Nick Meets the Galactic Telepaths

Nick Herbert parts the veils between worlds

In the early 60s I had experimented with the then-legal consciousness-expanding drugs LSD and peyote (available by mail from a ranch in Texas) and was ready to explore the effects of a substance considered so satanic by the American government that it is classed with heroin and its use forbidden even to sober scientists.

For me legal LSD and peyote acted as gateway drugs to the illegal use of marijuana.

At that time the street price of marijuana was $100 a "key" (kilogram = 2.2 pounds) which was broken down into "lids" (each about an ounce) which sold for between 5 and 10 dollars--the so-called nickel and dime bags. Unlike today's powerful sinsemilla buds, yesterday's marijuana was mostly leaf which had to be separated from seeds and stems. And to obtain pot, one had to have connections with a (technically) criminal underground. For the sake of science I made such connections and learned how to "clean a key" and "roll a joint". My mind seems to have an affinity for this forbidden substance and I have since had many unusual experiences with cannabis in various forms.

One evening I was alone in my house in Los Trancos Woods when Paul and his wife Miriam dropped by. Paul was a Stanford med student (now a therapist in So Cal) who was interested in psychedelics and psychodrama. I rolled a joint and we "got high". Someone suggested that we read aloud and I proposed "The Song of Songs". "I hate the Song of Songs," said Miriam. "Let's try this," she said, picking up an old college humor magazine from a pile of books. Miriam began to read and pot's ability to make the lowest silliness seem profoundly funny began to kick in. We laughed at Miriam's every word.

We laughed and laughed. And then something strange happened. It seemed to all three of us that there was only one person laughing. We had merged minds, so it seemed, into one laughing entity. "It's the sound," Paul conjectured. "It's the sound that's uniting us." So shocking was this new experience that we quickly came down. Drawing pictures on a napkin, Paul gave a mock-scientific explanation of the cannabis molecule's action on the brain which we all found funny but we were now laughing separately not as one being. They invited me to a party but I claimed to be too stoned (on one shared 60s joint?) to be good company. Paul and Miriam left and I stoked up the fire in my living room and prepared to enjoy an evening by myself.

Then inside my head the voices began to speak.

They claimed to be an ancient group of galactic telepaths traveling through space mind-to-mind rather than in clunky metal ships. "Here is what we do," they said and suddenly I experienced a kind of LSD trip. Then they turned off the "mind ray" and I become completely normal. They took me in and out of this odd psychological space several times to show off (I suppose) their prowess in the mental realm.

Then the aliens revealed the purpose of their visit. They were inviting me to join the conspiracy of galactic telepaths. They told me that some of my friends were already members. Unlike "Tony the angel" whose voice projected a clear persona, these alien voices seemed colorless, like ticket agents or office clerks. My initial response was that if this community really existed its goals would differ from human goals as much as human goals differ from the goals of fishes. This group must by necessity be non-human. So by joining it I would in some sense be betraying the human race.

The aliens seemed to understand my misgivings, but assured me that although I qualified for membership, there was no pressure to join. Then they withdrew from my mind and left me alone.

For the next few days I was obsessed with this contact and tried to discover other members of the group. Some of my psychedelic pals in the Stanford psychology department were prime candidates but they all shrewdly denied being galactic telepaths.

If this offer was real then I missed my chance to meet a million alien beings, to learn startlingly new truths about the mental and physical universe and to hear dozens of alien ethnic jokes.

On the other hand, if this experience was a message from my larger self, it may have been a prescient hint concerning the nature of quantum tantra--a more intimate way of doing physics that may look less like the physics of today and more like the sort of science practiced by galactic telepaths.

Nick Meets an Angel

Nick Herbert caught off guard at his lab bench

In the summer of 1960, I was living in a loft in Berkeley near Rose and Shattuck and working as a lab tech at the Berkeley Radiation Lab, minding the liquid hydrogen refrigerator for the 72-inch bubble chamber which tracked nuclear events spawned by protons from the Berkeley Bevatron--the highest-energy particle accelerator of its day, comparable to today's LHC. A few years earlier physicists at the Bevatron had discovered the antiproton  and were exploring other new high-energy hadron reactions.

