CHAPTER 15

JOURNEY TO THE EAST

After meeting in Paris, David and I flew nonstop to Tehran. We arrived to discover the Land Rover ensnared in a Kafka-like hell of Iranian bureaucracy. We required just the right piece of paper to liberate it from customs, a matter of significant diplomatic negotiation and a glittering opportunity for local graft. While we waited for the paperwork to clear, we decided to fly to Isfahan, a city known for its stunning architecture.

Isfahan was a capital of ancient Persia, and its Imam Square is one of the largest public squares in the world. The Shah Mosque, with its hand-painted tiles and geometric art, was breathtaking. Because of the Six-Day War, there were no tourists, and as we wandered the city—its palaces, mosques, minarets, bridges, and a huge bazaar—David and I had it all to ourselves. Our guide was Ferydoon Agahi, a Sufi fellow with family in Tehran. When he heard us discuss India and learned that we planned to drive through the city of Mashhad, home to Iran’s largest religious shrine, he asked if he could hitch a ride.

Since he could translate Farsi for us, we agreed. We set out in the reclaimed Land Rover, heading east across the Alborz Range and down along the Caspian Sea. There were no road maps, so we used old aviation maps. As we drove, Ferydoon narrated the history and culture of Iran. David and I were both interested in Sufism and the different schools of Islam, and as we listened—stopping to see exquisite art and architecture all along the way—we developed a deep appreciation for the great beauty of Islam.

We remained insulated in the Land Rover. We listened to Vivaldi tapes and ate peanut butter while observing the life and culture outside. The Land Rover was crammed with so much stuff that we couldn’t move around, so at some point we began to off-load. We gave a steel trunk to a young woman along the road who was getting married. We found we didn’t need the refrigerator, so we gave that away too. Finally we got the car stripped down enough for easy traveling. But it was still a Western bubble we sat comfortably inside.

David has an encyclopedic mind, and we enjoyed connecting intellectually, though we had different perspectives on just about everything. We discussed psychology—me from an academic standpoint, him on its real-world application—and also environmental issues, which David knew a lot about. I had parted company with Tim, and he had parted with his company, Basic Systems, parallel experiences we bonded over and teased each other about.

David kept a faithful travel journal (many of these details are thanks to him). He also read and memorized Persian poetry, which he recited as we drove. One of these works, The Conference of the Birds, was written by the great Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, from Nishapur. When we passed the town on the way to Mashhad, we stopped to visit his tomb. We also visited the white-marble mausoleum of Omar Khayyam, another of Nishapur’s famous poets.

Then we got to Mashhad, which is called “the holy city of Iran” because it is home to the tomb of Imam Reza, Islam’s eighth Shiʽ‘a imam. The shrine around the tomb is immense, with a golden dome and minarets and many surrounding courtyards. The blue tile work and calligraphy are intricate and beautiful.

Ferydoon was going to visit the tomb, and we told him we wanted to see it too. “No, no,” he said, “you are not Muslim. You can’t go in.” Non-Muslims can visit the courtyards but not the tomb. “Oh, come on!” we protested. David said he would disguise himself in a hijab, as a woman.

“You are insane,” replied Ferydoon. “They will kill you. They will really kill you. Don’t do that.” So we hung around outside. There were almost no Western tourists, but people were very friendly. We got to observe such Shi‘a devotional practices as chanting, crying, and recitation.

After leaving Ferydoon, we went on toward Afghanistan, another 150 miles to the border. The dividing line between the two countries was a simple barbed-wire fence, stretching into the distance. Across the road, a long red and white pole on a hinge, with a padlock on it, served as an entry gate. That was the border crossing. We stopped at the gate, not knowing what to do.

There was a shack up on the hillside, and we watched as a guy came down to meet us. We handed him our passports. He looked at my passport and turned some of the pages, holding it upside down. He had no idea what he was looking at.

The man’s features were Mongolian or Chinese, totally unlike those of the Persians and Afghans we had seen. We learned later the Afghan government had a practice of assigning men from the eastern part of the country to the western border. The border agent lifted the gate, and we drove another few miles, to a town with an administrative center where they would mark our passports with an entry stamp. The official took out a stamp, but instead of inking it on a pad he licked the stamp with his tongue. Then he stamped the passports. He was reusing the ink already on the stamp.

