INITIATION V: MASTERY (December 1982 - January 1985): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part III (January 1984 - July 1984)
Kerry and I spent the next six months in Portland, Maine. I continued to experience others' Souls as aspects of my Self, but intermittently and less vividly. It felt a little odd to be living just around the corner from the old, palatial TM center on Spring Street where I had lived and loved and laughed with my new best-friend Annie for a blissful week in the summer of '76. Just over the hill lay Deering Oaks Park, where I had sat engraving an exuberantly intricate scrimshaw including the very fir-tree I was sitting beneath, while waiting for Annie to finish her shift at the Sew-Fro fabric store on Forest Avenue.
Full of the new delights of sex, I had boldly put four haloed, naked nymphs around the ivory tooth --- one European, one Chinese, one Native American, and one African --- joining hands in a world-embracing dance, and supporting the roundels containing the scrimshaw's main scenes. I had been "witnessing" pretty continuously day and night by then, and was very satisfied with my unbroken Cosmic Consciousness. But for the most part, those memories felt as distant as one of my former lives. Now I was living with Kerry, and it was 1984; Portland radio had gone from playing Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" to Boy George's "Karma Chameleon." I wasn't too inspired with songs like that winter's "Here Comes the Rain Again" by the Eurythmics, and I spent a lot of time listening to WBOQ, Portland's classical station. I even won a few tickets to classical concerts!
The winter was a particularly cold one, and we wondered why we had felt so impelled to leave the Bahamas before spring. We also felt rather pinched by poverty; neither one of us had a job, but were both busy pursuing our bliss. Kerry was learning how to make lace; I was holding the usual classes in healing and psycho-spiritual development (I named our school Mirabilis), but few people attended, and still fewer paid. Portland seemed to be at least ten years behind the times; most people were as yet uninterested in "New Age" phenomena. There was a funky health-food store nearby, the Good Day Market a few blocks over on Brackett Street, but the food there was pretty expensive. We walked across the long, windy Million-Dollar Bridge to South Portland to buy most of our groceries at Stop and Shop, carrying the paper bags back through the bitter cold to our cozy apartment on State Street.
I didn't know it then, but I was also living only two blocks from where my great-great-grandfather, Reverend Daniel Freeman Smith, had opened his own Episcopalian school for spiritual development --- St. Augustine's School for Boys --- 114 years before. At that time Episcopalianism too was new to Maine, which was predominantly Congregational; and he too had been living a life of genteel semi-poverty and spiritual enthusiasm.
We did meet a charming fellow named Gawaine who was a Wiccan, Cabbalistic magician, and very astute astrologer; we traded sessions with each other, and he gave me his copy of Isaac Bonewits's lovely classic, Real Magic, which I still own. Gawaine introduced us to B.B., a well-known fashion model and aspiring rock singer. Her apartment was walled with countless framed magazine covers depicting her, each one apparently a completely different woman --- she was protean, assuming varied personas with mercurial ease. She knew Rod Stuart, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, and the Stones very well, and had a daughter by a famous rock-star.
Meeting her was surprising, because my mother, being an antique-dealer, had somewhere picked up a stack of decade-old Playboys, and while living with her the previous month I had leafed through them. I had come across the centerfold and bio of this very woman, read of her associations with various rock-musicians, and idly wondered what she was doing now. And now here she was! After she first called me for a channeling appointment, I scanned her field, and was literally thrown backwards by her very forceful guardian-daemon. The channeling went well, though, and we met several times after that. Her daughter, who must have been about five or six, is now a famous movie-star in her own right.
We held several largish circles of eight or ten people and did some significant work, but I mostly remember spending a great many hours doing research in Portland's brand-new Public Library downtown: spiritual books, mostly, of course, though I did some pen-and-inks of Portland in the nineteenth century, working from old photographs in the Library's Portland Room. I was also working on another illuminated MS. on angels, and spent a lot of time writing poetry and doing pen-and-inks for that. Around that time I bought what became our new Bible, Barbara Walker's marvelous book, The Women's Dictionary of Myths and Secrets, and Kerry and I would read this to each other constantly. Kerry was an ex-Catholic, and the book fueled her anti-Christian and anti-patriarchal rage while it dazzled us both with its glimpses of the pagan archetypes that had been "borrowed" and incorporated into Christian mythology.
It was during this period that I received a Utopian vision of everyone conjoined, via computers and telephone, to form a single network in an awe-inspiring world-mind. I had not yet heard of the Internet, but my inner Masters showed it to me; little did I suspect that thirteen years later I would finally connect with it myself, and record that very vision!
The only significant meditative experience I remember during this time was of suddenly appearing amidst a huge throng of people in one of the heaven-realms; they were all chanting OM SRI RAM JAI RAM JAI JAI in a combined voice like thunder, and were all standing or bowing before an immense throne where I presumed the God Rama was wont to sit. The focused devotion of all those beings, while awe-inspiring, created an atmosphere of almost uncomfortable intensity.
In late May of 1984, our old Fairfield friends John and Vicki C. wrote to us from Seattle, where they had recently moved after getting married. A friend of theirs needed a house-sitter for the month of July. Would we consider it? Of course we would. We gave notice on our apartment, sold most of our few possessions, and shipped the rest out west. We took a Greyhound cross-country and slept in each other's laps each night until we reached Wisconsin. We spent a few days recuperating there, enjoying the casually-friendly hospitality of Kerry's dad, who did not seem to be quite the monster his ex-wife and daughter had portrayed. We then boarded the bus again for the last leg, finally to pass through the Swiss-like Cascades into Seattle. Smelling strongly of second-hand cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, we alit in Seattle to the waiting arms of John and Vicki, who gamely embraced us.
