When I was a teenager, I used to hitchhike from my mother’s house where I was living in the Bay Area to J-R’s home in Rosemead. I had met J-R a year earlier in 1965 at a spiritual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but that’s another story. I just wanted to be around J-R as much as I could.
Lee Clausen in 1968, age 19, during his hitchhiking days.
I hitchhiked to his home a lot. Every two or three months, and then stay for a weekend, or longer if it was a holiday. I hitchhiked back and forth between the Bay Area and his home probably about 15-20 times during a 3-4 year period between 1966 and 1969. I was a very experienced hitchhiker and was familiar with the route mainly on highway 101. This was before highway 5 was built through California’s central valley, although I did take highway 99 a couple of times. It all depended on which route my driver was going to take.
J-R even gave me a hitchhiking tone to chant to myself while sticking out my thumb and waiting for my next ride. When he first gave me the hitchhiking tone I thought to myself, “Really? Chanting this tone is supposed to help me get rides?” At this time in my relationship with J-R, he didn’t talk about different realms of God and the sound current, that came later for me. When he talked about the inner realms, he would just talk about how beautiful they were. So, this was the first mention to me of any tone and how it may relate to Spirit. I was a little skeptical at first, but I knew J-R had special knowledge of Spirit, so I was willing to give it a try.
The first time I tried the hitchhiking chant was once when I was traveling North to my home. My driver was going to let me off at his destination in San Luis Obispo. At night, in the dark. Now, I had learned from experience that San Luis Obispo was a terrible place to get a ride. Very few on ramps to the freeway and the rides you were likely to get were from local people traveling just a few miles and leaving you off in the middle of nowhere, making your next ride much more difficult to get.
So, as we approached the town, I decided to take a chance and asked the person driving if they would let me off on the freeway itself. That way I would have a better chance of my next ride being longer (hitchhiking on the freeway itself is highly illegal but I was willing to take my chances of getting a ride before any cops saw me). The driver agreed and made a risky move by pulling over on the freeway before approaching his off ramp.
I moved to be under a streetlamp where I could be seen by the speeding traffic on the freeway. Remember this is at night and, where I was standing, there was a slight bend to the freeway so that approaching drivers coming around the bend couldn’t see me until they were only 200 or 300 yards away. Pulling over on the freeway so suddenly could be hazardous for the driver as well as me but hitchhiking is about taking chances anyway, so I was willing to do it.
Well, I stuck out my thumb and started inwardly chanting the hitchhiking tone that J-R had given me. The very next car that came around that bend made a wild, last second move to pull over and came to a screeching halt about 30 feet past me. I ran to the car and quickly jumped into the back seat. The driver stomped on the gas as he made a daring move to merge with the fast-moving freeway traffic.
There were two young men in their twenties sitting in the front seat and they were very cheerful and welcoming to me. They were fun loving and open to sharing their life experiences, so we had a great time traveling together. It turned out that they were both graduate students from Stanford University. Now, at that time my mother’s house was in the small town of Portola Valley which just happened to be only a few miles from the Stanford campus, so they graciously decided to take me directly to the doorstep of my mother’s house. One ride, from San Luis Obispo to my doorstep in Portola Valley.
From J-R’s home in Rosemead to my doorstep in Portola Valley, a total travel time of 8 1/2 hours. A new inner world record that still stands today!!
