CHAPTER 7
It was our fourth trip back to Germany from the states, and everything had been running smoothly. The European market for Sunshine had generated the finances for our Afghanistan scam and, as soon as the grams of LSD were absorbed, it would be time for us to head to the Mideast. After we’d been back about a week and had already turned four of our seven grams, we were working the park one afternoon through our local connections, when one of them came to me and asked for a thousand hits. The way the process worked was that we would stash the LSD in our Hanomaug bus and then every day park it in different locations, so it would never be in the same place twice, a precaution we took for security reasons. Fred was working with some other people at the time, so I went to the bus to get the hits, continually checking for signs of “the heat,” and taking different routes to get there.
When arriving, I unlocked the door and jumped in to get a couple of five hundred hit bags. As I glanced out the window a few seconds later, my heart sank. I saw ten plain clothes German police rushing the car from every direction and four funny-looking European cop cars, with those weird sounding sirens, racing down both sides of the street. They screeched to a stop at both ends of the Hanomaug, and two more cops got out of each of those cars and started charging the bus behind the others. The German agents had caught me completely off guard, helpless and unaware of their trap. To this day, I don’t know how they got onto us. It took them a while, but they searched the bus and found three grams of LSD and Fred's passport. They handcuffed me, confiscated my passport, then put me into a windowless police van and sped off toward the Frankfurt City Jail. Immediately after arriving, as they began questioning me, I had two quick realizations. One was that the van was in Fred’s name, and they would need him to make their case against me. Without Fred, I had a plausible explanation, although a weak one, that he had given me the keys to the van so I could get something for him, without my knowing there was any contraband inside. The agents had his passport and knew there was still time to find him before he could somehow get another one and slip out of the country. In desperation, the English-speaking interpreters at the jail relentlessly interrogated me for information regarding his whereabouts.
The second realization came as I was being questioned by one of the cops. I happened to glance down, and spot a half-ounce of Lebanese hash in my shirt pocket. The thought instantly came to mind that this discovery could be a curse or a blessing. I had gotten this far without the police finding it, and if I could somehow keep it concealed until my final destination, wherever that might be, I’d have a little smoke to make my stay a bit more pleasant. On the other hand, if they found it, there’d be another charge on top of everything else, and the hole in which I found myself, would only get deeper. It didn’t take long for the outcome to reveal itself. The instinctive expression of surprise and delight on my face must have given it away, because as soon as I looked up at the cop who had been grilling me about Fred, he reached for my shirt pocket. When he found the chunk of hash, I reacted as if to say, “O.K., you got me,” and then prepared myself for another booking process like the one I had just gone through on the LSD charge. All of a sudden, the cop freaked out and lunged at me, yelling something in German, and then tried to cram the half-ounce piece of hash down my throat. I wasn't in a very good position to defend myself because my hands were handcuffed behind my back. Always trying to stay positive, I began to think of ways this might work to my benefit; there would be no evidence and I’d get a little buzz as well. But remembering the effect of eating a couple grams of hash, I knew first hand, twelve more would be coma time, and there really was no advantage to being in that state under these circumstances.
