Naropa Institute and the Early Buddhist Community

This interview is with a person who inadvertantly came to Boulder from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. A woman who belonged to the STP Family who was hitchhiking through Wyoming led him to Boulder. Then, almost by accident, he ended up in the Buddhist community. The evolution in this person’s life from abusing drugs to joining the growing Buddhist movement in Boulder is almost worthy of an entire book in itself, yet it is not untypical of the many fascinating accounts of what led people here and what inspired them to stay. As with other people who were involved with the drug culture in the ‘60s and ‘70s, this person did not want his name used.

There is a very real fear in today’s society that some people have about revealing their past lifestyles. One of the people I had interviewed for this book who worked for Celestial Seasonings told me that Kraft Foods, which had bought the company from Mo Siegel, was following the trend in the mid-‘80s to actively identify drug users or former drug users within the company and firing them. There was a certain irony to this at Celestial Seasonings given its hippie roots and certain urban legends about its founders from which one could infer that tea was not the only plant that were harvested, packaged and sold in the beginnings of the company.

Drug tests in the workplace suggest that we are being asked to accept that in exchange for finding meaningful employment that one’s employer can act as surrogate police-state for the government. In an era of perpetual layoffs, downsizings, and economic readjustments it is easy for private employers to coerce submission to drug tests to circumvent the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution which protects one from self-incrimination in civil and criminal proceedings. Unreasonable search and our Fifth Amendment rights have been circumvented in this manner. Giving up one’s Constitutional rights in order to work is a very dangerous road to travel down, in my view.

The Interview

We were a drug-dealing family from San Francisco who, well, the situation sort of burned itself out there. A couple of us rented a van and we were driving to Boston and we picked up a hitchhiker outside of Las Vegas – a lady who it later turned out was a member of the STP Family.

When we were driving through the mountains, we ran into a big snowstorm. We were planning on going through Cheyenne, but we couldn’t let her off in the snowstorm to hitchhike, so we drove her to Boulder. We let her off in the mountains where the STP Gang was staying outside of Boulder. Then we came to Boulder and we were really impressed with the mountains. We thought it was so beautiful!

We had an argument over whether we should continue on to Boston, and we decided to stay in Boulder. The next day we rented a house on The Hill. And then people started filtering out from California that were associated with the drug-dealing clique in San Francisco.

At first we had a bunch of money, but then, stupidly enough, we got involved in dealing again. We fronted drugs to a local Boulderite who we used to sell drugs to (from San Francisco) who was the only supplier of drugs in Boulder for several years. We fronted him a whole bunch of dope and he promptly went out and got busted with it. At that point, in the first place most people didn’t want to get re-involved with dealing. They wanted to have nothing to do with it after that. After that incident, we vowed never to do it again and make a clean break.

Was it pretty lucrative selling dope? Could you make a lot of money?

Yeah. In San Francisco we were pretty well-off. Nobody worked and everybody lived pretty well. Typically, we would get stoned all day and go to whatever concerts there were at night and just hung out at different people’s houses getting stoned.

Were you wholesalers?

Yeah – LSD mainly. Pure LSD. We had a connection with the best that was being put out. Would sell it to people in different cities all over the United States.

Was it orange or green barrels?

Well, barrels were one of the kinds. At any particular time there was a given kind, whether it was Barrels or Chocolate Chips. There were Saucers. There was – I can’t even remember.

Purple Dragon?

Every time our people would come out with a particular kind, then three or four other organizations would imitate the shape and color, only (theirs) wouldn’t be pure. It would be cut with strychnine, speed, or different things.

That was always a problem. We had to charge a little more because ours was pure. They would try to undercut us and sell for less than what we could. People would come in from different cities and go for the cheap stuff because they could make more of a profit, which meant that people who took it would not get the sort of trip that you would have on the pure stuff. It was not very good and definitely not good for people’s mental health.

