I first heard about the practice of recapitulation in Carlos Castaneda’s book s describing his encounters with a Mexican shaman. In several of those books he briefly talks about the importance of using a practice of going back and re-experiencing life events as an important way to get access to our personal energy.  However, while he mentions it and alludes to its power, he doesn’t give enough details to be able to do it.  Luckily, a couple of his fellow apprentices also wrote books about don Juan and the path of the warrior.  They are much more specific about the importance of this practice, and give descriptions that are clear enough to actually do the practice.   When I met my Toltec leader/guide/teacher/mentor Ramin, he stressed the importance of this practice, and suggested a book by Victor Sanchez, The Teachings of don Carlos, that provides additional details about how to do this practice.  Ramin highly recommended it as a necessary step toward getting access to our personal power.

Sometime around 1996 it became clear that if I were serious about learning the Toltec path to wisdom I would have to do the practice of recapitulating my life.  Therefore, I dedicated a year to it.  My original agreement with myself when I started taking classes from Ramin was to do whatever he suggested for a year to see if it was worthwhile.  I completed this year and found it to be exactly what I was hoping for.  An additional year dedicated to taking the next step seemed reasonable to me.

The idea behind the practice of recapitulation is to re-experience (recapitulate) all of the important experiences in our lives in such a way as to be able to release the energy that we have invested in them.  The point is that all of our personal energy is bound up in these past experiences, and that through the practice of recapitulation it is possible to free up that energy for our use.  The Toltecs claim that we have a limited amount of total personal energy. Therefore, the goal is not to make new energy, but merely to gain better access to the energy that we already have. Our energy is almost always bound up with people that we have known, with the binding connections going both ways.  Sometimes we are holding them with our energy, and sometimes they are holding us with theirs.  In either case, we do not have access to all of our personal energy, and we are therefore not free.  My goal is to be free.

The idea behind this process is pretty bizarre. It involves something that I can talk about and know a little about, but mostly it is inconceivable.  Carlos talks about our “egg” of energy.  He says that people consist of a large egg-shaped ball of energy fibers surrounding our body.  These fibers are our connection to the universe and allow us to perceive the world around us.  We interact using these fibers. Where the fibers come together they form what he calls the “assemblage point.”  This point is located at about an arm’s length behind our right shoulder.  The exact location of the assemblage point on this ball of luminous fibers determines how we perceive the world.  Move it and our view of the world changes – Castaneda says the world actually changes; it is more than just our view of it.  These fibers get “hooked” with other people’s fibers during our life, which means that we lose our ability to use those hooked fibers for other purposes.  Recapitulation is a method for unhooking the bound up fibers as well as getting our egg back into shape, patching any holes and smoothing out any snarls that might have occurred during the tossing and tumbling of life. 

The first step in the process of recapitulation is to identify the important people and events in your life.  This would be a lot easier for a younger person.  For a fifty-year-old like me, it included a long list of a LOT of important events.  Partly based upon directions from Ramin, but mostly from directions from the books of Carlos and his cohorts, I made a chronological list of all of the people that I could recall in my life.  I did this by breaking my life into phases (houses where I lived, jobs that I had, etc.) and then working my way through the memories of these phases.  This part of the process took me about three months working on it an hour or two every day.  Actually, it was most of my waking hours; the hour or two per day was spent documenting what I had been thinking about the rest of the time.  At first I tried to sort out the important people from the unimportant ones, but I finally settled on the idea that if I could remember them, they were important for some reason.  The ones that I couldn’t remember might not be so important.  I tried to identify them by name, but in some instances I couldn’t recall names, so instead I made short descriptions to remind me of them. The names weren’t important, but the memory of them and our experiences together were.  This list ended up including about 3,000 people.  I created the list using a computer so I could sort them and print the list for future use.

The experience of doing this first step was amazing!  It connected my life into a single, whole, experience rather than a long series of experiences. Before making this list I had tended to forget, or not pay attention to, past experiences and was just moving along in the “bubble” of the present.  Paying attention to the present is not necessarily a bad thing, a focus on the present is what I am trying to achieve.  However, the experience of remembering all of my life somehow broke the bounds of the present and made me realize that the past and the present are all here in the moment, we do not really leave the past behind.  It is hard to explain, but I ended up feeling like the past, present and future were illusions – the reality is that it is all one.  Just this part of the process turned out to be an amazing experience.

Then came the recapitulation. I made a wooden box to sit in while recapitulating.  The box was just big enough so that I could sit cross-legged within it without touching the walls or top.  It was tied together with cotton string; I used no metal in its construction.  It was made from 1×6 boards, leaving cracks between the boards for ventilation.  The front came off to make a door and there were no windows or other openings.  The box ended up being rather wobbly in all directions, but was enough to give me a space of my own.  I put the box in a shed out in my backyard, within a grove of eucalyptus trees, to protect it from the elements.  Every day for about a year I would take my list of names, and sit in the box going person by person down the list until I had revisited everyone on the list.

I had a candle in the box with me so I had enough light to read the list.  After reading the next name on the list, I would tear off the name and recapitulate them.  In reality, I wasn’t exactly recapitulating them, I was recapitulating the events associated with them – but these two are so closely connected that I gave up trying to figure out the distinction.  When I finished with a person, I burned their name and add the remains to a can of ashes. 

I soon realized that there was a problem with dealing with the events associated with a person because people that I know well for a long time have hundreds or thousands of events associated with them – many of the events were very important indeed.  I started to wonder if I should recapitulate each event or each person.  I had to decide how to deal with this.  Going back to don Juan’s instructions, it seemed like the idea was that we make connections to people in our lives. These connections are more or less permanent, continuing to influence our lives long after they were created.  In the process of recapitulation, we are trying to disconnect these inter-personnel connections.  Therefore, it is only necessary to go back to the last time that we encountered them – at that time all of the connections would exist and be available to us.  I followed his guidance and concentrated on the last encounter that I could recall with each person.

After a few weeks of working my way down the list of people, I decided that the process is a purely magical one, meaning that it has little or no meaning to my logical mind – it just works.  I had to give up on making any sense out of it and do it with the assumption that something was happening.  The process is pretty simple.  It consisted of the following five steps: (1) I imagined the person and the event surrounding the last time that I could recall seeing them. (2) I then watched that event from the prospective of being outside of the event, kind of like watching a movie.  (3) Then I “jumped” into the event, recalling what it was like, and how I felt, from the inside when it was happening.  At this step I tried to remember it as clearly as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, temperature, etc.  The more complete this reconstruction was the better.  This step involved the realignment of the assemblage point with where it was at that previous time.  The realignment brings the connections that existed at that moment back in a way that allows them to be changed again. (4) I then jumped back out to see the view as in a movie, but this time including the smells and other things, and then finally (5) I breathed to release the energy binding us together. 

The breathing was done in a special way.  I turned my head toward the right shoulder and breathed in through my nose while slowly turning my head toward the left shoulder, retrieving energy that I used to connect and hold the other person.  After that was completed, I then breathed out while turning my head from left to right, releasing energy that the other was holding me with.  I would focus on breathing in, then focus on breathing out.  I breathed like this, imagining the energy being released from both directions, until it felt like there were no more connections.   At that point I was finished with that person, and would light the paper with their name and burn it up, placing the ashes in a can along with the ashes of all of the other names.

Every once in a while I came across an event that contained a special jewel for me.  These were times when I found the source of agreements that I had made about myself and who I am.  It turns out that my self image, and my understanding of who I am, come from a long series of agreements that I have made with myself, usually based upon things that others have told me while I was growing up.  The agreements include things like, “you are not handsome.”  Oh, really?  Ok, I agree with that, I am not handsome.  “You are good at science.” Oh really?  I agree, I am science oriented and good at it.  “You are too stupid to do that.”  Sorry, I can’t do that, I am too stupid.  It goes on and on and on.  I slowly built up the story of who I am, what I can do, what I cannot do, what I like, etc. based on all of these little agreements.  This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it is. The problem is that I made the agreements without thinking about them, based upon assumptions of what was meant (which was usually wrong), and we made a whole set of conflicting and confusing agreements because I got input from many people and experiences all jumbled together.  This helps to explain the mess that we are in when we try to untangle who we “really are.”  We sometimes have a chance to revisit these agreements and change them.

While recapitulating, now and then I came across events and people that seemed to be at the root of some agreement that I had about myself.  I then had the chance to re-visit that agreement and make a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to keep it.  I could decide right then and there to discard it.  However, I couldn’t just throw it away; I had to replace it with something.  At about this same time I had read don Miguel Ruiz’s little book The Four Agreements.  It turned out that in almost all cases I could replace my unwanted agreement with one or more of the four agreements.  I didn’t have to change from “I am stupid” to “I am smart.” All I had to do was change from “I am stupid” to “I will do the best that I can”.  With this simple change I dropped the judgments and baggage that came with the initial agreement.

This process was hugely liberating!  Day after day I found that I kept feeling more and more free.  I stopped worrying about problems with others, stopped trying to hold others with my energy, stopped letting them hold on to me.  I started being solid and strong by myself.  At first I was afraid that this process would ruin my feelings of love for my wife, family and friends because I was confused about the difference of being attached and being in love.  It is true, I lost my attachments – but that was a good thing.  I could finally just feel my love and allow myself to enjoy them and our relationship, no attachments and no controlling the other is needed. Love and friendship are not based upon holding onto and controlling the other.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  It is involved in allowing the other to be free and enjoying them just as they are without trying to change or control that.  Instead of making me become isolated from my friends and loved ones, it brought me much closer in a much warmer and comfortable way. 

