REFLECTIONS ON REALITY
I can dish some dirt now that wouldn’t get me arrested again for possession with intent to sell. Take one sociopathic boyfriend I was trying to break up with and a big bag of homegrown marijuana that my team for The Cosmic Fuel Pump, my TV soapbox in the early ‘80s, was regularly puffing on, and you get a call to the police that got me spending two years in the criminal justice system.
Jonathan was my hero lawyer, a darling of the New Age who had stopped a chain letter and gotten refunds for people who had put $1,000 in cash into the US mail. Jonathan was in a war with my D.A., so motion after motion he filed to get me out of the system was rejected, and in the battle of paperwork the reject piles got so high on the judge’s desk they obstructed my view of him. At some point, I petitioned to speak. Usually the lawyers do it all. I pleaded with the judge to consider the standout person I am that a sheaf of letters of recommendation attested to, who treated marijuana like evening cocktails so where’s the harm? He said before too long what I’d been arrested for would be legal, but, given the personalities of the D.A. and my lawyer, there wasn’t anything he could do about the pile being likely to double before I was out of there.
Get the scene. I’d go to a room in the basement of the courthouse to be questioned, and the little boy who saw his father shoot his mother would leave the witness stand for me to sit in his seat. I thought the judges and lawyers, in that dungeon they reported to every day, were as unfortunate as the people they sent to jail.
PS: The hero lawyer, who got people refunds of money they’d put in the mail, was arrested seven years later for being the perpetrator of The Airplane Game. That was the next pyramid scheme in a cyclical situation where every seven years or so people forget the last go-around — which mathematically has to end with 50% of the players losing their money and getting pissed off. And, more PS: When I fired Jonathan (who had become my boyfriend — he was fired from that, too), I got an attorney who quickly got me a plea deal saying I was guilty of something I had no involvement with but legally could be dismissed. I made the plea and I don’t have a record.
So, now that there’s freedom in California to smoke and to grow, as I tend my plants I keep thinking to hide them and then I remember I don’t have to hide anything now. And, regarding my former travails, as Krishna is supposed to have said about why bad things happen to good people: “To thicken the plot.” We advance by overcoming obstacles. On the bumpy road to nirvana, we go toward ever more awareness of our oneness and how we’re all in it together and need to be devoted to tending this planet.
Well, you get that perception when you smoke marijuana. That, to me, is its underlying charm. It cuts through societal convention and gets you to the core of your beingness. Truth be told, I don’t totally trust anyone who hasn’t smoked anything. There’s a seatedness in the way it is in smokers. I’d add to that something Ram Dass said. That’s the same Ram Dass who eventually apologized for naively being one of the perpetrators of the $100 “Circle of Gold” chain letter that led to the $1,000 version (“a way to have your dreams met”), where it was because of his status that the pyramid scheme took off. Some years ago, in the first talk he gave after his stroke, his major message was for people to come clean about how valuable mind-altering substances had been!
To add some more personal spice to this story, my first sampling of weed was in 1969, when my husband was writing a TV special for Bill Cosby. Cosby’s manager, Roy, came to visit us and bought some joints. I was eager to try. I’d been having babies in the ‘60s and had missed the rebellious activity that was consistent with a certain wildness in me that drove my husband crazy. (He was a hands-on dad, but one time he was so enraged that he threw his wet washcloth at me, screaming, “Can’t you do anything like anyone else? Sputter sputter. You even had twins!!!”) My husband was big on rules, and while Roy and his wife and I took our puffs, hubby went around the living room spraying Airwick in case the police came to the door.
I like psychedelics, too. Or I did. It’s been decades, but I attribute who I am to the openings to the infinite I got from them. The sociopath boyfriend was a shaman type, and in the early ’80s, on mushrooms, I had two breakthrough experiences that revealed things to me about the universe and my true nature.
Empress of the World: I was sitting cross-legged on my bed when everything became very calm. Unusually, surreally so. The future was up to me, and what I had to do was “let everything land in my lap.” I was to accept reality with no resistance or drama or story. Reality is what is, regardless of any opinion about it, and I was to anchor myself in this primary perception. I sensed that if even one person practiced total acceptance, and the challenge was for it to be me, it would be the pivot for humanity to get to a new place.
Cosmic Remorse: A group experience was led by a guide who gave us “heroic doses.” We had been asked to go back and back and back to where we had come from when all of a sudden I wooshed into my current reality from some infinite place, beyond the beyond, realizing my small self came from an infinitely larger existence where everything, including me, was sacred. This led to hours of uncontrollable sobbing “for ever having doubted myself.”
That Cosmic Remorse set-up can’t really be described. It has no name. It isn’t anything finite. Certainly not scientific. But, then again, science can’t tell where the universe came from. It’s the great mystery and always will remain so. What was before the universe began? You can’t get to a causal realm.
For the other experience, there are plays and movies about Christ returning – and again getting killed. But, I think someone who was a Christ would nail it with everyone. All those people who worship his teaching would melt in his presence. The closest I’ve come to anyone I think could do the job is Brian Swimme. I wonder what he’d think about my saying this. When he occasionally takes the stage he is stunning, but he doesn’t do it often. I tell you, if I were able to deliver Brian to the world I would I’d think I’d fulfilled my destiny.
In the meantime, the ancient tools of shamanic cultures afford a blueprint to a level of reality beyond the small self, where we are connected to everyone and everything, and they help us to be the authors of our lives and not its victims. We all need to meet in the miracle of life, the sacredness of Earth, and the divinity of soul. That, and not a war on anything, should be our societal reality.