When I was growing up there were family stories and jokes about our “family” ghost, Mr. Brown.  He was mentioned in passing, half in jest, whenever something was out of place, or if someone heard an unexplained noise.   I was never quite sure if these explanations were meant to be true, or if they were just little jokes.  I am still not sure about that, even in my own mind. 

For the first year of my life, we lived in a little old farmhouse in Novato, California.  The building had been built by my mother’s family and was located on a family farm not far from town.  At some time prior to our moving in, the house had been used as the local post office.  According to our family story one day a dead man, Mr. Brown, was found floating in the water trough in front of the post office.  Mr. Brown had come to a violent end, either being drowned or possibly murdered and then thrown into the trough.  In any case, he ended up dead in the front yard of the building.  The murderer was never caught.  After Mr. Brown’s death, stories were told around town that the house had become haunted by his ghost.  Apparently, those stories did not stop my parents from purchasing the house and associated ranch for their new family.

When I was about one year old, my folks sold the ranch in Marin County and we moved to the small town of Sierra City in the gold country of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  At that time, Sierra City was a real old-time mining town – complete with the 85 year old lady, Myrtle, who would sit on the front porch of the grocery store telling stories of the old days when the gold rush was on.  She kept a loaded 45 caliber revolver nearby for protection. 

We lived in an apartment over the grocery store, next to the fire bell that was mounted on two tall poles.  The fire bell had a pair of ropes hanging down with “D” handles that were used to ring the alarm when needed.  Those ropes were just right to make a swing for us kids, which was okay as long as we were very careful not to pull harder on one rope than the other, because that would cause the bell to ring.  This created a “false alarm” and was definitely frowned upon by the adults of the town.  My folks ran a small dry goods store that shared a building with the post office.  In the winter months, they ran a rope-tow ski slope that featured an extremely steep and short slope that ended abruptly at the banks of the Yuba River.  You had to be a good skier to avoid going into the icy river at the bottom of the hill. In his free time during summer months my father was a carpenter.  This was a wonderful little town for a young child.  During this time, whenever something odd would happen, such as an unexplained noise, or a door shutting by itself, it was explained as being the works of Mr. Brown.  When I was very little, this made sense to me and I believed that he was nearby.  I just assumed that there was a friendly ghost hanging around most of the time.

We moved to the town of Sonoma when I was almost five years old.   Apparently the ghost moved with us, because my parents kept talking about Mr. Brown doing things.  They explained that he seemed to like our family and had moved along with us.  This was a pretty easy way to account for the many odd little things that happened, always half joking and half-serious.  I think my folks almost believed in their story of Mr. Brown.

Every Christmas we had a bell-shaped music box that would play a Christmas song if you pulled down a string hanging from the bottom.  It was kind of fun to pull the string down now and then to get a little Christmas cheer.  One year a few days before Christmas my father was sitting by the fire reading a book around 5:00 o’clock when the Christmas bell chime went through its song without being started.  That was the first evidence that I am aware of “Mr. Brown” doing anything more than opening and closing doors, moving papers around, and other things that could easily be explained away as the wind and the actions of children.  I didn’t really believe in Mr. Brown, but I kind of liked the idea of having a friendly ghost around the place.  It can be fun to have an imaginary friend.

A few years after the Christmas bell incident, I saw Mr. Brown one evening in my father’s shop.  I was about ten or twelve years old at the time, and was working on a project in my father’s garage shop.  It was early in the evening, not quite dark, when I “felt” a presence with me in the room.  At first I thought it was my older brother, father or perhaps a friend – but when I looked up from my work, I was alone.  I decided that I was just imagining things, so I went back to working on my project.  Then I felt really weird and the hair on the back of my neck rose.  I was really feeling something this time.  I looked up again, and there was a person standing in front of me, floating a foot or so above the floor.  It was a thin man, in his early thirties or so, standing in front of the workbench watching me work.  He didn’t make any large moves, or acknowledge my noticing him, he just seemed to watching me work.  However he wasn’t a normal man, he wasn’t solid – I could see though him.  He was more like what I would now image a hologram to look like.  Very clear, easy to see, but obviously just made of light, not made of a solid substance.   We stood watching each other; I was transfixed by seeing Mr. Brown for the first time.  After a few minutes of this I decided that I should go get my brother and let him see the apparition.  I told “Mr. Brown” to stay where he was, I would be back in a minute and that I wanted to introduce him to my brother.  I went into the house to get my brother to come see this, but of course by the time we got back the ghostly man was gone. 

