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Dave Loomis, one of my fellow editors, selected which letters to the editor would appear in the paper. At the time, I didn’t think to ask to see the unedited letters, nor did I think to ask to see the letters he did not select for publication.  So I cannot know if the letters that appeared were representative. All I know is that nearly all the adverse letters came from fundamentalists.

My article criticized materialism rather than fundamentalism, So far as I could see, my piece hadn’t attacked their religious beliefs even implicitly. Contacting your higher self needn’t be done within a Christian framework, yet certainly may be, and has been for nearly two thousand years. As I explicitly said. I had written in a very low-key, matter-of-fact manner, sensing that dramatization is falsification, and that descriptions of metaphysical pursuits are very prone to just this error. What could be more matter-of-fact than the reporter’s six questions of who, what, when, where, how, and why? I did try my best to get through to as many people as possible. Yet here were people saying that getting in touch with our Higher Selves was the work of the devil.

One man wrote that as “a person’s spirit becomes open, the susceptibility to demonic influences increases. I know this to be true because at one time I touched on the occult and received a very bad experience.” He suggested that searchers “do it under God’s guidance by way of a qualified person such as a pastor or priest in an established church.” In other words, like the medieval Catholic Church, he thought one should talk to spirit only through a licensed intermediary of an “established church,” as if people like me would have been still searching if we had found what we needed there.

Another said Shirley MacLaine “offers more abstraction and vagueness to a large group of desperate souls in search of a quick fix in their spiritual lives.” He said she “came to town to peddle an ancient, rehashed version of sorcery and nether-world indulgence.” He added that she had been his favorite actress, but was “now someone who must be avoided at all costs. The Holy Spirit demands it.” This name-calling was justified, presumably, because he knew what the Holy Spirit demands.

A third writer said Ms. MacLaine had “taken the same detour that disillusioned so many in the 1960s. Eastern religions, despite their seemingly profound inner revelations, can lead to a dead end. Ask the Beatles.” (I never did figure this one out.)

A fourth, to cite one last example, said she was “shocked and appalled at the publicity your newspaper gave the seminar,” which she termed a “rip-off,” and said she was “most anxious to learn the name of her new temple and what false idol will be worshipped there.” Ms. MacLaine, she said, had used “various brainwashing techniques such as ‘visualization,’” and was “playing with fire. That fire has a name: a destructive cult.”

What I found disturbing in this last letter was its misunderstanding of, fear of, and therefore rejection of techniques such as visualization. I was to learn in years to come that many fundamentalist Churches fear—perhaps more than any other single thing—individual attempts to commune with spirit in the absence of whatever version of the Bible that Church happens to believe in. Some teach that meditation is dangerous as “Satan can insert thoughts into open minds.” God, apparently, can’t.

The odd thing is that the critics were entirely mistaking me intent and my background, and their assumptions didn’t have much to do with anything I experienced. On the first day, waiting for the seminar to begin, I had asked myself in my journal what I wanted, and had written, “Power. Connection. What God wants.” When I asked what phenomena I would hope to experience, the answer was an out of body experience or some experience of past lives, but when I asked further what I wanted, the answer was to be made spiritually, physically, and mentally whole.

I knew I could trust the Higher Self, and knew I could trust God. But each of these labels came with its own emotional nuances, and they didn’t fit all that well together. It’s too easy for the idea of God to become confused by every bit of half-baked theology that has ever come our way. And although I knew I had connected to something at the seminar, I got no sense of a separate individual or group of individuals like The Gentlemen Upstairs as I later experienced them. The Higher Self was a vague concept to me, little more than a smarter aspect of my personal self. It showed me that the long, hard, solitary road wasn’t the only road there is, but it didn’t give me much more to work with.

I belonged to no church, but I had learned to live in faith, which I then interpreted in pretty traditional terms. I lived, or tried to live, listening to God, doing God’s will, leaving it up to God. My prayer was, “Dear God, show me the way.” There are many worse ways to live.

In any case, other things had begun to happen, things that couldn’t really be pursued or described in public.

In that article, I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than I was to pretend that nothing had happened to me. Yet I made no attempt to describe meeting my “higher self,” because for a general audience a thirdhand description would be worse than none at all. (Thirdhand, in that they would have had to interpret my interpretation of my experience.) It is one thing to describe a thing to someone who may use that description as a guide or as a trail marker. It is quite another, futile, thing to describe it to those who will then judge its validity offhand, without having had the experience and without making any attempt to have the experience.

