged ego trip, to bolster their low self-esteem, and heroin just put people beyond their personal pain, whatever it was, without even looking at it.<br />
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Not for me. Cannabis and other psychedelics put you into your deepest stuff, and if you could handle it, you could break on through to Higher Consciousness and a fuller understanding of Life itself. Of course psychedelics are tricky. Set and setting—as Leary pointed out—are very important, as are one’s intention in using the substance and how much inner work a person had done – how well one knew one’s self. If you don’t know yourself very well and have a subconscious full of things you felt guilty about when you take a psychedelic, you might run into (i.e., create) “monsters” as your mind expands into previously subconscious areas. And you might project those monsters onto the people around you, thinking everyone is evil and out to get you, or some paranoid trip like that. But if you’ve done some inner work and are relatively at peace with yourself, you can move right through the subconscious realm and into the Jung’s “collective unconscious” and embody your archetype. And this Earth Mother knew it was time to get her family out of the city.<br />
<br />
~~<br />
<br />
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Peace and Love<br />
Sylvia</span>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-70676985931391246752010-12-07T19:25:00.000-08:002010-12-10T18:05:02.155-08:00Flashback Download: The Summer of Love<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
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[Continuing from previous posts] Spring slipped into summer, 1967. Higher consciousness was spreading. Its signs were everywhere.<br />
Buffalo Springfield sang, “Somethin’ happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear . . .” Grace Slick asked, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” and noted that “One pill makes you taller...” Jim Morrison and the Doors advised us to “Break on through to the other side.”<br />
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Some local promoters were hyping that summer as “The Summer of Love.” Many of the young people who had been here during spring break went back to their home towns or their college campuses to tell their friends that “something is happening” in San Francisco.</span><br />
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So they came – thousands of them – hitchhiking, or piling into a friend’s car, or scraping together barely enough money for one-way bus fare. By mid-June the Haight was simply bursting with young people from all over America. They were so young, so naïve, so pure. Almost immediately some of them got ripped off for any money or possessions they had. And there they were on Haight Street—barefoot, homeless, and penniless – owning nothing but the clothes on their backs, panhandling for food money, and asking everyone who passed if they knew of a place where they could spend the night.<br />
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Many of them were told to go to 703 Shrader Street and ask for Sylvia. I would sit and talk with them for a while and get to know them a little bit. And – unless they were under 16 – Big Mama would usually end up telling them that, yes, they could sleep on my floor if they could find a space. I figured they were better off on my floor than sleeping in some laundromat or hallway somewhere, or going home with someone who would take advantage of them. I’ll never know exactly how many people passed through my apartment that spring and summer – somewhere in the hundreds, at least. And I treated each one as family - (Inasmuch as you have done this . . .) – for as long as he or she was there. It was an open, flowing here-and-now time.<br />
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There were free concerts in the park every Sunday that summer – at first down in the Panhandle, then later out at Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park proper. I went to a few of them, but after a while, as I became more and more pregnant, it was more fun for me to stay home and have the whole apartment to myself for a few hours. Then I was always glad when the concert was over and my huge live-in family started straggling home, usually acid-eyed and grinning.<br />
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Part of my Awakening was that I was no longer willing to give any of my energy to the “establishment” – no longer willing to work within the “system” – no longer willing to support the government and the military-industrial complex with my labor or my tax money. It all looked so corrupt and so based on false values to me that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I supported myself, Todd, and a varying number of other young people who were also in the process of finding their own values and dropping out of the decadent system. It was amusing to see that the square society considered hippies to be decadent, and we thought the same about their culture and government.<br />
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I remember the family returning after one concert totally blown away by this hot young guitar player they had just seen for the first time – some previously unknown kid named Jimi Hendrix. Richard, the drummer, had hooked up with a new band – “Anonymous Artists of America” or “AAA” – and he had moved into a large house on Portrero Hill that the band shared. One weekend afternoon Richard and some other AAA members came to get me and take me to the Avalon Ballroom where Richard would be playing a drum solo. Big Brother and the Holding Company was also playing that afternoon, and Richard and I got to hang out backstage a few minutes with Big Brother’s new female singer – a Texas girl named Janis Joplin. This was before Janis was famous. She seemed like a warm, friendly young hippie girl to me.<br />
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I was casting the I Ching first thing every morning, before Todd got up, with my morning cup and bowl. It tuned my head into a nice high frequency, and I wasn’t put off by its cultural gender bias. I found it accurate as an oracle and full of deep wisdom.<br />
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Two underground newspapers were common in the Haight at that time – The San Francisco Oracle and The Berkeley Barb. There would be someone on almost every street corner selling one or the other. The Oracle had an office on Haight Street and captured the metaphysical vibes of the surrounding scene. I remember an interview with Alan Watts on his houseboat in Sausalito. The Barb was published in Berkeley and was political, satirical, and activist. I liked the Oracle best.<br />
<br />
There seemed to be two kinds of hippies – the political activists, centered in Berkeley, and the spiritual hippies, focused in Haight-Ashbury. I had stopped paying attention to politics a while back, and now that I was experiencing this profound spiritual awakening, I was much more interested in bringing in the Aquarian Age that I was in confronting the establishment. I didn’t want to deal with the establishment at all. I wanted to ignore it – withdraw my energy from it – and focus on living this emerging value system. It looked to me like the old way was so corrupt and distorted that it would eventually crumble – and all the sooner if tuned in people stopped giving it energy.<br />
<br />
Then there was the night that Danny, one of our family at the Shrader Street apartment, dropped some acid and took a bath while he was coming on to it. And there in the bathtub he broke through his childhood conditioning and realized that he had been taught a lie by his parents and society. He had been taught that nakedness was bad, that naked bodies were shameful. But as he bathed his own naked body, coming on to the LSD, he realized that naked bodies were nothing to be ashamed of. They were natural. They were beautiful. So he got up out of the bathtub, walked down the stairs, out the front door, and on up to Haight Street – buck naked. He made it down several blocks of Haight before the cops picked him up. They kept him until morning and then released him.<br />
<br />
