MISCELLANEOUS
MISCELLANEOUS: Asana, TIMS, Ram Dass, Fritz Perls, Zen, Backster, LSD, Kwawer, Pittenger, Clingan, Oldest books, Simon, Farrell, Robbe-Grillet, Sontag, Iliad, Highet, SRI, LSD lecture, Aureon encounters, Non-fiction workshop, Judaism, Zen on “The Long Search,” and another “Long Search.” Dates are not in order, varying from 1964 to 1978, with various labeling systems. When I say miscellaneous, I really mean miscellaneous!
DIARY 94
12/11/68
ASANA CLASS
But then the day goes wrong when I decide that the idea I had last night to get rid of the programs is one that can be accomplished in a short period of time, and I get down to it all day, only to discover by 6 pm that I've gotten part of the ballet, part of the concerts, part of the opera, and part of the play pages finished, but I haven't touched many of the ballet and concert programs, and there's the enormous quantity of current (like from 1965 on) programs which haven't even been sorted as to category. My eyes are getting tired from the strain, and it's just taking enormously longer than I thought it would. Finish for a bit in order to have lunch-dinner: Linner, Dinch, Dunch, Lunner???---at 4:30, fulfilling the Asana requirement for 8 pm of eating a light meal 3-4 hours prior to the lecture. Take a shower and shave for the Asana lecture, making sure my stockings are good, since the shoes will probably be coming off, and dress very casually in blue jeans, since they say we'll be on the floor. Take off at 7:15 and get there rather early at 7:45, preparing for a crowd which might be limited for purposes of the class, and the redhead looks up to ask "Did you come for the Asana class?" It has much the same sound of the cancelled Nude Workshop, as I say that I have that, and he says it's been cancelled because there's a lecture for the student group at Steinway Hall which everyone's going to. I decide it's all the same, particularly when I pause a bit and he says "But if you really want the Asana lecture, I suppose I could get someone to give it to you." Then he makes it a bit nice by saying that everyone's going down by cab, and I'm perfectly welcome to share it free if I wish. I do wish, and ride down with Mrs. Collins, a terribly fat lady from the student section, and the dowdy blond who's always around as a foil to Mrs. Farber's loveliness. We chat about how the lecturer is the director of the student group, NOT a student, since he wouldn't be able to direct all the students, about 40, and his lectures are usually very good. I feel good about going to a student thing, and the crowd does my expectations justice, since it's full of absolute dolls of fellows with curling hair and soft eyes and hard legs encased in blue jean sausages.
DIARY 95
12/11/68
Notes from lecture: TIMS Special MEETING, with Director Jerry Jarvis
Sleep during meditation erases a fatigue at a level not reached by a deep sleep. "Feeling the body" is not done by FOCUSING, which would hinder feeling, but the attention will be drawn to that part of the body, and the discomfort will eventually pass, just take it and follow it AS it comes. Never concentrate in the meditation, when meditation "feels wrong," you've stopped transcendental meditation, come to the center and be checked. Must be balance between meditation and activity---ideal is maximum activity and maximum meditation. DROWN in meditation, THEN drown in activity. In illness, meditate long to keep attention INSIDE. It's good to have a routine of life and meditate at the SAME time. Seven levels of consciousness: (1) Sleep; (2) Dream; (3) Waking; (4) Meditation; (5) Cosmic consciousness, experience of BEING; (6) God consciousness---the last two are meant to be experienced and KEPT AS PART OF NORMAL HUMAN LIFE. (7) Supreme knowledge of creation---where God Consciousness is experience of highest manifestation of RELATIVE creation, Supreme Knowledge is that the relative is ABSOLUTE, and we LIVE that absolute. And ALL these levels take are (1) Regular meditation, (2) Proper guidance, and (3) Proper activity. A doctor is BEING a doctor, or NOT ACTING AS a doctor, but he is ALWAYS a doctor. In same way, BEING always IS, yet it can ACT dually as RELATIVE CREATION (Was and Will be) and yet STILL be BEING. The UNITY of being IS the solution of the paradox of eternal being and relative creation. There is no rebirth where there is a death, where there is ONLY eternal being. The body is a TOOL used in GETTING to the end, and if the tool breaks, then mind must RETOOL. Thus, reincarnation is a FAILURE. Five years to reach cosmic consciousness, then it takes three years of research and development to GOD consciousness. Movement launched in 1958, and in 1965, he laid out five-year plan. 18-24 months of meditation, then further instruction is given and you get to course two. Course two is about one year and you get MORE instruction. OUR times and notices are computerized, we'll get NOTICE of "fertilization necessary" after 18-24 months. "He/in desperation/took meditation." "My mother said, Don't go to India, go to Miami." WED and SUN group meditation at 8 pm.
DIARY 612
10/1/69
CATCHING UP (NOTES FROM RAM DASS)
1) We live a life caught between two mirrors. There is the sphere of the universe, silvered on the inside, reflecting inward. And there is the sphere of the self, silvered on the outside, reflecting outward. Normally, life is caught between these two mirrors, the mirror of the self within the mirror of the universe. Religion directs us to polish the mirror of the self so that we may see more clearly. Science attempts to polish the mirror of the universe so that we may know more fully. Yoga shows how to penetrate the mirror of our self with our mind, so that we may see it, mirrored in the universe, as being all things. I say that the mirror of the universe should be removed, so there is no more reflection, only "it," untouched, unreflected, untouchable. But "it moves" in a space other than ours through a time other than ours, creating the universe. Then the universe is not an illusion: "it" IS real, but we haven't the point of view to realize that our universe (and all universes) outside our time and space, is only "it."
2) Eating a pear at lunch, slipping the still-living fruit into my mouth, my living earth becomes even more human. As I eat to live, so it MUST be seen that the EARTH must open its mouth in graves to receive the bodies (or ashes) of all living, so that IT may go on living, otherwise the fruit (man) would live but the tree (earth) would die. And if the tree (earth) dies, there can be no more fruit (men).
3) Strange, thinking of eating, that we don't, CAN'T, see ourselves biting and eating, as many animals do. Is this good or BAD?
4) ALSO strange, thinking of seeing, that OTHER parts of our bodies don't see (our fingers can't see items, though they can feel, even in the dark). And why can't we see INWARD, to see the ulcer or cancer or blood clot? Will we GROW into it?
5) Debating with RD (IS that Richard or Ram Das?), he comes up with the idea of God, the God sinned against by the "first parents," causing them to be thrown out of the Garden of Eden. THIS, much more likely than V's Collision of Mars and Venus, is likely to make the human race paranoid, the universal guilt complex against sinning. Was like ADAM and EVE didn't know there was a god, and DOUBTED, and that got them into trouble. So original sin wasn't disobedience, or sex (could it have been the procreation of children, the first case of over-population, and the guilt stems from their thought that maybe they loved their children more than god, and DEATH was invented as the punishment for bringing NEW lives into the world: and making another clause onto "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, LIFE FOR LIFE:" they gave birth, and THUS must die!), or lack of love for God, where would that lead?), but DOUBT OF GOD. That's why ALL religions, INCLUDING the Yoga, relies on FAITH IN THAT RELIGION AS THE ONLY (or at least by far the best, since RD stepped into "All ways lead to the light") WAY TO GET WHERE YOU WANT TO GO---NOT-DEATH!!
6) RD's "Ego-Osterizer" is cute, but not what I meant. The JOY of remaining ME, is the joy of knowing that (for all that's wrong) I AM me!
