In every home in America, in the world, there was cruelty, anger and hatred – things I didn’t feel.
I found that the breakthroughs for me, as I went through school, came through sexuality, explorations of consciousness, reading, loving, friends, time in nature, and through psychedelic experiences.
I’ve been very fortunate because many of the teachers I had were exceptional. But I didn’t realize that at the time that all teachers were not alike.
I leaned from my friends in school. I had lots of friends; yet I was very indrawn.
I read a great deal, avoided the comapny of the children in school who seemed superfical, and fell in love with nature.
In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it – I read it.
I saw more truth and sensitivity in art than I did in many of the people in this world.
I was attracted to poetry, which is perhaps the purest of the art forms, where love is the medium of exchange and the nobility of love is considered. It’s a land of higher ideals.
I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane.
Through high school, college, graduate school and beyond, I had a number of relationships that were wonderful.
I found growing up that love and sexuality was a wonderful way to understand existence. When we love it takes us beyond ourselves, otherwise we’re just absorbed with the preoccupations that we invent.
I think I’ve learned more from women than anyone else, and perhaps from love. What a wonderful testing ground.
The women that I met were exceptional, extraordinary – tremendous purity, tremendous gentleness, self-giving and power.
For some reason, the women in my life have always been extremely powerful. I’ve learned a great deal from that. I’ve learned that we’re all women when we’re complete and we’re all men.
Love was where I learned to go beyond myself, through the arts, through relationships, through sexuality.
In my adolescence, love, as I think for most of us, was a tremendous focus. I wanted to find the perfect partner. I did and married her.
I realized after being married for some time that it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to lead an individual life where I loved on person and we created a world together.
I was very fortunate, and have always been, that the women I met and fell in love with were exceptional, from my first girlfriend to the woman I married when I was 21, to all the remarkable women I have known as either friends or lovers.
I explored alternate states of consciousness at one period of my life through psychedelics, as was the fashion with all my friends.
It was a time period in the 1960, when a generation of souls looked at the established society, looked at the pettiness, the greed, the hate, and rejected it and tried to create something new. Their creation neither succeeded nor failed. It was another experience.