Was that what happened at that Rolling Stone’s concert at Altamont do you think?

I don’t really know, but there was a lot of bad acid around. I left the area before that. That was where several people were killed. The results of the people who took pure LSD as compared to people who took the bad stuff, how it turned out was that the people who took the pure stuff got into better things and had a better viewpoint of life – and were more quality people, I’d say. That was my experience.

The people I was with were not into acid for entertainment. It was more like for revolution, to change the consciousness of the country, to change the social system. Our parents and that generation were so screwed-up that if they continued on the path that they were going on that it was going to be really bad news. It was like a revolutionary, non-violent movement to change the way that people thought and to open people’s minds up. Our purpose was to get it out to as many people as possible. Now, looking back, I can see that for a lot of people it was very dangerous and a lot of people didn’t make it. A lot of people flipped out.

Even on the good acid?

Yes. A lot less . . . A lot less. All the people I knew are doing somewhat well and some are doing extremely well and are into good things. Most of those people were total freaks. Typically, everybody was stoned all the time. They never got into any criminal activities other than selling acid. They were in love with life. I guess you could say that love of life was their personal philosophy. But they were good people – real nice people. They wouldn’t harm a fly. None of them had guns or anything. If somebody got ripped-off, that was just too bad, you know. We just wouldn’t have anything to do with the people who did it anymore.

I saw all kinds of people around that situation that we wouldn’t have anything to with. They had all kinds of bum experiences and had really screwed-up mentalities and got into criminal activities. Some of them committed suicide.

Do you think cocaine had a lot to do with people going into criminal activities?

I was told right at the beginning not to have anything to do with it. Although we would snort occasionally, we stayed away from it even though there were large profits to be made. We knew that it wasn’t any good right from the beginning. We wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Was it a “bad karma” drug?

Yeah. We wouldn’t have anything to do with pills or hard drugs. There were some people who would occasionally take a little of this or a little of that, but basically we didn’t want to have anything to do with it, or anybody who was into it either. It was mainly just psychedelics and hash oils. And no needles! Needles were totally un-cool. We wouldn’t let anybody in our house that we knew were using needles or selling speed, heroin, or anything like that.

Was San Francisco really going down-hill due to heroin use?

Yeah. That had a lot to do with it. When I first got there, the Haight-Ashbury area was still real nice. The flower children thing was still in its peak. People were really nice and there weren’t any hard-drugs around.

Is the use of hard-drugs what changed it?

Absolutely! Speed and heroin started infiltrating and everything changed dramatically, real fast. The whole thing went really bad. You’d be standing on the street one summer and be seeing these beautiful girls and then you’d see them the next year and their faces would be white and they’d look like ghosts. They’d be totally screwed up, because they started shooting up speed or something.

That’s when people started moving out of that area. We moved out of the area when that was going on and basically most of the people who stayed in that area were the people who got into hard drugs and bum-trip stuff.

So it was the same people who were made different by a different drug? You didn’t have a new underclass of hippies that were a kind of scum to begin with?

Yeah, that happened too. I think the hard drugs are what attracted the scummy people. I think the original people who got into the hard drugs were of the same group of people who originally had the good intentions and the good ideas, but somehow got into using hard drugs and got strung out on it. It was probably because they were weaker or for some other reason, karmic or whatever. They got into it and other people didn’t and still maintained their moral philosophy or whatever.

Did that happen in Boulder too?

That’s exactly what happened in Boulder. The Hill in Boulder was a little microcosm of what went on in Haight-Ashbury. It was similar to what happened in San Francisco, only it happened several years later. That was one of the things that attracted us to Boulder. We were totally amazed to drive into the city and go up to The Hill and discover that it was like San Francisco.

Did the Boulder Dealer’s Association (BDA) try to keep the Mafia out of Boulder?

