2nd LSD Trip: Meeting My Teacher

Spiritual Visions and Dreams

During my first LSD trip in 1968, at the age of 17, I was elevated to, surrounded by and infused with a living light. I became aware of the existence of an underlying intelligence that manifested and animated everything including myself. I was hesitant to call it God because it was ultimately too big to fit any description. If anything I might call it the Great Whatever It Is, but I knew I was onto something and the lessons weren’t over. A year later I took my second trip. 

I felt safe doing it alone as long as I remained close to nature, so I chose Queens Park in the heart of Toronto. It was a large circular park surrounded by busy downtown Toronto traffic and filled with trees that helped filter out the noise of the city. When the first warm spring day rolled around I left my apartment on Spadina, enjoyed my stroll under the budding foliage along Hoskins Avenue and arrived at the park. I found a friendly tree, settled into a comfortable spot at the base of its trunk and swallowed the gift.  

Within a half hour I was in my new perception. The lively intelligence and energy underlying and animating all the living things around me moved like a web of interconnected energy in a slow fluid synchronistic dance between and through everything. From a distance, I noticed two people walking towards me. As they got closer I recognized Karen, an old friend from my high school days and her freshly minted husband. They greeted me with a friendly hello and sat down to join me. Unfortunately their conversation eventually devolved into an oppressive bickering and left me wondering if they really liked each other. Remembering my parents constant unhappiness with each other, I wondered if this was what you could come to expect with marriage. They finally got up to go and not wanting to leave me alone, invited me to go home with them and hang out. Figuring it was time to move on, I got up and followed them. 

I was trailing behind them by about 15 feet as we approached the other side of the park but as I got closer to the curb where they were waiting for me…time/movement began to slow down. It became slower and slower until I hit a spot about 10 feet from them when time stopped and everything froze in place. The cars, the trees, people, me. I couldn’t move forward. I didn’t panic, rather I just stepped back, things unfroze and life continued as usual. I took a step forward and everything stopped again. I stepped back and this time my friends turned and told me to hurry up as they were getting ready to cross the road. I moved forward and...same thing. I stepped back and told them I had changed my mind and was going to stay. “Okay! See you later!”  They turned around and crossed the street.

It was clear something was keeping me from leaving the park. Rather than panic or fight it, I accepted it and the idea came to me that I was there to meet someone.  So I began wondering and wandering about the park. Who was I to meet?

The first person I ran into was Sally Sunshine sitting with a group of children. That was her real name. She was part of our Yorkville community and was known for having a consistently gentle, friendly and happy demeanor. Her long, wavy, golden hair, and stunning huge blue eyes that barely blinked when you caught her gaze gave her an angelic appearance. I thought: “Sally Sunshine, of course! This is who I should be meeting. A spirit of innocence, joy and happiness! ”  But when she looked up and saw me, her eyes clouded over with concern. I knew right away that Sally and these children were not my next stop. I gave her a friendly hello and kept walking.

Well then who?  I continued to wander around when I saw him. Michael! I instantly knew this was who I was meant to meet. Another member of our Yorkville community, Michael, tall with his long black hair swept back off his head and sharp green eyes, had always made a cutting figure when he showed up on Yorkville striding along the street, books often tucked under his arms. He was a young and very serious student of the Western mystical traditions and always wore a black shawl wrapped around his shoulders and knee high leather boots as he strode forward with focused purpose. He had a droll sense of humor, armed wit and his observations of life on the street, of life in general, always had me in stitches. We had become instant friends. Yes Michael was exactly who I should be talking to and he apparently had the time to talk. 

As I waved him over he strode up to me grinning from ear to ear. When I told him I had taken LSD that afternoon he gave a familiar chuckle and invited me to sit with him on the nearest park bench. As we settled in, he asked me how I was doing and I realized I actually had to have a conversation with him. I knew there was a question inside of me that needed to be asked but I struggled to find it. My mind was like air, everywhere. It took great effort to form a linear thought let alone a question. I sat silently trying to squeeze my fourth dimensional consciousness into a two dimensional focus and as I did, the question finally popped up. I grabbed it like a hunter with a butterfly net. It was the most important question anyone could ever ask. It was the essential question of all philosophic endeavor. The question between two lovers as they begin to recognize their love for each other. The question every child would want to ask a parent if it knew it had the option. The question asked by every scientist staring into a microscope or a telescope out into the universe. And coincidently, the question that was used everyday in the new cultural tsunami sweeping the western world.  

