epignosis - the search for knowledge

The Circle of Life

2009-05-24T10:23:00.035-05:00

A few months ago, our daughter, Sarah, informed us that she was pregnant and that the baby was due at the end of October. Since she just turned 32 and it's been awhile since she left our home, this was very welcome news to two future grandparents.

This will be the first grandchild from either of our two daughters. Our other daughter, Marin, - younger by 3 1/2 years - is busy tasting the fruits of a spiritual world that currently holds no time for marriage and or a child. But like happened to Sarah, perhaps one or the other or both will come suddenly and unexpectedly.

This event takes me back some 33 years to my wife's first pregnancy and how in that 1976 Centennial year, we were at the very beginning of an adventure that has been, without a doubt, the greatest joy of our lives.

What is so exciting for us as we watch Sarah begin her own journey through the awe and wonder of pregnancy and birth is that today there is so much information at our fingertips to follow this astonishing event compared to then.

Since the day Sarah told us, we've followed our grandchild's fetal development with a program called PregnanSee™ which can be found at ZNet Downloads. This wonderful little program is shareware and costs $14.99, but can be tried out for 15 days.

The information found in this program covers topics such as Changes in Baby, Changes in You, Good to Know, Wholesome Advice, Your Actions, Common Concerns and Nutrition.

It is a week-by-week account of the baby's development. Each week, you can see a real ultrasound video of a baby at that stage. For instance, at this point, Sarah's pregnancy is at week 17 and the fetal age is 15 weeks. We've been following his or her development since pregnancy week 6 and fetal week 4. The pregnancy week is marked as time since the last menstrual period.

At pregnancy week 6, these were things Sarah discovered about her baby:

From crown to rump, your baby measures at 2-4mm or 0.08-0.16 inch, the size of a small lentil.
This week marks the beginning of the embryonic period which spans from the 6th to 10th weeks of pregnancy or the 4th to 8th weeks of fetal development.
Growth is rapid this week with your baby resembling a tadpole with a tail but no brain.
It is already 10,000 times larger than the fertilized egg; it doesn't have gender characteristics yet.
Over the next 5 months, more than 100 billion neurons will be formed in the brain, laying the necessary groundwork for a lifetime of learning.

Each week, with this program, we've followed a tiny bundle of cells as it differentiated and grew; watched as a minuscule heart formed; as it developed limbs, fingers and toes, even nails; as it formed genitalia and reproductive organs; as it might have become male if given a shot of testosterone at about fetal week 8; as it formed internal organs of digestion and as the brain began the phenomenal journey to becoming a conscious, sentient being.

As I write this, our "grandfetus" has these characteristics:

From crown to rump the baby measures about 5-6 inches and weighs about 100g or 3.5oz.
The fetus is the size of a hand spread wide open
While still big, the head is beginning to look in proportion with the rest of the body.
Incredible changes are happening now: fat is beginning to form this week and will continue in the weeks that follow. Know as adipose tissue, fat helps to keep baby warm and gives it energy.
It's small heart is pumping 24 liters of blood a day.
The baby can now hear sounds outside mother's body and may even be startled by it.

Right now the fetus's tiny heart is pumping 24 liters of blood a day! That's close to 6 gallons. And it won't stop pumping for perhaps another 80 or 90 years!

And so it goes. Each new fact of each new week is even more amazing than the last.

Consciousness

Since one of the areas I've been studying for a number of years is the concept of Consciousness, I naturally began to wonder about the tiny life growing inside my daughter's body.

When does Consciousness first manifest in the fetus?

At one end of the spectrum of ideas relating to this question, Dr. Stanislav Grof - of whom I've written much here - has based the entire field of Transpersonal Psychology on the theory that Consciousness exists independent of time or individual organism.

In his research of over 50+ years, he has found compelling evidence that Consciousness is very fluid. Using such tools as psychedelic drugs and Holotropic Breathwork, he has had subjects experience conscious awareness,

back to the time of their birth
during their birth
before their birth back to the moment of conception
during human lives prior to their own conception
from beings other than our own species
even from inanimate objects

Obviously, each item on the list above becomes increasingly more incredible, yet Dr. Grof lays out the results of his research in a remarkable book, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality. As I was preparing to experience the worlds of Holotropic Breathwork last year, I explored this man and his book in my post, The Breath of Lives.

