2/7/2020
Those were the best days of my life – Bryan Adams
I was heading south from New York for the promise of a new beginning, on my way to a place that I hoped would be both a sanctuary and a laboratory, a place I hoped would reignite my passion for learning and open up a new chapter in my life.
My journey began inauspiciously, traversing states that were foreign and menacing to me, the deep south of Easy Rider fame. The drawls became more pronounced the further south I drove, and I wondered if I had made a colossal error. But soon after arriving I realized I was among a cohort of fellow soul-seekers, assembled from across the lower 48 with a few Canadians to boot. Who would’ve imagined this congress of vagabonds, I thought?
The excitement among us was palpable and contagious. This was a Master’s program with a curriculum like no other. Classes with headings like Unconventional Modes of Experience promised to deliver something well beyond the commonplace academic syllabus (and prompting my mother to ask “Are you taking drugs?”). It augured something more, like a bohemian science fair, illuminated by the writings of the gurus and swamis of the human potential movement: Carl Rogers, Fritz Pearls, Eric Berne.
We were free to bring any and everything to the table; our psychedelic experiences, our vision quests, our sojourns in far off places. All of it was acceptable subject matter for experiential review, in a fecund atmosphere of enlightenment and authenticity. The campus and the town became our magic kingdom, with spontaneous encounter groups at McDonald’s, nude sunbathing at the aptly named Whooping Creek, weekly jamborees at the communal house where music flourished, and the brownies were a gateway to hallucinogenic frolics.
The boundaries between school and the rest of life dissolved and we pursued our consciousness-raising with apostolic zeal. We learned to diagram our conversations using the deconstructions of transactional analysis and confronted our middle-class timidity with the dictums of the Gestalt Prayer. “I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine”.
We learned to read the language of our bodies, to identify and work through the character armor that had encased our primal wounds. We re-imagined and re-experienced and learned to alter our perceptions in the moment. A benevolent, almost beatific, spirit enveloped us, the only limits were our imaginations and our capacities for self-awareness.
The power of it all was intoxicating. We were chrysalides in the process of evolving. “Be all that you can be” and then some. Our personal histories, only yesterday so prosaic, became archeological sites of unearthing and analysis. There were no psychological barriers too big to withstand our relentless challenge. Our lives became lyrical, verses and choruses over brimming with emotion and insight. We embraced each other and our community fully, openly, without guile or shame. Freedom was ours and we would not go willingly back into the bottle.
It would end, as all earthly nirvanas do, almost a year to the day after it began. We returned to the lives we had left and adapted to the compromises and constraints of life in the American economy. But the experience changed us, changed me, I could never again see my family, my friends, my “reality” in the same way. I had been ordained in a new truth and eaten lustfully of the tree of knowledge.