“What’s...happening?” I asked in all earnestness.

Michael, to my relief, broke out in laughter. This comforted me and took some weight off the moment.  

He said, “Dianne, look around you.”  I looked around and saw the leaves shivering in the breeze, people going about their business, cars driving to destinations, children laughing and shouting, buildings filled with activity and life everywhere.  

Then in a soft low tone, he said in all seriousness… “This...is...it.”

My mind exploded into a profound “Aha!!” moment as the shackles of my misperception, my confusion, fell away and I saw with absolute clarity that Life was what was “happening” moment to moment to moment. Anything that existed outside of this moment was a fiction, our ideas of the future and the memories of the past were just stories we told ourselves that affected our experience in the moment. All that ever was or will be, exists right now in this moment, not outside of it. Right Now is the only place that is fully alive and the only place we can truly call reality. Be here now. Not there then.

I saw, I understood and I was filled with awe. “This is it!!” I said with deep and total insight and understanding. 

Whereupon Michael replied,  “Well San Francisco is really it but Toronto will do.” and we both burst into laughter.

He then asked me to observe some pigeons pecking the ground in front of us.  He stared at them and they suddenly stopped pecking, turned and faced each other, bobbed their heads up and down, turned out, and turned back in, bobbed up and down again, turned and scattered in flight. I turned to him. “Did you do that?” He laughed. “Pigeons are easy.”

Michael then asked me a question:

“When the wind blows through the blossoms of the trees, is it the wind that moves or the blossoms that move?” 

I sat gazing out at the landscape and I could feel my mind struggle to answer this strange question. (I would later find out that this was a famous Zen koan) When contemplating a Koan, trying to figure it out or reason it out is impossible. The answer has to manifest spontaneously. I strggled with it and felt I was on the verge of an answer when Michael quietly said, 

“It’s the mind that moves.”

And with that my mind exploded as my perception shifted once more. His words acted like a magical abracadabra, unlocking a door that gave me deep perception into the nature of what animates the Now. The blinders fell from my eyes like they did from Neo’s eyes at the end of the Matrix when he sees that all the objects around him, the “reality” around him, was actually a fictional construct animated by mathematical programming. What I saw had a slightly different spin. I saw that everything around me was animated by “Mind”. Everything from the trees to the people, to the birds, cars, the government building at the end of the park started as an idea from this Mind that was thinking creation into being… included me.  

I later understood that when the bible tells us God created us in his own image, they left out the part about ‘and with his talents’. “God” is a creator. Made in his own image, so are we.  Just as the Creator Mind creates the Universe, we create our own realities with our mind. It's not so much what happens to us, but how we think about what happens to us which shapes what will happen to us. In order to change my life, my reality, I needed to change my mind and my reactions. I got it. I understood it. 

I later realized there was something in my life that had wanted to communicate to me, instruct me, to continue the message from the Light of my first trip and it kept me from leaving the park. I was an 18 year old runaway, completely free and unmoored from the typical constructs of school, family, rules, social requirements and it’s conditioned realities. I was a blank slate of impulses. I woke up and did what I wanted, nothing to lose, not compelled to compete or prove myself. I didn’t ask for much and didn’t need much...but in truth I was broke, relied on welfare to pay my rent, aimless, disconnected from a healthy sense of self, completely unaware of what I would come to discover were a variety of natural talents. I was a victim of my appetites and impulses and misinterpretations of my life experience.  Rudderless, adrift in an ocean, I was just given a golden boat with beautiful sails and a map and even a captain, a teacher. It was a get out of jail free card. If I didn’t like my circumstances, I could change them. I didn’t need to stay stuck in a endless loop of repetitive and deepening trauma drama that went nowhere but to the beginning of the loop again. 

I can’t remember much of what happened after that but the lesson changed the direction of my life. I was willing to eventually get therapy, found spiritual practices and 12 Step Programs and despite ongoing behavior issues, a friendly, caring light guided me out of the darkness of dead end behaviors. I developed a stong relationship with this intuitive voice and was put on the path of healing and the resulting life of the abundance of Spirit I was meant to live. About 10 years later, when I was 29, I left Toronto not for San Francisco but Los Angeles. 

Years later I ran into Michael and reminded him about the event. He said he couldn’t recall any of it and had never heard of that Zen riddle he’d given me. I then realized that it wasn't him I was meant to meet. It was my teacher.

(If you have read this far and like what you've read, please click the heart button. It helps with my algorithm.)

To subscribe to my weekly true story posts for free: