My Singaporean friend, professor and poet Kirpal Singh and I cruised along the narrow lanes that wind through the rainforests of East Hawaii, on the Big Island, somewhere south of the old plantation village of Pahoa, until we found the multi-level octagonal house that was concealed from the road, set back in a green pocket of burgeoning nature lined with colorful orchids and anthuriums. It was the place Jim DeKorne had arranged to meet us, after corresponding by email for several months. In 1992, Jim founded and for several years edited The Entheogen Review, a quarterly publication that served as a clearinghouse for data about the use of visionary plants and drugs.

I’d read the second edition of his 1994 underground classic, Psychedelic Shamanism, and discovered he was a man who’d not only been through the full, cosmic ‘60s experience, but who’d kept a level head as he wrote about it, often in terms that might be characterized as Jungian, but slipping easily in and out of Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Gnostic or other spiritual paradigms and so managing somehow to describe what is essentially indescribable. “Words strain, crack and sometimes break,” T.S. Eliot had once written. Jim’s website features a picture of him squinting wryly, his finger pointing at the moon behind him, with both “finger” and “moon” boldly labeled. So there it was, clear as could be­—the reality behind the words.

Jim’s ex-wife and present best friend, Kornelia, met us in the garden and showed us through an arbor and up the stairs into the spacious, high-ceilinged dwelling. She was a smiling, archetypal Earth Mother with an unusual accent that neither Kirpal nor I could identify. She laughed and said it was Hungarian. We met Jim, in person finally, a tall, slender figure with a buzz cut and light beard wearing what looked like a Balinese batik shirt, who arose from a chair to greet us before we were seated comfortably around a low table where Kornelia served flower teas in colorful china cups, and their friend Patrick arrived and took a seat also. He’d been a lightshow technician and a member of a famous commune, the Hog Farm, in the heyday of the hippie movement, he told us, and like many survivors of that period, he now abided among the extravagant beauty of the Big Island.

We settled in after introductions and asked Jim some questions about his experiences with LSD in 1964 when he lived in Berkeley. He’d documented this in his book, but I wanted to hear more, wanted to understand in as much depth as possible because this sort of experience was one of the reasons I’d come to Hawaii from Seattle, as well as my motivation behind writing this book.

“I’d heard about LSD, but had no chance to try it until this buddy of mine who used to hang out with (writer Ken) Kesey and the pranksters got hold of some. It was probably Sandoz. I was curious and I took it. I kind of expected it to be a spiritual experience, and boom! My consciousness was somewhere way up high looking down on everything—and everything was perfect. Whatever happened, atomic war, plague, the planet was perfect in and of itself, everything was fine… I was an antiwar activist, and it was saying, ‘Don’t worry, be happy.’ That lasted about four hours, then I started coming down,” he lamented.

The problem with this was that Jim was up there, where all was as it should be forever, then found himself evicted back into the hardscrabble of everyday life, wondering “how can I get back there?” He had to work the next day at the University of California virus lab, and asked his supervisor for the afternoon off. It was difficult to cope because he’d “been to the top of the mountain and now was back in the swamp,” as Jim put it. “I wanted to be there all the time.”

This wasn’t unlike Aldous Huxley, who’d written that while you could experience the “white light,” you weren’t allowed to live in it permanently.

“I was fairly naïve,” Jim said. “And of course there’s various levels of Samadhi, and I think mine was not the highest because I was still able to see subject and object. I could look at reality and everything was perfect just as it was, God’s in his heaven, om-m-m-m-m, forever.”

Samadhi or its equivalent state is seen in most Eastern mystical literature as having three or more levels, and is often described as a meditative mental state in which the differences between all things fade into unity, only a pure awareness remains in which nothing is missing from wholeness and perfection.

But Jim found there was more to come. A subsequent experience was different; there was an inner voice questioning whether he took responsibility. “That was an Other,” Jim said. “An Other, a not me, coming into my life and saying: ‘Do you take responsibility?’ That was like an entheogen, that was like God speaking.”

Jim has written that if an Amazonian shaman had been the guru of the ‘60s rather than Timothy Leary, perhaps the period would have lived up to its original promise, a statement I instinctively agreed with after having personally watched the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco go downhill and crash in a matter of a couple years. If a shaman is a person, as Jim says, who is capable of reconnecting his ego with the collective unconscious, of skillfully tapping directly into the ultimate source of spiritual inspiration when such guidance may be needed, then yes, he’s probably right. Leary partook of mushrooms and LSD and used them to become a media messiah and an “act,” a sort of Hollywood creature advising a younger generation to “Turn on, tune in and drop out,” which in retrospect probably wasn’t exactly sage advice.

“Leary was an interesting guy,” Jim said, but “anyone reading his biography might plausibly conclude that he was a sociopath. If, as a national media ‘guru’, you advise a nation of teenagers to ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out,’ what you get is what the ‘60s turned into. I’m a purist, this is a spiritual thing, I’m interested in the entheogen aspect of it. The proper use of a powerful transcendental catalyst like LSD is making contact with the Other, not mindless hedonistic excess. To me, that’s like getting deliberately drunk on sacramental wine and puking all over the altar.”