It seemed like he stayed around my family for quite some time after that, and always felt like a friendly, comfortable being to me.  I was never frightened of him or the idea of him.  I kept hoping for another chance to see him – but never did.  When we all moved out of the house and my parents sold the place he seemed to finally go away. For awhile it seemed that he had followed my brother and me to Arcata where we went to college, but then he just faded away.  I have not felt his presence for many years.  I kind of miss him. I liked having him around – looking after us from his secret place.

This story is my first memory of having a really weird experience.  It is not only my first memory of such an experience, but remains by far the most powerful and awe inspiring of my life.  I am not sure of the year, but I believe that I was around five, or possibly six years old, which would make is somewhere around 1952 or 1953.  The anesthetic (probably ether) was administered by dropping a liquid onto a cloth face mask.

When I think back on this experience, I don’t just recall it – I experience it once more.  I sometimes think that I must have almost died during that operation.  My impression of the event was that I experienced the dissolution of my body and rejoining of my mind with the cosmos.  Recalling this event reminds me that we are only here for a moment of time, only a temporary combination of star dust that experiences life for a brief time, and then goes back to where it comes from.  As the bible says; “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”  I learned that life is all a dream, but a dream of reality that is real. The reality is energy and light.

When I was a little boy of about five years old I had been having chronic throat problems diagnosed as tonsillitis.  My parents and doctor decided that I needed to have my tonsils removed.  The doctor and my mother assured me that it would be quick and simple and that I won’t feel a thing.  Being a young child, I believed them.  Not only was it supposed to be quick and easy, but I was told that I would be allowed to eat as much ice cream as I wanted after the surgery.

The big day finally came when I went to the hospital.  I was told to put on a silly gown with no back, and get into the hospital bed.  It was slightly scary, but since my mom was with me and she seemed completely at ease, I was more curious than frightened.  After a short wait a nurse wheeled me down the hall to the operating room.  I recall watching the lights and ceiling tiles go by overhead as the nurse pushed me along.  When we were finally in the operating room, I looked into a big bright light above the bed. The doctor put a cloth mask over my nose and mouth.  He said that he was going to help me go to sleep and that when I woke up the operation would be all finished. He then took a little liquid (ether) from a bottle with an eye dropper device.  He asked me to breathe deeply and count from one to ten as he put drops of the liquid on the mask.  I took a breath, counted “one” and thought that he wasn’t going to be successful because nothing seemed to change.  After “two” I noticed that I was getting a little dizzy.  By the middle of “three,” I was launched into the most amazing experience of my life. 

I found myself looking into a dark night sky, full of bright stars.  I was not on the earth, but was floating in space completely comfortable, warm and at ease.  Then the sky slowly started to slowly spin around a point directly above me like a giant pinwheel.  As it spun, the sky started to change shape, forming a tunnel leading away from me into the distance. It was a little like I would imagine if I were to look directly up into the bottom of a big, slow moving tornado. 

What was even more amazing was what was happening to my body.  It started by becoming fluid feeling, as if it were made out of something like a big bunch of silly putty.  I could feel my arms and legs growing, and twisting in ways that were clearly impossible.  As I twisted and lost shape, I started to move into the bottom of the spinning tunnel, being pulled further and further into it.  Faster and faster the tunnel walls turned, and faster and faster I shot up the center of the tunnel.  After a bit my body started feeling like it was not only twisting and distorting, but was starting to come apart – all of the connections were still in place, but no longer felt connected.  My face and body distorted until I was just a blob of energy and matter, no longer in the shape of my body.  The tunnel got narrower as I moved up, and turned faster until it was a rapidly spinning tornado of energy and lights, carrying my distorting body up through the center of the vortex.

