Near Greenwich Village in 1966, my sister, an editor, and her boyfriend “Smoky”, a record executive, shared an apartment They had a friend over for dinner, a Peace Corp volunteer who’d just returned from Nepal with a treat: it was light green and almost powdery, didn’t even smell like the pot I’d smoked before. Around 9 o’clock I began to cry and didn’t stop until past midnight. They bed me down. I awoke to a transformed world, one of love and empathy where I could read minds and the future. This lasted six months, and I tried to sustain it with more pot and a few psychedelics without success. I joined the Rosicrucian Order, had my Third Eye opened by a disciple of Guru Maharaji, taught for Teacher Corp. In 1970 I moved to California where I met more gurus and studied group dynamics at Sonoma State. Along the way I had several more transcendental experiences, none as deep or lasting as the NYC one, but one well worth mentioning is a man known as “Sunyata”, or “The Void” in Hindi. He showed me the power of emptiness.
