COSMIC PHYSICAL
INITIATION 0: THRESHOLD: Part II October 1973 - April 1974): The Fourth State: Transcendental Consciousness
In the fall of 1973, I began my freshman year at Harvard. To this day, the Rolling Stones' ballad "Angie" evokes the bittersweet feel of that autumn for me. My parents had no money to spare, and I was on a scholarship, "with no money in my coat." I had left my old world behind; my childish dreams had "all gone up in smoke" like October's burning leaves. But Cambridge was intoxicating; "ain't it good to be alive?" I was surrounded by a paradise of bookstores, some open until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Harvard paid my tuition, and I paid my room and board with loans and a work-study program. I could not afford to buy unnecessary books, so I would read them in the aisles of the bookstores, often remaining right up until closing-time. Most of the booksellers would let students read for hours, but if one manager regarded me fishily, I could always walk across the street to a competitor and resume the book where I had left off in the first store.
I read The Seth Material, channeled by Jane Roberts --- I first experienced a past life while sitting right there on the floor of Paperback Booksmith, upon reading Seth's words on the simultaneity of all "past" lives. I closed my eyes, and was instantly in a small, damp cell: a nun from fifteenth-century England. I read Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe; much of the Eckankar material, by Paul Twitchell; and -- as always -- everything I could find on astrology, myth, tarot, kundalini and the chakras, magic, symbols, --- the list was endless! I took the information that inspired and made sense, filed away what didn't make sense but still "sang" to me, and discarded what did not inspire.
My freshman year I tried drunkenness twice, both times with some more worldly dorm-mates who lived downstairs. The first time was in December; they escorted us to Trader Vic's after the Boston premiere of "The Exorcist," which I had found powerful but not as disturbing as rumored. After I had imbibed two Fog Cutters and felt nothing, I realized I might as well relax and give the alcohol a chance to work, or I would have wasted my money! It instantly kicked in; a sensation of disoriented uncoordination that was interesting but not particularly edifying. For years afterwards, hearing "Tubular Bells" on the radio would make me slightly dizzy.
At my room-mates' behest, I also experimented briefly with marijuana shortly after my eighteenth birthday in March. We smoked 40 bowls of very potent Panama Red over four nights: While my room-mates were rolling around on the floor in blissful abandon, I felt nothing. Finally I realized that, as with the alcohol, I was holding the drug at bay with my own resistance; I consciously relaxed into it and immediately felt a shift in perception. Along with some emotional mellowing, space became more tangible; I could "flip" chairs inside out, so that their front legs seemed to be behind their back ones. I closed my eyes as intricately vivid visions flashed by in rapid succession; the only one I remember now was a stepped pyramid with flowers flowing down its sides. I also noticed a great appetite and enhanced sense of taste; a 2:00-a.m. foray across Mass. Ave to Store 24 for a Hostess Blueberry Pie brought the most exquisite gratification imaginable.
About this time I re-read Ram Dass's Be Here Now, which crystallized my will to focus everything on spiritual enlightenment, and provided a handy "cookbook" of suggestions for self-improvement, including breath-work or pranayama, body-postures or asanas, the practice of innocent harmlessness or ahimsa, and vegetarianism.
Shortly after adopting these practices in the spring of 1974 (in addition to the mantra-yoga, which I still practiced regularly), I felt a new inner lightness, and noticed a blissful sensation pouring through my third-eye area much of the time. I also noticed that light itself had fine fibers; by attending to these I began to see rainbows around street-lamps. I noticed, though, that the rainbow always stayed absolutely the same size, so that it appeared to shrink as I approached the light: The rainbow was in my own visual processing, therefore; not actually around the light itself.
I prayed to Jesus for the ability actually to see auras; in my inner vision, a being I assumed to be Jesus appeared and granted my wish. For some time thereafter, I would sporadically see rich colors around people --- my Spanish Lit. teacher was immersed in a gorgeous field of rich azure; a tall woman going to class in front of me emanated an odd brown; and so on. Unlike the rainbows, these color-fields obeyed the rules of perspective, appearing to be actually present around the people. At home on Spring Break I noticed that my brother Mark had a clear yellowish field around his head; out of curiosity I tried teasing him and watched the clear yellow disappear as his field darkened. I explained to him what I had been doing, and marveled as his light slowly returned. Clearly seeing the metaphysical effects of my habitual older-brother routines sobered me; I resolved to try to honor the light in others from then on.