7) For ONCE, let's have a religion which does NOT say, "He who knows, does not speak." or "For those who know, there is no way of telling those who DON'T know." It's only a cop-out to silence the incessant talker, to appease the inept teacher.
8) THOU ARE THAT, YOU GROK GOD, GOD IS LOVE, LOVE IS IT.
THAT IS YOU, GROK GOD IS LOVE IS IT.
THAT IS IT.
THAT'S IT!
9) RD's "I'm here, how are you?" making the enormous assumption that "I'm here" means "I'm fine," though you CAN be here and STILL be unhappy, as he was, at times.
ODDS AND ENDS---Last fellow eating with fingers, even to melon. Henry mock-praying before every bite "He's so weird I can't keep my eyes off him" as a girl across from him says. Bob keeps his eyes on his plate except for the sighing Liz---is this a mother image? Jim is looking all around, but he mainly has eyes for Ed. Many of the waif-girls with glasses have singled out Henry or Ed for their admiring gazes. RD bounces in and says "You don't look so much like Indians sitting there on the floor, as short Westerners." Since the table is square, my non-blessing of food stands out. Lois cocks an appraising eye at her small tomato and it dawns on me: love apples! I fumble one and as she looks over I pick it off the floor and suck it into my mouth with a plop that sends her into hand-sheltered face-convulsions. Main thing about RD is his SANCTIMONIOUSNESS. Girls giggle and ask about Chakra 2, and he tells about the English chick called Caroline who's sent him to India, then leads them on into the Tibetan temple tahini's (or something), who are schooled in 4th Chakra by monks who have NO interest in lust, which is mere subject-object sex. Is THAT why my sex is so much more fun than others'?
The point of view is all: as I walk back into the room he's saying that it's useless for people to record things in their notebooks, because "it's never enough." All religions based on faith have ALL the answers. If you say that you disagree with them, they say "You're trampling on my flowers," or "I'm not skillful enough to let you in on it like my guru let ME in on it." (but of course if he'd been PERFECTLY into the role, he wouldn't be around to talk to me). He got beat up in Big Sur because he had a "flicker of impurity"---maybe if he'd BEEN pure he'd been killed, and we wouldn't be around to hear about it.
Soon I'll be accused of sending out "bad vibrations," and they'll boot me out of the group because I'm bringing everyone down, by my "ego standing out like a sore thumb." He makes constant references to our "encounter" yesterday morning that "sucked me into this big vortex that put me back under the heavy load." And then the girl "verified" with "Yeah, I saw you sitting there with a suit on."
RD describes his utter despair with everything in India, so that at a certain point, ANYTHING would fill the despair. And that's true of everyone, they seek in their despair until one of two things happen: something happens that brings them out of it, or they suicide. He repeats the idea that "everything I did before was intended to lead me up to my 'redemption,'" which I had felt leading up to each LSD/pot "business."
It's both/and. It's a "hype" if you don't believe it, but it's true if you have the faith in it. (Karma yoga: keep DOING everything but have the WITNESS). It all sounds like an ego trip, but these hysterical gals sob and bend forward and yearn to touch his feet, while I sit back and wince. All extend their ego trips by saying "I fasted for 18 hours. I went for three days, I went for eight days, I went for 18 days"---"Oh, I faint a lot when I do 9-day fasts."
It's "The Way" if it's the way for YOU, but it's not the way if some OTHER way is stronger.
IF he really wanted us to be alone, we'd EAT alone and have our OWN cells and never SEE each other to be tempted, because the girls are cozying up to me and other guys, and one girl lays back on Ed's legs and everyone NOTES it with varying degrees of "interpersonal jealousy."
He pauses, he retreats to his beads, he thinks desperately what to say, then places the blame on me by saying that I flip out---rather than WE don't meet.
Even rudeness has its excuse if the person is great enough: his Maharaji can tell the fellow who took him to India in his $7000 land rover (what happened to the Caroline who sent him YESTERDAY?) to "Get out of here" and with every validity in the world say that the vibrations weren't right, exactly because he didn't appear as miraculous to the person who saw him as a self-seeking old man.
Phrases about "Who'd want this old body, anyway," lead closer to the truth than he'd like to admit. He's much too easy to talk about sex off-handedly, he's much too ready to leave himself open to "Oh, gee, you're so great, let me give you my body in the fifth Chakra," and the way is open to good old-fashioned sex, which happens to be one of the FEW things that have been around even longer than religion.
The three Hindu gunas: energy, inertia, and the drive toward enlightenment, or as he so indelicately put it, the drive toward further evolution, sounds pretty good.
There's no information about sex with the 6'7" blond hair-down-to-shoulders guy from Laguna Beach who was so easy to meet in Nepal and have "five days of talk, eat, sleep, ice cream, and hot baths"---who was IN these baths?
"You'd look at him and see an old man in a blanket," he says to me, the perfect put-down for one who has no faith and does not SEE. He was SO taken with the blond that he was willing to follow him anywhere (and then this sickly thing of seeing his mother and her saying "go"), that anyone HE would bow down to would certainly take on the aspect of a god in his eyes. Anyone that you admire who admires someone ELSE---this third person is obviously someone of note.
So again it's a cul de sac, it's a corner that I painted myself into. Since I've never SEEN any of those things, I don't believe them, and if I WOULD see, I'd think I'd managed to hype myself into believing them, and we're back to the both/and of 2).
He even offered to refund part of my money if I left, but I said I'd stay if he'd let me, and he couldn't say anything, but he let me stay. This, again, makes me impatient. His "lifestyle," to steal from Arnie, FORCES him to not send me away, much as he might like to, so he cops out of his choice and mumbles something about "karma" and "watching it unfold," and pretends he doesn't have a choice and makes the best of a bad situation.
It's appealing to think that the India that produced these ideas was so far back in time that it was a Garden of Eden where everyone picked fruit from the trees, and that the toils of many DIDN'T go into the pockets of the few, but I couldn't help think that KARMA isn't the main reason today why India is overpopulated, under industrialized and starving.
Many books around, but as I'd already stated I'd READ them all, I avoid them, and that leaves me lots of free time to meditate.
Silence is good, because people can't complain about the lousy food to each other, about how cold it is, about how crowded the cottage is with six of the eight beds filled, about some of the stupidities of the guru and some of the possible gems from the students.
The Pranayam that sucks in the breath, hits it, snorts out the breath, hits it, and starts slowly and evenly and gets faster and faster is curiously exciting, as if it were mimicking the sound of orgasm.
RD is preternaturally alert to outside noises, looking at everyone who comes in and out, telling how to do things, and even telling the guy giving out the tea HOW to give out the tea, as if it mattered.
Mantra-reciting is terribly awkward, because most of the mind is taken up with 1) how do I breathe, 2) when do I start the sound, 3) What tone do I give it, 4) Just HOW do I say it (and most say it wrong, and it DOES sound stupid), 5) and how long does it last? I tend to come out with the sound FIRST, and tend to lead, but have to slow down and let RD start the sound, but then it's awkward for ME. Only at the end did HE drop out, and then various others would take over the lead for one or two, get embarrassed, and someone ELSE would start.
Thankfully, no one smoked, which could be the last irony. And ironic it WAS when RD said this tall lovely blond who "had so much" SMOKED. If he had so much, why did he need to smoke?
He agrees that the colors of Hindu paintings are garish, with their liquid greens, their putrid oranges and their metallic reds.
The tea (Mu tea, he said) has a sweet, chicken-fat smell like broth, and an off-tea taste which is pleasant, but not as appetizing as the mouth-watering smell---particularly after pranayam!