Finally another agent walked in, calmly said a couple of words in Deutsch to the lunatic cop, and the guy backed right off. The officer in command then took over very efficiently, and after finishing with the formalities, we were soon on our way to a prison located somewhere in the vicinity. When the van drove up to the prison entrance, it looked very different than I had imagined. It was like being sent back to the past through a time warp. The building was completely square. The walls were made out of huge, rectangularcut blocks of solid rock, and it stood about six or seven stories high. The Gothic-looking structure had cells with small arched windows crisscrossed by flat bars at about two inch intervals, circling the building from top to bottom and from side to side, except for the lower section where the main rooms, used as offices for prison staff, were located. To get into the building, you had to drive through a huge archway and a couple of thick, solid iron double doors, with each set of gates unlocked and opened by two guards. Nothing seemed to be run automatically, and everything was opened or closed manually by hacks wearing giant key rings dangling at their sides, with heavy, iron skeleton keys attached to them. You could hear a prison guard patrolling the cement tier walkways long before seeing him, because of the heavy metal keys clanging together, sending echoes down the cavernous stone hallways. The looks and sounds of the old penitentiary caused one to feel what it must have been like to be arrested in the distant past, and thrown into a medieval dungeon. Even the guards seemed like outdated relics. Not medieval, but from the times of the Hitler era. They had on cloth hats with shiny patent leather brims, black boots, and long trench coats like Nazi soldiers always wore in the old black and white World War II films. It caused a weird contrast of feelings, as if incarcerated during the dark ages, guarded by the feared Gestapo, yet having been arrested by a modern day German special task force. The whole scene reminded me of being back in another one of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes, except this nightmare was real.
I thought the worst was over until two prison guards escorted me to my cell. They handed me a white cloth towel, a washcloth, and some army blankets, and then we walked up six stories of huge steel staircases and down a narrow hallway to my new home. We stopped in front of a small, arched, solid steel door and one of the guards pulled out a key, opened it up, and ordered me in. After the door slammed shut, I got myself together and took a detailed survey of the cold, damp, room that would be my new living quarters. The inside walls had the texture of rough boulders, and the cell had one arched barred window, a spring militarytype bed with a thin mattress on it, a table and chair against one of the walls, and a light bulb hanging down from the ceiling by an electrical wire, with a string attached to turn it on and off. The inside of the cell was like a cave somebody had run electricity into as an afterthought. It was a small eight by ten foot room, but the bulb only put out a dim glow, so it was dark when first entering until my eyes adjusted. The cell had no running water or toilet, and my first impression was I had been thrown into the hole in an attempt to crack me so I’d give up Fred. That thought only resolved me to stay cool, and not give my captors the satisfaction of thinking their scare tactics were working. I had learned long ago that cops pick up on panic or fear like sharks sensing blood in the water and will try to use it to their advantage. In the long run, after the dust settles, it’s much more advantageous to show no sign of weakness because then they have nothing to play off, and you stay more in control of the situation. If a person panicked while at their mercy, cops would use that cold, calculated opportunity to manipulate their prey.
While psyching myself into the warrior mentality, I heard keys clanging down the stone hallway and a guard stopped to unlock my cell door. There was an inmate with him, obviously an American, standing there with a big smile on his face, looking like he was trying to hold back from laughing at a good joke. He walked in and asked, “How do you like your private suite?” and we started talking. The brother explained he couldn’t help but trip on Americans’ first reactions when arriving at this place because things were done so differently, from what we were accustomed to in the states. Tony, and two of his buddies, all from central California, had already been in the prison for one year, with three to go, on a four year sentence they received for getting caught with 25,000 hits of blotter acid. Blotter acid came in the form of sheets of paper marked into small squares saturated with LSD. Each square was a hit, and when a quantity was turned, a portion of the paper would be cut equal to the amount of squares the person was buying. It was very convenient and easy to stash but this type of LSD usually wasn’t as strong as the tabs or caps, and not even close to Sunshine. Tony was the welcoming committee for new American arrivals at the prison, and an interpreter for the guards, because very few of them spoke English. He had picked up quite a bit of German over the year he and his friends had been locked up, so the hacks made him orderly for the American inmates who were almost all young hippies, arrested on either hash or LSD charges. After filling me in on a little general information about the place, Tony announced with a grin that he had some things for me. He stepped outside the cell door and returned with a square box made of wood that had a seat with a round hole cut in the center of it. He sat the object down on the floor, lifted the top up and put a metal bucket inside, saying, “Here’s your toilet.” He knew exactly what was going through my mind and how bizarre this appeared to the “new fish on the block,” and as we looked at each other, we started busting up. Next he brought in a tall, stainless steel can and a long handled ladle, with instructions that this was my water for drinking, washing, and putting into the “honey bucket” to keep the smell down. Tony explained that once every morning the guard would open the door, and you should have the toilet and water buckets ready to exchange. The routine was for each prisoner to set the used buckets outside the door each morning, and get a clean one and full container of water from the guard. He gave me a tip about not forgetting about the exchange, telling me that if you were late, the hacks just closed the cell door back up and left you to deal with the toilet and whatever water you had left until the next day. That didn’t sound too appealing, so I made it a point to be up by six a.m. every morning, standing at the door with buckets in hand, making sure I didn’t miss that part of the daily routine.