Not only did this process help me to get closer to others, it helped me to let go of damaging agreements that were not useful to me.  It also allowed me to feel much more empowered to be able to use (or withhold) my energy to suit my needs.  I no longer feel compelled to use up all of my energy on things that don’t matter.  I feel like I am now much freer to be me, and much less compelled to be what I think others want me to be.

By the time I had spent a year sitting in my box, burned the last name from my list, and burned the box – I was floating in the clouds.  I now feel peace and joy with life most of the time, even when it is not “fun” or peaceful.  I stand up tall and look life straight on with fearlessness and excitement to see what is coming next.  I find that I am much more relaxed and patient with my friends and loved ones because I just enjoy the time that I am having with them at the moment, there is nothing more important to do than what I am doing.  I find that what people do and say has less impact on me.  I can see clearly that what they say and do tells me a lot about them, but very little about me – so if they say something bad or something good, about me, it is not about me – it is about them.  I don’t need to let them “hook” me, and I don’t have to try to “hook” them. When this happens, then I go back and unhook in a mini-recapitulation exercise.  In order to avoid the extra work later on, I try to avoid the hooks in the first place.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t let myself like or love them, or accept their good feelings; it just means that I don’t accept the controlling aspects of the relationship.

My year of sitting in my box was a true turning point in my life.  I no longer am able to return to be the person that I was before I met Ramin and started on the path of the warrior.  I am now on a path full of love, hope, joy, excitement and mystery.  I will never be able to go back, nor would I want to.

It is an odd thing, but I can’t seem to recall the year that I went to Teotihuacán with don Miguel and his group for a week-long spiritual retreat in Mexico.  It was just about the same time that I started working with my good friend and teacher, Ramin.  I don’t suppose the date is important.  At that time I didn’t know much about the Toltec tradition or don Miguel Ruiz.  I had somehow found out about a week-long trip to the pyramids and decided to give it a try.  I probably heard about it on one of the evenings that I had gone to see and listen to don Miguel in Sacramento or Davis.  I thought the costs for the trip were exorbitant,t but since I could afford it I decided not to worry too much about the money and go for the adventure. 

I flew from Sacramento to Austin, then on to Mexico City.  I was supposed to meet with the group of people attending the spiritual journey to Teotihuacán, north of Mexico City at the airport in Mexico City and then be bused about 30 miles to the hotel near Teotihuacán.  I arrived at Mexico City expecting a greeter, a sign, or some other fairly obvious way to identify the group. I was new to the group and would not recognize anyone, with the possible exception of don Miguel.  I got off the plane, went into the terminal and found no sign of the group.  There were lots of people milling around waiting for people or waiting to board the next plane, but there were no signs announcing the group, “Toltecs,” Miguel, my name or anything else.  I walked around the airport looking for some hint of what I might do next.  I was getting a little worried since I had no idea where to catch up to them if I missed them at the airport. I hadn’t been told the name of the hotel where we were to stay, or giving any local contact information.  I started to wonder what I was going to do next.  I waited around for an hour and a half, hoping that someone would show up – but they never did. 

I finally noticed that there were some people scattered around the airport sitting on chairs or the floor talking to each other.  They appeared to be together and were also waiting for something or someone.  They appeared to be Americans, so I felt comfortable asking them if they happened to have any idea about the group I was looking for.  It turned out that they were the group, and they were waiting for me!  What a relief that was. 

There were about 100 people attending the trip. The unexpectedly large size of the group heightened my feeling that the prices were quite high.   Once I added up in my head the costs and the income from these folks.  Based on the apparent costs, the number of attendees and the price per attendee it seemed to be a big money maker for the leaders.  I became concerned that I had just signed up for a week of “rip off the tourist.”  However, as I talked to folks I learned that most had taken journeys with don Miguel in the past and seemed to be quite willing to pay the price. They expressed the opinion that the costs were well worth the benefits.  I decided that since I was there, and had already spent the money, I might as well stop worrying about that part, and see what might come of the trip. 

Our group filled up the Club Med that is located right next to the pyramid site, lined up with the Avenue of the Dead, situated in a location that might have actually been part of the southern end of the pyramid complex at one time.  Not having stayed at a Club Med before, I was surprised at the austerity of the place.  It was very pretty and had a lot of “local color” about its design, but was not as lavish as I would have expected of Club Meds.  We seemed to have filled the hotel to capacity as there were no other guests for the week.  The hotel aligned perfectly with my personal desires for accommodations in that it was comfortable and nice, but not gaudy or glitzy.  It turns out that this is one of three or four “archeological” Club Meds, and is not the normal family oriented club that I had heard about.  It was actually perfect; it had all that we needed and was quite comfortable for our group.

Since the group was so large, we broke up into smaller groups to visit the pyramid site.  I was assigned to a group of six or seven ladies.  The group was led by Heather Ash, who had been one of don Miguel’s apprentices and was now a Toltec leader/teacher.  It was evident that everyone in this small group, except me, knew each other very well.  I was happy with the selection since they all seemed to be great people and I looked forward to spending the week with them. 

The plan was to start at the southern end of the Avenue of the Dead, near the Feathered Serpent Pyramid (Temple of Quetzalcoatl) and then carefully work our way north along the mile and a half of the Avenue of the Dead to the Pyramid of the Moon, finishing up several days later at the Pyramid of the Sun.

Each morning don Miguel talked to all of us in a large group for an hour or two, then we broke up into our smaller groups to experience the pyramid complex.  We were told some of the history of the place from don Miguel’s point of view, which turned out to be quite different from what I read on the plaques and the written materials presented for the tourists.  Then we were told what lessons and experiences were possible in this power place and were guided on a tour that was a only our group, rather than an archeological tour of the ruins.  We were using the place and its energy as tools, not as something to see.  In the afternoon we took a break or attended training sessions put on by various spiritual teachers.  In the evening Miguel talked to the group about the day and set our intent to continue working in our dreams.

We spent the biggest part of each day within the confines of the pyramid complex.  It was an interesting experience to be focused on meditation, power, awakening, and personal understanding in the middle of a place that was bustling with tourists and venders selling local goods and trinkets.  We focused on our work, and let the hustle and bustle flow around us.  I felt that those tourists that noticed us at all must have thought we were pretty wacky since we were on such a totally different pace and were spending our time in places that didn’t seem to have much visual draw (but did have a strong energetic attraction).  Mainly it was clear that we were two distinct groups of people, flowing past each other but not interacting very much.  It opened my eyes to the possibility of experiencing a place in peace and solitude, even though it is thronged with tourists.  I have since noticed this division at temples where the holy men go about their business, seemingly without hindrance from the many tourists around them.

After about three days of moving north along the Avenue of the Dead, we came to the Pyramid of the Moon – and climbed the steep stairs to the top.  At the top of the pyramid is a wide square or “plaza” that is slightly raised toward the center.  This day appeared to be school field trip day since there were many school kids in uniforms, many tourists with still and video cameras, and others on the pyramid.  I don’t know how many people were up there, but I would guess there were at least a couple of hundred.

Heather decided that we should sit in a circle and chant “Om” for awhile.  We started to sit in a circle, but were stopped by a big, rather intimating looking, guard.  He noticed what we were about to do and wagging his finger at us, indicated that we were not to do that.  We were surprised and disappointed that we weren’t going to be allowed to chant on top of the pyramid.  However, he then motioned us to follow him, which we did.  He pointed down, and there was a marker – he had brought us to the very center of the pyramid.  He then indicated, with the hint of a twinkle in his eye, that THAT was the right place to do what we wanted.  He didn’t seem to have a problem with our project, he just wanted to make sure we did it in the right place!

We sat and formed a circle that was perhaps eight feet across, closed our eyes, and started chanting.  It was one of those magical times when chanting Om starts my entire being to vibrate and feel like it is expanding and connecting to the universe.  I had experienced this sort of feeling when chanting this simple word before, so I wasn’t surprised with the feeling.  However, when I slowly opened my eyes while continuing to chant I was taken totally by surprise.  I found myself facing not just the circle of friends, but a huge column of energy shooting up out of the center of the pyramid!  It filled the space between us.  It was the size and shape of the trunk of a redwood tree.  It appeared to be flowing upward, reminding me of a huge jet of water shooting out of a fire hose or something like that.   The surface of the column shimmered and danced as it moved, forming a distinct boundary that looked like I could reach out and touch it.  However, this didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do since it was obviously so powerful and beautiful. It was not something I dared, or wanted, to interfere with.  I didn’t think to look up to see how far it went, but it went straight up out of my field of vision into the clear blue sky.  We continued to chant for ten or fifteen minutes longer, and that huge jet of energy kept rushing from deep within the pyramid, into the sky.  I felt that we had tapped into the energy that was the reason for the pyramid in the first place.  It finally dissipated, and we stopped chanting.  I had been absolutely, totally caught up in the power of the chanting and the power of the column of energy.  My body was alive and my soul was soaring.

