Be Here Now

Silence.
And I’d say, “How long do you think we’re going to be on this trip?”
And he’d say, “Don’t think about the future. Just be here now.”
I’d say, “You know, I really feel crumby, my hips are hurting . . .”
“Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”
He had just sort of wiped out my whole game. That was it—that was my whole trip—emotions, and past experiences, and future plans. I was, after all, a great story teller.
So we were silent. There was nothing to say

Where am I??
Here! What time is it? Now!

When starting to teach me about what it meant to be ‘ahimsa’ or non-violent, and the effect on the environment around you of the vibrations—when he started to teach me about energy and vibrations, his opening statement was “Snakes Know Heart.” “Yogis in jungle need not fear.” Because if you’re pure enough, cool it, don’t worry. But you’ve got to be very pure

free. I had been through many years of psychoanalysis and still I had managed to keep private places in my head—I wouldn’t say they were big, labeled categories, but they were certain attitudes or feelings that were still very private. And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that

We had transcended mother-child and personalities and we had come into true contact. I spent days in the hospital just meditating. And I felt no loss when she died. Instead there was a tremendous continuing contact with her

And yet, I never felt so profound an intimacy with another being. It was as if he were inside of my heart. And what started to blow my mind was that everywhere we went, he was at home

“Emotions are like waves. Watch them disappear in the distance on the vast calm ocean.”

we had a seminar with Alexandra David Neehl’s books and Sir John Woodroffe’s Serpent Power

Tim and Ralph Metzner with him (I was just given author’s credit because I took care of the kitchen) had come across the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was a very close description of a number of these experiences. This book was 2500 years old, at least, and it had been used all those years for preparing Tibetan Lamas to die and be reincarnated. And when we opened it, we would find descriptions of the 49 days after death before rebirth, that were perfect descriptions of sessions we were having with psychedelics.
How could this be? The parallel was so close. Tim rewrote the book as a manual called “The Psychedelic Experience”, a manual for psychological death and rebirth, arguing that this was really a metaphor about psychological death and rebirth and not necessarily physical death and reincarnation

we realized then that what we needed to do was to create certain kinds of environments which would allow a person, after being into another state of consciousness, to retain a certain kind of environmental support for new ways of looking at himself