There were shower areas on each floor and a rotation system used, allowing one to be taken every five to seven days. For recreation, the inmates were released from their cells for twenty minutes a day and made to walk counter clockwise around the small square courtyard, in the center of the tall prison walls. There was no stopping allowed for any reason during the twenty minutes, so you just got together with your bros and talked, while walking nonstop until the guards signaled it was time for your group to go back into the building, so another could be herded out. The only view we had of the outside world was by looking straight up at the same square patch of sky, day in and day out, framed by the four gray rock walls enclosing the recreation yard. Time away from the cell was limited to showers and the twenty-minute walk, so the inmates were isolated, and had to somehow keep occupied for the other 23½ hours of the day. Since the walls were thick rock and the doors solid steel, the only way to communicate was either while walking in the yard or by talking to each other through the barred windows. It wasn’t always possible to see the person with whom you were conversing, so we developed nicknames in order to get each other’s attention. My friends christened me “Billy” short for Billy the Kid because I had just turned twenty and was the youngest American in the prison at that time. The name stuck and ended up being my handle to those who knew me. I encountered colorful people from all over the world who all had interesting stories. One of them was a young tour bus driver from England, in for smuggling hash. He had traveled throughout India for many years, becoming interested in Vedic religion and art during the time spent there. His teacher, or guru, was also a master artist and taught him the spiritual artistic techniques used for illustrating Vedic religious stories. This brother had become a master himself, and with a set of colored ink pens could create drawings of Krishna and religious scenes that looked like oil paintings. The detail was incredible, down to eyelashes and single strands of hair on the head, as if he’d drawn the picture with the help of a magnifying glass. He explained he had learned the technique of meditating and focusing on the picture in his mind’s eye before putting anything down on paper. He would envision an entire concept of what was to be drawn right down to the very minuscule details and then hold the image in meditation until he felt moved and prepared to create it. Then, he would begin drawing and imitate the picture he held in his mind down to the finest details. He explained it really wasn’t necessary for him to watch it materialize on paper because the vision being created was much clearer in his mind’s eye, as his hands reproduced the picture. That’s how the fine detail in his art was done, without relying solely on sight. It was an interesting concept, to consider tapping into the mind’s imagination and having your body so disciplined that it would be able to automatically recreate the exact image visualized. With all the journeys I’d taken using psychedelics, the technique made perfect sense to me because I had also been taught that with focus and willpower the mind becomes a very dynamic, energized organism, able to create within itself any concept, picture, or color. The imagination is very potent, and thoughts are like seeds of realities waiting for the right amount of effort and the proper channels to be physically manifested into our daily lives. All material objects, both natural and manmade, have their beginnings in the realm of thought initially, so what better way to draw a picture than to copy it straight from the source. This English brother was an interesting character and a very spiritual person due to his travels and experiences in the East, but he was also doing some serious time because he’d been caught by Customs bringing in four tons of hash from Afghanistan, in a double-decker tour bus loaded with tourists he was driving back to Germany.