Between the end of the seminar and the appearance of my article the following weekend, I was busy absorbing and applying the lessons and the promise I had received from the internal events of the weekend. For instance, my brother Joe.

Joe had died at age 30 in 1979, eight years earlier, and I had never done the mourning his death required. Now I knew that things left unresolved between us could perhaps be fixed. All day Wednesday, beginning at daybreak, as a sort of background to my waking life, I had an image of myself riding the unicorn,  “across the dark water,” flying to find him.

Early on Thursday, we alit., coming down not near another willow tree as I had expected, but on a seashore, barren and featureless. On the sand was a giant tortoise with arms and legs and head inside the shell. This was Joe’s unicorn. A very appropriate image: pulled in, withdrawn, self-protected from a hostile world.

I had been very unjust to Joe, his whole short life. For whatever reason, so many things about him irritated me, and this was long before I became able to cast a critical eye on my own judgments and reactions. Only after he was dead could I see his virtues. The priest delivering his eulogy, a family friend, had called him “the upright man,” and I had realized, in a sudden instant reassessment, that this was precisely what he had been. The things about him that irritated me really didn’t matter. I had lived with the upright man, and had not recognized him. Now I was wanting to make amends, but he was withdrawn within himself.

I said how sorry I was for how I’d been to him when we were children, and how I’d tried as adults (in every way but actually saying it, I realized now) to make up for it. I said how sorry I was for how it worked out. I started to say we’d go now, and then realized that I was talking and not asking. So I asked what he would prefer.

That old, patient, infinitely experienced turtle head came out then, not slowly but all at once, and I embraced it around its neck (which was bigger than I was) and kissed it. I had to first overcome a certain revulsion against appearance – just as in life. I decided we would stay a while, and was still there when I recorded the meeting in my journal.

That same day, I went up to the newspaper’s library, and as I came through the door, one of the women there had said, “Look, it’s Frank DeMarco!” The newsroom budget for Sunday had mentioned that I would have a piece on the Shirley MacLaine seminar. It was my first experience of how much underground interest there is in the subject. Also on Thursday, I made a point of having lunch with Bill Wood, my boss, to tell him about the article that was going to appear on Sunday. I didn’t want him to be blindsided, but I had delayed as long as I could, fearing that he would prevent it from being published. Already, without my quite noticing it, I was putting publication of my experiences ahead of everything else: job, “respectability,” relationships.

On the Monday following, I went to work braced for a wave of criticism or ridicule. Instead, I got lots of reinforcement. Reporters and editors talked to me (carefully!) in the hallways, showing intense but strictly private interest, even fascination. Lots of people were interested, but few were willing to be known as interested.

This one article introduced me to the New Age community throughout Hampton Roads. In 1987, they had never seen a newspaper article give first-hand and favorable coverage to a metaphysical event. A local radio host asked me to appear on his show to talk about the seminar. A fellow journalist at another bureau said she was interested in her inner self, and asked if I could suggest a starting place or a book. Another colleague, an older man, called to say that he and his wife had “a certain amount of experience” in the field themselves, had liked the article, and admired my courage in letting it be published. Again, an experience of people’s trepidation. It wasn’t long before I found out why. The criticism followed in a second wave.

“In the Spirit” appeared on Feb. 1, 1987.

In the spirit

Shirley MacLaine Isn’t the only one out on that limb

                                                             by Frank DeMarco

I was among those who paid $300 to attend Shirley MacLaine’s two-day seminar in Virginia Beach on “Connecting with the higher self” last weekend. Let me go out on a limb a bit myself: That weekend already has changed my life.

I know, from talking to others, that I was not the only person there who had questioned his own judgment for plunking down $300 to attend. It left many wondering, as the session started, if we had been ripped off. Someone questioned Shirley MacLaine about it, and she said she had struggled with the question of money and had finally set the fee so high in order, as she put it, to eliminate those who “might want to have a spiritual tea party with a celebrity” after reading her book or seeing her recent TV special, “Out on a limb.”

Correct decision. Those who came despite the fee were those who had a strong inner need to be there.

