Linked from Contacts with Source
Note added in 2018: One day in 1975, sitting in the zendo at ZCLA I had a flash of memory of all the times I took psychedelics. During the walking meditation period I ran up to my room and wrote down the times and places. Then while I was writing the Antioch paper I fleshed out the list to fit their format for documenting experiential learning.
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ADDENDUM TO Skills and Knowledge and
Participation and responsibilities
A description of the 31 LSD sessions (other psychedelics when specified), with a brief comment under the heading of P/R (Participation and responsibilities) and S/K (Skills and knowledge).
1. First Trip: Big Sur (1965)
P/R: I sat with my friend on a cliff overlooking the ocean and became one with the sea. Every time I would turn to tell him what a wonderful experience this was, everything would go black and white and two dimensional. I finally gave up trying to describe it. Later in the evening we went into Perls’s dream seminar. I did not go onto the Hot Seat, but did have some wonderful eye exchanges with Perls while he was saying words which I heard as, “Well, my friend, nobody really knows what’s going on here except you, because all these other people are pretending to be neurotic so they can get my support, and they don’t even know they’re pretending. Only you can see through this game. This feeds into the book I am writing now called Games Therapists Play or Who’s Fooling Who?”
S/K: I felt that I gained knowledge of the personality of the founder of Gestalt Therapy, Fritz Perls, from the eye contacts that we maintained during his dream seminar. But more important, I gained first hand knowledge of the experience of unity with the All, the dissolution of the ego.
2. Second Trip: Big Sur (1965)
P/R: We went back to Big Sur, but this time my friend brought his girlfriend and a blind date for me. She was very nice but the LSD made it a little too intense for us to start a friendship so we sort of drifted apart. I ended up walking in the creek most of the day.
S/K: I learned that the depth of the LSD experience made it difficult for me to strike up a casual acquaintance with a new friend. Or at least I learned that I was too defensive to let a total stranger into this experience.
3. Marijuana with DMT at Richard Alpert’s cottage (1965)
P/R: My friend who had first introduced me to marijuana invited me to spend the evening with him at Richard Alpert’s little cottage behind the campus. We smoked joints containing DMT and the wall to wall madras bedspreads and mattresses felt very womblike. The next day I hitch-hiked to New York to see a girl I was in love with, leaving behind the rock band I had just joined.
S/K: I learned the style of turning on that Richard Alpert was doing at that time, while he was a major LSD guru. He was providing a very comfortable and supportive atmosphere, almost womblike.
4. DMT at a small party (1965) Chloe Scott’s House
P/R: Back in Palo Alto, a pipe of DMT was passed around at a small party whose guests included Neal Cassady, hero of Kerouac’s “On The Road,” and Steve Durkee, later founder of Lama Foundation in New Mexico. Durkee by the way had picked me up hitchhiking on my way back from the first trip in Big Sur. The room and everybody in it turned a warm gold color. Very impressive. I felt like I was in the realm of the gods.
S/K: I learned of the effects of DMT, which was like a very intense fifteen minute LSD trip. Those experienced with the drug would take one inhalation of smoke and immediately lie on their back and close their eyes to wait for the visions.
5. Palo Alto Acid Test (1965)
P/R: I moved into a communal house near the Stanford campus and attended the Palo Alto acid test. The Grateful Dead played, and Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters tried to play some music. I mostly watched, stoned, but at one point climbed up to the drum set on the pedestal which one of the pranksters had left vacated. The pranksters almost panicked as this stranger ascended their throne at the top of the pyramid and they shouted me down. From then on I mostly watched Kesey try to figure out where all the wires connected to on the amplifiers.
S/K: I learned what it felt like to be at the Acid Test, in my opinion a turning point in American cultural history. The ambiance was of a multi-level, multi-media freak show, characterized by the sign next to the band, “Freak Freely.”