Another interesting person I met was a young guy from Ireland, named Kyle. His story, which I received mostly by reliable secondhand sources and newspaper articles written about him, was full of political intrigue. He was very secretive and didn’t talk much about his circumstances, even though we became good friends during my stay. Kyle was another worldly young guy who spent a lot of time in the East, making many trips back and forth from Persia and Asia. He was also doing time for hash importation, but I had a feeling when I was around him that Kyle was on a mission, and more sophisticated than other smugglers inside the prison. The guards treated him differently, too, always handling him with a certain amount of respect and caution. I got the vibe he was more of a political prisoner than a normal drug offender, and there was a reason for that. As the partially documented story goes, because as I said, he never talked about himself to me or anyone else, Kyle was an integral figure, very well connected to the Irish Republican Army. His expertise was in generating money to finance weapons, vehicles, communication equipment, and other materials for the cause. The means for doing this was smuggling hash into Europe, selling it through his connections, and then turning a portion of the profits over to the organization to use as needed. He was another young guy who had spent enough time in the East to be well versed in those cultures and religions. As I got to know Kyle, I had no doubt he was a very committed person who had seen and been through things in his young life that made him seem much older than his years. He was also very generous. He'd find a way to get anything a friend wanted or needed. When I eventually learned about his role in the workings of the IRA, I felt his personality was well suited to the part he played. Kyle was a hero, very well known throughout Ireland, but also featured almost daily in German newspaper articles about his case and connection to the IRA. He was also hated and wanted by the English for crimes against their government, and that was Kyle’s dilemma and why he was caught in the middle of an international political game. Germany was holding him for hash smuggling but the English wanted Kyle extradited to England. It was an amusing spectacle because, after spending some time in Germany, it had become clear to me there was no love lost between the Germans and English due to lingering bad feelings from World War II. The two governments might deny it publicly, but it was evident in other ways, and I could tell the Germans were getting quite a kick out of possessing a guy who was giving the English a lot of problems, somebody they wanted so badly they could taste it, and needed in order to gain a major political victory. Kyle was constantly fighting the English legal system’s efforts to extradite him, and at the same time pleading before the German courts that they let him serve out his remaining time on the hash charge in Germany, and then be released. For Kyle, it was the difference of doing a five-year sentence in Germany, compared to a twentyfive year to life sentence in England. He was never hurting for money and had the best German and Irish lawyers fighting his case, and it was common knowledge the IRA organization was backing him. Another reason why prison officials treated Kyle with such respect and caution was because they wanted to avoid conflicts with the IRA, such as them trying to break him out or getting revenge in some other way, so the guards considered him both a possible serious threat and a celebrity.
One day while out on one of our twenty-minute walks in the yard, Kyle came up and handed me four very old red hard-covered 500-page books, and gave me the news he was being transferred to another prison early the next morning. The German government frequently moved Kyle around because of not wanting him in any one location for very long, fearing the IRA would devise a plan to free him, so they were constantly shuffling the brother from one prison to another. He went on to say these books had been with him throughout all of his travels over the past seven years, and that they had been a gift from a spiritual master he had studied under on one of his first trips to India. He had a funny look and smile on his face as he said, “I’ve read these books many times from cover to cover and still don’t completely comprehend what they mean, so I want you to study them and see if you can understand.” Our recreation time was soon over, so we said our goodbyes, giving each other a hug, and I never saw Kyle again. After returning to my cell, I looked the books over and my first impression of them was one of overwhelming awe. I had read a lot of material concerning eastern philosophy in the past, but never four, 500-page volumes, and these particular books were clearly very old; used and studied, like a personal Bible that had been carried around during someone’s entire life, which rendered them very special and unique, sort of a testimonial to the beliefs and principles of whoever owned them. They were books on the Hindu religion, written, ironically enough I thought, given that Kyle was Irish, by an Englishman named Sir John Woodroffe in the early 1900s. Woodroffe left England to study and finally embrace the religion and became a very well known Hindu scholar who wrote many books in English to try and help the Western World’s intellect understand and integrate with the Eastern World’s spirituality. The names of the books were S’akti and