I deal first with the seemingly peripheral issue of money because when I tell someone I attended, the first (usually incredulous) response I get is: “You paid $300?” Which is to say” “You were that gullible?” Well, yes, we were tilling to risk being that gullible. We went not in blind sleep-walking assurance, but in confidence mixed with hope — and hope implies doubt. But doubt was removed — for me at least — before we trooped out again at the first intermission.

These preliminaries dispose of two of the six journalistic questions, when and where. More important are the other questions: who, what, how and why.

Who: What kind of people attend such a seminar? Misfits and failures, surely? Aging hippies? The insecure young, looking for something — anything — to believe? From my own unscientific survey of the 600-some in attendance, these generalizations:

Many were between 30 and 60, with a fair number of elderly but few if any in their 20s. In all age groups, women seemed to outnumber men by at least six to one. Professional people were in abundance, including, among others I met, a management consultant, a fashion designer, a teacher and a real estate agent (though the most impressive was a factory worker). Many had come from considerable distance: I met some from Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and many from the Washington, D.C. area.

By a show of hands, about half of those attending described themselves as experienced students of metaphysics; the rest considered themselves beginners. Some had been aware of their psychic abilities virtually from birth, other had acquired (or recognized) such powers over time, and still others were unaware of, or skeptical of, such gifts.

And this is a good place to underline the fact that doubt was not absent among attendees. Many wondered if the mental images produced by exercises in visualization were “just their imagination” rather than an authentic communication rom their higher self (or super-conscious, or racial unconscious, or God, depending on what system of understanding you care to force it into). Exercises with strangers that resulted in startlingly accurate insights into other people’s motivations and fears left some wondering if they’d merely “guessed.” The search for truth proceeds, in metaphysics as in other areas, be perseverance in the face of self-doubt until skepticism is overwhelmed by evidence internal and external.

If this description gives the impression that these were “just folks,” well — that’s about it.

What: Three beliefs central to the seminar are stumbling blocks for those who are not familiar with ancient teachings in both East and West. These are: connectedness (the view that there are no accidents in life); reincarnation (that the soul does not die, but repeatedly alternates between dimensions we see and those we don’t); and the existence and function of chakras in the human body (that the physical dimension is connected to the spiritual in specific parts of the body, the workings of which can be experienced).

On reincarnation and the existence of the chakras, an extensive literature exists, and this is not the place to discuss them. But some thoughts about connectedness and coincidence may be in order.

What do you believe — that life is accident, or that it is a seamless web in which even apparent coincidences have meaning? Western man for hundreds of years has mostly chosen to look at life as a series of accidents: hence, his frantic efforts at gaining control — over others, over matter, over everything but his own being. Hence, today’s superb technology — particularly in warfare — accompanied by spiritual desolation. But the world is not meaningless coincidence.

Sez who? Well, says Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, for one. Jung decades ago coined the word “synchronicity” to describe internal and external events that are linked by time and psychological significance but are otherwise unrelated. (Meaningful coincidences, in short.) He also published studies of alchemy, astrology and the I Ching, the Chinese book of divination, and a book on the UFO phenomena — yet he can hardly be dismissed as a nut, a fraud or a gullible fool.

I cite Jung, not as support for whatever Shirley MacLaine has said or may say, but merely as one example of a towering figure in mental science who saw the world in the same way the participant in the seminar see it: as pattern, not as chance and accident, however it may have appeared to Hampton Roads’ police departments after the roads froze last Sunday night.

How: The mechanics of the seminars included question-and-answer sessions, meditations, explanations and exercises, each activity adding to the experience.

For instance, the first long question-and-answer session helped many to change focus from Shirley-as-the-center-of-the-experience to myself-as-center-or-the-action as the flow of questions moved beyond the material of the book or the TV show to more individual concerns.

But Q&A can be carried only so far. Once it had broken the ice, it was time to proceed to real work. And meditation and visualization — for those who’ve never tried — are real work. As clergymen know, groups engaged in such work together become more than the sum of the individuals involved. And in show-business professional MacLaine, participants had the assistance of a central figure directing the meditation who knew how to employ sound-effect techniques to good advantage to aid visualization.

Her explanations of theory I found a little too long — perhaps because this was familiar ground — and some of her theoretical structure I thought wrong. But the disagreement meant little: As the late economist E.F. Schumacher used to say, it’s amazing how much theory you can dispense with when you get down to doing real work. The real work, for me, were the meditations and exercises, a couple of which were mentioned under “who.”

