Category: Spirituality

My take on how telepathy works.

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History of the Torah

The Cyrus Cylinder.

After the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem there were three deportations brought to Babylon. The total number is estimated between 4,000 and 20,000. The Babylonians left the poor people and took only the most elite families, which included the top priests and scribes and craftsmen, and forced them to resettle in Babylon. This was to prevent further revolts by their client state Judah. This tactic of separating cultures from their homeland had also been practiced earlier by the Assyrians.

So when Cyrus (the first Persian king permitting freedom of religion, who allowed the spread of the Zoroastrian religion) freed those Judaic elites to return home, it’s possible he urged them to write down the Torah, and they might have been happy to craft a version of Moses that included elements of both Cyrus and Zoroaster (noble baby discarded at birth: man climbs sacred mountain and comes back with god’s laws). One thing for sure, the Torah was first compiled while they were still in Babylon but very close to going home. Another thing for sure: Cyrus loved to have things written down as attested by the Cyrus Cylinder created to commemorate his conquest of Babylon.

The caravans between Jerusalem and Babylon ran through Damascus to the north. Once there, they would turn northeast to the Euphrates and then follow the river to Babylon. A fast rider could make the trip in a few weeks but the caravans took four months.

The Jews being exiled could only take what little they could carry. All the wealth in Jerusalem had already been seized while the city was being leveled for the crime of forming an alliance with Egypt.

While in Babylon, the Jews became familiar with the many uses of hemp, a significant part of the Babylonian economy. The burning bush could be a reference to Zoroaster’s cannabis discoveries, and manna could be a reference to how hemp plants survived drought better than other grains, and the seeds could be turned into flour.

They were given small plots of land to cultivate and had to pay taxes with their crops, mostly barley, although they also grew vegetables for self consumption. Although Cyrus freed all slaves and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem (which had been demolished), most seemed to have stayed in Persia, and only a small group went back to start rebuilding the temple.

Scribes—including Ezekiel—used the time in Babylon to collect, redact, and organize oral and written traditions. This intensive period of literary curation formed the core text of what would become the Torah. Deprived of a physical sanctuary, the elite standardized new decentralized religious practices and shifted focus toward fixed communal prayer, public fasts, and the strict observance of the Sabbath.

In the ancient Near East, if your nation was conquered, it meant your god was weaker than the enemy’s god. When Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, the Israelites faced a crisis: either admit Yahweh was weak, or rethink their entire theology. Prophets and priests chose the latter.

The oldest known versions of the Torah were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and dated to around 250 to 300 years after Cyrus freed the Judaic elite.

Most mainstream historians and biblical scholars agree that Judaism was significantly influenced by Zoroastrianism. This historical intersection primarily occurred during the Babylonian Exile (586–538 BCE) and the subsequent Second Temple Period (538 BCE–70 CE), when the Jewish people lived under the rule of the Persian Achaemenid Empire.

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The Deficiencies of Theocracies

Herman Wouk had been completely secularized by the time he entered Columbia University at age 15. He’d been raised by an Orthodox family in the Bronx, but was so secularized that his first novel contained no Jews. In his most famous novel, The Caine Mutiny, the sole Jew is the lawyer who defends the mutinous crew and delivers an impassioned defense of the paranoid captain after winning the case.

Wouk was a comedy writer who had been editor of Columbia’s Jester and author of two Varsity Shows before becoming a joke writer, mostly for Fred Allen. But following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy and served in the Pacific Theater aboard two minesweepers, participating in six invasions and winning numerous battle stars.

Once the war was over, Wouk traveled to Europe and began researching what happened because he was disturbed by the systemic racism inside the US State Department that had allowed the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals from Europe in cold-blooded massacres. The impact on German troops carrying out the atrocities was so emotionally harmful that they stopped shooting and began building gas chambers. The ovens came later, after the buried bodies began leaking into the ground water.

Racism against Jews had been stoked for millennia by Christians and especially by the Vatican. The discovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature and philosophy suddenly spread across Europe like a wildfire, and there was a tremendous shift in zeitgeist that shook the Vatican to its core, which is why the Jesuits emerged as a military force designed to roll back the Renaissance. The Inquisition concentrated on Spain and Portugal where Conversos had attained immense power and authority. They attended Catholic mass on Sundays but held Hebrew ceremonies in secret on Saturdays.

