My eldest son Jonathan is now in his early forties and is himself the father of two beautiful young children. When he was in high school, in the 10th grade, he quit school because of all the bullshit that went along with it. He worked instead at the Monster Cookie store in Eugene, Oregon, and then, after working there for most of the day, he went to night school at the local community college. With all this, he still earned his high school diploma a full year before his old classmates graduated! Nowadays, he works in the West Coast entertainment world, doing what he likes to do, doing it well, and making a good living at it. He would have done just as well - with a whole lot less pain and hassle - if he had skipped school altogether.
     Attending public school was also a hurtful experience for my daughter Ariana. The other kids saw her as a hippie kid. A lot of them were really mean to her, putting her down for being different, for being an outsider. It has taken her years to regain her natural confidence in herself. Although she went on to graduate from college - she's very smart - she would have done much better if she had skipped the public school world entirely. She is extremely gifted and multi-talented-singer, songwriter, poet, dancer, artist, web designer, to name a few of her gifts - and a sure bet to become successful at whatever she does.
     Why did I inflict these horrible public school experiences on these two bright and creative children whom I loved with all my heart? I did this because, like most parents, I wanted time away from them, time to be more than just their dad - and what better place for them to be while I lived my own life than in school. However, I never once thought about what it might do to them.

     Now that Aspen and I are raising our two little boys, Callahan and Jake, I want to be with them as much as I can. I don't want to send them off to public school. I want them to learn with us instead. I'm certainly not about to make them suffer as Jonathan and Ariana have, as many of us have.
     Since making this decision, Aspen and I have come to realize that if we're not going to send Callahan and Jake off to school, if we are going to raise them outside of the system, we have to be outside of it ourselves. This won't be too difficult for us; neither of us has ever really fit into the system. But what about other parents and their children? We don't want to raise our boys in isolation. We want other folks involved too.
     There are other families already living outside the system. We are meeting some of them. Also, we're beginning to see how we can help families that are still stuck in the system to leave it without their lives falling apart in the process.
     First and foremost, people who have given their entire lives to this system that is now failing them, failing all of us really - and who can't see their way out, even as it is failing - need help rebuilding their egos and raising their consciousness to a new level. Most of the folks who are leaving or falling out of the system today are doing so because it has failed them. It has failed to provide them with meaningful and productive lives, let alone decent livelihoods.
     And because these folks have built their identities around the task of succeeding within the system, they will need a lot of help rebuilding their failed and fragile egos. In particular, they will need to learn how to take care of themselves in the world without being a part of the system. This may be quite difficult for many people, as the system has tried to brainwash all of us into believing that the only acceptable ego identity is the one that can survive within the system. But this is not so. There are other ways to develop the ego, which Carl Jung defines as the center of consciousness whose function is to mediate between the rest of consciousness and the outer world.
     For example, after I received my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA back in 1971, I decided to drop out and experiment with LSD and consciousness. Since then, I have found no reason to rejoin the system. I have always survived, sometimes very comfortably, sometimes a bit closer to the edge. I'm still here today too, very healthy for my many years, not so wealthy at this moment but maybe just a bit wiser. Along the way, I have developed a strong ego without trying to fit into the system. I have done this by confronting my own darkness and by living a spiritual warrior's life. These days, I'm happy with my head, and I do take care of business.

     I'm beginning to see where this is going. It isn't just about our children learning outside the system. It's about all of us, kids and parents together, becoming conscious together and learning how the world works and how to take care of ourselves in it without having to plug into the destructive and insane system that most of the world is still trying to maintain for want of anything better.
     It would require all of us being involved full time, not just the children. And I'm willing to bet too that the kids would come up with the best and most creative ideas regarding how we could all take care of ourselves in the world. This is their strength - they just got here and can still see the world through their innocent and unconditioned eyes. The rest of us, those of us who are parents, will probably know best how to implement our kids' creative and innovative ideas. This will be our strength. After all, we already do have a lot of experience doing this for them.

