"I was in Mexico, in the ocean, after an all-night LSD session and there was a very wild surf and I realized that if I went forward into the surf I, since I couldn't tell the difference between up and down, I probably would drown. I stood there feeling all these forces upon me and I realized…I felt, I got this experience of imagining going into the surf and being underwater and then that feeling of drowning and then shifting and then a whole new balance in relation to Nature, and then I'm a bit of floating something on the water and then everything changes and then there's moments in other people's minds when they say, "Oh, Richard, remember him – he died in the ocean in Mexico; and then there's all these little flickers and everything quiets down and then there's a new balance in the universe and it was just a little shift from that balance into that one. In one, I am this 'somebody' doing something and in the next, I am part of the ocean's stuff like a piece of seaweed and my consciousness has moved into some other plane and once I had gotten out of the anxiety about it, it was just a shift, a metamorphosis of balance. It's just like a tree falling and then rotting and then providing nurturance for everything else in the forest and going on and the tree isn't upset about its change of state. And I began to see there's the process of death. Seeing transformation of energy. And the deepest fear, of course, is the death, is the extinction of that fragile little thing that we created in the first place. Because once you get back into the mystical root being, your true self, it doesn't die, because it wasn't born. It just is. So there's always a place that is not afraid and that is what one works to find in oneself."