Understand, I know nothing. There are no hidden teachings here, no secrets revealed, no instruction. This is not yet another book on how to be a “shaman.” Here I have tried to evoke a particular time and place (namely, northern New Mexico in the last decades of the 20th century) where an unlikely meeting took place between traditional indigenous elders and the then emerging counterculture. So here are journal entries going back sometimes over 50 years, comprising (as Carl Jung put it) memories, dreams and reflections, non-linear for the most part, as such experiences are.

I don’t describe the ceremonies in any detail, that would not be appropriate and is far beyond my abilities. I also find that such descriptions, usually by anthropologists, are often empty and lifeless (they did this and then they did that”) and miss the heart of the matter – the effect of such practices upon the participant. This small book is chiefly my reactions to these medicines and ceremonies, my experience, nothing more, and in that respect I am only skimming the surface of what really occurred. These are my words, my thoughts, and are in no way intended to convey tribal truths or tradition.

Taos was a focal point for spirituality and the counterculture in the 1960s and there were a number of communes, two of which I mention here. New Buffalo, named by the poet Max Finstien, and of which I was one of the founders, was a hard core back-to-the-land live-like-the-Indians effort toward a new way of life, and was depicted in Dennis Hopper’s film Easy Rider. The Lama Foundation was made famous by Baba Ram Das and was dedicated to bringing the psychedelic experience into a drug-free exploration of world wide spiritual practices: Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu, Christian and Native American. Both had strong ties to the peyote elders of Taos pueblo.

Both the old peyote men and Leonard Crow Dog knew they had something good, something that could help human beings to have better lives. And they were willing to share it. Unlike today, where we have “shamans” and spiritual teachers proliferating on the internet, offering life changing weekend workshops and internet courses, these teachings were freely offered informally and face-to-face.

Sometimes I think I was recruited.