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Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life – Larry Hagman

The idea of trying LSD lodged in my brain and wouldn't go away. Then Maj and I went to a party at Brandon De Wilde's home in Topanga Canyon. Peter Fonda was there. We'd met years earlier in New York and we were glad to see each other again. We led Peter to our van and told him that we'd recently seen him in The Trip, a movie Jack Nicholson directed about a man going through a bad divorce, who in an effort to understand himself better takes LSD. We told Peter we really liked the film and thought he was great in it. I also explained that I'd been thinking about taking acid myself.

A few days later, Peter took me to see Crosby Stills and Nash in concert. After the show we went backstage and visited with David Crosby. I expressed my desire to turn on, and before we left, David handed me a handful of tabs. This wasn't ordinary LSD. It was the purest acid available, made by Stanley Owlsley the famed underground chemist from San Francisco. I kept them for close to a month before the time seemed right to trip.

My friend Larry Hall, the grandson of Big Jess Hall from Weatherford, was in L.A. He'd dropped acid a few times before, and for my initial journey I thought it would be wise to try it with someone who knew the ropes as my guide. The two of us met on a Saturday morning at my house. Maj was out with the kids. I wanted the environment comfortable and secure, since I'd been told that acid stripped you of all emotional and psychological protection.

I wore a hooded brown terry cloth robe that Maj had made. I looked like a monk. I'd also fasted for a couple of days as recommended by Larry. I swallowed a tab, sat back in the living room, and waited for something to happen. Without warning, I felt a buzz just below my navel. I thought this must be what they talked about-vibrations. Boy, was it ever!

Suddenly, I saw the entrance to a cave across the room. It was guarded by octopus-like creatures with long writhing tentacles. There were also two other creatures that looked like lions with feathers.

Then I turned and saw my grandmother, who'd died when I was 12. She was to my left, hovering about eight feet above me. She sat in the same position I was in, and wore the same robe. She didn't speak or motion. She simply looked at me with a wonderful, comforting smile and told me not to worry about it.

"All of this is just a natural thing," she said. ”You’re at the gate of all-new experiences. The guards at the gate are to keep you from going in. But don't worry about it. If something tries to pull you, don't resist. Go with it. If you feel pushed, don't fight it. Just go with the flow.”

All of a sudden, I got it. I thought about some of the passages I'd read in The Joyous Cosmology and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and they all said basically the same thing that my grandma had just told me. I headed for the cave.

As soon as I got to the doorway BOOM, I was sucked inside and down a tunnel at incredible speed. At the end, I saw a light. As I came out of the tunnel, I was in a place where I was surrounded by bright and diffused light. I saw a person who called out to me. I didn't know if it was a he or a she. That person didn't talk, but without speaking somehow let me know, "This is a glimpse. Where you've been, where you're going, where you are all the time."

It was too much for me to comprehend. The person seemed to understand I was having trouble making sense of it all. "You don't have to go any further. Having seen this is enough for now."

At that point, I was pulled back out through the tunnel. The guards at the gate were asleep. I looked around for my grandmother. She was gone. I hadn't thought of her in a long time, yet she had been there when I needed her. I wanted to thank her for taking me through the entrance.

Then I got an orange from the kitchen. When I broke it open, I saw its cellular structure pulse. It looked to me like the actual cells were alternating between life and death. It all seemed perfectly natural. I was studying the orange while standing in front of a mirror. When I looked up and saw my face, it was doing the same thing. The cells were pulsing. Some were dying and some were in the process of being reborn. It was an intricate picture. Every molecule was in constant motion.

I don't know how long I stared at my face, but after a while I realized I was a constant flow of energy. Everything was. I was part of everything, and everything was part of me. Everything was living, dying, and being reborn.

I started playing with a sixteen-millimetre movie camera Larry [Hall] had. He drove us into Beverly Hills, where we explored the different streets while staring at all the big old homes. They had beautiful gardens in front. All the colors jumped out at me. I looked at everything through the camera. As we drove along Sunset Boulevard, heading into Hollywood, I looked at people waiting at bus stops, exiting stores, and sitting in coffee shops. I used the camera to zoom in on them until I could look directly into their eyes. I saw their cells changing too.

The experience was extremely unsettling but just about the best thing that had ever happened to me. It changed my way of looking at people. I saw much deeper into their emotions. In those hours, I learned how to read body and facial language at a much more profound level.

More than anything else the experience changed my way of looking at life and death. I concluded death was just another stage of our development and that we go on to different levels of existence.

'We don't disappear when we "die." We become part of a curtain of energy. In almost every religion I knew about, they say, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be."

I had an understanding of God consciousness. It was so clear. The LSD experience took the fear of death from me, the fear of manmade heaven and hell. With that out of the way, I quit worrying. The amazing thing about this whole experience was that it was so familar. I'd been there before, done that before, and it was so, so familar.