It rains and the Sufi dancing is put off again, as if us mules still need carrots to get to the end of the week.
There's always the name-dropping details---the car, it was a new Cadillac, my father, he's a member of the President's Club, the guide, he was really beautiful, a tailor but everyone came around to listen to him talk. All an ego trip, which he admits as drama, but (both/and) the audience moans NO, it's all so relevant, and I say, MOVE, is that DRAMA?
But I can't sneer, I've got to use my fourth chakra and give him the compassion he so desperately needs---man, I DIG you and it's all OK. May he CRY? Or even the 5th and love him, which would be ICK.
The girls go from a headstand up onto her forearms and thuds dramatically to the floor, who yesterday asked questions about her fourth chakra mantra, which meant to HER that she was there, and she managed to moan about "all her sex drives and ego drives were being dissipated in this terrible compassion and she just NEVER had sex or ego-urges" without making the audience break up.
As we're freezing in the rain, the owner asks if it's hot enough inside, as the stove fumes (but it's since gone out) make a window open necessary, and that didn't count the broken panes high upon the wall that was always there, letting out the heat high up very effectively.
Krishnamurti Bulletin: Krishnamurti Foundation of America, P.O. Box 215, Ojai, California 93023 (Send $5 for "This light in Oneself," record of 1968, send $5 MORE and ask to be put on mailing list) 35¢ for booklet "Five Conversations."
It's all a question of selection and "what turns you on," since all the other periodicals on the box seem stupid and childish, yet I resolve to send away to the K foundation.
Room fills with smoke from the defective furnace, making it even more temple-like. The sounds of coins being shaken for I Ching, "Wanna hold the ladder, George" "I sure do." Now, THAT'S nice.
If I can only keep my mind on other things, I think, denying the thought with the action, I won't be so hungry through this 24-hour fast.
The game may be in me or in him (or in both), but the staring during the "interminable mantra" could only be stopped by my lying my head on the floor, saving him face since many were looking and would take it as my "high drama" submission to his benevolent gaze. Raised back up later to see the two girls going shrilly off into wild hysteria.
The fertility of the Seminar House was inconceivable. We sat on the lawn and were besieged by tiny flies that buzzed around our heads, a half dozen or more to each head. The grass was literally alive in each square inch with an ant, either large red or small black, or cricket or crawling fly or ladybug or spider, some of which caused difficulty with people who were particularly affected by them.
Then Liz got on my nerves with her incessant sighing, as if she never breathed, only gasped great lungfuls when needed.
She scratched her head much the same way as beautiful Bob, but at least his was beautiful, too. Ed and his friend sat in the corner and whispered away in the silence, and it was 4 pm, the awaited dinner nearing, the session of hatha yoga (postures) [nad yoga: inner sounds; tratak yoga, gazing at an object, like a fixed flame; and then there was the Zazen meditation, facing a wall and eyes lowered to a point on the floor, noting where the mind goes, and walking Zazen meditation, right hand clenched over the heart and the left hand clenched over it. Rajah Yoga, royal way, meditation; tantric yoga, through sex and senses, though these seem to be adequately described nowhere---as if in the selection of books from the New Testament to Lao Tsu to obscure modern Indians they couldn't find a GOOD introductory yoga book.
Ed's outlandish girlfriend makes Liz laugh by eating everything, including the acorn squash and lime ice cream, with her fingers.
But the meal seems to go quickly, probably since everyone's very hungry, though I don't feel it until I actually START eating, when my stomach goes out of its mind with rumbles.
RD and I seem to have a different relationship when it comes to the Hatha Yoga and he's over good-naturedly pushing my head down between my knees for something or other. Then he really gets in and feels around my neck and shoulders, and down around my waist, and finds things are loose and flexible and OK there, but there seems to be a mass of stiffness "Hard as a rock" around the middle of the back, and in fact he kneads it and the casing of bone and cartilage and muscle seems not to move at all. When we finished the exercise, he makes some statement to the effect that if I could keep it up for two or three months, I would find my body changing quite drastically and myself gaining great flexibility and skill "since I have so far to go" I say ruefully, flattered nonetheless. He hastens to tell me about the fellow "with just your body" at his farm in New Hampshire, who made great strides in just a month. All grins and smiles, and I'm waiting for tonight, when with the staying up, I'll just possibly be passing the borderline into "the room" about 4-5 am, and we might REALLY get to some new astral planes, RD and me, and I have the vague fantasy of writing this as my last words before shedding virag completely this evening, going into Satchitananda WITH RD, and both of us vanished before the startled eyes of the remaining 12 in a puff of cosmic "isness."
One must admit the evening begins well enough: women in blue sequined lounging pajamas lie about on the floor counting on their molas, candle light dimly and romantically, and the stove is so hot that the door is left open, allowing the cooling rain smell and the persistence of crickets and the mantric repetition of a raindrop on a garbage can lid. The carpets look richly red and blue in the candlelight, and the waning lack of interpersonality has been wearing off, and people smile, nod to acknowledge, and whisper huddled about a candle flame. Even Liz is so transformed I look at her and think she might be a rough-featured male addition to the group.
ATMA-VICHARA: "Who am I? I am not this physical body, nor am I the five organs of sense perception; I am not the five organs of external activity (vocal, hands, feet, anus, genitals), nor am I the five vital forces (controlling respiration, digestion, blood circulation, perspiration, excretion), nor am I even the thinking mind. "I am not this, nor am I this, nor this"/. Pure Awareness is what "I" am.
There is no such thing as mind apart from thought. There is no physical world apart from thought. The world is perceived as an apparent objective reality when the mind is externalized, thereby forsaking its identity with the Self. In this separateness it is known as the subtle body, ego, or soul. This FIRST-THOUGHT of the mind, the primal I-thought, comes from hrydayan (this center). All subsequent thought is dependent on this I-thought. As the stick used for stirring the burning funeral pyre is consumed, so finally is the I-thought by inquiry Who Am I?, after it has destroyed other thought.
As I had wished it, Liz got out of the hammock as I ambled toward it, wanting to feel what it was like.
The morning was clear after the rain, and the drops of wetness on the grass made the ground glisten. Ed's girl was playing the drums, and they echoed all over the area, and later I didn't go into the barn because someone was twanging the sitar.
Sitting and looking at all the bugs in the grass, I thought:
1) Anyone who TRULY lets EVERYTHING live could not move, and then could never die because he'd kill the gigabillion bodily parasites.
2) These bodily parasites would consider man the universe, and I visualize tale of a civilization of cells in a blood corpuscle, how they know about other worlds in passing corpuscles, how they get messages from the hemoglobin in the blood from the marrow in the bones, and from the white corpuscles from the lymph nodes, and all the other systems. They'd have senses LIKE sight, but of course couldn't see in the body's darkness. And the other proprioceptive senses. And they IMAGINE the trauma, destruction and decay as the human DIES. Do they know he's human, existence of OTHER humans, think of him as the God who CREATED their corpuscle? What do they know of "inside" and "outside"?
By Friday, the socialization had increased to the unpleasant point---people stood and sat around and talked, and discussions no longer went through RD, but everyone was again his own leader, and the spirit of the group being dead, RD came down and was stupider than ever. By contrast, I FAR preferred the silence, though in MY ignorance I did my part to break it down, and the awesome mysteries of each of us became the smiling hugs, mug shots for cameras (about which RD was strongly subjective), and endless fruitless (though of course pleasant) talks. Ed's girl had bubbled about how GREAT the group spirit was, though I, and I feel others, felt out of the group, and I thought back to the group feeling I'd projected onto the Aureon Encounter, and feared that I may have been as mistaken about them as she was about THIS, or at least MY inclusion in this group.
