Do Not Become Attached Nor Afraid Poem by Ron Stock

The last week of 1968. In an old white house called The Ghetto West in Kalamazoo. A friend and I are in a basement room of barn wood walls and carpeting green and blue. A groovy space with a universe of stars painted on a flat black ceiling, candles galore, incense burning, and the mellow sounds from a stereo on the edge of a sunken floor.
I'm on my back, eyes closed, on the rim, head propped against a pillow. Mort, my guide, has asked me to swallow a 550-microgram tab of LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.
Mort reads from The Psychedelic Experience; Leary, Alpert, and Metzner's book based upon The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel woozy, but I am able to listen. 'O Ron, the time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the Ron game are about to cease. You are about to be set face to face with the clear light. Do not become attached nor afraid.' Sometime later, musical notes become raw vibrant colors that merge and explode into dazzling molecular waves of energy. I sit up, open my eyes. The walls are vibrating, side to side, dancing, up and down, shimmying, to and fro, just before they pulsate into an intense red hot flame and melt away. Faaaaar out! I
think. But I did think. The point is not to think. To let go. To blow out, the flame of thought. To find the clear light. I lie down, relax, try to keep my, Ego Death, in sight. Eyes closed, kaleidoscopic images cascade over a spring of liquid inside my glistening arteries. Red, orange, and yellow psychedelic spinning childhood memories swirl, mingle, fuse with a retinal circus of floating amoebic forms. Darwinian insights carry my mind's eye back down the flow of time until the drumbeat of my heart, beats, with
the pulse of the sun. I'm spinning, funneling, downward. My riveting visions curl, disintegrate, as I try to let go of hallucinations, of awareness, of I......I'm a pea, detached from myself, floating. As a dagger of blinding white light stabs me in the eyeballs....
I sit up, open my eyes, "Mort, I can't do this. I saw this frightening white light." "Yes, you can." 'O nobly born, listen carefully: The radiant energy of the Seed from which come all living forms shoots forth and strikes you with a light so brilliant you will
scarcely be able to look at it. Do not be frightened. This is the Source Energy which has been radiating for billions of years. Accept it. Merge with it. Lose yourself in it.
I'm prone, eyes closed, willing, to except the blinding dagger of white light. I'm in a coal car on a blue-green toy train far above the primitive jungles of Africa. The train swirls
downward. I'm a small wet pea wrapped in a cocoon inside a soft, pulsing, red-walled cathedral, floating, warm and cozy, in a bubble, waiting, pulsing, waiting, pulsing. I feel a vague energy on the distant horizon of my mind. I see a pinpoint, of white light,
and know it is Ego Death. Come to me white light, come to me, come to me in my wet and cozy red-walled cathedral. Oh God! My God! I'm back, inside, my Mother's womb....
Very slowly, the tiny round pinpoint of white light expands, Expands, EXpands, larger, Larger, Towards me Towards Me and Suddenly SWOOOSH...surrounds me...I am now...in a state...of White Nothingness...in Nirvana...inside...ego death...Cognizant of nothing! Except... the all encompassing White Light of the Radiant Source Energy of the Universe