FEEDING THE BEAST
At the Crash Pad
The second time I met Sam, I heard him storming into the crash pad saying to himself, "Now there's gonna be someone up against the wall." His voice didn't sound threatening, but definitely serious. Nothing strange happened when he came into the room. We were hippies, summer, 1969. My friend Silas had told me about the crash pad. He was a college drop-out like me, mellow, relaxed. For a year, we'd both been living the hippie life. Everyone was skinny. Sam looked like a stick, body rigid. He walked on his toes, head first. He was below average in height. I knew nothing about him, where he came from. He knew nothing about me. No one asked questions.
I was riddled on psychedelic drugs. Everyone was. I was scrutinizing life in a new way. What resources can the mind tap? What are the hidden potentials? I was at the crash pad with Sam; we were both watching TV. All of a sudden the picture started flickering, and the image was contorted. I looked at the TV with concern as if ,"What's the problem?" The picture returned to normal. Sam murmured, "He's setting it right." Had Sam been causing the static with his mind? I didn't even know what I was doing. I was a puppy discovering my bark.
Next day, Silas confided to me, "When I send a peace vibe to Sam, he turns it around and sends it back as a hate vibe."
One morning, Silas left the house on a long errand. Then, a few minutes later, I was surprised to see him return. Sam was standing next to the couch. Silas walked up to him and sat down on the couch, head down, distraught, as if there were a rotten feeling in his stomach. I couldn't help but think there was something telepathic here, Sam pulling Silas back to the pad. Silas being reduced to a remote-controlled slave somehow. At that point I must have left because I don't remember any more. My time in this scene was almost over. I had exhausted my resources. Soon, I would go back to my family for help. I never saw Silas again.
"You don't know what it's like living in a bathtub full of gelatin." From Sam. Something internal, not external, binding him and restricting his movements? For some reason I thought it had to be his mother, the way she brought him up. Also turning him into a tyrant. But often my thoughts about things were only other things happening. I didn't want to make any assumptions. Sam was a person sharing a crash pad.
Sam was a hippie, then? A love child? He was terrorizing Silas. And there was nothing I could do about it because I was in total ignorance.
And finally something closer to the love children we were supposed to be. A young guy came in one evening and I found him attractive. A love vibe streamed out of me to him. He said to himself, "Oh yeah, unconditional love." But that love vibe was filled with erotic desire, as I experienced it, so he mistook me. Why all these people talked out loud, I don't know.
Did anyone else see such things? And if they did, could they make sense of them? I couldn't make sense of them, but I had my theories. I've kept stand-out experiences in my memory's hoard all these years. Some of those I have related here. So happens, I'm living across the street now from where the crash pad was forty years ago trying to remember. The crash pad was torn down long ago and now the high-school students park there.
Tripping Out
Way back when I was still a graduate student, I bought a hit of acid from a reliable dealer named Vic. He called it an orange wedgy. Christmas break was approaching. In January (1968), I was going to have to buckle down and finish my master's degree in French. While he was giving me the acid he said they were going to Mardi Gras in February.
"Yeah, it's really easy to manipulate their minds, especially when they're drunk and you're on acid."
"Oh, is that right?" I said not really paying much attention. Why would they want to manipulate someone else's mind? I had better things to do with acid. I put the acid in my pocket and went home, prepared to trip out.
It was Friday and I had nothing to do all weekend. I took the acid a little later and waited for it to come on. What got my mind going strange, I don't exactly recall, but I could have thought of what Vic had told me about manipulating people's minds. My mind swirled into something I did not like. And then I remembered the orgasm. I didn't ponder the problem because I didn't want to get caught up in it. To escape this thing in my mind, I had sex in a way that I had learned in Wilhelm Reich's writings, especially Character Analysis. He describes the curve of the successful orgasm. How to lead up to it and how to let it happen. The sex was a trip in itself, and from then on I had no trouble with my thoughts, they just flowed along of their own accord. Exhilarating it was the way my mind moved so freely. I thought it was STP because it lasted for three days.
The Spruce Street House
After finishing my degree, I wandered around town, becoming too independent on my heterosexual friend Dick. He finally sent me to Vic, the same dealer, to see if I could stay at his place. I spent one long morning in an interior room with no windows recovering from a trip. Vic had an apartment with a couple of girls. I probably talked to them a little while. As I was leaving, Vic told me the guy living in the front apartment needed a roommate. So there I was with a place to stay. I took a job as a night janitor for a few months. After a few weeks, my roommate returned home to Wyoming, so I had the place to myself.