That’s the way it was in those days – droves of us were getting high, getting in touch with big hunks of out-dated conditioning, and freeing ourselves from it – sometimes in rather dramatic ways. Not everyone could handle coming face to face with their inner stuff. Some of the young people were sincere spiritual seekers – or at least seekers of a lifestyle that made more sense to them than the one their parents were practicing. Others were just conforming – following the crowd – imitating those they thought were hip – and taking psychedelics without spiritual intention and without having done the inner work prerequisite to positive mind expansion. The word “psychedelic” comes from the Greek word psyche meaning “the human soul, spirit or mind”, and del(os) meaning “visible, manifest, evident,” These substances make the contents of your mind visible, manifest, evident. And if your mind is full of fear, then ingesting these substances may manifest fearsome entities around you, and you may have a bum trip. If, however, you have done enough inner work to be comfortable with the contents of your own mind, and if you ingest these substances with the intention of increasing personal growth and understanding of Spirit, and if you are in a setting conducive to same, you can experience Love and Truth—visible, manifest, and evident all around you.<br />
<br />
I clearly remember the first time I ever danced alone in public. It was at a concert in Golden Gate Park early that summer. I was on acid, and Todd was with me. I don’t remember now what band was playing, but I had been hung up about my physical appearance for years, and I hated to do anything that would call attention to myself in a crowd. I hated to be looked at. Even at the Fillmore that Palm Sunday, I didn’t dance. I stood on the sidelines and watched – mind-blown – but I didn’t go out there and do it myself. Still too hung up. But that day in the park I finally did. The LSD and the music and the crowd finally overcame my self-consciousness, I became Earth Mother again, and I danced – all by myself – raising my arms and moving my large body whichever way the music told it to go. It felt wonderful to close my eyes and just let the music move me. And guess what! When I opened my eyes, nobody was looking at me weirdly. Nobody came up to me and said, “Hey, you can’t dance like that! You’re too ugly to dance at all!” Nobody did that. No one seemed to notice me at all. Everyone else was just dancing and grooving and doing their own thing, and allowing me to do mine. What a release! What freedom! What bliss!<br />
<br />
By now the media was giving its usual twisted coverage to the Haight-Ashbury scene. Square tourists were coming to Haight-Ashbury to see the sights. They drove down Haight Street in their sleek new cars, quickly rolling up their windows if anyone approached their car, actually being in fear of us gentle, peace-loving hippies. We loved them in our universal way, but we also felt pity for them, in their drab business suits, suffocating ties, irrational fears, and conditioned minds. We wanted them all to find the peace and joy and freedom that we were discovering. But they rolled their windows up and looked at us like we were freaks.<br />
<br />
Actually, we accepted the label of “freaks” with great honor. We were happy to be considered freaks by a society that we considered unprincipled and degenerate. We wore the Freak badge proudly.<br />
<br />
I made a big, colorful poster saying, “Rejoice! The Kingdom of God is at Hand!” and put it up on the wall of the stairway, at the landing, so folks coming in the front door would see it. To me it meant that the “Kingdom of God” – that is, Higher Consciousness – is “at hand” – right here and right now. Not something that’s going to happen sometime in the near future – but here and now. All we have to do is tune in to it!<br />
<br />
Sometime early that summer one of my crasher family – I think it was Richard – brought in a young man called “Blues.” He was tall and thin, about 19, beardless and with short dark hair and trapped-looking eyes. He was newly arrived from Chicago, where his father was a judge. My Earth-Mother heart was immediately compassionate. With a judge for a father, what conditioning he must have to overcome before he can know the God within! I saw him as someone new to hippie-dom – still in the early stages of the changes, and needing lots of love.<br />
<br />
Blues needed a place to stay, too, and wanted to rent my back room That was a very strange concept to an Earth Mother. “No,” I told him, “you can’t rent a room. But you can just stay here and be part of the family.” But he insisted on paying, and I think I eventually accepted some money from him, which I spent on food for everybody.<br />
<br />
The weeks passed and Blues went through his changes. He smoked pot, he took acid, he went to concerts, he became part of the family and felt our Love. He relaxed, his hair grew, he learned to share, his eyes were sometimes big and almost peaceful. Then one day Blues came in and asked if he could see me alone. That day his eyes were big but sad. He was tripping. We went into my jewelry workroom and closed the door. Blues burst into tears.<br />
<br />
“I’ve been lying to you, Sylvia,” he sobbed. “All this time, I’ve been lying to you. You’ve been nicer to me than anyone else in my whole life, and I’ve been lying to you.”<br />
<br />
“What do you mean?” I asked.<br />
<br />
“Look,” he said, pulling an I.D. card out of his wallet and handing it to me. “I’m a narc,” he explained as I looked at the card. “My father got me the job. I moved in here to bust you, but you and the other people here have been so good to me I just can’t do that. And I can’t lie to you anymore.” Tears streamed down Blues’ face.<br />
<br />
I read the I.D. and yes, he was a narc. There was his picture and everything. I didn’t know what to say.<br />
<br />
“I know that I have to move out now that I’ve told you, but I promise I’ll never bust you, Sylvia,” he continued between sobs. “And if you’re ever someplace else when I’m busting that place, I’ll tell you to leave before we arrest anyone. You’ve been so good to me – I promise I’ll never bust you.”<br />
<br />
Todd came in just then, needing lunch. Blues packed up his stuff and moved out.<br />
<br />
So much else happened that summer I can’t possibly relate it all. There was a constant flow of people through the apartment – fifteen or twenty of them “living” there at any one time. Todd got lots of attention; I made and sold my jewelry and shared expanded headspace with those seekers who passed through the scene. We were all experimenting, being sure only that the old, square way of thinking didn’t fit us anymore, and that we were creating a new culture based on new values, new levels of understanding. Although we didn’t have the details all figured out, we did know that something new was forming, something that would be better for everyone than the current system, warped as it was by greed, materialism and fear.<br />
<br />
Later in the summer the Beatles new album, Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, came out. It was great! There was even a song about a girl who was running away from home because she had never felt any real love from her parents. “She’s leaving home. Bye, bye.”<br />
<br />
My sister, Elma, from Connecticut came to San Francisco for a visit. She crashed on the living room floor with the other crashers/family members. She went out to Haight Street panhandling with them, too, but she kept a ten dollar bill tucked in her pocket in case she wanted to buy something. Actually, she did buy a pair of sneakers for one of our crasher family who didn’t have any shoes.<br />
<br />
That summer I became aware of the tyranny of time – of always looking at the clock, of always needing to know what time it was. I finally put my clock in the freezer. It stayed there for the rest of the summer, and I was glad to be rid of it.<br />
<br />
Marion and her daughter Tanya, old friends from New York, showed up and joined the family. Crashers came and went. Josh and Ellie had become long-term family members. I kept on cooking and cleaning up after everyone and making jewelry to pay the rent and buy the food. Todd was free and healthy, with lots of big sisters and brothers to play with. Life was wild and crazy, but high and holy, too.<br />
<br />
Through all this I was, of course, pregnant – again with no partner on the scene. Although I didn’t intend to have this baby in a hospital, I did want confirmation of my pregnancy and a due date for the baby, so I went to a pre-natal clinic once, to get that information. They gave me a due date of September 3rd.<br />
<br />
When I was pregnant with Todd in NYC in 1962, before I started turning on, I got fired from my midtown Manhattan secretarial job for being pregnant and not married, and unwilling to wear a fake wedding ring and lie about my marital status. I was told that I was “bad for the image of the organization.” Then I wanted natural childbirth but had to fight off the anesthetist and doctor (both women), who kept trying to slap a gas mask on my face or jab me with a long needle while my arms and legs were strapped down, even though I had told them I wanted to do it naturally. I had to turn my head away and hold my breath for a couple of contractions, but I did manage to squirt the baby out before they could put me under, even though I tore a little in the process. They had never seen a natural birth before, and both had to admit afterward that it was beautiful. Then they thought I was nuts because I wanted to breastfeed him, and I didn’t want him circumcised. And to see him, I had to take the elevator to another floor of the hospital and watch through big glass windows as he cried and cried in his basket, and no one even tried to comfort him. I couldn’t hack it. I signed myself out of the hospital early and took baby Todd home to my basement apartment on E. 2nd Street. That experience had left me feeling like I would have been better off giving birth at home alone, so that’s the way I decided to do this next one.<br />