When the leading Conversos heard a Jesuit inquisitor was coming to investigate them, they tragically decided to hire a hit man, and the Jesuits sought revenge for that crime, so all the Conversos were banished, many fleeing to the New World, although the Netherlands was a popular destination as the Dutch merchant class had fomented a successful and largely non-violent revolution that had democratized the new republic.

When the Jews were originally banished from their homeland it was only men who were forced to leave. The women were useful as slaves, midwives, prostitutes and wives. So single men spread out across Europe, looking for wives.

If you know anything about genetics, you know that when you marry two vastly different DNAs, you get hybrid vigor. Racism is an affront to spirituality because the great spirit welcomes the melting pot, which always produces great talents, while inbreeding produces only problems.

In Germany a new language emerged, a mishmash of Hebrew and German called Yiddish. The German Christians pushed the Jews into the Ukraine, Poland and other Eastern European countries, but the Russians began pushing from the other direction.

Even though hybrid vigor and universal education had sparked immense cultural contributions from the relatively tiny Jewish population, the pogroms never ended, nor did the dream that one day the Jews would reunite in their ancestral homeland, a place now occupied by the descendants of the Mycenae Greeks who attacked Egypt and were bribed and resettled in Gaza, first becoming known as the Philistines.

The decade Wouk spent studying the Holocaust shook him to his core, and led him back to the Talmud. His first work of non fiction was “This is My God: the Jewish Way of Life,” written seven years before the Six Day War, when the existence of the fragile state of Israel was in great peril. This existential threat cemented the religious rightwing into permanent power.

In the 1990s a peace messiah emerged, Yitzhak Rabin, and he orchestrated a two-state solution that might have begun the process of healing and mutual respect necessary for ending the never-ending terror show. Like all peace messiahs, Rabin was assassinated to erase his influence, and there was no more talk of two-state solutions.

Were Wouk alive today, I believe he would be horrified at what Israel has become and especially horrified by the destruction of Gaza in what seems to have been an orchestrated black flag event designed to keep the rightwing in power.

Populations have always been directed and influenced by propaganda and the science of propaganda has grown immensely since Goebbels. The kraken has been unleashed and now we are raining bombs on Iran. This insures that for generations, suicide bombers will be plotting revenge against America.

Embracing orthodox religion may provide emotional comfort, but it is the wrong direction and will not lead out of this morass. Wouk leaned on the Talmud for his morality and empathy, but it blinded him to the deficiencies of theocracies.

When Wouk published Winds of War and War of Remembrance, it was the first time the Nazi horror show was revealed. In the early 80s, the two books became one of the greatest television events ever, although the 50-hour series was never streamed and has largely disappeared.

So I put the entire 50-hours up for free on Youtube. Two families are explored, one deep inside the WASP oligarchy and one deep inside an educated and secularized Jewish family, and Wouk covers both with amazing insight. It is some of the best dialogue since Shakespeare, Chekov and George Eliot.

The end of war and the beginning of peace starts in remembrance.

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The Winds of War & War and Remembrance

I recently discovered a forgotten masterpiece: Herman Wouk’s 40-hour epic retelling of World War II. It only made me realize how lame WWII movies being made today really are, and how most of them only wish to show the brutality and violence, but never reveal the emotional costs faced by all sides.

I was vexed to discover that most of the series is impossible to find online except for dubs taken from VHS tapes. So I ordered a used copy of all the DVDs and began transferring them with the help of my iPhone. Making these transfers has become my 2026 420 ceremony. The final episode will be posted on April 19, 2026.

Perhaps you weren’t alive in 1983 when the entire series was shown on prime time television. Or maybe you just missed all the hoopla. If so you are in for a real treat, as well as perhaps the longest binge-watch of your life.

Before you dive in, however, here’s a message from the creator:

“War and Remembrance, both as a novel and as a long film serial, is intended in the first instance as entertainment on the grand scale. In this my models have been classics like Les Miserables and the historical romances of Dumas and Stendhal.

