I forget what Mike used to order. Maybe it was the carrot juice. Or the banana-and-strawberry smoothie. Or the high-protein carob shake, topped off with wheat germ and brewer’s yeast and — ahem — a raw egg. Each day around noon I’d blend up a frothy drink and carry it across the street to him. We’d talk — about his bookstore and my juice bar and the winding trail that led us, in the early seventies, from our old lives in New York City to Chapel Hill. We’d talk about the elusive truths we were seeking which always seemed just around the next bend, in the next hitchhiking trip or acid trip or love affair . . . or on some dusty shelf, in some odd little book by some unknown author, someone wise enough and presumptuous enough to try to explain us to ourselves.
One day, Mike handed me a slim volume with the improbable title of The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment. “I am a lazy man,” Thaddeus Golas writes on the first page. “Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, nonsmoking, and other evidences of virtue. That’s about the worst heresy I could propose, but I have to be honest before I can be reverent.”
I took the book home and read it that night, and a few nights later I read it again. During the past twenty years, I’ve returned to it more than a few times; for wisdom and solace it’s been an indispensable friend. An unsentimental celebration of the redemptive power of love, it’s also a real guide — a practical and reliable one — to higher states of consciousness. And its message can be reduced to a few phrases that are simple enough to recall in any crisis. “It has taken me and others safely,” Golas writes, “through some extreme states of mind.”
The Guide became an underground classic and has been translated into five languages. “Afterthoughts were inevitable,” he writes in his introduction to The Cosmic Airdrome. His new book, for which he hopes to find a publisher, is drawn from nearly two decades’ worth of essays, journals, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. It is, he writes, “a reply to those who have written to thank me for writing the Guide. It is a letter to those who merely thought of sending a note. It provides ideas for those who felt they wrote the Guide themselves. Of course I think you who are none of the above will also be entertained. . . . This book does not propose to be as inspiring as the Guide, but I hope here and there a line will set off a flash of pleasurable insight.”
We’re thankful to Golas for permission to print these excerpts.
— Sy Safransky
“We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.”
That sentence began my first book, and I still live by it and write by it.
The best things in life are not only free, they are mostly invisible.
Meditation is the Cosmic Airdrome where everyone changes planes.
The losers often write the best books, and losing nations may display new energy. Perhaps failure makes us willing to examine ourselves, to reconsider our view of the world, to work with more humility.
But when the spirit is real to you, it is like being so wealthy you cannot lose it all. A loss in one place is a gain in another. “Sickness is a guru,” say the Tibetans.
Once I bought a cassette recorder to use in writing. I could record while in bed — while sitting with my eyes closed or with half an eye on the silent TV screen.
And that’s just the trouble! I felt invaded. There was no escape; the “writing” wasn’t only where the computer was. I couldn’t walk away from it because the cassette can go anywhere — even to the beach! Trapped!
But it was interesting to learn how much emotion there is in my voice. Emotions that I felt while recording but failed to hear in my voice were vivid in the playback.
You always tell more than you think you are telling.
Writing about God is useless, because sentences have an end, and God does not.
Whatever you refuse to love leaves that much more for God to love, because God has to love everything.
In reading, hearing music, editing, writing, driving and fixing my car, in love affairs, and living alone, I have been and am authentic. I have not been authentic in job-holding, in marriages, in communes, in casual sex.
Everything happens first as a conceptual reality, and the physical experience is the froth that appears in the wake. By the time something becomes physically manifest, it is far too late to make a significant choice.
We should never take anyone’s overt behavior as evidence of his or her spiritual state or understanding.
Let us say that all human beings are gods of the stature of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus. Is it not conceivable that an immortal being might very well relish the peculiar experience of being stupid John Doe drinking beer at the ballgame? Maybe he’s done the experience of being a saint and savior, and prefers the unique adventure (rare in the universe, to be sure) of watching a ballgame.
Life in a sixties commune:
The difference between myself and others was not, it seemed, the cosmic experiences I was having, but that people around me were not paying attention to simple details of survival. I had gone into communal life because it seemed a context in which I could let go of concern for physical reality and social conventions — the original reason, I suppose, monasteries were founded. But soon I was in a widened region of danger, and had to pay attention. I was sometimes accused of “negative thinking,” but I didn’t want to burn to death because of someone’s sentiment for a cute rabbit that was chewing the insulation off the wiring.
