Thousands of meditators in a small town to save the world and to evolve, the only place where enlightenment had a chance, with friends who had common beliefs, a common purpose for the big dive. We carried our illusions as badges, like the badges we needed for permission to dive with the big group. Friends of great depth engaged in dialogues that rivaled the ancients in their probing of reality. Unfathomable people lived beneath the stock phrases and programmed beliefs. Confusion, too. People flying off into inflated scenarios of what was real and what wasn’t, trying this and that when things did not move fast enough and when the gilded cage of groupthink began to fray at the edges. But the satisfaction of belonging to such a group kept me enthralled. I merged into the community and took my seat. I could not imagine living anywhere else. I identified with all this even while trying on Tibetan Buddhism, Liberal Catholicism, the red path of American Indians, kriya, Advaita Vedanta. I turned them all down. How small they seemed, despite a blizzard of visions and mind-popping dreams; visitations by gods, saints, elders, and angels; interfacing with multi-dimensional beings who knew as little about me as I did about them, and something that answered “Yes,” when I asked if it were God. Visitors entered my body thinking I had checked out and split like bats out of hell when they realized that this body was still mine. Meditation eventually became a stabilizing habit after the veils between here and there began to thin out and mental handholds began to slip. These kind of adventures and many more went on for five years. Then another trip to India. Another crash landing after coming back. Then realizing I had to learn to fly in a different way—above the earth and alone; where there was no difference between Kabul, the Himalayas, and a small town in the middle of nowhere. Something from all that had gone before had passed away.