The seminar had little to do with sitting at someone’s feet to pluck pre-digested pearls of wisdom and much to do with practicing meditations and visualization exercises. The seminar was named, not “Talking about the higher self” but “Connecting with the higher self.” And of the 600-some participants, the great majority, on a show of hands, succeeded in making the connection. About half did so for the first time, among them — to my delight — me.

(Being neither superman nor guru, I am very much aware how exposed this public statement leaves me, and the awareness gives me redoubled respect for Shirley MacLaine’s courage in going public. Even though she lives in California and is of a show-business background – two very tolerant cultures – I suppose that few people enjoy being called kook or worse.)

Questions such as “What did it feel like?” and “How did you know you weren’t imagining it all?” are very natural. But describing the experience would convey neither the reality nor the basis of conviction. Reading about meditation isn’t the same as practicing it. For those interested, the mystical traditions in Christianity and other religions have for centuries provided descriptions of how to begin.

Why: The comments I’ve seen in print on the TV special that aired the week before the seminar seemed to miss the point. What was important was not the construction of metaphysical systems, nor UFOs nor the acquisition of psychic powers. And it certainly had nothing to do with establishing a cult to worship at the shrine of the arch-priestess Shirley. The last thing the world needs is another cult or another instant guru.

What it does need is thousands — millions — getting in touch with their higher selves. Only the experience, not some theory or conviction, can change lives — and our lives need changing.

America, the land of immigrants that became the world in miniature, has for too long placed its faith in technology, in politics, in weapons and in organization. But neurotic, resentful, fearful people cannot construct a better world: We as a society have been approaching the matter from the wrong end. Improve ourselves — heal ourselves — and the systems will improve more or less automatically. And this can only be done as individuals.

Besides — as every religious teacher has known — everything begins within the solitary individual, and each individual human soul is worth more than “world peace” and “social justice” and “progress” and all the other chimeras people organize for, work for, and finally, kill for.

America brought materialist trends to an extreme; it is fitting that counter-movements should first catch fire in this country. Shirley MacLaine has begun one such counter-movement, perhaps the most genuinely democratic yet seen. By helping participants to gain access to their own inner guides, this movement may help thousands to become new centers of spiritual growth. Instead of guru, to whom members abdicate their critical faculties and wills, she is attempting to be the facilitator, “on tap, not on top,” in a one-time experience that shows people how to get out of their own way, then leaves them to do it, and goes on to others.

I shake my head in wonder that I was among those who were there at a meeting which — as a beginning — may prove to have been historic.

I wish all my investments would turn out so well.

Into Magic

All day Thursday, January 1, 1987, it had rained, and for much of the day, I sat in my dining room looking out the windows, watching the silver sheets of rain come down, ending what had been a prolonged drought. A few days later, on the 10th, again it rained all day. In retrospect, that rain symbolized an access of spirit, a coming end to the prolonged drought I had been living so long.

At that time I was still in my first year as associate editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, writing editorials, columns, and book reviews. I was very happy to be able to finally make a living writing, after years stranded doing work for which I was less fitted. Yet when it came to what I considered serious writing – a novel I had been working on for eight years, an historical study of Thoreau and Emerson I had begun even earlier – I dried up. Why? And I had other problems, including my relationships with my wife and our young children. And, in particular, what appeared to be the premature onset of old age.

I was going through repeated periods of great pain. Any little thing, like building a cold frame for some lettuce seedlings, reduced me to near immobility. I couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, couldn’t lie down, in any comfortable way. One Tuesday in mid-January, my chiropractor showed me why.

She had sent me to be x-rayed, and here were the results: The X-rays showed extensive arthritis, calcium deposits on the bones looking like white frosting. In addition, there were other problems, but by itself the arthritis was a serious problem, and nothing could be done about it. I was only forty, and apparently I was beginning to become an old man,. I was used to struggling with asthma, but this was a new challenge, and I had no idea how to deal with it.

Along with the pain came depression, I not realizing that this was the low point. Because, the following week came a miracle, and an awakening, and the beginning of another life, entirely unanticipated.

