INITIATION V: MASTERY (December 1982 - January 1985): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part IV (July 1984 - January 1985)
We spent a few days in John and Vicki's '20's-style apartment in Capitol Hill on East 18th Street, which they shared with another meditator, Carolyn, and her two young children. The second-floor rooms were large, airy, and warm; rose-colored walls contrasted beautifully with lush green foliage just outside generous windows. Kerry and I then took up our month of housesitting. We had never had a whole house to ourselves, and except for a slight feeling of "walking on eggshells" --- it was, after all, not our house, and it overflowed with valuable breakables --- I enjoyed it greatly.
When the housesitting was done, we moved back into John and Vicki's apartment. Carolyn was a little dubious about the arrangement until she attended a channeling session; her resistance then evaporated and we all spent several months holding circles nearly every day. Love bloomed; we became a very tight-knit group, and dreamed of the service we would all perform together someday.
John also introduced me to Steve M., another TM'er friend of his whose emotional field was as damp and grayly overcast as Seattle's skies. "What a tale I have to tell," he began gloomily, and filled us in with the sorrowful details of a heartfelt relationship that had been torpedoed by his ex-lover. I empathized, having suffered similar rejections myself, but couldn't help noticing over the following months that Steve, a wealthy computer-programmer who had mastered every realm of life but the romantic, was at that time so consistent in his gloom that he reminded me almost comically of Marvin, the depressed robot from Douglas Adam's Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Like John, Vicki and Carolyn, though, he was a true friend: honest, steadfast, loving and loyal. Steve and I both remembered past lives we had shared together, especially one aboard a seventeenth-century Dutch privateer/merchant vessel making frequent voyages to the Caribbean. Our paths were to continue to cross ever afterwards; we now remain in contact via ICQ.
About this time, my maternal grandmother, who had been listening to Annie's tales of abandonment, wrote me a bluntly scathing letter, accusing me of multitudinous irresponsibilities to Annie and society, and contemptuously exhorting me to get a job and, for God's sake, a driver's license.
My grandmother was Barbara Greenough Bradley, a woman born to great wealth and prestige. Her father was Henry Vose Greenough, a witty but conventional Boston Brahmin, son of Charles Pelham Greenough and Mary Dwight Vose, and descendant of highly-respected merchants, lawyers, politicians, Boston tea-party rebels, and Mayflower pilgrims. Her mother was Emery Holden, the brilliantly creative daughter of Cleveland's mining, hotel and newspaper magnate Liberty Emery Holden by his wife Delia Elizabeth Bulkeley, descendant of Harvard presidents, New England founding fathers, and English royalty. Emery had married late but optimistically, only to be shattered by her husband's affairs and crushed by Greenough domesticity. She and Henry had apparently wanted another boy, and were disappointed at Barbara's birth.
Her parents' disappointment permanently wounded and enraged my grandmother, who was a proud and generous Leo. She inherited her mother's artistic and literary abilities, found her household stifling, and escaped at age nineteen by marrying her West Chop tennis tutor, John Freeman Bradley, an ambitious Harvard graduate just embarking on his career in architecture in the depths of the Depression. His family was also of mediaeval royal descent and quite respectable, but had fallen on hard times. He himself was bright and talented but there was no work to be had. Two daughters came in quick succession. The strains of poverty, motherhood, and marriage to a critical and overbearing husband nine years her senior (indeed, in many ways, her relationship to my grandfather foreshadowed that of Kerry and me) were too much for my grandmother. She suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted unsuccessfully to kill her two young daughters and herself. After some time in a sanatorium, she had divorced my grandfather, and spent the rest of her days living a bohemian but unfulfilled life of lesbianism, poetry, art, and alcoholism, and had had her own driver's license revoked countless times.
It is possible she was drunk when she wrote me that letter, but I was deeply wounded all the same. When I had first begun to channel, it was if I had died, no longer caring what my relatives --- or anyone --- thought of me. Now, I was beginning to care very deeply about my family again. This woman had been a favorite relative, my mentor and financial sponsor over the years, and I was hard-put how to reply. In a way she had certainly made some valid points. I had not finished Divinity School; my marriage with Annie had failed; ordinary work no longer interested me, and I was afraid to get a license, fearing that my highway-induced spaciness might kill someone. I knew by now that I was responsible for my own reality; I was actually wounding myself here, and my grandmother's letter was a manifestation of my own inner guilts.