The building had three apartments. Vic's was in back, mine in front, with another upstairs. I shared a bathroom off a corridor with the tenants upstairs. My apartment had two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, with a large opening between. From outside, I used a door that gave into the bedroom.
One day that fall, I ran into Vic outside the building, and he said one of the girls staying with him had flipped out. I suppose we all knew we were risking insanity by taking acid. But he said it with a certain emphasis as if some responsibility lay on me.
For some reason, I was wary of Vic and his girls, but probably because of what he had said nearly a year earlier about manipulating the minds of the drunk at Mardi Gras. I had tried to seal off my part of the building from theirs, psychically. I imagined I was weaving a wall of energy along the plaster one, like another layer.
When I was a senior in high school (1960-61), a shy, quiet girl in my English class asked me to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and I did. But I didn't ask her out again because I had found a girlfriend. In the spring, the English teacher told us the shy and quiet girl was in a mental hospital. I wondered. Had it anything to do with my lack of interest in her? No one said anything to me about it. Years later, Carol, who was in the mental health program, told us of a similar experience that had caused her difficulties.
Was I supposed to know Vic's girl was interested in me?
About that time, I was sitting in a coffee shop. A female cashier was sitting at the counter talking to another girl. She claimed she could take an idea from her boss's mind and replace it with something else, so she could get away with things at work. I thought she must be exaggerating, but the point is she was trying to manipulate his mind. She also mentioned something about how the "witches," her word, shared information about which guy was a "do."
During the sixties, Buckminster Fuller used to speak a lot at our college. Once he said, "We're going to send everyone fishing so they can find out what they wanted to do before they were told they must be a success."
I learned to approach the world in a new way. I let my sense of awareness reach out beyond my body. I did experiments, such as sending my awareness into my mind and then out to include the whole community. I perceived a gaudy chaos, people screaming but making no sound, a hellish throng. Then saying to myself, "I've got to do something about this." I had found my way.
Spring
By the time spring came I thought I didn't need my own place anymore and I had a new friend, Shebaz, a black man from New Orleans, who needed a place. He and his girlfriend, Susan, moved in and I went onto the streets. I went back to that apartment every once in a while, however, to unwind. Susan had a young daughter by a previous marriage. I went into the apartment and a friend of Susan's was visiting with her daughter the same age as Susan's but much smaller. The smaller girl, a bit forlorn, asked as I entered, "Where did you come from?" I had no answer for her.
Then this drama occurred in the next room: A man asked the visiting woman for the keys to the car. The woman gave them to him, and as he was coming through the living room to the door, she accused him menacingly: "But I know what you're going to do." He spun and threw the keys at the woman in impotent rage. The keys landed at her feet. I don't remember what happened next. I probably left to avoid their squabbles. Here, the witch was frustrating her man sexually and stunting the growth of her child. I couldn't find it more obvious.
What was I to do? Coming together in my mind that people were trying to manipulate other people from afar, telepathically. Was I myself a "do?" And then, what would it mean if they could succeed in reducing many people to a remote-controlled robot? As frightening as this may seem, I knew there had to be answers.
I could not perceive the world in a different way. I could only go forward with what I knew through experience and build on it.
But anyway, it became clear to me that our enemies were not necessarily our parents, the older generation, or the system, but those among us destroying at grass-roots level the life-style we were trying to create. Our enemies were among us. That's what went wrong.
Enter Sam
Next, I met Sam, who showed himself to be a tyrant. I was having a conversation with Karen at her apartment. She and I exchanged a few words about an upcoming event at college, and I was asking, where, when, what would be happening. I wish I could remember it exactly. We were exchanging facts about a specific event. Sam was there and said, "I can't believe I just heard that conversation." I glanced at him quizzically. I always wondered why he found that conversation extraordinary. It seemed fairly simple, straight forward, with no games being played between Karen and me. Was that it?
What I experienced at the crash pad with Sam and Silas brought it all together for me. From then on, I assumed there was a peril here for the whole of our society, not only the counterculture and hippies. A grass-roots beginning to create another horrid state totalitarianism. I may have softened my attitude since then, especially when I learned that they too had limits and weaknesses. But at the time, I decided to believe the worst was about to happen so as not to muff it by diminishing the problem.