And the isolates were even more isolated. I could bear to sit next to Liz at the table because no social interchange was expected, and it was easier to respect that with HER than with the bubbly blond Lois next to me. But after Lois hugged RD and Henry and Jim, and other girls were found in various sexless embracings, the plight of Liz and Deborah seemed more poignant than ever, Liz talking to herself and bustling from one place to another as if she were looking for the friend in the group that didn't exist, Rebecca sat on a bench in the physical center but emotional outskirts, pretending to read with yogic detachment, but looking fixedly at the groups laughing together and the couples chatting quietly, and the book was forgotten, to be greeted by a lonely sigh as she bent back to the book in the bright sun.
Crickets and locusts and birds faded into the afternoon background sounds of sitar from the barn, wind from the trees, and dabbling splashes from the tiny stone-filled pond, the buzz of bees and incessant flies, sometimes too close to eyes or ears to ignore, the dull thud of a passing plane, the swish and gravel rattle of speeding cars, and talk from people. From an ashram in unidentified hills outside America, Bucks County Seminar House had become a resort in the Poconos for a group of people whom socialization had ALREADY washed the tiny beginning of boredom with each other and anticipation that tomorrow is the last day. Of course I took refuge in writing, becoming the witness (except when I was God and the Witness), and exempting myself from socialization from fear of no one to talk to, having to chat with the females who were after me, and caressless awkwardness with the males that I found so attractive. Ah! The CURSE of attachment!
Chapatti-making is a can of worms---56 have to be mixed, cut into 8 parts of 7 each, 7 of them oiled to prevent drying out, and only one is taken and cut into 7, 6 of which are thrown back into the pot, and the ONE, SINGLE one is rolled and rolled and rolled until it is VERY thin, then fried on a hot pan, ungreased except for ghee or oil sprinkled on top. Mu tea is the great stuff we've been drinking, and it contains 18 ingredients, and the basic first macrobiotic diet is brown rice and mu tea, and that's ALL.
He speaks of India, how people wipe themselves with their left hands and water, how his first month's 3-day fast was terrible, but his second month's fast was easier, and it took him about 6 months to get totally used to it. His teacher (the fat one, Swagwar Dass, or someone) who doesn't do hatha or raja yoga) said that it would take three years for his body to change from a Westerner's to an Eastern ascetic's body.
And in walked God with his shoulder bag and cassette tape recorder.
ADITYA HRIDAYAM PUNYAM; SARV SHATRU BENA SHENAM.
All evil vanishes from life for him who keeps the sun in his heart.
James: Varieties of Religious Experience: page 81:
"I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long;
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth"
From Song of Myself by Walt Whitman.
THAT ARE THOU: YOU GROK GOD: GOD IS LOVE.
Bakti yoga is only in head, devotional love to God. Raja yoga goes into everything (breathing, body, mind). Karma yoga: you watch it unfold, working out your Karma. Karma increases anytime the individual acts with attachment. Gyeon yoga is meditation to one-pointedness, concentration on one thought---mantra yoga is a PART of it.
From a 16th-century Norman crucifix:
I am the great sun-----------but you do not see me.
I am your husband------------but you turn away.
I am the captive-------------but you will not free me.
I am the captain-------------you will not obey.
I am the truth---------------but you will not believe me.
I am the city----------------where you will not stay.
I am your wife, your child---but you will leave me.
I am that God----------------to whom you will not pray.
I am your council------------but you do not hear me.
I am your lover--------------whom you will betray.
I am the victor--------------but you do not cheer me.
I am the holy dove-----------whom you will slay.
I am your life---------------but if you will not name me
Seal up your soul with tears and never blame me.
SUFI DANCING:
1) Join hands in circle, spread out, walk counterclockwise saying "Allah HO." Two people into center, facing, raising hands in air above heads like bowing "Allah ho," then lowering the bending into the bow, sharply, "Allah HUCK." They then step through 90° clockwise and repeat 3 times, at least.
2) Drop hands, stand, look to left: "El" snap head to front and say "Allah" snap head to right and say "Ho." Two people to center, grasp hands, running clockwise around hands, repeating "Allah HOOOOOOO."
3) Link hands, swinging them frontwards "Allah," swinging them backwards "HO." Into center goes a dervish, shouting "HOOOOO" as he spins clockwise, stopped by circle.
4) Drop hands, diminish circle, right hand up to front person's left shoulder, around faster and faster, saying, "Allah ho," until circle pulls apart and each element spins until exhausted.
There are TWO possibilities: to say
1) NOT that, NOT that, I am NONE of that, or
2) I AM that, AND I am that, and I am ALL that.
Composed during last day:
Bluebirds blazed in red trees.
My eyes held them
As cold branches grasped their feet.
Jay's cries scratched harsh marks
Across the clear air of sky.
Chalk lines of white slate.
Each step dislodges grasshoppers.
Flying flecks flee
As shadows shun dawn.
Blood-stained maple leaves,
Still green,
Startled that autumn should change them so soon.
Confusion of colors:
Yellow leaves, indigo-veined,
Blushing to red.
Lace-trace on leaf-back,
River-map in miniature.
Chlorophyll blood.
Motor-mutter invades the temple,
Cutting incense silence:
With Time.
Plucked stalk dying,
Fresh cerements
Annihilating preservation.
Sun shaft on madras:
Antiquities illumination
Here, yes, now.
Red Carpets on concrete:
Cold luxury for bare feet.
Man's sweat's soft \scent.
Asana strains prana.
Body exertion clenches lungs
Like flexed fists.
DIARY 648
12/22/69
NOTES FROM FRITZ PERLS
Young boy comes up to talk, and Perls says: "No, nothing, please" putting his hand up. Boy sits back, a red-faced smile frozen on his face.
"I just have to sit helpless and someone comes to rescue the damsel in distress," as a pretty young girl walks up the aisle to give matches for his lightless cigarette. From the movie, he loves Kyoto and Elath.
First words: "I have no stage manners, so I introduce myself in the film."
Everyone always plays roles that are escapes from being animals. We think animals are inferior species, but MAN is rapidly spoiling the planet. "Gestalt therapy is part of the ecological approach." We all write out our own life-script, karma, destiny. Dream is condensed life-script, full of messages. He smokes incessantly, asks pretty girls to "hug me."
Layers in people: cliché, roles, imploding (uptight, held in, tensed up), exploding (grief, joy, orgasm, anger), authenticity.
Perls' "Self-support" leaves me with my "All I've got is ME, and that's shit." Is THAT where HE is, and what Ram Dass saw in ME, too? So I've gotten to Perls' level, but got to go beyond him, to the LOVE he doesn't show. Self-support cuts out love of others, doesn't it?
"He tried to suck me in," says Perls, when he ACTUALLY (?) didn't HEAR what Perls said, "Change your seat?" Perls is Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion after he got his courage. But Perls was right "I detach myself from you," says Craig, PERLS SAW THAT! Perls: You have to learn to wipe your own ass." Monty: "You don't give a shit"---it makes the wiping EASIER! Monty admits: I'm trying to suck you in. WHY??
