Using Smack
Meditation
Recovery
Music
Meditation


My first experience with "smack" was during the war, about 1969. I had met a girl from the east coast, Her husband was stationed in Vietnam. She would receives a radio or camera from him, take off the back to reveal a rather large bag full of "chine white" heroin  It was tightly packed inside, where the working parts should have been.

Heroin so strong we had no idea of the power we had, nor the destruction.
It was a time of intense and widespread interest in varied expression and experiences. This fragmentation of appeal goes back to early 60's when LSD and marijuana where being used for profound spiritual experiences. We were searching for insights into why we felt so artificial, and unfulfilled. The answer lies within.
But we didn't know that yet...
 'LSD is like a trigger, (Sidney Cohen apt comments in his book , "Drugs of Hallucination".) not only in the way it releases chemical activities that proceed long after the drug has been eliminated. It also seems to trigger a depth charge into unconscious processes. The direction that the explosion will take is the result of factors other than the drug.' I agree with Cohen..
Structurally LSD is similar to the substance serotonin which is stored in the pineal gland in the brain traditionally the local of the "third eye". LSD is believed to act in the serotonin receptor site in our brain.
But this was not LSD, we were to find out months later it was a different trip altogether.

We got some gel caps double ott. Large caps and sold them cheep. In the end we used most of it ourselves... "The Bonzo gang".
The powdered black heroin on the street at that time was sold in balloons for $7-$10. The 00 caps we stuffed contained enough H. to get 4 people off for 18 hours. Only a match head was needed. After the first few hours, my face would be raw around the nose and mouth from itching. I learned to drink ice water and enjoy throwing it up so fast it was still cold. Dumping was a side effect of the potent drug. But it didn't bother me. I rather liked it. In fact, I loved everything to do with that feeling! Stomach drops; heat fills the cells from toes to scalp. Even your hair follicles relax.
We could have made a million dollars off that bag of china white. But instead we 'turned on' all our pals. There was about a dozen of us living in a bubble of mindless bliss. Tune into Star Trek at 4 PM each afternoon and the ritual began there. The candle, spoon, stainless steel point and binkie.. Fit needle to an eyedropper, register in a vein the moment you're in. Boiled after use in a pan on the stove.
Crash
One day it was all gone. The gal was gone.. the dope was gone. No trace. Leaving us bonzo's bozo's.
Well that was fun, but now it's over. Why do I feel so terrible? Dozens of us, all first timers with various degrees of street smarts. I believe I had to have been the most naive. Once our connection disappeared we all went in different directions. "I caught a terrible flue", I explained to Eddie, "Why are you laughing?", I had to crawl down the hall to the bathroom and throw up.. He looked ill too. But my eyes couldn't really focus and my voice was shaky; and without power. "you're hooked", he replied, "we are all hooked". Rabbit was out robbing cabins at the ski resorts which were unoccupied during the off season. Steve was trying to join the army.
After a few days we had discovered a doctor / croaker who would write for morphine. Morphine surette is like a toothpaste tube with needle on the end. It didn't help much and hit me totally, completely different. Gone was the abandon, now a fear was there. I could never visualize it, but it was dark and always accompanied morphine. It hit my legs and a small wave of relaxation seem to float out from me spread through, but also a fear, a darkness grabbed me. You can't quit vomiting and it's not a good trip. . Morphine was sick and I still felt sick. Weighted too much. Legs too heavy. I can't move..  .
Withdrawal is a reality after or during addiction. The actual changes are internal, but an addict has a blind spot as far as progress of a habit is concerned. Does not realize or believe. in a habit at all. "I only used sometimes. I had no symptoms." I didn't realize my normal interests had lost importance. I believed I lived a normal life. The Star Trek hour was a friendship deal, like a cocktail hour. In hindsight I can't understand why I didn't realize what had happened. I had become physically addicted. The blind spot is real. I was not alone. Many still suffer today, everyday a new child experiments, never to be the same.
 Once it was gone. I needed something. To get the sick off. To stay alive. I heard later that heroin is 7 times stronger than morphine. Who ever came up with that ratio and how..?? I can't agree. Heroin comes in such varied strengths. Depending on the process of refinement and country where the poppies are grown, the cut applied before it is sold. etc. How can anyone compare that to another totally regulated narcotic?? It can't be done.
Heroin produces a metabolic dependence. A biologic need like water. Narcotic drugs.
 Carlos  Casteneda never mentions any of this. What does it all mean?
Finally someone discovered the street Heroin at the Hotel. Three stories of card games, whores, pimps, drugs, other illegal activities, along with roaches, mice and od's, urine and murder. We had somehow come up with money for a bag. But it didn't work. Eddie went back and threw a brick through the window, "for burning us, you sorry......* *"    It took several of those bags to even get the sick partly off us.
That was when we realized what we had been held captive by. Then we realized what was really gone.
  I eventually went to hospital where they did blood work, as I looked yellow. Hepatitis and in the isolation ward with other women. One girl so anorexic she would not quit her sit-ups and exercise routine. She was skeleton skinny, but saw fat. She died. On the other side of my bed a girl who couldn't even speak. She was so terrified. I learned from the nurse she was coming off "barbs" and had already had several seizures.. They had to medicate her carefully as hepatitis effects the liver and even vitamins can be dangerous. They didn't know much about the disease in early 70'
See my Hep. Page

Labs before and after treatment

Recovery (some thoughts)


There are 10,000 stepping stones on the path of healing. They float like galaxies in the mind. Each takes us one step farther into the mystery. None tells us what's next. We honor the mystery with trust in the process. We will not let go of fear and haterd, no matter how badly they make us feel, because we just don't believe we could "be ourselves" without them. We identify so with our suffering that it is difficult for us to imagine who we would be without them.



