No Windowpane or Purple Haze in This Biography

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 19, 2026, 7:05 a.m.

I did not take LSD in the 1970s. No windowpane. No purple haze. No chemical passport to altered reality. But I still managed to pick up something just as strange—out of a paperback book left lying around an apartment over a neighborhood store.

That is where this story starts.

The Book That Would Not Stay Found

Somewhere in the 1970s, in a small apartment above a local market, I picked up a book that belonged to my sister. It was not fringe in appearance. It did not scream cult or mysticism. It read like something that could have come from a church shelf or a self-help rack—plain language, confident tone, nothing outwardly bizarre.

But inside, the author made an argument that stuck.

Not because it was profound. Because it crossed a line.

The idea, as best as I can reconstruct it decades later, was simple: human beings seek release. Not just physical, but emotional and spiritual. And in moments when the body is engaged in elimination, the mind becomes aware of what it is also trying to “get rid of” internally. That is when people turn toward God. That is when prayer happens.

Not a direct quote. Not a formal doctrine. But that was the thrust of it.

At the time, I thought it was nonsense. I still do.

And yet, the idea stayed with me—persisting in a way that is difficult to explain and harder to dismiss, resurfacing in the same setting where it was first observed.

Pop Psychology, 1970s Style

This was not theology in any traditional sense. It was part of a broader trend that ran through the 1960s and 1970s—what we would now call pop psychology mixed with spiritual language.

Writers of that era tried to explain everything:

  • behavior
  • emotion
  • belief
  • even everyday habits

They worked from a basic formula: take an ordinary human experience, reinterpret it as symbolic, and present it as a deeper truth about the human condition.

Sometimes they got something right. Often, they pushed it too far.

The book I read fell into that category. It took a real observation—that people think differently when they are alone, unguarded, and physically relaxed—and stretched it into a universal explanation about prayer, release, and the human need to purge what weighs on them.

It was the kind of argument that sounds reasonable for about ten seconds. Then you stop and realize it has gone off the rails.

The Problem With Memorable Ideas

Here is the part that matters.

That book did not change my beliefs. It did not convert me to anything. It did not even impress me.

But it left a mark.

Because the human brain does not always preserve what is correct. It preserves what is memorable.

And nothing is more memorable than an idea that crosses a boundary—especially when you encounter it young, unfiltered, and not expecting it.

So decades later, the book itself is gone:

  • no title
  • no author
  • no trace

But the idea remains.

The Book That History Misplaced

We cannot find it.

That is not unusual.

The 1970s produced thousands of paperback books that:

  • were printed once
  • sold modestly
  • were never reissued
  • were never digitized

They were not important enough to preserve, and not famous enough to catalog. They simply faded out of circulation.

Some of them still exist in used bookstores or forgotten boxes. Most are gone.

This one appears to be one of them.

What Was Actually Happening

Stripped of its language, the author’s observation reduces to something far simpler.

People think differently when they are:

  • alone
  • unobserved
  • physically relaxed
  • temporarily disconnected from the demands of the outside world

In those moments, the mind turns inward. For some, that means reflection. For others, it means problem-solving. For many, it means talking to God.

The setting is incidental. The mental state is the cause.

The author noticed the setting and mistook it for the mechanism.

The Acid Trip We Never Took

People often ask what it was really like to be alive in the 1970s. This is part of the answer.

It was an era where ideas like this circulated freely—half psychology, half spirituality, presented with complete confidence and just enough plausibility to make you pause before realizing something was off. Between roughly 1971 and 1977, that blend of accessible language and overextended meaning defined a slice of the culture.

The music was better than the philosophy.

There is a reason this memory still feels strange.

It was an altered way of looking at the world—without chemicals, without intent, without preparation. A shift in perspective delivered casually, in paperback form, during a time when people were actively trying to reinterpret human experience.

In that sense, it was a kind of intellectual acid trip.

No hallucinations. No substances. Just an idea that bent reality slightly out of shape and then stayed there.

Final Thought

The book is gone. The argument was flawed. The conclusion did not hold.

But the moment remains.

That is how influence works sometimes. Not through correctness or importance, but through persistence. A single idea, encountered at the right time, can linger long after its source disappears.

And every now and then, it resurfaces—quietly, inconveniently—reminding you that somewhere, sometime, someone wrote something strange enough that it refused to be forgotten.

For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org

If you read this and it matters, help me keep it going: https://www.patreon.com/cw/WPSNews

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