It was my wife’s suggestion that I watch Out on a Limb, a two-part TV special about actress Shirley MacLaine’s spiritual search. That she would make the suggestion was odd, because (1) she knew I didn’t like television, and (2) she found the subject of psychic experiences threatening. Still, she made the suggestion and I have always been glad, though she probably came to regret it.

I didn’t have any particular interest in Shirley MacLaine. But I was in pain, without anything better to do. Why not watch a little TV? So on Monday night (Jan. 19), I watched the first night’s program (three hours’ worth) with intense interest—and the damnedest thing happened. When I got up to go to bed, I suddenly realized that for the first time in days, my back didn’t hurt! What’s more—to jump the gun on the story—the arthritis of the spine disappeared, and never troubled me again. I had years of back pain yet ahead, but never again from arthritis.

I watched the rest of the two-part special the following night. No further miracles, but I can take a hint, if it’s broad enough. The first Higher Self Seminar was going to be held in nearby Virginia Beach (in honor of Edgar Cayce) that coming weekend. It would cost $300, no small amount for us then, and I wondered if I was going to be taken for a ride, but decided to attend, and again my wife supported the decision. And so I was one of the six hundred-plus people in the good-natured crowd that filed into the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach Saturday morning

The newspaper ad had said that the seminar would offer “group meditations, techniques in visualization, chakra-raising sessions, questions and answers relating to past-life recognition, how we create our own reality, and the final connection with the Higher Self.” I saw, clearly enough, the expert manipulation that had been used in the wording of the ad, but reading it again all these years later, I judge that what she offered is what she delivered.

She was a seasoned showbiz professional. She knew not only how to employ sound-effect techniques but how to mobilize and use group energy. In the very first visualization exercise, her voice led us to visualize crossing a river to where the Higher Self would be waiting. To my astonishment, there indeed was an image, one I never would have consciously chosen.

My Higher Self appeared as a unicorn! A unicorn, a magical, mythological beast. For the first time, I realized why my father—who could be symbolized as a loyal, dependable workhorse—had always been so dismissive of my beliefs. He thought I was “really” a horse who thought he was a unicorn. My unworldliness had worried him. By telling me (against my active resistance) “the way things are,” he had tried to protect me. The gift of the situation, besides all the practical things he did teach me, was that living with him provided me with protection against (that is, understanding of) skeptics and cynics.

On the other hand, I realized that weekend, I’m not a horse. I am what I am! I am different, and that difference is to be prized. This visualization, more than any single event in my life, removed my shame and doubt about who and what I was. (Also, I got a vision of myself as translator. Somebody to comprehend the time and the energy and the pattern, and help everyone deal with them. Somebody who is empowered from within, one in touch with all levels. Oddly, by the time I got confirmation of this at The Monroe Institute five and a half years later, I had long forgotten it.)

When I came home Sunday night, I called the editor of our Commentary section and asked if he would like a first-hand account of the Higher Self Seminar for next Sunday’s paper. He said he would, but he would need it by Tuesday, and I told him that wouldn’t be a problem. On Tuesday morning handed him 53 column-inches of copy. He asked me to trim it to 40 inches, which I did, and expressed himself satisfied. Then it was time for second thoughts. On the Friday before publication, when I saw the article in page proofs, with my suggested headline made into a subhead and “In the spirit” used as the head, I thought, “Oh God, what have I done?” Nothing in the piece was phony, shallow or wrong, though it might have been more carefully hedged. But it was so open and unprotected! I suddenly wasn’t so sure I wanted it so widely distributed.

Came across this New York Times obit while poking around my files. Shocking to realize he was only 66 when he died, and that it was all of 22 years ago..

Ken Kesey, Author of ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: November 11, 2001

Ken Kesey, the Pied Piper of the psychedelic era, who was best known as the author of the novel ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died yesterday in a hospital in Eugene, Ore., said his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.

The cause was complications after surgery for liver cancer late last month, said his friend and business associate, Ken Babbs.

Mr. Kesey was also well known as the hero of Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction book about psychedelic drugs, ”The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). An early flowering of Mr. Wolfe’s innovative new-journalism style, the book somewhat mockingly compared Mr. Kesey to the leaders of the world’s great religions, dispensing to his followers not spiritual balm but quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to enhance their search for the universe within themselves.