<br />
What could be more natural than giving birth? It’s what my body was made to do. I had heard stories of Eskimo women who delivered their own babies and bit the cord off with their teeth, and Russian peasant women who stopped plowing the field long enough to squat in the bushes and give birth, then return to pulling the plow with their newborns strapped to their body.<br />
<br />
If they could do it, so could I! Maybe when the time came, I’d just go for a walk in Golden Gate Park and have the baby there somewhere – in some green, shady place, maybe beside a little creek. Then the blood and afterbirth could sink into the ground, and I could wash the baby in the flowing water.<br />
<br />
I mentioned this to a couple of friends. They were absolutely horrified at the idea and strongly urged me to abandon it. I reluctantly agreed -–I guess I could just have the baby at home in the apartment – but I certainly didn’t want any doctors interfering with the process.<br />
<br />
By now my mind had expanded enough to understand that there is a Great Perfection underlying (or overlaying?) all other realities. From the highest perspective, everything is always Perfect. It is just in our lower, mundane consciousness that we fail to see that Perfection and think we have problems – or create them for ourselves. It seemed to me that the best way to bring a baby into the world would be with a consciousness expanded into that Great Perfection, and the way I knew to do that was by eating some LSD.<br />
<br />
I still considered acid one of my sacraments - specifically because it always got me to that headspace of Oneness and the Great Perfection - but I hadn’t taken any acid during the last trimester of my pregnancy because I had heard that if taken at that time it might bring on premature labor. I decided that I would take some once labor had started naturally and in that way I would give my new baby the highest, holiest start I possibly could. One of the things I had discovered about this new consciousness was that when I was in it, I could manifest things just by “sending” for them with my mind. And what I “sent” for would show up – usually from some entirely unexpected source – within an hour or two in time/space reality. I pondered on how that could possibly happen. Although I didn’t address my request to “God” or anyone else, it was like praying because from that level of awareness, I was integrated with whatever Beingness answers prayer, and the stipulation was always there that it be for the highest good of all life. I had but to state mentally my desire or intention, in words or images, and what I asked for would appear – not out of thin air but as part of the daily flow of my life, and that something must have already been on its way to me before I even asked for it! What a Universe! What a Creator! My soul bowed inwardly to this Divine Intelligence.<br />
<br />
I combined this theory with what I called the “vacuum theory”, which was based on the principle we all learned in school that “nature abhors a vacuum.” So then, the way to bring in more of something is to create a vacuum, and then nature would fill it. I often applied this theory to our family stash of marijuana. If we were almost out, we would smoke up the last of it to “create a vacuum”, and from that heightened consciousness, I’d “send out” a thought-request for more. And believe it or not, it worked every time. One of the family would be walking down the street and a stranger would come up and ask him if he knew of a place where he could smoke some of this grass he had just scored, and he would be brought home to “meet the family.” Or an old friend would drop in wanting to bag up his new kilo in the back bedroom. It would be something we couldn’t possibly have planned – but Somebody or Something had planned it – down to the most minute detail. How could that be? What was this Mind that coordinated all of this, that knew what I was going to ask for way before I even knew I wanted it? I realized what “omniscient” meant in regards to the Divine Totality of All Beingness. Sometime in my third trimester I used this means of manifestation to “send out” for some LSD for the birth, and about three weeks before my due date Skip, a former crasher and still a member of my extended family, came over and gave me a lovely little purple wedge. I put it away in a container on my bedroom altar until labor began.<br />
<br />
Then Diane, a young woman who had stayed with us for a week or two in the spring, stopped by for a visit, and when she saw the extent of my pregnancy and the workload I was carrying, she invited me to spend a week or so at her place in Marin county. It sounded good to me. I had been realizing that I was doing most of the work that was getting done around the place, and that in order for others to step in and do some of it, I had to create a vacuum – a space for them to fill.<br />
<br />
I packed up a few clothes for Todd and me, told the crashers they were on their own for a couple of weeks, and split. A vacation in the country was just what I needed. Diane and her old man lived in a large, Spanish-style house, with a swimming pool and a view of rolling hills. I just sat in a lawn chair for hours on end, soaking up the natural surroundings and unwinding from my self-appointed role of Crash Pad Mama.<br />
<br />
Todd played happily with the young girl who lived there. The folks in that scene swam and sunbathed nude. That was fine with me. I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, and it was good to get naked, outdoors in the water and sun. (I had done nude modeling in various art schools in New York and spend several days at a nudist colony, Eden West, on a previous visit to California. People who have never taken their clothes off in public seem to think that if mixed-gender groups are together naked, they must be having orgies or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. Certainly being naked and seeing other people naked is a pleasant experience—the human body is truly beautiful—but for people of high consciousness, nudity is neither sexual nor embarrassing.<br />
<br />
One day during my stay at Diane’s the members of Quick Silver Messenger Service came to visit. My friend’s partner was their roadie. We all enjoyed the pool together that afternoon. They were just regular folks – some of Mother Earth’s talented children, going through their changes.<br />
<br />
Two weeks later, when I returned home, the “kids” had totally taken over the scene. They had been buying and cooking their own meals, cleaning up after themselves, and even had some money set aside toward rent. “Vacuum theory” strikes again!<br />
<br />
~~~</span>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-1192903362357339962010-12-07T19:23:00.000-08:002010-12-10T18:04:31.591-08:00Flashback Download: The Human Be-In and Arrival of the Flower Children<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
<br />
It was Christmas season in Haight-Ashbury. I was still in my new multi-dimensional consciousness much of the time, Peace, Love, and Joy filled the air and filled my heart as Todd and I strolled along Haight Street on Christmas Eve, giving away pairs of filigree-and-bead earrings I had made, in hopes of teaching Todd that the joy of Christmas is in giving – even to total strangers. People on Haight Street received the earrings much more graciously than the New Yorkers had. One guy even said he was on his way to his girlfriend’s and didn’t have a gift for her, or money to buy one, so he really appreciated the help.<br />
<br />
Later that evening, after Todd was asleep and I was sitting alone in my darkened living room, I heard a group of carolers singing on the street corner beneath my window. The song they sang was not a traditional Christmas carol. It was the Negro spiritual, He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand. My consciousness expanded with this reminder that an infinite Creative Intelligence held the Earth and Earth Mother Sylvia (really just one Being) within Its eternal mantle of protection. And part of that protection is that we are eternal. Our souls – the God sparks within us – live forever. This God-stuff of which everything is made is always changing as it passes through its cycles from non-material to material and back to non-material again, but the grand, reliable rhythm of those cycles is, itself, our protection. To my mind, those carolers beneath my window, and the transcendent consciousness they triggered, were my Christmas gift from the Great Allness of the All.<br />