What are you running away from?  Turn your back to the front of the car... What are you rebelling against?  The spent past behind the car gains, instant by instant, a little bit of his future. As in everyone's acquiescence in the fact of theater itself, but also on the audience's temporary suspension of attention to the real life that continues behind them while they watch the play. If seeing what's behind us means turning around, and this fact leads to our thinking the past has a physical place, then this Platonic model or reality introduces a spatial metaphor for time. The past isn't just gone, it's behind us. Digital culture smashed that model conceptually but did nothing about human physiognomy.  Various retreats into nostalgia become appealing. And we think we can get a grip on the past and where we are in the time of our lives if we can just slow things down for a moment and bring what is behind us into focus. Ann Marlowe

Thus, the popularity of heroin, and on a sunnier note, of meditation and yoga.
Opiate addiction only became a social problem when it became a social solution: when it addressed widespread longings and needs. And this only happened when large number of people began to feel detached from and anxious about time and their bodies and lacked a natural way of organizing their days.

Heroin is an urban drug, an accessory of life lived all night, under artificial light. Nonusers wonder why junkies with serious habits don't see the absurdity of arranging their whole day around their need for heroin, but they've got it wrong way around. One reason people become junkies is to find some compelling way of arranging their lives on an hour-to-hour basis.
The body, its clock fixed, says something different from what digital culture suggests. This new state of uncertainty we have entered causes anxiety. There is always more cyberspace. There's always more time.

I have always been more comfortable with thinking than feeling, with talking about my emotions rather than having them. As I grew up I gradually learned that my reactions are different from most people. Going through life hoping to avoid excessive feelings, I also felt outside the mainstream of human reactions for this very disposition. Heroin killed these two birds with one stone. It allowed me to avoid having my own emotions while having feelings in common with others. Heroin allows you to experience your feelings as feeble, remote and even pitiable little phenomena, rather than the frighteningly overwhelming experiences you may have known before. (Your blunted emotions resurface in one area, attachment to the drug.. The feelings that you used to direct to others, or to other experiences, wrap themselves around that white powder)
Addiction is a special case of diminishing returns, where the less you get out of something, the more you do it. Your awareness of being in a situation of diminishing returns is supposed to pull you out of it - that's what rationality is about. Addiction occurs when you're aware of getting less from the drug but this makes changing your situation harder instead of easier. What happens is, the less rewarding the drug, the better the past looks. You realize that the future is going to be worse than the present, and much worse than the past. Things really and truly are getting worse. What’s good about the past, finally, is that it's not about to become past. The worst has already happened to the past; it doesn't suggest death as much as the present does. So turning toward the past makes sense, even though you'll never get there.

There is a body memory of dope: the bitterness at the back of the throat, the warmth rising into the brain. But I feel nothing but repugnance for the space the drug used to take up in my mind, the time I wasted in its pursuit. 
The specialness it brought. Giving up the elements of minor outlawry meant renouncing certain claims to specialness, to exceptionality. Transgressive glamour.
The way of communication with two stoned people..talking past each other. And the counterculture is gone. The sixties were about a counterculture, where you could go anywhere in the country and the like-minded would welcome you. Now it's just another easily consumable entertainment option, as unglamorous as dope would probably be if it were legalized.
So cozy is heroin's aura of enlightenment, so heated the drug's initial passage through your bloodstream that you think of it vaguely as warm. You experience the high as a bathe of benevolence, imparting a rosy glow to all surroundings. And on a more mundane level, in the first hours of the high you may venture into a winter evening without a coat, or burst into suspicious sweat when no one else is hot. It's like being in a room with a cheerful crackling open fire. But as the drug disintegrates you return to a usual sense of temperature, and in the last phases of the high, a chill. When you get cold, you know it's time to go to sleep again, the miracle is over.