Outside on the porch, we found a dozen Afghan men sitting on benches, talking and drinking tea. They all had rifles and wore bandoliers of bullets. They looked rugged and dangerous, like extras out of a Khyber Pass B movie. As we walked out, they went quiet. They watched intently as we strode toward the parked Land Rover.

On our drive through Iran, David and I had been smoking a lot of dope. I’d brought along a big bag of Owsley’s White Lightning, but we’d limited ourselves to one small LSD session by ourselves at the hotel in Tehran. Now, feeling the stares of these hardened fighters, I rummaged through the car for our hash pipe. It was an awkward-looking thing, with a big wooden bowl, a brass stem, and a mouthpiece.

I filled it with dope and lit up, then passed it to David. The gunmen watched. David smoked a bit. Then he gave it to one of the guys, who had a smoke and passed the pipe. Everyone had a toke. In a few minutes, the atmosphere changed from tense to relaxed and contemplative.

We continued peacefully on our way. Entering Afghanistan was like turning the clock back centuries. Now it’s a war zone, but back then it was pastoral, with sheep and herdsmen, subsistence farms, and mountainous landscapes. Occasionally we’d have to stop and wait for flocks of sheep to clear the road.

It was very hot and dry. In Herat, we spent a couple of days in a hotel and went swimming in the pool. It was wonderful, the first swim we’d had. From there, we planned to drive to Kabul on a northern route, through Mazar-i-Sharif, but the road was so bad we were forced to turn around. Instead, we went south through Kandahar, later the power seat of the Taliban.

This road was a brand-new highway, built by the Soviets. It had no road signs, but it was a perfect two-lane ribbon of asphalt—not a crack in it, soft shoulders on either side. We passed a drinking well, also built by the Soviets, and met a couple of French kids who were hitchhiking to India. In Ghazni, just south of Kabul, we stopped at the Museum of Islamic Art, one of the most beautiful museums I have ever seen. It had just opened its galleries a year earlier. Years of conflict have since damaged some of the collections, but at the time, I was struck by the splendor of both the artifacts and the building, which was the mausoleum of the Persian scholar Abd al-Razzaq. The mausoleum’s architecture is thought to have inspired the design of the Taj Mahal.

Finally, we got to Kabul, a third-world city that, like many others, was modernizing. Of what was to come from Communists or jihadists there was no sign; instead, the streets were filled with young people who worked for United Nations agencies, the women walking around in short skirts. It felt like Bangkok or Manila. The king was still on the throne, although he lived mostly in Italy.

For the equivalent of two dollars we scored a kilo of hash—“Take all you want!”—and then headed north, to see the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan. We took the Salang Pass, a very high and dangerous road through the mountains. The two sixth-century statues, carved out of sandstone cliffs in the Bamiyan Valley, were famous for their beauty and craftsmanship, as well as their imposing size. The taller of the two was more than 170 feet tall. At Bamiyan, we climbed up a hidden stairway and sat on top of the great Buddha’s head. The head alone was gigantic, some fifteen or twenty feet high.

I was still so much the psychologist that any spiritual significance of the Buddhas was lost on me—I thought of them simply as artifacts—but David, who understood Buddhist history and philosophy, was moved. In March 2001, the Buddhas were blown up by the Taliban, an act of destruction that prefigured the attacks of 9/11.

Back in Kabul, we met up with a friend of David’s, a Pakistani Sufi named Tariq Hamid, who served as a translator. Tariq had been part of the psychedelic scene in New York and was sort of an intellectual type. The plan was for us to travel over the Khyber Pass, into and across Pakistan, then through Amritsar, Jammu, and on to Srinagar, in Kashmir. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want to do that. Maybe I was fed up with the driving and the endless scenery or with needing Tariq as a translator.

In any case, I decided to fly ahead to India. I wanted to see the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri and all the things I’d heard about from Tim and Ralph and Allen Ginsberg. Since David had already seen all these tourist places, he was fine with me taking off. We agreed to rendezvous in a couple of weeks in Srinagar.

For the two weeks I traveled on my own, I played at being a tourist, staying at fancy hotels. It was the luxury side of India, though wealth and poverty are never that far apart there. Then I headed up to Srinagar, where David and I had agreed to meet on a houseboat called the New Ruby, on Dal Lake. Srinagar is in the Kashmir Valley, next to a couple of lakes, and it’s known for its incredible water and mountain vistas.