Another area I've studied is the scientific work of Rick Strassman, whose book DMT: The Spirit Molecule explores N,N-dimethyltryptamine or DMT, which is a naturally-occurring molecule in both plants and animals, including our own bodies. It is one of the most powerful psychoactive molecules and is the active agent in psychedelic substances like the shamanic brew, Ayahuasca

Based on several years of intensive medical research, Dr. Strassman proposes that the release of DMT from the pineal gland at 49 days after conception marks the entrance of the spirit -or Consciousness, if you will - into the fetus. This 49-day prenatal period is very interesting in that it corresponds to the first signs of fetal pineal tissue, the differentiation of the gonads into male and female, and - according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition - the time between the death of an individual and its soul’s next rebirth. While I've seemingly conflated Consciousness with Spirit here, I've done it purposefully since these two things have been so intricately intermingled on my journey and in this blog.

Dr. Strassman suggests that the individual’s life-force enters the body through the pineal gland and leaves it through the pineal gland at death. The infant’s brain is flooded with 5-MeO-DMT, secreted from the pineal gland and the brain is 40% more active and open. In effect, then, the fetus is "tripping balls", as the kids so artfully put it.

So at about 7 weeks, then, I will assume that Sarah's baby assumed Consciousness. Has it assumed - as Buddhist thought believes - the Consciousness of a someone who died 49 days earlier and has been traveling through the Bardo in search of a physical body?

This is one of those questions that will, for us earthbound mortals, remain a universal mystery, I'm afraid. It is fascinating to speculate upon however. One thing is certain. The tiny life that is growing by leaps and bounds inside Sarah's body contains the genetic code of our entire species back through the phylogenetic history of all earth organisms, back through time to the very first DNA and RNA molecules on earth.

According to some scientists, furthermore, those first molecules were, in fact, extra-terrestrial by means of a process called exogenesis or panspermia, and arrived on this planet via meteors and/or asteroids from somewhere out there. Fewer scientists yet - including the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick - have proposed the idea of directed panspermia, where primitive life or its precursors were "seeded" throughout the universe by an advanced intelligence. Could this be where a God fits into the picture? Or perhaps they were the earliest Greys!

This far-out idea, however, is one to be explored by others, for there is too much to be discovered right here on our own Big Blue Marble.

As a Father and a Male

The adventure Sarah is experiencing so completely in her life right now is quite remarkable, and gives rise to many thoughts and questions concerning life in general and human life in particular. As a male, it also makes me feel quite unimportant, as biologically we males are for the most part minor - but obviously essential - players whereas the female plays the lead role in this incredible production called life. It's almost a wonder that males exist at all in the animal world.

Certainly, a species could exist with all females. Sexual reproduction - which evolved only to create genetic diversity - could be accomplished by females alone. In fact, a female-only ant species has been found only recently in the Western Hemisphere. This species reproduces asexually, however, which can be an evolutionary disadvantage.

Certainly very few males would be needed - just for genetic diversity - but a world of human females could be a possibility as in vitro fertilization technology continues to develop. As we watch the slow, but seemingly inevitable destruction of our earth by "Man" (mostly men unfortunately), this idea raises the important question as to whether this would be a better world with far fewer males. Could the very biology that makes me a male bear the seeds of our destruction?

In an interesting switch to the reproductive process, the nematode or flatworm, C. elegans, exists only as either a hermaphrodite or a male. The predominant sexual form of C. elegans is the hermaphrodite — this animal produces both sperm and eggs. Thus, it can self-fertilize. Coincidentally, Sarah spent many years studying this tiny creature on her way to becoming a working geneticist.

But I digress.

The Female Brain

For over 30 years, I've lived only with women: my wife and two daughters. And so I was intrigued by a book I came across recently called The Female Brain by neuropsychiatrist, Louann Brizendine. Perhaps it was time to learn for myself (perhaps long past time) about these strange, wondrous creatures called females.

During medical school, Dr. Brizendine was confronted with the fact that brain studies were almost universally conducted using male subjects. One of the reasons given her (unspoken was an inherent male chauvinism that pervaded science and medicine up to that point) was that female brains seemed to change too often to study. But this wasn't a good enough answer for Dr. Brizendine, who has been studying the female brain ever since and what she has discovered about our mothers and sisters and daughters is utterly fascinating.