Would dope feel warm if we did not feel chilled? I sometimes wondered if a happy and satisfied person, that phantasm, would even enjoy heroin, if it were slipped into her body on the sly. Would the comfort and security I experienced be stifling for her? Would what I felt as delightful warmth be an oppressive, frightening fever?
I acted out of impulses that had been with me my whole life, so unconscious that they outlasted psychoanalysis. And for awhile heroin worked. It gave me some years free of pain, in which I was able to ............ be free of most other emotions too. For a while distracted by the high you don't even notice the cessation of anxiety. Anxiety about the future. You just feel free of burdens you were never conscious of before. For a short while this freedom can be a revelation. It can make you more productive and more open to other people. But that anxiety was put there for a reason by evolution; it separates us from the other animals. Living in an eternal present is not good for us, however much we may want it? I'm not sure I agree.  I do see gaps in personality of leached out junkies. It is as though you could pass your arm through their bodies. For all the psychic space they take up. Despite the annoying self-absorption heroin favors in its devotees, the drug erodes individuality.
Just gets me to thinking about time and the wasting of time and how you might otherwise use the time..? Time in general, and attraction, and the loop that you go through to find things. Again the factuals. The road chosen.


 Like the way I got into drumming was through first studying "glossolalia" speaking in tongues or religious extraordinary trance..I was trying to find the word ecstatic spelling it wrong.."extacy". And to Felicitas Goodman and rattling then to the Cuyamungue Institute and on to Shamanism..it's just interesting how things happen and what time you spend and where it ends, where you end at..? Is there end?? What is the beginning? Is it really digital? Chronological? Alphabetical? I'm confused!
It was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins. Most people go out and seek what they want. I never knew what it was I wanted, so I more or less distanced myself or grew closer to those things that drifted past me in life..
There are these relationships cemented by dope, but many dope users have boyfriends or girlfriends who don't do the drug. They become the third wheel in their relationship. The nonuser who is romantically involved with an unrepentant user is constantly in the position of annoying her lover by her disapproval of his drug use, but she also feels guilty for not doing more to stop it. For both these reasons she is angry at the dope-using companion. Generating these effects are probably what the heroin user has in mind, way in back of his head. It is what he knows of love from his family. Romance? he can't imagine it otherwise.
Perhaps relationships don't take place despite the drug, but because of it. I don't mean co-dependency. What the dope provides is the perfect love rival for people who always need to have competition around: a love rival from whom you suffer few ego wounds when you lose, and one that society roundly spurns. For once, everyone is on your side.
Getting dope displaces your fear of moratality.  or the fear of the drugs running out could be manageable - the fear of time running down. All of your anxieties come to rest on the single question of getting dope, which while strenuous in its own fashion, is easier to negotiate than your mortality.
The avoidance of entropy explains another aspect of doing dope that is puzzling to the outsiders. For instance, why become so involved that you get withdrawal symptoms? Well, for one thing, they are there from the start. They just take a long time to manifest as such, because your body isn't used to metabolizing heroin. You feel shitty the day after, the day after a night of indulgence, and those same sensations, magnified, will eventually appear the day after, or even six or eight hours later, as soon as you wake up. What you once thought of as a dope hangover reveals itself as withdrawal. It would be common sense to stop doing heroin for awhile when you notice this acceleration of the drug's decay in your body, but this isn't the most frequent reaction. Instead, because it is easier to deal with a few symptoms than with entropy, you embrace this evidence of addiction, and take measures to deal with it. The most usual is to get high more often.

Some things to break this reading and yet stay on the subject:
Beat poets.."The story of junk", "The Lotus Crew", "Meditations in Green", "The Last Bongo Sunset."  Alexander Trocchi's, "Cain's Book." Robert Stone's, "Dog Soldiers.".

You might come to heroin seeking control, looking for a relationship where you wouldn't get hurt, and indeed you find a lover who will never abandon you but oddly enough, speculate as you will about quitting you can only hurt yourselves, never the drug.
Heroin will not listen to you, not even once, but it will always take you back. It will be there waiting, whenever you are ready to return. You have all the time in the world, and no fear of losing your companion, who by this point are little more than security in the frame of our addiction. They are so much less interesting than dope has become. Heroin is a counter in a shell game you play with yourself. You smirk at the betrayal - addiction - when it finally arrives. It was, after all, to be expected. The real risk in two-person relationships is unexpected, the sudden failure of trust. And while heroin bags are tangible, an affair you can abandon or pick up at any time with no difference in feeling, the power and devastation of romantic love spring from the uniqueness of the loved one. If you lose him, there will never, never be a true replacement. It also springs from the knife-edge awareness that each of us is as irreplaceable as our beloved. One reason romantic love has existential depth is that our tears at the end of an affair are shed partially in pity for your own inevitable deaths.

Heroin blunts the edge of mortality; love hones it.
Power - and the people we attract or are attracted to -

Heroin is the ultimate power struggle as a romance..easy to switch and let it be the one..the power struggle. Use this much today, this much tomorrow and so-forth.

Dope doesn't really help you to relax. It offers a euphoria that distracts you from noticing how tense you are, and it slows our life down temporarily to the point where you can believe you're in control of it. So it's ideal for people who are frightened of relaxing but need to escape from overwhelming pressure.