It may grieve the judicious that the great public learns much of its history from entertainment. But such is the case. A writer like myself, living in the present moment an uncanonized by generations of readers, is well advised to make the history unimpeachable by the highest scholarly standards. Although only one reader in a hundred, and one viewer in a thousand, may know or care, that is what I have done to the best of my powers, in the sixteen years of arduous research for War and Remembrance and its predecessor, The Winds of War.

World War II was actually the first global war, and — failing world suicide — almost certainly the last. It had the dramatic structure of a manhunt. The worst monster in human history, Adolf Hitler, sprang out on the international stage and led the German nation to commit unprecedented crimes. For a while, with his formidable ally, militaristic Japan, he threatened to achieve a world empire.

The black night of barbarism that would have descended on a Hitlerite world is beyond imagining, as the barbarism he actually executed in destroying the Jews of Europe is to this day beyond fathoming. Barely in time, the rest of the world laid aside its differences, and united long enough to smash Hilter’s Germany and do the monster to death. America and Russia, with their allies, accomplished this together; one cannot say either could have done it alone, so powerful was Hitler’s vast engine of war.

Today it is an easy thing for thinkers to assert that Nazism was a fraud, a forged check on human nature, doomed to fail. We who lived through the global manhunt, and fought in it, know what a close-run thing it was.

I have done my best to make these great and terrible days live again, graphically and truthfully, in War and Remembrance. To do so, I have portrayed not only the famous battles — Midway, Stalingrad, Normandy, Kursk, Leyte Gulf — but what we now call the Holocaust. For that insane and tragically successful assault on an entire people was at the white-hot core of Hitler’s feral attack on world civilization. If I were not Jewish I would still have to tell the same story, if with less grief and passion than I have done, in order to delineate the world manhunt as it truly happened.

The motto of the film is the same as that of my book.

The beginning of the end of war lies in remembrance.”

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Western literature started with Homer

The myths created in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse celebrating the lost civilization of Mycenean culture circulated for centuries before Homer crafted songs of such artistic value that they laid a foundation for western literature.

Both the Torah and the Illiad were improvised with performers taking turns. In Athens, a singer might be expected to go for many hours before needing a substitution who would pick up the story from that point. The Torah is the second pillar of western literature next to Homer. By 560 BC, copies of Homer were all over the ancient world. Thirty years later, Cyrus freed the Jews and the Torah was codified. 

Homer’s Illiad was sung in pentatonic dactylic hexameter (six metrical feet per line) with nearly 16,000 lines divided into 24 chapters. Modern day performances last 24 hours, but the original performances covered three days for the Illiad and three weeks for the festival. Pericles was the one who codified the music festival, creating the first Greek Woodstock, but an annual competition for poets had been well established for centuries and was even referenced in the Illiad. Around 600 BC is when a standard text for Homer was being established that ended all improvisation. The oldest examples of ancient Greek date to 750 BC, which is around the same time Homer was writing his poems. Some historians think the alphabet was created to preserve Homer’s work for future generations.

The same thing happened after Cyrus freed the Jews and told them to write down the Torah to prevent further alterations, although Zoroastrian elements likely entered Judaism even earlier, while the Jews had to disguise their hatred for their Babylonian masters by making them Egyptians. . Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Hebrew derive from the Phoenician alphabet, and all three cultures lived under pantheons in ancient times. The Zoroastrian element is what drove cultures toward monotheism and a rejection of paganism. Cyrus, Moses and Paris were all abandoned and ordered killed at birth and survived through miraculous happenstance. Paris may be the original template the others imitated.

It is doubtful Homer was blind from birth because the descriptions are so visually vivid. The gods and goddesses who drive the story and play crucial and devious roles are easily interpreted as emanations from the Greek collective unconscious involving people grappling with inner demons and compulsions.

The psychological complexity of the Illiad has never been successfully captured on film (not even close) because the directors want to make a battle film when Homer was writing an elegy for the second greatest Greek hero (after Heracles).

Particularly disappointing in Brad’s version is Achilles inside the horse, dying during the massacre of Troy. In fact, his death so demoralized the Greeks that it prompted Odysseus to come up with the idea of feigning a mass retreat to fool the Trojans into thinking they’d won the war. You can’t scramble the basic chronology and keep the psychological complexities intact.