Once we stopped, I looked around.  The first thing I saw was our big guard friend.  He had a huge grin on his face, smiling at us.  He gave us a big “thumbs up” sign to let us know that he knew that we had tapped into the energy of the pyramid.  Then I looked around to the rest of the people on top of the pyramid; they were all silent and transfixed in their spots.  They were all focusing on where we were, were all silent and everyone looked as dazed as I felt.  I believe that they not only experienced what I had seen, but were caught and moved by the energy just as I had been.  They all looked peaceful, content, and transported to “another place.”  This included all of the school kids who had stopped their running and yelling to stand and behold the miracle with us. 

I have never mentioned my experience to Heather or any of the other ladies in my group, so I don’t know if I was alone with my perceptions, or if we shared them that day.  I thought about asking them, but was afraid that talking about it would somehow dissipate the magic, turning it from something really special to just an imagined figment of my imagination.  I didn’t want to move it from a “felt” experience to a “thought.”  It really doesn’t matter too much if we shared the same thing or not, because I am positive that all of us on top of the pyramid that day shared a huge experience.  We might have experienced it differently, but I am sure that we all felt it.

This dream was the first that I am aware of where a Toltec teacher was helping and guiding me in a lucid dream. 

As the dream started, I was walking though the countryside toward a large city.  The road went through agricultural fields, over gently rolling hills.  It was a clear day, with blue skies and a slight chill to the air.  I could see the city off in the distance, but had a long walk ahead of me.  A car pulled up next to me and the driver, a man in his 40’s, asked if I would like a ride.   I accepted, and we continued on toward the city.  As we drove along he told me that he was going to be my teacher, and that he had something to show me.

We entered a large bustling city, which I assume was New York, or equivalent.  We found a place to park, and he said we had to walk through the city. 

When we got out of the car, I looked around and saw that the city was almost empty.  There were no cars or any other vehicles on the streets.  There were a few people on the sidewalks, but they appeared to be in some sort of suspended animation.  We were walking through a deserted and stilled city.  We walked down empty streets, looking at the skyscrapers and other buildings.  It was an eerie feeling, reading the street signs, looking into empty stores, walking across empty streets.  It was a little like what I imagine it would be to walk through the town of Chernobyl when it was evacuated after the nuclear power plant accident – except that there were motionless people in this city.

I then noticed that the people had started to move, but not with any direction; they were just milling around.  They saw us and were commenting among themselves about us. It was clear that they found us to be out of the norm, and to be frightening.  They pointed to us, and I overheard them telling each other that we were not the same as they were – to be careful of us.

I asked my teacher what this was about, and why was he showing me such an odd place?  He said that he wanted to point out that this is the normal situation; there are a few people who are “awake,” but mostly everyone is asleep and there really isn’t anything going on of importance – most people are just milling around using up their days.  There was really almost nothing in the cities, even though we think of them as being full of things.  He said that he brought me here because he wanted to be sure that I understood that in many ways the path I have chosen to follow is lonely and disassociated from most of the people around me. He said that I would find that most things that I previously thought were important don’t even exist.  Even those few people who do take notice do so from a distance.  They will be fearful because I would be different and unknown to them.  He said it isn’t all like that, but much of what I have come to view as full of important things is actually empty.  He then told me that he would continue to visit me in my dreams to help me along the path to enlightenment.

I don’t know if this dream was some sort of warning or just a statement of fact.  I have thought of it often over the years because it seems so true.  I had just finished a cruise in the Mediterranean that had a lot of the feeling of that dream.  The ship and other passengers were basically not there.  They were busy and seemed to be engaged, but were actually so far into their internal worlds that they missed most of what was happening around them.  Those few that I did talk to were hesitant to get any closer than just passing acquaintances.   When we went ashore to visit old ruins we saw and interacted very little with the peoples or places that we were traveling through.  It felt a lot like that empty city, full of people just whiling away their lives.

As far back as I can remember I have had vivid, fun dreams.  For example, I dream of flying on a regular basis. In these dreams I need a board like a swimming pool kick board to guide me though the air.  I start by giving a little jump heading toward the ground with the board held out in front of me sort of like diving into a pool.  Just before I hit the ground I gain enough speed to fly and then can turn toward the sky.  While the dreams are vivid, and sometimes easy to recall, they are always obviously dreams and things just seem to happen to me in them. I go along for the ride but don’t really have much control.  In fact, whenever I try to control them (such as when running away from a bad guy), I find that I am mired down in some sort of impossible situation where I can barely move, much less run.  The harder I try to move, the more difficult it becomes. However, after many years of experiencing these kinds of vivid dreams I started having dreams of an entirely different level of “reality.”  I started having what are sometimes called lucid dreams, dreams so real and so solid that my experiences of them have the same quality of being “real” as when I am awake – assuming I am ever actually awake.

Starting about 1995 I began having lucid dreams that are of an entirely different nature from my normal vivid dreams when I experience things, but somehow lack control.  These lucid dreams often include a small group of friends and/or teachers.  These dreams are extremely realistic; in fact they are so realistic that sometimes they involve group discussions with some of my Toltec friends where we are trying to decide the difference between these types of dreams and real life – often concluding that they are real life. For example, a few years ago I had a dream where Ramin and some of our friends were sitting in my living room trying to figure out if we were in a dream, or if we were actually awake.  Everything looked, felt, tasted and smelled normal.  We did all sorts of things to try to identify a difference, but couldn’t find anything.   There was nothing that we could find that gave it away.  At one point someone was arguing that it had to be real because they were having their own thoughts and I couldn’t dream their thoughts for them.  In this particular dream we couldn’t come to a decision until I woke up.  Then I got up from my bed and started into my “real” life, going to the bathroom and starting to take a shower – then I woke up again.  I found myself in bed again, wondering what that was about.  Mary Jo and I talked about this odd dream within a dream, and just sort of lay there warm and comfortable, when I woke up again!  Now it was getting spooky, how many times do I have to wake up, and how do I know when I am actually awake?  I guess this last one was the “real” one since I didn’t wake up again – but that is just a guess.

I used to try to see my hands in my dreams because that is what don Juan instructed Carlos Castaneda to do.  While it was very easy to see things and look around, it was extremely difficult to remember to look at my hands.  For one thing, it is quite difficult to even know that these dreams are dreams, they are so life-like that there is usually nothing that stands out and says “this is a dream.”  I finally decided that the solution to this problem is to periodically look at my hands when I am awake – on the off chance that I am really not awake but asleep dreaming instead.  This approach worked.  I found that it was relatively easy to look at my hands, all that I had to do was do it.  However, they are different looking in my dreams.  My dream hands have five fingers and a thumb.  The extra digit is a very useful thing.  Now I don’t get confused and wonder if I am awake or asleep; all I have to do is look at my hands and if there are five fingers, I know that I am asleep and dreaming.  I still don’t know if sometimes I have four fingers when I am dreaming, but at least some of the time it is obvious that I am dreaming.

This is very useful because it lets me know that I am dreaming, and then I can do things fully aware that they are dream actions.  Carlos’ book, The Art of Dreaming, discusses practices that can be done to strengthen and broaden dreaming powers.  He suggests things like learning to move purposefully.  As he indicates, after a little practice it is possible to control movements; however, I don’t normally do that while in these types of dreams. Instead I “intend” my movements.  I can just intend to be in a different place, and I am.  I practiced this one time while dreaming I was in a large courtyard with my brother Michael.  It started with him being at one end and myself at the other.  Then I just intended myself to be next to him, and I was.  I bounced around the courtyard like that for awhile, and then taught him how to do the same.  That was all that this dream included, it was just an exercise in moving from place to place.  I had another where I was in a room with a window.  Outside of the window was a grassy field, with a billboard off in the distance.  I practiced intending myself to the location of the billboard, and then from place to place after that. 

 In my normal dreams I do all sorts of things, but they are not necessarily under my control.  These dreams can be very vivid, but are not what I mean by “lucid” dreams.  Lucid dreams are somehow more than vivid dreams, in some mysterious way they seem to be somehow “real” rather than hallucinations.   After some practice I got to the point where it because easy to “intend” movement within a dream.  I finally got to the point that I can not only intend my dreaming movements, but I can intend the content of the dream.  I wake up so fully in these dreams that I can purposefully do just about anything that I feel is important to do.  Carlos indicates that after learning to move, change the content, and dream within dreams, one of the next steps is to start to identify the “real” things in dreams apart from the imagined things.  He says that there are “allies” that inhabit these types of dreams, that we can identify them as “sizzling” energy, and that we can make use of our relationship with them. He talks about pointing to things within the dream and if they are allies, they will sizzle.   I am at the point where that was the next step, but have stopped having these types of dreams altogether.  I have a feeling that I just don’t have the energy to deal with these allies yet, maybe someday I will and maybe someday I will return to this type of dreaming practice.

Even though I no longer seem to be practicing according to Carlos’ directions, I still have lucid dreams, I just don’t practice this kind of control.  These dreams are now almost always in the form of classes where one or more of my teachers is helping me along my spiritual path.  I get instructions, demonstrations, and “homework assignments” just as I do from my awake teachers.  I seem to have a male and a female teacher that keep coming back to give me instructions.  In addition, now and then they bring others with them.  Unfortunately, while I can recall the experience of having these dreams, I can’t recall the details of the teachings.  I am assuming that the lessons stay in my mind at some level, just not at a level that I have ready access to with my memory.  I wonder  if someday these experiences might become accessible again, just as Carlos describes his experiences with don Juan and the other naguals.  It really doesn’t matter much because it is clear to me that I am learning the lessons, even though I don’t recall them as normal memories.  They are just part of the mystery of it all. 

