INITIATION VI: ASCENSION (February 1985 - March 1987): The Tenth State: Shiva Consciousness
Part II (August 1985 - March 1986)
About late August of 1985, Nancy came to stay with us for awhile, having ended her affair with her Bahamian lover; his smouldering jealousy had finally erupted into violent rage, and she had decided to escape. She had done a lot of teaching there, and we had all experienced a lot of growth there, but we couldn't say the center had materialized as we thought it would! Kerry, Nancy, and I now had a great time together, but Nancy's powerful presence further disturbed the precarious truce between the two housemate couples. To our embarrassment, we also were two days late with our September rent payment --- the first and last time this ever happened --- and Rick and Beth seized this excuse to ask us to leave, deciding to take the whole house for themselves when our year was up. I was angered by their decision, but had to admit that it was undoubtedly for the best.
By October Nancy had returned to Fairfield, and Kerry and I moved down the hill to 11th Street, where we took an apartment for ourselves. Our new place gave us ample privacy, yet was in a house that was full of other New-Age explorers. Though closer to the busy downtown, it had a peaceful back-yard with a fig-tree.
It was here that I was finally inducted into the mysteries of Dungeons & Dragons; Steve M. tried his hand as DM for the rest of us: Kerry, John, Vicki, and me. We spent most of the time constructing our characters, but when we finally played, I was immensely moved by the game's archetypal power. I felt as if I were dreaming with my eyes open! It seemed to me that this was how reality itself was constructed --- with a group of souls assembling and agreeing to dream it together, and then incarnating as characters specifically constructed to cooperate in exploring that reality's potentials. The implications for group-magic seemed very exciting! I was titillated by the possibility of using the material I was working on as a framework for a role-playing game, so that the players could actually learn the laws of magic and get to know their inner Council of Masters while they were playing. The potential has continued to haunt me over the years. We only played that once, however; another twelve years would roll by before I played again.
We were pretty happy, but continued to experience poverty; we paid the rent and the bills, but for a while we had no food. I was seeing a few clients, but not quite enough to pay all the expenses my trust-check didn't cover. We hadn't mentioned our plight to anyone, but our good friend Carolyn gave us about eight bags of grains of various kinds: rice, soy, millet, wheat, amaranth, etc. We thanked her and Divinity gratefully, and we lived for about a week on pan-fried bread. Shortly afterwards, Kerry went to work for her favorite company in Seattle, Pacific Desserts. She was much happier, and our money problems were over.
I had continued rebirthing myself over the months, and the process had become easier and easier as more old trauma was integrated and healed. I had recalled many suppressed layers of fear and pain, and I now had full conscious memory of myself emerging from my mother's womb, feeling massaged by the birth-process as I emerged into a cluster of doctors --- they seemed almost like a constellation of stars to me --- and then being lifted up by my heels and spanked into breathing. Were my subtle-body ascension experiences --- passing through the vibrating portal, emerging amidst a cluster of masters --- distorted memories of my own physical birth? While the theory held a tempting simplicity, and certainly a Freudian would explain them thus, still it did not seem entirely true to me; perhaps all births --- physical and spiritual --- shared a certain archetypal deep-structure, but that did not mean they were identical. Now, during that Autumn, much of the time I felt as if my whole body were being completely accepted and massaged by the surrounding Universe: the loving vagina of the Goddess.
In late November a rebirthing-client of mine invited me to a meeting that Sondra Ray was holding in her apartment in Seattle. I had by now read and used many of Sondra Ray's books in my counseling practice, and I wanted to meet her to express my gratitude for her work in the rebirthing field. Her apartment was luxurious and spacious, with beautiful views over Seattle. We were served salmon, which I ate with gusto; ever since the Bahamas, I now occasionally varied my vegetarian diet with chicken and fish. We sat around and shared our rebirthing experiences; I excitedly shared mine, and nodded when Sondra said some of us might even be experiencing some rebirthing memories at that very moment. I was indeed; I felt as if I were in my mother's womb, and could feel her heartbeat. Sondra Ray was as enthusiastic in person as she was in print, and I enjoyed her presence greatly.