And yet, I was enraged; I wanted to speak up for the beauties of my life. Dare I alienate her? I meditated on it for two days. On reflection I realized it was Divinity who was my true source of supply, and if I could be honest with Divinity, I could be honest with my grandmother. I finally wrote a passionate letter back to her, answering her accusations point by point, telling her I had been responsible to the highest source I knew, Divinity itself, and concluding with the insight that she lived in a house of mirrors, and was flailing away at fragmented images of herself. She never replied, but we have enjoyed a congenial and loving relationship ever since.
As usual I delved into the second-hand book stores, and found an unusual gem by Robert Anton Wilson --- Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, which stimulated many hours of delightful contemplation. My spiritual experiences continued; in meditation I felt Yogananda's param-guru, the immortal Babaji, pouring warm oil on my forehead and anointing me into Divine Service. I now became that very Master-portal I had passed through in the Bahamas; able to transmit a more powerful Divine grace to others. I made contact with a future Self, from another lifetime I supposed, who was working with the spiritual dimensions of some sort of geodesic architecture; this one turned out to be the "me" of only a few months in the future!
I also began to regularly experience extra-terrestrial alternate Selves: one was a human-shaped Starship Commander, dressed in a high-collared tunic of black, with silver relief. Another was an amphibious cetacean; from Sirius I supposed. Still another resembled a giant crab, with its hundreds of delicate arms navigating a Mother-ship and overseeing the correct positioning of dozens of smaller Star-vessels. Yet another --- also maintaining a Constellation-ship --- resembled a huge, upright bear. These experiences were valid; I knew these beings to be a part of the real me. Yet I wondered: Was I somehow merely anthropomorphizing the constellations --- Cetus, Cancer, Ursa Major, or did the original namers of the Constellations also have experiences like mine, of these various alien species?
I was informed of Galactic and Constellation politics. There was an ongoing "War in Heaven," in which two major factions were concerned with Earth. One, which had been in ascendancy for many millennia, was attempting to keep humanity enslaved in ignorance, and to keep the Earth quarantined from the rest of the Confederation. The other, to which I apparently belonged, was dropping agents surreptitiously into Earth, having them incarnate in the regular manner and serve as enzymes of enlightenment, to ferment a massive change of consciousness from within, and reconnect earth to the Confederation of star-systems. This expanded on the egg-serpent-star vision I had received in Cambridge the year before.
While on some levels I had already chosen sides in this galactic drama, nonetheless part of me remained aloof; I didn't particularly care to be a Galactic warrior or ambassador; I preferred to be a researcher and seer. Part of me was uncertain that I really had the whole truth here; perhaps I was just being fed propaganda? Who was to say that Galactic politics were any more enlightened than Earth politics? Perhaps humanity was on a perfect path of slow growth, and too-quick change would be disastrous; I had seen the devastating effects of quick infusions of Western culture into third-world countries like India. In the larger sense, I contained both factions within myself, as I contained everything. However, I begrudgingly admitted that my heart lay with quick change; I enjoyed stirring people out of complacency and into larger world-views.
Two of the people I enjoyed stirring the most were my friends Vicki and John; we had endless conversations, wherein I --- and the Guides --- tickled them into expanding their boundaries. They responded in good grace; they were --- and are --- beautiful Souls, and the love and trust between us all continued to grow and deepen. Nonetheless, there was some friction, especially between Aquarian Kerry, our youngest and most rebellious member, and John, our oldest and most rigid, who was a Scorpio. Spacious as it was, the apartment was still a little too small for three couples. Even channeling and then helping out with the rent, Kerry and I stayed there too long, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when in October we finally found a place of our own --- about two blocks down 18th Street. It was a modest house we had looked at weeks before; the prospective tenant interviewing us had liked it but decided not to rent the house, ceding it to another young couple, Rick and Beth. Graduate students at the University, they were also looking for house-mates, and we all got along well.