I don’t know if it was the Mafia. What I heard, and I knew some of the people, so it’s probably good information, that if they found out somebody was dealing bad drugs, that they actually had connections with the police and they’d go and tell on the people and get them busted. I didn’t think it was exactly like the Mafia moving in. I think most of the people selling bad drugs like heroin and speed weren’t exactly the Mafia. It was just people trying to make some money by selling bad drugs – not that they were necessarily connected with the Mafia.

Just to make a buck? There was more money in that?

Yeah. I think that at that point in Boulder, the dealers were coming from the same idealism that we were in San Francisco. They felt like they were doing a really groovy thing and that they weren’t just caring about the money and that they cared about the people. It was only later that it got screwed up.

Now, at the present time, I think it’s just as screwed up as anywhere else. I think there are still some good people doing it, but there are people using guns and there are rip-offs. A lot of people of the people involved are purely profit-motivated. The whole thing has looked sour for a long, long time.

I’ve noticed this attitude of a lot of people who were formerly into drugs and the ‘60s counterculture who have now become yuppies that is an almost condescending attitude toward people who have maintained the ‘60s idealism and values.

I’ve had that attitude, even though I was never that successful monetarily. I’ve had that attitude, but it’s not real strong. Two of the people that were in the group that I was involved with and continued doing the ‘60s thing have had a lot of bum things happen in their lives that the other people haven’t. They’ve had it lot harder than the people who’ve changed. And both of them are extremely nice people. One guy was a Rhodes Scholar and he is an artist and he’s really good and he always was.

They never did anything wrong or bad or anything like that. But they’ve had really hard lives because they didn’t change. I think you have to change. You can’t hold on or grasp on to any one thing. That’s the wrong way to go. On the other hand, if you’ve got somebody feeling superior because he changed and has a sixty or seventy thousand dollar job . . . there’s something suspicious in that too. But I think it is important for people to change. They have to! It’s natural. There were a lot of people who were real intelligent. They were the kind of people who, when they put their energy into making a good living, they can do it because lots of people who got involved in drugs were the more intelligent people.

If they try to grasp on to something because it was so great back then, because it was, in a lot of ways it was really nice, is unrealistic. I think they’ve suffered the consequences. A lot of people who originally got into drugs were the more intelligent people and that is why they are successful in business today and have high-paying jobs and moved on out of the ‘60s.

What do you remember about the STP Gang? Was there anything cool about them?

There wasn’t anything cool about them. They were totally screwed up. I think what happened was that they were from New York or New Jersey and it was a drug-dealing family from that area. I think they were selling some kind of real bad drugs. They were selling some kind of amphetamine-derivative like MDA. The current one is Ecstasy. All it involves is where you change the chemical composition of methadrine or whatever and you create all these sort of psychedelic-like drugs. They must have been getting something real bad. They were all burned out and totally screwed up.

They ended up living in the woods above Boulder. I ran across them on quite a few occasions. They used to come up to our commune sometimes and we’d try to get rid of them as soon as we could. I remember one time when my best friend and I went up camping. We were camping in the area where they were living. If you would drive off of the Boulder Canyon road, there was a certain place down a dirt road into the woods and it was almost like they had their own little town there or something.

I remember going there once and they lived in dome-shaped tents made of logs and animal skins. It looked like something you’d see in a museum depicting how people lived in prehistoric times.

And some of them lived in caves up there. On situation that totally amazed me was when my friend and I one day were walking through the woods and here comes this old 1930s or ‘40s car driving through the woods. The guys in it were dressed in old suits and hats on and looked like out of a gangster movie, and there was a guy riding on the running boards on the outside of the car. The women in the car were also dressed like models out of a gangster movie. These people were driving through the woods, but you got the impression from them that they were gangsters who thought that they were driving through New York City in the 1930s or something.

At night everybody would be around campfires and they’d be getting totally screwed up. They’d get drunk out of their minds. This one guy got up from the fire and walked right into a tree. I mean, they’d be so screwed up that they wouldn’t even know what they were doing.

