New Buffalo was one of the most successful of the collective farms that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Arthur Kopecky's journals take us back to that era as he and his comrades wend their way to the area near Taos, New Mexico, where they encounter magic, wisdom, a mix of people, the Peyote Church, planting, and hard winters. The journals trace the group's evolution to adulthood as the party mood of the early 1970s gives way to the concerns of maintaining a growing farm. By 1975, several hundred people had called New Buffalo home and the business turned away from their...

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston and raised on secular Judaism, Cocoa Puffs, and Gilligan's Island, Peter Bebergal was barely in his teens when the ancient desire to finding higher spiritual meaning in the universe struck. Already schooled in mysticism by way of comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, and Carlos Castaneda, he turned to hallucinogens, convinced they would provide a path to illumination.

Was this profound desire for God--a god he believed that could only be apprehended by an extreme state of altered consciousness--simply a side effect of the drugs? Or was it a deeper...