The book’s narrative focused on a series of quests undertaken by Mr. Kesey in the 1960’s. First, there was the transcontinental trip with a band of friends he named the Merry Pranksters, aboard a 1939 International Harvester bus called Further (it was painted as ”Furthur” on the bus). It was wired for sound and painted riotously in Day-Glo colors. Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac’s ”On the Road,” was recruited to drive. The journey, which took the Pranksters from La Honda, Calif., to New York City and back, was timed to coincide with the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Its purposes were to film and tape an extended movie, to experience roadway America while high on acid and to practice ”tootling the multitudes,” as Mr. Wolfe put it, referring to the way a Prankster would stand with a flute on the bus’s roof and play sounds to imitate people’s various reactions to the bus.

”The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied,” Mr. Kesey told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly after the bus arrived in New York City. ”But we found as we went along it got easier to make contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be different without being a threat.”

Then, back in California, there were the so-called Acid Tests that Mr. Kesey organized — parties with music and strobe lights where he and his friends served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of the public and challenged them to avoid ”freaking out,” as Mr. Wolfe put it. They were interrupted by Mr. Kesey’s flight to Mexico in January 1966 to avoid going on trial on charges of possession of marijuana. Finally, after he returned to the United States in October and was arrested again and waiting to stand trial, there was the final Acid Test, the graduation ceremony ostensibly designed to persuade people to go beyond drugs and achieve a mind-altered state without LSD.

This was the public Ken Kesey, the magnetic leader who built a bridge from beatniks on the road to hippies in Haight-Ashbury; who brewed the cultural mix that fermented everything from psychedelic art to acid-rock groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane to the Trips Festival dance concerts in the Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco; and who, in the process of his pilgrimage, blew an entire generation’s mind.

Yet Mr. Wolfe also narrated the adventures of a more private Ken Kesey, one who in addition to his quests took the inner trips that gave him his best fiction. It is true that by 1959, when he had his first experience with drugs, he had already produced a novel, ”End of Autumn,” about college athletics, although it would never be published. But after he volunteered at a hospital to be a paid subject of experiments with little-known psychomimetic drugs — drugs that bring on temporary states resembling psychosis — his imagination underwent a startling change.

To earn extra money and to work on a novel called ”Zoo,” about the beatniks of the North Beach community in San Francisco, Mr. Kesey also took a job as a night attendant on the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Watching the patients there convinced him that they were locked into a system that was the very opposite of therapeutic, and it provided the raw material for ”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” One night on the ward, high on peyote, he suddenly envisioned what Mr. Wolfe described as ”a full-blown Indian — Chief Broom — the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel.”

As Mr. Kesey explained, his discovery of Chief Broom, despite not knowing anything about American Indians, gave him a character from whose point of view he could depict a schizophrenic state of mind and at the same time describe objectively the battle of wills between two other key characters, the new inmate Randle Patrick McMurphy, who undertook to fight the system, and the tyrannical Big Nurse, Miss Ratched, who ended up lobotomizing McMurphy. Chief Broom’s unstable mental state and Mr. Kesey’s imagining of it, presumably with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, also allowed the author to elevate the hospital into what he saw as a metaphor of repressive America, which Chief Broom called the Combine.

Mr. Kesey would ”write like mad under the drugs,” as Mr. Wolfe put it, and then cut what he saw was ”junk” after he came down.

”Cuckoo’s Nest” was published by Viking Press in early 1962 to enthusiastic reviews. Time magazine call it ”a roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them.” Stage and screen rights were acquired by the actor Kirk Douglas, who the following year returned to Broadway after a long absence to play McMurphy in an adaptation by Dale Wasserman that ran for 82 performances at the Cort Theater during the 1963-64 season. The play was revived professionally in slightly different form in 1970, with William Devane playing the part of McMurphy, and again in 2001, with Gary Sinise in the part.

Even more successful was the film version, which was released in 1975 and the following year won five Oscars, for best picture; best director, Milos Forman; best actor, Jack Nicholson as McMurphy; best actress, Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched; and best screen adaptation, Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman.

But Mr. Kesey was not happy with the production. He disapproved of the script, thought Mr. Nicholson wrong for the part of McMurphy and believed that the producers, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, had not lived up to the handshake deal he insisted he had made with them. He sued them for 5 percent of the movie’s gross and $800,000 in punitive damages and eventually agreed on a settlement. But he still refused to watch the film.