Maturation is going from environmental support to self-support (but CHILDREN are marvelously self-supporting: inventing their own friends, own worlds---and there they ARE happy. Society's definition of maturation is AGAINST this! PERLS IS self-supporting, and it gives people reason to HATE him. "The INSANE are totally cared for, and everyone hates THEM, too." So there has to be some dependence somewhere, or you're ALONE?!
DIARY 657
12/18/69
ZEN - 1
"The dust motes were only visible in the light, so you got the idea that there WERE no others, yet the hall was full of them. So the strobe light gave you the idea there was "more" to the movement than you actually saw."
That tiny note was the only note taken during the Zen Introduction on 12/18, but there were so many frustrations and disheartenments about the evening that I have to set the whole thing down the same night. First I was told to get there at 6:15, which was verified when I telephoned that morning, but the thing really didn't start until 7. I, smart guy, wanting to get there early to maybe look around (assuming as casual an operation as the Maharishi's), got there about 6:05, and the small colored fellow said that he'd rung, and they said the door would be opened in ten minutes. The hall was neat and new, part of an old stable along 67th, next to "...and Vinnie's" (which contributed noisy people on the sidewalks outside to disturb the meditations inside), and the dust motes were in the tiny square entranceway that boasted mailboxes for the Zen Studies Center, Shimono (who turned out to be the head priest, and the Roshi everyone talked about was now 85 and too old to journey from Japan, so he wouldn't be there anymore), and Carpenter Guevera, so there were strangers on the top floor, unless they were connected with the place, too. About 6:10 a fellow who looked as if he belonged came in, buzzed shortly, took his shoes off in obedience to the sign, buzzed again, finger-combed his long blond hair, and buzzed again. The door opened quickly, I saw a glimpse of gray-robed men holding the door open and coming down the stairs, a waft of incense floated out, and then the door was closed, leaving the confused dust motes orbiting the light shaft.
The little old woman across from me loosened the laces on her shoes and shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Others came and, finding the antechamber full, waited outside, peeping back in from time to time to see if the time had come. Almost exactly at 6:15 the door opened, and everyone bent to remove their shoes, two fellows even taking off their socks, but I thought that was a bit much.
Responding to the sign that said "Tell the doorman if this is your first time," I looked toward the androgynous doorkeeper (The hair and the delicacy of the fingers said she, but the flat-chested look was more he than she, but under the burlappy wrinkled semi-penitent's smock, it didn't really make much difference.), and it said "Hang your coat in the closet and then come back to me," as if I wasn't capable of remembering a sequence of instructions. I'd already put my shoes into the mailbox-like affair just inside the door, hung up my coat, and returned to my directorix. "Go to the first floor and turn to the right; they'll tell you what to do then."
Up the softly carpeted stairs, brightly lit, marred only by the painted-over scars where they'd removed the hardware which supported the vanished banister, I turned right across a small hallway, a closed door to the left, over the stairwell a painting of a fat Japanese mystic with a hairy chest under an open cloak and a dirty-smiling face, and the end of the hall was boxed into a room that had no entrance from the hall.
Into the room at the side of the stairway, and I was greeted by the lotus-seated figure of a shaven-headed young man with glasses and a board up his back who directed me to "take the first pillow on the right, and sit down facing the wall." There was another person in the room, a many-garmented hippie with dirty golden corduroys who was wandering down the brightly lit room on the saffron carpet toward the formal Buddhist altar at the far end under spotlights. Punk smoked in an urn, a candle burned, flowers drooped, and a small replica of the stairwell painting completed the objects subsidiary to a large bronze Buddha in the "preaching" position.
I settled onto the farthest pillow until the gray robe rather curtly directed me to "take the first AVAILABLE pillow, please," and I concluded that the hippie was the first pillow, and I was the second. I sat down facing the wall, sitting on the foot-square round pillow, black on the floor, and debated taking up the best approximation I could to the lotus. The hippie shuffled over next to me, plumped himself down cross-legged, stretched his arms out straight behind his back and twisted his arms and torso to crack bones, and adapted a rigid lotus, the back of his trousers falling away from his kidney region, so that I could even see the cleft of the buttocks as he sat directly and correctly on his yoni. Soon his breathing became audible and controlled, and I figured this might be his first time here, but it wasn't his first introduction to the mysteries of the East.
Since it promised to be a long evening, I sat down in my most comfortable floor-position: knees up, arms wreathed about them, one hand holding onto the other wrist to form a circle, almost everything relaxed, except that the back had a tendency to bow and constrict breathing. I stretched up straight every so often, and noticed my partner was beginning to slump, and he brought up his right hand into the "now breathe in through this nostril, then out, then breathe in through the other nostril, then out" that Ram Das taught me. Then he straightened up with a sigh, and began his regular breathing again. Two colored fellows came in next, and were seated next to me, and only a slight sense of mystification prevented them from talking and laughing together: they were as new here as I.
Two other single fellows came in, one a yummy looking chap with bright black eyes and a formidable fringe of hair from the top of his head to the point of his obscured but strong chin. Toward 7 a fellow came in only in a tee-shirt, adapted an absolutely beautiful double lotus, and sat still as rigor mortis. Two other fellows came in at the end, and then, when I was beginning to fume with impatience (I didn't have the wit to think it could have STARTED later than 6:15, I just assumed they wanted us to have a taste of meditation even if we didn't have the faintest idea what it was to meditate). The main priest came in to talk with our fellow, and when the ponderous gong outside sounded, there was the almost simultaneous chime of a bell from our room and from the next room, which contained those who WEREN'T here for the first time, and we were told "We're going downstairs now." Not what we were doing downstairs, but that we were going downstairs.
There was a pause and a bunch-up at the door, probably allowing the other room to go down ahead of us, so I don't know if there was anyone downstairs to start with or not, but when we got to the room below our first room, it took up almost the whole floor, with two rows of a slightly raised boxed-in set of tatami, and on each tatami was a three-foot square black pillow, surmounted with little round ones like we had. There were 37 of us in all in this room, doing what I knew to be the walking meditation, but you couldn't have proved it to most of the newcomers. We were told to walk out of the upstairs room with our hands folded upward in prayer, and we kept them that way until, one by one, we decided that the others in the room were clasping both hands to their chest, and I decided to follow the others, and someone must have been so quick, because Shosano announced that the proper stance for this walk was the hands palm down on chest. It was one of the first words of instruction we heard.
We walked north down the east wall, came to the Oriental nook at the corner with a statuette of Buddha on a donkey, arms raised in glee, turned around the flower-garden affair of the tatamis, then turned back along that set of mats until we passed a huge cauldron in the center of the floor, then doubled back around that to go down the center aisle again, toward a smaller altar with the burning punk, and beyond to the left another smaller room which had someone standing praying in it, and beyond was a lighted outdoor formal garden with tree-skeletons sharing the air with three stones and nothing more beside the brick wall backing and the pattern-raked gravel. Then we turned around the tatamis on the west side of the room and walked south, down to the end of the room, then circled the end of the room and followed ourselves back up the west wall.
This went on for only about 10 minutes (I was envisioning another half-hour wasted), and then we were directed "Return to your seats." For the people in that room it was easy, but the new ones followed until the parade stopped, and then there was the baffled silence. "Return to your seats" was repeated again, and then our keeper appeared out of the darkened room and dragged the first of us novices into the room, saying "This way." And we returned upstairs.
The pillows had been changed into four aisles of about ten each, and I went back to where my first one had been, and then everyone seemed to follow us up, because the room filled with everyone I'd seen downstairs, and the priest took up his position in front of the altar and announced that this night was the last night of this year, and possibly to celebrate that he said he wouldn't be talking, but that he'd answer any of our questions, so we wouldn't be "frustrated" was his work.
