One Train Later: A Memoir (14 page)

I return to the flat, remembering that tonight we are supposed to take a mind-altering drug, but I feel like practicing and pick up the guitar to play for a while. I feel light and strong, the guitar feels good in my hands, I'm filled with a pleasant new resolve: I am who I am ... I have leapt over an obstacle ... what doesn't kill you makes you stronger-yeah, that's it, okay.

I play a beautiful raga scale called "Purvi" that has been taught to me by Nazir Jairazbhoy-it has a mood that is sweet and romantic and I work my way into it, finding variations and centering myself with its structure. After playing for three-quarters of an hour, I hear the sound of voices upstairs and, with my new light but steely resolve in hand, decide to go up to Zoot's to see what is going on. The illuminati are arriving, bottles are being opened, sounds are coming out of the record player, and smoke is drifting upward. By about twelve-thirty A.M., with a nice crowd of fifteen or twenty hanging out amid a smorgasbord of scotch, vodka, wine, and hashish, the fiesta is grooving and convivial with the sounds of Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, Ray Charles, and Tim Hardin in the background. Hilton Valentine and Chas Chandler of the Animals arrive and slide into the well-oiled groove. After a while Hilton comes over and says, "Feel like tripping?" I feel a sliver of apprehension, but all innocence and wanting to be a groovy cat, I smile and say, "Yeah, man-yeah." I don't have a clue about the seriously mindbending effects of this drug, that it might put you into a psychotic state from which you may never return, that it's akin to being asked to go jump out of a plane with no parachute and told to fly, but I keep smiling. As the clock strikes one, Hilton places a capsule in my hand between the heart and life lines. I swallow it and go on enjoying the party, not feeling anything much other than the nice buzz I already have. But after half an hour Hilton looks at me and says, "I think you're ready." He pulls Timothy Leary's book The Psychedelic Experience from his bag, studies my face carefully again, opens the book, and begins to read.

In a low voice he starts intoning the following: "Andy ... the time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the Andy game are about to cease, you who are about to enter the nameless void-turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream." As he speaks, my mind, my perception, my visual sense somersault into a new hyperkinetic reality-the room in front of me dissolves into an egg-yolk rainbow of bright plastic colors and all that once had dimension and solidity becomes liquid.

"It's a trick," I croak, "a trick," and it comes to me in an instant that my whole life up until this point has been a cosmic joke, a hoax perpetrated on me by everyone else, they are all in on it, they know, but now I am ready for this sacred moment and they are pulling back the veils.

I hear a voice say, "And he's off," and I start down a tunnel of intense kaleidoscopic imagery propelled by the music, which now takes on incredible significance and seems incredibly loud and right inside my head. Alice going down the tunnel into Wonderland, oh yeah, oh yeah, so this is it, and it's scary and exhilarating as hell, but like a returning memory, I know in the way that you can't speak about, this is the hot line. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Watts, Huxley, de Quincey, the Zen masters, Lords of the Realm Within, this is what they are talking about.

I shoot from one brilliant cartoon image to another, barely able to keep up with the speed of my own mind. Now I'm in a brilliantly lit cave of sparkling jewels; now I float down rivers of gold; now I merge with sky-silvered dragonfly wings of shining translucence; now I see the eternal Buddha smile and impossible towers of iridescent blue-this is it! "This is what you have been looking for, the search is over, you are home," I whisper to myself.

As the trip continues I experience extremes of joy with wild swings of intense paranoia. One second I am surfing a rainbow, and the next momentif I open my eyes-the room appears full of horrible little monkeys staring at me with burning eyes. I try to let the music take me and return to that vast cosmic moment that always has been and always will be, the canopy of space time. Vast infinities illuminate my soaring consciousness, and West Kensington dissolves into the flow of eternity: no birth, no death, just shining mindlessness-inseparable from radiance. A ceaseless transformation of life energy, rhythmic pulsing activity, the molecular dance of infinite change; interconnected, interbeing.

I stagger out into the kitchen and try to eat a piece of cheese. How so normal an activity manages to pierce my Krishna consciousness at this point I'll never know, unless it's the voice of my mum echoing in some deep recess to make sure I eat, but it tastes like cardboard in my mouth and I try to spit it into the rubbish bin. But as I do I notice that the bin is like a box of incredible jewels. Old banana skins, cereal boxes, and cigarette packets are dazzling jewels of incredible energy that appear to me now in either particle or wave form; everything is a dance, a pulsating waltz of the submolecular world-electrons, nuclei, quarks, and hedrons.

And I know. I know in a way that I have never known before-and I know that I know it, and it is familiar in the sense of finally returning home. "It is," I whisper to the used box of sugar-frosted flakes lying on top of the garbage like a handful of quartz crystals. "It ... is." I become sentient and about a billion years old; I myself-and what or who is that? I snigger at the concept-am nothing more than a complex of energy passing through the infinite spiral. I place my hand on the draining board and watch the atoms that are me happily sink into the dance that is masquerading as a draining board. I stare up at a strange relic from the mechanistic universe, a clock, an artifact of classical physics, the cosmic machine, the meeanique celeste. I wave my hand through the air and see it atomize into a fan. Energy packets, photons, quanta, probabilities of interconnections, tendencies to exist, all dancing together in Smith and Gardner-Brown's subatomic kitchen. I cackle like a mad parrot and see my life unfolding as if in a series of corridors like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

I float back to the far-off land of the sitting room, examining the corridor wallpaper on the way because now it's alive with exquisite mountains, valleys, and rivers, and I talk to it for a while and then like the Archangel Gabriel arrive by the record player, which shines like an ancient source of energy, with everyone now sprawled out on the floor around it. A few million years later the trip levels out into a steady cosmic plateau and I find that I am able to control the pendulum motions and steer myself toward the beautiful, the beneficent, and the ineffable light. By now I am standing in the center of the room, radiating bliss and God power like a celestial blast furnace, and into the room walks the Betrayer-She, Angela, Kali-and with her, him-Eric, Shiva-but I see them as part of the cosmic fabric and from some remote Tibetan mountain peak I bless and shower them with my radiance. We all love one another; we all love one another, says a distant heavenly voice that is mine; and I continue my spiral on through the whirling geometric dance, the fire flow of internal unity.

