INITIATION III: TRANSFIGURATION (September 1978 - October 1980): The Seventh State: Unity Consciousness
In the fall I took up my new duties as Supervisor of the Harvard Fine Arts Library's Visual Collections, at that time still located in a basement mezzanine of the Fogg Art Museum. I was now in charge of circulation, reference, and audio-visual processing of the Fine Arts Library's million-plus slides and photographs; my staff consisted of eight part-time work-study students and one full-time assistant. I had worked my way up through both of these positions, so I knew the department well, but now I was the department, and I revelled in the concurrent expansion of consciousness. Now, my awareness enveloped the whole floor where I worked, as if all these people and works of art were in a sense inside of me. It was generally easy to infuse the atmosphere with a perennial hum of cheerful service.
The job required some diplomacy, as I had to juggle the sometimes conflicting needs of Fine Arts professors, graduate students, undergraduates, and visitors from other departments, other schools, and other countries. I loved being diplomatic, balancing various needs, and making everyone happy.
I also enjoyed operating our brand-new color-photocopier. Not only could this machine copy art-plates in full-color --- a great boon to Art-history students --- it could also enlarge and print a color slide onto paper, or print a paper contact-sheet of a lot of slides. We began using these contact sheets in the slide drawers, cutting and pasting a slide's print to the backup card which kept its place. While versatile, the machine was cranky, and required an artist's delicate touch on its three color-knobs to produce a relatively true color-copy; it was challenging and satisying to produce copies that were as perfect as possible.
My favorite part of the job was answering reference questions --- if someone needed an illustration of a lute-playing angel, or the Moulin Rouge in Paris, or a Zen Buddhist ink painting of persimmons, it was my job to find one for them --- immediately! My intuition worked well in recovering "missing" slides and photos too. More and more, it seemed as if everything was inside of me --- inside of my "egg" of being.
In October of 1978, Annie and I got married in Brookline --- it was a fairy-tale wedding. Episcopalians excel at making romantic, old-English churches, and the Church of Our Saviour was exquisite --- rough-cut stone, rose-bushes around a medieval cloister, a mellow organ, and stained-glass windows by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones ... I do not remember much of the wedding; the energies of the hundreds of people were so intense that I floated out of the body in a blissful daze much of the time!
By the late Seventies, some libraries were beginning to computerize their catalogues, and I shared Librarian Wolfgang Freitag's enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by computers. Annie and I had timed our wedding so that we could combine our honeymoon in Europe with a week-long conference in Pisa on "Computer Storage and Retrieval of Art-Historical Data and Documents," which I was to attend as the delegate from Harvard. We both loved art. We first spent about a week visiting all the art museums in London and Paris --- Annie was tireless, and dragged me through every inch of the Louvre in under two hours, which has to be some kind of record --- before going to Pisa, where the University had paid for our accomodations. Annie visited the art museums in Pisa, Siena and the environs while I attended the conference presentations, which the speaker might offer in English, French, Italian, Spanish, or German, putting my old linguistic skills to the test.
Dr. Fabio Bisogni, the conference's charming and erudite sponsor, had assembled a marvelous computer program for accessing iconography and symbolism in Italian Art. Sensing a possible ally at Harvard, at the conference's end he invited Annie and me to stay for a week in his luxurious apartment in Florence. From here we enjoyed the Borghese palace, the countless Florentine churches, and the Uffizi, where I would spend hours contemplating my then-favorite painting: Simone Martini's glorious fourteenth-century triptych of the Annunciation, with its graceful figures of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel against a gold-leaf background. Dr. Bisogni even took us to neighboring Settignano, where we enjoyed the Villa I Tatti, Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Culture. He entertained us with stories of the I Tatti's nineteenth-century owner, the eccentric fine-arts connoiseur Bernard Berenson. It was with great regret that I had to write him later from Cambridge to tell him that Harvard's professor of Italian Art, the eminent Sydney Freedberg, had no interest in his computer program.
I spent the next year, as promised, as Supervisor of the Visual Collections. I had used up all nearly all my vacation time, so did not have a chance to take the rest of my TM-Sidhis course blocks in residence. It was with great delight, therefore, that I heard of the Movement's plans to offer the TM-Sidhis course in-house, to be taken in the evenings through the local TM centers. I signed up for one of the first, in March of 1979.
