Chapter III: ADRIFT ON MOUNT ARARAT

Three years later I left college with a teacher’s certificate and little chance of getting a job. With a few others I had fallen foul of the college administration which had provided me — I discovered in a roundabout way — with a report that would prevent my finding a permanent post. The system just didn’t need people like me. I had naively believed what my tutors had told me about exporting our ideals into the teaching profession. Now, I discovered that the reality was very different. Despite the great changes taking place in the world, what we discovered when sent out into the schools was a very conservative establishment hanging onto its outdated values. Everything told me that this was no place to be for anyone with the slightest degree of imagination and individuality.

After a short holiday in France I found work as a factory storeman. Four months later I was out of work and on social welfare. I sold my car to raise money. Lonely, depressed and withdrawn from the world I escaped by sleeping a lot. It became difficult at times just to get up to go to the welfare office to pick up my cheque. One evening I was at a party and someone sold me some LSD. Hiding it in the barrel of a pen, I walked the six miles back to my flat and swallowed the microdot. The subsequent experience was much more pleasant than the first time I had taken it and the inner worlds into which I travelled seemed to have far more meaning than the grey existence of normality.

My nocturnal escapade disturbed the students upstairs who complained to the landlady. “If Mr. Winter is unable to control his transports I shall have to ask you both to leave!” she wrote my flat-mate.

One cold March day, wheezing from a heavy bronchial attack, I packed my belongings and left. Richmond Hill, in south-west London, provided a night-time panorama which reminded me of the view from the Sacré Coeur in Paris. There I found a bedsitter on the first-floor of a decaying Victorian house at the top of Mount Ararat Road. Next to me lived a retired Scots Tea Planter who had worked in Ceylon. He drank heavily and mostly I kept out of his way. When we met occasionally in the communal kitchen we got on with each other. In the other room was a retired Major in his ‘seventies who was a vegetarian and a spiritualist. He didn’t say much but I was attracted by what I thought of then as his eccentricities. One day just before he moved out we got talking.

“D’you see that building across the road?” he asked, pointing out of the kitchen window. “Kaiser William stayed there when he visited Richmond. Now it’s a brothel. All these houses are neglected and they’re falling down. The land will fetch a fortune ... and watch the landlady’s agent. He’s a very violent man and won’t worry about using unpleasant tactics if you upset him.”

The Major found a companion to marry and went to live on the South Coast. I moved into his old room which had a peaceful atmosphere unlike the rest of the house. It became a haven from all my troubles. Into my old room moved Charley.

Charley came from a rich family where the only thing he lacked seemed to be love. He had dropped out of school and spent his days saving money to travel to Afghanistan where he could live cheaply and smoke all the marijuana he wanted.

“Man, it’s a beautiful place. People are free there. Not like the West where everyone behaves like robots in a machine!”1 Charley was just passing through.

Listening to SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND we overloaded our nervous systems regularly with street Acid. What did it matter?2 Nobody cared about anything anymore. Our civilization hadn’t much longer to go and if Acid turned us on, why not? At least we could seek some kind of more meaningful reality in chemical substances with names like White Lightning and California Sunshine.

Standing by the large kitchen window tripping I gazed out onto the street below. A church-spire reflected the late spring moon. “How beautiful it is!” I exclaimed.

“Is it?” Charley seemed to reply in a voice that sounded angry and cynical.

Just then a car tore past, screeching its tyres. Someone opened a passenger-door, screamed and banged it close. In an instant the beauty I had perceived a moment ago changed into a harsh, monochrome, carbon-monoxide world of tortured reality. I ran my fingers through my hair. It snapped and crackled like coils of bare electric wire and my fingers felt like steel claws. I could feel myself falling into psychosis.

“There’s too much Speed in this Acid,” I replied in a hollow voice.3

Staring at the bare light-bulb in my room I felt myself melting into a vast continuum of time, going back several millennia. I saw Moses cross the Red Sea with the Israelites. The continuum zoomed back into my room at Mount Ararat Road. Then an Amerindian spoke from the pit of my stomach and announced himself to be God. I could feel the Indian trapped in a world where his spirit had become enslaved by materialism. I looked into the light-bulb and in its centre saw another Planet somewhere on the other side of the universe waiting to be populated by the human race. To get there we would have to travel faster than light itself. It lay beyond death.