What better way than dope to act out your rage at a joylessly cautious, work-oriented politically correct and officially ascetic society? And heroin is conveniently cheaper than beer.



back

Music
When thinking of altering consciousness music has to be an equally strong component.
I was always aware of music. Sound has been a large part of my life from infancy. In fact, one of my first memories was of music. My Mom had a piano which she practiced on daily. These were times when I twirled and danced and spun around and made up songs. I was a ballerina, I was a  ballroom dancer, I was high!
I also remember on a summer vacation (maybe to the campsite) when my father tuned the radioi into a country western station. I had never heard music with a beat like that. Guitars twang, base guitar with the beat of it's own, and the drums. Pleasure must have shown on my face. My dad said, "You like that music don't you? " Please don't ever let it end" is all I could reply.


It is 1965, I was 15 and going to one of the kick-ass concerts of my life. Big Brother and the Holding Company was coming to the Terrace Ballroom on Main Street, Salt Lake City, The Terrace Ballroom has long since been torn down. Sad that such a wonderful piece of Americona and icon of freeier days is plowed under to make room for more corporate offices or parking lots of large corporate offices. Some really great musicians came from SLC. The backup members of the Mothers studied at Westminister Collage, and attended Highland High.  COQ: Another woman of infamy in your world was Suzy Creamcheese. What's her storv?
Zappa: Suzy Creamcheese was a girl named Jeanme Vassoir. And she is the voice that s on the Freak Out album. The mvth of Suzy Creamcheese, the letter on the album, I wrote myself. There never really was a Suzy Creamcheese. It was just a figment of my imagination until people started identifying with it heavily. It got to weird proportions in Europe, so that in 1967. when we did our first tour of Europe. people were asking if Suzie Creamcheese was along with us. So I procured the services of another girl named Pamela Zarubica, who was hired to be the Suzy Cream cheese of the European tour. And then she maintained the reputation of being Suzy Creamcheese after 1967. The first one went someplace, we don't know where. She's back in town now; I saw her.
COQ: What was the origin of the name Suzy Creamcheese? Is there a sexual connotation?
Zappa: I think it came from a dream.
COQ: A wet one?
Zappa: No, it wasn't even a cheesy one.
ME: i thought i might be able to fit it all in the thing i was growing on my harddisc   if you're reading this, it means that i succeeded in putting (at least part of) it on the net.

"Everything in the Universe is made of one element, which is a note, a single note. Elements are really vibrations you know. With your extentions of the Big Note, EVERYTHING IS A NOTE.
(Zappa, Lumpy Gravy)
Stevie Nicks went to Skyline High, (my almamater) for a term in 67.
 In her own works.. S. Nicks
See I moved a lot. I was born in Phoenix and I moved from there when I was a baby to Los Angeles and I lived there until I was about five and a half or six. And then we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico and I lived there for a year and a half, two years. And then we moved to El Paso, Texas and I lived there for five years, 'till the end of the seventh grade. Then we moved to Salt Lake City, Utah and I lived there until the end of the ninth grade. Then we moved back to Los Angeles, and I lived there for my tenth grade and eleventh grade year. And then we were transferred again to San Francisco ~ to up by Stanford University ~ so I was a brand new senior there. Then I went to junior college that was halfway down the peninsula, in San Mateo for two years. Then I went all the way back to the other side to San Jose State [University] for another three years, then, when I was in a band with Lindsey. And then Lindsey and I moved back to Los Angeles in about 1971.
~Stevie Nicks, Special RKO Radio, December 21, 1981
 

 [On the effects of moving so much while growing-up] I did make friends I just didn't have time to make too many. So I was very adaptable, I learned to make friends quickly and to accepted quickly because I didn't have enough time to waste ~ to be snooty for 6 months until I decided to come down to earth and be a part of everything didn't work at all. So, I just had to be real amiable, and friendly and open to people, Or, I would be alone for a year and then we would move.
~Stevie Nicks, Special RKO Radio, December 21, 1981
 
Back to Janice Joplin .. Our friends had been the opening band, Holden Caulfield with Mike Johnson, Mike Smith and another bud, Rick, had a big old bus, with seats removed and pillows made of circular designs, strange hanging incense burners, various hippy items on the inside, and peace signs, flowers and butterflies on out. It was the love bus of SLC.
We were given the honor of going to airport to pick up the bands equipment and transport it to The Terrace. We smoked a joint on the way. A first time for me. I was so nervous I don't know if I even felt it.. But did notice my arms and legs were numb.. Later at the concert, we were crammed in the front row, dancing, swaying and singing along with all the others.. I was directly in front of the base players’ 7 foot speaker. Which he kept getting so close to knocking off the stage as he staggered here and there, I wondered if I would make it out alive. I pictured myself a pancake under the massive weight of that speaker. After the concert we were all invited to a big bash at the hotel.. It actually ended up being at someone’s home and not a motel room. This has to be the best of all times. But my parents are strict and I have a curfew. If I were to call and explain, "This is a one time, never to happen again, happening, I am going to get bombed with Janice and the Holding Company, Janice!!."  Well, they would have sent the police to pick me up.
 When we stepped out the Terrace our bus had been vandalized. Tires slashed. Some sticky stuff thrown all over and the words "Fucking Hippy" and "Die Hippy" where painted all over the windows.. and sides of the bus. I thought Rick would die. The boys of our gang gave chase to anyone looking suspect. A fight was on. "These hippies are not all about love.. we will kick your ass..!"
In those days the lines were drawn between Greeser and Hippy .. between jock and stoner, between drinkers and smokers, even between Heads and surfers, and as strange as it all seems to me today, back then there was no tolerance for different ways of altering consciousness, or of being counted among.. The Hippies hated the necks. The necks hated everything! the stoners hated drinking and drinkers hated smokers. Too much hate and intolerance, but those were the 60's in Utah.
Later that same year they opened a club called The Abyss.. it was a coffee house/music club.. With beat-poets, bands and all sorts of cool goings on. It too was in downtown SLC. Growing up in Utah was like setting your watch back 5 or 10 years. The local powers that be did their best to keep any unacceptable culture from taking root here.. or even having a comfortable visit to the land of Zion.  Our wonderful public radio station KRCL often chanted "Coming to you live behind the Zion Curtain its Radio free KRCL broadcasting with listeners support. owned and operated by the people for the people ....." Even that is slowly becoming a different situation.

