STONE

Pud gets annoyed when I refer to his “seventy-five acid trips.”

“Seventy-five is just a ballpark number,” he reminds me, “And it wasn’t all acid. There was lots of mescaline and psilocybin in there.”

“That stuff was so cheap! Two or three bucks a pop, for a twelve hour trip! And you couldn’t do it more than once or twice a week.

“Not everyone can afford to winter at Krishnamurti’s institute in Ojai. But even the groundskeepers there could afford a few square mms of windowpane on a Friday night.”

Pud and I agree that the ultimate insight to be obtained, either from years of meditation or from a few hours on LSD, is minerality.

We are taught there are three existences: animal, vegetable and mineral.

This is false.

It’s all mineral.

I refer to my own enlightenment on this topic as “my brother the streetcar.”

It was the day after an acid trip, and I had to take the streetcar downtown on some errand. The joint I smoked before leaving started my visual plane swirling again.

Swinging around a turn I realized that the molecules that made up the streetcar I was on and the molecules that made up me were completely identical as to global position and directionality. We bonded, the streetcar and I.

Life, whether animal or vegetable, is a particular, temporary configuration of molecules, all of which are mineral, which makes it so amazing.

When you see expert ballet dancers on stage doing a pas de deux, the choreography might be more or less aesthetically pleasing, but the awesomeness that underlies the event is that we are watching boulders that somehow got up and started moving around.

Sfmike sent some photos of our hike up Tahquitz (rhymes with "pockets") canyon. (See his post here.) In the photo below we see Palm-Springs-Tony in the foreground. (To say that Tony is sfmike’s better half grossly understates the math.) Of the boulders we see behind Tony, one has a special name. It’s “sfwillie.” Can you pick it out? (Hint: white cap.)

Death is the loss of the particular organization of minerals called “life.” And it's the loss of the illusion of non-minerality.

Our delectation of beautiful human bodies seems unexceptional. “From fairest creatures we desire increase…”

Less clear to me is why we delight in beautiful landscapes and vistas. Why, especially, do we ever enjoy looking at rocks? Why did I so enjoy the hike up Tahquitz Canyon?

I contend it’s a “my brother the boulder” thing. Just as we are drawn to another human body with becoming-oneness as a goal, so we are drawn to beautiful earth-forms.

In Tahquitz where the strata of sheered cliffs show the twists and groans of geologic time, I feel contained. My spirit, when I die, won’t go flying off into nowhere. It will be welcomed, as when lovers unite at the end of Act III, by the mineral world, and held tight and secure.

This all comforts me. I won’t be nothing when I die.

"Yeah," Pud says, "you'll be a goddamn rock!

Pud is often misunderstood. Sometimes you think he’s saying, “I’m stoned.”

What he’s actually saying is, “I’m stone.”

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