“After we die and leave this place we shall fly there,” the Indian declared. “And that new Planet shall be called Peace!”

Taking a walk in Richmond Great Park, I would look at the trees, seeing their branches opening into the sky, spreading their nervous systems out into space and deep into the ground. I felt like a sannyasi travelling through the concrete jungles of the West.4 One day I sat in the middle of the parquet floor of the bandstand in the Park and sang to the deer. They gathered about to listen and lay down in the grass, their tails flicking away flies. Everything was holy. The sun set, lighting up the glass towers of central London far on the horizon. A red aircraft-navigation light, blinking above a distant telecommunications tower, reminded me of another city of silver domes and towers — perhaps on Mars or on another planet somewhere else in time and the universe...

Twenty-three years on this Earth, born under the Union Jack. My mother had brought me into the world and to this strange land. Now I was alone. All my past was gone. I was a holy man singing to the deer in the Park...

One night, I went deep into the karma of my adopted land ... saw it as a crown of barbed wire and thorns. I saw how everyday we crucified the Christ over and over. The world in which I found myself was full of the horror of a time without a soul. We had been conditioned, anaesthetized to accept it since childhood but some of us it seemed were destined to see through the anodyne.

I began to see its stark ugliness and its beauty. The world was both light and dark. Here was the wasteland that T.S. Eliot had described in a poem few cared to understand but which I had been fortunate to study. Eliot’s Waste Land was not in the past. It was still here with us in the material world where man lives by bread alone:


What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the Sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
and the dry stone no sound of water.5


Where was the meaning of being in a myopic civilization that lay trapped between heaven and hell, preoccupied with survival and opportunism? And who had made the rules in this deathly competition? What had I to do with any of it when deep inside me I felt so alien from it all? Then I began to see that it wasn’t possible to separate the outer from the inner. Everything on the third dimension seemed to be separated but looking beyond the duality of that which separated everything from everything else I began to get a very different picture of the universe.

One morning I emerged from a trip to find myself sitting in the corner of my room while the others who were there argued pointlessly amongst themselves. I sat and watched them as the thought arose that we found ourselves, right then and there, not by accident but as part of a much greater mystery. We were all players in a game of consciousness. And last night we had played the game on a dimension where the laws of reason and time made as much sense as a sub-nuclear quark to Newtonian physics ... I’m sitting here, I thought, and they’re here with me because I dreamed me and them as well as this room, this house, and country as well as this time called the twentieth century! It was all an illusion ... Maya6... and yet, it was very real ... an aspect of a much vaster holographic thought which existed beyond the limitations of time and space7...

I had glimpsed a sense of divinity as well as a state resembling hell — a sort of temporary unsanity — and through a transcendence of self reached a kind of mystic unity. All part of that other world experience to which I returned again and again to perceive life through both ends of a cosmic telescope. We were the players. It was a scary thought that ‘I‘ was responsible for the world in which I found myself — for its wickedness and horror as well as its beauty. The trips would often leave my body and mind feeling wasted like a battlefield. I wanted to sleep and forget the whole awesome experience. The discovery that everything was illusory and that the normal world was no longer a safe or comfortable haven had cast me into a no-man’s-land. Suddenly, to be a conscious human-being had become too painful a burden to bear. Not even death it seemed could provide more than a brief forgetfulness. There was really no escape-hatch. To awake into consciousness, to find the answers, was only possible when the I began to see Them as aspects of Itself... Out there as well as in here.

And we were waking up to find ourselves right inside the Age of Kali, the final destructive Age of the Mahayuga Cycle in which the Creator steered us — each players in that game — through the Biggest Trip of All.8


I was too afraid to grasp such a reality. I had begun to lift myself out of forgetfulness but was not prepared yet to deal with the information that the universe now fed me. Lying in a seedy old bedsitter, surrounded by people I hardly knew, having lost all the material security of my past, without a job or any obvious future, I awoke into a strange new world. Through some unconscious, unplanned rite of self-initiation it seemed as if I had travelled across several universes and times to get to this eternal moment of knowing. Yet, it was not the nirvana I had sought. The illusions had gone and I found myself right in the middle of the sangsara of this world.9

The wonder and awe of the LSD experience would wear off and leave me locked inside the deadness of consensus-normality. And every time I returned to that world it seemed to be more dead than ever before! I was alone. Neither religion nor education had prepared me for this. I was totally alone in a world of my making. No longer the unthinking, conventional, middle-class me. The mask of pretence had fallen to reveal … the face of God?