Many have the misperception the Illiad and the Torah were memorized as they existed as oral traditions for centuries before being written down. Not so. They were improvisational performances involving teams. In Greece, the singers always accompanied themselves on a four-string lyre. What was memorized was the outline of the stories, openings to the chapters, and certain phrases, some of which were repeated allowing performers time to catch a break. Not unlike, “yes, yes, y’all, to the beat y’all” used in early rap.

Playing a minor pentatonic on a four-string lyre with psychologically descriptive poetry is very close to what Robert Johnson was doing at the crossroads of Highway 61.

Homer was incredibly prolific while he lived, but only two works survived. Alexander the Great had established a great library in Egypt to house the entire history of culture and science, but it caught fire in 48 BC after Julius Ceasar burned his fleet to prevent his troops from fleeing. The library fell into gradual ruin and decay, and countless works of Homer disappeared like snow devils in a winter blizzard. Alexander was obsessed with Homer, and traveled with his copy of the Illiad. When he arrived at the Temple of Athena near Troy, he seized the armor of Achilles on display and wore it during his quest to takeover the world. He seized Egypt without a fight and declared a god upon arrival.

It was a strange twist of fate considering Alexander’s father had been murdered during a ceremony designed to anoint himself as the 13th god of the Greek pantheon. And later that week, a whole lot of Alexander’s relatives got stabbed to death as well.

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It Matters Because It’s Holy


Everything happens for a reason. 30 years later, Bloom still can’t drop the hate.

He’ll be calling me a serial sex abuser who had nothing to do with 420 while he’s doing his death wheeze.
 
I’m making this into a movie and it’s a comedy for sure. Grumpy old man gone mad with jealously gets megaphone and uses it to bash the dude who stole his girl, his job and takes a dump on that dude every chance he gets.
For 30 fucking years.
 
I would be laughing too if I wasn’t the victim.
 
When a link to the first ever positive story written about me in America appeared on my page, Bloom began making comment almost immediately to take a dump on that story because it refuted his claims the code spread through the Dead and not through my efforts.

I tried to grab a screen shot, but halfway through he erased it and decided my front lawn was not the place to take this dump.

Every previous time Bloom has come to my page to throw shade, I’d flame him crispy with my dragon roar, and he’d quickly delete his comment, so as to remove my response, meekly backing away all blackened. He can’t really do flame war against me because he can’t compete with the truth against his lies.

So I did something I never did before, I went over to his group CelebStoner, and, sure enough, the link to the story pops up, posted by Bloom and headlined, “Poor Steve Hager, always whining.”

Thing is I wasn’t even interviewed for the story. I haven’t done interviews since I departed the realms of cannabis many years ago. So how am I whining? Lots of people chimed in, yeah, Hager’s a whiner. That comment had zero to do with the link. It was just his way of taking a dump on the first story to praise me in American history. If you don’t believe me, find another.

Bloom knows I have PTSD and he knows 420 is a trigger, and he pulls it every chance he gets. And he gets it every 420.

It’s become life-threatening for me as he has given me uncontrollable hypertension that can’t be treated by meds. But what that does is give me energy to fight back. So I start defending myself coherently, with reasoned debate and real facts, and Bloom’s only response in real time is “blah, blah, blah.”

So I defend myself more, and he responds with the same three words.

For his third repartee, he drops the bomb on me. He was obviously very frustrated by his inability to spar with me intellectually, so he blurted out his trump card, something he always plays in private, but when I confront him in real time on his own Facebook group in front of his toadies, he is on the spot, so he decides to go dragon and roars: “Hager was suspended numerous times for sexual harassment.”

Something like that is enough to push my blood pressure to 220, and it did. And I have been in a PTSD crisis every since. Writing these rants is one of the tools I use to help me wind down, along with drinking water and riding my pedal boat.

My big fear is Bloom is going to give me a heart attack, and the narrative he has salted, “Steve Hager is a serial sex abuser who had nothing to do with spreading 420,” will go down in history as the real story.

And few people seem to comprehend what’s going on. This is not two equals squabbling over minor shit. Bloom is attacking me and destroying the beautiful vibes I had laid down for 420, which is now a cloud of smoke and nothing more. Just like he yanked the spirituality out of the Bonghitters, he has successfully yanked it out of 420.