Were any of them married with wives and kids?

I don’t remember seeing any kids.

Did they have girlfriends?

Oh, yeah! There was a lot of women. It might not have been fifty-fifty, but there was a lot of women. They had their own little subculture going on there. I think they were just into getting screwed up and they’d burned their minds up totally. They couldn’t cope with . . . I think they had to live in the woods because the public couldn’t cope with them. Typically, they had cuts and sores on them and stuff that would be festering and infected. They were just really screwed up.

Then you’d start hearing and reading in the newspaper that they’d get in fights with each other, and one after another was killed. It reached the point that six or seven years ago there might have been only a couple of them left.

It’s not that they were these real mean hoodlum-types or anything like that, it’s just that they burned out completely on some kind of bad drugs. Then they got so screwed up and one thing led to another and they were leading a real hard life. Then they’d get into fights, knife fights, and things like that and just went after one another and died, to the point that almost every one of them had died. You’d see them in Boulder. They’d come to The Hill, or whatever, and they’d have scabs all over their arms and infections. Some of them were dressed just totally outrageously, like with chains strapped all over their body.

Did they sell dope? How did they make money? Did they beg?

They may have sold dope, but I don’t think they sold very much. They might have gotten a little money from that, but they were . . . I think that they just didn’t have anything.

When we were camping up near their camp, some guy showed up with a keg of beer. He was not one of them – just somebody from town or something came up there with a keg. Maybe some people helped them out. I don’t think they had anything – they were just these people who blew their minds out. They’d be so dirty that maybe they never took baths or anything. Their clothes would just be rotting on them. They were really messed up. Nobody admired them or was particularly into their thing or anything. As far as I know, no one would buy into their trip. I don’t think they had many converts or anything.

There were a lot of strange characters. There was John the Baptist. He used to preach in the parks. He used to get little groups of people around him and thought that he was John the Baptist! I actually ended up visiting these two girls who lived in the house where he lived and was talking to him. And he was really an alright guy. He really was. He just thought he was John the Baptist!

Was he part of STP?

No. He was just one of the characters. When we first got here, one of the guys who was the sort of godfather of the drug scene was “Papa Joe,” and he had this whole family of people around him. Everybody would come to him for advice with problems that they might have. He’d sit there in a chair and people would come up to him and say, “This is going on.” Or “That is going on.” And he’d give them a decision. There were all kinds of unusual people around at that time.

A couple of us got jobs, like my wife was a nurse. But, in general, most of us had a hard time finding employment. Most of us were so far out from all the drugs that we had done that I don’t think people were ready for us. We did try to get jobs.

As a group, we had six or seven people living at the house. People started filtering out of San Francisco and we really couldn’t afford the house on The Hill anymore, so we rented a farm out on Arapahoe about half-way between Boulder and Lafayette. It was a farmhouse and a big barn.

And then more people started coming out from San Francisco. We ended up without about twenty people. We were into health foods, macrobiotics, herbs (and) things like that. At first, well, we went through a lot of different changes. But at first, we’d go out and get jobs again. I was working at King Soopers as a cashier.

I came home from work one day and one of the guys was just sitting there, and he had just quit his job and he said, “This is screwed!” We had just gotten some Panama Red and had been smoking that and getting pretty stoned. He said, “This is screwed, let’s all quit our jobs!”

There were some deer antler laying around and we’d seen some marijuana pipes made out of deer antler. So we said, “Why don’t we start making pipes out of deer antler?” So I said, “Okay,” and I quit (my job). We didn’t even have an electric drill, so we used to take clothes hangers and we’d get them red-hot and somehow jam the clothes hanger through the antlers and make pipes out of them. But when we took them around to sell them, we sold them right away! So that encouraged us and we started getting tools, and we got further and further into it. We actually built up a good clientele. Dope dealers would come out and pull out a wad of hundred dollar bills and buy everything.