What special qualities did I possess for dealing with the problem? I didn't ask myself. I knew I could fall in the mud at any moment. An M.A. in French Lit, a very introspective literature. The writers had confidence that their own minds' were capable of dealing with reality in a rational way.
As I approached my last trip, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to cope, since I had to go back home and begin a new life without pot and LSD. I was searching for some answer that might help me if I became the victim of one of these people. I dropped some acid in the morning and then headed out of town to a park-like wilderness area. It was hilly and I saw a panorama of the city below me at times. Or else, I could hide between two hills in a vale. I tried some sexual pleasure, but nothing happened. I was tired, probably hungry, thought of Prometheus with a pain in my side. The LSD let me list through the day, and in the afternoon, I was lying looking up at the sky, cloudless, and caught a glimpse of something, a geodesic pattern domed the sky. It startled me and as I tried to focus on it, it disappeared. The borders of the hexagons were of light with the blue sky showing between. I felt I had been given a special treat, a glimpse of something rarely seen, a force field somehow. I was reminded of a time when I was walking home from school towards the west and the sun appeared from behind a cloud and sank below the horizon. I felt as if the sun had slowly winked at me. The wonder of it lingered as I headed back to town.
The next morning I was still faced with my problem. I gave myself the task of finding an answer because obviously it wasn't going to come in a flash of insight. As I drank my morning coffee, the juke box played, "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down." The whole hippie thing was in shambles. I hadn't really experienced anything like the Summer of Love. The way it was early on, before they illegalized acid.
Later, sitting in a park close by, suddenly I thought of Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand). What were they doing there? The industrialists, who had created value in the first place, accused the government of stealing away that value and making it impossible for them to function. Some of them were withholding their value from the world. If it's something valuable people like Sam take from us, in spiritual terms, we would withhold our love, esteem, generosity from them. We would pull our energies back into our own bodies, not send any peace vibes to be returned as hate. I actually imagined the energy streaming back into my body. Like pulling in the astral body. At the time, I didn't think that tactic would yield much, though the idea reassured me. Later I realized that it was the very tactic that would allow me to fight the beast without feeding the beast. I was ready. In a few days, I was staying with my sister in a near-by town, and the hippie, drug-riddled days were over.
The second time I met Sam, I heard him storming into the crash pad saying to himself, "Now there's gonna be someone up against the wall." His voice didn't sound threatening, but definitely serious. Nothing strange happened when he came into the room. We were hippies, summer, 1969. My friend Silas had told me about the crash pad. He was a college drop-out like me, mellow, relaxed. For a year, we'd both been living the hippie life. Everyone was skinny. Sam looked like a stick, body rigid. He walked on his toes, head first. He was below average in height. I knew nothing about him, where he came from. He knew nothing about me. No one asked questions.
I was riddled on psychedelic drugs. Everyone was. I was scrutinizing life in a new way. What resources can the mind tap? What are the hidden potentials? I was at the crash pad with Sam; we were both watching TV. All of a sudden the picture started flickering, and the image was contorted. I looked at the TV with concern as if ,"What's the problem?" The picture returned to normal. Sam murmured, "He's setting it right." Had Sam been causing the static with his mind? I didn't even know what I was doing. I was a puppy discovering my bark.
Next day, Silas confided to me, "When I send a peace vibe to Sam, he turns it around and sends it back as a hate vibe."
One morning, Silas left the house on a long errand. Then, a few minutes later, I was surprised to see him return. Sam was standing next to the couch. Silas walked up to him and sat down on the couch, head down, distraught, as if there were a rotten feeling in his stomach. I couldn't help but think there was something telepathic here, Sam pulling Silas back to the pad. Silas being reduced to a remote-controlled slave somehow. At that point I must have left because I don't remember any more. My time in this scene was almost over. I had exhausted my resources. Soon, I would go back to my family for help. I never saw Silas again.
"You don't know what it's like living in a bathtub full of gelatin." From Sam. Something internal, not external, binding him and restricting his movements? For some reason I thought it had to be his mother, the way she brought him up. Also turning him into a tyrant. But often my thoughts about things were only other things happening. I didn't want to make any assumptions. Sam was a person sharing a crash pad.
Sam was a hippie, then? A love child? He was terrorizing Silas. And there was nothing I could do about it because I was in total ignorance.