My encounter with an angel has made lasting and important changes to my life.  One of the obvious changes is associated with the nagging question of “who was that lady?” I assume that it all can be rationally argued by considering that the lady was just a normal person who stopped to help at the accident scene and that her use of the term “guardian angel” was purely metaphorical, rather than factual.

I encountered my first “angel” sometime in the summer of 1995 or 1996 in the tiny town of Zamora, California. I had recently joined the local volunteer fire department and was still quite apprehensive about going to automobile accidents for fear that I would do something wrong and hurt someone. Actually, “apprehensive” is an understatement, “terrified” is closer to the truth.

One afternoon I got a call on my fire department pager notifying me that there had been an accident on one of the main county roads just outside of town.  I quickly put on my “turnouts” and rushed off to the call, but came upon the accident before I managed to get to the fire department.  I parked my car and went to see what I could do.  The accident was a very serious one where a small car had been hit in the driver’s side door by the business end of a “harrow bed.”  A harrow bed is a large truck-based machine that is used to pick up and stack bales of hay in the fields.  It has a long “scoop” device that sticks out the front of the vehicle.  The scoop moves up and down so that it can slide under a bale of hay, picking it up off of the ground.  The bale is then placed onto a conveyor belt that moves it toward the rear of the vehicle where it is automatically stacked.  Since harrow beds are built on truck chassis, they travel on normal roads at highway speeds when going from field to field during the haying season. 

The driver of the car had pulled out in front of the harrow bed at an intersection, and the scoop device crashed through the door, crushing the driver to the right side, pressing her down into the lap of the passenger.  The mangled door and intruding scoop device held her down in a bent over, sideways position. Our problem was to safely and quickly get the driver and the passenger out of the car and into the waiting ambulances.  The car was so crushed that both of the ladies in the car were trapped. The driver was obviously very seriously injured with massive head and torso injuries.  The scoop end of the harrow bed was intertwined with the wreckage, and had lifted the front portion of the car off of the ground.  This event happened before the fire department owned a “jaws of life” device, so extrication had to be done with hammers, axes, saws, bars or whatever was available.  My job was to get inside of the car next to the women, calming them as much as possible while holding a tarp over them to protect them from broken glass, and do whatever I could to help them medically. 

The three of us ended up in a very tight position in the front seats.  We were covered up by the tarp. We couldn’t see what was happening outside, but we could hear and feel the banging and twisting of metal as the firemen worked at opening enough space to pull the women free from the wreckage.  It was pretty disorienting and rather frightening being unable to see out. The passenger did not seem to have a medical emergency, but was very hysterical.  She was screaming, crying and calling for her friend.  Her friend’s head was smashed into the passenger’s lap so she couldn’t move.  The driver was clearly in extremely serious danger, she was unconscious, bent in ways that are impossible for a normal person, and was bleeding out of her head, mouth and ears.  Blood was pooling in the passenger’s lap.  While it was clear that this was an emergency situation, there was nothing that I, nor anyone else, could do to help the driver because of the position of her body, the presence of the passenger, and the tangled mess of metal surrounding her.  All that I could do was try to calm the passenger and hold my hands on the driver’s head in a gesture of compassion. 

I quickly found myself enveloped in a very strange feeling of love and compassionate energy.  It felt like the three of us had been somehow transported into a new dimension where we were in a bubble, separate from the rest of the world.  The passenger calmed down and it just felt like we were somehow outside of time with the three of us joined together in a single energy field. 

After some time passed (I have no idea how long it was), the passenger asked me about her daughter.  This took me by surprise because as far as I knew there were only two people in the accident.  I asked her what she was talking about and she told me that her young daughter was in the back seat of the car.  I looked back there and found there was no back seat!  It had been ripped loose.  The car was crushed and mangled, but there was nobody else in the car.  I had the thought that the daughter must have been thrown out of the car and was lying injured in a ditch somewhere, unattended because we didn’t know of her presence.

I decided to get out of the car and go find the little girl.  As I started to do so, I came face to face with a very nice looking lady in her late twenties or early thirties.  She put up her hand to stop me and very forcefully said that I needed to stay where I was, that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, and that the little girl was uninjured.  She said that she was the girl’s “guardian angel” and had taken the girl out of the car following the accident.   She told me that she had taken the girl to a nearby parking lot and was helping her. She also said that my job was to stay with the mother and the driver, her job was to look after the little girl.  For some odd reason, I was convinced at that moment that she was just what she claimed to be (an angel), and that her directions were to be followed.  I returned to my job of holding the energy and light within the vehicle.

The other firemen finally got enough of the vehicle untangled and torn apart enough to be able to slide the driver out from under the steering wheel.  I helped pull the passenger out of the car and place her on a gurney.  I then returned to help extricate the driver.  The first task I had to do was to reach through the passenger side door, lying over the driver in order to get to her feet to move them out from under the pedals.  Once the driver’s feet were clear of the pedals, the EMT lady from one of the ambulances told me to help pull and lift her out, but warned me that when we pulled on the girl (the driver) we would probably pull her in half and she would die immediately!  My mind’s eye raced to the vision of seeing the girl’s guts and blood spill out as we tried to pull her free.  This image just about did me in, but somehow I stayed steady and calm.   Happily, the girl stayed in one piece and we were able to get her onto another gurney, perform some emergency procedures on her, and place her into a waiting ambulance. 

The passenger was once again screaming and crying in hysteria.  She wanted to see her daughter and wanted her friend to live.  I told her that I would get her daughter for her, but that she had to become strong for her daughter, she couldn’t be screaming and hysterical or it would hurt her daughter.  I held her hands and she finally calmed herself, and I went to get the daughter.  I found her easily, but the lady that I had talked to was nowhere to be found.  A few neighbors were taking care of the little girl, but there was no sign that the “angel lady” was there, or had ever been there.  I asked around but nobody had seen the person that I had talked to at the car.

Once the ladies were taken away by the ambulances, we heard nothing more about the two young women.  I wanted feedback from the hospital concerning their condition, but that was not available.

For the next few days I kept having very uneasy feelings about the driver.  My mind kept going back to her, drawn somehow not so much by the image of that day, but by her in the hospital.  I assumed that it was just that I was still in the drama/trauma of the event.  About a week later I was sitting in meditation under a tree in the early morning as the sun came up.  I felt strongly drawn to a mental image of the driver, who was in the hospital 30 or so miles away.  It was as if I was being pulled that way, more than just my attention being pulled – it felt like a physical force.  I was noticing that when all of a sudden my body started to shake and shiver as if something was physically shaking me about.  I felt hot, and then cold, and was shivering all over.  This didn’t last long, just a few seconds, and then I felt calm and peaceful.  It was like a wave had come over me and then passed, leaving a great calmness behind.  It felt like I was finally finished with my job, I was released and at ease.

That day we heard more about the women.  The passenger was not seriously injured, as I had expected.  The driver was very seriously injured with many internal injuries, broken bones, and a serious head injury.  She had been in a coma until that morning, when she finally woke up.  As far as I was able to determine, she woke up about the same time that I felt the shivering.  I later heard that the driver survived, but was confined to a wheelchair.  I don’t know what the final outcome has been for the driver, and have not seen either of the ladies since that day.

Since that encounter I have had a few experiences with “healing” events as described in other stories.  I can’t say that I healed anyone because that is obviously not true.  I was there when people got better, observed the changes that took place, and I felt what seemed like energy flowing from me to them – but that is all.   However, upon careful consideration it appears to me that these healing events are somehow tied into the encounter with “the angel.”  That seems to mark a transition in my life that opened up something in me that makes me feel more “connected” to people than I had before that day.  I think maybe that “connection” has something to do with compassion, and that compassion has allowed me to be more aware of others in need – and the act of being aware helps.

As a final note, there was a lawsuit concerning the design of the intersection and the county put up a new flashing light to control the intersection.  As a result of this accident, the fire department purchased a “jaws of life,” which has aided us to more quickly rescue several people.  There have been no serious accidents at that location since the flashing lights were installed.

I don’t have any idea why this story is titled “K,” but that seems to be the correct title.  That is the name that comes to my mind when I think of the event. The name seems to be the unspoken name of the mysterious entity in the desert. I had been following Carlos Castaneda’s adventures as described in his books and thought that I was well along with gathering enough personal “power” to be able to withstand an encounter with “the other side.” Apparently I was wrong about that.

It was during a school break that my wife and I decided it was once again time to take the kids to the desert.  I had been reading Carlos Castaneda’s books, and was hoping for an encounter of another kind.  Both of us were anxious to make sure our children experienced the desert enough for them to learn to love it (or at least, not fear it).  As usual, we went to the Turtle Mountains near the Nevada/California border, south of Needles.  We pulled my father’s small house trailer down there so we could have some of the conveniences of home.  It mainly afforded us a protected place to cook, and a way to get out of the wind if necessary.

