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[How This Book Came To Be, A Letter From Thaddeus Golas Part 2]
The full story of the 1960s can never be told because so much of it consisted of subjective experiences. Readers who have no echo in their own experience can give no credibility to what might be written or said. Only the music transcended such limits. Otherwise, those images most publicized were usually the silliest.
Many people who had transcendent experiences made the mistake of believing their euphoria would effect changes in our social reality, that mystical exaltation would have a physical consequence. One day when sitting on a hill in San Francisco, overlooking the ocean, I thought about what my expectations were. I did not want beings in higher consciousness to come down and rescue me—I preferred that they stay where they were, so they would be there when I arrived. I had a strong intuition that the rules we make for others apply to ourselves, and I would have to be extremely careful about what I told people. I understood that the way up was just as easy as the way down, and it would not be honest to tell people that enlightenment was a long or difficult learning process. Strange and tricky, perhaps, in the light of reason, but not laborious. It once came to me that if I had followed all the good advice available, I would never have written my book. My intent has never been to have unusual experiences or to "be enlightened," but to understand how the world works, how to go to the spirit and stay. What I wanted, I decided, was a little handbook that would tell me how to do it myself. That was what I then proceeded to write: a little guide.
I bought a thick-covered bookkeeper's journal with "Day" on the cover.
As soon as I began to write, my right arm began to hurt with a constant fierce pain, the same sharp pain I had felt when I cracked my humerus at the age of eight. It made me sweat, and I tried all kinds of mental tricks to make it go away, but nothing worked. I did not stop writing. For several days I got little sleep, though I took aspirins, which should have knocked me out. I wrote a few pages every day in longhand. At last I decided to go to Everyman's Free Clinic.
The doctor proposed to give me a shot of cortisone. First, to alleviate the pain of that, he gave me a shot of Novocain. I had stopped taking LSD because I knew I would not finish writing the book unless I stayed earthbound, but when the needle went in, it was like an LSD trip of pure pain—I was out in space in a universe of pain. My body broke into a cold sweat. After a moment or two, which was a true eternity—no past or future—the pain subsided. He then gave me the cortisone.
In the days after, an enormous bulbous growth arose in my right armpit, as big as a small teacup, and I was ready to believe the demons were after me. When I went back to the clinic, the doctor gave me a shot of penicillin, and over the next days the growth disappeared.
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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