That which offends the sentimental in the short run is often the greatest kindness over a longer time. I try to be kind to strong people because they have endured much to become strong.
Love may sometimes be blind, but it does not require us to be blind. To “love it the way it is,” in the phrase from my first book, it is necessary to see it the way it is.
We do not help the cause of spirituality by giving blanket approval to anyone and everyone who acknowledges the spirit’s existence. The world of the spirit has become a no man’s land into which all sorts of follies are dumped.
How quickly and casually we take our successful intentions for granted — how little awe and gratitude we have — how puzzled we are at the dark mystery of our troubles!
No sooner do we learn the way to do it right than we treat the knowledge with bored disdain, and perversely try to circumvent the rule!
Or we get lost in torrents of emotion about what others are doing or not doing.
We buy a large limousine and then complain of the lack of parking space.
We get confidently enmeshed in the gluelike processes of matter, and then wonder why it seems so hard to get out.
We want autonomy among others who also have it, and then are astounded when their choices are different from ours.
I have a message for the money in the world, especially for the money that feels neglected and unloved: any money that comes this way will be cared for, loved, and comforted. And well used. (Note: this incantation did not work at all.)
But I once tried it on a tiger at the San Francisco Zoo and it worked. I thought I’d try it with money since I have been completely inept at acquiring it. I don’t want to pay the price of money.
But now that I reflect on it — once you’ve succeeded, how do you handle the tiger? Think about that one. At the zoo there was a moat and a fence, fortunately.
Once when I took some trash to a country dump, there was an old but well-manicured Chevy pickup truck in front of me, moving very slowly. I had my car completely turned around before the driver, an old man, had backed up to unload. As I was going back to my car after tossing a bag of trash, I saw a little girl about five years old on the passenger side of the truck. The look on her face!
She was shy and proud and pleased and amazed, astonished at the large earth-moving machines and how tiny she was in the scale of the excavation, delighted that she had been allowed to go along on such an important trip, full of innocent, lovable pleasure — all this was in her face at once.
If only I could always be so innocently grateful to God.
Life is more than any concept about life.
I am more than my body.
I am more than my foolishness.
I am more than my fears.
I am more than my successes.
I am more than what people think of me.
I am more than anything that can happen to me, any mistake I can make, any failure of energy, of motivation, of action.
Whatever the horror movie that is running, you are more than that.
The major gift of the religions was the idea that we are of spiritual nature, of soul.
The major failing of religions was the idea that the soul must conform to rules and regulations.
It is usually tiresome to hear a long drawn-out account of someone’s dreams. Only the great poet can legislate dreams.
In a meditation, as I sat cross-legged, I thought, “Well, here I am, ready to go,” but was stopped short when I realized I might permanently go, leaving an ungoverned, lunatic brain or a messy dead body behind. Then I thought, “Okay, suppose you know for sure that this whole level of reality is an illusion, and that it will all vanish when you leave. Would you go?” After long seconds, I decided, “Yes. Yes, I would go.” Instantly the whole room turned radiant, as though lit from within. “That’s it,” I thought. “Be ready to leave.” It’s like those dull summer vacations when everything interesting starts to happen just when it is time to go home. Be ready to leave at any time. Do not hold on. Don’t look back.
Our immersion in physical existence may be a retreat to an area where we feel we have some control: that is what we all do, after all, for even psychosis may be seen as a retreat to any area, however small, where there is some sense of control.
We do not follow the line of least resistance, but the line of greatest control. That is why people are so passionate about driving cars.
The rat in the maze is not nearly so interesting as the maze in the rat.
I think it is a beautiful universe when foolishness and irrationality can be so self-defeating. And I say that, having paid with so much pain for my own folly.
Why does a person feel better about some problem or guilt when he or she discovers that others have had the same experience? That shows the discomfort was not about the problem, but about the sense of dealing with it alone, dealing with a situation without a knowable outcome.
There are a lot of interesting dumb things to be smart about! What fun! I feel like one of those comic strips in which the artist’s hand is shown drawing the strip.