S’akta, The Great Liberation (MAHA NIRVA TANTRA), Principles of Tantra Part I, and Principles of Tantra Part II. When I opened the cover of the first book, S’akti and S’akta there was a blank page Kyle had written on that told me volumes about him. This is what it said, copied straight out of the book, as he wrote it: Billy, Before the printing press A boy heard his father’s words and forgot them Take heed--- And remembered at the time of need. Gurus gave the magic seeds. In words, urgent and bound into the tight bonds of those present. for prescience’s sake. The learning innocent in the world’s innocence lets the images bounce upon the silent floors of their mirror’s dreaming - And now, NOW - that second’s catch of uncertainty upon the moments of emotion we call love. That takes the mirror of our guru’s words and our Mirror’s mirror makes a picture of his words It makes a mirror of our own doing! So we forget the times of need but not the printed word. Take heed. Love Kyle I have kept those four books throughout the years and often read what Kyle wrote inside before giving them to me. To this day, I’m still not sure I have a full understanding of the message he was passing on to me, but of one thing I am certain. When I look back on that time in the prison yard as the young Irishman handed over his treasured possessions, smiling, telling me he would like me to have them because he’d studied them from cover to cover and still didn’t understand, I now realize Kyle possessed more wisdom than he revealed to most, and that our meeting and the resulting friendship between an American warrior for peace and an Irish warrior for freedom was more than a coincidence. We seemed to have been drawn together from half way around the world to influence each other in some way, and I pray Kyle found his freedom peacefully.
Another colorful character at the prison was a Pakistani businessman who we called “Sahib.” There were a lot of Pakistanis in the prison, but when someone yelled “Sahib” out their window or down in the recreation yard as he was walking, everyone knew who was being addressed. The guy was royalty among all residing hash smugglers. Sahib was a big man and looked like the genie released from the magic lamp in the tale of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. He owned a tile manufacturing company in Peshawar, Pakistan, and distributed tons of tiles into Germany and throughout Europe. What Sahib had really been profiting on, though, was the product inside the tiles he shipped. His operation in Peshawar was a hash-exporting factory. He and his people molded hashish into thin squares, put them into specially made, hollowed out pieces of tile, and then sealed the edges to conceal the hash. Through his business, he was sending multiton loads of hash by freighter to countries all over Europe. He had been doing it for years and was a major supplier of Pakistani hash to the continent but finally got caught shipping twelve tons into Hamburg. Sahib’s stable, positive attitude made him unforgettable. Considering the amount of trouble he was facing, there was a constant smile on his face and he always seemed to be not just happy, but joyful. Whenever anyone was talking with Sahib, he was very gracious and would always end the conversation with, “Come visit my family and you will be very well taken care of in my country.” Whenever he was asked when he was getting out, Sahib would get a big smile on his face, and his response would always be, “Soon, soon.” He was a very wealthy and respected foreign businessman in Frankfurt, and it seemed he knew something the rest of us didn’t, and with his money and connections, that thought had crossed our minds more than a few times. He had already been locked up for a year going through the court system, and every day his prediction never changed, until finally it became a standard joke around the prison because everybody there was sure Sahib was going down for at least ten years for that amount of hash. People would come up to each other and jokingly ask, “Hey, So and So, when are you going home?” and the other guy would give Sahib’s patent answer, “Soon, soon,” and everyone would start busting up. The Pakistani brother was a popular figure in the prison though, and it was all done in fun. One day while in my cell doing yoga exercises, I heard my nickname, “Billy, Billy,” being called from down in the yard. It was obvious who it was, so I went to the window and asked, “What's up?” Sahib told me to get a pencil and paper and write down the address he was about to give me because he was leaving for home in the morning. The first thing that flashed across my mind was, “Yeah, right, Sahib. That’s been the story for over a year now, and I personally have heard it every day for the past two months,” but I wrote it anyway to humor him. We talked until the end of his recreation time, he told me to be sure to come see him and that he would take “very” good care of me, and then said goodbye. I went back to my yoga, fully expecting to see Sahib’s smiling face at the same time, in the same place, walking the yard the following day. When the next day came, though, and I went to my window to see if he was there, sure enough, he wasn’t. The one thing quickly noticeable was how the prison seemed more like a prison without Sahib’s upbeat attitude there. I really missed him and never saw the brother again, but I can still see his smile and the sunny charm of his charismatic personality lighting up the prison walls when I think back on that experience.