Sometimes, paranoia and psychosis threatened to take over. Fearful demons would dance in my brain and I gripped desperately onto the final vestige of sanity as it threatened to slip away for ever. I felt myself to be on the edge of some kind of nervous breakdown. What I had perceived as the madness of the world was now my own. The walls between in-here and out-there had collapsed.

I shaved my hair off in a symbolic act of renouncing the world. My head felt ready to explode and the fires of kundalini — prematurely roused — raged inside me.10 I mistook it to be insanity. Just occasionally glimpsing a great inner peace which seemed to reside at the very centre of my being, I entered the timeless bliss of the Pure Land.11 It dawned in me that nothing could redeem the aspects of death into which I peered now but love and compassion. For it is love that quickens and transforms us. Without it we fall back into an existence full of misery and pain. Through love alone could I redeem my life and grow beyond fear. Love was in everything and beyond all of it.

I knew that I had poisoned myself with too many toxic chemicals. When we bought and took street Acid we just didn’t know what might be in it. But we took that risk over and over. I knew I had to pull back before it was too late. I began to feel an invisible Christ Presence by my side, guiding and protecting me from the consequences of my careless actions. And the events that followed subsequently enabled me to begin detoxifying and healing myself.

But the question remained: How was I to understand an experience that had caused me to shift my perception of living so radically? It felt as if I had fallen off a surfboard into the barrel of a wave and on emerging had discovered that the beach had changed. Though it appeared the same as before its place in time had shifted and I seemed to come out of the wave into another planet somewhere else in the universe. Everything in the world remained as I had left it. But the lens through which I perceived it was different.

How could I understand it? I felt unable to turn to the Christian church whose conventional doctrines did not accommodate such leading questions as karma and reincarnation. I was nominally only part Christian. For the first time my other heritage broke its silence and moved into help. I could feel the compassion of the Buddha speak within me. The Eastern wisdoms were mine also and in them I might find the answers.

Having been brought up as a Christian in a life styled predominantly on occidental culture I knew very little about Buddhism. But now I could feel the need to return to that heritage to contact the ancestral spirit which would give me a spiritual healing-home in which to recover. I had sensed the Christ presence in a very personal way that had nothing to do with the established orthodoxy of the Christian church.

At that time I discovered the TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD (the Bardo Thôdol or Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane) which has been used for centuries by Mahayana Buddhists as a spiritual text and guide.12 In Tibet, Egypt, the Druid civilizations of the West and elsewhere the science of dying had long been taught as an essential part of life. In Mahayana Buddhism I discovered that death, far from being a finite end, was seen as a real opportunity for liberation from the illusion of sangsara — i.e. where everything and every being appeared to be separate. If that sense of unity in all things could be understood and maintained, liberation from the eternal round of sangsara could be achieved. All that was experienced on the physical plane in life and the Astral plane (particularly during the period between death and rebirth) sprang from the subconscious mind. Immediately after death a Clear White Light was seen — the clear light of nirvana. If it was not recognized and reached the dead soul began a gradual descent into another state of illusion over a period of forty-nine days.

During the final stages of its descent the soul began to draw close to rebirth. Frightening apparitions awaited those who continued the downward path into the illusory world of sangsara. The soul — by then clothed in a desire-body — was constantly encouraged to face these apparitions, to see their unreality. For “The Lords of Death are thine own hallucinations.”13 In death, I learnt, the mind continued to be aware of events. Only the physical body was no longer present. Like old movies, the experiences that reside in the subconscious continued to play. By recognizing their source they might cease to cause the soul fear and the need to escape. Thus liberation might be achieved and rebirth avoided.

I began to see a relationship between the experiences described in the Bardo world during the time of death and the effects of psychedelics. In the Bardo Thôdol I found compassionate advice which could help me understand, better, my own life-death initiations with LSD. Though written many centuries ago to assist the dying and the dead it was clear to me that the meaning of the Thôdol held true for the living.


When the shapes of mine empty thought-forms dawn upon
me here,
May the Buddhas, exerting the power of their
divine compassion,
Cause it to come that there be neither awe nor terror
in the Bardo.