During all this time we were going through changes of people who lived there. And the word got out that it was a place that you could go and stay. We were rather heavy duty as far as relating to the people who came. We’d let them stay there for a couple of days, but if they wanted to stay longer we would really check them out and really put them through the wringer. We ended up with about thirty people who were really together, but we probably went through hundreds and hundreds of people.

In the meantime, a bunch of the people had started making leather jackets. They were entirely hand-laced, not even using a sewing machine, and that became the main means of support. They were selling pretty good , and they’d sell them in high-class boutiques in Chicago and New York and places like that.

We had a reputation around Boulder – a lot of the hippies around Boulder thought that we really knew the old-timers. They would ask us advice about things and relate to us like we were real together. We were still doing drugs a lot. We were still dropping acid a lot, (although) not nearly as much, though, as we did when we were living in San Francisco. But we were still doing it and sitting around at night smoking dope.

 

We’d have these meetings where everybody sat around in a circle and everybody could say something in turn. And then we’d put people on the hot spot, where they’d have to stand in the middle and answer questions from everybody. I think it was supposed to be the Hopi way of doing it. And we’d play the tabla and different drums at night and all get stoned.

It was like in San Francisco, we took so many drugs that it started to seem that the trips were the same, over and over again, and everybody was burning out. So we decided that we’d better get into spirituality.

So we started checking out all of the different spiritual disciplines and we’d read various books and a couple of people got into the Intrical (sic) Yoga Institute, Hatha Yoga, and one guy that lived there was into the Maharishi (and) transcendental meditation. Darma Zong took over the original Yoga space. The Guru was Tatcha Yunanda . He’s a really outstanding teacher. Right about that time there was a spiritual festival in Boulder in the year when we were really starting to get into this stuff. Our search for a teacher was intensifying. Most of the major Eastern teachers that were in the West came to that festival, (which) was held at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was a tremendous opportunity to come in contact with all these different teachers.

There was another thing going on, and that was this couple had come to live with us at our commune and the guy was a sculptor. He was very talented. Anyway, he said that he’d met this lady in New Orleans that had told hi that if he came to Colorado that one of his kids would die. In the meantime, we had moved into a sort of a resort around Ward. It was like a lodge with a bunch of cabins.

We were doing very well. Our leather business was booming. We had combined with this other commune that lived by Haystack Mountain, and they were the ones that were really good at leather making. We had good connections and everything for selling stuff.

I had recently gotten married, and the day after I had gotten married, a bunch of us took off for San Francisco to hear the Grateful Dead. When we were in San Francisco, we were treated very well and all of the people we used to deal with treated us just great.

Then we got a phone call that the lodge had burned down and the guy’s kid had died in the fire. So we were coming back for the funeral. We had jumped in the car and headed back immediately and cracked up on the way back. Three people were killed and a couple of others got serious damage. I just broke my nose.

Anyway, this guy was just totally amazed that what this guy had prophesied had come true. So he went back down to New Orleans to find out what was going on and he became one of her main disciples. She called herself Koomie – The Dot in the Center of the Circle. She was an old New Orleans housewife, and she talked with a Brooklyn accent.

There’s a section of New Orleans where people speak with a Brooklyn-type accent – the Irish section. Her husband was a truck driver. Anyway, she said that she had studied under Tibetan lamas. Basically, her teachings were a combination of Western theosophical-type stuff, which we had already been getting into that stuff, too, along with regular Eastern disciplines and Western esoteric stuff. Things like seeing auras and astral-projection. All those things were really happening. Everybody was really experiencing it.

A group from our place was looking for a place to take a vacation, so they went down to New Orleans and they stayed with this guy and his wife, just for a place to stay. They were living in the French Quarter. And they came back with these glowing reports of how mind-blowing this lady was and that it was for real.

Everybody discounted it, but anyway, I was on the second trip that went down there and by no means were we going down there to check this situation out or did we believe it at all. But we got blown away by the whole thing. We stayed in the house with all the other people.