<br />
Early in the new year (1967), I realized that since I was sexually active again, I’d better get down to the Planned Parenthood clinic and get some birth control. This was before “the pill” was common, and I thought I’d try an I.U.D., in those days commonly called a “coil.” I got out my calendar to get my dates straight because I knew that at the clinic they would ask me when I had my last period. “Let’s see – there was the mark – my last period was one, two, three, four, five, six! Six weeks ago?!? Whoops!!! Too late for birth control now – I’m pregnant! I had been celibate for almost five years now – since Todd’s conception – but there was that one night with Steve while I was still very much glowing and transcendent from my Earth-Mother awakening. Now Steve had left the city for parts unknown, and I had no idea how to find him.<br />
<br />
This information merged into my new consciousness, and I was humbled by the honor of growing within me yet another child of the new Age. I had already received inner knowledge that Todd had come to assist in Earth’s new beginning, and now I would get to bear yet another Aquarian Age child to help bring in the budding era of the Brotherhood of Man.<br />
</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
Those five days of Awakening last November had changed my life and my consciousness forever. And now that I was carrying another child, my number-one priority became living my new truth as fully as possible. I knew by then that children don’t learn from what we say to them; they learn from our behavior, from our example. So I decided that living my highest ideal – the Unconditional Universal Love of an Earth Mother – would be the best possible example I could give my offspring.<br />
<br />
To me that meant sharing everything I had with everyone who came my way. It meant rejoicing constantly in my heart because God is real and a new Age of Peace and Brotherhood is beginning. That meant seeing everyone at a soul level – seeing the spark of God within each one – and relating to that God Self from my God Self. That meant living the Earth Mother archetype that had awakened within me and loving and nurturing all Earth’s children, and treating each one as a potential Christed entity. (“Inasmuch as you have done this even to one of the least of these…”) And that meant sharing my “pad” – spacious five-room flat that it was – with whoever crossed my path needing a place to stay.<br />
<br />
The first one to move in was Richard – a 19-year-old rock-n-roll drummer from Texas. Richard was a sweet, sensitive young man, short in stature, with blond hair just starting to grow down over his ears, and a wide Howdy-Doody grin. He needed not only a place to crash, but also a place to set up his drums and practice. And yes, my living room would do just fine, thanks! Richard and his drum set moved in. He took Todd to the park with him often, and they became good buddies.<br />
<br />
That January (1967), Mary and Christopher and Todd and I went to the first “Human Be-In” at the Polo Grounds of Golden Gate Park. The civil rights movement of the early sixties had popularized the idea of “sit-ins”, and now someone had called a “Be-In, a Gathering of the Tribes to celebrate our Human Beingness. The event was free, and so were we.<br />
<br />
It was a mellow, sunny day – warm for January. Reaching the crest of a small hill as we approached the Polo Grounds, we looked down at the large crowd that had already gathered. We continued down the slope and onto the lawn, mind-blown by the spectacle of thousands of people like us – long hair, beads, creative clothing, smiles, and big, peaceful eyes. I don’t think any of us had any idea that there were that many of us until that day. That realization alone got us high.<br />
<br />
There was music and speakers. Hope flooded my womb when Allen Ginsberg led a prayer in honor of the coming Maitreya – the coming Buddha – “whose beauty is already among us.”<br />
<br />
Someone parachuted down onto the field from a small plane, creating quite a murmur in the crowd. It turned out to be Timothy Leary.<br />
<br />
But what impressed me most was just how many hippies there were, and how high and beautiful and open and sharing everyone was. This was the first time I experienced the collective vibe of thousands of high-minded people in the same place at the same time. Remember, this was in the olden days, before outdoor concerta with thousands and thousands of hippies. Nothing like this gathering had happened before—so many hip people in one place—each one beautiful in his or her own natural beingness.<br />
<br />
Joints and pipes were being passed openly. Lots of people were on acid. The police, on horseback, watched from the slopes above the field but never came down into the crowd and hassled anyone. Here was a peaceful, flowing Perfection to the scene – lots of action, but it all seemed to be cosmically choreographed into One Perfect, Flowing Dance of Light and Love. The crowd dispersed at sunset, carrying the vibe of integrated consciousness with us out into the city and beyond.<br />
<br />
On Palm Sunday that spring Mary took me to my first rock-and-roll dance at the Fillmore. We both took some LSD. I was now about four months pregnant. The “chromosome damage” disinformation had not yet been spread. I felt that acid was good for me and was here to save the world. It was the sacrament of my personal religion. It must be good for my baby, too.<br />
<br />
On that Palm Sunday at the Fillmore, Chuck Berry and Quicksilver Messenger Service were holding communion.<br />
<br />
Now, the last time I had gone to a dance was when I was in high school in small town Connecticut, back in the late 1940’s, when the main dance was the fox trot, couples only, and a girl had to wait to be asked by a boy to dance. So the Fillmore on that Palm Sunday afternoon blew my mind a little further yet. Loud, inescapable, pulsating music, strobe lights, black lights, a projected light show, everyone dancing in this free, uninhibited, un-self-conscious, tribal way – it was all such a breakthrough from the neurotic conditioning of the mainstream culture – such a testimony to mental and spiritual wholeness – that I knew then for sure, if there had been any doubt left within me, that humankind was saved! We had broken through the fetters of separation and control, and were being healed and made whole again! Indescribable joy swelled up within me as this knowingness burst upon my consciousness. It was all true! God is real and humanity is being saved!<br />
<br />
The next week was Easter Sunday. I took some acid to celebrate Earth’s rebirth. Todd and I went to the park. The meadow at the foot of Hippie Hill was alive with beautiful people. Todd joined a group of kids flying a kite. For a while I chanted Hare Krishna with Swami Bhaktavedanta and his followers. The swami had just arrived from New York, and it was a very high time for the folks from the San Francisco Krishna Consciousness temple. I didn’t realize at the time that the swami was the one who had written the little Who’s Crazy? pamphlet, but I did notice that the chanting was especially strong and inspired due to his presence.<br />
<br />
As we chanted – Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare. Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare – over and over again, I began coming on to the LSD. To me, Krishna and Rama are just local names for the One Divine Consciousness, or God, and I joyously chanted Its praises as my own consciousness expanded to unite with that Great Cosmic Consciousness of The All.<br />
<br />
There was a large frisbee game in the center of the meadow, and again I was struck with the sense of choreographed dance as I watched the random but somehow synchronized movements of the meadow throng. Frisbee’s flew, babies crawled, children ran, dogs chased, Krishnas chanted, butterflies floated, congas boomed – and no one got in anyone else’s way, no accidents happened, no one got angry at anyone else, no one put out funky vibes of any kind – a meadow full of turned-on and tuned-in people, merging into one harmonious happening – a joyous Dance of Life, directed by the Cosmic Choreographer of the One-That-Is-All, through whose eyes I was now gazing at the scene.<br />
<br />
The two weeks around Palm Sunday and Easter were spring vacation for many high schools and colleges around the country, as they are today, and hundreds of young people made pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury. They could be seen trudging along Haight Street with backpacks and sleeping bags, or sitting on Hippie Hill, weaving garlands of daisies for their hair and looking for the Love that they had heard was happening here.<br />
<br />
