How This Book Came To Be
A Letter From Thaddeus Golas
Dear Readers,
Thank you for all the lovely messages you have sent me over the years. What can I say that will not fall short of your imagination about me? I am mortal, your equal, and that's the message I was trying to deliver: we can all do it. Recently I was asked, "What led to your opening up to cosmic consciousness?"
Was it at age fourteen during dental work, under gas, when I was aware of the pain as spirals of light? Was it when I slammed my head against a wall in Holland during World War II, was knocked out, and realized I was out in space seeing stars as I was coming to (just like the comic strips!)? Was it in 1950, when I casually wrote in my journal, "Space is to energy as energy is to mass"—an idea that kept me busy for twenty years, especially after I equated space with consciousness? Was it the satori in a Manhattan, Kansas, restaurant in 1966? Was it in 1969 when, the very weekend I was having a pamphlet published with my theories (terrible writing, impossible to read now), I was offered LSD and went Home? That was when I decided I wouldn't advertise my personal illumination, but would try to show it by my behavior and by what I produced. And it seems I succeeded, miraculously, with The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment.
I did not at all anticipate the kind of experiences I had on LSD. I had never taken refuge in castles in the air. In college days at Columbia, John Hollander had cued me to The White Goddess by Robert Graves when it was first published. I was interested enough in matriarchy to read most of Graves' other books, including King Jesus and the little-known Watch the North Wind Rise. I read enough metaphysics to check out my theories, but I was rooted in the Earth, and spent more time scanning scientific works to see if anything that was known to be true contradicted my lines of thought. Of course I do recall reading Indian Yoga when in high school, but I remember that only because Allen Ginsberg (all of thirteen years old!) told me, "Some people go crazy from reading books like that."
I never varied from my determination to evolve hard information, a way of being that could be relied on even in chaos. It was chaos that taught me. I was so ruthless in testing, suspecting every sentiment, that I came to feel I was a destroyer of ideas, and indeed my books are based on what I could not demolish. Anyone who wants to tear those books down will have to work harder and longer than I did.
At times on my psychedelic trips I was distinctly aware of myself as an unmoved watcher, a still core of awareness immune to changes. However, there were often wild storms of emotion, and I made a deliberate effort to be completely passive, open to anything. There were beautiful states of being where I would have loved to linger, but they vanished the instant I embraced them willingly. I took reassurance just knowing they were there and that I might return. There were states I recalled from previous trips but which flashed by as I went somewhere else. There was a constancy in these realms where I was unpredictably bouncing around.
I might have constructed a whole life of behavior on the basis of only my first trip, as some have done after a single illumination, but I was greedy for more. I wanted to live there.
How This Book Came To Be
A Letter From Thaddeus Golas
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Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment Contents
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