It’s not too late to do something to swing things back the way they were when I was the center of gravity on 420, and it wasn’t about me, it was about having a moment of silence.

Why does this matter? Because cannabis is spiritually charged and 420 is the manifestation that caused legalization.

I saw the flyer the same time Bloom did. I had a satori moment and said, we can use this to help legalization and get religious rights. Bloom just thought it was stupid and something to make a joke out it. I thought it had Pythagorean implications. Bloom likely has zero concept of who Pythagoras was or what he did to bring Zoroastrian magic to Greece.

The story of how it began, how it spread, are of utmost importance to get correct for future generations because cannabis is the sacrament of peace culture and holy.

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Busy Bee goes to Rainbow

Chiefrocker Busy Bee, the first rapper who wasn’t also a deejay.

My plan for the first day of trial is to hold a press conference on the courthouse steps. I won’t say much, just introduce Coke La Rock, Grandmaster Caz and Chiefrocker Busybee, the founders of hip hop. They will speak on my behalf because they got on my peace train, became Temple Dragons, and manifested improvisational ritual theater at numerous events I produced before and after I got fired from High Times. And they know how healing my ceremonies were.

After High Times fired me, I didn’t need a big audience to keep my art going. And I had no problems organizing successful events in Aspen, Denver and San Rafael and selling tickets to cover the cost. I never cared to make money off my ceremonies. It wasn’t about the money. Everything I reaped was put back into the ceremony.

Busy Bee got so caught up in the peace vibe that he followed me into Rainbow, not once, but twice. We always went in my Roadtrek, the Phoenixmobile.

The first time was hilarious. I camped across the trail from NY Purple Gang and ended up bonding with two 12-year olds who began following me around, helping me fix problems. They were my Junior Temple Dragons, and they were soaking up my magic. Think Laurence of Arabia.

Most people avoided me at Rainbow because I was a constant whirlwind of work, always trying to determine, where is the best place to focus my boundless energy and spotlight mind?

One shitter I built had a sunset view across a creek from a high point. It had complete privacy from the trail down the hill, but a great sunset view. It had lime, hand washing station, TP in a coffee can, and some sort of disinfectant. I also liked to put camping mirrors in my shitters.

The sign I painted on poster board and planted with a stake was a masterpiece. I must have carried 30 sheets of poster board as making signs was something I did constantly. That was the easiest way to fix problems. I also had my paint box filled with day-glo waterbase paints.

Imagine my surprise when I build my ubiquitous recycling center which appeared at all my events and festivals….it was the only recycling center on site. The core principle had eroded.

The Temple Dragon Jr. squad and me fixed a huge problem. It was the morning of the fourth, the day of the big ceremony, and Fairy Camp had held a huge drunken blow-out the night before. That was another new thing. Suddenly, there was alcohol everywhere, not just at A-camp.

I figured out I could harvest the moss-covered bark off dead trees, and cover some of the worst mud pits. I didn’t anticipate a 100-yard bridge over the mess created by the drunken blow-out. I never would have done it. But when I started to cover the biggest pits with bark, my squad arrived and started imitating me, filling in holes.

It was a blast building the bridge, and so much more fun because the kids were into it. Those mud holes had hidden all sorts of nasty thorns. When the barefooted people started making their way to circle, they walked on a plush moss rug bridge. And not a soul cried ouchy ouch.

Second time we went, I decided to make a welcome home camp because the scene at the gate had been taken over by an A-camp shake-down scene.

They wanted people to park at their camp and walk two miles in. I camped on a hill overlooking their scene, and when cars parked and people began walking up the hill, Busy Bee and I jumped on our electric bikes and zoomed down there to tell them there was parking two miles in and real close to the entrance. The locals were day-tripping, so slots opened up every morning.

Lugging your gear, water and food two miles when you don’t have to in 90 degree heat is no joke.

A-camp started going nuts on me. They actually said they were going to beat the shit out of me and one brandished a baseball bat. “That’s not the way you’re supposed to talk at Rainbow,” I said before blasting back up the hill on Bucephalis, my fat tire e-bike.

