Heightened Sensing & Drugs


In the late 1960's, I was comically unaware of the drug scene, which was happening all around me. I was like the clueless guy in comedy movies, that finds himself at at Italian restaurant surrounded by muscular guys in dark suits who speak to each other with exaggerated politeness. He thinks that they must work out a lot, thus the big shoulders, and that they are big on self-improvement, thus the impeccable suits in the middle of the day.

I lived in Costa Mesa, a few miles up the coast from Laguna Beach, where Timothy Leary was based. If I had any money or time, I am sure I would have been as stoned as everyone else. But I did not have money or time – during high school and college, I was working fifteen or twenty hours a week. In high school, that meant pumping gas or mowing the greens at the local golf course. The university was great because I could work in the labs, and got a job at the physiology lab that was doing research on dreams, hypnosis, and meditation. I was also obsessed with trying to get straight A's, so that I could get the hell out of there. If you have ever worked and gone to school, you know what I mean – every day is long and intense and any mistake, like missing a couple of hours of sleep – is absolute torture. A party? Are you kidding?

And of course I had to surf – I knew all the secret spots from Malibu to San Clemente, and being in the ocean was my religion. In 1966, wetsuits were not what they are today – a supple second-skin that keeps you warm. Surfing meant going voluntarily into cold water, so cold that after a few minutes you couldn't feel your feet. We shivered constantly and pushed the edges of hypothermia every day, and didn't care. Adapting to cold is just amazingly painful, but once you get through the first month of torture, your body adapts and starts to heat up your metabolism as soon as skin touches water. You start to burn a huge amount of calories, as if you are running. Then when you get out, the relief is psychedelic, all your senses are shimmering and you feel absolutely brand-new. The cold always hurt, and it was really hard to get people to go surfing with me. So I almost always went surfing alone, at dawn, in one of my secret, uncrowded spots.

So I never heard the buzz, what was happening. And I never had any interest in what other people were doing or thinking. Who had the time? So I walked through this psychedelic world with the aloofness of a cat, absorbed in the hum of OM like purring and supremely indifferent to what the human beings were doing.

My first awareness of marijuana “in the daylight” was in 1967, from Henry, the guy at the end of the block. As I recall, he had welded a secret compartment into the gas tank of a car, and filled that with hashish in Morocco, then driven the car somewhere, and smuggled the hash back to California and made a fortune. That got him started, then he switched to pot, and was selling baggies of pot out of his house, and over a period of 9 months he went from someone looking for a job to a person who could pay cash for a really cool car. For that period, he was living high and large, he was a star, and then he got busted and went to prison. Meanwhile, Dave, the guy across the street from me was smoking pot everyday and had a great life and a gorgeous girlfriend. Dave was tall, ruggedly handsome, and had started a business moving furniture and was making a lot of money. He had the most wonderful dog, an Australian Shepard, and the dog loved to sniff marijuana. Dave would blow smoke in the dog’s direction and the dog would sniff it and get stoned with Dave. But then after only a year of this, Dave injured his back horribly, moving a sofa up a flight of stairs. It turns out that moving furniture while stoned is not a good idea. First it increases the odds of getting injured, then if you get stoned to cover up the pain, you get re-injured and don’t let your body heal because you do not realize the extent of the injury. So Dave soared and then crashed and burned all in a year, from thinking that marijuana was the MAGIC THING, the one true thing, the elixir of life.

Before that, I was around a lot of marijuana “in the darkness,” in jazz nightclubs. In 1966 and 1967 I would occasionally smoke cigarettes as cover when I would sneak into jazz nightclubs in Los Angeles, which I did every week. But basically I hated smoking, and marijuana seemed to be some form of “cigarette” to me. Smoking was not fun, it was a kind of cover. I loved jazz and Brazilian music, and I found that if I walked into a music nightclub wearing an expensive, well-tailored dark suit, classic dark glasses, smoking a cigarette, and immediately ordered a scotch on the rocks, they wouldn’t ask me for ID. In other words, a cigarette was not to be enjoyed, the awfulness of the taste made me scowl in a way that made me look older. It was a passport. You only use your passport to cross a border. I love all music, but Brazilian music and the kind of jazz created by quartets has always spoken to me very deeply and sort of saved my life. Brazil was the Promised Land to me as a teenager and I thought I would have to move there to find a wife. So there I was, age 16 and 17 at a jazz nightclub in Los Angeles,
Shelly's Manne-Hole. And there were amazing musicians playing every night. They came from all over the United States - New York and New Orleans and Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere, and they were doing a gig at Shelly’s. It was a magic center of the universe of music.