As it turns out, the perception that females brains change often is absolutely true. In fact, whereas male brains are rather static in their functioning day in and day out, female brains change virtually daily.

The reasons for this are due to the very thing that makes females female: their hormones. So in a fascinating story that explores the female brain from conception through menopause, The Female Brain is an exceptionally eye-opening book for both men and women. This is from the Publishers Weekly review:

Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond. At the same time, Brizedine is not above reviewing the basics: "We may think we're a lot more sophisticated than Fred or Wilma Flintstone, but our basic mental outlook and equipment are the same." While this book will be of interest to anyone who wonders why men and women are so different, it will be particularly useful for women and parents of girls.

For an interesting discussion from ABC's 20/20 about sex differences between men and women, which includes a synopsis of Dr. Brizendine's work, click this link.

As the father of two girls, I wish I had read this book before they were born - even before I got married. It would have helped me fathom the ebbs and flows of moods and struggles all the women in my life - as well as I - had to endure during the most trying times of their lives.

As one of those static-brained males, I could never fully understood the fact that emotion was a volatile driving force in their lives or why I couldn't reason with them at times, as I was wont to do. They still baffle me quite often, yet the very aspects of femaleness that control their lives is what gives our world and our species the beauty and nectar that makes life so incredibly worthwhile.

Female and Male Psychology

Still, hormones and brain states are just the physical aspects of being a male or a female. The yin and yang of masculine and feminine energy are psychological aspects of each and every one of us.

Males generally have more masculine energy, which drives aspects of personality like being assertive, logical, analytical, doing, controlling, being aggressive, striving, projecting, hard, organizing, rushing, thrusting and always pushing to survive.

The feminine energy, on the other hand, is delicate, intuitive, nurturing, receptive, tender, surrendering, synthesizing, integrating, soft, feeling, and the part of us that knows without explanation and incorporates creativity, the natural life-force and even an innate understanding of death as being a part of life. This is psychologically understood by a woman in the knowledge that each 28 days a potential life is swept from her body during menstruation.

The feminine helps us to be. This form of energy softens the constant male-driven doingness of our lives, which has become part of our misguided and relentless efforts to survive in the material world.

David Deida delves heavily into these two energies in his books and workshops. A very provocative writer and thinker, he is described in Wikipedia as "an American author, independent researcher, and teacher. He writes on spiritual practice, nondual sexuality, and sociocultural evolution. He has published ten books in more than 25 languages. Deida’s early scientific research includes psychobiology, human evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and mathematical modeling of the immune and nervous systems. Since 1975 he has trained in hatha yoga, tai chi chuan, various forms of meditation, and sexual yoga. For over two decades, Deida has been writing books on spiritual-sexual growth, practicing in solitary retreat, and traveling internationally to present his work to a wide range of audiences."

This is an excerpt from David Deida's book, It's a Guy Thing: An Owner's Manual for Women:

Our masculine and feminine ways are not only rooted in our biological roots, but also in our spiritual depths. As it has been said in many spiritual traditions, the first thing created was light. This light is the true source of our feminine energy, and the void in which it shines is the source of our masculine.

That's why many women are concerned with their radiance. They identify themselves as sources of light or energy. They want shiny hair, glossy lips, blushed cheeks, glowing skin, radiant eyes. The feminine in each of us feels akin to life force itself.

The masculine in each of us feels more akin to the void in which the light shines. Most men would rather watch women dance than dance themselves. They want to witness feminine radiance. Thus, men identify more with the witness, with awareness, with consciousness itself.

This consciousness never moves, while the feminine energy always moves. This consciousness never changes, while the feminine energy always changes. Men who stand firm and trustable in their deep truth are more sexy to women. Women who move their bodies freely in radiant energy are more sexy to men.

Men seek perfection in the external world--in their philosophies, golf games and a centerfold's body--because they intuit the perfection of deep and eternal consciousness. But they misplace this desire for perfection. Deep consciousness, or divine consciousness, may be perfect, changeless and unblemished, but life is not. Life is the play of energy. Life is feminine!

It is a grand adventure, then, is it not? This being male and female. There is so much involved with being man and woman, masculine and feminine, and it always seems to be a struggle to understand it in each other and in ourselves.