Just to make sure I had given alcohol a fair chance, I tried it again in the spring, combining ample amounts of marijuana with six beers and numerous stale pretzels, only to lose the whole mess ignominiously in a snowdrift outside our dorm. So much for the Dionysian path! I never got drunk again. I abandoned marijuana as well. While it enhanced the senses and appetite delightfully, it turned my own aura --- normally (at that time) a clear turquoise --- into a murky green, like thick pea-soup, and adversely affected my ability to transcend in meditation --- as if my mind had frozen, and the mantra was like a pebble skipping on the ice, unable to sink into the depths. I decided to continue on the path of meditation.
Meanwhile, my first year at Harvard was an emotional see-saw. I enjoyed days of sheer giddy delight in the Cantabrigian freedom and knowledge; our spirits were often high, and we delighted in playing practical jokes on one another, usually involving water-balloons dropped from the superior vantage point of third-floor D-32 onto unsuspecting heads below. It might have been in self-defense, therefore, that the Straus Rape & Pillage Society --- a motley collection of house-mates who indulged in weekly processions around the Yard, marching in mismatched finery to the drone of bagpipes and bearing large signs proudly identifying their Society --- also took to sporting opened umbrellas even in clear weather.
Some of my jokes were more psychological. During mid-year exams I sent carefully-typed "form letters" on photocopied --- photocopied! What a wonderful new technology! --- Harvard stationery of Dean of Freshmen Burris Young's (on which I had cut and pasted a "Veritas" seal for extra verity) to our three neighbors across the hall, who were a very close-knit bunch. The letters told them that, due to the large influx of incoming transfer students from other Universities at mid-year, they were being reassigned to other quarters for the remainder of the year. With another typewriter, at a slight slant, I then typed in their new addresses, sending them off to the most remote and unpopular dorms: Greenough, Stoughton, and (shudder) Radcliffe's Currier House. Because this was in the midst of mid-term exams, the letters continued, they were being allowed a full three days to move their possessions, instead of the ususal 24 hours. I finished the three letters very late at night, and slipped them into their mailboxes downstairs.
My room-mates, who were in on the joke, awoke me gleefully the next morning to revel in the anguished screams coming from across the hall: "Radcliffe! I've been sent to Radcliffe!" We grinned at each other. But when I heard one of them calling his mother long-distance, I took pity and knocked on their door. "Umm...did you get some letters this morning ...?" I asked innocently. "You too?" Mike Duffy screamed. " Where did you get sent?" "Er, no ..." I grinned. "I sent them." After it registered, he threatened to defenestrate me, but only half-heartedly; his delighted relief was palpable. The one who was phoning his mother gave her the update, and all ended well. He later told me his mother had said, "I can't believe Harvard would do that! Notre Dame, yes, but not Harvard!"
Russ, the third of the trio, mentioned afterwards that he showed my handiwork to Dean Young, who was a good friend of his. The Dean took one look at the letter and said, "Oh, no...How many of these went out?" He had nightmarish visions that this was a brainchild of the sadists at the Harvard Lampoon, who would indeed have sent them to every freshman at Harvard. The chaos would have been unimaginable. I had had dreams of sending them to other freshmen, and had photocopied a whole stack of Dean Young's stationery, but decided to have mercy on those too remote for me to relieve personally after a few moments of agony.
Despite these giddy days of pure freedom, I also plunged at times into great depression. Our dorm was all-male, and I missed female companionship; I was still too shy to do more than glory silently in the energy-fields of the beautiful Radcliffe women sitting next to me in darkened lecture-halls or in the Freshman Union. As it had for some three years, Playboy faithfully continued to provide me with illusory lovers for self-pleasuring. I knew I was not yet emotionally ready to attempt a mature relationship with a woman.
Never the best of letter-writers, I had maintained a desultory correspondence with Margaret A., whom I had loved from afar in high school. She was attending Bowdoin College in Maine, and we made plans for her to visit several times, but they always fell through. I had little privacy; the best I could offer her was a spot on the floor of our suite's living room, where I myself lived --- my two dormitory roommates, who were far more sophisticated than I, had arrived before me and taken the two private rooms in Straus D-32. Bill Emerson, a very-long-haired trumpet-player from Syoset, had arrived first and was royally ensconced in the suite's single. At first I had double-bunked with Jed Roberts, my jazz-loving room-mate from Chicago, but he accused me of snoring and evicted me. I took the bunk-frame and the lower bunk out into the living room and draped a bedspread over the high bunk-frame, like a Conestoga wagon, to give me the semblance of a private alcove. I found the lack of privacy to be difficult at times, particularly when my room-mates wanted to indulge in late-night social revels in the living-room when I wanted to sleep. Once or twice, when the noise was simply too loud, I took some blankets and a pillow down to the basement to sleep. It was clean, warm and dry there; and very quiet.
