As a teenage philosophy major I worked in a local hospital in 1966. My Gnostic/Buddhist values depicted "reality" as a DREAM that the Sutras called Samsara. Within Buddhism there is also the Divine Feminine, Tara.
My girlfriend Lynn was a microcosmic version, divinely feminine, who I called the "girl of my dreams" in long rambling poems to her in the college literary magazine. But at times, usually just before her monthly cycle, she was just "too much" to dream about. Lynn was as photogenic as she was intense, with her lustrous hair and wide child like eyes.
We enjoyed long candlelit evenings discussing the teachings of Buddha, Lao Tsu and Jesus who in certain scriptures referred to existence as a chimera, a restless dream. With thes horizontal couch conversations punctuated with amorous kisses. In those pre-birth-control years, we did not "go all the way" erotically, but our spiritual dialogues were episodes of tantric bliss.
So after one such de.LIGHTfull evening, I slept at my family home. That night radiant-eyed Tara appeared to me, reigning not over Samsara, this tumultuous earthly realm where countless others are wracked with afflictions, but reigning over a Tushita Heaven where its citizens have "seen the light" and are "illuminated."
AWAKE! "and then came the dawn, and you were gone." My vision of Tara dissolved because "I'm not ready to see the light" of samadhi. So I put the key in the ignition of my new blue Mustang and drove to tell Lynn about my incredible visionary dream but when I turned on the radio there was this song I heard for the first time. Its shimmering feedback echoed the electromagnetic resonance in my own Gnostic/Buddhist Heart/Mind.
So I purchased that song and played it for Lynn and we listened to the signal frequency of that sound as if it was a mantric message from Tara herself.
As one of the leading Psychedelic Artists in the Haight Ashbury it was common to hear non San Francisco groups be ridiculed for being "wanna be" bands. But every lysergic scented person I knew in SF, Berkeley, NY, LA & London (where my work appeared frequently in the Underground Press) always saw there was so much more to that song than just some lonesome guy referencing his girlfriend.
When I, and some other musician/artists. fell asleep on the influence of LSD we often summed it up by saying "We Had Too Much To Dream" and that this messed up planet was "just too much."
As genuine "Tree Huggers" we gathered outside of town in an orchard at night. Dead plum tree branches were used to make a bonfire, while we held hands around it. The owners of the orchard provided us with barrels of free plums and prunes, so we all hugged the trees as we recognized them as being just as conscious as we were, emersed in this same confabulated collective DREAM that is "just too much."
As all living things flow with electromagnetic resonance we could actually feel the flow of these plum trees as we each hugged them. As we touched the living plums on their boughs our finger tips could actually receive their electric signals, just as the plum received ours.
In our circle around that crackling fire the leading poets and guitarists in our group wrote lyrics that described the plums as the intended gifts of the non predatory and illuminated trees in that sacred orchard. We even noticed that even when they had dried in the hot sun for a week, our fingers could still feel the "vibes" from those Electric Prunes.
One Latino teen in that orchard who enjoyed those prunes is now one of the top writers in California. And as for my girlfriend Lynn, for 30 years she is been the "wife" of one of America's richest and most famous painters. Since then scientific studies at UCD on those prunes and plums we enjoyed back then, confirm what ancient Taoists Sages said about them in mystical poems, they they are intended to be the low priced gifts of wise plums trees, one of the most advanced species of life on this samsaric planet where all is too much of a psychedelic dream.
by John Thompson (freelance writer)
|