On this trip we decided to approach the springs and the petroglyphs from another side of the Turtle Mountains, from the west.  We went to Vidal Junction, and headed west along State Highway 62 for a few miles, paralleling the Colorado River Aqueduct flowing from the Colorado River to Los Angeles.  We found a place where we could cross under the aqueduct, and headed north up the broad Chemehuevi Wash, following a faint jeep trail into the desert.  We bounced along for a few miles and finally decided that it didn’t make any sense to pull the trailer any further, so we unhitched it and continued north toward the petroglyphs in our Jeep Cherokee.  I was navigating by the seat of my pants, but finally managed to get to the edge of the Turtle Mountains where the petroglyphs are located.  We stopped to set up camp in the dry, sandy wash a few hundred feet from the petroglyphs.  I have always felt this area to be a very powerful place, a “power spot” in Carlos Castaneda’s terminology. Its power draws me, and I have a feeling of awe when among the rocks in this area.  Judging from the hundreds of ancient petroglyphs in the small area, it appears that others felt this power too.

After setting up camp we went to explore and look at the mysterious petroglyphs.  The area is strewn with big boulders that my father refers to as volcanic bombs, which I suppose best describes their genesis.  These have been in the desert sun for so many thousands of years that they have turned black on the upper surfaces.  Scientists have found that the black is caused by the growth of an extremely slow growing lichen related organism.  The ancient native inhabitants in the area took advantage of this black covering to use as a kind of black board.  They pecked lines through the layer, exposing the lighter underlying rock.  They could make patterns that have lasted for thousands of years using this technique.  Unfortunately, nobody has figured out how to date these patterns, so we don’t know how many thousands of years it might be. 

There appears to be a wide time span between the oldest and the newest petroglyphs because some have very little new overgrowth of “desert varnish,” as the growth is commonly called.  Others have such a thick varnish that the patterns are almost impossible to distinguish.  The current thinking among archeologists is that the age of the art spans a time of several thousand years, possibly more than ten thousand years.  An archeologist friend who accompanied my family to the area believed these particular petroglyphs were created on the shoreline of a vast ancient lake.  The modern day natives who live in the area usually say that these patterns were not made by their peoples, but rather by “the old people” who used to live in the area. The patterns do not appear to be of anything identifiable. They are geometric patterns, but do not appear to be pictures of things.  The origin, meaning, and age of this type of art in this part of the desert is a mystery. 

One of the rocks in this area has always intrigued me as being somehow very different from the others.  It is shaped something like a bed or an altar.  It is about five feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide and two feet high.  It is almost flat on top, and has a roughly rectangular cross section from above.  The side walls are approximately straight and vertical. It is covered with black desert varnish, except on the top surface.  The top surface of the rock does not have the normal pattern of lines but rather appears to have been beaten over the entire surface.  Every time I see this rock it brings to mind images of an Indian couple making love on top of the rock.  I don’t know why this comes to mind, but the image is very strong.  It feels like a powerful altar to me.

As we were exploring the area, my children did one of those kid things that drive parents crazy. They started banging rocks on top of this “altar.”  I consider it completely unacceptable to deface rock art, therefore I immediately tried to stop them.  However, before I could do that I was amazed at what was happening.  The altar was ringing like a bell as they hit it.  It was quite loud and very clear.  Curious about this, I got down on my hands and knees to inspect under the rock and found that it was sitting on three rocks. The entire underside was suspended about two inches above the ground.  It appeared to have been intentionally placed there.  I think it is a rock that was used as a bell or musical instrument.

We started looking at other rocks in the area and found three more “bell rocks” nearby that were sitting on other rocks holding them off the ground.  These three other rocks also had been hammered on rather than pecked to make lines.  Of course we had to try them out, and found that they all rang like bells when struck (our banging left no obvious marks).  Apparently, we found a whole orchestra of bell rocks.

I had a very strong desire to spend the night by myself among the petroglyphs.  I have always felt that this is an extremely powerful place, and the idea of sitting among them for the night was very attractive.

As evening came I decided to spend the night on the altar rock (the largest of the bell rocks).  It seemed to be the most powerful, drew me to it the most, and looked the most comfortable.  We put the kids to bed in the tent early as usual in the desert.  I went to the petroglyphs to spend the night alone.  As the sun was setting, I was sitting cross legged on the rock, facing the western horizon, and began meditating. 

I don’t know how long I sat there, maybe an hour or so – maybe longer.  The night was moonless, making it difficult to see the desert.  The stars came out and filled the sky as they can only do in the desert.  It was a beautiful sight and I felt relaxed, at ease.  After awhile I began to get a bit fidgety, sitting on that rock was fairly comfortable, but it was getting hard and my legs were starting to hurt.  I tried to relax to let the night go by.

Then I heard a sound off in the distance, toward the north.  It sounded like it was a large animal walking through the field of petroglyphs toward me.  I told myself that it must be a desert sheep; there are no dangerous large animals in that part of the desert so it should be fun to see whatever it was.  As it got closer, I could hear it much better and realized that it could not be a sheep because it was walking on two legs rather than four.  That really puzzled me since I could see the tent a little ways across the wash from me, and my family was in the tent.  They were not out walking around.  We had not seen any other campers (in fact I have never seen any other campers out there), so it seemed highly unlikely that it was someone visiting the place.  I just sat there, getting more nervous; wondering what could possibly be walking toward me in the dark. Whatever it was, it sounded BIG.  I could feel fear starting to tug at my chest.   As it got closer, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.  As I sat, it just kept coming and was getting pretty close when I finally lost my nerve.  I looked toward the sound, but could see nothing.  By that time I was in full panic mode so I jumped up, ran across the desert to the tent where my family was, and crawled in.  I could not bring myself to look back out to see what, if anything was out there.  I told my wife what had happened; she didn’t seem interested in checking it out either.  I don’t normally sleep inside of a tent when camping in the desert, but I did that night. 

I have no idea what was out there, but it felt like whatever it was, it was stalking me.  It felt big, powerful, nasty, and focused on me.  I have not had the desire, or nerve, to attempt a repeat of that particular experiment.  We spent the remainder of the week in the desert, having a wonderful time – but I didn’t try coming face-to-face with whatever powers are there.   

At about 7:00 am, on February 26, 1979 there was a total eclipse of the sun near the town of The Dalles in Oregon.  Being a life long crazy guy about the stars, astronomy, and physics I really wanted to see this event.  At the time, my wife Mary Jo, my year and a half old son Kevin and I lived in McKinleyville, on the far north coast of California.  A little 500 mile jaunt to the The Dalles on the northern border of Oregon seemed like a reasonable weekend trip (even though the 26^th was on a Monday and there was snow on many of the roads).  The physics department at Humboldt State University was making the trip and planned to watch the eclipse from an observatory on the north bank of the Columbia River.  However, since I had graduated from the department five years earlier, I was not invited to join their adventure.  That meant that I would have to make the trip on my own.  Mary Jo decided to accompany me with Kevin, which I found to be a great blessing that would really enhance the adventure.

My family and I headed north toward The Dalles on Sunday the 25^th hoping to be in a good location by first light Monday morning so that we would have a view as the eclipse started at 8:00am.  Since we were poor at the time, in order to save expenses we decided to camp on Sunday night, get up early to see the eclipse, and then drive home that same day.  We would miss only two days from work this way, so it was really just a long weekend adventure.

The drive over highway 99 to Redding and then north up highway 5 to the region was uneventful.  Since it was the middle of winter, the camp grounds in Oregon were not full – in fact they were empty.  Luckily they weren’t all closed.  We found a beautiful campsite next to a crystal clear river.  The campsite was set in a grove of aspen trees, many of which had recently been felled by beavers.  It was cloudy and cold, but at least there was no snow. 

We spent a cold night sleeping in the back of my work van.  The van was just a shell that I used as a work-truck when building houses.  It had no insulation or other fancy things (no carpets, back seats or anything else).  Moisture kept forming in the ceiling and raining down upon us as we slept.  Our son had a fever and didn’t feel well.  We tried to stay warm as we settled into our sleeping bags – but it was not a very restful night.

At first light we woke up and headed east, looking for a good place to observe the eclipse.  The weather was not promising because it was mostly cloudy – the last thing you need for observing an eclipse is cloud cover.  However, as we traveled east, the clouds started to break up, becoming patchy in the dark sky (the moon is always dark when an eclipse of the sun occurs because it gets between the earth and the sun, hence no sunlight falls on the side that we observe). 

We finally came over a rise and found ourselves on the ridge of a hill that sloped down to the east.  The Columbia River was to our left (north) and in front of us was a great rolling wheat field, disappearing over the eastern horizon in front of us.  It made me think of looking across the fields of wheat in the Midwest.  It was almost time for the eclipse to begin, so we had to stop if we were going to catch the show.  We pulled off the road with a couple of other cars, and got out to wait.  By this time it was almost 8:00 am and the sun was up.  We could see the observatory with the other folks from Humboldt to the north, just across the river. They were in the shadows of the clouds with no view of the sun, we were standing in the sunshine.

