LETTER TO MILANA
I am still keeping up with politics, but now, with the Biden/Harris administration running the show, I feel as if I have room to explore. I am doing this by listening to TED talks on YouTube. TED talks are great teaching tools. Each one is different. Each one is an intimate look at one aspect of the endless variations of the human experience.
Lately, I have walked in the shoes of a former religious bigot, a former neo-Nazi, an intellectual who couldn't shut off his brain, a college student who'd been gang-raped by his team mates, a scientist explaining String Theory, a comedian explaining how comedy works, and a psychologist reporting on the positive outcomes he has recorded with the use of psychedelic drugs in PTSD therapeutics.
Philip Fernbach tried to answer the question, "Why do we believe things that aren't true?" His point is that the content of our beliefs depends upon the people around us. He used the term "contagious understanding." He noted that thinking is a social process, a gathering of specializations, a collaboration.
Years ago, I side-stepped the question of whether or not God exists. I realized that the massive Universe beyond the planet Earth would have unfolded exactly as it has, with or without our God. I made up my own Earth-origin narrative, wherein Earth is an abandoned eighth-grade science project for which an ET named Glork17 would have received an A-plus had he not, at the last minute before the project was due, introduced humans to his molten-core meatball, a move which knocked his grade down to a C-minus.
I grew up with the Methodist version of God. In Sunday school I learned to talk to God through prayer. By the time I entered college, the hierarchy set up by deferential worship had worn off, like a vaccination that didn’t take. I would not call myself an atheist or an agnostic. For a while I called myself a heathen. After I moved to Montana, I realized that I am an animist.
animism (1832) the attribution of conscious life to the objects in and the phenomena of nature, or to inanimate objects or to spirits separate from bodies.
A few days ago, the religious aspects of an LSD trip came up in an op-ed in the online New York Times. Of course, I had to attempt a reader comment…
In 1972, on my 25th birthday, my gift was a hit of LSD. I spent the day on an isolated beach on the southern coast of Crete. I became suffused with joy, fascination and sensuality. I walked naked into the clear sea and baptized myself. I made the connection with the All-That-Is. Later that night, after the high had worn off, I realized that the organized church had become obsolete.
[I’ve known Milana since 1980. That summer, she crossed the swinging bridge over the Blackfoot River and spent a few months in the tipi just downriver from my small cabin. She is of Serbian/Montenegrin ancestry, a warrior bloodline, born and raised in Butte, in a rough neighborhood in a tough Montana mining town. In her youth she was a bartender in Missoula and a competitive black belt in tae kwon do. She is a clinical psychologist who works with troubled juveniles. She has published four novels and one award-winning nonfiction book that deals with the lives of prostitutes and madams in Idaho mining towns from the 1850s to the 1880s. Milana was curious about the origin of the word cocktail. She thought that cock might refer to the penis and tail might refer to the vagina. She chalked up her lazy word origin analysis to her Adolescent Butte Gutter Mind. Milana shared a few details from her first LSD trip.]
I first took LSD when I was 12 years old. I took it with Louie Kovac whom I absolutely did not trust. At a stop light, I jumped out of his car and into a car with Jimmy Richards and Ken Klise, both of whom I absolutely did trust. Taking LSD changed my thinking. The experience enhanced my awareness of the invisible world and allowed me to embrace my moment on the planet as a member of reality.
I turned 12 in 1959. My dad gave me a .22 bolt action rifle and a Swiss army knife. That summer, he taught me to use his power saw and together we built an outdoor enclosure for the garbage cans. I can't imagine myself at 12 on an acid trip unfolding in the forest behind our house, with the water in the creek turning to molten plastic and the windblown vines hanging from the trees, beckoning to me like snakes.
Like you, I consider LSD a crucial ingredient in my never-ending rite of passage. LSD helped me to come to a respect for my “hour on the stage.” What you and I have in common is that our saving grace is family and friends, along with our honest effort to make good. Our warrior ancestry, going back hundreds of years, is always alive inside us.
Nashville is not the Deep South, but you don't have to go too far down the road to find Deep South behavior, the menace and belligerence and misogyny hiding just under the surface of white Christian men. When in Nashville, I often start my morning at the nearest Starbucks, crowded with students heading to a high school or a college campus, and adults heading to work.
This morning, the only seat in the place was in the back at a table for eight. At the head of the table and just to my right was a man of about 60. He was attempting to chat-up the two college girls to his right, interrupting their conversation in an oily, smirky way. I listened for a bit. I could see the young women were uncomfortable. He kept repeating that he was a deacon in his church, as if that gave him some kind of cover for his smarmy behavior.
I caught the deacon’s eye but he didn't ease up. Instead, he accelerated and quickly crossed the line. I smacked my palm on the table top hard enough to get everyone’s attention and I stared at him. The young women sat back and went silent. The deacon turned away from my glare, but I could see that I’d burst his phony Foghorn Leghorn charm offensive. The spell he was trying to cast was broken. He got up and exited through the back door. The whole idea of shame is that one learns from one's mistakes. The deacon thought he was impervious to shame. Like the organized church, he persisted with his passive-aggressive assault and I called him on it… the crackdown.
The interesting thing about this literary exercise is that... each week I dive into my massive paper trail (both digital and hard copy) and I never know what I am going to find that grabs me. There have been many false starts... delete and begin anew... Thanks for making contact.
This posting sorta reminds me of the grego I initially began to follow... Keep 'em coming, grego. Luv, geno