I was depressed..... and even a bit suicidal ....as I bummed the beaches at Biddeford, Kennebunkport, and Wells. I was rescued by a woman who taught prahna ( breathing ) yoga. She let me crash at her place, and began to teach me the basics of meditation. I stuck with the discipline until I was able to relax into a trance quite easily (playing around with hypnosis at college had made me a ready subject), but one day on the beach, when I was seeking the so-called “white-light” transcendental experience, I instead found myself staring up in a vision into a sky that was brilliantly blue. Instead of some sort of escape from the boundaries of my mind, I saw above me a great golden figure, like a gigantic living statue, who looked at me and warned me to go no farther with the practice of meditation. I now think that this was either an angelic being or the Lord Christ himself; then I didn’t know. But I was spooked enough to stop the yoga stuff.
That summer was kind of a mapless exercise in chance encounters. I was more or less a hippie, but without the ideological commitment to utopianism: Rather I was opportunistic, committed to nothing but myself, drifting aimlessly. I think that I must have had some sort of subconscious deathwish: I did lots of stupid things. Among the most significant of these was my first use of LSD. Unfortunately, I enjoyed the trip quite a lot. I had once told myself that I would not use any drugs at all, then that I would not do anything stronger than pot, then nothing stronger than hashish. I was on the slippery slope and was losing my footing, though at the time I was confident I could handle my habits. My lack of direction and purpose only made things worse.
At the end of the summer I went home. The family was self-destructing, though it wouldn’t come completely apart for a couple of years yet. I set up a room in the basement, so I could come and go as I pleased without being under scrutiny. I remember that my sister, who had started going to a Christian coffeehouse, got me to go once with her. (Eventually, I managed to confuse her enough that she stopped going herself, and I take no little responsibility for her subsequent decades of real hard times during which she had no faith strong enough to be of much help to her.) I also went to church once with my dad, who had started attending the Assemby of God fellowship which ran the coffee house: Looking back now I realize that that night I did encounter the Lord in a spiritually real way, but nobody followed up on me and I was very soon back to my selfish and self-destructive habits. I met a girl who became my significant other. Her crowd, however, was very actively into drugs, and I joined them..“no stronger than opium”. “no stronger than mescaline” , “no stronger than......”. The slope got steeper. I continued also to delve into the occult.