It was an apartment complex that was several hundred years old with a square courtyard in the middle and all her main students stayed there. And all of these incredible things were happening to us and just blowing our minds. So we got into it.

We came back and were trying to convince more people to get into it. She did not want us to leave, the lady – Koomie. I think that although we were completely amazed by the whole thing, we were very cynical people. We were very dubious. We didn’t buy it totally.

Right after we got back is when Chugyum Trunka Rimpoche, a Tibetan lama, had been invited to the university to give a lecture. It was part of a whole series of Eastern teachers that were giving lectures at the Spiritual Festival. We had been quite impressed by several of the teachers. We actually liked Maharishi quite a bit, and Sasha Yananda (also). There were Hindus. There was every kind you could think of. But we were really impressed when Rimpoche talked! We used to see the auras of the different ones, and we really liked his aura. It seemed a solid gold.

Are these auras something you can see from taking LSD? Is it an acquired thing?

It must be. I mean, we were reading these books on how to do this stuff, and people were doing it. We read the books and just started doing it! All kinds of weird stuff was going on – we were astral-projecting all the time. We’d see each other floating around the room and talk about it afterwards. The other guy was doing the same thing and you saw him doing it.

There were all kinds of weird things going on. We were receiving communications from beings from other planets. People were getting possessed and all kinds of weird shit! We were doing these practices that were given to us by Koomie where demons would be drawn forth and it would get real freaky. And it wasn’t nice – we didn’t like it. We were into magic and we were getting into that stuff. And anyway, we sent a delegation of people up to the house that Chugyum Trumpa Rimpoche was staying at and he was invited to dinner.

And he came over and everybody really liked him, so we all decided that we should go to his home. Then we got evicted from our farm and didn’t have a place to go, so we ended up living up in the mountains above Boulder. There were about thirty of us.

The Sheriff’s Department would make us move every few days, and they’d be always checking us out. It was actually very nice. We had these pretty-nice camps that we’d set up in the woods. And we’d find these really nice spots and we’d just spend the day reading a book and hanging out beneath a tree or something.

In the meantime, we were still going to Rimpoche’s house in Four Mile Canyon. We’d go there to meditate and have meetings. Anyway, these two guys showed up who owned the Whole Earth Catalogue Store in Boulder and they had bought a resort down in Southern Colorado (called) Mineral Hot Springs. So they invited us to move down there.

So we took them up on it and all moved down there. It turned out to be just like a health spa. They had a sixty foot swimming pool with hot mineral water coming into it, and they had a motel with about six units. A restaurant and bar, a gas station, a bath house, and it was situated at the head of the San Luis Valley, right between two mountain ranges. The sky was real close and you didn’t have to work or anything. They didn’t charge us anything to live there. All we had to do was get food.

We’d hang out all day and go into this mineral hot water and everybody would be totally relaxed. Everybody went naked most of the time. Sometimes we’d go up into the mountains and hike around. We lived there about six months.

Several out-of-the-ordinary things happened while we were there. For instance, the guy who was managing the local ranch had been getting it on with one of the local girls who lived there. And he came over one day and smoked some Bombay hash and freaked out, and they had to tie him up, you know, because he got violent. And they took him back and dropped him off at his farmhouse and he got mad and cut the water lines.

He came over the next day with an acetylene torch and cut our water lines. And it went on and escalated until he invited all the locals for free beer. He bought a lot of beer and they built campfires right across from the restaurant and bar and proceeded to get drunk. All these different locals showed up, and the idea was that they were going to attack us and wipe us out!

So we called the Sheriff’s Department. So they had a couple of sheriff’s cars parked out in front and we could hear the people across the road getting drunk out of their minds and screaming and yelling. When nightfall came, they started crawling through the bushes to attack us. So the Sheriff’s Department caught this one guy right off the bat and they brought him into the restaurant and he was all freaked out. And we said, “Awe, let him go.”