When I held my first Munchie Cup in Denver, and got some national publicity, an anonymous person threw shade on the article saying, “why doesn’t he stop and go away?”

I knew this was the publisher of High Times, Mary McEvoy who was frustrated by the million dollar hole she dug trying to do the Cannabis Cup in Colorado. This was now the rap on me in the High Times office, “why doesn’t he just go away?”

The encounter is enshrined on my facebook page. I remember John McNaughton, one of my closest and oldest friends, and a famous film director, chimed in and said, “sounds like she’s jealous.”

Imagine what might have happened
it’s easy if you try.
No Hager haters at High Times,
everyone joins his peace vibe
But that’s not what really happened.
Nobody at High Times boarded that train
Just 20,000 hippies
And the founders of hip hop
and the Merry Merry Pranksters
Who saw him make Hippie Disneyland
with circus tents, Christmas lights and day-glo.
It made so much crazy money
and garnered so much publicity
Cruella knew she had to kill it
She surrounded him with Claggarts,
lot’s of fog and friction
and a steady stream of backstabs….
It could have been so different.
I could have got a decent salary
No need to do all those lectures.
the travel was exhausting
and I hate flying.
Cruella could have listened
and bought 100 acres
for my WHEE! and Cannabis Cup,
land that we owned
No more outside promoters
No more traveling anywhere
Bring the stoners to us.
Every ceremony at stoner Disneyland
built around a lake
free primitive camping
just have to pay for parking
If they’d just let me work my magic
it had never let me down.
But haters claim I have no magic
that it is all in my mind…and no one else’s
It might have been so different
it might have tamped the violence down
there might have been fewer shootings
and fewer vets committing suicide.
It might have made a difference
in some people’s mental state,
if they had connected with peace culture…
instead of with the hate.
It might have made a difference
and got my people out of jail.
And I could have done much bigger ceremonies….
Kesey said bring WHEE! to Mountain Girl’s.
We could have made a deal with her.
But Cruella saw that happening.
She couldn’t let that happen.
I wasn’t trying to be a cult leader.
I deferred to Kesey, Mountain Girl and Babbs.
They always outranked me.
Along with Wavy Gravy.
Had my plan been allowed to happen.
I’d be a counterculture icon for peace,
and not a forgotten man
ridiculed and abused
a whiner
and creep
and phony cult leader
It’s not easy doing ceremonies with no dogma.
I had to learn from scratch…
Always learning the hard way.
Fighting through layers of fakers and psyops.
At the end, there was only
one rule left standing,
Don’t hurt anybody
How hard is that?
And what’s so horrible
about peace, love and understanding?
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The Reason I Got Involved with 420

Steven Hager and Flick Ford teamed up in 1985. They transformed High Times into the coolest magazine in America, and created one of the greatest garage/punk bands of their era and could stand toe-to-toe with the Fleshtones, but could not come close to their songwriting genius, as Hager’s songwriting abilities would not fully emerge for another 30 years.

I post a lot on facebook because it is my diary. I don’t ever open my news feed because I’m not interested in Meta making money off my eyeballs and like to reserve my intake to things that matter, and not celebrity gossip and click bait.

My blogs and books begin as a few facebook posts that get assembled and moved here to The Tin Whistle once they have properly incubated. I get massive help from comments made on the posts and appreciate the small audience of fans who follow me on Facebook and here. After a few dozen blog posts have appeared on a particular topic, the material can be transferred to a book on CreateSpace. This has been my workflow since I was fired by High Times.

The reason I got involved with spreading 420 was not for personal fame nor glory. It was because I was alarmed by the growing level of violence in our society, and in the 80s I knew a lot of that violence was being driven by Big Pharma stuffing pills into everybody combined with the steady climb of violence-porn in the media.

Violence is the problem, but what is the solution?

I was leading a garage/punk band called The Original Soul Assassins and began hanging out at Dino’s on 6th Street, which is where I met Garrick Beck, who invited me to Central Park for a Rainbow Family picnic. There was a drum circle blasting and everyone was having fun. But then the drums stopped and everyone packed into a cluster and began OMming. I had never done that, but since I ended up deep inside the cluster, I felt obliged to go along.

All the stress in my body drained away and I felt a tremendous surge of positive energy.