They took a one-year lease and we moved into our new house. By now I had become a member of the Seattle Theosophical Society and a frequent patron of their library. I read Gerald Massey's divinely-inspired but poorly-organized Natural Genesis, numerous books on Theosophy, and attended a Theosophical service of the Liberal Catholic Church, offered by their bishop from Ojai, California. He included a liturgy to the Divine Mother that deeply moved me to copious tears: painful lump in the throat, embarassingly runny nose, the works. I felt the Divine Mother in my heart, blossoming in gratitude at being acknowledged. It was about this time I noticed I could nonjudgementally see the auric fields of others as rich multilayered dramas containing specific life-themes of simultaneous beauty and ugliness, like ongoing multidimensional works of art.
I also began spending a lot of time at the Seattle Public Library, reading Timothy Leary's Exo-psychology and Neuropolitics, Aleister Crowley's 777, Francis Hitching's Earth Magic, various wonderful works by John Michell, and that magnificent classic, Hamlet's Mill, by de Santillana and Von Decherd. More immediately important, in November I discovered some books by Sondra Ray on rebirthing. This reminded me of the "Prana is Brahman" bliss-qualities of the Atmic realm I had been shown after the Crucifixion into the Buddhic; I had not really continued exploring this! Her description of rebirthing was clear and inspiring, and though she recommended learning it from a qualified rebirther, I felt confident I could do it on my own.
I went home and spent about eight hours rebirthing myself. It would have been easier and quicker with another to guide me; I kept spacing out and transcending away whenever I got close to deep areas of cellular fear and pain. I persisted, though, and integrated the birth-trauma, passing through a choking, freezing, immensely rigid terror of death to warm up into a whole new aliveness and bodily bliss. By the time I finished, the whole room reeked of ether, like a hospital; my body had exuded large amounts of old anaesthetic it had picked up somewhere along the way: most likely, when I had my tonsils or wisdom teeth out.
Now I began integrating rebirthing and meditation; they were perfectly complementary. Meditation led to ascension out of the body-mind; rebirthing led to manifestation into and through the body-mind. It became more and more obvious that I had full control over my reality; I merely needed to clear subtle blocks in my body-mind for my manifestation or reality to shift accordingly. I was getting tired of my continued flirtation with poverty, and as I was dwelling on affirmations of what I wanted --- prosperity --- my subconscious resistance sharpened into a very tight pain between my spine and my left shoulderblade. I began breathing through it, and I was suddenly inside the pain, in a lifetime of acute poverty and fear of starvation. It was terrifying. I continued to breathe through it, and it warmed up and healed into a feeling of utter peace, bliss, and prosperity. I knew this was a major shift.
That evening Kerry and I attended our friend John C.'s birthday party. The room was full Seattle TM'ers that I didn't know. I began speaking with a few of them, and was filled with a radiant golden enthusiasm that suffused the room as I described that day's discoveries. Suddenly, I noticed that the entire room of people had reshaped themselves around me! They wanted me to teach them, and I made dozens of counseling/rebirthing appointments. Overnight, I was prosperous, with a counseling practice almost too big to handle. I now charged $60/hour for channeling, and $30/hour for rebirthing.
I greatly enjoyed this work --- I was sitting in pure bliss, as I had been while channeling, but now was precisely focused on the client's body-mind, which I experienced as grounded in the bliss-self we both shared. It was my job to feel and identify the emotional-mental pains the client needed to acknowledge, allowing the client to breathe through these layers of "not-bliss," and integrate them into bliss. Like me, the clients greatly enjoyed the process and experienced magical improvements in their outer lives, so my counseling practice continued to spread, and I was booked for weeks in advance.
During this time I continued my inner work. I was especially impressed with Sondra Ray's theories on immortality, and I tried one of her techniques to defuse the unconscious death-urge, saying to myself, "One of the really GREAT things about death is..." and then letting my mind fill in the blank, no matter how silly the response sounded. Some of death's "payoffs" were: a chance to rest completely, no more responsibilities, and a chance to explore celestial realms. Then I would continue with, "... and I can have that while I am alive." This shocked my mind into examining possibilities it had previously rejected as impossible, and I would breathe my body into full acceptance of the new fusions. When I was done with this after about an hour, my inner life-light shone so brightly it bounced back off the walls, almost blindingly intense! I taught the technique to my clients as well, and recommended that they read Sondra Ray's works.