Since I was so new, I didn't want to waste anyone else's frustration, so I kept quiet, but one of the colored fellows asked my question, and the response was that there was an orientation session afterwards, if we would come back up afterwards. Afterwards what, he didn't say.
One man came up with a typical question. He had "put his thoughts into his left palm, his mind was completely blank, and he experienced a momentary peace. What now?" Just like the Maharishi's questions about "Hey, what comes after the white light of awareness?" He fumbled with the answer for a number of minutes and decided that "it would be up to what you wanted to get out of it." Another question about pain in the meditation position was answered by saying that the meditator should repeat "Pain, pain, pain," and the expression on his face was remarkable, "and you BECOME pain, you attract all the pain in the world to you." Another asked about breathing, another asked about koan practice (It is dangerous to select your own koan, was the predicted answer), and then his half-hour was up and we were told we were having another walking session, and that those who were beginners would come back for further instructions.
Another firm direction, how lucky we were!
Another walking session, I looking at the large-lumped jeans of a fellow, and some of the dreadful females, and when we were told "Return to your seats," we actually knew where to go and what to do.
Back upstairs the pillow-changer had again been at work and there was a circle of pillows, and our keeper told us something about breathing counting, and how to assume the "firm position," with both knees on the ground. I was better with two cushions, but he couldn't tell me how to stop the pain on the tops of my feet. I got out of the position soon, to feel the boiling blood perk through my veins, but he didn't even critique me. Then we were downstairs again for another walk, and then we ended up in the chilly ante-zazen room for our final meditation, with something about folded hands and a clap on the back that I didn't hear, so I didn't do.
Then he said (I got so tired I got out of position in about ten minutes) there would be a hand-out for the newcomers, and we got up and left, knowing there would be no more meetings until January 8. I picked up the brochure, tried a bit to cruise some of the cuties waiting outside, and walked home too late to catch the TV at 8:30 OR the WBAI at 8.
After I got home, Arnie called up, having seen not only my light from the street, but my shadow on the window as I cut the steak to put it into the broiler, and invited himself up. I prepared my dinner, ate until about 10:45, lightly because the steak was totally bone in the center, and then I typed these six pages until 11:30, when I went in to watch "The Actress," a rather poor thing with Jean Simmons about the decision year of Ruth Gordon, with Spencer Tracy as the kvetchy father ranting about nothing in particular except poverty. Then we got to bed at 1:30, and I had the continuous feeling that I was doing so much nothing these recent days that I really should re-commence the DIARY day-by-day (after all, it would only take ten minutes each day), to see WHAT the nothing is that I DO do.
DIARY 1064
4/23/70
NOTES FROM BACKSTER
He's boring when he's talking about what I'M not interested in.
He found the reaction first on February 2, 1966, for no reason.
I had the following questions to ask: (1) Effect of walls, none, effect valid at 700 miles. (2) Effect of silencers, nothing effective, neither voltage walls, nor lead, nor water. He did NOT use LIFE to test its interference powers. (3) It's a variable response rather than all-or-nothing, but it's unknown what affects intensity and duration. (4) A plant reaction vs a polygraph reaction solved when a fixed resistor attached showed straight line graphs. (5) Human vs animals vs plants vs cultures (How LOW does the effect go, he says he's WORKING down the scale, GETS the effect with human undifferentiated cells, and has a "program of disclosure" worked out for some fantastic discovery about metallic atoms. (6) Do plants sleep, get sick, get preoccupied? Plants NEVER adapt to death of human cells, and SICK plants don't react, and WELL plants don't react to SICK deaths. (7) He listed what he didn't expect and got, but nothing that he DID expect that he DIDN'T get. (8) Does it vary with the PART of plant tested (leaves, flower, root, fruit)? (9) He didn't test UNHEALTHY plant communicating with an UNHEALTHY shrimp. (10) Any unknown second-level effects: wife to husband to plant. (11) Opposite: maybe plants are JOYFUL at liberation from GAME OF LIFE. (12) Plant's reaction to people being HIGH?
Other points: People who bought the plants did NOT know about the purpose of the research. There DOES seem to be a "concentration" of plant on the LAB area, a "discretion" used for the people there. There must be an exposure or affinity to violence---won't react to strangers killing. You can't tell one emotion from another on a polygraph (so that plant COULD be happy with death, rather than sad). NOT sure how long it takes to attenuate the response down to no response. Feb-Mar '69 issue of "National Wildlife," also reprinted in "Science and the Mind." They haven't yet tested it on a human subject with 500,000 volts going through him. He calls ESP "Primary sense; five senses COVERS it, because we FEAR it. MAYBE the capabilities are WORN OUT, and we've managed to attenuate OUR responses. The effect is ALWAYS instantaneous. Pretending causes no fear; intending DOES cause fear. 20-30 universities are NOW starting research. Imagery, NOT words, affects the plant. Plant DIDN'T react to insect noises, DID react to person's FEARS of insects being sounded." "Kinship with all Life" Harper and Row, by J. Allen Boone (an unnaturalist). Women WILL admit they get messages FROM plants. Cockroaches and crabgrass won't listen (unless you REALLY use sincerity and confidence). CAN convert polygraph lines to MUSIC (naturally). He's trying to get NASA to put a plant on a Mars probe when it takes 6 minutes for LIGHT to get back and forth. DOES it go instantly? When Backster started talking about God, I, EVEN THOUGH I AGREED WITH HIM, was SO turned off that I finally REALIZED the WISDOM behind "He who knows, does not speak." He could give us facts about plants, but only opinions about God (If you want facts about dogs, ask dogs; if you want opinions about dogs, ask people). Plants react to killing brine shrimp three times, then it dies. When reinforced by electric shock (Pavlov), the reaction lasts much longer. He's done plant monitoring during "absence healing." Plants, he found, can differentiate between LIVING substances. You not only may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, but you threw you the baby and KEPT the bathwater! Backster, in talking science AND God, is keeping BOTH, and THIS, TOO, might be impractical. "But that's only an observation." The next day: what about a person with plants in TWO places: Plants being LEFT consoled by plants being GONE TOWARD? Plants "meeting" and recognizing each other as having the same owner and reacting. What about the effect of plants reacting to the SAME TYPE PLANT being destroyed or threatened? Backster also said he was interested in LSD, that "LSD hallucinations are caused by the same spectrum of force that excites plants." And he'd like to do research into that, can't attend next week's talk.
DIARY 1076
4/28/70
LSD (GROF)
USA LSD Research:
1) NYC---Dr. Charles Clay Dahlberg (Still? Private psychiatrist)
2) Spring Grove---Kurland (Leader) and Grof, no more than three sessions, Grof has had more than 80 sessions, from Prague, Czechoslovakia, Psychiatric Research Center; Spring Grove operates with U.S. National Institute of Health grant. "Treats" neurotics, hard-drug addicts, alcoholics.
3) Topeka, Kansas, about 40 sessions per person, only on schizophrenics, has US permission, no grant.
4) Sinai Hospital---treats in connection with terminal cancer (as was "done with Aldous Huxley, to give it at the time of death, to ease it.")
LSD History:
1938---Discovered.
1943---"Let's look again," Hoffman's bicycle experience.
1947---Shtoll (?) "classic paper," first report on LSD (?)
1963---Over 2000 papers on various aspects of LSD (Grof first took in 1956).
History of LSD "Theory"
1) Generates model schizophrenia (100-150 mg).