We got out to watch the show, but unfortunately our son decided it was time to scream for attention.  Not a gentle cry, or something that could be remedied with a little food, but rather a full blown tantrum that required some serious attention.  It was one of those terrible, distressing moments in my life.  My son demanded attention, but the eclipse was starting and totality would last less than three minutes.  We had just driven ten hours getting here, and it would probably be the last time in any of our lives that we would see such a thing.  We were going into a 15 minute event; my opinion was that we just let him scream for 15 minutes and deal with him later.  He was a very colicky child and did this often.  My wife couldn’t bring herself to let him be for a few minutes, the mothering instinct was just too strong.  I wanted to watch the event, so I did – but with a huge amount of anger being directed at me for ignoring my son.  She was extremely forceful about making sure that she was going to deal with him, and ignore the eclipse.  I finally decided that even though I was clearly getting into lifelong trouble, I wanted to watch the eclipse – she would only take glances now and then, so I think she missed most of it.  It was really too bad, because we were in for such an amazing experience.  For the next 15 minutes I kept trying to point out what was happening, but by then she was so upset that I didn’t think she could really see the magnitude of the beauty that was all about us.

The day was breathtakingly beautiful.  Large clouds were swirling through the sky, dark ominous rain clouds with large breaks edged with bright white borders.  The sun was low in the eastern sky, lighting the wheat fields in a way that made them like golden waves reaching toward the horizon.  The fields dipped off to the river on the north which cut along the base of a bluff, where the observatory was located – still in deep shadows and rain.

Then it started.  The first thing that I noticed was that the fields felt like they were pulsating with light.  At first it was a gentle pulsation about a second apart.  They gradually become more evident and I could see that they were bands of shadows racing across the fields from the east toward us.  The shadow bands, as they are called, went perpendicular to their movement.  They looked like waves in a pond where someone had splashed a rock on the far side from where we stood.  They were very distinct, dark shadows and bright sunlight alternated between the lines of shadows marching toward us.  As they crossed our location, the light level went from almost dark, to full sunlight, which accounted for the pulsing.  The pulsing got to be so strong that it felt like my entire body and the earth were pulsing in a giant coordinated unity.  It jarred me.  I felt my entire body react with each pulse, which got faster and faster with time.

I looked down to the ground and saw that the shadows of things (my body, arms, hands, the car, trees, etc) had somehow grown long feathery hairs.  The hairs looked to be about a foot long and were wavy, they edged everything.  I am not sure, but I think they began to grow on things themselves, not just their shadows.  For some reason this is difficult to recall, I am not sure if the “feathery hairs” were just on the shadows, or on things too.

So there I was, pulsing with the light, seeing hair-like projections on everything, watching the moon slip across the front of the sun though my welding goggle lenses, as the day got darker and darker.  I was totally amazed and transfixed by the experience.

Then the moon finally lined up completely over the sun for the beginning of totality.  Everything went totally silent.  The pulses stopped, the shadows vanished, it felt like the breeze stopped blowing, and all noises stopped – we were suspended in complete stillness and solitude, while in the sky the sun blossomed into a huge shinning mandala of golden light encircling the black disk of the moon.  The sun became the size of a basketball held at arm’s length in front of your face. It was no longer a solid object with a defined surface, but rather it was a wispy, glowing, beautiful thing surrounding the dark central disk of the moon.  We all stood in awe at the majesty and beauty of the sight and feeling.  The cold air settled in my bones as I watched for the almost three minutes of totality.

Then the pulses started up again, slowly at first but quickly returning to their rapid pace. It all repeated, playing backwards in time.  I could see that across the river the observatory never got a glimpse of the magic that was playing out on our side of the river.  Too bad their luck failed them on that trip.

After the event was completed I felt like I had been carried into a dream, I was just standing there feeling like I had been blessed with some sort of universal magic.  It was a totally awe inspiring and huge experience.  It was nothing at all like what I had expected.  I had expected to see the day get dark, I had seen photos of totality so I expected to see the corona beyond the moon, I had heard that it got quiet as the birds went to sleep.  However, I didn’t know about the shadow bands, feathery hairs, or the feeling that it all forced upon me.  It was truly an overwhelming experience.  I can understand why it was such a big deal by the ancient ones, it IS a big deal.

It was finally over, and my son had finally calmed down.  I was in trouble with my wife, but was pleased at having been able to observe such a magnificent sight. I am still sorry that my wife couldn’t find a way to set a few minutes aside to fully appreciate the beauty of the event.  We left to travel home, taking a short cut over the mountains near Crater Lake.  The road past Crater Lake was open, but the snow was 15 feet or so deep.  We traveled over the mountains through canyons of snow, vertical walls fifteen to twenty feet on either side of the two lane road.  It was beautiful, but a bit scary, to be in such wilderness in the dead of winter, with almost no other traffic on the road.

A few years later we happened to be traveling in the desert near Needles, California.  We had heard of an ancient native America rock art work next to the Colorado River.  It was called the Topoc Maze.  It is located on a gentle rolling desert hillside.  The native peoples of the area had moved rocks into long parallel rows, some with the dark desert varnish showing, and some with the white side showing.  This pattern results in waves of light and dark lines going across the hillside.  It is hundreds of feet across, with the lines staying parallel to each other as they wrap across the hills and valleys of the area.  My first and current reaction is that they recreated the appearance of the shadow bands in rock.  It looks just the same to me as what I saw in Oregon on that cold and beautiful morning.  I think that the maze could be dated by finding out the date of the last full eclipse of the sun to go across that region.  I wrote to a noted expert in the field and told him my theory.  He shot back that it was impossible, that the Indians never did anything that didn’t have immediate practical use and they would never make art the attempted to reproduce real experiences.  I thought it was a pretty odd response, but it didn’t do much to change my mind. I can understand how they might have found an eclipse a moving enough event to want to copy in on the ground for whatever purpose.

Here are a couple of short accounts of my brother’s adventures in Death Valley. I suppose they could be called coincidences, although sometimes I wonder just how far you can stretch a coincidence.  I was on the sidelines of these experiences, observing my brother but not experiencing anything “out of the ordinary” myself.

It was in the late 1960’s when a group of us from the Eureka area of northern California decided to take a road trip to Death Valley.  I don’t recall all of the people who were on that trip, but there were probably ten or twelve of us, approximately the same number of men as women.   One of the couples in our group had purchased an old school bus, and we made a group effort to fix it up to function as a house car complete with a picnic table bolted to the floor, beds and various types of comfortable chairs for the trip.  There was a large wooden platform mounted on the top where we could ride for a more scenic, albeit rather dangerous, view.  Of course, it might not have been very safe to change from the “upper level” to the main level while traveling because we had to do it by crawling out of one of the side windows and pulling ourselves up and over the side of the platform to the top.  As unsafe as that seems now, that is how we did it while going down the highway.  I considered us to be just a group of friends off on a desert vacation, but I suppose all who saw us considered us to be a bunch of crazy hippies.  Both descriptions were correct.  When crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on the way south, the toll taker didn’t believe that we were a “house car” so he boarded our vehicle to check it out.  Since the table was bolted to the floor instead of being loose, we passed as a house car and saved some bridge fare.

On our way through San Francisco with our old school bus, we started the journey in the pre-dawn hours from my parent’s home in Sonoma, ending at dusk in the desert on the eastern edge of Death Valley.  We entered Death Valley from the east side, down a winding narrow canyon in order to avoid tourists as much as possible.   Before descending into the valley we decided to stop for the night and camp in an open area that was surrounded on three sides by high, many colored rock cliffs.  We slept under the stars, which is how I always like to sleep in the desert so I can watch the beauty of the stars slowly circling overhead.

I woke up at my normal time before dawn when you can feel the air change to become cooler in advance of the glow of dawn.  When it got light enough to move around I found my older brother, Michael, sitting cross-legged facing the soon to be rising sun in the eastern sky.  As the light got brighter, the colors of the place intensified until we were sitting in the middle of an amazing palette of blazing colors on the walls of the cliffs surrounding us.  My brother complemented that blaze of color because he had been up early working with a box of pastels.  He had painted himself from head to foot with a wild, bright, sunburst design reflecting the reds, yellows, browns and whites of our surrounding – he was quite regal in his naked splendor.

I watched him for a while before asking him what he was doing.  He said that he was calling the lizard to come to him.  I hadn’t noticed that there was a fairly large lizard doing its morning “pushups” on a rock about thirty feet in front of him.  Wondering how this lizard calling was going to work out, I just sat still and watched.  To my amazement, the lizard slowly made its way across the ground until it came to Mike’s foot.  Then it climbed up on him, making its way up to Mike’s shoulder, turned facing the same direction as my brother, and seemed to settle down to watch the sun come up! There was my brother Mike and the lizard, waiting for the sun to come up over the cliffs and heat up the day.

Our next camping spot on the trip was to be at the Race Track toward the northwest side of Death Valley.  This place consists of a large, dry lake that has many small to medium sized boulders sitting on its surface.  The boulders apparently move about on the surface of the lake bed, as evidenced by trails that they leave in the hardened mud, attesting to their movement.  The interesting thing about this is that the trails go in all directions, even crossing one another at various locations.  It appears that the rocks do not move in a coordinated manner, sometimes some go one way, and sometimes others go another.  I have heard lots of theories about what causes the movement, and how the paths manage to cross each other, but none of the theories seem entirely satisfactory. 

