I am grateful for the wonderful good health I have, the physical well-being, and the daily joys that are open to me now in ways that weren’t available before because, while there were isolated moments in which I stopped to appreciate the world around me, I didn’t have, or didn’t take, the time to let go of my plans enough to immerse myself in the present moment. I remember particular instances in which I was able to enter into an unfiltered world made available to me through LSD, but which the business of life screens out. Those experiences with acid opened my eyes to a vista of a world that I realized was always there, but which I was never really seeing. So I knew there was something out there worth paying attention to, but the exigencies of daily life always reclaimed my attention and made a filter which shut down what was no longer essential to the business at hand. My plans always circumscribed what I could see, what I could touch, what I could feel. The pressure of the future was always looming over me. By virtue of necessity, the present is now open to me now in ways that it wasn’t open to me before.
Another good one charles seem like your buddhist practice is shining through, but here is a question…does the acid experience still maintain its status as the signpost of this awareness?
I think so. Memory is a tricky thing. Everytime you take a memory out and examine it, you change it. The one thing I remember is the ability to enter music. For example, the Blues Project in a cafe in Greenwich Village in 1966 stays with me because it was unlike anything I ever experienced.