Here in the USA many citizens are vastly entertained and enriched and pained from reading historic CIA and FBI documents brought to light by our Freedom Of Information Act (may it ever stand as law). There are a couple of current big selling books that expose the FBI's files on Frank Sinatra and also John Lennon. Who needs pulp fiction when pulp reality is so much more vivid and unbelievable?

But the most shocking and popular true story out there in my opinion is a book called "Acid Dreams" which tells the story of LSD in the USA. But first, I need to remind you that it is now completely OUT that the USA not only brought in Nazis after WW2 to make our rockets but we also hired them on as our CIA!

In regards to LSD, it turns out that the CIA was experimenting with this powerful hallucinogen as a war drug after WW2. And the things those CIA agents did to one another while dosing each other, often unawares, with LSD is exquisitely painful and funny reading, all true stories from official CIA files.

So the CIA was doing it's LSD experiments in the 1950s and then in the 1960s the drug got away from them and it hit the streets of America. By 1968 millions of young people all over the World, but especially in the West, had "tripped" and we were calling it a mass "spiritual awakening".

Of course, we lived in a Christian World. None of us knew a thing about Eastern Religion back then. Until we all took LSD we USA Baby Boomer teens had not been that interested in theology you understand. But again, LSD produces a "religious" experience and being on LSD, it turns out, is visually much like the experience of being in a really intensely decorated Hindu Temple or living in a Tibetan Buddhist Tanka.

Richard Alpert, soon to become Ram Das, was a Harvard professor back then who, along with his friend Timothy Leary, got kicked out of the ivory tower of academia for beingand public about using LSD. Richard Alpert went to India and found a Guru and wrote his classic "Be Here Now!" Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts and many other very intelligent souls also did early LSD experimentation (any LSD experience before 1966 was early) and they became powerful teachers in Eastern thought and guided millions of Baby Boomers through our first trips and travels into Eastern thought.

So this is how Eastern religion came to the USA! The CIA couldn't BELIEVE that anyone would LIKE the LSD experience much less that a whole generation would adore it. CIA types don't have very good trips and the fact that others have great trips really spooked them!

To give my generation credit, few of us have continued to use LSD. Actually by the early 1970s most of us were burnt out on the stuff. We turned to looking for ways to get HIGH without the wear and tear of drug abuse! Personally, I tried many things but Kundalini Yoga worked the best! By breathing like a locomotive on speed, while doing certain body positions, I could make my own body produce GREAT drugs!

Years later (funny how time flies when you are on drugs, external or internal) I remember sitting in front of a room full of my Yoga students watching them experience their bodies light up and go all buzzy and full of energy! And maybe it was Guru Nanak in my ear, or just the Divine Voice in a more general form, but I heard a strong inner voice and it asked a very simple question, "Energy for what?"

Kundalini Yoga and LSD create lots of energy and dazzling experiences, but energy for what? In the case of Kundalini Yoga I spent years getting all high and buzzy so that I could get even more skilled at getting high and buzzy! Kundalini Yoga was the method and the result all rolled into one! And I was addicted to it.

"O that is why Guru Nanak preached at the Yogis! What is so enlightened about sitting around giving yourself peak experiences?"

Isn't that a strange story? Trippy even? But that is how the CIA brought Eastern Religion to the West!

Kamalla Rose Kaur is USA born, of Irish descent, and embraced Sikhism in 1972, at age 18. She tried everything for over twenty years, including frantic practice of Yoga, until she learned "why Sikhs are so adament about having the Sri Guru Granth Sahib as their only Guru."

Kamalla Rose is a professional writer, theater director, workshop and seminar leader,
publicist, events planner and singer. Her column appears every Saturday and, starting with this article, every Wednesday as well.

The author welcomes comments and feedback: Love&Light