DOSE:

1 tablet

oral

LSD

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

Jerusalem, April 23, 1970: The morning weather was glorious, Easter and Passover entwined, the Orthodox parents were on a bus to Haifa, and in my jeans pocket (bell-bottoms, natch) was a hit of mescaline, an untested gift from a friend back in New York. The previous fall I’d had two other mescaline trips, intriguing but far from definitive. I walked from the hotel down to the bus terminal, stopping at an Arab street market to buy water and a bag of strawberries. Met a bus heading to the Mount of Olives and boarded it. Looked out the window at the passing city, its ancient and medieval stones all ochre and golden. Man and woman, adult and child, Jew, Arab and Christian went about their business without evident conflict or tension. With the flip of a mental switch, curiosity overcame anxiety and paranoia was mum. I pulled the pink pill from my pocket and washed it down.

Before chronicling the next few hours’ events, I need to tackle “God.” It’s a word I prefer to avoid for any number of reasons:
1. It starts unnecessary arguments and closes minds.
2. It tends to personalize and otherwise pin down the mysterious Source of Vitality which pours life perpetually into the world.
3. It has inescapably male, patriarchal and authoritarian overtones that summon equally creaky alternatives like “Goddess.”
4. It lends itself to an “ours” versus “yours” mindset which makes idols of cultural products like books.
5. Neutering or feminizing the masculine pronoun associated with it would kill the punch line of a joke like “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”
There are others, but these will do.

Nevertheless throughout the Seventies (and even later) I employed “God” myself. So my private understanding of the term —and its male modifiers “Lord, Father, He, Etc.”—was gender-neutral, no biggie. Habits of speech are hard to break and bucking verbal trends is often more trouble than it’s worth. By whom is “whom” still used?

What term do I prefer? “Source, Being, Spirit, Life Force, Tao, Buddha Nature, Big Mind” all have their place. I’m partial to Divinity, or “Div” for short, but when accurately quoting thoughts or remarks from the past, the old-timey moniker must intrude. In 1970 I wouldn’t have uttered the words, “Mother, today I saw Div.”

The Mount of Olives is well under three thousand feet, not steep, and even halfway up affords a view toward the west of the Old City and its crowning Temple Mount with the great golden Dome of the Rock. I got off the bus near the Russian Orthodox Church, with its seven golden domes, like a family of shiny onions. A stony trail led toward a secluded patch on the hillside where I could stretch out on the grass, enjoy the sun’s warmth and scope the panorama. I peeled off my Indian cotton tunic and basked.

The sky was a brilliant blue, the air comfortably warm with no humidity, a perfect spring day. Sprawling on the hills before me was an ancient yet modern city, long revered by assorted faiths, with mosques, synagogues and churches, Crusader walls and Islamic spires all rising to greet that brilliant blue. In the Kidron Valley below, pilgrimage buses were pulling up in a steady flow alongside the Church of All Nations, next door to the Garden of Gethsemane, which even a Jew had heard of, a Jew who at this juncture was throwing overripe strawberries at a nearby boulder, enjoying each burst of vivid red juice that splashed across the pale and dusty stone.

The mescaline had kicked in, tuning my mind to a new but by now familiar frequency, deeply peaceful, playful, fascinated, welcoming. On the slopes below me two contrasting groves of green called out: imposing spears of cypress, dark toward black ness, and way down at the foot of the mountain the silvery pastel shimmer of the ancient olive trees in Gethsemane itself. They persuaded me it was time to wipe my torso dry, slip the tunic back on and take a downhill stroll.
The entrance to the Garden of Geth semane was a gate in the stone wall to my left. The moment I walked through, surrounded by opu lent ly flowering rose bushes and olive trees approaching two millennia in age, I picked up another frequency, familiar but in a different way.

When I was a boy but finally old enough to fast for the full twenty-four hours of Yom Kippur, the final moment of that solemn service was always magic. I accepted without question the teaching that on Yom Kippur “God” would decide, sternly but fairly, whether our repentance in that sacred season had been genuine enough to buy us a coming year free from calamity, both nationally and individually. The psychological weight of this decision, aided by the light-headedness of a full day without food or drink, reliably drove me to a sense of looming import which, as the shofar’s blast pierced the silence, flipped over into sheer magical awe. A thrill in the body. A power pulling the mind out of its self-absorption toward the possibility of encountering something more alive.

Now, at age twenty-three, awe was the frequency again. By the time I reached the garden’s western edge I was no longer capable of standing. Among these ancient and silent witnesses, I felt that “God” was about to speak. How can you respond to such a feeling but with, “Okay, I’m listening?” Trembling in front of a yellow rosebush with the largest blooms I’d ever seen, I dropped to my knees. Beyond was a low wall, past which I saw Temple Mount rising in the distance, the golden dome, and in the sky above it the late afternoon sun, screened by branches of the foreground rosebush. A breeze stirred the branches, the sun blazed full in my face and I, as the saying goes, lost consciousness. Fainted. Blacked out.

Inwardly, anything but. My mindscreen blazed with a vast multitude of fiery Hebrew letters streaming towards “me” from every corner and direction of infi nite space. The letters were Kuph, Dalet, Shin, spelling out KoDeSH, the Hebrew for “holi ness” or “the sacred.” Simultaneous with this light show dawned a feeling of prodigious joy, and a direct witnessing that the entire manifest cosmos springs from a single, conscious, non-physical Source with twin attributes that are yet one: Love and Intelligence.