I noticed that there was an end to the tunnel.  At the very far end of the twisting tunnel there was a tiny dark spot which was rapidly growing bigger and bigger as I got closer to it.  As I neared the end of the tunnel, I could see through the hole to …. nothing.  I was still thinking and perceiving clearly, and understood that once I shot though the end of the tunnel I would enter a place of nothingness; a complete and black void.  At first that frightened me because it was so unknown.  It was bad enough to be twisting, turning and distorting inside of a giant spinning tunnel, but to be in nothing was frightening.  It wasn’t terrifying, but certainly not something I was looking forward to.  I found myself picking up a huge amount of speed, approaching what felt like the speed of light and everything was flashing by as a blur. The tunnel was getting narrower, getting very close to my body as it whirled around me.  It was obvious that I was not going to avoid the transition at the end of the tunnel, and found myself being really curious about what was going to happen next.  I started to almost look forward to the event of entering into nothingness.

Then I shot through the hole, into the void.  As I crossed the boundary, my body exploded into trillions and trillions of tiny particles that flew off in all directions into the great void.  All went silent, time stopped; motion became fast and slow all at the same time because there was no “thing” such as time and distance to measure them by.  I was just floating as trillions of tiny pieces, but I was still thinking, somehow I still had my mind.  I could still perceive, and could still think, but I was just part of an infinite, timeless void.  I floated like this for what seemed like an eternity in complete peace and joy.

Then I heard a voice.  It was very far away and very quiet. The voice was calling my name over and over again, soft and lovely and attractive – pulling me toward it.  I finally realized that I was supposed to go to the voice, and slowly started forming my body again.  When I finally opened my eyes I was looking into my mother’s face.  She was gently calling my name.  She looked pleased to see me open my eyes, and said that it was all over and that I was okay.

As I lay there trying to complete the reformation of my body, I was thinking that they should have prepared me for this wild journey; they should have let me know what I was going to experience.  Of course, now that I look back on it, they had no idea what was going to happen to me.  Since then I have talked to many people who have been operated on using ether, and none of them experienced anything at all like my wild ride to infinity.  A while ago I was listening to a friend tell about a “near death” experience that he had and it seemed very similar.  This makes me wonder if maybe something went wrong during the operation and I died.  Maybe the experience was my death, and they managed to bring me back to life.  I don’t know. All that I know is that it is my oldest recollection of an altered state of consciousness.

Whatever it was, it was by far the most dramatic and most enduring experience of my spiritual life.  I felt like I joined with the infinity, sometimes I still feel I never really came all the way back. The experience changed me forever in many good ways.  I feel like I am sort of half way between worlds, one foot in the infinite, and one on this earth.  And by the way, I really didn’t want the ice cream after all, I wanted steak instead.

I refer to the experiences described in these pages as “experiences” rather than “events” not so much because they weren’t events, but rather because I have no independent “proof” that they actually occurred, or occurred as I describe them.  All that I can honestly report are the memories, which I have attempted to describe without embellishment or explanation.  I have attempted to stay within the guidelines of Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday, “All we want are the facts, ma’am.”   I am attempting to merely report, not interpret or otherwise assign any “higher” meaning to the experiences.  Of course, in the still of the night I sometimes wonder if there is something behind these experiences, some “secret” that I can use in my life.  (However, I have no knowledge of any hidden meaning, or hidden reality.  All that I have are the memories.)  

After telling a friend one of these stories, he wanted to know when these experiences started.  As I think back in attempting to answer his question, I find that maybe there was no starting point – they have been a part of my life from my earliest memories.  My first “memory” is of the moment of birth as a very physical feeling of pressure, squeezing, and my nose being smashed flat against my face.  Sometimes when calmly resting or meditating I recall the feelings of that early experience.  The memory takes the form of physical feelings of pressure and movement.   

