Dan no more believed in God than a man believes in the train that has run over him. I wasn’t toying here with tooth-fairy faith. While I had doubts about his philosophy, I never doubted the authenticity of his experience. He had the Vision, saw the Source, however imperfectly he articulated it. I was never able to get a coherent narrative of it because whenever he talked about it at length, he drifted into a trance-state. I had to piece together a jumble of dropped references.
He was a probation officer and a graduate student in behavioral psychology, and the experience occurred while he was attending a psychologists’ conference in Oregon . He went into the conference on a creative tidal wave, presenting papers on three different studies. It was the early Sixties and he was on the verge of having the god-experience that Leary, Alpert, and probably some in the seminar audience would soon be chasing with psychedelics.
His papers were all poorly received and the resulting crash seemed to have been the catalyst. One thing that made him unique: he had virtually no religious training either in school or at home other than some respectable generic Protestantism. Indeed, before the experience, he would have described himself as an atheist.
During the experience, he had sensitivity heightened almost to telepathy, he had a god-like overview of history and humanity, and an intense love for everyone around him. (“We humans are heroic,” he told me once. “We carry around so much pain…” And I could see as he said it that he empathetically felt the secret burden of pain in all humans.)
The experience varied in intensity during its roughly four-days. At some point, he was in a crowded restaurant and felt that he was an intimate of everyone in the room. When he got to the cashier, he discovered he didn’t have any money (earlier he had blindly emptied his pockets to pay a cabbie). Somehow by looking at the cashier, he got her to let him leave without paying.
There was a woman in a bar who said talking to him was better than sex. There was skinny-dipping at night with a Catholic priest and some teenage girls. There was an aimless train ride in an open boxcar through the night and the voice of God telling him that was enough, now go home.
It ruined his life. He was committed to a hospital and diagnosed with a nervous breakdown. Every time he tried to explain the days he was missing, he fell silent. He said later that was the experience protecting itself. The admitting psychiatrist reported his “dissettlingly passive aspect.”
Later, when that same doctor annoyed him, Dan made him cry. Whether he thought he did it telepathically or with a calculated comment, I could never get straight. After the hospital, he took his Japanese wife and two children and moved to Japan . His father-in-law gave him the job of running the Tokyo English Institute, a language school for executives. (His mother-in-law was the first woman elected to the Japanese parliament.)