I remember the bartender at Shelly's Manne-Hole, looking up from the sink and in a glance seeing through my cover the first time I walked in - I could see his flash of recognition - but he let me get away with it, maybe because my camouflage was so good. (God bless you, wherever you are, Mr. Bartender!) So I got to sit there, with the sense of awe you get from sneaking into a place you don’t really belong, and listen to amazing jazz by world-famous musicians and great unknowns, the people who were cherished by the greats, people who were unknown except to connoisseurs, and who inspired them. Music has always seemed to me to be one of the most wonderful things in the world, that which makes the world tolerable, and here was a group of people listening to music with that kind of reverence. The patrons were often musicians, and probably half the people around me were stoned. I got the sense that marijuana was a pain-killer, something that helped people blot out the noise in their heads and focus on music. Some of the musicians on stage were as elegant and composed as conductors, others were so blasted on something - heroin or marijuana - that they could barely walk, but they reached into their hearts and gave forth the music that saves lives and redeems souls. It was the people who were sober, letting the jazz sing them into ecstasy, that I resonated with. The jazz was the elixir, not the drugs. The musicians and audience who had to get stoned in order to be with the music seemed lessened by it. There was a poignancy in the air, because everyone knew lots of friends who had died from drugs, or ruined their lives, or lost their chance at expressing their talent. By being there at Shelly’s, and seeing all this, I got to take in the hard-won, blood-soaked experience of the musician drug scene all over the US, stretching back to the 40’s and 50’s. These were the avant-garde of drugs, these people knew everything there was to know about drugs and psychedelics, and there was no romance at all. In 1967, probably no one in America knew more about marijuana, heroin, speed, and hash than black jazz musicians and their friends and family. The sense in the air at Shelly’s was that drugs of all kinds were medications, maybe you have to take them, but they WILL kill you. The musicians who were onstage would do a set then come sit in the audience for the other musicians. You cannot dance with the devil and not have to pay. That was the atmosphere I absorbed at 16 and 17 from these amazing people who were kind enough to let a kid just listen. I was there for the music, to save my life, and occasionally the guy on piano or bass would strike a chord in combination with the guitarist, the drummer would give a beat, and my heart would receive the resonance that life is good, life is going to happen, there is enough depth of love to balance the friction and meaninglessness of everyday noise.

Once in awhile, rarely, I would talk to the musicians. The club was so small that if you were sitting at a table, people would join you because there was nowhere else to sit. I was watching someone carry his instrument up on stage and there was something unusual about the way he moved - as if he was underwater, or walking through jello. I made a comment to the guy sitting near me and the attitude was, “Kid, you are WHITE. What the FUCK do you have to get stoned about? It is ILLEGITIMATE for you. You can rule the world. I say listen to the music, drive home, and fuck as many white women as you can.” Then one night I was sitting at a table with some other people, and everyone got up and left, except me and some guy, who turned to me and and asked who I was. From the first moment of the conversation, I knew this was the most conscious person I had ever met - by far. He was wearing dark glasses, and after awhile I realized he was blind, but it was obvious that he was seeing more than anyone - he was seeing with his entire skin, sensing the space all around him, and he was infinitely kind. His name was
George Shearing, and he was a jazz pianist and composer. Until a few years later, when I started meeting yogis from India, George was the most alert person I’d ever encountered, and if I were going to meet someone in Heaven and ask “What’s happening?” it would be him, because jazz is about the TRUTH. When you are 17 and around people like this, they let you participate in their world, you learn from them, and you learn from the tragedy they have seen, and they had all been around every kind of drug for decades. So somehow, through osmosis, I absorbed this ancient, worldly-wise attitude about drugs from these musicians. I think they ruined me for drugs - there was absolutely no romance. I somehow absorbed their weariness and suffering about drugs and marijuana and their blessing of, “Kid, don’t walk down this road. Find another way to live and get high.”

