Returning to the US from Tibet was like falling down a dark tunnel where the chaos of others’ thoughts pummeled my brain. Sleep was a war of dirty minds against the silence, purity, and emptiness of life above 15,000 ft. Berkeley twenty-five years later and still the angry demanded the cold illusion of government responsibility to give them their dignity. I was sick in body and mind and could not imagine life beyond what I had just experienced. Better to die in the open spaces of Tibet than bleed spirit all over asphalt, concrete, and the hard floors of claustrophobic living. Our new residence was up the road, however, but the illusions we tried to fit into there were only slightly easier, until we took them on and succumbed to the pretense that permeated everything, despite the group of us who took on the mantle of being spiritual. In our group there was only one soul whose sails were pointed in the direction where she wanted to flow. We stayed close to her. She saved my sanity and enhanced my inner expansion on many occasions. It was here that the heavens fell into my brain with more intensity than ever. My consciousness burst into the highest plane of existence I had ever experienced. I expanded to such a degree that one could easily say I had gone mad. Most around me did not see it, but I occupied spaces where this universe was just an insignificant bauble on a cosmic string that circled in on itself eternally, ever changing, fired eternally by cosmic energy, fed by a cosmic thing into whose space I surged like a teenager thinking I could fly a 747. Crashes, derangement, frustrations, loss of connection with earth ground reality. It all came true after Tibet, bare survival, loss of wife, abandonment of the community that had taken me in, and a journey alone north to Oregon, where the madness settled slightly but where all hope of regaining some semblance of a normal life vanished forever.