At this point two things happen as I am standing and reaching upward for the bliss, the ineffable source of all being. I surrender, and like a giant sun of peace, light floods my mind, my soul, my being. Radiant bliss? God? There is no other description, and maybe it is the most singular moment of my life. But on the earthly plane on ironic little event animates this moment, for as I experience this absolute mind with both arms raised overhead, the action causes my pants to fall down around my ankles. Somewhere miles below me there is laughter, but I am elsewhere, I am in the ray of God, the alpha and omega, the peace that passeth all understanding, the Buddha field, the Void, I am bathing, swimming, spiritualizing here, in this eleven-quida-month flat in West Ken. This is the Clear White Light, the infallible mind of the pure mystic state, and direct experience and phrases from Buddhism float like ticker tape through the white field of my mind: "Obtain Buddhahood in the realm of the densely packed." "Merge into the heart glow of the Buddha." And then somewhere far below a flat London voice says, "It's horrible." It's Angela staring at my writhing and reaching with a sick look on her face, but I bless her again and continue to illuminate the wallpaper. Eventually the light fades and I slump back down on the couch full of love and rainbow color. But here, tonight, in this one-bedroom flat in London, I have received the light, I have known.

Sometime around six A.M. I feel myself drifting toward Earth and float off downstairs to my bedroom, but when I get there I feel afraid to be alone in a different place. I stare at my face in the mirror and watch as it goes through a metamorphosis of Hindu princes, princesses, animals, kings, queens, eagles, Cherokee Indians, skulls, and various historical personalities. Obviously they are all the incarnations I have lived through, but it is frightening and I have to turn away from the intensity. Exhausted, I finally crawl between the sheets and attempt sleep as the working day begins. As if in litany, the words of John Dowland pass through my mind: "Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death / And close up these my weary weeping eyes," and through the darkness and the blackness of closed eyelids, I observe the final burst of fireworks, the hymn of the universe singing softly in my head-we all love one another, we all love one another....

I wake up at three the next afternoon and, regaining consciousness in the kitchen with a strong cup of Darjeeling, shakily realize that I have just been through what might be termed a life-altering experience. Clearly LSD is not for the fragile; it's risky, dangerous, a journey from which you may not return. But as it comes back to me in floaty shards of memory it connects with psychology, Buddhism, Zen, and quantum physics and verifies the information. My hand disappearing into the draining board, the colors, the white light, the incredible white light, a nonintellectual experience of absolute reality. I stir the spoon in the tea, watching the ripples that float from the center of the cup and think, That's it, that's the whole of it right there-waveform. The meeting of spirit and matter. Oneness with everything. I smear some butter onto a piece of toast, and the words of Chang-tzu float into my mind: "The still mind of the sage is a mirror of heaven and earth." That was the white light, but what was the rest of that insane kaleidoscope?

Hilton has left me his copy of The Psychedelic Experience, and over the next few days I read through it. Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Psychedelic Experience purports to be a modern reading of the ancient tome. Rather than its being a hook of instruction to guide the dead through the forty-nine-day period between death and rebirth according to Tibetan belief, the more esoteric idea is that it is a guide to ego loss, to a state of transcendence that is attained through strict discipline and meditation. Leary, Alpert, and Metzner state in the introduction that in modern times these states can be achieved with chemicals and that they have come to us because we all need to have this experience.

In London we who are not yet international stars had been hearing vague reports about something called tripping but were confused as to whether it's a new form of holiday or stumbling over a log. Now we know. Are the changing times a result of this, or is it the other way around? We are in a state of flux, all is possible, all is permitted, so let's blow our minds. Guitars sing; hair flows; clothes radiate; brown rice, seaweed, and organic vegetables invade our human corporeality with deep nature; and with a Buddha-like smile we extend free love and compassion to all of God's creatures. A deeply muscled man in a loincloth walks to center stage and bangs a gong, and in a shower of ringing silvery frequencies the world morphs from black-andwhite into full color. Acid gets you there in about half an hour.

The Beatles by this time are experienced acidheads, and although we haven't yet realized it, their songs reflect this. The words-turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream-are in fact Leary's words, right out of The Psychedelic Experience. Now we are in on the joke, we have joined the fraternity, and the code reveals itself.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes three stages that you pass through on the inner journey: the first Bardo, the second Bardo, and the third Bardo. The first Bardo is when you are supposed to experience the white light as you let go of all ego and game playing, as Leary puts it; in the second stage you experience intense hallucinations of a karmic nature; and the third is the period of reentry or rebirth.

I stare out the kitchen window at the scruffy garden facing a row of dilapidated terrace houses and try to rethink my experience. I had been through all those stages, including the radiant white light, the paranoid visions, and the final comedown. It was overwhelming, an incredible parallel universe, and yet the memory is still so vivid, so clear, it appears as real as the uneaten toast on the plate before me.

Zoot and I take more trips, and it becomes obvious that we are going in a different direction from the rest of the band: we are heads and they aren't; there's a division, and to me it's growing more painful daily.