So a year later (a long time in the life of a teenager) whatever the students at UCI (University of California at Irvine) were smoking and eating didn’t grab my interest. When I started meditating in 1968, time slowed down and opened up. All of a sudden, I had time to sit around on campus and just BE. I found that I could get all my homework done, work, take classes, surf, and still have time to loaf. It was probably just twenty minutes of leisure, here and there, but to me it felt like a LOT of time, and meditation taught me to open up and SEE. And as I started to listen to the people around me on campus, much of what they were interested in and talking about was – DRUGS. Meaning, acid, speed and grass (and mushrooms). I was incredulous: THAT is what you think the secret of life is? You people who have free time and plenty of money and can afford to eat in the cafeteria, and can afford to live on campus, and don't have to worry about where you will get the money to pay your tuition – you are talking about drugs and staying up all night stoned. Ah, the lush life.

For me, it was an effort each month to come up with the money for rent, books, tuition, my car payment and food. I never ate in restaurants, and only once every few weeks would I afford to eat a little something at the Student Cafeteria. I would bring my food in a paper bag from home. I felt like a slave, or a lower-class person. The people with a little money from home were like exotic animals to me, a different species - they could stay in the expensive student dorms, eat all they wanted, buy whatever books they wanted, go to concerts, take vacations, throw money around. Before actually listening to my classmates, I was sure that they knew things I did not, and that they were onto all the cool things in life, and that I was just a sort of dorky outsider, condemned to work and study all the time.

Marijuana was so all-pervasive at the University that once in a psychology class in 1968, the teaching assistant gave us a psych test, had us fill it out, then handed out joints for us to smoke, waited half an hour, then had us fill out the test again. It was part of her Ph.D. thesis. That was the first time I ever got stoned, and I found out that marijuana affects me very intensely, like people’s descriptions of LSD. Time stops. A zone of total mental silence appears. My senses become supremely dilated. I remember driving home after that class, and it was as if I was sitting still and the world was moving around me. There was a detour on the way, fire trucks had their hoses going across the street and a traffic cop was waving people to go down a side street, and I felt like I was entering Dante’s Purgatorio.
Then it took a week or two before my meditative experience was clear again. I tried marijuana six or so other times, and it was often extremely interesting, but each time it would take a week or two before my
meditation became interesting again. I have a hunch that the body produces its own marijuana-like substances during meditation, and for me at least, taking the substances we had available in Orange County in the 60’s were so crude that they interfered with clear meditations.

Meditation had an odd effect on me, or side-effect. All my senses were heightened as a result of meditating: colors and visual textures were very intense, the world looked like technicolor; my hearing became acute and I could hear layers of meaning underneath what people were saying on the surface; my skin became very electric and like radar, sensing the presence of other people standing behind me, or to the sides, and I could feel what felt like
their emotions, even from twenty or thirty feet away; and there was a very subtle sense of smell and taste, as if I could smell people's energies and intentions. An interesting side-effect of this heightened sensing resulting from meditation was that I became able to see, hear and feel subtle energies.

The teenagers around me (I was 18) did not look so good as a result of the drugs they were taking. They looked kind of wasted. This was probably due to the fact that they were staying up stoned all night in a college dorm in Orange County, rather than hiking up into the mountains and getting lit next to a waterfall. I did not care that they used spiritual language, revelatory language, to talk about drugs. They didn't look illuminated to me. On the other hand, the people I was seeing who were 30 and over who took drugs occasionally (acid on weekends, pot in the evenings) often looked aglow with secret delight. Clearly, they knew
how to take drugs, and also had some kind of strength to handle them. I was friends with one of the administrators of the University, and he was filled with grace. It was like he had found God through LSD. He was majestic, a powerful male, helping run the place, and on weekends he would listen to classical music and take acid and contemplate the Upanishads. The thought came to me that you need to develop an ego before you dissolve it, maybe you have to develop some kind of sense of your own personality and exercise who you are before you tear down the walls. So I made a mental note to check out LSD sometime in my 30’s. (In my 30’s I did have one session, and it was so profound that I had no desire to repeat it.)