In the Spirit: Wendy Weir
Conversations with the spirit of Jerry Garcia
Talking on love: love that is freely given and received without the devastating fear of harm, guilt, abandonment, ridicule or manipulation. The love that I have sent to you os only a small fraction of the love of God..All that is

Music as the Vehicle for love.. Its energy, its vibration, breaks through the subtle barriers of human consciousness to free our inner selves to give us the opportunity to discover who we truly are.
Drugs have been misunderstood. Under proper shamanic guidance and ceremony they enable one to glimpse more deeply into the sacred. Taken as recreation, for a quick high or to avoid deeper recognition of pain, they become destructive, for they dull our higher senses and block out innate ability to heal ourselves. Our higher consciousness cannot help or even be heard when our energy field is filled with the stagnant black blobs left by drug use. These dark, dead matters of energy bring our vibration down and keep us heavy in the lower frequencies of the physical. I know I have been there. It is not the way. We can go hand in hand with the Earth as she frees herself of the darkness, the negative energy that has held her back form her won growth and evolution of consciousness. This negative energy is represented and held here by the actions of man: social injustice, environmental pollution and actions of man destruction, greed, fear, control, political manipulation and much more. This must end. The Earth will be free of it. We have the option to go with her into the light, or to remain back in the darkness. The music is the mission. It will lead all those willing to hear its message forward. But it will not get you there. Only each one of you can do that within yourselves.

Hate: There is not room in our Universe for hate, That is a very low, destructive energy, It means that you do not recognize that aspect of the other within yourself. Other act as mirrors in our lives. If you feel hate, ask yourself, why. What part of you needs to be looked at, embraced and released? Same with anger. When used as a force to motivate you through a personal trial, it is good. When it takes up residence within your being, when you hold on to it, it is not good for you. Look at why it is there in your life, why you are holding on to it. Then embrace and accept the understanding that comes to you and release the anger. Once free in the universe, that anger - which is a form of negative energy - caan be transmitted into a more positive energy.
Look at you efforts as a reflection of your fears. Then look at your fear. Where do they come from ? why are they here? go deep within to find the answer. You know that past lives of which we will not speak have influenced ...transform that negative energy of fear, which holds the frequency of our vibration down, into the energy of love, which can grow and expand and help to heal others.



 Meditation
From "Practice within the Cell"
An interview with Fleet Maull

I was in a county jail for the first seven months. It was a hell-realm experience...very crowded, noisy, tense conditions. I was going through a dark night of the soul. I was wracked with fear, remorse, guilt, and shame, and devastated by what I had done to my family, my community, and myself. I could hardly sleep. My mind raced with escape fantasies. It would race back and forth over what I could have done differently to escape this fate.

There were five cells in a concrete and steel tank with no windows. The only opening was a food slot in the steel entry door of the cell block. Suffocating heat. Two men to a tiny cell. All doors were locked at the same time mechanically. Prisoners kept radios and televisions on day and night. There was yelling from one cell to another; there were frequent fights and serious injuries. It was very intense.

I started practicing meditation for many hours a day almost immediately. I chose to sleep on the upper bunk, where there was enough headroom to sit up straight on a folded blanket. One evening, many months into my sentence, I realized that my mind was not moving. I was calm and my mind was steady. Regardless of the noise and anger around me, my mind was not pulled by it. I had had these kinds of experiences before, but in a quiet Buddhist retreat center. To find it in the midst of those circumstances was liberating. I knew that I could somehow handle this and use it as a path.


Recovery: Recovery / Addiction  revisited
 
 The way it all began doesn't matter any longer. The fact is, addiction messes up your life and at some point you realize you want more.
Although I realized this years before it became reality, I was under some kind of delusion that I should have serenity when what I had was chaos. and for this I blamed my therapist, my doctor, my children, friends, and parents. The poison of hate is powerful  For me many things came together to change my life.