The reaction against big government, bureaucracy, and the military is somehow merged with a defiance of reason, science, and technology — perhaps for no better reason than that the government’s fools have employed technology — or because, with the atom bomb, science has become capable of sin. Even the “pure” knowledge of mathematics has lost its claim to purity.
But I say to you that those who toy with unreason and superstition — as though these were the latest harmless fads, the in-group language, the new delicious consumer products for the mind — have a very short memory for what it was actually like to live in social groups dominated by irrational fears and superstitions. That way lies madness and pain, coercion and mob rule. You wouldn’t like it.
Whether there is any less coercion and mob rule in technologically dominated societies, I cannot say, but I would rather take my chances with them. I do know that I would prefer to live among people who agree that water boils at a given temperature, and that the fire will light even if you don’t pray to it first.
The power of the false and stupid. Emotional appeals and manipulations, whether in advertising, con games, or religious sects, are always seen by intelligence as duplicitous, hypocritical, pandering. Often the appeal is so obviously false that people seem hypnotized or brainwashed.
What is perhaps more astonishing is that intellectuals persist in expecting reason to have an emotional appeal!
A reasoning mind looks for the exercise of law and precision — and never predicts the effect of stupidity and passion.
If you take a step, don’t stop there. Look for the next step. You haven’t taken the right step until there are no steps in front of you.
NO STEP AHEAD
We tend to think of consciousness as a region of absolute subjective autonomy. But it may be that, like visitors to Paris, we feel uninhibited because we do not understand the language and the local inhibitions and rules.
The sanity of science is to defer subjectivity so that some reality can be measured. But there is also madness in this, for one not only quells one’s own random emotions, but also loses comprehension of the emotions in others. (Perhaps that is why the emotions in science fiction are peculiarly unconvincing and immature.)
The horror movies and comic books were right: scientists are mad, whatever their apparent success. What is the threat from witchcraft or black magic, compared to radioactivity and pollution?
There is nothing the laws say we must do, but the world is quick with pain or failure to tell us what we must not do.
We imagine the evil are enjoying themselves and getting away with something, but the fact is they are not having a good time — on the contrary, it is precisely their self-contempt that prompts them to act in a destructive way. There is no need to imagine a punishment for them in afterlife — it is already a punishment to be in their present state of mind.
It’s as though we built a house out of spiritual laws, and the truth keeps it standing. And then we move in and do crazy, seemingly unlawful things in the house.
Part of the problem of life on Earth is the one we discovered with computers — learning instantly that a computer does exactly what you tell it to do, and if you make an error in your instructions, the computer carries it out and magnifies it impartially. The natural world has “programs” of which we are not aware, so we often get side effects when we set a train of events in motion. Add that to the unpredictability of human beings, and you have quite a mess.
It never occurred to me to exploit the readers of The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment with seminars and courses. I did not want to relate to people in that way. I wrote the book so I would not have to talk about it. I considered myself a living example: what I had done without courses or teachers could also be done alone by others. Each of us must learn to travel alone sooner or later. If we wait until a group is ready, we will never leave this reality. As I said in the Guide, all states of consciousness exist right now. What teachers really teach is how to be a teacher.
Information-sharing is a characteristic of human beings, but I find I never remember cautionary reports in time. I read in a newspaper that when entering Canada you should definitely not mention plans to settle there, because border officials would question you closely and search your car thoroughly. Yet that is exactly what I did in my travels.
I want my writing to provide a reliable map, but I cannot presume to tell anyone how fast to drive or where to go.
It staggers me to see all the attractive new books when I go into a bookstore these days, and I always think, This is information overload. How can books compete with films, tapes, and dozens of glittering magazines?
Especially since the 1960s, small and large publishers have produced scores of practical books for every interest. It seems that if you are a left-handed person with a right-hand-drive van and want to go camping on Tuesdays, there is a book for you. There is scarcely an echo of a spiritual insight that hasn’t become a book. Yet I think it kills the adventure to be told what to expect ahead of time. We learn lessons best when we live and learn ourselves. This is true even for the spiritual nomad.
I have reverence and awe for untouched nature, so much so that I don’t even want to know the names of animals and plants. I love the forces of nature that are beyond man’s ability to tamper. This first struck me forcefully on a mountain near Lone Pine: the fantastic mountains and cliffs, so enormous that giant sequoias looked like blades of grass, these mountains were as airy as lace. In contrast, the small human intrusions where we were — an unfinished building with its construction debris — looked heavy, dreadfully heavy and inappropriate, so much so that it pained me. Wherever man goes there is mud and garbage.