More difficult was the "small fish-big pond" syndrome. I had been one of the brightest students in my High School in Bath, Maine; one of only two studying Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Greek, and the only one learning Sanskrit. Now, I was surrounded by competitive geniuses who knew all these things and more. Furthermore, my Psychology, Linguistics, and Sanskrit classes, though taught by eminent scholars, were disappointingly dry, while my work-study job for a grad student in psycholinguistics --- transcribing tapes of pre-school teacher-student interactions and tallying different sentence structures --- was actually mind-numbing.
I was becoming more interested in studying the paranormal, and the teachers at the Cambridge TM Center were frustratingly unhelpful --- whenever I would attempt a discussion of auras, or past-life memories, or kundalini and the chakras, I inevitably received the same robotically-phrased suggestion to continue meditating and to ignore all phenomena! Also, while I loved Cambridge I pined for my sweetly-rural hometown. Two of that winter's biggest radio-hits, Stevie Wonder's "Living For the City" and Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," perfectly caught my discomfort with the big city and my nostalgia for Maine. Lastly, I deeply missed my family, which was going through problems of its own; my parents had finally decided to divorce, and my father moved out to live with his lover and her kids. (I was certainly not the only one to feel the strain of first-year Harvard; a housemate whom I had vaguely known from C-entry hanged himself in his room over Christmas break, to be discovered by the Janitor several days later. Not knowing him well, I thought his reaction a bit extreme, but I could certainly empathize with the depression he must have been feeling )
For all these reasons I briefly flirted with an English cult, well-established in Cambridge at that time, called The Process. There were women there who were easy to speak with. The group offered a respite from my room-mates. They were not geniuses --- no threat to my ego! And they offered clear-cut status-grades: Acolyte, Disciple, Messenger, and Prophet. Most important, they did not disguise their interest in subtle archetypal psychology and the development of psychic abilities. I was most impressed with the psychic reading one Prophet had given me by psychometrizing my Swiss Army knife; she had actually described the antique wax head I kept in the dorm, saying "I see a disembodied head on your desk --- it has bright blue eyes; it looks a lot like you," offering the further interpretation that the head symbolized my own detached psychological state. Moreover the group offered a ready-made --- if ersatz --- "family." I contemplated taking a leave of absence to join The Process fulltime, about midway through that bleak, snowy winter in Cambridge, but my parents and Harvard Dean of Freshmen Burris Young recommended that I give Harvard a full year before deciding -- advice for which I am most grateful, in retrospect.
Life got easier as Spring blossomed. The whole city seemed to stretch sensuously in the bright sunny days and perfumed, sultry nights. Some students in nearby Massachusetts Hall opened their windows wide and pointed their huge Bose speakers out into the yard with volume cranked beyond fortissimo to "stentorian;" the pounding finale of Led Zeppelin's beautiful classic "Stairway to Heaven" expressed my new spiritual optimism exactly.
Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know,Unbeknownst to me, this was a perfect description of the Third Initiation, or Transfiguration, which I would be most grateful to experience some five years later.
The piper's calling you to join him.
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul,
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How ev'rything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.
(After the music had echoed away, those students were naive enough to hook a microphone into the speakers and ask for requests, blasting their phone number for the entire Yard to hear. We had enjoyed the music, but we seized the opportunity and called them. A visiting friend of ours with a very flat Boston accent claimed to be Sergeant Malloy from the Cambridge Police, and threatened them urbanely with prison-time for disturbing the peace. I provided suitable background imitations of a police dispatcher's radio by squawking police jargon and hissing static into a paper-towel roll, while a third room-mate pounded his typewriter, punctuating the clatter with the occasional "ding" of the carriage-return bell. We paid close attention to detail, and our noisy neighbors were gratifyingly cowed. They apologized profusely, the next song abruptly diminuendoto a sweetly reasonable pianissimo.)
My experiences in meditation were deepening somewhat, and my classes became more fun, as I had switched my concentration at midyear from Linguistics to Fine Arts, where I could indulge my passion for beauty and symbolism. While retaining my year-long courses in Psychology and in Spanish Literature, I added a class in studio drawing with the delightful Will Reimann, and a marvelous course in Japanese art of the Heian period, taught by Professor Rosenfield. I explored the treasures of the Fogg Art Museum, and discovered a wonderful, life-sized temple-statue of Kuan Yin, which I would contemplate for hours, deriving deep satisfaction from her compassionate serenity. Furthermore, The Process underwent schism, and my cult-mentors left town. Nonetheless, I still decided to take a year off; India was beginning to beckon. The TM Center was offering something called a "residence course" that Summer at the University of Maine at Orono; I signed up for four days in late June of 1974.