One white-haired Rainbow was moving slowly around the cluster ringing a bell periodically. There are absolutely no off notes in an OM. You can’t be off-key, but some were tuning into that bell and moving from bass up to tenor. Others were improving up and down the scale.

Soon I was traveling to Minnesota to attend my first National Rainbow Family Gathering, where I participated in much bigger OMs with thousands, and learned all the Rainbow Family songs and sang them with tears in my eyes.

I smoked a little weed at the gathering but mostly just shared my stash. I drank no alcohol, did no drugs, ate no sugar. When I emerged days later and walked into a toilet for the first time in over a week, it was a foreign experience and nothing like shitting in the woods while watching the sunrise. I realized I looked like a Bowery bum in my dirty jeans and t-shirt. I had gone swimming in a lake and had a few solar showers but mostly just collected dust as I tramped up and down the trails lugging supplies, digging shitters and helping out everybody I could and throwing love bombs to everyone I met.

I got back to the High Times office, called the staff together and said I was altering the structure and we were now going to run on consensus, and my main mission was getting religious rights protections for the Rainbow Family and anyone else who identified as a hippie. I knew the family agreed cannabis was a sacrament and as a medicine it was universally respected.

It was always very, very hard getting neophytes to participate in the OM. Most were afraid, just like it’s hard to get people to sing. Many are afraid of being off pitch. I have trouble with pitch and I am massively dyslexic because I was abused as a toddler. They don’t understand the magic: there is no wrong note.

I studied the history of the Scythians, the first to create cannabis ceremonies and also the histories of the halo and the OM, which began in Bactria at the Zoroastrian fire temples and moved east and west, where it became known as Amen.

I also studied the impact of mindful peace meditations on the communities they were held in, and learned there was always a steep drop in violent crimes for days for miles around. OMs create ripples on the telepathic plain.

So I had the solution and it was to tie 420 to OM circles and drive down violence in America. And I had it going, holding circles with tens of thousands, of which maybe a few hundred actually participated in the OM.

I know now how to do it. First you need a pole to focus the energy. Second any children should be placed holding hands around the pole. The best and most experienced OMmers should cluster around the childen, and the neophytes behind them. The children start the OM. At Rainbow they sing “All We Are Saying, Is Give Peace a Chance” and then everyone goes silent. The silence lasts for a long time, but slowly and faintly the OM starts.

It starts deep in the belly with a bass note, but gradually moves up the spine until the “MMM” sound dings your skull. You will feel the vibration in your nose.

Now, the big dig on me that haters like to keep repeating is Hager is a whiner. I do keep a diary of my daily thoughts on facebook, but it’s not for haters to read and ridicule. It is part of my process as a writer and artist.

I do discuss the abuses of my life because these things still trouble me and by talking it out, the stress can be relieved.

Why a disabled old man like me should have to endure the constant rebuke of those who never met me, or have any clue to my work in art, music, playwriting and journalism is a great wonder to me. I have never gone to another person’s post on facebook for the purpose of throwing shade on them. I abhor flame wars and that is how they start.

I have caused no grief to Bloom and only attack him when he defames me. My role is strictly defensive and I am hoping this recent engagement will tamp down the negativity on me.

I am retired, not interested in flame wars, never acted out of ego, only thought I could help, but I got curb-stomped and I deserve to live out my final years sans ridicule.

And I don’t whine. But I do unwind my triggers. And it’s not for your benefit, but mine.

All the unwinding I did on High Times eventually resulted in a 2-hour documentary that goes miles deeper into intel penetration of the counterculture than anything else ever produced. This research needs to be picked up by the next generation.

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The story of Zoroaster

Zoroaster was a Bronze-Age rock star.

He was most likely Scythian. I am sure the best musicians and dancers would have been drawn to his ceremonies.

Unlike the mythical Moses and Jesus, Zoroaster really walked the earth and left his best songs as proof. The truly spiritual among us are gifted with the greatest talents, and Zoroaster was the greatest rock star of his time.

Zoroaster had a revelation one day while stepping out of a stream while wondering why the hell was there was so much evil in the world?

Boom!!!!!!!!!!!

Rather than a complex pantheon of gods like everyone thought, there must be an all-powerful and perfect vibe that created the universe!