This happened to me the year my Sun progressed into Gemini. Probably the most fundamental of all the changes the progressed Sun can make, is to change from one sign to another. To say this marks the beginning of a new chapter in your life is too weak a statement. It is more like an entirely unprecedented set of motivations and needs arise. Your goals, aspirations, experiences, everything changes. I was a creature of habit but something happened.. I saw new viewpoints and attitudes and circumstances changed to allow the growth I needed.
At this same time another truly major-league astrological event unfolded for me . Saturn, the planet of wisdom and maturity (among other things) conjunct my natal Sun a month after my Sun changed signs. This Saturn thing is big. When the Sun interacts with Saturn, a season of limits and definitions is upon you. Neither concept sounds all that attractive, but both are necessary for maturation. The road seemed to grow narrower before it widens up for possibilities and for me allowed the inner changes I had spent years working on to become reality.  
 
 Other Factors 
 
 I can't say the Sun leapt into Gemini and I was cured. I had begun a meditation practice about a year before and had not used any dope in over a year. Some how I became calm.
All around me the chaos was still happening, but inside me it was calm and quiet. The Trickster was still crouching  around the corner waiting for a moment of opportunity to mix up my mind again.


I had a wonderful opportunity for 2 full free sessions with an Hakomi therapist. I took these sessions with the intent of getting as much as possible out of them. Following with a few paid sessions. This is a body-centered psychotherapy method my Ron Kurtz. Using mindfulness and probes of different types, this therapy gets to core issues in life very quickly. For me it was too quick ~ scared me away.

My room mate was still actively using cocaine and living in the fast lane.  I had both grandmothers pass away within a week of each other: Paternal grandma on Friday of the first week, maternal grandma the next Friday. I had to fly home both times for the funeral and family business. At this time I simply made the decision I had been clean long enough to return home and stay strong. This proved to be true.

Notes from my first year of sobriety.. 1989
We grow too soon old and too late smart. All the demons that regularly tormented me, dissatisfaction, restlessness anxiety and depression vanish. I fill with happiness, love, creativity and inspiration .Karma cleansing = recall painful incidents from past, involving sex, money and powerGet out of your head. Where's the feeling?Lived so long in my intellect, rationalizing away misgivings. and justifying everything I did Out of touch with inner reality . I was emotionally dumb.Dealing with feelings experiencing and expressing them. Confronting about feeling I am lazy "Is there any truth to it? Has it been a pattern in your life? " disturbing memory .. My laziness had damaged relationships with others for most of my life.I claimed I had no guilt about being a dope fiend! What about your child? I describe day of child's Jr. High graduation. In minds eye saw it...Releasing a torrent of sorrow and guilt from bottomless well of grief. It was  a revelation to me whiten I got in touch with how I really felt during those years. Inside was pain, rage, guild, shame and sorrow.  I never knew I felt. Dope covered itI want relief? another way? are you gonna listen t dope. The only way out is through. Miss getting high, miss streets, let go of "the life" = grieve the loss. The way was to do it.Morning periods and active grieving. Admit dope days are over. Learn patience, Even largest task can be accomplished bit by bit. if you keep at it.Caring is only antidote to addiction. Feel overwhelmed. Go lock in closet and cry then pray for strength to get through it. Analyze why say things are. Why I feel like giving up. Where did it come from?? Where did you feel this way before?It is difficult to get in touch with feelings when we intellectualize or rationalize them away. Peace inside hard to pin down. Insubstantial as a feather yet solid as a rock. Deeper than love felt with any man. Can't get it in street, - cop in drugstore. I couldn't touch it, but I knew it was there. Best of all, it came from in me. Part of me I couldn't loose it. It was something I had earned and mo none or nothing could take it ways!
First time I had a new method of working. Found a solution to a problem at the job rather than giving up in despair or defiance.
I knew I was beginning to apply the lessons I'd learned in treatment to my outside world.
 Some miracle they were working out here are well. Wow

March 28, 1989
I am on the bus, Going to Midvale from town. so it's going to be a LONG ride.






Spirituality: next

    Secret of the Golden Flower
For practical purposes, a distinction is made in the golden flower teaching between the "original spirit" and the "conscious spirit". The original spirit is the formless essence of awareness; it is unconditioned and transcends culture and history. The conscious spirit is the mind-set of feelings, thoughts, and attitudes, conditioned by personal and cultural history, bound by habit to specific forms.  In Chan Buddhism, the primal original spirit is also known as the host, while the conditioned conscious spirit is known as the guest; the original spirit is the master, and the conscious spirit is the servant. Self-delusion occurs when the servant has taken over from the master; self-enlightenment rakes place when the master is restored to autonomy in the center. The idea of two minds or two aspects of mind ... Turning the light around.
Good and bad come from your won mind. But what do you call your own mind, apart from your actions and thoughts? Where does your own mind come from? "The thinker is the mind, what is thought of is the environment. In the environment are mountains, rivers, land, buildings, people, animals, and so on.
Now turn your thought around to think of the thinking mind; are there so many things there?"
To consider the question of how the golden flower method could shed light on clues to the understanding and treatment of mood and personality disorders, it is useful to work with the Chan concept of host and guest, a simple concept corresponding to the Taoist distinction between the original spirit and the conscious spirit.