Comically, one of my best friends, a guy I respected a lot and who was always kind toward me, was one of the main drug dealers on campus. I only found this out years later. But during the 60’s and early 70’s, he subtly guided me away from using any drugs at all. I had a little house in Costa Mesa with a large garden and a meditation room, and friends would come over to take acid, because it was a peaceful place. I would pick carrots and juice them and feed people carrot juice and make salads, while they listened to CREAM, Crosby Stills and Nash, Blind Faith and Ritchie Havens.

Someone left a copy of
The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience at my house and I thought it was one of the most beautifully written things I had ever seen. Then one of the guys who lived at my house in 1969 died from a drug overdose. He had moved out several months before, I think to spare me the downward descent he knew he was on. Then two other guys died in drug-related incidents. Perhaps because Orange County is so close to the Mexican border, the drug supply involved the Mexican mafia, and very dark people. So these innocent college kids were smoking stuff that was transported to them by murderers, and they were unknowingly tainted by those vibes. I don’t know the full story, but for whatever reason, the drug-supply distribution channel at the university was touched by evil, and enough people in our little community died that the smell of death was everywhere. It was as if we were having a picnic around a small lake, and the bodies of several teenage friends were floating in the lake, rotting and polluting the water. This was the 60’s, so one day it would be flowers and rainbows and the next day it would be, they found a boat docked in Newport Harbor with blood everywhere, the drug dealers slaughtered an entire family on the boat, filled it with marijuana, and then sailed it into Newport Beach and unloaded tons of weed in the middle of the night.

Then I would read one sentence from the vijnana bhairava tantra and go on an adventure with the ways of perceiving it described.

I think we all have energy perception, but usually there is so much noise and static inside our heads and nerves that we miss the quiet signals. Dogs and cats certainly seem to be alert to these signals, so it is not necessarily a spiritual quality – or maybe dogs and cats are really spiritual. With me, energy perception is usually a combination of senses, all activated simultaneously. The energies flowing through and around a person can be heard, seen, felt, smelt and tasted. When I look at someone or think of them, I tend to experience the person as existing within a field of relatedness to life. Each person is like a band with an accompanying lightshow. There are so many things to notice – the moving colored lights, the motions of the band as they play, the sound coming off each instrument, the overall combination of sounds, the lyrics, the total feeling of the music, the moment-by-moment touch of each note. People seem to shape space by the way they are living – the sum total of the way they handle all their momentum, drives, desires. What they do with a breath.

Paying attention to subtle sensory impressions was mostly pleasurable, as when I would see a friend approaching me from a hundred feet away and I would know their mood at a glance. If they were at all in a good mood, I would be bathed in delight. And if they were stoned, I could see it by the quality of light around them. Sometimes it would make my chakras hurt, I don’t know why - perhaps because they were taking the drugs under bad conditions, or were crashing (coming down off the substance). This was 1968 and I was at the University of California! I would people walk toward me, and over time it developed that I could tell from a hundred feet what drugs they were on – marijuana, hash, LSD, speed, mushrooms; whether it was just coming on, peaking, crashing, or hung over; and also sometimes, the quality of the drug. I did not have any willpower, or "won't power." The people I met just did not look like they were having as good a time as I do when I go surfing and then do Tai Chi and meditate. They looked fucked up. And it’s odd - forty years later I still think of marijuana and drugs as for people who are smarter, richer, stronger, and have more time on their hands than I do.

Joe Cocker at Woodstock – "Let's Go Get Stoned"