Although Mr. Kesey wrote several more books during his life, ”Cuckoo’s Nest” remained the high point of his career. Reviewing the film version in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that ”the novel preceded the university turmoil, Vietnam, drugs, the counterculture.” She continued, ”Yet it contained the prophetic essence of that whole period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic.”

”Much of what it said,” she concluded, ”has entered the consciousness of many — possibly most — Americans.”

”Sometimes a Great Notion” followed in 1964. It was a longer and more ambitious novel about an Oregon logging family and, in the strife between two brothers, the conflict between West Coast individualism and East Coast intellectualism. Written under the influence of both drugs and Mr. Kesey’s exposure to modern literature — ”an ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ set in Oregon,” one critic called it — the novel received mixed reviews, some impressed by its energy and others annoyed by its wordiness. In 1971, a film version appeared, directed by Paul Newman and starring Mr. Newman, Henry Fonda and Lee Remick. It left so little an impression that when it was released for television, its title was changed to ”Never Give an Inch.”

Initially Mr. Kesey acted undaunted by the negative reaction to the novel’s appearance, which was timed for the arrival of the Pranksters in New York. He told his bus mates that writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form, and that they were transcending it with their experiments in metaconsciousness. A decade later, however, he told an interviewer, ”The thing about writers is that they never seem to get any better than their first work,” and, ”This bothers me a lot.” He added: ”You look back and their last work is no improvement on their first. I feel I have an obligation to improve, and I worry about that.”

Yet he never did surpass his first two books. During the remainder of his life, he published two more novels, ”Sailor Song” (1992), about civilization contending with nature in Alaska, and ”Last Go Round: A Dime Western” (1994), an account of a famous Oregon rodeo written in the form of pulp fiction, with research done by his friend and fellow Prankster, Mr. Babbs. He also published three nonfiction works, ”Kesey’s Garage Sale” (1973), a miscellany of essays by himself and others; ”Demon Box” (1986), a mix of essays and stories; and ”The Further Inquiry” (1990), his own history of the Prankster bus trip, as well as two children’s books, ”Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear” (1990), which he often performed to music, and ”The Sea Lion: A Story of the Sea Cliff People” (1991).

Ken Elton Kesey was born on Sept. 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colo., the older of two sons born to the dairy farmers Fred A. and Geneva Smith Kesey. Early in his life, the family migrated to Springfield, Ore., where he underwent a rugged upbringing. Although following the move his father founded a prosperous marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, and established the family in a comfortable suburban setting, Mr. Kesey and his brother were taught early to hunt, fish and swim, as well as to box, wrestle and shoot the rapids of the local rivers on inner-tube rafts.

These all-American he-man lessons took, at least up to a point. Mr. Kesey developed great physical power; Mr. Wolfe writes that ”he had an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and calluses on his hands.” He became a star football player and wrestler in high school and was voted ”most likely to succeed” in the graduating class of 1953. At the University of Oregon, where he devoted himself to sports and fraternities, he acted in college plays and he won the Fred Lowe Scholarship, awarded to the outstanding wrestler in the Northwest. In May 1956, he married Norma Faye Haxby, his high school sweetheart. He even considered trying to become a movie star, moving to Los Angeles after graduation and playing bit parts in several films.

 

But his imagination exerted a counterattraction. After graduating from Oregon in 1957 and winning scholarships to Stanford University’s graduate writing program, he moved to Perry Lane, the bohemian section of Palo Alto.

There he met Vic Lovell, a graduate student in psychology who told him about the drug experiments at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park that were paying $75 a session to volunteer subjects. His journey to the interior began.

After the bus trip, the Acid Tests, and a six-month sentence on a work farm in 1967 for drug possession, he moved back to his father’s farm in Pleasant Hill.

Shunning a second Prankster bus trip in 1969, its destination this time the Woodstock rock festival in the New York countryside, he settled down with his wife to raise their children — Shannon, Zane, Jed and Sunshine — work the farm, involve himself in community activities and write. In later years he insisted that he had always been a family man with strong ties to the community.