A brief history of my life might be useful to help you understand some of what might have formed my current outlook, and might have been instrumental in my taking note of the experiences described in this book as something worth remembering.

As a very young child I remember having “invisible” friends.  While they were invisible, nevertheless they were real to me.  We talked, laughed and played together.  My mother tolerated them until I reached school age – at which point she took me aside and told me that while these friends might be fun to play with, they weren’t actually “real” and I had to stop playing with them, and had to stop believing in them.  She told me that she knew what I was doing because she did the same as a young child, but that it just doesn’t work with other people who don’t understand.  I remember that it was a very sad day for me because on that day as I agreed to let them go, it felt like moving away from my best friends.  Even though I agreed with her that I would stop talking and playing with them, I silently promised them that I would not forget them or make them go away. 

After that day I didn’t interact with these friends.  However, I think I was always a little different from most of my peers.  For example, when in the third grade other kids would play ball and other games during recess, I liked to go into an area near the playground where the grass was tall and I was hidden.  In the springtime I loved to lie back on the sweet, soft grass and watch the clouds drift overhead.  There were almost always one or two friends who would join me as we watched all kinds of animals and other things in the clouds.  If there were no clouds, I would lie on my stomach and watch the tiny, brightly colored flowers and all of the little bugs crawling through their miniature forest.  I didn’t feel anti-social in any way, just not interested in many of the normal “kid’s” games.  During summer months I would gather up a friend or two and we would hike all day in the forest and hills near my home.  We would start out right after breakfast  with my dog, CaseC (we got him at the pound, and he was in Case C), and roam for miles and miles exploring and imagining what it must have been like hundreds of years ago.  My mother never questioned where we were going, or what we were doing.  The only rule was to get home before dark.  I started doing this when I was about nine, and kept it up through most of high school years.

When I was around fifteen years old it seemed like my invisible friends were back once again.  They were still invisible, and they never actually spoke to me – but I “felt” them as a presence.  They make me feel like I am never truly alone; I am always in the presence of friends.

During high school I was a bit of a “problem child.”  I was on the “college prep” track, but was not allowed to attend a lot of the classes.  I think I was too disruptive, and there was no other place to put kids like me.  In those days there were no “special” classes or avenues for those of us who were too interested in the subject matter.  I was “kicked out” of Biology class by being sent to the creek behind the school to collect euglenas.  The teacher said I should be able to spot them by eye, but since they are less than a 1/100 of an inch long, that was unlikely.  I should have researched the issue to figure out actually how to catch those little guys, but the truth was that I was happy to be spending time on the banks of the creek.  It kept me out of the classroom for most of the year, and I had a great time hanging out in “my” creek.  I still had to do the homework, and had to attend class for labs and tests – but the rest of the time during the biology class I was free to explore and observe in my little wild part of the campus.  I also got kicked out of Chemistry class with two other boys.  We had to spend the lecture time in the lab, which wasn’t a very safe option for the three most inquisitive boys in the class.  I think it was sheer luck that we didn’t blow up the lab, burn the building down, or poison ourselves.   For example, one morning one of the brighter boys in school and I were fooling in the lab during lecture time.  We were “testing” a rather large electrolytic capacitor with a power supply, charging and discharging the capacitor to see how it worked.  I am not sure exactly what caused the explosion, but the capacitor blew up with the sound of so much dynamite, throwing the pieces of the metal case and the inner parts throughout the lab space.  We were startled, but luckily not hurt.  The teacher opened the door to the lecture room to and asked what had happened, then closed the door without a word – acting as if nothing had happened!

Another class from which I was barred was an English class.  I had to spend the entire year in a room across from the normal classroom.  Luckily, after a couple of months of “solitary confinement” two very nice girls were sent to join me.  We wrote stories and poems and generally had a good time.  Before long, I convinced them to help me create a campus literary magazine that featured stories, poems and other writings by students from around campus.  We got permission to use the mimeograph machine to publish it.  That magazine continued for a few years after we graduated, but finally faded away.

