Posts in Chronological Order

One night late in February 1970, very shortly before I got a call from Dave’s father saying Dave was dying, I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. (Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal…

In 1970, I was living my life exclusively Downstairs. I believed in “supernatural” powers, or wanted to, but I had no access, and no way of gaining access. (Besides—though I didn’t realize it then—my idea of supernatural powers was closer to Superman comics than to the real thing.) I had no guide, no idea where…

I have come to realize, nobody can possibly tell the true story of his life. How do you put a quart of material into a pint of words? It can’t be done. Life comes at us all at once, and all the time. When we come to try to describe it, we have to look…

(Non)-ordinary life From May, 1970 (the mescaline experience that woke me up to new possibilities), to January, 1987 (the Shirley MacLaine workshop that did the same thing in a very different way) was almost 17 years. Ordinary years? Ordinary life? Yes and no. The externals were much the same as anybody else’s. The internals were…

This past week, I got involved in one of those projects that keeps your surface mind occupied but gives you time to remember, and daydream, and ponder. Really, it worked like a time machine. I had all these clippings that had sat in my file cabinet, literally for decades. Editorials, columns, book reviews, that I…

[An early version of Muddy Tracks was going to be titled Living in Monroe’s New World.  That will never be written, now, so I might as well post it here.] In the course of writing Muddy Tracks, I re-read Bob Monroe’s three books all at the same time, reading each one from front to back,…

In my post on “Bob Monroe’s Journey,” I recounted what I learned in marathon readings of his three books back in 1997, when I was writing what became Muddy Tracks. My friend Charles Sides reminds me that I ought to write about what I learned and how it affected me. He should talk, but he has…

More than I knew at the time, my life was shaped and guided by others. Initially, of course, there was  the family I grew up in, but here I refer to something else. My family provided the human warmth without which we can scarcely live, but their influence on my life must go largely unreported.…

Joy and Colin and me, March 17, 1995 As I said in a previous post,  Colin Wilson provided invisible companionship during long years from 1970 through the 25 years before we met. What he did for me, he must have done for uncounted thousands. But how to give even the faintest idea of his importance…