It was during this course that my next significant milestone occurred. I was sitting in a brief meditation, waiting for the TM-Sidhi Administrator to come with that night's instructions. My energy rose, and I felt my spine straighten and align so perfectly that there was "no space" between my cocyx and my head. I suddenly developed 360-degree vision, and I was immersed in an ocean of rich gold light. Then, gradually, out of the light came a figure --- made also of woven light. The figure approached me from behind, and then merged with me; my own body then became woven light. I knew this was my Solar Angel; I wondered if he/I had wings? He laughed, and obligingly produced a pair. The feeling of love, unity, peace and perfection this being brought into me was indescribable, and like nothing I had ever felt before. It was as if my whole life had been illusion until now; this was all that mattered. I later understood this was the Transfiguration; my Higher Self had descended as far as the Heart, and my Lower Self had ascended as far as the Navel, or the Mental Subplane, the Realm of Fire. They now met at the midpoint, my Solar Plexus: the Realm of the Causal or Solar Angel.
When the TM-Sidhi Administrator arrived, she asked if anyone had had any experiences over the past day. "Um, yes, I did..." I ventured. "While I was waiting just now in meditation, an Angel merged with me..." I told her briefly of my experience. Her response was immediate, and sharp. "What? You're not a Governor! You couldn't possibly have that!" I did not argue with her; what would have been the point? She might have said I was "unstressing" and kicked me off the course; stranger things had happened to friends of mine. But I could not deny Divinity, and when she left, I stood and firmly addressed the class: "She is wrong. This experience was the most significant of my entire life. I know it to be true, and I believe it over anything and anyone else."
At last, we received nearly all of the siddhis; the final week --- which imparted the long-awaited levitation technique --- was still offered in residence only, so in May of 1979 I went back to Livingston Manor for the third and last time. I very much enjoyed the levitation technique, which was by far the most powerful of the siddhis we were given --- I felt myself becoming very buoyant and ecstatic; my body felt as if it were suspended like a basket from a balloon. While sitting cross-legged or in lotus position, it would then give an involuntary leap and I was off, soaring across the foam-rubber-paved room, laughing hilariously all the way. The energy pouring through was divinely intoxicating. I noticed my own body beginning to assume the spontaneous yogic gestures or mudras that I had seen in Annie; the energy flows these mudras released in my body were delightful. However, while lying down after the flying, I would also notice a burning, angy impatience in my abdominal area; this would often last for five or ten minutes.
Were we really flying? No, more like great, froglike hops. But it was effortless, and it felt terrific. We were told this was a preliminary stage of flying. In my impatience I dreamed I would someday be the first to really fly; this would be my gift to Maharishi; it would remind everyone else how to levitate as well, and our united shift in understanding of the laws of nature would indeed change the world. Meanwhile, something good was happening, and I was reasonably content with my progress.
Once after flying I was approached by another flyer; his face was pale as he worriedly asked if I were all right. "Sure, why?" I asked. He said we had crashed together in midair; my face had hit his elbow; he had heard a crunch and felt my jaw give way, and was certain it must be broken. I dimly remembered hitting someone and apologizing, but I had been wrapped in ecstasy and certainly had felt no pain. I felt my jaw. It was fine, not even sore.
Returning to Cambridge, I would often fly in the evenings with the other Sidhas in the mattress-paved basement of the Cambridge TM-Center at 33 Garden Street. One of the men who would quietly come in, fly, and leave was Ned Beatty, who had recently starred with Burt Reynolds in the harrowing movie Deliverance. My ecstatic soaring continued; once at the end of a four-yard leap I landed on the side of my foot directly on concrete, between two mattresses. I felt nothing at the time and continued my flying, but when I stood up to leave, I realized I had broken my foot. I spent the next ten days on crutches, eliciting some interesting comments both from the doctor and from my co-workers at the Fogg when answering their queries on how I had broken it.
Life just kept getting better. Finally, my promised year was up, and I was thinking seriously about returning to school. Then my maternal grandmother offered to pay for my first year's tuition in Divinity School! With alacrity, I accepted. I entered the M.T.S (Master of Theological Studies) program at Harvard Divinity School in January of 1980.