When I got there, I met two American girls, Beth and Jacqui, who were going around the world. It was a serendipitous encounter—they were just wandering—and I invited them to join David and me on the houseboat. We boarded a water taxi, called a shikar, to cross Dal Lake. Halfway across, we spied another shikar, and who should be on it but David?

We all stayed together on the New Ruby—David slept with one of the girls—and for the next several days we relaxed and got high. We had some celestial LSD parties on the houseboat, awed by our surroundings. After some days, we decided to trek to Amarnath cave, a Hindu shrine farther up in the twenty-thousand-foot Himalaya peaks, about forty miles from Srinagar. David loves mountains. Amarnath is a deeply sacred pilgrimage site because of its ice stalagmite, formed from the meltwater that drips from the ceiling of the cave and believed to be one of the Jyotirlingams, a phallic representation of Shiva. The pillar of ice changes in height and size with the season and temperature, and it is called a “lingam of light” for how it catches sunlight. The cave is surrounded by snow most of the year, and every summer, thousands of devotees make a pilgrimage.

The owner of our houseboat and his father had led expeditions for foreigners during the British Raj, and they had equipment and tents. It was before the pilgrimage season, and they told us it would be cold. We hired ponies. When the ponies could go no farther, we walked. We had saddle sores and blisters. It was a two-day trek from base camp. The cold and snow and miniscule mountain trails were more than we’d bargained for. David wrote in his diary: “Unbelievable ascent up the side of the river chasm. Terrifying ice crossings, two thousand foot drops, three-foot wide path on slippery soft shale. Hair-raising quality for several hours—‘How did I get myself into this?’ thoughts. Turning the corner into Amarnath Gorge, with a meadow on the shoulder with a million colored flowers—for only two weeks a year.” Finally, we made it to the cave. Even though I had no inkling of its meaning, I was impressed. (Later, Maharaj-ji said to me, “You went to Amarnath. But you didn’t know what it was.”)

After Amarnath, the girls went their own way. David and I continued on to Dharamsala, a city on the edge of the Himalayas where the Dalai Lama has taken refuge since fleeing Tibet in 1959. There, we met with Keith Dowman, a great student of esoteric Buddhism who is fluent in Tibetan and has studied with Tibetan yogis. We also tried to get an audience with the Dalai Lama, who was then about thirty years old. With no advance notice, we went up to the gate at Swarg Ashram, his headquarters. “No, he’s in meditation today,” we were told. “Maybe tomorrow.”

We decided to wait. Anyway, we couldn’t really leave: the Land Rover needed repairs. Climbing an immensely steep hill near Dharamsala, we’d heard a cracking sound from one of the front hubs. Then the Land Rover had given a great shudder and ground to a halt. We managed to back down the hill to a repair shop in McLeod Ganj, a little suburb of Dharamsala. The mechanic fished around under the car and in the rear differential box and then stood up. His hands, full of black grease, held thirty or forty fragments of metal. The front hubs of the Land Rover had slipped, and with all of the torque suddenly being applied to the rear axle, the gears had stripped.

We didn’t know what to do. There was no hope of finding replacement parts in Dharamsala. India had plenty of Jeeps but no Land Rovers. The only answer seemed to be to contact the British Consulate in New Delhi for help getting parts.

Fortunately, the Dalai Lama was now ready to see us. We went to the audience with His Holiness. He was open and engaging. He was curious about my psychedelic work, and we talked about consciousness and LSD. He was fascinated by Western technology, and these drugs were a Western phenomenon. He was a fellow explorer of consciousness within his Tibetan framework—which I wasn’t entirely ignorant of, thanks to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He urged David to read Nagarjuna, one of Buddhism’s most important philosophers, perfect for David. Afterward, we visited the Dalai Lama’s mother and his sister, who ran a children’s charity. We stayed in the guesthouse run by his brother, which is still the in place to stay.

I was impressed. The Dalai Lama was close to us in age, practically our peer, and he had all these monks around him, treating him with deep deference and respect. I gave His Holiness a diffraction grating bindi and showed him how you could put it on your forehead, where it made rainbows. I was so naïve. I wonder how he saw us? Probably as babes in the woods.

We tried to locate a truck to take the crippled Land Rover to Delhi, to no avail. Eventually we figured out that even though the rear wheels were gone, if we put it in four-wheel drive, the front wheels still had traction. It was a precarious scheme, but it worked. Occasionally the front wheels would also lose traction and the engine would rev pointlessly. I discovered that if we packed the front hubs with gravel and pounded it in with a hammer, they would hold together for a while.

