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My brothers and I were raised listening to our mother’s childhood stories of the laughing man in the top hat and tails who would jump back and forth over her bed at night, a fancy cane tucked lightly under one arm. We also knew that her brother Jack once became two Jacks: she passed one Jack walking up the stairs, then turned the corner into the kitchen to find a second Jack drinking water in his underwear.
I was nineteen when I first dropped acid. A sophomore at UC Santa Cruz, I was living with my best friend, Kat, in a ramshackle beach cottage. We gave each other a long gaze, wished each other luck, and each swallowed a tiny piece of paper, blotted with a dot of LSD. Then we lay down in the tiny living room on the plush, blood-red carpet and waited for the acid to hit our systems. No one had advised us to vacuum.
In 1993, I went to Lucknow, India to receive teachings from the Advaita master H.W. L. Poonjaji, a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. Many of my friends and colleagues, including several dedicated teachers of Vipassana meditation, had preceded me to Poonjaji’s door. By the time I arrived, his fame had blossomed and his small living room bulged with seekers from around the world who had elbowed their way into his morning satsang.
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