I couldn’t walk down Haight Street without being stopped by at least one or two young people who would ask me if I knew of a place where they could crash that night. And of course I did. Inasmuch as you have done this . .…<br />
<br />
My apartment was soon full of wide-eyed seekers – from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, or Tupelo, Mississippi. Some stayed for one night, some stayed for several months. They were all my children. I loved them all and tried to help them in any way I could.<br />
<br />
Todd suddenly had lots of teenage “sisters and brothers”, who liked to take him to the park or Haight Street, and who played with him around the apartment at other times. I housed them and fed them and sometimes clothed them. Any Earth Mother would have done the same. I shared smoke with them and read to them from the I Ching. I did my best to point their consciousness toward Spirit.<br />
<br />
I had just dropped some acid when I opened a letter from my sister in Connecticut, which contained an article about the “LSD-damages-chromosomes” myth. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not. I decided that if LSD really did change my baby’s chromosomes, it would be a change in consciousness for the better, and I would be proud to be the mother of the next step in humanity’s evolution. Maybe that was what Jesus meant by the coming of the “Son of Man” – the next generation in human consciousness.<br />
<br />
Richard’s band was now practicing in the apartment a couple of afternoons a week. That meant, among other things, a bigger-than-usual crowd for dinner. I always fed whoever was around at meal time, but it was tricky to predict what the count might be. I would walk around the pad about 4 p.m., counting heads, and then prepare a meal for one-and-a-half times that many. If I counted twenty people at four o’clock, I’d cook for thirty, and it would usually come out just right.<br />
<br />
With the band practicing, conversation was impossible – thinking didn’t even work, the music was so loud and insistent. So I learned to jump up to the non-verbal plane and cook dinner in a headspace of wordlessness. This took some adjusting for li’l ol’ conceptual me, but I had experienced pre-verbal consciousness in my explorations of other dimensions, and after a while I was able to give my left brain a break for a couple of hours and function from a level where knowingness exists without words.<br />
<br />
Another thing we were discovering is a phenomenon called a “contact high.” We began to notice that when hanging out with someone in a high consciousness (usually from grass or acid), others would begin to get high, too, even though they had not taken a psychedelic or even smoked any pot. Somehow the high consciousness of the partaker was able to influence the consciousness of those around him or her. It was amazing! Those who got the contact high didn’t usually get to the point of hallucinations or anything, but they did notice a definite rising of their consciousness just being around someone who was high.<br />
<br />
At that time I was supporting Todd and myself (and an ever-changing couple dozen other folks) by making jewelry and selling it to the Psychedelic Shop and through wholesale mail orders. So I paid all the rent, bought all the food, did all the cooking and most of the cleaning up – all with a child of the new Age growing in my belly. (Teach by example. Live your highest ideal.)<br />
<br />
This was really my first experience in group living. We were an extended family – but one in which I was doing all the work. At the time it seemed appropriate – I was almost a generation older than the rest of the “family” and was just doing my Earth Mother thing.<br />
<br />
One of the crashers who spent his spring vacation in my home that year was Bruce, a tall, dark-haired, gentle teenager from Santa Cruz. I enjoyed having him around. And he had such a great time at my pad in April that he showed up again in May – this time with six friends from Santa Cruz, all under 16, all wanting to know if they could crash there.<br />
<br />
Haight Street overflowed with runaways in those days, and I was sympathetic to them because I felt that they were wise to flee from the square conditioning of their birth families and seek their own spiritual awakenings here in the City of St. Francis, where the seeds of gentleness and love were beginning to sprout. But I also knew – and had recently been reminded by some new friends – that harboring runaways was a bust, and I definitely didn’t want to get busted.<br />
<br />
So I told Bruce and his friends, “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you stay here. You’ll have to find another place.”<br />
<br />
“Okay,” they said cheerfully. “We’ll go out and look. But can we just leave our stuff here while we’re looking?”<br />
<br />
That was easy to say “yes” to – no runaways, just some backpacks and sleeping bags. “Okay,” I said. “Put them in the hall closet.”<br />
<br />
That night I went to bed early as usual. I was still basically a country girl – despite living in New York City for nine years – and I was in the habit of getting up by 6 a.m. So I was ready for bed at 9:30 in the evening, soon after I got Todd settled in for the night. The only two rules I had for the crashers were no hard drugs ever, and no noise after 9:30 p.m. The young folks were usually pretty quiet after I went to bed, and I never did see any hard drugs around the place.<br />
<br />
About 4 a.m. the next morning I was awakened by a cop shining his flashlight in my eyes as I lay in bed (actually a mattress on the floor). “Is this your apartment?” he was saying. “Get up. You’re under arrest.”<br />
<br />
“What for?” I asked groggily.<br />
<br />
“Runaways. We just found seven of them sleeping on your living-room floor.” And he started reading me my rights.<br />
<br />
Bruce and his friends had not found another place to stay. They had come back after I was asleep and crashed in the living room. Furthermore, they had been given a ride from Santa Cruz to my front door by another teen friend of theirs. This “friend” had returned to Santa Cruz and given my address when pressed by worried parents and the Santa Cruz police. The Santa Cruz fuzz called the San Francisco fuzz, the runaways were found and returned, and I was busted – for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor, on seven counts.”<br />
<br />
There were two cops, and they were gruff and sarcastic. I could see, through my Earth Mother eyes, that their status quo was threatened by us free, loving hippies who were living by a new set of rules. I could feel their fear. I told them I loved them. They told me I needed a bath.<br />
<br />
I was driven downtown, handcuffed, in a squad car. I was booked, strip-searched and de-bugged. (This process is a gigantic ego death in itself. - Me? In jail? Jail is for criminals. I’m not that kind of person…)<br />
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By then it was fully morning, and I was put into the city jail’s “day room” with a few dozen other women, who were sitting at long, institutional-type tables, smoking cigarettes, talking with each other, or looking at a newspaper. Most of them seemed angry.<br />
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I’ll never forget the clang of the iron door as it shut behind me, and I realized for the first time that I was locked up inside there. Furthermore, “they” had the keys and weren’t going to let me out until “they” were good and ready. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of powerlessness as I sat down at one of the tables.<br />
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Some of the women in the day room were hookers. The one sitting next to me was there for forging checks. I felt uncomfortable and out of place. My head was spinning. I hadn’t had breakfast, and the baby in my belly was beginning to remind me about that.<br />
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I needed something to help me keep my head together. No I Ching here. I walked up to the door and asked the guard outside for a Bible to read. She looked me over from head to toe and said, “What do you want with a Bible?” (Like, “How could such an obvious degenerate as you be interested in a Bible?”)<br />
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I told her I wanted to read it. “Isn’t there some law that says prisoners can get a Bible whenever they ask for one?”<br />
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She gave me a snotty look and walked away without answering.<br />
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A while later she returned and motioned for me to come up to the barred door. There she silently handed me a Bible. I started reading The Sermon on the Mount, and my consciousness began to rise again, merging with Christ Consciousness as I read Jesus’ high and holy words.<br />