Don’t ask how this took me over, it just did. As if I’d been scuba diving and out of nowhere a whale appeared at arm’s length. It was suddenly there, self-evident, incontrovertible, ultimate, the new commander of my allegiance. And indeed, the true source. And I didn’t even know its name.

To this day I have no idea how long the experience lasted, seconds, minutes, an actual eternity which halted time altogether. When five-sense awareness returned I was flat on my face in the dirt beside the rosebush. Ever theatrical, I asked myself, “So what’s the finish?” and right on cue the adjoining Church of All Nations’ bells rang out, sweeping me back into the realm of prodigious, miraculous bliss. I laughed helplessly as joy-tears streamed down my face.

The first thought I had was that an experience of such magnitude couldn’t have come from a small pink pill. I had just accessed the interior state that the Beatles and other psychedelic mavens had discovered, and were encouraging anyone who’d listen to find for themselves: the place where Love begins. I remembered the Bible story of Jacob’s ladder dream. He woke from its blissful images and said, “Truly [Divinity] was in this place, but I knew it not.” If “this place” means your actual body/mind unit, Jacob was neither the first nor the last to “know it not.” It sure took me by surprise.

Somehow I got back on my feet without losing my connection to this indwelling, all-enfolding love thing, and, dazed, walked out of the garden. A brown-robed friar passed me at the gate, and although I thought of asking him to bless me, my conditioning whispered that it wasn’t kosher; inwardly I blessed him instead. Ambling along the Kidron Valley road, I looked out at a world transformed, ablaze with love and ripe for the mutual flow of blessedness. The song of birds, the sky and sun light, the monks and tour buses, the school-chil dren at play, the Hasidic father chastising his small son, the very foliage and stones and hills of Jerusalem, anything my gaze included, seemed connected to me with raging bonds of empathy.

The realization that followed knocked the breath out of me. I came to a sudden halt, frozen where I stood. A source of grievance and anxiety that had afflicted me for a decade started to relax. A mountain of guilt began to melt. Ten years previous, in the sticky moments after my first ejaculation (a load shot spontaneously at thirteen, heart pounding at the sight of a particular bare-chested actor on TV), I had labeled myself “a homosexual.” Never spoke of it, never acted on it, coped by becoming an orgasm junkie, burdened by self-enforced silence, furtive desire and private shame.

Now I had been shown that the true and authentic me, sexual self included, is worthy of the greatest gift the universe has to offer. Not condemned, cursed, doomed or outcast. Every element of my nature is present for Spirit’s use. Being and I are interwoven, one. There is nowhere to hide nor any need. There is no Other. I sink to the ground and weep some more, tears of gratitude and relief, tears of dawning wholeness. I declare that if I die at this moment, fine, I’m ready to go; life could never be sweeter or happier.

I regretted that declaration about half an hour later, clinging precariously to the side of a cliff. I’d left the valley road for what looked like a shortcut up Temple Mount, and in my continuing state of enthusiasm I failed to notice how steep and rough the path was getting. Given what had just gone down, my sense perceptions were iffy anyhow. I had reached a slope where it was too steep to see my next move and too crumbly to back down. A sheer drop. Paused to collect myself. Speculated that if Being had caught the declaration, the joke was on me and my sentimental bravado. “I take it back, I take it back,” I volunteered, now that We were on intimate terms.

At last I found handholds reliable enough to pull myself up a yard or two and hoist myself over a ledge. The ledge turned out to be just beneath the old Crusader wall; my shortcut had actually paid off. Not only that, but I had just escaped death. Far out. The whole day was looking far out. But now what?

I brushed most of the dirt off, sat with my back to the wall and looked across at where I had just been. The mountain and the garden, the trees and the church all looked so small now, but they held a vastness that I never dreamed existed, nor guessed my own my brain could contain. I looked for the spot where I’d knelt and thought: that rose bush, that one? Couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t be sure of anything, really. Except one thing. Or rather, One Thing.

I was still tripping, no doubt. There weren’t any fiery projectile words shooting through the foreground, but I felt high and alert, powerful and light. If asked, I could name the President or sing a memorized lyric or recite Shakespeare, but I knew I was no longer the person I had supposed myself to be.

I wondered what this revelation was pointing me towards.
I wondered what I should say, if anything, to the parents.
I wondered if the experience was repeatable.
I wondered, since “It” lived inside me somewhere (remarkable for something so immense), if access to It necessarily required a drug? Worth investigating.

I wondered how to share the news. I wanted my friends to hear about it. But I didn’t know what to say. I was an evangelical without a theology. I wondered if I needed one. I wondered if there was any kind of intellectual framework I could use to talk about this experience, to persuade others of its availability. Everyone! There was a zonked-out bliss train moving through youth culture and I was ready to hop aboard.

I wondered if there were any books I could read to help me understand what exactly had happened to me in that garden over there just now. Little did I imagine how many sources I would find, consume and be nourished by in those first weeks, months and years.
Decades, in fact.

Exp Year: 1970	ExpID: 107422
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: May 13, 2026	Views: Not Supported
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Mescaline (36), LSD (2) : Alone (16), Nature / Outdoors (23), Mystical Experiences (9), Glowing Experiences (4), Retrospective / Summary (11)