Personal Experiences
In early spring of the the next year, I went to live by myself in my parent's summer cottage in Cape Cod. I continued working on my book; however, my health rapidly deteriorated. It began with headaches and insomnia; my head felt as though it would burst with pain after an hour of reading and many nights I could not sleep. I felt miserable and depressed. Then I had a recurrence of an illness I had suffered 10 years earlier, Crohn's disease, a serious condition affecting the intestines producing internal bleeding. I forced myself to keep reading, taking aspirin and other medication for the headaches.
I had discussions with contemporary people including R. D. Laing, Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Straus, Bob Dylan and Abby Hoffman. People who were no longer living also communicated with me: Durkheim, Locke, Hobbes, Rosseau, Mead, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Freud, Jung, and, of course, Buddha and Christ. In my book were listed brief summaries of the "messages" I had obtained from each of them. At times during the writing, the clarity of my thoughts and the beauty of my vision for the future brought tears to my eyes. Initially I assumed a penname "The Scholar" to allude to the erudite origins of this project, and I soon realized that "The Scholar" was my new reincarnated identity. After five days of writing, the book was finished. Its 47 pages contained a combination of parables, poems and instructions on how to organize the new society. I originally planned to leave five copies in front of Cody's bookstore in Berkeley, California. In 1971, Cody's was the center of a communication vortex of hippies and freaks, who would be first to herald my new Bible and circulate it to others. However, when the 10 copies were made and bound in spiral notebooks, I mailed eight to friends and family, wanting those closest to me to be the first ones enlightened. Some expressed real interest. Others were casual. Some did not respond. No one reported becoming immediately enlightened; no one expressed a desire to join my mission to change the world. Nevertheless, I was sure that the revolution I was to lead would materialize.
Over the next five months of waiting, I was so preoccuppied with my mission that I didn't work to earn money. I "crashed" at many friends' homes. They were compassionate and generous in supporting me, both financially and psychologically. None of them ever treated me as though they thought I were crazy. They gave me food and shelter and let me read their books. They listened to my new ideas and talked to me about religion and life.
My sense of being the reincarnation of Buddha and Christ slowly dissipated over the next two months. I don't remember a specific moment when I broke through this delusion. I just thought about myself less and less as the Supreme Being while I worked on revising the book. Although I began to realize that it was not to be a new "Bible," I still believed that there were many brilliant and novel ideas and syntheses of previous thought. I would publish it as a best-selling book.
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