Certain people who have had mystical flights come back with the notion that humanity also can live a completely value-free existence, with no regard to good or evil consequences: for instance, Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” This is a serious mistake, since human behavior does have good and evil effects. Human beings can have mystical illuminations that are euphorically convincing, but that are misinformed about earthly life.
It seems to me more rational to assume that earthly life forms arose out of a background field that is itself alive, out of a universe of life, than that life occurred as a special local case in a reality that is not alive.
The human mind is a miracle of intricate energy, but is not a greater wonder than pure consciousness.
What is art?
The difficulty in commenting on art, as artists and critics have discovered, is that unless the comments are also works of art, they may sound silly or confused.
What is art?
What is art supposed to do? That is our clue. To be art, a work must evoke the feelings we have when we are deeply conscious. Those feelings are undefinable but real. It is a great and rare achievement when someone does manage to manipulate matter and energy in such a way that we are reminded of our potential for full consciousness, and we rightly honor such persons as great artists.
We may thus have a simple standard by which to judge a work of true art, against the many strange fashionable objects and actions that have in recent years been given the benefit of the doubt. Does the work reawaken in us how it feels to be deeply conscious? If it does, it is art. We can spend a few hours with Rembrandts in a museum and emerge seeing a world of masterpieces about us. Bach and Mozart and other composers will lift our spirits to consciousness. Dostoevsky will awaken a compassionate vision of the bonds of the human heart.
If art cannot be faked, how does it happen that great paintings can be forged? Why are the copies not art also? Do they not display the same skill and color and technique? Alas, that is the fate of all sublime conceptions that are brought to earth, that are narrowed down to forms of energy and matter: once the material expression exists, it can be copied, vulgarized, mocked, faked, distorted, and parodied. What is missing is the artist’s authentic connection to the divine source in consciousness; the imitations are not art. We might note that those most likely to be fooled by forgeries are those who see the works only as valuable objects. Consequently there are almost no forgeries in music and literature, where the value does not depend on single copies.
The artist takes the risk of opening her or his consciousness, of transcending earthly limits, and there is within us as witnesses something — our own consciousness — that knows whether the artist has truly taken the risk, whether the ascent to paradise and the descent to hell has really happened.
When you are long separated from a friend, death has less effect. When my friend Jonathan Braman died, he lived on in my mind as before. He is just located a little farther away than Miami.
Many propose to expound truth, but few are honest.
Pleasure is easily created by making one’s actions voluntary rather than obligatory.
Hearing is more other-determined than vision. You cannot “hear away” as you can look away.
Even before remote controls I wired my TV set to be able to cut the sound of commercials, and never listened to them. And this is what I observed:
Older women in coffee commercials were incredibly wise and competent.
People in headache-remedy ads were trying too hard to please.
People in food ads were serious and intent.
Ads for indigestion remedies had people who were effusive, explosive, and cheerful.
Ads for laundry soap had women of masculine brusqueness.
Bath soap ads had slippery sex, as did deodorant ads.
TV preachers were usually dressed and made up as neatly as corpses.
Why is it that the passage of time in a given circumstance, like a job or residence, can be borne for years, but when you know for certain it will end or change, every moment of delay is difficult to bear?
So often under repressive regimes the worst disorder comes when improvements are made, and hope rekindles.
At the time of the French Revolution, the King was a most agreeable man, trying to institute reforms.
Perhaps that is why spiritual revivals so often lead to violence — people have no patience when deliverance is said to be at hand. Be careful of what you promise, even if you can deliver.
In any group, look for the person that others are afraid of “upsetting,” and you will find the prime manipulator, the power-wielder.
The large error is not in being materialistic, sensual, or obsessed with the physical world, but that people do it poorly, with so little perception and style. Often people do not see what is in front of them. Like the “practical” men who build cities that are not only ugly but inefficient as well.
The true test of the spirit is not in getting away from this material reality, but in how deeply you can feel and understand what is happening here.
It is tragic that so many of us undervalue the magical, unusual realm in which we dwell.
God loves us even when we are stupid, but not because we are stupid.