Anyway, after the guy got caught, they all left. Nothing happened. Another time these people people showed up from Big Sur with some Orange Sunshine (LSD) and they spiked everything.

In the meantime, travelling salesmen and people like that would stop by the restaurant thinking it was still a regular restaurant to get breakfast or whatever. And since we didn’t have any source of income, the girls would cook them some food up and people like that would stop by the restaurant thinking it was still a regular restaurant (to order food and eat).

I think a tire salesman was the first one. He ended up walking around the back of the place just totally mind-blown and feeling great. And one thing led to another and these people started calling their friends up. And people just started descending on the place – all of these locals.

And a big party ensued. Everybody was wrecked out of their minds on psychedelics. All the local forest rangers and the sheriff ended up there. And he was having a great time. He called up the owner of the liquor store and had a whole bunch of beer brought out. We just had a great time and nobody got into any fights or anything. It was just like the greatest time in the world.

After that, our bad relations with the people in the valley were gone. We had good relations and they liked us. But it turned out that the two hippie guys that were letting us stay there, the two entrepreneurs, started acting like they were our gurus or our teachers. We didn’t go for it. They were on some kind of ego trip. So anyway, they threw us out of there. In the meantime, we were searching for a piece of land to buy to establish a meditation center in association with Chogyum Trumpa. One of his students had inherited some money.

Our idea was to buy a ranch or something with all the buildings already on it. We found that the land prices were too expensive within a sixty-mile radius of Denver. We were having a hard time finding a good piece of land for the amount of money that we wanted to spend. We wanted water on it – you know, a nice piece of land.

We ended up buying a piece of land about sixty miles west of Fort Collins. We all moved up there, but the day before that there was a tremendous snowstorm that dumped about three feet of snow on the Rockies. When I woke up in the tent I had been in, the tent had collapsed and I had been sleeping in this little air pocket.

So there was three-and-a-half feet of snow on the ground and the land didn’t have any buildings. But actually it was a very nice piece of land with a creek running through it and everything. It was three hundred sixty acres.

After the snow melted, we built a couple of chicken coop type shacks and lived in those for the winter. In the next couple of years people got enough money to start building some decent cabins and we started developing the whole thing.

It’s to the point now that it’s a pretty substantial meditation center. Right now, they’re planning on building a large complex of buildings up there. It’s going to be really incredible.

For the first couple of years, Rimpoche just kept letting us do our drugs or whatever. But then he came down real heavy on us and did not want us doing drugs at all. He didn’t even want us smoking a joint. So we all started drinking. One thing led to another to the point now that I’ve disassociated myself with all that stuff.

And I’m glad for it. I think that the quality of my life is so much better not being around those people and the drug scene. I hardly feel the desire to do drugs, ever! I’m not sorry for making those changes and disassociating myself from drugs.

As it turned out, the interpretation that everybody was giving themselves about how great the ‘60s scene was back in those days . . . when I cleared my mind up and could see what was really going on, it wasn’t really that great. It was actually, in some ways, a bummer. Overdoing it, as far as doing those quantities of drugs that we did, we were just becoming stupid, burned out. We were fried. Our minds weren’t functioning right anymore or anything. At first it was real good, but we overdid it. We were just becoming a bunch of idiots hanging on to the past, and we couldn’t think clearly.

I’m so grateful for having become involved in something like Buddhism that allowed me to pull myself out of that, and to become a regular person. I feel like I’m relatively sane and that I’ve got my head screwed on pretty well. It took me years to get myself back together from the experience with the drugs. I’m lucky to have done it, because some people didn’t.

At this point in my life, I have decided to devote my life to furthering my realization of the Buddhist paths. Interestingly enough, I must have had some good karma to get hooked up with the teacher I had. He turned out to be acknowledged, even by other Buddhist teachers, as being really advanced.

Copyright 2026 S. Byron Gassaway