We left Dharamsala for New Delhi, passing through Kurukshetra, where the epic battle of Mahabharata is said to have taken place, the scene of the Bhagavad Gita. After several hundred miles, we got to India’s capital and made our way to the British Consulate. Officials there said we could get a new axle assembly from Calcutta, which we proceeded to order. While we waited, we spent time looking around the city and visiting Tibet House, a new five-story outpost of Tibetan art and culture. The Land Rover was becoming a saga unto itself.

Harish Johari, the poet-musician-sculptor-yogi whom David had met on his previous sojourn in India, came to meet us in New Delhi. One of his first commissions as a sculptor was a statue of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, for a temple in his hometown of Bareilly. He made other temple statues and was also known for his painted frescoes. He was an Indian renaissance man; he eventually was recognized for his writings and lectures on everything from astrology to chakras.

Once the Land Rover got its new rear axle, we drove with Harish to Bareilly, to visit his family’s home. Then we went on to Varanasi, or Benares, the holy city on the banks of the River Ganges and one of the most intensely religious places on the planet, a major pilgrimage site. Many Hindus come there to die and be cremated along the banks of the river, which is considered holy.

We stayed in a small hotel near the Ganga, close to Manikarnika Ghat, one of the holiest of the cremation grounds. I was overwhelmed by the number of people wandering the streets, waiting to die. There were lepers and people with obvious deformities and visible cancers. Each person carried just enough money to pay for the firewood needed for their cremation. I could barely look at them. I felt waves of horror. I thought they should all be in the hospital. I couldn’t connect with or even confront them as human beings.

I remained a tourist, caught up in my bubble—exuding Western pity. The sights and ideas I’d encountered in India were churning inside me, but I was viewing the culture through the windshield of the Land Rover. From my correspondence with Meher Baba, I had some sense of India, but it was still a mystery. Temples and pilgrimage places gave me a strong hit. The mystery was in the people. The culture was pulling me in, but I didn’t understand it.

Benares was a forced immersion, my first encounter with the reality of India. No more tourism: we sat by the burning ghats and watched families bring bodies for cremation. As the body burned, the oldest son or another family representative would crack the skull with a stick to liberate the dead person’s soul. The ashes were taken to the river’s edge and dumped in the sacred waters of the Ganga.

David, Harish, and I went out on a boat on the Ganga and took LSD. It was Harish’s first trip. David took a lower dose so he could hold the ground. The corpse of a young girl, maybe four years old, bumped gently into our boat, bloated and discolored. Young children are sometimes just put in the river, as are saints and yogis.

Seeing the body really did something to me. It was a true initiation into impermanence. That and god intoxication filled Benares. I was so freaked out I went back to the hotel and hid under the bed.

From Benares, we drove to Kathmandu, in Nepal. We stayed at the Soaltee Hotel, a five-star luxury hotel that had been built by the prince of Nepal and inaugurated a year earlier by King Mahendra. Hungry, we went into town and ended up at a restaurant called the Blue Tibetan, a popular hangout for foreigners.

Somehow people knew who I was and that I was presumably a source for LSD. In my quest for people in the East who knew about planes of consciousness, David and I had freely given of my supply to any holy man who wanted to try it. I’d hoped these men could offer the understanding I sought, but no one had offered me any fresh insight. One guy said, “It gave me a headache.” An old Theravada Buddhist monk said, “It’s good, but not as good as meditation.” Another man asked, “Where can I get more?”

The scenery and our adventures had been breathtaking, but so far no map reader had emerged. I was starting to feel depressed. We’d seen the Dalai Lama, been to Amarnath and Benares, now Kathmandu—yet I wasn’t any closer to the answers I was looking for. Our trip was winding down, and David was talking about flying to Calcutta, then stopping in Japan on our way back to the US. In Kyoto we planned to meet up with Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and the poet Philip Whalen, who were all there visiting Japanese temples and studying Zen Buddhism. It wasn’t a bad plan, but what was I going to do when I got back?

We met some French hippies at the Blue Tibetan and got to talking. As we sat there, a tall, arresting figure walked up to our table. He was a westerner, about six foot seven, with a blond beard. His hair was coiled in blond dreadlocks, sadhu style, and he was wearing malas and a dhoti. He’d heard about ex–Harvard Professor Richard Alpert and his supply of LSD. We invited him to join us.

