crow," said Jim softly, paraphrasing Don
Juan as he stirred the seeds. "Sometimes it's a powerful sorcerer in
disguise."

Intrigued by the paradox of the crow, I plowed through The Teachings of
Don Juan and through Castaneda's A Separate Reality and Journey To
Ixtlan. At summer's end, still drugless and clueless as to whether
crows were birds or sorcerers, I left Boston clutching a Castaneda book.

Back in New York, I chose to see the world less through the eyes of an
eleventh grader taking honors physics and history, and more through the
eyes of a sorcerer's apprentice. I incorporated into my daily routine
Don Juan's recommendations. As an exercise in humility, I spoke aloud
to plants. To *see* beyond society's description of reality, I tried
to stop my thoughts. To expand my awareness beyond the confines of the
waking state, I sought to wake within a dream.

My interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional reality led to
an interest in what lay beyond the scope of traditional education, and,
that fall, I thought about switching to a public experimental high
school founded in the late '60s. I firmly believed that I would thrive
in a world without grades, attendance taking, tests, and requirements.
In January, 1977, with the guidance of my brother, I managed to
persuade my reluctant parents to let me join.

I chose to continue taking physics and history at the traditional
school; other subjects I took at the non-traditional school where, in a
creative writing class, I wrote:

Teachers force us to perceive,
The surface world of reason:
"A tree is but a pole with leaves,
Whose habits change each season."

I thrived within a self-designed, academically rigorous educational
program, but experienced no breakthroughs in my search for Hidden
Realms of Perception until the following summer. The experience came
when I was working ten-hour days and five-and-a-half day weeks on a
farm in southern New Hampshire. In my spare time, I was designing and
building an electricity-producing windmill, which ended up towering
some twenty feet above Onyx, one of the tallest cows. Farm-crew
members sometimes walked out to the hay fields to get high. One night,
after smoking marijuana, I fell asleep and later saw, above where I
lay, a cow, its head swaying gently to and fro. Though I thought I was
awake it was but a dream, for when I woke from "w