Those were some of the interesting highlights of my stay, but it wasn’t all fun and games. Because I was aware that if Fred got caught we would probably both do some serious time, I woke up paranoid every morning, asking everybody I knew if any Americans had been brought in late in the evening or earlier that day. The information was usually easy to come by through the grapevine because there weren’t that many of us, and it was always big news when an American did show up. For weeks it was impossible for me to start the daily routine with any peace of mind until I heard whether any new guys were transferred in or not, and it had a wearing effect, feeling that kind of stress day in and day out. Sometimes I’d hear the guards processing a new inmate late at night, and would have to find out if it was Fred or not, just to get back to sleep. Finally, after about two months on the emotional roller coaster, things started looking up. Soon after Sahib’s release, a guard came to my cell one day with the announcement that my lawyer was here to see me, which was unexpected news because I didn't even know I had one. He escorted me to a room and had me sit down while explaining my attorney would be there in a few minutes. A half hour later, the door opens, and in shuffles a stooped over little man leaning on a cane, who must have been at least seventy years old. If first impressions mean anything, one look at this dude had disaster written all over it. He didn’t speak much English, and I spoke very little German, so we groped through the communication barrier, trying to understand each other the best we could. At first, I thought he was a court appointed attorney, but after talking with him for a while, I finally came to the understanding that Fred had hired him to represent me. He reported that Fred hid out for three weeks with our local friends before finally finding a way to get another passport, and then retained the lawyer before returning to the states, on the lawyer’s recommendation, so he didn’t get caught and make things worse for the both of us. With some quick basic math, I figured Fred had been gone for over a month, and this guy had just gotten around to seeing me.
For sixty days, I was up every morning worrying about Fred getting caught and my own lawyer had known he’d left the country over a month ago, and was just now getting around to telling me about it. He explained that in Germany police can pick anybody up without giving a reason and hold them ninety days until either filing a charge or dropping the investigation. He pointed out that when Fred initially hired him, I still had over two months before my first hearing so he didn’t feel it necessary to come see me until now. He was very cut and dry and matter of fact about everything, so much so it gave the impression he was trying to save every ounce of energy just to take his next breath, and from my observations of our first meeting together, I have to say that my confidence in this old gentleman was at an all time low. All of a sudden, without discussing the case or any strategy, he gave me the date of my court appearance, which was scheduled for the following month, told me he’d see me then, and left. I went back to my cell thinking how Fred had blown it hooking me up with this dinosaur, and that I would have only spoken with my attorney one time in nearly ninety days before seeing him again on the day of my first court appearance. Strategy and preparation were obviously not in the plans, and from all appearances there seemed to be no other possible outcome other than me being dumped, but all that could be done for now was to take one day at a time and stay centered on being positive and believing things would work out. When my recreation time came around the next day everyone wanted to know where the hacks had taken me the day before, and I told them about my meeting. As the lawyer’s name was mentioned, the reactions weren’t what I had expected them to be. I assumed that nobody would have heard of him or, if they had, would wonder how I got hooked up with such a loser. Instead, people couldn't believe it at first and kept telling me I probably misunderstood him and that it had to be somebody else. When they were finally convinced, I began hearing nothing but good things about the little old man and knew then that my faith in a positive outcome had been rewarded. My road dogs (friends) described this guy as one of the most famous and influential lawyers in Germany. He had been a defense attorney during the Nazi trials and had argued for quite a few of the accused war criminals. He was well known, and either loved or hated for getting most of his clients off with prison terms instead of a death sentence. Interestingly enough, an old exNazi officer who kept the recreation yard clean at the prison had been one of his clients fighting for his life during the war crimes trials.