The tenor of the meeting soon shifted slightly, however. Sondra Ray was teaching a new course and we were invited to participate. The cost was something like $300. I had obviously made a good beginning already; wouldn't I like to sign up? "No," I told her regretfully. Why not? Hmmm, I thought, looking inside myself. The money? A client's appointment already booked for that weekend? Both true, but not the root of the matter. I simply didn't feel that I needed any more courses. I said to her, "I am not moved." I felt on the one hand like a very small child --- perhaps this was my baby-self, wanting to stay in the womb --- and on the other, like an incarnation of Shiva, pointing out that He was the Unmoved One. "You are not moved?" she asked me incredulously. I looked inside again. That was all Shiva had to say on the matter. I repeated, "I am not moved," with an apologetic smile. "Hmp!" she said, and moved to speak with someone else.
At the close of 1985, I was still deeply immersed in unfolding the Canon, painting countless watercolors with calligraphic text to illustrate and explain the various sacred geometries: Now, I was consciously dwelling all the time in the realms I had briefly glimpsed on my return through my third eye in my first Kundalini experiences. By this time, I had evolved the twelve Buddhic Archangels of the Months, discovering the Planet and Sign for each of the twelve color-Rays, and I was now further subdividing them into a calendar of 144 Causal or Solar Angels, the symbols whereof I was trying to discover (I had most of them, but could not establish the correct sound-values for the Angels of the Atmic Realm). Furthermore, I had clearly felt there were to be twelve healing centers erected on the twelve major power-spots of the world: one center for each color-Ray. Where were these to be?
Jack Potticary and his fiancee had gone north, to live in the reclusive compound of investment-millionaire Dick Tuck on Orcas Island in the San Juans. Orcas was a wildly beautiful place, and home to many millionaires. Another was Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, and many other best-sellers; his ultra-light plane could often be spotted flying high overhead. Kerry and I visited Orcas with John and Vicki, and we were introduced to the beautiful Madrona Point and several other power spots by shaman Jim Hardman, who had lived on the north shore of Orcas all his life. Somewhat resembling a mythical faun, Jim was a very talented potter, painter, and New-Age music composer. His mate, coincidentally, was my favorite teacher from my TM-Teacher Training Course back at Livingston Manor, the humorous and delightfully-human Carol O'Brien. John and Vicki were enraptured by Orcas, and ended up moving there a few months later. I too was most impressed with the sanctity of the island; I felt Orcas was to be the Lunar (Cancer) healing center of the world, containing the global temple-library. When we returned to Seattle, I bought a globe and began inscribing a VE Matrix on it, to establish the locations of the other eleven major gates.
During the first months of 1986, I became sensitive to the VE-Matrix as a system of four great-circle ley-lines surrounding the globe, intersecting at the twelve "concentrative" power-spots. Each of these power-spots was to center one of the twelve major color-Rays. I stretched and tied additional strings around the globe, and discovered 14 additional "distributive" power-spots, centered in each of the VE Matrix's 14 faces. Now, I would often feel myself skating along these ley-lines, almost like monorails of light for my consciousness as I traversed the globe. I was aware that psychics would "see" my conciousness as one or a group of UFO's flowing over these ley-lines. I also received a brief glimpse of the entire starry universe as my own body, but its awesome poignancy was too intense to sustain; I dropped it quickly.
At the same time, I was personally plagued more and more by flashes of Kerry as a White Goddess, an aloof Snow Queen with bone-white skin, of poetic inspiration but also of freezing hauteur and denial. These powerful visions disturbed me; I didn't know what to do with them, so I ignored them, for the most part. Our relationship seemed overall to flourish; our souls continued to dwell in the same celestial realms, while our bodies experienced ever-greater trust in Tantric fusions that often were multi-faceted, involving several dimensions or lifetimes simultaneously. Several times during love-making we were also both aware of ourselves as Priest-King and Priestess-Queen in ancient Mesopotamia, making love as a sacred rite to increase the crop-yield. As I was making love with Kerry, the ancient Priest-King was loving his Priestess-Queen and ploughing the fertile earth simultaneously, reverently watching her body ripen into sheaves of grain.
At other times our sexes were reversed. As my femaleness was well-developed, so was Kerry's maleness. While I, though, was firmly heterosexual, she was strongly attracted to women. She had experimented a little as a teenager, and knew she would make love with some, one day. I found the idea exciting; sometimes we joked about a menage-a-trois, and spoke approvingly of open marriage. I don't think either of us suspected, though, that by my thirtieth birthday in March we actually would find ourselves deeply enmeshed in a threesome.