The road to the Race Track is a very long, desolate, dirt road through the desert.  We had been driving for quite some time along this road, seeing no other vehicles, when we were stopped because a car was broken down smack in the middle of the road and we couldn’t get by.  In the car was a man, his wife and his teenage daughter.  Of course we got out of our bus to see what we could do to help, which apparently scared the man half to death.  (This was about the time of Charles Manson, which had people a bit nervous about hippies in the desert.) The man made his women sit in the car, roll up the windows, and lock the doors while he got out to talk to us.  He told us that his car had stopped running and wouldn’t start again. 

We flew into action, bringing out the large supply of mechanics tools that we had packed under the assumption that our old bus would break down, and started to work on his car.  He looked very apprehensive about all of us getting out of the bus, and even more so when we had him open the hood and we started taking things apart.  At one point we had removed the carburetor and had taken it completely apart in our search for the problem.  I understand  being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a couple of women, and a bus load of wild haired, oddly clothed hippies would make any sane person nervous.  We managed to get his car going (it was a carburetor problem), and he finally drove out of there – very relieved I would guess.  He was so anxious to get going that he neglected to thank us for our assistance.  We found his failure to thank us to be kind of funny, he surely would have if he had been in his “normal” mind – but this encounter was just too much for that.  I don’t think he was aware of it, but it was obvious that his daughter wanted to get out of the car and join our fun.  She clearly wasn’t afraid of the spectacle that we must have presented.

I found this entire event to be quite funny because of the range of points of view expressed by the various participants, and how that those points of view were shaping their perceptions and experiences.  Our little group of “crazy hippies” wasn’t really so crazy at all.  We consisted of a group of college educated and highly skilled friends and family, out for a fun adventure in the desert. When we came upon the stranded family in the middle of nowhere our goal was to help them out and make sure that they were safe – which we did.  The husband’s view appeared to be that was in great danger, first by being unprepared and stranded in the middle of the desert and secondly by encountering a bunch of strange people and being forced to accept their help.  The daughter’s view appeared to be that she was trapped stuck in the back seat of the car, rather than being able to get out and play with the hippies.  All of these views shaped our interactions and our emotions.  I found myself in a mental space where I stepped back and observed the event from the perspective of each participant, noticing the very different emotions that their individual assumptions were creating.

That night we camped next to the Race Track. In the morning we decided to go hiking for an adventure.  We left camp just after sun rise, heading across the flat, dry lake bed and over the hills.  We had no maps or other means of navigating; we were just planning on exploring the surrounding desert and return after making a large circle in the desert during the day.  As we were leaving camp, my brother told me that he was going to get a bird that day.  I found this to be a rather odd statement since there were very few birds in the desert that time of year, and we had nothing to “get” them with.  I just nodded and wondered what that was all about.

We hiked up hills, down into valleys and across the desert going no place in particular, just wandering around, exploring the desert.  At about lunch time we came upon an abandoned mine site. There were lots of old metal things, rusted vehicles, abandoned mine shafts and other evidence of mining activity.  There was also an old, abandoned house trailer.  The windows were broken out, and the door swung on its hinges, so it was obviously not really trespassing to enter it.  My brother entered first, and I followed him.  He entered through the back door and walked right to the front where the kitchen was located.  He stopped in front of a kitchen cabinet, opened the cabinet door, reached in and picked up a perfectly preserved beautiful little dead bird!  Its feathers were clean and shiny, with shades of blue and red glistening in the sun.  So this is what he meant; he indeed did get a bird that day.

This event occurred a few days before Christmas of 1968 when I was 21 years old.  My fiancé, Katie, and I were spending a few days over the Christmas holiday with her parents in Palo Alto, California (in “Silicon Valley”).  It had been a hectic year at college so we hadn’t yet finished our Christmas shopping. The two of us went to a nearby shopping mall (the Mayfield Mall) to see what we could find.  The mall was busy, but since it was early in the morning it was not packed or in a “Christmas rush” mode. It was kind of fun to just relax and watch people coming and going. The mall was all decorated in the spirit of the season, with Christmas music playing softly in the background.  Everyone seemed in a good mood that day. Since Katie was the one who was most interested in shopping, we decided that I would hang out in the open part of the mall, watching folks, while she did her shopping. 

I picked a spot near the main entrance that was out of the pedestrian traffic, but close enough to watch the comings and goings of folks.  I was in a covered courtyard that connected the entrance to the shops on either side of a wide hallway going off in an easterly direction.  There was a little roll-around flower cart next to where I was standing, and a bench about 20 feet away, facing me but facing away from most of the foot traffic. 

I was leaning against a railing along the wall when I noticed two men on the bench.  They were Hispanic-looking men, sitting and talking to each other.  One was an older gentleman wearing an old, slightly floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat and neat, clean, “farmer” cloths.  He was dressed like what I would expect an older, rural, Mexican gentleman to wear when he went shopping in town.  The other man was younger, slightly chubby, wearing slacks, white shirt and tie. 

At first I didn’t pay much attention to them because they were just a couple of guys sitting and chatting, probably waiting for their women just like I was.   However, I then noticed that they were watching me very intently, and apparently talking about me. This caught my attention, especially when I realized that I could easily hear what they were saying – in clear English with no apparent accent.  The old man gestured toward me and told the younger one that I was a physicist, and had worked at NASA.  (I was majoring in physics at the time and had spent a summer working for NASA at Moffett Field).  He then went on to describe my summer job at NASA and added other specifics about me that should have been impossible to know.  They were both watching me in a most unusual way, it felt like there were catching me in a “spell” of some sort.  I found myself connected to them, and oddly disconnected from the rest of the environment and people in the mall.  It was like I was floating in suspended animation wrapped in a cocoon with those two men. 

After a few seconds (minutes?) of this, I got a really embarrassed feeling because I felt that I was somehow being stripped naked by these guys.  In my embarrassment I stepped behind the flower cart to get out of the “heat” of the moment, and hide from them.  My action broke my spell and I was immediately overwhelmed with curiosity.  I quickly turned back, determined to go up to them and ask them who they were and how they knew these personal things about me.  I had the very clear impression that the two men were Carlos Castaneda and his teacher Don Juan and I wanted to know for sure.  It couldn’t have been more than two or three seconds before making this decision and turning back.  I spun around to confront them, but they were gone! 

I looked around the mall, but even though the mall floor was 60 or 70 feet wide, and there were only a handful of people on the floor at that moment, I could see clearly that they were not in the halls.  I wondered if maybe they had somehow gotten up and left through the entrance a couple of dozen feet away, which would have been the only possible way for them to have gotten out of sight.    I ran to the entrance and checked it, the attached hall and the parking lot, but they were not there.  My only explanation is that they vanished into thin air; they were just gone (or maybe hadn’t actually been there).

At that moment I realized that I had failed an important test that Carlos Castaneda had discussed in one of his earlier books.  Don Juan had told Carlos about “cracks, or slivers, of opportunity” that open into the other side of reality. He said that we have to stay awake to be able to jump into them at the moment they open.  Somehow those men opened such a crack of opportunity for me, but instead of reacting immediately to the opportunity, I become confused and embarrassed.  I missed the moment, and once I missed it – it had closed and was gone.   It became clear to me that one of the main things that a warrior on the path to enlightenment needs to do is become aware and quick enough to spot opportunities and jump – to jump or step through the opening.  It is like being a cat, watching and watching (stalking) for the moment, but once the moment is right, then putting all of your energy into pouncing to catch the opportunity.

Katie showed up looking for me and found me frantically running up and down the mall looking in vain for those men.  I knew that they weren’t there, but I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t overlooked some obvious and mundane explanation for their disappearance.  She just laughed at me as I babbled on about the weird non-encounter encounter. 

This story is about love, lust and heartbreak.  While this isn’t really a story of the “other side,” it is a time that fundamentally changed me in ways that are still unknown to me. This story concerns the first time that I learned that it is possible for me to lose connection with almost everything outside of the focus of my attention. 

At the time of this story I lived in a tiny house on Q Street, just west of downtown Arcata.  It wasn’t exactly a house; in fact it was barely a building.  The floors were rotten, the roof leaked, the porch was rotting off, there were rats running around at night, and a dried dead rat somewhere inside of the couch in the living room.  (The dead rat had stopped smelling long before I moved in.)  However, it was in a nice quiet neighborhood next to an abandoned saw mill and VERY affordable.  Part of the agreement that I had with the landlord was that in exchange for low rent I would tear the building down when I moved out!  I had cheap rent, but a difficult job to do at the end. 

At that time I spent quite a lot of time at my brother’s rooming house in town and knew all of the roomers.  One of the roomers, Bill, brought his girlfriend Darlene by to visit.  I liked Bill, but found his girlfriend to be mesmerizing.  However, since they were a couple I stayed out of it and didn’t do anything to interfere.  I just watched and appreciated her from afar.

The three of us got to be friends. One day they invited me to go to the beach with them.  We went to College Cove, north of Trinidad, for the day.  College Cove is a traditional college student hang out, featuring nude sunbathing, beautiful beaches, very cold ocean water, lots of beer, and occasional big parties.  At that time it was only used by younger folks because the access down to the beach was treacherous. Access was by way of a tiny slippery, steep, muddy trail down the hill from the bluff to the beach.  Darlene seemed to be having trouble navigating the trail, so I stayed with her and helped her down and back up at the end of the day.  On the other hand, Bill ran and slid down the hill and was on the beach long before we worked our way down. We hung out on the beach, just enjoying the water and beauty of the place.  Nothing special happened that day, we just talked and played as friends. 