When the bright radiances of the Five Wisdoms shine
upon me now,
Let it come that I, neither awed nor terrified, may
recognize them to be of myself;
When the apparitions of the Peaceful and Wrathful forms
are dawning upon me here,
Let it come that I, obtaining the assurance of fearlessness,
may recognize the Bardo.14


Our daily lives are constantly affected by the play of subconscious thoughts and reactions. The LSD experience I discovered was influenced, too, by the emergence of subconscious thought-forms. One moment we might know heaven and, in the very next instant, find ourselves falling into hell. The more the ego resisted the unpleasant, the more frightening the experience would become. The only thing was to stop resisting and simply to watch from a distance as the old movies played themselves out.

The psychedelic experience is part of sangsara also, not nirvana. The Tantric symbols used in the Bardo Thôdol correspond to the various psychic nerves and centres called nadis and chakras which store subconscious impulses. And behind the symbolism of deities, mandalas and psychic centres lay “the rational explanation ... that each deity, as it dawns from its appropriate psychic-centre, represents the coming into after-death karmic activity of some corresponding impulse or passion of the complex consciousness. As though in an initiatory mystery-play, the actors for each day of the Bardo come on the mind-stage of the deceased who is their sole spectator; and their director is Karma.”15

LSD overloads and blasts open the psychic centres. The street Acid we bought might have had other toxins such as amphetamine which wreak havoc on the nervous system and cause paranoia. The more we took the black-market psychedelic the greater was the chance of damaging our minds permanently or temporarily. Much later I discovered how any strong drug, including alcohol and cigarettes, can affect the body’s physical and psychic equilibrium, leaving the aura open to outside influences. Seeking escape and short cuts to nirvana we had, in fact, played Russian Roulette with our lives.

For me the process of healing took years and caused much pain to my family and myself. But I was fortunate and with my healing I found the guru. Others were less fortunate. The last time I met Charley — about ten years after Richmond — he shook uncontrollably as if with Delirium Tremens. He had spent years going in and out of mental homes and was sedated with heavy tranquillizers. Though his thinking was quite normal and his reasoning as sharp as ever his nerves were shot to pieces. The paths to God are many and I pray that his is today a happier one.

We grow from our experiences. The more harrowing they are the more permanent the lesson! Whatever method or path we might choose we always return to God. No life ever need be wasted. Looking back at the ‘sixties I am struck by the clumsy and dangerous manner in which we as individuals and as a generation sought to discover ourselves. Was LSD and Flower Power a kind of mass initiation-ceremony or the repetition of a hedonistic past to be re-experienced before going on into the Aquarian Age? Each generation, after all, provides a bridge between the past and a future which it helps to create.

In other civilizations, various methods had been used to alter consciousness in order to provide religious initiations. These initiations were administered by priests who had the knowledge and training to administer such rites. Hallucinogens were revered for their holiness. Some civilizations, such as that of the Brahmans in India, concentrated on yoga and meditation as the process to enlightenment and liberation. During the permissive atmosphere of the ‘sixties we possessed little knowledge of the use of hallucinogens. They were abused in a careless and destructive manner and, in consequence, caused much psychic and physical damage.

Of the many who took LSD a fair number must have turned to seek God in less destructive and more lasting ways. I believe that the dead-end cul-de-sacs we encountered in seeking instant pathways to nirvana were part of the playing-out of our karmic evolution. But they provided us also with a powerful reminder — if we cared to listen — why we had chosen to incarnate in this time and place.


POST-SCRIPT: More recently, I have discovered that many of the ‘rites-of-passage’ I went through during my formative years had occurred within the area of a great Zodiac Circle or Star Temple in the suburbs of London. The Kingston Zodiac was discovered after geomantic research in the ‘seventies and in the zodiacal patterns that were unearthed I discovered a rich, personal meaning.16

During those crucial years, it turned out that I had lived, studied and undergone spiritual self-initiation in the areas of the Kingston Zodiac where the three main signs of my horoscope fell. And, finally I had drawn close to Lud, the ancient Celtic God of Light, on Mount Ararat! Today, I believe Baba to be the Christ presence who had protected me through those difficult times — through the scary, Bardo-like experiences of LSD — and who had stood invisibly by my side to deliver the Bardo Thôdol into my hands. Though I did not know it, then, I was on the road to the Avathar and even greater revelations.17



© RW 1989