Anything we do willingly is pleasurable, even dying.
Anything we do unwillingly is painful in one way or another.
Thus even the most elevated philosophy, the grandest wisdom will be boring and tiresome for those who follow unwillingly. And the silliest beliefs are enjoyable to those who agree willingly.
It seems I have labored through forests of concepts only to arrive at the obvious. Still, it is often the obvious that we are slow to acknowledge.
Can it really be that simple?
You think of reaching for a glass, and your hand moves to it. You go to sleep and awaken. In these two sentences are profound truths: you can participate in a function without being conscious of how it works. You go on living and functioning whether you are conscious or not.
“No matter what happens, I am conscious all the time.”
Saying these words is not the same as doing it, but sooner or later it will happen, probably when your mind is on something else. Maintain the intention.
Energy cannot stop you from being continuously conscious.
Energy cannot stop you from ceasing to be energy.
Fortunately, physical reality is rational, lawful, and consistent in its craziness.
Reality is that which happens regardless of what we think about it, or what we know about it.
In the past, intellectuals were certain that farm laborers and factory workers were stultified by boredom. But when bright brain-workers took up jogging and aerobics, the rewards of “mindless” effort came as a revelation, and these busy excesses were given dignity and status.
Freedom is never freedom from reality.
Freedom is the choice of one’s relation to reality.
Did you ever picture a wise person as being busy?
Sometimes I worry that technology is like those parents who think they are giving love to their children by showering them with objects.
It is not ignorance that is evil. Evil is the half-conscious energy that manipulates ignorance.
The spiritual leader who acquires “efficient” managers and administrators is doomed.
Jesus chose a bunch of beautiful losers. Jesus did not choose Paul. Paul elected himself, and made Christianity what it became.
We suffer more from our virtues than we do from our failings.
Like little kittens, we chase movement. Our attention is drawn to whatever is moving and changing.
We human beings have been charging ahead in the belief that we want more and more energy at our command, as I have been pressing ahead in the belief that we want more and more information about how the world works.
But humanity has survived for millions of years with very little energy and even less information.
Magic is more innocent than science — and more amusing! — because it is so rarely effective.
It was once insisted that planetary motions must occur in perfect circles.
For a universe to be able to exist, there can be no such binding requirements as “perfection.”
If we make our idea of perfection important, then we become obsessed by the profusion of imperfections.
Many things can be done slowly without pain that are painful if done suddenly or quickly.
Persuasion by degrees.
Sudden illuminations are often unstable.
Consider: if you could suddenly be in paradise, but knew that back on earth your body-mind was continuing its statistically probable pattern, with other entities in charge, would you be willing to let go? Would you be anxious about what those others might do to affect “your” reputation? Would you come back to make sure everything was being done right? Would you then hang on for dear life until death convinced you it was all right to leave?
Not only wisdom, but human folly is a proof of consciousness. If people were always rational, they could not be distinguished from other animals or robots.
The fading of an illusion is more painful than a real disaster. A crushed romance is worse than an earthquake. If we come through a real danger, we are relieved and grateful to be alive, but when passion fades, we are heart-torn to see it go.
Nature is careless. Millions of seeds are wasted for every flower that grows. We see order in nature, but rarely count its price in discontinued forms and discarded individuals. Nature does not win with wit and planning, but with redundancy.
Habits and addictions:
The human body, like other organisms, has an overriding imperative: to maintain its homeostasis, its balance, like water sloshing in a bathtub until level. That balance was found over millions of years of evolution.
When a disturbing substance comes into the system, the body takes vigorous measures to counteract the effect, to restore the balance. Whenever you then cease ingesting the stuff, be it alcohol or drugs, your system will still chug away for a while, reacting to what is not there any more. “Withdrawal symptoms” show you what your body was doing all the time while the alien substance was in your system, as it tried to recover its balance. That is the discomfort of breaking a habit.
There is no true desire or appetite involved. Of course it would feel easier to give in and take the stuff and thus maintain the new homeostasis, but that keeps you working for the company store. Far better to wait out the tension until your body learns there is no more junk coming in.
Another mechanism involved in addictive pleasures is that any change at all provides a rush, as the body is suddenly alerted that something new is happening, whether it is moving into a new house or trying a new drug. This rush is often mistaken as the effect of the drug. How many people continue smoking marijuana for years, merely on the memory of the first or third time they smoked it? A drug soon becomes necessary just to feel the way you did before you used any of it.
