College And Revolution

I remember the moment when I dedicated my life.

My dad and I were driving away from our house,

downhill, towards town. It was the summer before my

sophomore year in college, at Carleton. I knew

about LSD, and what was happening in general in the

United States. I knew I had to find out what it was.

I knew that wherever the knowledge I gained led me,

that that was the direction I would take. That moment

happened as my father and I were driving downhill

together in silence.

It was about this time that I would

begin having the recurring ephemeral experience

that someone was looking for me.

The year before at Carleton had been literally nothing

except realizing that the system I was in and part of was

nothing more than a treadmill at best…and that if I was

going to stay there I had to see something else. It all came

together my sophomore year, on 4^th Musser , where LSD met

my road, and insights and long lasting friendships were made,

like the places in the universe where stars are born. It was an

opening that showed me how closed I was, which took another

forty years to process…but, was it worth it? Yes!!

The only thing worth anything. That year, 1968-69, was the

forge in which I awoke and was formed.. It is the hope that still

rings down time and echos in the moment. It was a gift, an offering

to the world one last time before it had to come to this.

What were the Sixties? It was a time of political, social and

spiritual revolution fueled by the burgeoning realization that

consciousness could be freed.. that freedom itself contained

a natural order. Power didn’t have structure in place to contain

this knowledge at the time, so, it relied on brute force and

infiltration tactics to disband and discredit the movement.

We were just discovering having fun and how that was

OK! Once Power discovered and put into place the control

systems for us Eloi, the revolution was over.

But we learned so much in that time….not exactly survival

skills, but rather true lack of the constraints of social norms

that were just pedantic artifacts unrelated to open experience

and expression. The walls around my dorm room (tile) were

covered in graffiti…my roommate and I kept a motorcycle in

there as a centerpiece. The first night I took ACID was the

first night I heard the Grateful Dead. The first friend I met

that night, Chris Gillman, (never met before), kept taking

me to different rooms…different places, saying: “I want to

show you something.” We would get there…sit there

for a while…then, I would say to him: “What did you want

to show me?” At that point, he would get up and lead me

somewhere else.

I didn’t go to college to learn anything specific. I went to

college to find out what this so-called reality was in the

first place. Psychedelics helped. They cleared the deck for

a while so I could take a good look. Then the habitual

patterns swept back in like a tide and covered the naked beach.

Psychedelics showed all of the questions, and none of the

answers. This experience of temporary openness was the

basis of the revolution, but, like a good teacher, could only

show the direction of the path… other steps still had to be taken.