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A few minutes later another guard called my name. Pat, my black landlord and upstairs neighbor, had put his house on the line to bail me out and was there to drive me home. What a friend!<br />
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The next day there was an article in the paper about the arrest. It said that the police had found twenty-six adult hippies milling around my apartment that morning, in addition to the seven runaways. And it said that I was known by the neighborhood kids as “Big Mama.”<br />
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Later some of the folks crashing at the pad told me that when the cops arrived that morning, everyone was very stoned – they had just finished capping a gram of acid on my kitchen table while I slept.<br />
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The father of a girl who had crashed at my place was a lawyer. He offered to defend me, free. Bruce, his aunt, and some other parents of the runaways came to my apartment to pick up the kids’ stuff. I was friendly; they were polite. A few days later the charges against me were dropped. (Whew! “He’s got the whole world, in His hands…”)<br />
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Another highlight of that Spring was a Ravi Shankar concert in San Francisco. As soon as I heard about it, I wanted to attend, but I never did get around to getting a ticket, and of course they were all sold out a few weeks before the concert. So I reconciled myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be going. Then the day of the concert arrived, and Biff came bursting into my kitchen with two tickets. I had picked up Biff and his friend just ourside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and given them a ride to their homes in California. Biff wanted me to go with him to the concert. A little “thank you” for the help I had given him on the road. One of my crasher family watched Todd for the evening. The concert was great, and I was once again reminded of the Great Perfection, and how what we put out really does come back to us</span>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3254297014096288513.post-3258403572274225112010-12-07T19:09:00.000-08:002010-12-10T18:04:04.538-08:00Flashback Downloads- Haight-Ashbury 1966<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: purple;"><br />
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If we had to live in a city again, I wanted a big apartment, close to a park. I found one through a rental agency. It was a five-room flat on the corner of Shrader and Waller streets, a block from Golden Gate Park and within my budget. Great! The fact that it was also a block from Haight Street didn’t mean a thing to me. I was still in my New-Yorker head of thinking that nothing really important could be happening anywhere west of the Hudson, and I had never even heard of Haight-Ashbury. It was Fall, 1966, Little did I know that all Heaven was about to break loose in our new neighborhood, in our apartment, and in my own consciousness.<br />
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So Todd, Yogi and I moved into our new digs in the Haight. The apartment was one flight up, over a tool rental store. I actually felt somewhat relieved living in a city again. At least I could walk to the laundromat and grocery store if the van wasn’t running. And living just a block from Golden Gate Park was wonderful. It was a huge park, extending ten miles west to the ocean, with many meadows, forested areas, museums, and a great playground for kids of all ages. Todd especially enjoyed the spiral slide, the petting zoo, and the merry-go-round.<br />
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Of course we had to walk Yogi a couple of times a day, so Todd and I checked out the neighborhood. We discovered that a St. Bernard puppy is a great conversation piece, and folks often stopped to exchange a few words with us about him.</span><br />
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One morning our travels took us across Haight Street and a couple of blocks north to the Panhandle. There were tall eucalyptus trees there (exotic to us Easterners), good flat space for Todd and Yogi to run around, and a bench for me to sit on. It was there that I met a woman in her mid-twenties named Mary. She had a son, Christopher, who was a year younger than Todd, and while the boys played together with Yogi, Mary and I sat on the bench and got to know each other.<br />
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Mary was slender, with red hair, bright green eyes, and a very metaphysical consciousness. She was also a single mother, and we became friends. Sometimes she and Christopher would come to our apartment, where Mary and I would smoke some grass I had scored from the folks who had grown it. Ten ounces for $100. That sounded good to me. I was used to paying $20 and ounce back east. They said it was “cured in LSD” – whatever that meant. (I had been smoking pot for about three years and had eaten some peyote, some sugar-cube acid, and even some morning glory seeds New York, but grass “cured in LSD” was a new concept for me.)</span><br />
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It was excellent smoke, and I could feel my mind expanding as I stretched to integrate Mary’s spiritual perspective. She talked about God a lot, and the coming of the Aquarian Age. She was truly excited about the changes that were beginning to happen in many minds, and the new spiritual age that was budding.<br />
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This was all new stuff to me. I had had a slight interest in astrology in earlier years, when my sister and I would occasionally buy those little Sun Sign books sold at supermarket checkout stands, but I had never heard anything about the Piscean Age or the Aquarian Age.<br />
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I could actually feel my mind getting bigger and bigger as we talked. My Higher Self kept coming on stronger and stronger. Finally I just stopped copping to all those neurotic inhibitions that had been hanging me up for so long, and as I did this, I felt myself opening up like a giant jungle flower. I was giving and sharing and being kind and real and unselfconscious in a way that I had never been before, and my mind just kept expanding and expanding and expanding.<br />
Spiritual consciousness was everywhere in the Haight. The Psychedelic Shop had a large open Bible in its window. The Strait Theatre marquis read “PEACE”.<br />
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I read, in the introduction to The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, that there is a 25,820 year cycle, caused by the tilt of the earth’s axis, during which our sun and its planets travel through each of the twelve signs of the zodiac, as seen from Earth. This cycle is called the “precession of the equinoxes.” This 26,000-year cycle is divided into twelve sections, called “ages” or “dispensations”, of about 2,150 years each, determined by which sign of the zodiac the sun is in when it rises on the Spring Equinox. An Avatar appears near the beginning of each age and sets the tone for that dispensation. For the past 2,150 years or so, the sun has been in the sign of Pisces, the fishes, when it rises on the Spring Equinox, so we have been in the Piscean Age. This has been the Christian dispensation, with Jesus arriving on the scene early in the Piscean Age, and fish being a predominant symbol of this dispensation (for example, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, “I will make you fishers of men”, drawings of fish used by early Christians to identify themselves to each other, etc.).<br />
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I learned that because there are such huge amounts of time involved, it is difficult to determine the exact date that the Piscean Age ends and the Aquarian Age begins, but it is generally agreed that we are now at the cusp between those two Ages (the precession of the equinoxes goes through the signs in reverse order to the order the sun travels through the signs in the course of a year). Pisces is a water sign, and during the Piscean Age humans sailed the oceans of earth; Aquarius, an air sign, rules the airwaves and electricity, and in this new Age, air travel and communication on the airwaves will be developed and expanded. The sign of Pisces carries the energy of vast amounts of sacrifice and struggle; Aquarius energy carries brotherhood and humanitarianism, scientific knowledge, and invention. The old Piscean way of thinking is passing on, and a new way of thinking is being born.<br />
Yes! I could feel that something old was passing away and something new was beginning. Now I understood why. The entire planet was moving out of one energy field and into a whole new one. It wasn’t just me. This was good news!<br />