The Sphinx:
Why does an inscrutable smile suggest an unspoken secret?
In painting, Mona Lisa fascinates us.
Buddha smiles.
And then there is the Sphinx.
What Mona Lisa knows may be guessed at.
What Buddha knows may be achieved in enlightenment.
But what the Sphinx knows is forever secret, and the Sphinx tantalizes us.
The Sphinx is an echo of the universe: it is indifferent to us. We want the Sphinx to notice us, but there it sits, impassive, unblinking.
Perhaps the Sphinx is the guardian to the gate of consciousness, a consciousness beyond ours, that can be gained and lived in only when we are willing to leave our human selves behind.
To ascend to that consciousness requires the willingness to leap from the cliff, to die, to go mad, to be pulled from the human context like a tooth.
It would seem we expect every hurt feeling to be salved with legislation and court decisions. Sir John Glubb says a profusion of schools and hospitals is symptomatic of a culture in its decline. When a culture is young, no one complains of the pain.
Righteous anger can chew up your insides just like any other anger. It is not an unqualified good to let your feelings go. A burst of emotion may be appropriate in one situation, but it can quickly get to be a bad habit.
Anger is not a quantity that builds up if unused. It is a mobilization of your system, and you can demobilize. (Millions died in World War I because the Kaiser’s officials did not want to mess up the railroad schedules by demobilizing.)
If a situation displeases you, ask yourself first, “What reward am I getting from this?”
The reward of knowing you are right? That justice is on your side?
Turning the other cheek may be hard, but it can save your body as well as your soul.
It occurred to me that during recent decades the U.S. government learned to punish rebels by arresting them — absorbing the energy of opponents by keeping them busy defending themselves. (Lenny Bruce took the bait and lost himself in lawbooks.)
But in the late 1800s, it was inventors who were sucked into years of litigation, rarely able to enjoy their success.
Perhaps we should say: if you are at the cutting edge of social power, you are likely to end up in court, explaining yourself.
What is a miracle?
A miracle is that human beings can agree sufficiently to build the George Washington Bridge.
Reality: what’s wrong with it is what makes it work.
I suspect that we are not the light of consciousness in a dead universe, but the local darkness in a universe of life.
Humanity sees law everywhere except in itself.
A time to remember: gentle thunder and a much-needed rain.
What possesses weather forecasters to speak of rain as “bad” weather even in a drought?
We can only recognize as conscious that behavior that is conscious when we do it ourselves.
Why should we expect trees to speak humanese?
False alarms taught me to stop being a fire engine.
If you think of yourself as a spirit enmeshed in matter, hold the idea that you are doing it of your own free will.
On one occasion I was annoyed at having my meditation interrupted, and then I realized that enlightenment would be an interruption.
I have never varied from my determination to evolve hard information, a way of being that could be relied on even in chaos. It was chaos that taught me. I was so ruthless in testing, suspecting every sentiment, that I came to feel I was a destroyer of ideas, and indeed my other books are based on what I could not demolish. Anyone who wants to tear those books down will have to work harder and longer than I did.
A sociologist says there is a higher rate of divorce now, when people marry for romantic reasons, than there would be if each married the first person met by chance, walking down the street. But that just shows that romance will never be contained in statistics.
What is consciousness? It is what you are after you ask that question and are waiting for the answer.
“Any old Gypsy love song will do.” So began a song I once wrote, but it was so witty and apt I could not be sure I had not heard it somewhere. We need automatic teller machines for our memory banks.
“Do not be attached to the fruits of your labors.” Do not even be attached to the labors.
The truth is painless.
If it hurts, it’s not the whole truth.
In life as in love, little publicity is given to those who are happiest.
A small problem that is recurrent is a big problem.
A small pain repeated is a big pain.
We need small solutions that can be repeated easily.
Find small pleasures that can be enjoyed often.
Read in a news story that scientists could account for only 3 percent of the matter in the universe. I think it can be safely guessed that scientists have less than 3 percent of the information about anything.
The saying is, the truth will make you free, not that it will make you comfortable.