Ken Kesey doesn’t fare much better in the eyes of Jim, who readily confesses to a puritanical streak. “Here was one of the most original authors of the era running around publically stoned, wearing a goofy hat and pink-and-blue saddle oxfords, raining on our anti-war parade with his prankster friends… He was an enigma to me. I couldn’t understand why he lent his great talent to such puerile expressions of bad taste.” There is an at least partially redeeming explanation, however, that might be found by focusing on the spirit of the times. “You have to look at the zeitgeist, and I concede that on that score Leary and Kesey played their roles to perfection,” Jim said. “They blew the world’s collective mind… Frankly, I wouldn’t be who I am today if those guys hadn’t kicked off the psychedelic revolution. ”

I had to agree. It’s difficult to argue to the contrary. Decades later, in the ‘90s, I was living in Asia working as a journalist, still pondering the decline of the Haight and my own experience of Samadhi or cosmic consciousness and its meaning, I mentioned to Jim, Kirpal, Patrick and Kornelia as we drank our fragrant tea. “I had an email exchange with Kesey,” I said. I told him of my concerns about the resulting chaos in the Haight, its destructive effect on the lives of many people. I mentioned that I’d like to write a book about it, an idea that subsequently lay dormant for many years, until now. I asked him: “How do we tell people about the things that went on, the things that happened?” A couple days later an email came back, saying simply: “We wired the world. Let the juice flow”

“They played their role in the zeitgeist,” Jim said. “He and Leary both, Ram Dass, all those guys.”

Kirpal had been waiting for a chance to ask a question. He was my first and best friend from my years working in Singapore. Shortly after relocating to the Southeast Asian island from Tokyo, my office had received a news release saying that there would be a seminar at a local university on Aldous Huxley and his relationship with D.H. Lawrence; it was sponsored by Kirpal and marked the beginning of our friendship. He, his wife Clarinda and their son Chris had now come to spend a week with us in Hawaii, as it had been almost five years since we left Singapore for Seattle. Kirpal is a practicing Sikh, often wears turbans color coordinated with silk shirts and teaches not only English and poetry, but creativity as well these days. His question for Jim was a big one. “How would you confront or engage with evil?” Kirpal asked. “Or is there no such thing?”

Jim had been on a roll, but this caused some hesitation, some gathering of thoughts before speaking…
Finally he said: “There is the One. The One explodes, you can think of it as the Big Bang, and suddenly there are the many. In Buddhism the object is to transcend multiplicity and return to the One, the original Unity, so that you won’t have to reincarnate into the world of diversity anymore. The catch is that within the polarized middle ground of our Big Bang awareness also dwell Hindu devas and asuras, Christian devils and angels, and Buddhist peaceful and wrathful deities–spiritual lifeforms playing their eternal game of good and evil. The Gnostics call these entities archons–rulers. They rule awareness, and I equate them with subpersonalities, ego-states or Jungian complexes. These thought-like beings are very real and they live in and through us. They dwell in the unconscious psyche and deceive us into believing they are aspects of who we really are.

“Ultimately, ‘who we really are’ are thoughts in the mind of God, hence the universal psychedelic insight: We are all One. The Gnostic Christ, said, ‘Resist not evil.’ That’s a very Buddhist concept. Resistance implies attachment, which mandates imprisonment in the world’s dream. A sadhana of Zen-like non-attachment doesn’t preclude a few well-chosen karate chops to Evil, however. Everything depends on where your head is at in the execution. This mindset of course, is not easy to attain.”

Kirpal, whose grandmother had been a shaman back in India and who had moved to Malaysia, where he was eventually born, ventured that perhaps as she’d once told him, shamanism, the inner journey, wasn’t for everyone.

Jim agreed. “I wouldn’t advocate anything for anyone that didn’t come from inside. Go inside and find out: What is your dharma? Why are you here? Kesey followed his dharma; Leary followed his. We’re all following ours whether we realize it or not, but things always go better (not necessarily easier) when we understand what we’re doing and why. As the Bhagavad Gita says: ‘Better is one’s own dharma, though imperfectly performed, than the dharma of another well performed…the dharma of another is fraught with peril.'”

As we were finishing up, I mentioned how much I liked the quote from Carl Jung that Jim had used to close Psychedelic Shamanism. He picked it up and read it aloud, with commentary:

“’Man’s consciousness was created to the end that it may recognize its descent from a higher unity, pay due and careful regard to this source, execute its commands intelligently and responsibly (Responsibly, that part speaks to me, he said) and thereby afford the psyche as a whole the optimum degree of life and development.”

It seemed like a good place to finish. I turned off my recorder. Kirpal and I got up and wandered outdoors, lingering for awhile in the garden, chatting with Kornelia and Patrick and Jim about the spiritual life and the long-ago days of the Haight-Ashbury, finally driving off into the tropical landscape, feeling light and inspired.

Mike Millard is a veteran journalist who spent more than two decades in Asia and the author of two books. This piece was excerpted from his work-in-progress, The Fool: Resurrecting the Secret Psychedelic Heart of the ‘60s.