* * * * * * * * *

Nevertheless, in a very real sense, we are a young species. We've only been introspective about who we are for a few thousand years and we've only tried to understand ourselves and nature scientifically for a few hundred years.

Still, our species continues to do what all species do. As individual organisms we conceive, develop, reproduce and then die. But as a species we have thrived and keep striving to utilize more fully this amazing and remarkable tool, the brain, evolution has gifted us with. In the process, we have learned a great deal about our Universe and everything that comprises it. Yet, the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know and we are compelled to keep searching for answers.

I feel that the worst thing we can do as human beings is to believe that we have all the answers. Or that there is a man, a book or a philosophy that incorporates all we can and should know. I think we do a great disservice to the special gifts we've been given if we stop searching for answers to life's questions.

Unfortunately, we can't know if there is an ultimate architect to all of this. We can believe there is, but we can't know - at least yet. If there is a divine intelligence behind this curtain of reality we exist in front of, that is amazing. Yet, if the mathematical beauty of the Friedmann equations and the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems predict an uncaused beginning of this magnificent universe, that to me is equally amazing.

We know that life has a biological imperative. For us, as humans, we also have an intellectual imperative. Discovery is that intellectual imperative, and constant, endless inquiry is how we accomplish it.

To Sarah and her baby, as well as my other daughter, Marin, I bequeath this unique and marvelous legacy. Use it well and joyfully, my beautiful Children of Eve.

Black Madonna - Mitochondrial Eve
by David Hewson

A History of God

2009-03-30T15:29:00.017-05:00

My study of Consciousness has led me down many fascinating paths in the past few years: from quantum physics to shamanism to psychedelics and a number of different religious traditions.

But as a person who has always wanted to know how we got to wherever it is we are, I've often wondered over the years what it must have been like for early Homo Sapiens. How did their minds work? Were they truly conscious?

The real question here is 'what is Consciousness?' When did it arrive in our species? And before it arrived, did our earliest ancestors muse about things or question what happened around them? Or was their consciousness similar to a dog's in which life is mostly a response to external stimuli and internal biological needs?

It seems obvious that before some point in time, this was indeed the case. We are, after all, merely differently-evolved animals.

So...when was the point at which Consciousness was sparked in us? By Consciousness, then, I mean introspection: the ability to look inside oneself from the viewpoint of the "I" inside.

It seems odd that before this remarkable moment - which could have taken hundreds, even thousands of years - men and women didn't possess egos, since ego is, by definition, the "I" inside. Still, even in very early Man, there was genuine mental activity of a "conscious" nature. We know this by archaeological evidence going back as far as 40,000 years ago when primitive artists, shamans and other visionaries painted images on the walls of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira as well as create other items of manufacture.

But what creative drive were these artists and artisans responding to if not their own sense of self? This, to me, is one of the great mysteries of humanity. It seems that the time is right, therefore, that I should dig deeper into these compelling questions.

As such, I just completed a book, the title of which has intrigued me for years, but only now felt ready to explore.

The book is called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes. It was originally published in 1976 and was very controversial when it first came out. In fact, its ideas are still controversial. Yet, over the years, instead of Jaynes' ideas falling into disrepute, the evolving science of brain imagery has validated a great deal of what Dr. Jaynes hypothesized over three decades ago about Consciousness.

The most startling idea in the book - at least to me - is not how consciousness evolved in man, but how recently Jaynes believed this to have happened.

His theory purports that the consciousness we all know and love - the womb of our egos and therefore the birthplace of most of the mental and emotional anguish that we are heir to - is a mere 3500 years old give or take a few centuries.

Ponder the significance of this if you will. Our genus, Homo, diverged from the early hominids, Austalopethecines, about 2 million years ago. Our own species, Sapiens, diverged from the Neanderthal species about 500,000 years ago. The approximate time of divergence from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was about 200,000 years ago. Although there were many earlier movements of Homo species that left Africa, anatomically modern humans evolved solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch - our branch - leaving Africa by 60,000 years ago.

Language, arguably the most important cultural tool ever developed by man, probably began from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. We developed agriculture some 10,000 years ago. To assist in the necessary accounting of excess agricultural yields in trade, the earliest forms of writing were invented 9,000 years ago. The first writing systems developed around 6,000 years ago. Yet, incredibly according to Jaynes, it would be another 2500 years before people could sit down and think about the world around them - and more importantly - the world inside their minds. This idea is indeed mind-boggling!