6. Acid Test – Fillmore Auditorium (1965)
P/R: The Fillmore Acid Test, unlike our small local party, was a large ballroom affair. I spent the evening wandering around the crowded ballroom with a few friends, stopping in at the carnival booths and enjoying the multi-level funhouse atmosphere.
S/K: I saw the next phase in the growth of the local LSD party into the huge rock concerts which were to come. And I saw the confusion of the police as they were first confronted by this phenomenon.
7. Trips Festival – Longshoremans’ Hall (1965)
P/R: The Trips Festival at Longshoremans’ Hall was even larger. By this time Kesey was climbing a large scaffolding wearing a Captain America costume, and accepting the crowd’s nomination for governor of California. The Acid Test sense of participation had dwindled to just another spectator event, with bands on the stage and fans just watching and dancing. I was one of the watchers.
S/K: I learned how with the increased size of the event this sense of intimacy seemed to be automatically decreasing.
P/R: A couple of times I took LSD in the house on Oakwood and spent almost the whole time listening to Bob Dylan and other contemporaries who seemed to be talking to my new consciousness. One of these times I spent about the last five hours writing down slogans that kept popping up as possibilities for buttons which were becoming a fad at that time.
S/K: I learned that there was a natural desire in me to do something creative with this surplus of energy.
[Reading the above in 2017 I am reminded of another project from taking LSD in that house at that time. Inspired by William Burroughs’ cut up technique, I mixed two elements on the pages of a binder: random sentences from a school assignment I had typed and random panels from Marvel super hero comic books.]
[A note added in 2019 – One thing I remember thinking after taking LSD in that house was it felt like having all the file drawers in my brain spilled on the floor and scattered so it would be very hard to put them back in the same order. I wanted to put them back in a better order, hopefully aligned with the Tao and all the natural forces in the universe. I decided to read and reread the I Ching while my mind was in a fluid state so it would set into a pattern influenced by that nature-based archetypal wisdom.]
9. Anonymous Artists of America – La Honda, CA (1965)
P/R: All the time I was living down in Palo Alto I was also visiting the AAA, a commune up in the hills. They had been given a music synthesizer and a year’s supply of LSD by Richard Alpert. One time up there I took LSD with them, played a little music, and spent some time alone in the woods, watching the trees and birds and writing haiku poems about what I saw.
S/K: I learned more of the incredibly beautiful dimensions nature can take on under LSD. It was so easy to experience unity with the ocean, or the trees, or whatever I was with.
10. Medway Forest – La Honda (1965)
P/R: Down the road from the Anonymous Artists was another commune called the Medway Forest. The renter of this property, Jim Poston, had been taking LSD and experiencing very primitive states. He had changed his name to Jwab. I spent a trip out in the woods with him and his wife and son. At that time I was reading Meher Baba and I can remember at one point hugging a tree and crying to be heard by Baba. At another point I was lying on my back looking up through the trees and listening to a stereo Jwab had imported into the woods.
S/K: I began to explore the communal aspects of stoned consciousness, sitting all day with a family in the woods, exploring each other’s fantasies.
11. Medway Beach Outing (1966)
P/R: Some of us who were living at Medway took some LSD and went to the beach. The day consisted of looking in awe at the patterns in the rocks and trying to negotiate our way to and from the beach. We laughed a lot.
S/K: I began to experience the sense of travelling communally while stoned. The given was the sense of awe and wonder at everything presented. The learning was that we could navigate almost as well as in normal consciousness, or at least well enough to get ourselves to the beach and back.
12. Medway DMT day (1966)
P/R: One afternoon at Medway, Pat and Donna, who had a separate little cottage, invited me in to have some DMT with them. They had a round table hanging from the ceiling. We all sat around the table, took a puff of DMT, and spun the table slowly. Whatever item on the table ended up at your position became your whole universe for about ten or fifteen minutes. I remember spending that time with a page from the Bible, although I can’t remember the passage. Later than evening I borrowed their copy of Tim Leary’s record, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” and listened to it.
