Jackie Gladfelter Devereaux 

Seeing Jesus on LSD

     I still recall a vivid hallucination from the summer of 1970.  I was 15 years old tripping on LSD at a Steppenwolf and Elton John concert in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  After the concert, I couldn't go home because I was still high and my parents would know after one look in my eyes.

I rushed from the busy concert area to the boardwalk and beach hoping to sober up.  I sat cross-legged on the beach watching the waves break waiting for the sunrise. 

Just before dawn, Jesus Christ appeared before me dressed in a long, white robe ready to fight the Devil who was dressed in black robes to my right.  They circled each other, squaring off for a winner take all.  I prayed Jesus would win and watched wide-eyed as the two giants slugged it out along the shoreline while I sat mesmerized in the sand.

They fought a couple rounds dancing back and forth until they tumbled down rolling over each other in the sand.  Jesus pulled his fist back strucking a final decisive blow to defeat the Devil.

As the wounded demon crawled away, Jesus erased him in an instant by saying the word, “Begone,”  three times while waving his hand in the air. The demon’s body jerked up into the air and evaporated above the waves. Jesus dusted some sand off his robes then helped me stand up holding out both his hands.

“Go home now,” he said smiling while gently turning me around. I remember the rising sun warming my back.

The beach and boardwalk loomed empty up ahead except for a lone, dark-haired man at a wooden bench.  He looked like John Lennon dressed in a white T-shirt, blue jeans and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. 

I remember seeing yellow and orange lights swirling and flickering across the chapel sign swaying above him. 

It was a heavenly sign because when I looked back, Jesus was gone. The only evidence of the fight were scattered footprints left in the sand. I remember looking down, staring intently at the approaching waves as they washed away the impressions in the sand.

I slowly walked toward the wooden stairs leading up to the boardwalk.  The dark-haired man sat strumming a guitar. There was coffee and donuts on the table. 

The instant our eyes met, I knew he knew I was tripping on LSD. I sat down, ate a donut and told him about the fight the beach. 

He said he'd been watching me for quite a while and knew I eventually would head for the boardwalk, so he brewed a pot of coffee.

I remember telling him how happy and relieved I was that Jesus won the fight.  I didn’t want the Devil to get my soul. 

"Jesus saved you for a reason. He wants you to do something meaningful and significant with your life,” he said looking up at the clock.

"It's time you went home." The man smiled.  I took one last sip of coffee, thanked him and dashed home.  I remember sneaking through the kitchen screen door tip toeing into bed just minutes before everyone started waking up.  My little sister, Jaye, saw me sneak in but she didn't rat me out. She was cool.

I pretended to be asleep but my parents wouldn’t let me stay in bed.  They were going to the race track and I was going with them. I didn’t want to go and tried faking an illness. Dad said, “You have to come. You're my good luck charm. I need you.”

I sat in the front seat between my parents calmly trying to keep it together but the radio blasted and my Mom complained constantly about Dad’s gambling losses. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Shut up, shut up. You’re driving me crazy,” I yelled abruptly turning off the radio.  I confessed that I was high on LSD and told my Mom she was “freaking me out.”

She wanted my Dad to stop the car and turn me into the police for doing drugs.

“I’m not turning her into the police. Are you crazy ? Police don’t solve problems, they only create new ones,” he said.

Dad asked if I needed a doctor. I said no. I just needed to come down. “It’s only a drug and will wear off soon,” I said.

When we arrived at the race track my Mom was so mad that she wouldn’t sit with us.  She sat five rows away. I was relieved.  Dad turned out to be very cool about the whole LSD incident. We opened up to each other honestly and bonded together. He asked me what it felt like. I described it best I could. 

Then he confessed that he took opium in 1947 while stationed overseas in China. He and some Marine buddies went out on the town drinking and smoking opium before they all got tattoos. 

“It was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life,” he said pointing to the tattoos on his arms. “Don’t you ever get a tattoo.  You hear me, never.”

He explanined how his body felt like pins and needles while withdrawing from the opiates at a base infirmary.

I told him how my mind reached altered states of consciousness on LSD where I could see things, like the glowing auras around the horses and jockeys. 

Dad suddenly became very interested in the auras and asked me to describe them.  He listened intently and then said we needed to go to the paddock area where betters preview the horses and jockeys before each race. 

We studied the horses and jockeys as they circled the paddock and I told Dad which ones had the best auras.  He combined my observations with his picks before placing his bets.

Mom sat apart from us until Dad hit his first big winning ticket. She calmed down some but I remember she stayed mad at me for a real long time afterwards.

I'll never forget the summer of 1970 and that acid trip at the Jersey shore.  First, Jesus saved my soul and then I told both parents I took LSD. 

I’ll never forget how different each parent responded. Dad and I bonded, forging a strong level of trust and honesty.  He also won a lot of money at the race track that day.

How LSD Saved My Life

     I have told this story over the years to many people but most don’t believe me while others think I’m joking.

     During my sophomore and junior years of high school, I experimented with psychotropic drugs - magic mushrooms, peyote, mescaline and LSD.  I had smoked marijuana earlier in Southern California but never tried any other drugs until we moved Simi Valley, California to my Dad’s hometown of Berwick, Pennsylvania. 