Currently, I am reading (or rather listening to) an audiobook called The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong. This is from a Washington Post review or the book:

In 1948, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term "Axial Age" to denote an astonishing era, from roughly 900 B.C. to 200 B.C., in which the foundations of the world's great religions were laid. This was the time of Socrates, Elijah, Siddhartha, Confucius. In her magisterial new exploration of the era, Karen Armstrong argues that all Axial Age traditions emphasized justice and were committed to the practice of "disciplined sympathy" and compassion. The Great Transformation is Armstrong at her best -- translating and distilling complex history into lucid prose that will delight scholars and armchair historians alike, drawing connections between the distant past and our own religious practices, suggesting that the antidotes to some of contemporary religion's excesses lie in the roots of the religious traditions themselves.

In researching more about Karen Armstrong, I found out that she is a former Catholic nun who eschewed religion - and even God -when she left the convent, but who then found herself wanting to know more about what religion, in fact, was and how it developed in us. Over a long and remarkable career as an author and television producer, she has become one of the great authorities on comparative religions and has become a forceful speaker for a more realistic viewing of Islam in a Post-911 world.

One of her discoveries is that religious faith is a very recent concept having come about in the 18th Century, and that the roots of most religions were not about belief, but rather about behavior.

Click here to watch to a very interesting 21 minute TED Talk, Ms. Armstrong gave in 2008 about these ideas and about her Charter for Compassion, which is about her efforts to return The Golden Rule, which was the basis for all the great religious traditions of the world, to our culture and society - and mostly to our religions.

What I am most interested in learning about in this book is how much correlation there is between Jaynes' idea about the Bicameral Mind and Armstrong's "history of God", because both are concerned with how human psychology and consciousness developed in the past 3500 years.

Much of what Armstrong discusses regarding the origins of the world's great religions corresponds quite well with Jayne's views.

Armstrong notes that in all these Axial religions and philosophies, the lack of introspection in all the early writings followed by the gradual ascent of a moral code fits with Jaynes' idea that until a certain point in mankind's intellectual evolution, introspection simply didn't exist for man.

In his book, Julian Jaynes argues that:

ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods. Jaynes argued that the change from this mode of thinking (which he called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.

These twin pillars of human intellect - language and writing - together allowed man to not only describe things and events in his or her life, but by writing them down in symbolic form allowed time and the passage of time to be marked in a way never before known. These two things also contributed to the employment of memory to a greater degree than ever before because by viewing again and again the metaphorical ideas that writing symbolized, memories were formed and reinforced. The "pondering" upon memories created billions of new connections in the brain that created more abilities within the brain. As a result of all this, the inside "I" came into being.

Obviously, this is a very simplistic and abbreviated account of Jaynes arguments laid out in his book, but as brain research has exploded in the past thirty years, the Bicameral Brain concept has become the standard theory of how the brain works.

A recent book I wrote about here called My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. by Jill Bolte Taylor gives even more credence to Jaynes' idea of the Bicacmeral Brain when her left brain - the time-bound logical brain - was severely damaged by a stroke. Her right brain, then in control, created a mystical world where she described herself as

the life force power of the Universe. I am the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form...at one with all that is.

Jaynes puts forth that as mankind has two distinct language centers - one in each hemisphere - called Wernicke's area evolved and language developed, both areas processed language. But while man's right brain still dominated, words leaked from the right brain to the left. To primitive man, as with modern man, much of what goes on in the right brain is unconscious to us. From thus comes imagination, dreams, art, poetry and other forms of creativity. But for men and women who had no sense of self or "I", the words they heard seemed alien - were alien - and were from somewhere out there. The only explanation their primitive minds could come up with was that these were the words of kings or gods (often being equivalent in early societies) commanding them in some way. In fact, it was their own minds in the earliest mode of thinking.

And as the prerequisites of Consciousness' - writing and memory - spread around the world, this new thing called thinking spread along with them, and as the ego, the "I", developed over the centuries, the gods' voices from the right brain dimmed and then stopped altogether.

But they didn't disappear without a fight. As less and less people heard the voices of their gods, the ones who did were seen as special: as prophets, a word that comes from the Greek and means "an interpreter, spokesman, especially of the gods".