[Di-propyl-triptomine (DPT) (4-hour trip); Di-ethyl-triptomine (DET); Di-methyl-triptomine (DMT) (10-hour trip); Adrenochrome; Psilocybin; Mescaline]
Took three years to discover that LSD is BROADER in SCOPE than schizophrenia.
LSD reactions for the same dose, same setting, different people:
1) classic, 2) nausea and discomfort, 3) psychotic, 4) cosmic orgasm, 5) mystic.
For 72 patients, much data, 1-3 sessions with LSD:
1) LSD reaction is personality-specific: MEANINGFUL to patient.
2) Experience is polarized: VERY bright or VERY dark; goes immediately to
CENTER of patient's problem.
3) LSD reaction is as CONDENSED and RELEVANT as dream.
Fear of taking LSD linked to:
1) Sexual problems, inability to achieve orgasm, frigidity, urge to retain
control (orgasm as letting go).
2) Hatred of disease and fever.
3) Hatred and fear of Hypnogogic time (Time just before falling asleep).
"Second Stage": LSD Reactions.
1) Obsessive-Compulsive (Repeating ritual against their will, resistant to
effect of LSD; it "sublimes" to PHYSICAL reactions).
2) Hysterical (Fast, romantic reactions on LOW dosages).
3) Most are between above two extremes (Latent homosexuals have paranoid
reactions).
"Third Stage": (5-8 sessions for some of the 72 individuals)
MOST IMPORTANT: "Psycholytic" Stage (Intensification of Psychoanalytic Training)
1) Build up a relationship of trust between therapist and patient.
2) Subsequent sessions followed from previous sessions.
3) Finding themselves "at the same spot as before" only deeper, resolved
to a FULL reliving of a childhood trauma.
"Psychedelic" Stage (Shortcut to religious-mystical experience [Unity with
everything there is, floating, melting])
1) Pre-Stressing Mysticism
2) High dose (450 mg) ("Afterglow" lasts a week to 10 days, time for
integration with LIFE)
3) Pleasant set and setting (flowers, nice room, nature)
3) Eyeshades and stereo music.
[They DID try giving LSD to therapist, but it died out, ineffective]
[Therapists do sometimes get something like a "contact high"!]
[There is NO ONE SINGLE SYMPTOM of an LSD high (not even dilated pupils)]
[Uptight people can KEEP pupils SMALL, then "barriers" go and BAM, dilated]
[High-dose sessions usually have BIGGER problems than sex ("Beyond sex, Same as
sex, Sacramental sex"]
[Schizophrenics NOT treated differently from other patients]
[LSD is an AMPLIFIER of mental processes: it can be used constructively or
destructively"]
[Artistic "breakthroughs" rare; UNLEASHING LATENT talent is more common]
MAIN study of "Psycholytics," Requirements for 50 patients:
1) Wide range of psychoses and neuroses and problems and psychosomatics
2) Highly intelligent, verbal, descriptive.
3) VERY poor clinical prognosis (Couldn't be much WORSE off)
Transformation of symptoms: INTO session with suicide-prone, sleeplessness, psychosomatic ills, then he achieved "ecstasy" and THEN got hysterical reaction of paralyzed hand.
["Psychosomatic: "one-week" psoriasis; localized eczema]
["Everyone knows a baby is unconscious during delivery, like delivering a sack of sand, only MOTHER feels pain," but Grof doesn't believe it NOW, he does think "Hour 20" is RELIVING birth trauma!]
Freud Rank Jung
"Normal"
General Neurotic Progress.
"Neurotic"
"Psychotic"
# OF SESSIONS: 5 10 15 20 25 30
Sessions 1-15 very multiform: "Symptom relief."
Patient regressed to childhood "Freud would have stopped"
Sessions 15-20 VERY similar: ego agony, faces change colors, emotional agony, pulse 160-180, suffocating, jerks, toward DEATH, cramps, ANXIETY, "I'm dying," thought on mortality of man.
[One person DID die, under 200 mg LSD, with English Dr. Martin (female), the son of her colleague, for INEXPLICABLE reasons, he just "didn't come back." No organic evidence of ANY kind.] [Only bad heart prevents LSD, for emotional reasons---also epilepsy triggering]
[NO reports of BREATHING arrest]
[People have survived 10,000 mg]
["Everyone drawing THIS close to death DEMANDS a MEANING for LIFE."]
All values sardonically discarded---ambitions become meaningless. "Dark Night of the soul."
Money goes, knowledge goes, "Existential crisis"
Everyone THEN brings in religion to TRANSCEND.
Within the 15-20:
1) 15-17---Trapped, no exit, hell, pain and suffering, NO way out in time or space. Hell is only hell if you KNOW it is endless. Horrors, wars, diseases, pains, "Life is suffering."
2) 18-20---You're a victim, overwhelmed, no chance to FIGHT. Finally, it goes beyond any criterion, it's agony AND ecstasy.
[Some LSD patients "replayed" the pain of an anaesthetized operation, implying that though the pain wasn't FELT, it's been recorded somewhere as part of "experience."]
[It's the agony of a frightened baby; you're absolutely CONVINCED of their agony]
[Patient-Therapist relation VERY HIGHLY determines LENGTH of treatment]
2) [Continued] Agony AND ecstasy build---"Volcanic ecstasy," oscillate between being victim and annihilating power, it produces sadomasochistic and sexual orgies, alternating with experiences of clear light, rebirth, expansion of space. Can happen MANY times---"working through" this area.
3) #20---Absolute, physical death, total failure, nadir experience, cosmic bottom, THEN---STRIKING POINT---TOTAL transformation, ecstatic rebirth.
4) #21-25---Embryological, inter-uterine awareness, experiences as fetus, experience of parental intercourses, battles with mythological-astrological monsters.
"Memory" of attempted ABORTION!
But never so BLACK as before.
Whether it happened or it's fantasy, to the PATIENT, it's REAL and must be treated as such.
[Patient went through SOME pre-delivery stress, then trumpets and horns.
What was it? Patient thought "Ah, Yahrmarkt"---the yearly market noises and checking, he found his mother DID go there just before his birth.]
[What it feels like to be an aroused snake, a hungry jellyfish---they RELIVE evolution]
"All is one" alternates with cosmic monsters. Jungian archetypes---cosmic mother, evil mother, cosmic man.
FARTHER out, experiences in ancient Egypt, or old India, or Central America, and reliving events THERE.
Intuitive reliving of Karmic law, reincarnation.
They FEEL these are MEMORIES, they FEEL they understand the art, religion, morality, they FEEL it is a REAL MEMORY, not a fantasy!
General NORMAL patients:
General PSYCHOTIC patients:
(This based on 3 patients)
BACK top neurotic scale:
1) 15-17---suicidal, monoxide poisoning, drowning, bridges DRAW you to water, cars URGE you to fall under them.
2) 20-25---tendency to enjoy simple things (nature, art, music, human relations; AWAY from money, ambition, etc.
3) 25-30---depends on society:
a) If society VALUES productivity, values in 2), above, are considered NEGATIVE.
b) If society VALUES hedonism, values in 2), above, are considered POSITIVE.
Back to Psychotic---it's called TRANSFERENCE psychosis: RETURNS to psychotic temporarily.
[She was normal UNDER LSD, psychotic WITHOUT LSD] FANTASTIC!!
[TWIN whose catatonic positions related to the embryonic positions in which SHE was comfortable in the WOMB with her BROTHER!!]