My lawyer won him a thirtyyear sentence, which is no piece of cake, but considering the mood of the world during that time, it was a remarkable feat for a defense attorney. Because of his political clout and connections, he had clients standing in line for his services, which allowed him the freedom of working only on the most high profile cases. Everybody was amazed he was representing me, and I was just as surprised as they were, especially after hearing the glowing stories they were telling me about this guy and his reputation. I later found out that a German hippie friend who was helping us turn the Sunshine happened to be related to the old attorney and asked him to take my case. The other thing I discovered was that he had also been Sahib’s lawyer, and it suddenly became clear why he was always so confident and upbeat about his case. After learning of the old German lawyer’s good reputation, I was feeling much better about my future and got into a routine of yoga, writing, and art for the next thirty days, until my court date. When the day finally arrived, I was taken to a courthouse, and my attorney met me in the hallway outside the courtroom. He instructed me not to say a word during the proceedings, and when the judge spoke to him and he turned and nodded my way, I was to answer, “Yes” to the court interpreter, and that was all. It’s a little unsettling to be in a foreign courtroom full of government officials and cops with everybody speaking a language that you don’t understand, while you’re expected to say, “yes” to everything they ask you. But I did as I was told, hoping I wasn’t pleading guilty to a fifteenyear charge without having a clue. I was thinking how it seemed everyone there but me knew what was going to happen ahead of time, and then the judge said a couple more things to my lawyer in German, got up, and left. The old attorney shook my hand and told me I was free to go but that I was banned from Germany for life and had twentyfour hours to exit the country. The police took me back to the prison to release my personal belongings, and before long, I was standing out in the street on a cold winter day in Frankfurt, Germany. There I was, a thin, pale, longhaired American hippie in a foreign country, just out of prison, trying to get a taxi to the airport, and the whole thing seemed like an ongoing surreal dream. Three months ago, I had been rushed by an army of cops and thrown in jail. For ninety days I spent 23½ hours a day alone in a cell with no running water, a bucket for a toilet, showering once a week. I wasn’t ever sure if I was being charged with the LSD, having only talked to my legal representative once about my case during the entire three months I was there. I couldn’t understand the different languages most of the time, but somehow managed to communicate with and meet a colorful cast of interesting people. Because of the isolation of being in a single man cell and a burning determination to stay mentally strong, the hours of yoga, meditation, writing, and drawing created a monastery-like atmosphere that provided undivided time for selfexamination and the opportunity to work on myself without outside distractions.
The analogy might sound strange to some after going through that type of experience, but owing to the deprivation of outside stimulus and diversions, these conditions created the perfect environment for continual inner reflection and time to “BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD,” which generates strength to help one cope with life’s misfortunes. That particular experience produced the opportunity to reflect on a very important truth and lesson. Man, while in his partially developed state of mind, doesn’t yet possess the knowledge to keep himself totally immune from the distress, trials, and tribulations happening in life that are tests of heart and builders of character in the process of imperfect man’s evolution toward the WISDOM of inner perfection. What influence you do have, though, is to determine what your reaction will be and, according to your choices, you will either reap the benefits of learning how to correctly handle certain encounters, and avoid repeating mistakes, thereby making life more enjoyable; or by misinterpreting the purpose of karma and missing the point, afraid or unwilling to change, you could be doomed to an unconscious endless cycle of repetitious negative thoughts, actions, and consequences. It is a wise person who believes without a doubt that every cloud has a silver lining and has the ability to make lemonade from a lemon. The end had finally come to my European odyssey. I grabbed a taxi for Frankfurt International, and Wendy picked me up fifteen hours later at the L.A. Airport, to take me home to Laguna.