From the point of view of the host, or original spirit, everything concerned with mood and personality is in the domain of the guest. But through the process of social conditioning, the average individual comes to be centered in the guest and therefore regards it as the self. As a result the true host is concealed, and it cannot bring out its more objective and encompassing perspective on matters of mood and personality. When the guest has taken over center stage and the host is no longer in sight, the "switching" that takes place within and individual in response to psychological and environmental factors is taking place from one mood or personality to another; it does not return all the way to the source. The individual can then no longer command the capacity to switch deliberately from a subjective mood or subpersonality to an objective and impersonal state of observant mind.   Considered in this light, the ability to experience the pure self of the original mind and the capacity to return to it at will can be of fundamental significance in the psychic life of the individual. Even as the conditioned mind goes form state to state in the course of changing circumstances, the golden flower technique provides a means of searching out the host behind the scenes to gain direct input form its creative energy and inspiration.  
This host, or original spirit, can occasionally be glimpsed in the space between temporal shifts of mood or personality, but it generally takes practice to stabilize it and use it deliberately.
For application of the golden flower mind-awakening method, one of the most useful instructional devices in Chan Buddhist teaching explains the "two minds" in terms of "four relations between host and guest."  To focus them in the mind all at once, these four relations are expressed in mnemonic phrases: the guest within the guest; the host within the guest; the guest within the host; the host within the host.
   
    The guest within the guest is the state of the ordinary mind going form one mood, state or subpersonality to another, alienated from conscious contact with the host behind the scenes.
The host within the guest is the first stage of turning the light around, when contact with the original mind is established even as the individual is passing through shifting moods and personalities.      The guest within the host is a more mature level of attainment, at which the individual can enjoy free access to thought and its products, including ideas, nods,a nd personalities, without being deceived by them or bound to them.
    The host within the host is the original spirit itself, the primal source of consciousness in which is found the hidden "turning point" in which psychic liberty hinges. In one sense, conscious experience of the host within host follows realization of     The host within the guest; yet in a deeper sense the host within the host is not only at the pinnacle but even at the basis of the total experience of the golden flower practice.

One of the more dramatic examples: a young woman who was betrothed to a man she didn't love. She ran away to live with  her true lover, but eventually died. When her man returned to their hometown after her death, he found that in the experience of the people there she had been at home all the while, having taken to her sickbed shortly after her betrothal.
The girl had split souls; which one was the real one. If we say she was really at home; yet she lived with her lover; if we say she was with her lover, yet she was lying abed at home. The Chan answer is that both conditions, both "selves" were guests of a formless host. .. If you can awaken to the real one herein, you will know that leaving one state of being and entering another is like staying at an inn. This would suggest that the individual who realizes the true host can enter and exit thoughts, feelings, moods, and personalities at will being centered in the primal spirit and thus not subject to control by the contents of conditioned states of consciousness.
A parallel story form the Taoist tradition is the famous butterfly dream..  On awakening from this pleasant reverie, he found that he was no longer sure whether he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly now dreaming he was a man.
The issue of this story is not its question of which psychic contents to identify as the self but is in the act of recalling attention to the "turning point" recalled in between states, the formless "opening" or "aperture" through which the real self of the formless host can be seen and experienced in its own purity and freedom.
There are two main objects to stopping thought in Buddhist tradition.
One is to open up space to clarify thought by distinguishing compulsive habitual thought from deliberate logical thought.
The other is to clear room for the conscious operation of nonconceptual insight.  Practioners are carefully warned to avoid becoming intoxicated by the peaceful tranquillity of thought cessation.. Chan proverb goes, "stagnant water cannot contain the coils of a dragon."