S/K: I learned from Leary’s record that there was a more or less coherent social theory that went along with what we were doing.
13. Hitchhiking: Palo Alto to Santa Cruz (1966)
P/R: I was still wanting to do something creative with all this energy and hitchhiked down to Santa Cruz to see some friends who had a blues band and were looking for a drummer. The experience of being on the road alone was pretty scary. I was lucky that the officer who stopped me at the off-ramp in Santa Cruz didn’t hassle me any more about the blue work shirt I was wearing and which make him think I had escaped from an honor farm or something. I remember walking down the road writing angry comments about the people who wouldn’t give me a ride on the back page of my copy of Perls’s “Ego, Hunger, and Aggression.”
S/K: I learned that a lot of the credit for navigating while stoned went to my partners and it was very difficult for me to do it alone.
14. Berkeley Blues Festival (1966) [4/15/66]
P/R: I went to the Berkeley Blues Festival [with Richard Moore from the OakwoodLaurel Avenue house] and listened to Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin Hopkins, and the Muddy Waters band. This gave me a deep appreciation for the texture of the blues.
S/K: I learned that there was something in the music of the blues that was enhanced by the drug. Some things appeared uglier. To me the blues became very beautiful.
15. First Haight-Ashbury (1967)
P/R: Finally in 1967 I got a phone call from my old friend Warren, who had been the leader of our band at Stanford in 1965. He was starting a new band in Haight-Ashbury and wanted me to come play drums. The first week I was there I took LSD and walked around the neighborhood, visiting the Diggers and the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury. Here was a large urban community where everybody seemed to be involved with LSD.
S/K: I learned that the acid community had increased in size to the point where they had virtually taken over a whole neighborhood in San Francisco.
16. Country Joe’s Party (1967)
P/R: After our band got started we became regulars in the park, and one of our biggest fans was Barry Melton, the guitar player for Country Joe and the Fish. When they rented the Fillmore to celebrate the release of their first album they invited us (Mount Rushmore) to play, along with the Serpent Power and Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company. Barry passed out LSD to everybody in the hall and the hundreds of people waiting outside. We played our set, then I took my acid and watched Country Joe and the Fish dissolve and become transparent while they played.
S/K: I learned that it was possible that I might become a public figure in this neighborhood and community simply by playing my drums and staying high.
17. Fillmore with Butterfield and Roland Kirk (1967)
P/R: The first time we played a regular job at the Fillmore we were billed behind the Butterfield Blues Band and Roland Kirk. We did well the first two nights and I felt confident enough to take some LSD before going to the hall on the third night. Before the first set I noticed that my sticks were dissolving. I told Mike, the guitar player, but he couldn’t hear me, he told me in a loud booming voice that sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away.
I somehow made it through the first set, but in the dressing room between sets I got into translating radio beeps being sent from outer space along with the organ player from Butterfield. Suddenly Bill Graham was staring at me, angrily asking, “Young man, do you realize what time it is?” “Yes, it’s now, it’s always now,” I replied. “You get down onto that stage or you’ll never play in this hall again. You’re not a big enough star to make these thousands of people wait as long as you’ve made them wait,” he growled.
Down on the stage I couldn’t adjust my drum seat so as to be able to reach the bass drum pedal. After a while the band started without me and I walked around the stage adjusting microphones. Flash bulbs were snapping like crazy, as all the tourists had finally found a live freak. I finally found the drums and could only remember how to play crescendo rolls I had learned in my lessons. So while the band played the arrangements, I played drum crescendos climaxing in huge cymbal crashes. It was not funny to my manager or to Bill Graham.
S/K: I learned that there were definite limits, as actually coping with the situation of being on the stage under the influence of LSD was impossible for me, or at least very difficult.