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Todd and I continued spending time with Mary and Christopher, and the more we hung out together, the more I could feel my consciousness growing. We both wanted to raise our boys in the country, so we started talking about renting a house together somewhere rural. In late November the four of us took a trip in my heavenly blue van called “Morning Glory” to find us a new home. We went up to Mendocino county, met some nice people, but didn’t come up with a place to live.<br />
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We drank black coffee to stay awake on the return trip and arrived back at Shrader Street well after midnight. The boys were asleep in the back of the van. Mary and I were sitting up front. All the way home I had felt my mind opening in a new way, and now as Mary and I sat in the parked van smoking a bowl while we figured out sleeping arrangements, a young hippie who knew Mary came down the block and crossed in front of Morning Glory. When he saw us sitting there, he made a gesture with his right hand toward the windshield, and I felt a tingling of energy course through my body. His name was Tom, and we rolled down the window and talked with him for a while. He was on acid, and our conversation made sense on at least two levels at once. It was an ordinary conversation on the mundane, material level, but every word also had meaning and made sense on a more subtle, symbolic level – similar to when Charlie had made his remark about not wanting to look backwards anymore, when we were on peyote back in Brooklyn, but this was a more extended, complex conversation. It was like being in two worlds at once, but it wasn’t confusing. It was integrated. Both levels were happening at the same time and in the same space – one was material, one was symbolic. Everything existed on both these levels at once. But, fortunately, I didn’t intellectualize about it at the time. That would have ended the experience and kept me bound to the material-plane-only world. Instead I allowed my consciousness to expand to include this double entendre level where every word, every gesture, every thought was meaningful in more than one way. My mind was unfolding into a whole new awareness that included so much more than I had ever experienced before.<br />
After exchanging a few sentences in this new dimension, Tom drifted on toward Haight Street, and Mary and I carried the sleeping boys up to my apartment and put them to bed. Mary lay down with them, but I was too charged from this new expansion of consciousness to sleep. I sat in the kitchen to see what would happen if I smoked another bowl.<br />
What happened was that my consciousness seemed to leap over a chasm and into a whole different dimension – one that I had never known about before. It’s hard to describe in words, but it was like being in a whole new reality – one even beyond the symbolic plane. I was still in the same apartment - with Todd and Mary and Christopher asleep in the other room - but I was seeing it all from a whole new headspace – a space where everything made perfect sense and fit together into One Perfect Whole.<br />
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All the information that had ever come into my head had previously been stashed in separate compartments or categories, almost like file drawers, each neatly labeled by subject matter (psychology, history, religion, sociology, etc.) and separate from every other category. In mundane consciousness, the information in one area often contradicted the information in another, but the compartmentalization itself kept that from being noticed very much. Now, suddenly, all the separations in my mind dissolved, leaving a three-dimensional mandala of inter-related truths, where all paradoxes were resolved as each piece of information was seen from this new, integrated perspective.<br />
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This experience of expanded consciousness continued for several days. I was barely functional on the material plane. At one point I was looking down on Earth from some vantage point in space, zooming in on the corner of Shrader and Waller streets, in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California, USA, and I was laughing at silly little Sylvia and the ludicrous illusion she was all tangled up in. Illusion – the sense of separate self that causes humanity so much suffering – was not something to grieve about – it was something to laugh about! I was being let in on the Great Cosmic Joke, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.<br />
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All the Bible verses I had taught my Sunday school classes back in Connecticut came alive for me now. They all made sense in a new way, on a new level. The verses flashed through my mind, one after another – each one a joyous explosion of light and understanding. I laughed deep belly-laughs at the Divine Comedy – the joke of ego, of the sense of separate selves – that the Universe is always playing on us until we get the joke and see that everyone and everything here is just One Beingness, always changing in detail but always remaining the same in essence—One Infinite and Eternal Ground of Being.<br />
I saw my life and the life of Man on earth as a play so intricate and so perfect in every detail that I was humbled before the Mind that was creating it. I saw the history of the world as one great four-dimensional mesh of Cause and Effect – always just, always maintaining perfect balance, always obeying Its own Law. My physical life was energy working itself out. How outrageously hilarious it was that I had taken myself so seriously! There really was no “me” at all. There was only One Being in the whole universe – one Perfection—one infinite and eternal process that is the Source of, and includes within Itself, everything and everybody.<br />
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Words from Christian hymns flashed through my mind, along with lyrics from Beatles’ songs and from songs that were popular in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. I understood the symbolism of them all, the way we sometimes understand a dream, and they were all saying that God is real, there is an order to the universe, there is a system of justice that prevails eternally. You just have to be seeing the Big Picture to grok it.<br />
If I turned on the radio during that time, I would hear the songs, and even the commercials, speaking to me symbolically about the dawning of a new Age. It seemed as if the radio was speaking directly to me with very personalized messages.<br />
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The experience included new understandings not only of Christian Bible verses and hymns, but also of the smattering of Hinduism and dash of Zen that my intellect had acquired over the past year or two. As I said, all the compartments dissolved and everything I had ever learned made sense now in the context of this new understanding, this new level of consciousness. I was experiencing the Oneness of the contents of my own mind, which was a microcosm of the Oneness that is the Mind of the All.<br />
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I gazed upon that Oneness – that immense, ever-changing Perfection – and I knew that I was in the presence of God –a great, harmonious, cyclic Flow of Energy, in a continuum of wave lengths, from the density of the material plane to the white light of The Void. It was all the same God-stuff – the same Cosmic Essence - vibrating at varying frequencies, but all the same “stuff”, the same Beingness, the same Source.<br />
This “God” – this Beingness – had created everything and everyone, and there was a spark of this God Beingness within everyone and everything. That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “I was hungry and you fed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was in prison and you visited me . . . Inasmuch as you have done this even unto the least of these, my brethren, you have done it also unto me.”<br />
The same spark of God that was in Jesus Christ is within everyone - “even unto the least of these, my brethren.” I understood that salvation was not dependent on accepting Jesus as the only true savior and Christianity as the only true religion; it was dependent on recognizing the Christ Consciousness potential within all.<br />
The reality of Spirit flowered in my mind. There is a God, but it’s not a grumpy old man sitting on a throne in the sky! God is Beingness! God is the Unity of Everything! God is All that Is, Was, or Ever Shall Be!<br />
Jesus’ teachings are true if you understand them from Higher Consciousness.<br />
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Mankind is being saved!<br />
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A new Age of brotherhood is beginning!<br />