Turning the Light Around and Tuning the Breathing..reversed gazing.. reaching toward knowledge.observing mind..inner observation...focus on the center.
Two kinds of problems: oblivion and distraction. There is a device to get rid of them, which is simply to rest the mind on the breath.
The breath is one's own mind; one's own mind does the breathing. Once mind stirs, then there is energy. Energy is basically an emanation of mind. Our thoughts are very rapid; a single thought takes place in a moment, whereupon an exhalation and inhalation respond to it. Therefore inward breathing and outward breathing accompany each other like sound and echo. In a single day one breathes countless times, so has countless random thoughts. So should one have no thoughts ?  It is impossible to have no thoughts. Should one not breathe ? It is impossible not to breathe.
Nothing compares to making the affliction itself into medicine, which means to have mind and breath rest on each other. Therefore tuning the breath should be included in turning the light around.
When you sit, lower your eyelids and then establish a point of reference. Now let go. But if you let go absolutely, you may not be able to simultaneously keep your mind on listening to your breathing.
You should not allow your breath to actually be audible; just listen to its soundlessness. Then be patient and lighten up a little. The more you let go, the greater the subtlety; and the greater the subtlety, the deeper the quietude.   Eventually, after a long time, all of a sudden even the subtle will be interrupted and the true breathing will appear, whereupon the substance of mind will become perceptible. This is because when mind is subtle, breath is subtle; then mind is unified, it moves energy. When breath is subtle, mind is subtle; when energy is unified, it moves mind.
Stabilization of mind must be preceded by development of energy because the mind has no place to set to work on; so focus on energy is used as a starting point. This is what is called the preservation of pure energy.
If the mind tends to run off, then unify it by means of the breath; if the breath tends to become rough, then yet the mind to make it fine. If you do this, how can the mind fail to stabilize?   Generally speaking, the two afflictions of oblivion and distraction just require quieting practice to continue unbroken day after day..until complete cessation and rest occur spontaneously. When you are not sitting quietly, you may be distracted without knowing it; but once you are aware if it, distraction itself becomes a mechanism for getting rid of distraction.
As for unawares oblivion and oblivion of which you become aware, there is an inconceivable distance between them. Unawares oblivion is real oblivion; oblivion that you notice is not completely oblivious. Clear light is in this.
Distraction means the spirit is racing; oblivion means the spirit is unclear. Distraction is easy to cure; oblivion is hard to heal. A distracted mind can be concentrated, and a confused mind can be set in order; but oblivion is unformed darkness, in contrast to distraction, which still has some direction. Oblivion means the lower soul is in complete control, whereas the lower soul is a lingering presence in distraction. Oblivion is ruled by pure darkness and negativity.
When you are sitting quietly, if you become drowsy, this is oblivion. Repelling oblivion is simply a matter of tuning the breath. The "breath" in this case is respiration, not the "true breathing". Nevertheless the true breathing is present within it.

Whenever you sit, you should quiet you mind and unify your energy. How is the mind quieted" the Mechanism is in the breathing, but the mind alone knows you are breathing out and in; do not let the ears hear. When you don't hear it, the breathing is fine; and when breathing is fine, the mind is clear. If you can hear it, the breathing is rough, which means the mind is cloudy. Cloudiness means oblivion, so it is natural to feel sleepy. Even so, the mind should be kept on the breathing.  It is also essential to understand that this device is not mechanical or forced. Just maintain a subtle looking and listening.
What is "looking"? It is the eyes spontaneously shining, the eyes only looking inward and not outward. Not looking outward yet being alert is inward looking; it is not that there really is such a thing as looking inward.
What is "listening"? It is the light of the ears spontaneously listening, the ears only listening inward and not outward. Not listening outward, yet being alert, is inward listening; it is not that there really is such a thing as listening inward. Listening means listening to the soundless; looking means looking at the formless.   When the eyes do not look outside and the ears do not listen outside, they are closed in and have a tendency to race around inside.
Only by inward looking and listening can you prevent this inner racing as well as oblivion in between. When you sink into oblivion and become drowsy, get up and take a walk. When your spirit has cleared, sit again.
It is best to set aside all involvements and sit quietly for a while. Eventually you will attain absorption and not become oblivious or sleepy.

When you are going to practice this doctrine, it is essential to find potential and find its opening; don't sit inside nothingness or indifference.  Even as you let go of all objects, you are alert and self-possessed. But don't get enthusiastic about attaining the experience.   This means not that you shouldn't recognize reality, but that the rhythm of reality is on the brink of existence and nonexistence. You can get it by intent that is not willful.   Even in the midst of alert awareness, you are relaxed and natural. But don't fall into the elements of the body and mind, where material and psychological illusions take charge.
If you tend to fall into a deadness when ever you go into meditation and are relatively lacking in growth and creative energy, this means you have fallen into a shadow world. Your mood is cold, your breath sinking. Once you have gone into quietude and all sorts of loose ends come to you for not apparent reason, you find you cannot turn them away if you want to, and you even feel comfortable going along with them. This is called the master becoming the servant. If this goes on long, you fall into the various roads of the realms of form and desire.

When you are practicing the contemplation of emptiness, if you still know that the totality of things cannot be destroyed, and yet do not cling to them, this includes all three contemplations.
First there is emptiness, next is the conditional; though you know things are empty, you do not destroy the totality of things but take a constructive attitude toward all events in the midst of emptiness. Once you neither destroy things nor cling to things, this is the contemplation of the center. 
When on the way of the center, you will meditate on emptiness; but you don't call it emptiness, you call it the center. When you come to the center, there isn't need to say.

When the light of essence turns into thought, then it is consciousness. When consciousness arises, the light is obscured and cannot be found. It is not that there is not light, but that the light has become consciousnes. This is what is meant by saying, "when sound moves, it does not produce sound, it produces echoes"

Chang Po-tuan..Understanding reality: a Taoist Alchemical Classic..translated by Thomas Cleary...
Liu I-ming..The Inner Teachings of Taoism..Translated by Thomas Cleary..
Liu I-ming  I Ching Mandalas.  Translated by Thomas Cleary.
Liu I-ming. Awakening to the Tao. Translated by Thomas Cleary
Immortal Sisters. Translated and edited by Thomas Cleary.
Li Daoqun. The Book of Balance and Harmony. Translated by Thomas Cleary.
Zen Essence. Translated and edited by Thomas Cleary
The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life. Translated by Thomas Cleary.

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