Originally Michael Riggs, a twenty-three-year-old surfer from Laguna Beach, he had been living in India for several years and was now named Bhagavan Das. He seemed to know his way around. He looked the perfect yogi; at the same time, he could lapse into California surfer slang. I liked him.

We invited him over to the Soaltee and took LSD together. We hung out for several days, discussing Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and smoking hash. When we went down to the hotel swimming pool, he started performing puja, offering water in the pool. People began to pull their kids from the pool because this holy man was using it. His emanation was very strong.

There was something about him; I could feel Bhagavan Das knew something I needed to know. When he said he was going on a pilgrimage to several Buddhist temples, I asked to go with him. The reason I’d come to India was consciousness, not religion, but I knew I had hardly plumbed the country’s spiritual depth. I didn’t want to go to Japan—not yet. I felt, in a visceral way, that I was incomplete with India. I needed to go deeper.

I was also attracted to Bhagavan Das. He picked up on this, and he figured that was why I wanted to travel with him. But that wasn’t my main motivation: I truly felt pulled by something inside. In any case, he was attracted to me too—though in his case it was about the LSD. Richard Alpert, of “Leary and Alpert,” was well known, and he knew wherever I went, psychedelics went too.

David still intended to go to Japan. He decided to leave the Land Rover in Harish’s care, with instructions to give it to me if I wanted to use it. So as David took off for Calcutta to catch a flight farther east, the rest of us drove back to Harish’s home in Bareilly. There, Bhagavan Das and I left Harish, the Land Rover, and my Western baggage—literally and figuratively.

We set out barefoot. Bhagavan Das taught me to beg for food to turn me into a bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk. I’d find myself squatting on the street, begging with my kamandal, or sadhu pot. People would drop in a coin or two for the holy man. Meanwhile, in my jhola shoulder bag were my passport and my American Express Travelers Cheques, as well as my bottle of LSD.

We stayed in pilgrim rest houses called dharmsalas, some put up by the government, with concrete rooms and wooden beds. At first it was an adventure, and the spartan conditions didn’t bother me. But it was very hot, and as the days went by, I needed to distract myself from the blisters and bad food. I tried to entertain myself narrating my past exploits to Bhagavan Das. I thought he would be amused, but he was completely uninterested. When I told stories, he replied, “Just be here now.” I was thrown back into myself. Just be. Here. Now.

After two months of arduous travel, Bhagavan Das said he needed to visit his guru. He’d gotten a notice from the Indian government that his visa had expired, and he knew his guru could fix the paperwork. He asked if we could drive the Land Rover up to the Himalayan foothills, where his guru was. I had no interest in gurus or the garish trappings of Hinduism, but I grudgingly agreed.

We returned to Bareilly for the Land Rover, then began driving up to the hills. When nightfall came, we stayed with a family that Bhagavan Das knew. Like Harish, they were devotees of the monkey god, Hanuman. They welcomed us into their modest home and fed us a simple meal. Exhausted from our travels, Bhagavan Das and I found places to bed down on the floor.

My Western stomach hadn’t taken well to our many days of begging for Indian leftovers, however, and my innards were rumbling. Suddenly, I felt the urgent need for the toilet. There was no indoor plumbing in the house, so I felt around for the door to the outside. Stumbling, I headed for the outhouse. With no electric lights, the night was pitch black. I slowly groped my way along the short distance to the privy. Overhead the shimmering stars seemed so close they appeared as hanging lights. It was like a hallucinatory van Gogh painting.

There’s something profound about staring into the cosmos, and in that moment, I suddenly felt Mother with me. Not since I was on LSD at her funeral had I been with her as a soul, and in the months since, I’d not made time to mourn or acknowledge my sadness—what with the family commotion, the upheaval at Millbrook, my relationship with Caroline, my travels with David and Bhagavan Das. My emotions were still mixed and raw. Now in her presence again, I felt joy. It was as if she’d come in spirit to give me her love.

I had to laugh. Here I was, a Freudian-trained psychologist who’d endured years of psychoanalysis, on my way to the outdoor toilet, thinking about—of course!—my mother. My professional self loved the incongruity. Even in this tender moment, I was retreating into humor and irony to sidestep the gaping emptiness of Mother’s death. The thought passed.

I continued under the stars to the outhouse, emptied my innards, and stumbled back to the silent house. I fell into a dreamless sleep.