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And – wonder of wonders! – it is being brought in by the awakened hippies – the underdogs of society, who appeared decadent and irresponsible to the mainstream, but who were actually living their daily lives based on Christ-like compassion.<br />
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I’ve never know anything like the joy of that experience – the bliss of knowing for sure that Spirit is real, that everything, ultimately, is okay. I was so happy and relieved that I cried tears of joy at this revelation.<br />
All my chakras must have been open, but I was mostly coming from my heart. Love poured out for all of life. I walked through Haight Ashbury, seeing the dawning of the new Age every step.<br />
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When I walked around, all open like that, sometimes I’d feel a little electrical shock run through my body as I passed another person who was full open, too. And sometimes we’d both stop and look into each other’s eyes and talk the kind of talk that makes sense on at least two levels at once. And we would both understand all the levels. Even the street signs spoke to me symbolically.<br />
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At one point I had a vision – images projected out of my third eye onto the kitchen wall – of fires and tidal waves and earthquakes. I knew I was seeing the future, and although the scenes were of great devastation, I cried tears of joy because these changes meant a purification, a new beginning for Earth and for humanity. An understanding filled me that I would not physically survive these changes – I was an old soul and was going home – but Todd would survive and help bring in the new beginning.<br />
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Another awareness began to dawn upon me in those days, too. My love for all life was a mother’s love, and I began to feel like Mother Earth herself. Everything anyone said to me, I heard through the ears of the Earth Mother listening to her children. And when I answered them, my answers were true to the material plane situation and true also on the archetypal level I was experiencing. This was not intellectually contrived – nothing I thought about and tried to do—it just flowed from where my head was at.<br />
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I knew that I was God and so was everybody else. I was one with the Maillol statue in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. I felt her power – the Earth’s power – swelling within me, and I let it flow out through my heart in the form of unconditional love for all of struggling humanity – for all my children.<br />
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Being a large woman, I had often felt out of scale with the rest of the world, somehow larger than life, too big for this small planet. Now, as I discovered the archetypal Earth-Mother self within me, I felt incredibly large and powerful, but in a soft, yielding, receptive way. I was fully a woman in a way I had never been before.<br />
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One of the most meaningful parts of this experience was a deep understanding that God loves me. And I knew that the level of consciousness I was experiencing was the same level of consciousness that Jesus was speaking from when he had given his teachings. Buddha, too. It wasn’t an ego trip. It was a humble, compassionate consciousness, full of love and reverence for all life.<br />
This journey into other realms of consciousness continued in all my waking hours for five days. During that time I received a phone call from New York telling me that my friend Charlie had died. I felt Charlie’s spirit telling me that there is no death – that life is eternal.<br />
The 1966 Leonid meteor showers were occurring, and Mary and I took the boys out to the ocean one evening to view them. They were spectacular, and for me the event was a celebration of my arrival into this new consciousness. Part of my experience was the feeling that everyone else was already in this new headspace, and I was the last one to get there. But I had made it, and the whole universe was rejoicing!<br />
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This awakening continued, through various scenarios and levels of consciousness wherever I went – at home in the apartment, out on Haight Street, in Golden Gate Park, visiting friends of Mary’s. Flashes of new understanding alternated with times of being the Earth Mother herself and loving and blessing all my children.<br />
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Todd, too, was having visions. At one point he started crying and when I asked what was wrong, he said, “My pictures! They’re sticking ‘sharpies’ into the Earth, and it’s changing into a different place.” ‘Sharpies’ was our word for sharp items like scissors or needles. I’m not sure exactly what he was seeing, but it sounded a lot like my own visions of that time.<br />
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I remember lying face down on the living room floor and hearing what I unmistakably recognized as “the music of the spheres.” I loved that music. It sounded like Home, and I wanted to go to it – to merge with it – to stay there with it forever. But just as I was letting myself go, to fully unite with the music, Todd came in, hungry, and shook my shoulder until I came back into my body and got him some lunch.<br />
While I was spending all this time on the higher planes, my material-plane son was beginning to feel the absence of my attention in his life. The next day Todd started having an asthma attack, and I returned to mundane consciousness to care for him.<br />
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After “coming down” from that experience and resuming at least the semblance of normalcy, I began to realize that I had, indeed, witnessed and participated in a totally other reality, but one that was just as valid as the mundane, material-plane reality that I had previously believed to be the only one. I was once again functioning on the material plane, but that other, larger reality was still alive in some part of my consciousness.<br />
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I also realized that if I told a shrink about where my head was really at now, he would probably declare me insane and have me locked up in an institution. Still, I knew that the Reality I had just discovered was true and always there, waiting to be tuned in to – like radio waves, always there but inaccessible unless you tune your receiver to the right frequency.<br />
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A week or so later I was in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a small pamphlet caught my eye. In fact, it started buzzing and flashing at me. The title was Who’s Crazy?, and it was by Swami Bhaktivedanta, guru of the Krishna Consciousness movement.<br />
I knew the booklet was for me. I started reading it right there in the store, then bought it (25 cents) and took it home to read fully. It spoke of the experience of union with God. It said that in India people who had that experience were called “enlightened” and were honored and revered, but that here in America, people who had that experience were often considered crazy and were locked up.<br />
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That little pamphlet helped me understand my awakening and expand beyond the western, scientific, psychological mindset. It reinforced the validity of my experience and my intuitive feeling that I better not talk about it to the “wrong” people.<br />
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So I decided to live my new Earth Mother incarnation instead of talking about it. It was really hard to put into words, anyhow. And besides, I believed that everyone around me had experienced his or her own version of union with the Divine, and I was the last kid on the block to catch on.<br />
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That experience turned my life around 180 degrees. My values changed completely. Instead of valuing money and material possessions, I was much more interested in consciousness, especially the multi-layered Oneness that I had lived for five days and could re-experience in varying degrees thereafter. Psychedelics became my sacrament--material objects that facilitated my union with All That Is. I was reborn--not as a Christian, per se, but as a Lover of Higher Consciousness, whatever name It is called by at the moment, and as one committed to do my best to live that Consciousness in every day life.<br />
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For me, it was a brand new world seen through brand new eyes.<br />
For me, the new Age of Aquarius--the Age of the Brotherhood of Man and the Earth Motherhood of “silly little Sylvia”--had just begun</span>Vintage Tripperhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18303147552405645517noreply@blogger.com0