By Robert Samuelsen
On one of my exploratory Jeep adventures, I was seeking a way to go from Benson to Vail without using the freeway. On the maps, it showed public lands and a dirt road so I figured that it would be possible. Shortly after I left the main road, I encountered a “T” in the road and a cordial man in a pickup truck. He asked me where I was going to which I obliged him. He told me the public left road had been illegally blockaded by a crusty old man with a double-barreled shotgun and the right road led to a hippy commune. Succumbing to his sage wisdom, I timidly turned around defeated in my quest.
The comment about the commune piqued my interest and with the help of google, I discovered it to have an incredulous history of LSD, sex, new age theosophy, and Lemurian principles. Co-founded by the notorious LSD advocate and exiled Harvard professor Timothy Leary, the philosophy was created to promote the practice of psychedelics.
Leary’s theories were documented in his book “The Psychedelic Experience” which taught that it would lead to “new realms of consciousness such as the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and the ego” and later for the establishment of a religion with LSD as its holy sacrament. Disciples of Leary, Bill Sheatsley and Bill Haines bought the land near Benson and built the Sri Ram Ashram in time to host The Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries on Labor Day weekend in 1979. The Radical Faeries movement “contained elements of Marxism, feminism, paganism, Native American and New Age spirituality, anarchism, the mythopoetic men’s movement, radical individualism, and spiritual solemnity coupled with camp sensibility, gay liberation, and drag.”
Not to be short lived, the World University purchased the former Ashram in 1985 and named it the Desert Sanctuary Campus based on the teachings of Dr. Howard John Zitko. His books included the New Age Tantra Yoga, Streamers of Light from the New World, and The Cybernetics of Sex and Love. He was also a frequent lecturer of Lemuria, a theorized lost continent connecting Africa, India, and Australia. Supposedly, this continent sank into the Indian Ocean leaving behind an ancestor of four-armed humanoids which evolved into lemurs.
Dr. Zitko’s World University was based on thirteen Lemurian Theo-Christic Conception lessons designed to reveal our full possibilities as a human being.
These lessons were named such to trace the early history of the race from the Lemurian era of human civilization and to consider a method of achieving some degree of moral stature. Jesus, one of the Master Souls from ancient Lemuria, colonized the planet from within the solar system and set forth the restoration of the Divine Order of the prehistory past as the Kingdom of God. Clearly psychedelics played a role in all of this.
Recently, the new owners converted the property into a routine RV park. Not lost on me, on that fateful day some years ago, a simple right turn miscue on my part would have landed me in a cornucopia of hallucinogenic enlightenment instead of a modest backroad to Vail. Thanks but no thanks. I get enough of a “high” from my wanderlust adventures!
Rob Samuelsen is an executive and adventurer supported by his long-suffering but supportive wife!