But because all life is duality, the goodness and perfection of the good vibe, the force that had created everything, had to be balanced by an opposing force, the bad spirit, which had been tiny at creation, but got a foothold after the first human couple got infected by it. After people invented money and got super greedy and self-centered, and turned into murderous cut-throats, the bad spirit had gotten more powerful than the good vibe.

To remedy the situation, Zoroaster’s songs suggested “good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” in order to create ripples on the cosmic plain to dampen the bad spirit.

Zoroaster also sang about the sun (Mithras) and about Haoma (bhang).

His ceremonies were done outside, typically at some epic feng shui location, in the Scythian manner.

One song told of how there would be a zombie apocalypse one day and all the dead would rise and be forced to walk across Shinvat Bridge.

If they had good karma, the bridge would be wide but if they had mostly bad karma, it would shrink to the width of a knife blade, sending them spiraling down into the Valley of Lies forever.

Zoroaster also sang about how one day in the future, another great singer like him, a messiah, would emerge to usher in the zombie apocalypse.

The performances were designed to encourage people to become more empathetic and ethical, but that was a “boom!” heard round the world because it blew into Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

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The Ten Commandments of Exodus

I am the Lord your God. I am the one who freed you from the land of Egypt, where you were slaves.

Do not have any other gods before me.

Do not make any idols. Don’t make statues or pictures of anything from the sky, the earth, or the water. Don’t make idols of any kind, because I, the Lord, am your God and I hate my people worshiping other gods. People who sin against me become my enemies, and I will punish them, and I will punish their children, their grandchildren, and even their great-grandchildren. But I will be very kind to people who love me and obey my commands. I will be kind to their families for thousands of generations.

Don’t invoke my name when making empty promises. If you do, I will punish you.

Take Saturday off. You can work Sunday to Friday, but the seventh day is a day of rest so don’t go to work—not you, your sons and daughters, or your men and women slaves. Even your animals and the foreigners living in your cities must not work! That is because the Lord worked six days and made the sky, the earth, the sea, and everything. And on the seventh day, he rested. And what’s good for the Lord is good for you.

You must honor and respect your father and your mother. Do this so that you will have a happy family life.

Don’t kill anyone.

Don’t mess around with anyone’s wife or husband.

Don’t steal.

Don’t tell lies.

Don’t lust after your neighbor’s house or his wife or his men and women servants, or his cattle or his donkeys. You must not lust after anything that does not belong to you.

Exodus 20

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Camp Fun cancelled

Whee! ceremony for world peace.

Camp Fun Ceremony June 14-23, 2024, somewhere near Bethel, New York, site of first Woodstock festival.

Bring your useful junk to the Free Store. We will build a pop-up eco-village out of recycled and repurposed material that runs mostly on solar power.
Bring camping equipment and building supplies and especially bikes, even broken ones. We will paint them white in honor of the Provos and they will be free to all and there will be bike trails through the woods lit up with fairy lights at night. All the junk goes into the Free Store where it can be claimed by anyone.
Chef RA’s Psychedelic Kitchen will serve free food, 24-7. There will be a jar for donations, and donations buy most of the supplies for the kitchen. Anyone can volunteer and work on any of the crews, including the kitchen crew. If there is no crew to run the kitchen, help yourself snacks will be left out for anyone to forage.
There will be a solar-powered open mic stage. All attendees will be able to vend at the Barter Circle. There will be a peace pole erected during the event.
On Thursday, June 20, a 4:20 ceremony will be held at the pole. Anyone can volunteer to be in the ceremony. The script will be very basic but will have lots of action. There will be a confrontation between a group of monks dressed in white and a group of bikers dressed in black. It will result in the burning down of the monk’s paper temple and the death of everyone on both sides.
At exactly 4:50 (when the sun is closest to the earth), a giant phoenix bird puppet will appear in the distance and will come to circle the pole. A parade from kid village of only kids will enter with the phoenix. The kids will be singing: “All we are saying, is give peace a chance.”
The kids form a circle around the pole and hold hands. The adults form a circle or two around the kids and hold hands. When the circles are complete, the OM begins.

Note: This event was cancelled following the demise of co-conspirator Patti Astor.