After graduating from high school I found that I had a choice of going to war in Vietnam, or going to college.  I chose college.  However, I discovered a major problem when signing up for school.  They wanted me to declare a major, and I had no clue what that might be.  I finally decided to go through the college catalogue and mark out those areas that I felt I couldn’t do for one reason or another.  It took me several days to work my way down through the list, finally coming to the point where there was only one unmarked major – physics!   So I declared that as my major.  This was a much bigger decision than I understood at the time.  For one thing, physics is HARD – very hard.  The old stuff (Newtonian Physics) was pretty easy since it was all about falling apples, levers, rolling balls, rocket ships, flying bullets and things like that.  However, once past those very tangible topics it got really weird really fast.  All of a sudden I found that questions of infinity, the origin of the universe, quarks, leptons, energy fields, variable time, variable mass and all kinds of wacky concepts were the topics of study.  It was all about the tiny, the huge, the invisible, waves, entities that are waves and particles simultaneously and much, much more.  I found it almost impossible to concentrate on the topics because I was so enraptured with the ideas of how very different the universe and all things in it are than what we think they are.  Obviously, reality was nothing like what I experienced, or what I had come to believe in.  At one point a professor told me that I needed to stop trying to understand it all and to just “do the math.”  Even math had become such a terribly abstract thing that I couldn’t figure out how to do it any longer.  By the time I was finishing up my senior year I was lost and could find nothing to hang on to.  Luckily, I realized that I had already taken enough classes to graduate, so I did – without finishing the last class that was offered (advanced quantum mechanics).  Education in physics had a profound impact on my “spiritual” view of the world – it shook it down to the point where there was no longer any ground to stand on.  I came to believe that there is not only nothing but tiny particles and energy, but there actually aren’t any tiny particles either – it is ALL just energy!  What we think we know is just in our mind, we actually “know” nothing at all. 

While immersed in physics and math (the language of physics), I also had to take all of the requisite “general education” courses.  One of my big concerns was the requirement for taking a speech class.  The idea of writing a speech and then presenting it was rather terrifying.   Luckily, about that time the school hired a “speech guru” who was a great presenter.  He was one of those people who can stand in front of a crowd and rally their support for just about any cause.  I guess the word for this attribute is “charismatic.” The women all were in love with him, the men respected him and didn’t even seem to mind their women hanging all over him, and the university seemed to think that he spoke for them.  This was during the time of the Vietnam War protests, which gave him a natural topic and audience.   One day I noticed that he was teaching a class in “interpersonal communications” that met the “speech” requirement, and didn’t involve writing or presenting speeches.  All that was required was talking to people!  I signed up immediately, greatly relieved that I didn’t have to stand in front of a group to give a presentation.

Actually, it was a bit more complex than just talking to people – it was really a lot more about listening to people.  The class included a wide range of topics including verbal and non-verbal communication issues.  I found this to be a very exciting class because it clarified and made explicit topics that I only knew about from my “intuitive” knowledge.  Not only did I get an “A” in the class, but the professor hired me to help with future classes as his classroom assistant.  During this time I discovered that being charismatic is something that can be learned – there are techniques and “tricks” to get people to believe and get emotionally involved with your point of view.    He showed me many of these tricks, and gave me an opportunity to try them out.  They work!

The field of interpersonal communication caught my attention, and started me down a path of psychology with the idea of becoming a therapist.  This was during the hay day of “encounter groups.”  This approach seems to have fallen out of favor, but in general it consists of a group of individuals who engage in intensive verbal and nonverbal interaction, with the general intention of increasing awareness of self and sensitivity to others, and improving interpersonal skills.   I attended many of these sessions more as an assistant leader than as a member of the group.  However, because of the nature of the technique, I found it impossible to avoid becoming engaged at a pretty deep level.  Over time I became skilled at leading these groups, and was recognized as a person who could be helpful to others.  I thought I was on my way to becoming a healing therapist.