And finally something closer to the love children we were supposed to be. A young guy came in one evening and I found him attractive. A love vibe streamed out of me to him. He said to himself, "Oh yeah, unconditional love." But that love vibe was filled with erotic desire, as I experienced it, so he mistook me. Why all these people talked out loud, I don't know.
Did anyone else see such things? And if they did, could they make sense of them? I couldn't make sense of them, but I had my theories. I've kept stand-out experiences in my memory's hoard all these years. Some of those I have related here. So happens, I'm living across the street now from where the crash pad was forty years ago trying to remember. The crash pad was torn down long ago and now the high-school students park there.
Tripping Out
Way back when I was still a graduate student, I bought a hit of acid from a reliable dealer named Vic. He called it an orange wedgy. Christmas break was approaching. In January (1968), I was going to have to buckle down and finish my master's degree in French. While he was giving me the acid he said they were going to Mardi Gras in February.
"Yeah, it's really easy to manipulate their minds, especially when they're drunk and you're on acid."
"Oh, is that right?" I said not really paying much attention. Why would they want to manipulate someone else's mind? I had better things to do with acid. I put the acid in my pocket and went home, prepared to trip out.
It was Friday and I had nothing to do all weekend. I took the acid a little later and waited for it to come on. What got my mind going strange, I don't exactly recall, but I could have thought of what Vic had told me about manipulating people's minds. My mind swirled into something I did not like. And then I remembered the orgasm. I didn't ponder the problem because I didn't want to get caught up in it. To escape this thing in my mind, I had sex in a way that I had learned in Wilhelm Reich's writings, especially Character Analysis. He describes the curve of the successful orgasm. How to lead up to it and how to let it happen. The sex was a trip in itself, and from then on I had no trouble with my thoughts, they just flowed along of their own accord. Exhilarating it was the way my mind moved so freely. I thought it was STP because it lasted for three days.
The Spruce Street House
After finishing my degree, I wandered around town, becoming too independent on my heterosexual friend Dick. He finally sent me to Vic, the same dealer, to see if I could stay at his place. I spent one long morning in an interior room with no windows recovering from a trip. Vic had an apartment with a couple of girls. I probably talked to them a little while. As I was leaving, Vic told me the guy living in the front apartment needed a roommate. So there I was with a place to stay. I took a job as a night janitor for a few months. After a few weeks, my roommate returned home to Wyoming, so I had the place to myself.
The building had three apartments. Vic's was in back, mine in front, with another upstairs. I shared a bathroom off a corridor with the tenants upstairs. My apartment had two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, with a large opening between. From outside, I used a door that gave into the bedroom.
One day that fall, I ran into Vic outside the building, and he said one of the girls staying with him had flipped out. I suppose we all knew we were risking insanity by taking acid. But he said it with a certain emphasis as if some responsibility lay on me.
For some reason, I was wary of Vic and his girls, but probably because of what he had said nearly a year earlier about manipulating the minds of the drunk at Mardi Gras. I had tried to seal off my part of the building from theirs, psychically. I imagined I was weaving a wall of energy along the plaster one, like another layer.
When I was a senior in high school (1960-61), a shy, quiet girl in my English class asked me to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and I did. But I didn't ask her out again because I had found a girlfriend. In the spring, the English teacher told us the shy and quiet girl was in a mental hospital. I wondered. Had it anything to do with my lack of interest in her? No one said anything to me about it. Years later, Carol, who was in the mental health program, told us of a similar experience that had caused her difficulties.
Was I supposed to know Vic's girl was interested in me?
About that time, I was sitting in a coffee shop. A female cashier was sitting at the counter talking to another girl. She claimed she could take an idea from her boss's mind and replace it with something else, so she could get away with things at work. I thought she must be exaggerating, but the point is she was trying to manipulate his mind. She also mentioned something about how the "witches," her word, shared information about which guy was a "do."
During the sixties, Buckminster Fuller used to speak a lot at our college. Once he said, "We're going to send everyone fishing so they can find out what they wanted to do before they were told they must be a success."
I learned to approach the world in a new way. I let my sense of awareness reach out beyond my body. I did experiments, such as sending my awareness into my mind and then out to include the whole community. I perceived a gaudy chaos, people screaming but making no sound, a hellish throng. Then saying to myself, "I've got to do something about this." I had found my way.
