LSD doesn’t always create results that everyone thinks are beautiful. I’ve already painted a grand picture of the amazing things that happened to me when I took LSD, but here are some other things that happened, that I thought were great, but that made some friends and family angry, and also caused me trouble and a lot of extra work later on.

I was so high on LSD that I realized I didn’t need to stay in college because there were better things for me to do. I continued taking one course, MY OWN, and dropped out of all my other classes. Several years later I would return to College and finish my degree.

Before my LDS trip, the Chairman of the Philosophy department gave me the privilege to teach my own 4 credit course at Fordham. The Title of the course was The Philosophy of the Person.

But before I started teaching that class, I met a Fourth Way Master named Thane. I had been going to downtown Manhattan, many times to the cultural center of that city called Greenwich Village to attend talks given by gurus of various kinds. But when I first met Thane he knocked me over when we shook hands. He was standing right at the entrance to the room where he would speak, shaking hands with everyone as they entered. And when he took my hand I was bowled over by his luminous radiance. I had never seen a human being glow like that. And with such a sweet and glorious smile! In a way, I cringed, because I didn’t trust all this glowing sweetness.

The talk was two hours, and I didn’t understand anything he was saying, but he said he would be teaching Cosmic Intention Therapy on the weekend. I had no money, but they enrolled me anyway because I was a student. So I sat through the weekend class too, all day Saturday and Sunday, also not understanding very much.

But he did mention something called Translation, how to Translate our erroneous beliefs back into the Truth they were a lie about. And after a long process of asking around, I was finally given a Tape Monitor Class in Translation. And I told all my students/friends in the Fordham Class I was teaching, that this, Translation, was going to constitute the rest of the class.

So off we went, about 20 of us, to Ruth Hunt’s home in the Bronx all day Saturday and all day Sunday listening to the strange, fascinating, esoteric, metaphysical, mystical, philosophical class called Translation.

It was a life changer. We learned that matter was made of thought, and that through a 5 step process we could change the thoughts that were creating various parts of our experience, and in turn change those experiences.

We also learned about Androgyny, very helpful to me because I was gay-in-a-closet at that time, but it scared off a few of my friends. Being gay in 1971 was by no means an easy thing to do, and many, like me, just shoved the whole thing under the carpet and hoped it would go away.

Anyway, back to Translation. It was very hard to learn. Exciting, but hard to learn.

The foundation of the process consisted of using what they called a “Basic Syllogism.” One of the strangest things I’d ever heard at the time. It went like this:

Truth is that which is so,
That which is not Truth is not so,
Therefore Truth is all there is.

For several weeks I just kept reviewing that syllogism in my mind, Truth is that which is so, that which is not Truth is not so, therefore Truth is all there is. Over and over and over again trying to squeeze some meaning out of it. But no meaning was forthcoming.

Little did I know that I had begun to study a kind of teaching that I would eventually master and teach in 19 cities throughout the USA for 20 years.

But that’s a story for another day.