Kerry and I had finally decided to get married on Christmas Night; John and Vicki and Carolyn had lovingly offered their apartment for the ceremony. We had just finished a practice rehearsal there a few days before Christmas when I suddenly felt dizzy and had to lie down. The feelings intensified into anguish; it was as if I were being raped. I rebirthed them; eventually the feelings subsided, and we all had dinner. When we returned to our apartment, we entered chaos --- it had been burglarized! I didn't feel particularly bad, having integrated the feelings while the burglary was in progress. Our house-mates' losses were insured.
The only thing Kerry and I lost of value was a one-carat diamond ring that had belonged to my paternal grandmother. She had gotten it from her grandfather, Clarence S. Bement, a 19th-century Philadelphian multimillionaire. He had been a renowned collector of rare books (some of his collection formed a cornerstone of Harvard's Widener Library), antique coins (the Sotheby's catalogue of their sale remains a classic), and rare minerals (which now comprise about half of the mineral collection in the New York Museum of Natural History).
My grandmother had passed the ring on to my mother when she got engaged to my father, and my mother had given it to me when I got engaged to Annie. Of a rare and beautiful 19th-century European cut, this was a family heirloom, and Annie had sweetly returned it to me when we divorced. I had asked Kerry to wear it always, but she had left it home that night, and now it was gone. I was saddened, but thought perhaps it was just as well --- while a psychically very powerful piece, still the diamond had seen two divorces already! I had of course psychically cleansed it, but still, you never knew .... The burglars hadn't bothered to take our healing-collection of semi-precious stones. I had continued to buy the odd uncut gem from a wonderful shop downtown in Elliot Square, and had learned a great deal from these stones; a raw sapphire crystal was especially helpful in welcoming me to its understanding of physical form's intensely dense bliss-structure.
More to the point, I felt the burglary had esoterically been a manifestation of the rift in consciousness between Kerry and me and our house-mate couple --- we really didn't enjoy a lot of soul fusion, the way Kerry and I did with John and Vicki and Carolyn, and I didn't think our house-mates truly understood our "New Age" approach to life. It certainly must have been a strain on them to see the unending stream of clients coming to and from my room; while I had told them I was a counselor, none of us had expected such an influx of "strangers." I tried periodically imaging a large bubble of wholeness around the house, but it felt only moderately successful. Also, there was our upcoming marriage --- they, who were unmarried, hadn't expected to live with a married couple. Again, there seemed especially to be friction between Kerry, who was becoming more and more angrily feminist, and Rick, who --- like John --- was another male Scorpio.
The wedding went ahead as planned: Vicki worked at a florist shop, and she completely transformed their apartment. Huge, gorgeously arranged medieval bouquets flourished everywhere, and Christmas swags of be-ribboned evergreen and laurel hung around every door, along the walls, and on the mantle. Our ceremony, which incorporated Solstice symbolism, was by beeswax candlelight. Carolyn's daughters were the flower girls, who strewed rose-petals to the strains of Pachelbel's Canon. Kerry and I had written the ceremony to include Vicki and John, who handed us the glass ewers of red and white wine which Kerry and I then alchemically mingled and drank.
Kerry wore a 1902 ivory silk wedding-gown which my mother had found for us; I wore an antique silk Mandarin's robe with a dragon on it, which I had unearthed in an antique shop in Seattle. Another friend of ours, Jack Potticary, performed the ceremony. Jack was a high-powered ex-marine, a talented psychic who was teaching courses in creative intuition at large companies like Weyerhauser. His beautiful fiancee performed an expressive dance-piece she composed for us. None of our relatives except Kerry's father made it to the wedding, which was, after all, on Christmas Night, on the west coast, and rather last-minute. We were surrounded by TM'er friends and clients, and the love they beamed on us was almost overpowering. I breathed it through and stayed in the body this time, though! Afterwards we had eggnog, a lovely three-tiered wedding cake, and a potluck feast. Finally, John and Vicki treated us to a honeymoon night at a charming bed-and-breakfast on Vachon Island.
Since we were now a married couple, Rick and Beth offered us the master bedroom; we were puzzled by their largesse, but accepted. Rick and I both bought MacIntosh computers. His was a top-of-the-line 512k which he got through a UW student-discount; I settled for a slightly-older 128k, which with extra disk-drive and printer came to $1800. Kerry and I both spent a lot of time writing; Kerry was assembling an immense "Onomasticon" --- a compendium of names from around the world, and I soon began writing down the new revelations I was getting.