It was about this time that Annie and I moved a few blocks to Laurel Avenue in Somerville, at our landlord's suggestion, into another house he owned and was fixing up. While the apartment was potentially nicer than the one we had been occupying, it had not yet been (and never was) completely redone, lacking switch-plates, paint, etc. Also, it was a typical Somerville three-decker, and the neighborhood was a little poorer than the one we had left. However, it was very near the Harvard Divinity School, and it provided better accommodations for our two house-mates, Mary Ann and John. At this time I noticed a strange coincidence --- for years now, I had lived only on streets beginning with the letter "L" --- first on North House's Linnaean, then Line, then Linden, and now Laurel. The pattern was not to continue.
My brother John was now living in Brunswick, doing historical surveys of the town's architecture. I too became quite interested in the commercial history of Brunswick, and spent a good deal of weekend-time in Brunswick helping him photograph 19th-century advertisements, trade-cards, etc. from the archives of the Pejepscot Historical Society. I also helped him transcribe interesting architectural notes from the microfilmed newspapers of the 1850's, and began assembling a notebook of 19th-century Maine Street's commercial history, using photos and photocopied advertisments culled from directories, newspapers, and other publications. We had many photos from the mid-nineteenth century and afterwards, but of course next to no pictorial data from the beginning of the nineteenth century. I decided to try an astral projection to Brunswick of 1802.
What an eye-opener! One glance destroyed any illusions about wanting to live in 1802. Compared to its mid-century grace and elegance, the town was very unprepossessing: no trees; houses all white or unpainted; and Maine Street a veritable sea of mud. I noted with surprise the vanes of a Dutch-style windmill overlooking the town from the banks of the Androscoggin; could this detail be an astral "dream," an inaccuracy? The astral plane was notoriously unstable. When I returned to the physical plane, I delved into the Brunswick histories --- sure enough; there had indeed been a windmill there!
I continued on at the Fogg working part-time again as a work-study student --- as Assistant Cataloguer of Indian and Southeast Asian Art. Now, I was truly in Paradise. I was surrounded and pervaded by golden light much of the time; angels and the Divine Mother were pouring their grace through me; my hands were often flushed with the love-energy flowing out of them. I was studying Sufism, Hinduism, after-death experiences, and theology, and blissfully integrating the new knowledge both with my expertise in art history and --- still more satisfying --- with my own mystical experiences.
I also enjoyed meeting the spiritual luminaries who came to speak at the Harvard Divinity School, but could not help comparing them to Maharishi, an immensely charismatic and brilliant speaker who easily transmitted spiritual grace even over videotape, while clarifying the most intricate spiritual subtleties. Shri Chinmoy had a nice energy-field but did not, for me, wield much charisma; and his lecture, which consisted entirely of aphorisms like "Earth-bound journey: full of suffering; Heaven-bound journey: full of bliss ... Earth-bound journey: full of tears; Heaven-bound journey: full of joy;" did absolutely nothing for me, who had been taught the possibility of integrating the best of both worlds. I was also a little disturbed by the cult-like quality of his followers, who were all dressed in white, yet did not appear to have particularly inspiring auric fields.
I was more impressed a few years later, when my good friend Peter Vorliss invited me to accompany him to the Divinity School to meet the Dalai Lama. While he, too, lacked the charismatic presence of Maharishi, I noted that as soon as I sat down, I enjoyed a strong connection with the "golden parachute" over my head, and that I could see a similar light-anatomy over the Dalai Lama. After his speech, I went up to the front with Peter to meet him and receive his blessing. He was a beautiful being, and I liked him very much.
Despite the grace I was enjoying, however, a new tension began creeping in. I found my course-work almost too easy, and I was beginning to strongly feel a Divine hand tapping me on the shoulder, asking me to go into service. What service? The ministry? In September I took more Christian-oriented courses, with an eye to switching into the M.Div. (Master of Divinity) Program and eventually entering the Episcopalian ministry. I wasn't sure I could bridge the gap between my personal experiences and traditional Christianity, but I was determined to try. All went well for the first two months. The course on the gnostic currents in the Gospel of John was fascinating. The Christian mystics were delightful. The course on the Church fathers was mixed; while Origen and Clement had their moments of enlightenment, most of the rest --- Irenaeus, Tertullian, et al. --- seemed to be ignorant, power-hungry bigots, the godfathers of everything I detested in modern Christian fundamentalism. But it was a course in pastoral counseling that was to be my downfall.
NEXT: INITIATION IV: CRUCIFIXION (November 1980 - December 1982)