18. First STP-Golden Gate Park (1967)
P/R: Now I was starting to be a small cog in a mushrooming social movement. I took STP in the park for one of the big rock concerts. I saw Jack Cassady, bass player from the Jefferson Airplane, from clear across the park, and I could tell he had also taken STP. We walked all the way to the center of the park where he told me very solemnly, “My band is falling apart.” On the way home I felt like I was in negative space, a separate reality, and when I was let off at home I felt that the whole drive had taken exactly minus one second. I went down to the basement to play my drums but one light tap of the cymbal exploded into such an overwhelming total environment that I gave it up.
S/K: I learned about some of the subjective distortions possible, when I experienced negative time and space and a small sound as louder than the roar of the ocean.
19. Second STP-Alexander’s Birthday Party (1967)
P/R: The second time I took STP was for a bus ride celebrating a little boy named Alexander’s sixth birthday. As Masher, Bill Scott, the old tambourine player from our band and an ex-logging truck driver in Oregon pulled away, Eric, the announcer from the park concerts and the Avalon Ballroom, pulled out his little bag of STP and passed some out to everybody. We were driven up and down Mount Tamalpais, an incredible journey, with the driver also on the drug. I think it’s a miracle we all survived. I was blissfully unaware of the danger. Besides the party atmosphere my clearest memory was defecating in the bathroom near the top of the mountain, and feeling the power of the whole mountain as a throbbing presence.
S/K: I learned that an experience as humble as defecating can be the occasion for a vision of great power.
20. Third STP-Mount Rushmore (1967)
P/R: The third and last time I took STP was with all the members of Mount Rushmore, in our house. We were making a last attempt to keep our band together. We listened to music and talked most of the day, and then took a walk along Haight Street. It felt like we were carrying bright auras of white light, and we were much bigger than life as we walked along the street.
S/K: I learned what it felt like to spend a long afternoon with four very close friends all of whom were stoned and felt very comfortable with each other, and the subjective experience of carrying this into the community.
21. Splitting a tab with Tommy D. (1968)
P/R: I spent most of 1968 with a band called Salvation, from San Francisco, but down in Los Angeles making their second album. The cook, named Tommy D., is now a monk at Tassajara Zen Center. Tommy and I split a tab of purple acid and spent the day working in the garden. The experience of the afternoon train coming through our backyard left another indelible impression of throbbing power.
S/K: The police raided us in the evening but could find no crimes committed. The neighbor complained his sheep were missing, and Tommy, the gentlest and I thought the purest person there, was somehow taken to jail. I felt I learned that it is the most vulnerable person who takes the brunt of the karma in a situation.
22. The Holy Man Jam (1969)
P/R: Back up in Berkeley, our band had a job playing for an event called the Holy Man Jam, which included two other bands, Alan Watts, Tim Leary, and Indian Medicine Man Rolling Thunder. The members of our band spent the day of the performance taking LSD together at home. Mostly we laid laid together on the floor and listened to the new Beatles album. A couple of hours before it was time to go the girlfriend of one of the musicians became obsessed with the idea that it was already time for us to leave, and most of the rest of our energy was spent trying to calm her down and convince her everything was OK. We were totally drained by the time we played that night, and there was absolutely no excitement in our performance.
S/K: I learned that even thought our band played poorly we were considered teachers simply because we would take LSD and then go up on the stage and present a performance. In a way it lowered my respect for the community for which we were playing.
23. Mescaline on Blake St. – Berkeley (1969)
P/R: I remember taking mescaline on my own one day in Berkeley and just sitting in my room listening to records by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with whom we had been about to start a new world two years earlier. Now it was just a beginning of nostalgia for the past.
S/K: I learned that our peak as psychedelic rockers was fading into the past.
24. With the S.’s of Palo Alto Bookstore (1969)
P/R: I went back to Palo Alto for a day, searching back farther into the past for the magic. I went to the X Bookstore, which had been around the corner from the house on Oakwood where I had lived while going to the acid tests. Mrs. S., the co-owner, invited me to spend the evening at their house, and once we got up there she brought out three tabs of LSD, one for me, one for her husband, and one for her. We talked about metaphysics and I clearly remember her stopping at one point and saying, “This is important. I want you to hear a dowager saying Tao,” and then this incredibly deep and earthy voice intoning the long syllable. I tried to hitchhike home that night but once again found that LSD and the road do not mix for me. I got a ride to a friend’s house in Palo Alto and spent the night there after failing to get a ride back up to Berkeley.
