VACAVILLE, Nov. 4 – Charles Manson, perhaps the most bizarre mass murderer ever to be confined in Vacaville’s California Medical Facility, has left in better mental condition than when he arrived.

Manson — serving a life sentence for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and seven others — was quietly transferred back to Folsom Prison Oct. 22 after a seven-month stay in CMF’s Seguin Unit.

“He has a better contact with reality now,” said Folsom chief medical officer Everly Owens, Manson’s therapist there. “He’s less depressed and more alert. He communicates much better.”

Ironically, the man who appears to be most responsible for Manson’s improvement has been fired from CMF. Psychologist Wesley Hiler gave Manson virtually the only therapy he got while he was here.

Hiler was fired in September on a charge of violating the confidentiality of another famous ex-CMF inmate, LSD guru Timothy Leary. He told the Reporter his appeal is scheduled for a December hearing before the State Personnel Board.

“I saw him almost every day,” Hiler said. “We developed a good relationship. After a while he stopped playing crazy games with me and started talking about what he really wanted in prison.”

“What he wanted was a room by himself with a real guitar” — Manson had constructed a makeshift guitar out of a canteen box and threads he made from blanket fuzz — “and a tape recorder, so he could write music and try to publish it,” Hiler told the Reporter. “I thought that would be a good solution.”

Manson composed and sang “typical folk songs about love and sex and things like that,” the psychologist said.

Early in the relationship, Manson decided he liked Hiler. To prove it, he gave the therapist two dolls he made from blanket fuzz. Each doll was supposed to be “a pass, so I would survive when he destroyed the prison.”

Charles Manson summed up his philosophy in these lines, which he read to psychologist Wesley Hiler at CMF :

“With nothing in the past to look forward to, and no eyes in the future to look back at, now is my only reality.

“Should I cry for I? I know there is none, or ask why, and in knowing, why is not.

“The reason for reason is not sure, to others who look but never see that there is no you and I’m only playing me.”

Hiler told the Reporter that Manson meant “the whole thing’s an illusion.”

“He believes there are no separate beings,” Hiler said. “He’s God playing Manson, I’m God playing Wes, and there’s no reason for anything.”

“When he arrived at Vacaville, he was actively psychotic. He had a lot of dillusions of influence. He believed that he was responsible for Nixon’s problems,” Hiler said. Manson thought that by concentrating his telepathic energies he was taking revenge on President Richard Nixon for pronouncing him “guilty” during his Los Angeles trial, the psychologist said.

Hiler points to Manson’s improvement as an example of his theory that even acute psychotics can be helped by intensive one-to-one psychotherapy. Most psychologists and psychiatrists since Freud have believed that acute psychotics can’t be helped this way, he told the Reporter.

Hiler said he will include more discussion of Manson and his theories in a book he is writing about CMF, tentatively titled “Vacaville.”

Manson’s mental problem — “conceptual disorganization” — was caused by “being locked up continually,” Dr. Owens told the Reporter. During the seven months at Folsom before going to CMF, Manson left his cell only twice a week to walk 350 feet to a shower, he said.

He now is back in the Folsom “security housing unit” (which inmates still call “the hole”), but is no longer in “a quiet cell,” Dr. Owens said. His new cell, although still tiny, is “well-lighted,” and Dr. Owens hopes to get him out into a small exercise yard with “congenial” prisoners.

But no one is talking about ever letting Manson onto the prison “mainline,” much less out of prison.

“At the present time, I have to say that the situation will remain the same unless something develops,” Dr. Owens said.

By GREG DeGIERE