Spring
By the time spring came I thought I didn't need my own place anymore and I had a new friend, Shebaz, a black man from New Orleans, who needed a place. He and his girlfriend, Susan, moved in and I went onto the streets. I went back to that apartment every once in a while, however, to unwind. Susan had a young daughter by a previous marriage. I went into the apartment and a friend of Susan's was visiting with her daughter the same age as Susan's but much smaller. The smaller girl, a bit forlorn, asked as I entered, "Where did you come from?" I had no answer for her.
Then this drama occurred in the next room: A man asked the visiting woman for the keys to the car. The woman gave them to him, and as he was coming through the living room to the door, she accused him menacingly: "But I know what you're going to do." He spun and threw the keys at the woman in impotent rage. The keys landed at her feet. I don't remember what happened next. I probably left to avoid their squabbles. Here, the witch was frustrating her man sexually and stunting the growth of her child. I couldn't find it more obvious.
What was I to do? Coming together in my mind that people were trying to manipulate other people from afar, telepathically. Was I myself a "do?" And then, what would it mean if they could succeed in reducing many people to a remote-controlled robot? As frightening as this may seem, I knew there had to be answers.
I could not perceive the world in a different way. I could only go forward with what I knew through experience and build on it.
But anyway, it became clear to me that our enemies were not necessarily our parents, the older generation, or the system, but those among us destroying at grass-roots level the life-style we were trying to create. Our enemies were among us. That's what went wrong.
Enter Sam
Next, I met Sam, who showed himself to be a tyrant. I was having a conversation with Karen at her apartment. She and I exchanged a few words about an upcoming event at college, and I was asking, where, when, what would be happening. I wish I could remember it exactly. We were exchanging facts about a specific event. Sam was there and said, "I can't believe I just heard that conversation." I glanced at him quizzically. I always wondered why he found that conversation extraordinary. It seemed fairly simple, straight forward, with no games being played between Karen and me. Was that it?
What I experienced at the crash pad with Sam and Silas brought it all together for me. From then on, I assumed there was a peril here for the whole of our society, not only the counterculture and hippies. A grass-roots beginning to create another horrid state totalitarianism. I may have softened my attitude since then, especially when I learned that they too had limits and weaknesses. But at the time, I decided to believe the worst was about to happen so as not to muff it by diminishing the problem.
What special qualities did I possess for dealing with the problem? I didn't ask myself. I knew I could fall in the mud at any moment. An M.A. in French Lit, a very introspective literature. The writers had confidence that their own minds' were capable of dealing with reality in a rational way.
As I approached my last trip, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to cope, since I had to go back home and begin a new life without pot and LSD. I was searching for some answer that might help me if I became the victim of one of these people. I dropped some acid in the morning and then headed out of town to a park-like wilderness area. It was hilly and I saw a panorama of the city below me at times. Or else, I could hide between two hills in a vale. I tried some sexual pleasure, but nothing happened. I was tired, probably hungry, thought of Prometheus with a pain in my side. The LSD let me list through the day, and in the afternoon, I was lying looking up at the sky, cloudless, and caught a glimpse of something, a geodesic pattern domed the sky. It startled me and as I tried to focus on it, it disappeared. The borders of the hexagons were of light with the blue sky showing between. I felt I had been given a special treat, a glimpse of something rarely seen, a force field somehow. I was reminded of a time when I was walking home from school towards the west and the sun appeared from behind a cloud and sank below the horizon. I felt as if the sun had slowly winked at me. The wonder of it lingered as I headed back to town.
The next morning I was still faced with my problem. I gave myself the task of finding an answer because obviously it wasn't going to come in a flash of insight. As I drank my morning coffee, the juke box played, "Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down." The whole hippie thing was in shambles. I hadn't really experienced anything like the Summer of Love. The way it was early on, before they illegalized acid.
Later, sitting in a park close by, suddenly I thought of Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand). What were they doing there? The industrialists, who had created value in the first place, accused the government of stealing away that value and making it impossible for them to function. Some of them were withholding their value from the world. If it's something valuable people like Sam take from us, in spiritual terms, we would withhold our love, esteem, generosity from them. We would pull our energies back into our own bodies, not send any peace vibes to be returned as hate. I actually imagined the energy streaming back into my body. Like pulling in the astral body. At the time, I didn't think that tactic would yield much, though the idea reassured me. Later I realized that it was the very tactic that would allow me to fight the beast without feeding the beast. I was ready. In a few days, I was staying with my sister in a near-by town, and the hippie, drug-riddled days were over.
Copyright © 2010 Psychic Freedom Now
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