One of the most wonderful aspects of this voyage into the Impossible that I’ve been taking, thanks entirely to Jeffrey Kripal, Erik Davis and now Jeremy Vaeni, is the resurrection of at least some of my childhood passions, loves and energies. I was just a couple years too young to actually participate in the rebelliousness of the ‘60s. And if I’m honest, I didn’t have the courage even if I had been a little older. I had the opportunity to go to Woodstock with the brother of a friend, but it would have been on his motorcycle, and my parents would have totally flipped out. Instead I stayed comfortably home selling vegetables (true and slightly sad story). But if I didn’t have the reality, I did have the fantasies. I read enormous quantities of SciFi, fantasy and weird fiction. I owned most of the issues of Zap Comix and hid them in my dresser where they were later discovered and trashed by the horrified Parents. We were all soaked in the music and the imagery of the drug culture coming from California and England, even if we didn’t have the actual drugs. I’m grateful that my mother somehow convinced me never to try psychedelics by pointing out that my hold on reality was tenuous enough already. So I avoided the problems that some of my friends were soon to have. I did manage to overdose on hashish—which is a very, very bad thing to do. But there was a terrific sense of freedom and experiment surrounding even those of us without the wildness to actualize it. So now it’s super exciting to re-engage that atmosphere of craziness and abandon and maybe even have the freedom to make some of it Real.
In that spirit I offer you two very good books and two very good interviews with two of my current heroes. Enjoy!
I hope we can make some of it Real! I had an extended gap year, ‘66 - ‘68, first in France and then in Italy. It was a moment of potential transition. It would be good to shine light on it, if we can, before we are gone.