Paranoia

As I relapsed I had mostly delusions and paranoia. I thought the CIA was after me for awhile after I wrote a letter to the editor of Science magazine about how the US military was using dioxin as a weapon in Vietnam. My delusions had faded for the previous summer but they had never completely disappeared. That is to say I believed some pretty strange things. In Halifax I thought I had discovered the cause of World War Two. The influenza epidemic of 1918 changed peoples' nervous systems and led to the rise of fascism everywhere, so the cause of the war was a neurovirus. I thought my law professor in Halifax was very well connected with influential people in world politics and was telling people about my theory. Various important people were coming from Europe to meet the man who discovered the cause of World War 2. For example, someone might come up to me in Crofton and talk about mopeds and I would believe this man was the president of Motobecane, the world's largest manufacturer of mopeds. People seemed to know me before I introduced myself, and the local townspeople seemed to be laughing at me. I remember once the political cartoon in the local paper seemed to be about me and people who picked me up hitchhiking seemed to know who I was.

In the spring of 1980 I left Crofton forced out by the townspeople who demanded I get a job. I took the bus with no destination in mind until I ran out of money. From then on I usually hitchhiked, mostly through Alberta and B.C. quitting a job with my first pay check because I found working with people so difficult. They were playing games with me and making fun of me. I would then hitchhike somewhere else. I thought I was being followed by a WW2 veteran everywhere I went who wanted me to shape up by working in construction like he did after the war. He was grateful to me for discovering the cause of WW2 in which he fought with distinction, but he had no idea why til he heard about my theory. I kept trying to escape him because I didn't want to work in construction but he had friends everywhere. I slept in city parks, by the side of the road and in single men's hostels. I was homeless and often penniless.

I remember once in Calgary staying at the single men's hostel and not getting to eat very much for several weeks, becoming quite weak. I believed I couldn't work because I had dioxin poisoning and this was affecting my cortical hormone balance making work too stressful. Tibetan buddhist lamas were reading my mind everywhere I went in Calgary, respectful and curious, because I had caused the Mt. St. Helen's eruption for them earlier that year through tantric meditation. In doing so I had taken pressure off the continental plates so that San Francisco didn't drop off into the ocean. The Tibetans told me telepathically I might become the first Western Buddhist saint, comparable to Milarepa who is Tibet's favorite saint.

I don't think I quite understood or believed what was happening to me, but I was determined not to admit defeat and return to my parents house. It seemed like I had powerful friends who wanted me to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Only two years earlier I had been in graduate school, with a new friend, David Rae, discussing world politics while watching the CBC news at a local bar. David's brother, Bob Rae, later became the Premier of Ontario.

Come late fall I was in Victoria, driven south by the approaching winter. I had been homeless for six months or so. There I was somehow able to pay rent and I stayed there for four years. I started studying Tibetan buddhism and took refuge in the lama who lived there. I was given a Tibetan name Tashi Sampo, and ever since I've wondered what it meant. Tashi means good wisdom. I have no idea what Sampo means though. I thought this man was capable of all kinds of supernatural powers of the mind like telepathy and telekinesis. It is a tremendous invasion of privacy to have someone reading your mind all the time uninvited. I believed he was controlling my dreams while I slept as well. He said to me in his broken English, "you special" and I thought that meant I had a lot of natural ability to become a very powerful tantric like him. Somehow I knew he was the equivalent of a graduate teacher in the Tibetan monastic system. He was also very antisexual, having been celibate all his life and it seemed like he was interfering every time I started talking with a girl. The Tibetan Buddhists practice a celibate tantric tradition which is really a contradiction. Tibetan buddhists used to take wives, but the Red Hats as they were called, were persecuted and driven out of Tibet hundreds of years ago, mostly to Nepal, where a few still survive.

I had gone to several family physicians about my physical problems of which dioxin poisoning seemed to be the cause and I thought it