THE RELATIVE AND THE ABSOLUTE

When I returned from Vietnam I went, almost immediately, in search of my Guru, as people said then—the year being 1969. Looking back on my life it is easy to see why things happened when they did—there is a definite, clear linear progression and order to my life. There was the War Experience that shook up my life. To put it simply, when I returned, I was dazed and confused. That period, beginning in October of 69 was without a doubt, the strangest part of my life. I had moved into an apartment on Gainsborough Street in Boston with my old prep school roommate. He had just returned from California where he’d discovered hallucinogens—You want to see God? Drop acid. I think he actually spoke those words. So I did, and that was the beginning of something as frightening and strange as Vietnam in it’s own way. But, looking back, that phase was necessary too—it broke down more of the mind’s barriers, whatever few were still left standing. Vietnam had already blasted through many of one’s ideas of normal existence. The war made a hand grenade of everything we took for granted, chucked it away, exploded it and left only a crater full of questions in its place. The drugs were like the wind that blew away whatever thoughts of normalcy could have possibly remained.

So I arrived in Santa Barbara, California on one perfect, sunny day (the yearly mean temperature there is a nearly perfect-feeling 68 degrees) totally devoid of any sense of who I was—totally unsure about any sort of rational order to life. I owned one patched pair of jeans, a few shirts and a sleeping bag which I ended up living in, in the hold of a broken down anchovy boat down in the marina. There was no place lower to go than the hold of a fishing boat; it’s below sea level. But it was there one evening, while passing around a joint, that the next phase began.