Over the next three decades, he raised cattle and sheep, and grew blueberries. He joined school boards; helped out several local businesses; ran a Web site, Intrepid Trips; edited a magazine, Spit in the Ocean, which he founded in 1974; and worked on completing the films and tapes of the bus trip. He coached wrestling at several local schools and taught a graduate writing seminar at the University of Oregon, in which he collaborated with 13 students on ”Caverns,” a mystery published in 1990 under the pen name O. U. Levon. He practiced his lifelong hobby of magic, developing a trick in which he made a rabbit disappear. He occasionally visited the original Prankster bus, which he kept hidden in the woods on his farm.

As for drugs, Mr. Kesey’s relationship with them was revealed in an interview last April in The Times Union of Albany. Two weeks earlier, he told the interviewer, Doug Blackburn, he and a few close friends had gone on their annual Easter Sunday hike up Mount Pisgah, near his home. For the first time in more than three decades, he had decided to skip LSD for the event. Having recently taken medication for both diabetes and hepatitis C, he said that an additional substance was unnecessary.

”I felt like I was high enough just walking up the hill with nothing but adrenaline,” he said. ”Besides, I figured I ought to try making the hike at least once without psychedelics. The past few years that’s been the about the only time I’ve taken acid, and even then not much. Just enough to make the leaves dapple.”

He is survived by his wife; his mother; his brother, Joe, known as Chuck; his two daughters, Shannon and Sunshine; a son, Zane (his other son, Jed, died in a car accident in 1984); and three grandchildren.

 

Finally, as a sort of retrospective, this from David Poynter, four years later. (I was again in Britain.)

July 30, 2007

Well, David, another excursion to your homeland. I am going to get a map of the British Isles (or so I tell myself) and mark my various journeys since 1970. I’ve seen some of it now. Any comments on this trip?

Well, you did make it up as you went along, didn’t you, just as I said you would? Yet the outline was there all along, not needing to be worried over.

True enough.

You connected more with people on this trip that you remember. Not only Robert and his friends – though all that went very well – but many casual contacts and kindnesses.

I was not inhibited by ideas of their being different.

You were, on previous trips, to a degree you don’t seem to quite remember.

I had good contacts in 2003.

In 2003, though you were nearly apologetic about being an American.

Because of the war.

Well, because of the war, but because of you. You weren’t well and did not suspect it.

I don’t see the connection.

You were one thing and thought you were something else. Physically, mentally, spiritually. The incongruity between reality and idea left you somewhat off your feet.

As Hemingway was saying –

As you were saying to him. Pretense comes in many forms, and mostly in different levels of seriousness and awareness. It is less harmful perhaps to pretend actively than to pretend to oneself and not quite let oneself know it.

Hmm. Well it is true I have felt very much myself here. Wandering on my own, tramping with my pack on my back and another being carried over my neck or in one hand – walking seemingly endlessly and pretty tirelessly – feeling comfortable being silent and comfortable chatting.

One difference  between Hemingway and you, or van der Post and you, is that you imagined yourself into your future by following a lead from another part of yourself, not from a conscious plan, or from any form of manipulation. Therefore you needn’t wait uneasily for possible exposures of posturings. Your fears would be exposure of who you are inside; there are few external surprises that would interest anyone.

But here I am at 61 – as at every year for half a century, nearly – asking when I am going to write what I want to have written. At 61, one is hardly justified in expecting to inaugurate a new career. The world belongs to the young. Hemingway was in his twenties still when his first book was published – and more to the point he worked all the time he was supposed to work.

If you want to write, write. How many times have you been told that? But you aren’t necessarily here to write, either way. The work you are doing is not meaningless. Now – do that work when you return home. Set it out without notes, just write. The only planning you need to do concerns what you want to say. In other words, set out your topics one by one and set out to write them. After you do what your friend Michael calls a brain dump, then is the time for looking at documents, notes, incidents, etc. to fill-in or buttress.

I can see it in principle, and how many times have I laid out a list of things to write. But at home I dry up.

It isn’t harder to depend upon inspiration for topics than for words. You set out to write about healing and you did that. You set out to write about guidance and you did not do that, at least not yet. Another topic surely is how to contact the other side, which has a whole list of sub topics:

• The structure of minds in the afterlife
• The need for physical cooperation with the other side
• Integration of layers of yourself
• Connections with others as a means of creating structure
• Difficulties and perplexities of the process and of the questions of meaning

All that would be plenty to be getting on with.

Yes it would. Perhaps I can do it.

You can do it. The question is whether you will do it.