I had just completed my first year of course work at Stanford, was teaching a graduate physics lab and preparing for the qualifying exams for the PhD. I was a practicing Catholic then and was reading Dante's Inferno, the Book of Job, Chesterton's Orthodoxy and planning to find a spiritual advisor at Berkeley's Newman Club. I was working swing shift at the Rad Lab which seriously disrupted my sleep schedule. I had fallen in  love with a woman named Audrey in San Francisco and was enjoying exploring the City's bounties with her and her two roommates. At that time (Summer 1960) the only mind-altering drugs I had ever experienced were legal and ethanol-based.

The bedroom in my loft had a small window with a view of San Francisco Bay. I was sitting on my bed in T-shirt and sweat pants with my back to the window getting ready for sleep one night when I suddenly heard a voice in the empty room. "Hello, Nick." I turned to the window but no one could have climbed up the sheer wall and spoken thru the panes. The voice was inside my head.

"Hello, Nick." The voice was male, a middle-aged man, spoken in a matter-of-fact way. The man, who I will call "Tony", did not identify himself and got straight to the point.

"You are reaching a crucial stage in your life, Nick, and must make a choice between two careers. Two kinds of life await you and I am asking you now to choose between them. One life will be regular, understandable and conventional; the other will be unusual, unpredictable and unconventional. Both of these lives are good lives. Now choose between them."

"How can I choose?" I told the voice in my head. "Tell me more about these lives."

"You know all you need to know," the voice replied. "Now choose."

"Tell me more, " I pleaded. "Make your choice," said the voice in my head.

And so it went for five or ten frustrating minutes. I wanted more info. He wanted me to choose.

"Alright," the voice said and vanished. I got the sense that "Tony" had other obligations that night and didn't have the time to waste with me. I was shaking all over during this encounter and my clothes were soaked with sweat. "What the hell was that?" I thought.

I did what any scientist would do. I went to the library.

I found that people hearing voices was not uncommon. More than 10% of folks have heard voices and now I was one of them. This experience gave me a sympathetic ear for people whom I met later in life who reported hearing voices too.

Being a sophisticated scientist, my first assumption was that "Tony" was a part of my subconscious and that I was simply "speaking to myself". However, the experience didn't feel that way. Tony felt like a real person, different from me, with a distinct personality. From his tone of voice and manner of speaking, "Tony" came across as a regular guy, a butcher or a bus driver, who was now working as some sort of discarnate bureaucrat. I call him an "angel" because he was a discarnate entity, but far below the level of God and the saints. If I was making "Tony" up, I was doing a great acting job. It really worked. The guy felt real.

A second argument against my making this up was the utter ordinariness of the transaction. If I possessed an unconscious need to star in some fabulous drama, why not invent some Egyptian king, wizard or holy man to talk to?  Why did I make up ordinary Tony and not Hermes Trimegistus?

I marked this experience as "unsolved" and went on with my life. But three years later I met "Tony" again.

In three years a lot had happened. I had been accepted for the PhD program, I had (uneventfully) ceased being a Catholic, I had come within inches of losing my life in a climbing accident on Mt Shasta and, thanks to some dear friends in the Stanford psychology department, I had experienced LSD--a big dose.

I was then living in Los Trancos Woods, a semi-rural area in the hills behind Stanford, and had just dropped acid for the third time. I was awaiting my sitter (in those days we always had sitters to provide "ground control") but my friend was delayed waiting for a pie to bake. So for the first part of the trip I was on my own and exploring the sensual distortions, the merging with the walls and scenery and the philosophical paradoxes that a few mikes of this mind medicine can be counted on to produce.

What I didn't count on was that in the middle of my trip, Tony showed up. "Hi, Nick, " he said. "Same choice. No new information." "OK," I said. "I'll take that strange life." (Given the context, it was obvious what path I had already chosen.) "Thanks," said Tony, noting my decision on some invisible clipboard (Sometime later religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal dubbed this experience the "clipboard angel".)  My angel vanished and though I have since had a few more episodes of voices in my head, none of them ever behaved like Tony.