S/K: I learned that my quest was taking me back toward a more personal spiritual experience rather than the big crowds and excitement.
25. First Peyote-Easter Sunday (1970)
P/R: In 1970 we had moved to Santa Cruz. I spent Easter Sunday with a friend named Ruth, eating peyote and then going up to a favorite meadow where we took our clothes off and lay on our backs, foot to foot like in Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” looking at the sky. We felt in communion with Easter celebrants all over the world.
S/K: I learned that it was possible to be in communion with a woman and further to sense that communion with all of creation.
26. Second Peyote – Susan A. (1970)
P/R: I ate some peyote with a girl I was living with named Susan A. I felt myself getting sick and realized that I wanted her to take care of me. But then I realized that I had always used being sick as an excuse for someone to mother me. I felt the nausea as if it were the behavior pattern itself about to be discharged. When I threw up there was a sense of relief and a palpable sense that I was no longer involved with that behavior pattern.
S/K: I learned that the communion was not automatic but depended on working through any personal unfinished business that came in the way.
27. Mescaline – Susan H. (1970)
P/R: A girl that I was living with a little bit later, named Susan H., had gone out and taken a tab of mescaline and brought one back for me. We were going to a wedding the next day, and she said she wanted to take some with me before we went. I took it and went through some bizarre body distortions, never quite feeling at home in my body.
S/K: I learned that sexual experience on mescaline can be inadvisable unless you already have worked through your relationship to a very intimate level of trust.
28. Mescaline – Susan H. (1970)
P/R: Susan H. and I reserved the band’s cabin for the weekend and took some more mescaline. We had a very unpleasant experience together.
S/K: I learned that forcing the situation doesn’t help and spent the next couple of years avoiding women to get over the trauma.
29. Santa Cruz Paper Acid Day (1970)
P/R: A large shipment of paper acid came to Santa Cruz and it was agreed that everybody in the town’s head community would take it on the same day. A group of us took it at the beach and later went to a huge party being held at one of the town’s communes. It was one of the friendliest, most relaxed gatherings I’ve ever been to. Later that night our band was playing at a local Unitarian Church. A small crowd gathered but we were co-opted by a man named Leon who was running for mayor and dominated our microphone. I finally told him not to use us as a forum to advertise himself.
S/K: I learned that it was still possible for a few hundred people to spontaneously take LSD all at once and have a very pleasant experience together.
30. First Farm Peyote Day (1971)
P/R: I quit the band and went to the Farm in Tennessee. When we first gathered all the busses in the field we decided to set aside a day for everybody to do peyote. We had about six hundred buttons, about four per adult. I spent the day in one of the busses in one of the many small meetings where we strove to work through all the unconscious material that had accumulated in our months on the road.
S/K: I learned the format of the peyote meeting, adapted by Stephen to the needs of his students. We sipped tea all afternoon and shared experiences of visions and projections. When we worked through interpersonal difficulties we were able to feel in touch with the earth spirits of the state of Tennessee.
31. Second Farm Peyote Day (1971)
P/R: My last experience with a major psychedelic was another peyote day on the Farm in 1971. We all took peyote and I spent much of the day talking with Ruth, with whom I had taken peyote on Easter of the previous year. Then a couple of us started gathering wood for a huge bonfire that we had that night. One memory that was clear to me was walking across the eight acre field and seeing this girl coming toward me whom I had known at the Zen Center in San Francisco. When we crossed paths we simply bowed silently to each other and continued on.
S/K: I learned that the experience of trying to find or create a community based on the psychedelic communion this time ended for me in a dead end of primitivism and the cult of the personality of our leader.
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