Freud in early part, Rank for the "Existential Crisis," and for end Jung or various RELIGIONS.
[Cold associated with EMOTIONS: taking HAND warmly is better than 10 blankets]
[Rank (1927) described "Birth Trauma," formed a FRAME for this stage]
[Agony/Ecstasy: Sadism/Masochism---must have PAIN to be HAPPY]
[Is THAT why the HEAD exploding is enlightenment, because the HEAD explodes FIRST from the womb (ALSO, ORGASM, ALSO MOTHER, giving birth, ALSO, defecation, urination.]
["You can't imagine anything that ISN'T part of your experience"]
["Not only the tissues, but each CELL has an all-encompassing consciousness."]
[The POINT of the head at birth is the APEX of the "human-solid" in 4 dimensions!]
Pushers add strychnine, heroin, belladonna (Krippner also in on this), and dosages of LSD VERY unreliable. Later, someone said that the Neo-American Church's "Boo-Hoo Black" stuff is pretty standard.
QUESTIONS:
1) WHAT was EEG pattern during your "Cosmic experience"? Don't know these.
2) Do YOU observe: actions learned IN drug only apply in drug, actions learned OUT of drug apply OUT of drug? Not really.
3) Did the painter's TECHNICAL transitions CORRESPOND to the Freud-Rank-Jung transitions? Not really.
4) SOURCES of papers so WE can get them? Gren's reproducing them.
5) What's future of Spring Grove? Not answered.
HE'S been in 1700 sessions as observer. This talk started at 5 pm, broke at 6:30 for buffet, back at 8, and out at 11:30, and Grof is one of the most excellent presenters I know, wonderfully organized, personally impeccable, fascinating to talk with, willing to answer any questions, very patient.
FOR BACKSTER:
1) Can plants be used to CHECK if the fetus "in his fetal paradise" begins to "get indications that paradise is ending---a THREAT TO HIS WELL-BEING"?
2) Can plants be used to CHECK the mental attitudes of anesthetized person on operating table, quite APART from the tissue that is being cut?
3) Lois' hypnosis: She's a tree. Gets pains when they cut into a "dead" tree. "It's still alive!" They go into country: "This tree's married to that tree; they talk on the wind; all trees talk the same language; they ALL talk to each other on the wind." Back to office, she gets panicked just BEFORE the saw is turned back on. TREE panicked at IMAGE of "I'll start cutting again" and communicated WITH her?
4) Lois' hypnosis: "Lost the number 5," "Count fingers," "1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10---" and bursts into tears because she has ONE FINGER LEFT OVER.
5) Lois' hypnosis: [can PLANTS be hypnotized]?, Everything green: bread, tuna salad, Pepsi-Cola.
6) Lois' dream: walks into Hindu temple, man in trench coat with hat pulled down; looks up and it's a MONKEY face. She wakes, terrified, and there, on the pillow, next to her head, is the head of a monkey, staring at her, without a body! She leaps out of bed, wild with fear, Leo not home, and desperate to read something because doctor said "If you go back to sleep within 15 minutes, the dream will just COME RIGHT BACK."
So everything seems to be connected: I hear Krippner's name connected with Church of Awakening, Dream Clinic, Backster's research, Grof's research, the Universalist Church, and hypnotism and ESP. Fantastic. Backster should have been listening to Grof, as he wanted, because I'm sure the two would have hit it off, formed a friendship, and proceeded to seed each other's mind. And nowadays EVERYTHING, including pop songs, seems to agree with the unifying idea that "All is one," and Huxley's Perennial Philosophy seems never so real as right now, even beginning to be proved SCIENTIFICALLY.
DIARY 2073
6/26/71
JAY KWAWER'S STUDY
Penny is fat, and Kwawer is rather unpleasantly bushy-haired and sleepy-eyed, and we start the interview by looking at a flickering light and saying when I see a very brief flicker, then I look at some college yearbook pictures of plain guys and even plainer gals, and on a scale of 20-1, the best I can muster is a 9 for a fellow who's REASONABLY cute in the lumpkin lot, and it goes down to a 3 for a hard-eyed bitch-looking girl. Then he asks, on a scale of 100-1, how I feel for sex with a guy (20) and a gal (1), though I know for myself that I'm sated, rather than bored. But after more tests, I find myself getting very turned off, and the 20-1 goes down to 10-1, and I find myself speaking slower and making an effort to revive myself doesn't help. The fact that Kwawer is always deadpan and questions everything doesn't help. Then he shows me a series of inkblots and I see quantities of little animals, lots of bones, a couple of phallic shapes, some funny figures, but nothing spectacular. Then I catch a glimpse of an outline-drawing being slipped into the flicker-light machine, and I wonder what's coming off, though my responses go from bad to worse, and only the questionnaire seems to buck me up. Finally at the end, he says that it's REALLY a test in subliminal perception, because there are drawings WITH CAPTIONS (which blows my mind) in the flicker-machine that I can't identify that I've seen, but it's SUPPOSED to either turn me on or turn me off, though since this is a double-blind experiment (he doesn't know what set of pictures he's giving me, so that HE won't be able to cue me in for better or worse, depending on whether his pictures are turn-ons or turn-offs), he doesn't know what I'd been subjected to, though it's probably violence or ugly scenes which leave me feeling emotionally drained and faintly disgusted with looking at the guys and girls. He says that he'll be kind enough to send me a result of the survey, which is being run by the hospital, and it's also being given to straight guys, to see how the differences of reactions go. I leave before recalling it's supposed to be 2 90-minute sessions, but I call later and find I've taken both. They're still looking for people.
DIARY 2740
2/18/72
PITTENGER'S SERMON
Faulton looks particularly silly walking around following acolytes holding the silver-bound Bible above his head, and then after mounting the pulpit holding it again aloft while incongruously bowing his head when they announce "The Word of God." His accent eludes him until Christ goes up into "a HA mountain" for his Transfiguration, and then Pittenger ascends the heights with his sermon. Taking off from the 13th chapter of I Corinthians, he talks about love, and I love his choice of words when he says "here, here in this SCANDALOUSLY particular place, we KNOW that God IS Love." And the sense of the NERVE, the GLORY, and the BEAUTY of being able to say that is nicely summed up in the "SCANDALOUSLY." Then dealing with the trilogy of Faith, Hope, and Love, he says that the Church looks BACK to CHRIST with FAITH, looks FORWARD to the Kingdom of Heaven with HOPE, and lives today with love. He says, interestingly, that love is that giving of self to SELVES, and the pluralism is striking---no less so than his phrase about the love of God for his FELLOW MAN. He says that he raised an eyebrow of his colleagues, or sometimes even TWO eyebrows, when he said that not only Christ had to live by faith, hope, and love, but also GOD himself had to exist under the dominion of faith, hope, and love, which I though was going a bit far. Then he "ended the misery" and the services were over at noon. Follow the trickle of people from the 80-person congregation and there's coffee and cider, and I stand away while he greets dozens of people, then HE comes to ME with a former student of his from Union Theological, whom he introduced to me, and refers to John's tour, saying he hopes I'll see him in Cambridge, and then KIRK flatters me endlessly by asking ME for the manuscript, and they all have to go somewhere in Westchester quickly. Dr. Pittenger continues chatting with me after all have left, keeping his hand permanently on my shoulder, and he clasps me once, then we walk toward the robing room and again he clasps me wholly to him and kisses me fully on the lips in the full view of the church, saying again how much he enjoyed meeting me, and leaves, while I float out of the church in happiness from the morning.
