I am a Los Angeles native. I was born into the Scientology Center(though it was Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at the time). My first memories are of being in Coldwater Canyon and having a unitive experience of the hills, trees and chaparral. I remember thinking I was the hills of Coldwater Canyon. As a child, I dreamt of Coldwater Canyon in its pre-civilized state, without roads and without homes. I remember being at a party with my parents in Laurel Canyon, and being aware of a viscous, primordial reality flowing by outside the windows of the house, while inside, Hollywood types honked on about recent developments in the film industry.
As a teenager, i sat in my father’s palliative care room at Cedars Sinai during the final days of his life. It was an awesomely profound time. The doors into the next world swung open into his room. Once, while I was aware this was happening, a B list Film Director came to visit him, and then proceeded to regale my father with production details of his latest green lit project., while totally ignoring his impending death. “Sean Connery, Meg Ryan,” it was all happening. At a certain point, my father(who was probably taking one of his last ten thousand breaths) turned to me, and whispered quietly, “Get him out of here.” So I did.
After my father died, i left Los Angeles. I thought I would never return. I thought it was Sodom, and the least profound place anyone could ever live. I went to college in upstate New York and graduate school in the Bay Area. But while I was in graduate school, something strange began happening. I started dreaming of Los Angeles as I once had as a very young child. It was not about the culture of Los Angeles, or the people I had encountered there. The dreams were of a primordial Los Angeles. A part of Los Angeles that existed in its natural form, above the city below(which I called “The Flats.”) ) During the dreams, I remember wondering if this was a place that actually existed somewhere behind Beverly Hills and Bel Air, up near Mulholland, or whether it was a dreamscape. There was mountainous terrain, flowing creeks, abundant wildlife, and sometimes melting snow. It was the same dreamscape I experienced as a child, and it left me intrigued. When I recorded these dreams, I always described them not as of Los Angeles, but of “Suncanyon.”
Eventually, I found my way back to Los Angeles and rediscovered the Los Angeles of my early childhood. The verdant nature, the rugged terrain where coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions roam and thrive. It was still there. Primordial Los Angeles as it has always been, and always will be. The superficial crust of it changes. The developments, and the people who come here in pursuit of their dreams. The fires and the earthquakes continue to come and go. But beneath even the unceasing nature, a primordial reality flows that calls out for the transformation of consciousness that a human lifetime offers. It’s there right now as it was outside that window in Laurel Canyon in 1971. I have written elsewhere(City of The Dead) about the primordial reality of Los Angeles. There is a mystical reality here, a living bardo, that the demands for attention that so many place on the limited real estate of our consciousness, often camoflage.. But right below this push, a mystical foundation flows right in front of us. If you are here, or anywhere, it is there. Don’t miss it. Yoke it.