It takes more effort to avoid chores than just to do them. The more you put off a task, the less energy you feel you have to perform it.
There was a certain charm in life at a time when paintings, music, and books — indeed, Greenwich Village itself, with its two coffee shops — were almost secret as far as the society at large was concerned. All the seeds of the cultural explosion of the sixties were there in the Village: vegetarian food stores, metaphysical groups, chaotic apartment-sharing, the crazies, and even the artful con men like Victor (his only known name) with his big old limousines. It was fun to live an open secret that few others cared to see. Small signals of outward behavior denoted a genuine psychic condition.
In 1968 in San Francisco, at a rock concert in Golden Gate Park, I ran into Allen Ginsberg and asked if he recalled an incident of our high school years, for he was a freshman at Central High School in Paterson, New Jersey, when I was a towering junior:
My friend Aaron Rubin and I made a habit of meeting Bob Hanson at the student government office on Friday afternoons. In the euphoria of release from school, we would horse around, sometimes playing touch football with a crumpled ball of paper. More than once I would break my rimless glasses in the chaos. On one such occasion, Allen walked into the room just as I careened into a table, spilling my books on the floor. As Allen helped me retrieve my broken glasses and fallen books, he picked up a book called Indian Yoga which I had borrowed from the public library. As he handed it to me, he said, “You know, some people go crazy reading books like this.”
Not only did Allen recall this incident when I asked him in 1968, but he also named the other library book, The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White, which I had forgotten.
I once constructed a theory that as soon as a travel network was complete, it became obsolete: when canals were done, railroads came in; when railroads were done, highways came in. When the interstates were nearing completion, I expected another change — perhaps people working at home on a computer network. Oh, yes — when sailing vessels were perfected in the Clipper ships, steam came in; when passenger liners were perfected, air travel killed them. Where and how do we go from here?
Mystical experience: once one knows the reality is there, one is not impatient to repeat it, knowing it will happen again when one is ready. It is always there.
On a country weekend, lying in a field contemplating profound puzzles, I heard the voices of people climbing trees along a lane bordering the field. A man on the ground shouted, “Come on! I want to take your picture!” and a moment later, “Come on! Let’s make ourselves visible so we can record this thing!”
I laughed and thought, so that’s the reason for physical reality: to make ourselves visible and record this thing.
I have moved often and wandered far to find an isolated place to live simply. It was a long-standing aim. In 1945, around the time the first atom bombs were dropped, I had strange dreams of atomic wars. In one of them I was in a rowboat in a flooded lower Manhattan, coming to a nearly submerged truck-loading platform, the air hot with radioactivity. Another was of an air war with China. I decided I would head for the Rockies and learn to live off the land, without any of the implements of civilization. Then I concluded it would be pointless to survive if the rest of civilization were gone, and instead began to write a survival manual, showing edible plants and so forth. Such books of course have since been published; I never followed through.
Later, when I did travel, I saw that modern transportation has destroyed the possibility of isolation. I once thought of settling on a mountain in Lone Pine, California. Then I learned the spot was a favorite with hunters and backpackers. The only real anonymity is in the mass of a big city. When you are alone in the country there are always some who are vividly aware of you. And when visitors break your solitude, they cannot be sent down the street to a motel — you are stuck with their sometimes shocking presence.
When I was in Europe it occurred to me that Europeans have plenty of time but little space, so they had ageless buildings. We Americans have plenty of space but never enough time, so we have throwaway architecture.
Maybe we will all gather around some distant star and laugh about what we did as human beings, the way people talk about how drunk they got last Saturday night.
Why is everyone trying so hard to avoid dying? Compared to the degenerative diseases, a heart attack is a great way to go. Personally I hope to get blown away by a hurricane. Why are people so eager to linger into years of helplessness? One time when I slipped from my body, I thought, “Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t real!”
I know from my experience that consciousness transcends death. I do not need this idea for comfort, because one should be willing to die completely, to let one’s consciousness go completely blank, so that it truly does not make any difference whether we survive death or not. Whatever the reality is, we will all encounter it. Nevertheless, my advice is to do what I will do: in this reality or any other you find yourself in, hold the idea:
No matter what happens I am conscious all the time.
My epitaph: He did almost nothing.
In January 1995, The Sun published another excerpt: “Cosmic Airdrome (revisited).”