However, after a time I started to realize that it was all about ego, my ego and the egos of the leaders and teachers.  We were manipulating people’s emotions, self-images, and feelings of self-worth.  That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as it is done in a caring and helpful way – but it became rather overwhelming to me.  I found that I could use techniques to get people to like me, respect me, and in some cases think that they loved me.  I found that I could use techniques to help people feel good or bad about themselves.   I could adjust their self-image and feelings of worthiness (for good, or not so good).  I started to discover that some people had come to depend upon me to keep them feeling good – and if I wasn’t available they felt lost or sunk into depression.  I found this to be most perplexing and quite scary because I had no intention of manipulating anyone or of wanting anyone to become dependent upon me.  I was faced with two choices – to learn how to do all of this in a way that was somehow directed and owned by those in need, or get out of the field.  I got out.  I dropped all ties with the groups, with the psychology department, with the communications classes – everything.   I went back to my world of science, technology and mathematics.  

At about the time that I first encountered the interpersonal communications professor, I also encountered two other influences that were to remain as central features of my life. The first was meditation.   I attended a lot of talks by traveling gurus, listening to a wide range of metaphysical discussions until I found a simple technique called Transcendental Meditation (TM), which gave me a tool to help learn about my own mind.  I have used this meditation technique or variations on the same, for almost fifty years – sitting in meditation virtually every day of my adult life. The second was a series of books by Carlos Castaneda concerning some very weird experiences that he claims to have had with a Yaqui sorcerer, both with and without the assistance of “power plants.”  

I decided to try to duplicate the experiences that Castaneda described, but without using the plants.  It is much easier to have a “vision” with hallucinogenic substances than it is without their assistance.   However, then the visions seem to be “false” in some important way.  Instead of using hallucinogenic substances to achieve visions, I have attempted to learn how to quiet my mind and “observe” what is happening in the hopes of catching glimpses of another “reality.”  Many of the stories in this book are the results of these attempts. (I recently found out that Castaneda only used the power plants during the initial phase of his apprenticeship to don Juan.  He quickly stopped using them because they were too disruptive and not necessary.)

These practices have resulted in my learning to pay much closer attention to my mind, and to events happening in the world around me.  I spent many years perfecting the practice of being “an observer” – observing the world and myself without judgment or interpretation. 

When I was about 45 years old I came across a group of “sorcerers” from the same tradition as Castaneda’s Yaqui friends, which is actually a continuation of Toltec traditions.  The leader of this group is Miguel Ruiz, a practitioner and teacher of an ancient Toltec spiritual path.  I discovered that one of Ruiz’s students lived near my home, and decided to do whatever I could to learn from him.  At first I was unsure of this teacher, but decided to commit one year to doing whatever was suggested and see what would come of it.  That was more than twenty years ago, and I am still at it because it was far more powerful than I could possibly have imagined.  Many of the stories that are in this book come directly from my encounters with this teacher, a wonderful group of like-minded fellow travelers who live close to my home,  other “Toltec” practitioners  in Northern California, and don Miguel Ruiz and his party of apprentices and teachers from around the world. 

All of this has left me with a rather unique view of the world.  I am a scientist and engineer, I am a Buddhist meditator, and I am a dedicated practitioner of an ancient verbal tradition arising near modern day Mexico City.  These practices have all joined to allow me to simultaneously suspend dis-belief in what I experience, and to know that everything that I experience is internal – there is no “there” there.  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a reality – obviously there is.  However, I know that I am picking and choosing what I see, what it means, and how it affects me.  As Ruiz says, I see everything as if in a smoky mirror.  The image that I see is me. The stories in this book are examples of what we can see, and what we can experience, if we learn to stop blocking things out.  If we just relax and observe what is “out there” and “in here” – our world automatically opens to a vastly different and more interesting place.  If we stop judging, we can start loving.  If we stop making assumptions, we start seeing.  If we stop forcing our view upon the world, we can start seeing the world. As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön teaches, there is no such thing as a true story.  I don’t know if my experiences described in this book are “true” in some fundamental way, or not.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  Maybe there is no way to know because our lives are a mixture of the real and unreal – all day, every day.