     Since this idea first presented itself to me, I have noticed a natural and organic growth of family around Aspen and me and our two boys. We have certainly helped by letting go of our old hurts and fears and angers and by making peace with all those folks whom we once loved but had since shut out of our hearts. We have also begun meeting other old friends, folks with whom we have lost touch, meeting them 'by chance' around town. And, of course, we are always meeting new folks, especially other parents with young children.
     Folks are beginning to seek one another out again, remembering perhaps a paraphrase of that old Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers saying - that friends will get us through times of no money, work, or any of the other old systemic crutches better than any of them will get us through times of no friends. People are just now beginning to turn to one another again for support and for encouragement in the dark days ahead.
     I suggest that we look beyond this, that we take it yet another step. Consider the example of the folks who make the Burley bike trailers, the finest kid transportation system in the world. Burley is a collective of eighty-four individuals at last count, all of whom share a common vision and who decided to come together to implement this vision. Each member of the collective is an equal member. Each has equal seniority, even if he or she has just joined the collective today. Each has equal pay and equal responsibility. There are no bosses. They love their work too.
     Consider also The Farm. They were a large group of folks from the Haight-Ashbury-Acid district in San Francisco, who traveled together in hippie school buses across the United States in the late sixties and ended up buying a farm together in southern Tennessee. They were a very high and telepathic family. They may still be.
     When I was there in the early seventies, they told me something important. They told me that each and every member of their community had the whole farm and all its powerful resources between them and the system. For example, if one of them were in a legal dispute, the lawyers on the farm would represent him or her in the courts. And these lawyers weren't otherwise special, just useful whenever the need arose. When they weren't being lawyers, helping out the many individuals who made up the farm, they were out in the fields, working alongside everyone else. The folks on the Farm were big on avoiding the sin of social position, that is, the sin of thinking that if you were a lawyer, a doctor, a musician, or some other professional, you were somehow more important than the laborers or the carpenters or the cooks. For the Farm folks, work was work.
     I also remember The Alive Tribe, although I haven't heard anything from them in years. They were a much smaller group, less than twenty folks, both adults and children. Their focus, once they became a family, was upon the spiritual. Working together, they became very powerful healers.
     Then there was Acid Rescue, a medicine family based out of Berkeley, California, and later Eugene, Oregon, back in the seventies. They were a group of high spiritual folks working to raise the collective consciousness upon this Spaceship Earth. They were trying to wake up the crew of this spaceship (that's all of us, folks) before its untogether and unconscious 'officers' destroyed it.

     The Alive Tribe, Acid Rescue, the Farm, and all the other spiritual collectives of the sixties and seventies were all about raising consciousness - beginning with overcoming fear. And all of them saw that the fear that drives people the most was the fear of being close and open with each other.
     Most of us do spend most of our time avoiding being real with one another - avoiding real communication, avoiding real feelings, our own as well as those of others, and especially avoiding each other on the soul level. For example, most of us avoid eye contact and are unable to be really open with our eyes (the windows to our soul.) Also, most of us, even those of us who do LSD, are afraid to do higher doses of it. We are afraid of encountering the soul. In short, most of us spend most of our time pretending that we are actually separate beings.
     We do this, knowing at some deep level that if we ever let ourselves be really close and open with one another, we would very soon discover that we are all telepathic and in each others' heads and hearts all the time. This is way too scary for most of us. We're all too afraid of what others might learn of our true nature if they were to have access to our innermost thoughts and feelings.

     However, it doesn't have to be this way. Letting others into our heads doesn't have to be scary. It can actually be fun, even enlightening. In his book, Callahan's Secret, Spider Robinson has one of his characters say that "to approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up as high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each other's joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each other cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it's safe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each other anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each other's best, you work very hard at hosing all the bullshit out of your head so that it's clean enough for guests, silencing all the demons in your subconscious so that it's quiet enough to hear somebody thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make that work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick together and love each other and keep growing."
     Spider shows us this process happening in Callahan's magical Crosstime Saloon. Jake, the bartender, realizes the potential behind all that is happening in the saloon, what with all the good feelings engendered by friendship and the shared adventures. He suggests to the regulars that they be more conscious of this process and lend it their energy. His suggestion is met with unanimous approval, and choosing this goal takes the book's characters on a long and illuminating journey, the way of the "wonderful conspiracy."

     If Callahan's Saloon existed in this reality, I might be tempted to take up social drinking again. When I was younger, so much younger then, I did enjoy drinking some. Nowadays however, I prefer my own, more enlightening medicines. But I do hunger for folks like those who hang out in Callahan's Saloon. I do hunger for folks who aren't afraid to be brave and true. I'm tired of waiting for folks to get over their fear of being open and honest and telepathic.
     I definitely want to be part of the wonderful conspiracy. I definitely want to be part of a conscious group head. I want to join with others, both children and grownups, all of us working together to learn what we can about this wonderful world we live in, how it works, how to be conscious and healing in it - and especially how to provide for ourselves in this world through joyful and telepathic collective effort.

Eugene Marks, Ph.D.