I met Darlene the next day and she said that she had a wonderful time, really liked me, and wanted to do things with me instead of with Bill.  This was slightly confusing to me since she was my friend’s girlfriend.  I considered her “off limits.”  She explained her reasons, including the statement that she was going to break up with him in any case.  I agreed with her proposition to be more than mere friends and we started hanging out together as a couple. 

She was a theater major, so I spent a great deal of time visiting her in the theater department. I would stop by and visit as often as I could, thoroughly enjoying the other theater students.  I got to know everyone, was welcomed back stage during rehearsals and productions, got to help in the make-up room and building stage sets.  Darlene designed and made costumes, so I spent time in the costume department visiting her and her friends.  I was really amazed with the process of the process of painting very fluid looking watercolor paintings of the costumes, watch them be transformed into doll sized ¼ scale models, and finally into full gowns worn on the stage.

I was having a marvelous time.  Darlene and I spent most of our free time together talking, walking on the beach or in the woods, cooking for each other, making love, and all of those things that lovers do.  At one point she wanted to go to the Pleasure Faire in Marin County, so she made us really neat costumes.  She made my costume by purchasing standard patterns at the fabric store, then modifying them to fit her design and my body.  The Pleasure Faire was intimidating to me, but she got right into the swing of things and played the part to the fullest.  She ended up on a stage giving a production, and talked and acted in the style of the ancient times.  She was being very theatrical and visible; I was being very shy but enjoying being included in the “inner circle” of theatrical folks. 

Fall came, and we just continued to enjoy our time together.  I was in bliss, feeling so open and free because I had found someone who always looked delighted to see me, who welcomed my attentions, who seemed to love me, and who just liked to play. I found it amazing that I could be on top of the hill on campus and could pick her out of the crowd of hundreds from far away just by the way that she moved and walked.  It was almost as if it was a black and white view, but she was colored bright yellow.  My attention would instantly go to her, even when it seemed impossible to distinguish her in the crowd.

One day I met her in front of the theater building, and while talking to her on the sidewalk she told me that we were through.  She said that I was being too forceful, was paying too much attention to her, and that she felt too confined by my attentions.  I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t talk.  She just said that it was time to move on, and that our relationship was finished.  And then she walked away.

I was stunned.  The day instantly turned from being a pretty fall day to one of pain, fear and darkness.  I could hardly breathe, and couldn’t think at all.  My mind just started swirling around as I replayed the events that we had enjoyed together wondering how I could have so missed the clues that must have been there.  Up until that instant I had no idea that we weren’t both feeling the same.  Obviously I was wrong; I would never have considered breaking our relationship off because she wanted to spend too much time with me!  She had a much different view of things than me, but I was blind to the differences until that moment.

I wandered around for a couple of hours in shock, trying to understand what had just happened.  I couldn’t. It was too unexpected and too far from anything that I understood.  I finally decided to take my old Renault for a ride to see if that might help clear my head and soothe the pain.  I had no idea where I was headed, in fact, I wasn’t really headed anywhere. I just wanted to do something to occupy my mind.  I went east on highway 299, toward the Sacramento Valley.  The highway was steep and twisting, I was driving too fast. 

I eventually came to the town of Willow Creek and decided that I had driven enough and had been lucky to have stayed on the road.  It was getting late in the afternoon, and I decided to stop at a local bar and have a beer before returning home.  I pulled into the parking lot of the first bar that I came to, which was an old time rustic affair.  The front door faced on the street, but I entered through the side door to the parking lot.  It took my eyes a little while to get used to the darkness.  I walked up to the long bar and ordered a beer.  At the far end of the bar, near the front door, there were four or five guys who obviously worked in the woods because they were dressed in the traditional black pants with the cuffs torn off (to let them rip should they get caught by a cable or snag of a tree), plaid shirts with suspenders, and boots.  They all appeared to be local Indians. I guessed they were probably from the nearby Hoopa reservation.  I didn’t pay much attention to them.  There was also an “older” white guy and his much younger, blond girlfriend standing near where I had ordered my beer.

The old guy started up a conversation about nothing in particular.  He was a friendly, jovial kind of a guy who seemed to be enjoying himself and his lady friend.  I was immediately attracted to the blond, even though she appeared to be completely out of place because of  her dress and manner.  She was obviously a city lady, probably from Los Angeles.  My first reaction was that she was a “floozy” but found her to be pretty, engaging, flirtatious and funny.

I finished my beer and started to leave, but they asked me to stay and have a beer on them.  That sounded good to me, so I let them buy me a beer and settled in to talk a bit. The man then started to tease me about my pony tail and long beard.  I took it as a joke, and just played along.  Then he pulled on my beard, which I didn’t like much.  However, when I showed a bit of a reaction, he bought me another beer – which settled me down again.  His girlfriend started flirting with me, which caught my attention – even though she was ten years older than me, she was quite attractive.  They played back and forth for awhile, doing things to irritate me, and then soothing me.  He encouraged his girl to flirt, then would get pushy about it.  It was an odd little cat and mouse game.  I would start to leave, he would buy a beer.  I would start to get angry; she would snuggle up and flirt with me.  I was getting kind of disoriented, as well as pretty drunk.  The Indians at the other end of the bar were watching, but not joining in the activities.

At one point he grabbed my pony tail and pulled me along the bar.  This really got me mad.  I stood up to him and said that was too much, if he wanted to act like that we could go outside and have a fight. I was pretty strong at that point in my life, and felt like I could take on anyone.  This was not my normal way of acting, but for some reason that is where I ended up that day.  He just laughed at me and asked if I knew who he was.  I said I hadn’t a clue, but that it didn’t matter, I wasn’t putting up with his actions any longer.  He introduced himself as “Rocky.”  I said, “nice to meet you Rocky, I am Charlie.”  Then I reiterated my challenge, which he turned down.  He then bought me another beer, and left with his girl friend.

Now I was sitting alone at the end of the bar furthest from the Indians.  I could see that they were pretty drunk, and were not looking at all friendly.  In fact, they were looking positively hostile.  The bartender came over and said that he heard them talking among themselves and that they were planning to beat me up and steal what little money I had in my pocket (they wouldn’t have gotten much) when I left the bar.  This was a problem! 

The bartender asked if I knew who I had been “playing” with.  I said I had no clue.  He then told me that I had just asked Rocky Marciano (the World Heavyweight boxing champion) to go fight in the parking lot!  I guess I lucked out when he wouldn’t take me up on the offer. I think by the laws of the day he couldn’t fight me or it would have been attempted murder.  The bartender told me that Rocky came every year to Willow Creek to hunt deer, fish in the rivers, and just spend time in the mountains. 

As I was sitting there wondering how I was going to get out of there alive, Rocky walked back in.  He said that he was worried about me and the Indians, and had come to rescue me.  He walked me to my car and said goodbye in a nice friendly way. I was relieved that I no longer had to try to figure out how to get out of there.  (Rocky was killed in a plane crash the following year at the age of 45, so he wasn’t really such as old guy after all.)

By now it was dark and raining.  The drive back down off of the mountain was going to be a little more difficult because it was difficult to see, the roads were slick, and I was drunk.  I was driving too fast down the hill going around a sharp turn when my headlights went out.  Now I was in real trouble, all of a sudden I couldn’t see the road.  I tried to remember the corner, but hadn’t been paying all that much attention. 

Then I noticed smoke and fire coming from under my dashboard, so I guessed that the wires had burned and shorted.  I reached under the dash with my right hand while steering with my left, grabbed a handful of wires and crushed them together.  Amazingly, the headlights came back on so I could see to get around the corner.  The wires were still burning and sparking, burning my fingers and the palm of my hand.  However, I could at least see and made it around the corner.  I stopped the car by the side of the road and checked out the wiring.  It appeared to be working, so I continued down the hill to home.  I finally made it home and fell exhausted into my bed, worn out by a day that seemed to go on forever.  

In the morning when I woke up it felt like I had woken up from a huge dream.  It seemed like I had been in some kind of trance during my time with Darlene.  I was unable to recall many of the details of what had happened during that period of time.  I tried to think about how long it was, but couldn’t really put a date on it. I thought that it must have been a year or more, but that didn’t seem right because the seasons hadn’t changed and things that happen during a year hadn’t.  Confused, I went to find my brother to ask him what the date was.   It took me awhile to figure out the month, and then the day, and found it had only been a couple of months.   I searched around papers on my desk and figured out what classes I was enrolled in, and what I was doing there.  Somehow I hadn’t flunked out of my math and physics classes, but I think I missed almost everything being taught.  I found my school books and some homework that I had somehow done.  I must have been attending classes and doing things, but I didn’t recall it then, and still don’t have any memory of those activities.  I managed to pass all of my classes, but only by attending them in some kind of a fog.

It felt like an extra year in my life.  I had all of these experiences, all that I would expect in a year or year and a half, but it only took two months.  It remains an odd period of my life that just doesn’t fit into the rest of it.  It was a kind of side trip into love and lust, ending in heartbreak.  I was crushed for weeks because I missed the feeling of bliss and joy that had made time stand still for me, but was finally out of my trance.