     Dad moved us abruptly after the Tate/LaBianca murders of 1969.  The constant television news reports about the vagabond Mason Family Members and the gruesome murders pushed Dad over the edge. He decided to move us away from those "crazy hippies" who lived at the Spahn Ranch in the neighboring hills around Chatsworth.

     Both my teenage brothers revealed that they and other boys from their high school had been approached by two of the Manson women, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Susan Atkins, to have sex for money.  My Mom freaked out.

     The Tate-LaBianca murders unnerved my parents badly they made a fateful decision and move us from sunny Southern California to my Dad's hometown of Berwick, Pennsylvania. He said it was the safest place in America to raise kids. 

     I was upset about moving from California. I cried and whimpered quietly while sitting behind my Dad in the back seat of our Cadillac. I couldn't believe we were moving again and cried all the way from Simi Valley to the Arizona border. 

     “If you don’t stop crying before we get to Arizona, I’m going to give you something to cry about,” my mother threatened from the front passenger seat raising her fist at me.

     “Leave the girl alone, Helen,” my Dad said in my defense.

     Dad drove across country nearly non-stop while pulling a packed U-Haul trailer behind.  Mom tended to our German Shepard dog and Siamese cat while trying to keep six kids under control. We all complained about moving back to Pennsylvania. No one was happy about it. But I took it the worst.

     I became deeply depressed after moving back East. People in my Dad’s hometown didn’t like any of us, especially him. He had traveled the world complements of the US government while serving in the Marines. His sense of adventure and free-spirit only irked these people because it reminded them what they were missing in life. And they didn’t like it one bit. 

     I loved California and hated Pennsylvania because of the cold weather, the narrow-minded people and the cruel, snotty girls at school. I began hatching plans to return as soon as I turned 18.  I prayed that I would make it.

     Meanwhile, I walked to and from school everyday alone, acting like I didn’t care what the snotty girls said behind my  back.  I developed a superiority complex to defend myself against them and from being hurt.  But I grew more and more depressed as time went on. 

      I tried to hide my feelings by overcompensating and out-performing the students academically, athletically and in the arts.  "I'll show you," I thought. I sang lead soprano in the school Chorus and landed parts in the school plays.  In California, I had been a popular cheerleader and track star but there was no hope of achieving that at Berwick High.

     However, I did find some acceptance with a small group of hippie students who were musicians and artists. The snotty girls and preppy boys treated them like misfits and outsiders too. 

     I'll never forget the day that LSD saved my life. I can see it clearly in my mind’s eye like it was yesterday. It was the summer of 1970 and I got invited to party with some of my hippie friends. We all dropped a sliver of window pane acid and drove to a secure location in the woods to trip our brains out.  As the sun started setting the fireflies emerged in huge numbers all around us. We laid in a meadow of tall grass watching the fireflies light the night.

     As I stated peaking, the fireflies started flashing brighter and brighter until they turned into light bulbs then morphed into flashlights then morphed into big spotlights blazing up into the night’s sky. Within seconds, their bright lights enveloped me and dissolved my body into light.

      I flew through Outer Space at the speed of light because I was Light.  Like a space craft blasting up through the sky to reach the stars, I raced across the Universe because I had become “One with the Light.”

      During this hallucination, I saw well-defined particles of Light traveling on a wave of Light.  This vision rectified the scientific debate over whether Light is a Particle or a Wave. For me, the answer was clear. It’s both. I traveled the speed of Light through the Universe to the farthest reaches, to a region I can only describe as a primordial soup of Light and Harmonic Vibrations. 

     As Vibrating Light, I floated and became interconnected with everything. I felt “one with all.” Then just as I was getting comfortable as Light, I heard, something in the distance.

     “Jackie, Jackie, wake up, it’s time to go. Come on. We have to get out of here,” a male classmate said shaking me to my senses.

     I flew back into my body at the speed of light and opened my eyes.

     “Oh Man, I wish you hadn’t done that,” I said to my friend.  He didn’t realize where I had been or what I had seen. 

     During those brief moments as Light,  a number amazing truths were revealed that changed my life forever. 

     I knew that everyone including scientists, scholars and great thinkers didn’t figure out the formation of the Universe correctly. And these great minds didn’t really understand the concept of God either.  In fact, the most important truth I learned that day was “not to believe anything anyone else said because they probably got it wrong or at least partially wrong.”

      I also learned that everything was good. There is nothing bad. There is no right versus wrong. There only is. Everything is just as it’s suppose to be including the bad stuff.  It’s all good.

     I also learned “not to worry anymore” and “not to get depressed” because everything was perfect just as it is.  I realized in that Holy Instant as Light and Vibrating Sound that anything I needed or wanted would always be provided to me. 

     I no longer had to feel bad about the way the high school girls treated me because that was exactly the way they were “suppose” to treat me.  All the so-called bad circumstances now suddenly became good.  I had to experience the good, the bad and the ugly because each event and feeling led me to my next event and feeling which led me ultimately to my destiny. 

     I stopped feeling depressed. I realized that if I had gone to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade with the same students then I never would have traveled the world and never would have become a Writer. My soul chose this family specifically so I wouldn’t live a normal life, so I would travel a lot and become a free thinker. 

    I also knew I would never have children. I had to focus my energies on getting emotionally stable, getting a college education and accomplishing something meaningful and significant during this lifetime.  

   I also knew I would return to California as soon as possible.