Thus the great prophets of the Old Testament, such as Amos, Isaiah, Daniel and the myriad others were men who heard the voices of their gods just as clearly as we hear another person in our presence speak to us.

And these early prophets had only one reaction to the voices: obey! So when they were commanded to destroy the lives of their enemies, they did it, unquestioningly. When they were commanded to kill their own families, they did this too without question. Questioning of the voices would come later, when the "I" became more prominent and a richer understanding of social consequences could be understood.

Man during the age of the Bicameral mind was violent and reactive species; very much like a pack of wolves who react only with the base instincts they were born with. Before man could introspect, there was only reaction.

Incidentally, I use the term Man here both generically and chromosomal because one constant aspect of the Axial Age was that women were truly not seen as fully human; especially by the Greek Axial Age sages like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle where a definite misogynism exhibited in their ideas. While not as strong in other early Axial cultures like Judaic, Indian and Chinese, there was still a very real sense that women had nothing to offer society beyond their roles as wives and mothers.

Armstrong's book, then, talks about the origins of these religious and philosophical ideas that for the most part are still with us. But one common element that all these ideas brought to humanity was compassion: the ability to feel or suffer with another person.

The "I", then, created a mind-space where "what if" logic could be entertained. What if "I" was the person they were throwing stones at? What if "I" was blind and couldn't find food to eat? The new ideas that came about in the Axial times were the first to utilize the "I" - and the ideas of compassion, justice and love revolutionized the entire world by introducing a new way of thinking and acting.

The question both these books address at their core is, what about the idea of god? Where does He or She or It or Them fit into all this? Was God or the gods simply the hallucinated voices of people who weren't aware that it was simply their own voices - their own disparate pieces of their own personalities - they were hearing? This seems incredible to consider now.

But is it? There are today still many people whose worlds are filled with the voices of God, gods, devils and others from whom commands are to be obeyed. In the sense used by Jaynes, they are indeed Bicameral men and women.

These are people suffering from schizophrenia; the mental illness that exists in every society on the planet; leading one to surmise that this mental state has come down from the earliest sentient days of mankind. One of the conclusions of Jaynes' book is that before about 3000 years ago, all men and women were schizophrenic in a sense; except that auditory hallucinations were the norm and those developing a left brain dominance would have been the ones considerred to have a mental illness.

This is certainly an intriguing idea and would also explain many of the events of the scriptures - including the Old Testament - that were reported as miraculous and prophetic once the left brain was firmly established as the dominant mind of mankind.

Science and History can be a double-edged sword when dealing with our most basic belief systems. My own questioning about my belief in Christianity and its progenitor, Judaism, came about as a freshman in (of all places) a Catholic Jesuit University. The course was about the history of religion and one of the most pivotal ideas to me was the belief by many that The Bible is the absolute word of God.

Yet the historical fact of these writings is that for centuries, the Old Testament had been passed down as stories and myths and were edited and enhanced as they went along to make it appropriate and relevant to the current teller's culture and mores. When it was finally written down, the same thing happened. Passages and ideas were added, modified and deleted as needed in their current context.

The most evident example of this are the four Gospels of the New Testament. All four purport to tell the same story: that of Jesus of Nazareth. Yet each approaches the story with its own agenda, adding things here and leaving out things there. Some holes between the Gospels are large enough to drive a truck through.

Then one learns that none of the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Instead, they were written later, sometimes many decades after these apostles died by others who were inculcated in their own societies and its current crises and challenges.

Then, there is the fact that these four Gospels were set to be the only true Gospels in 325 A.D., when for any number of reasons, including political, social and sexual, many other gospels and letters were thrown out because they didn't conform to the political policies of the Church Fathers of the 4th century.

The book The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels is an excellent overview of how the early church, long after Jesus and the Apostles were gone, set about to create a Church that would establish its own power structure with those who had won the political struggle for the past three centuries. This book, like the ones mentioned here, is an eye-opening account of how little the vast majority of us know about something so integral to all our lives as our own religious history.

And so...where is God?

Billions on earth believe in some form of divinity or divinities. Have we all been given these ideas from the Bicameral brains of men three millennia ago?

Beyond even the question of God, what about spirit? Is this concept, too, just a product of the breakdown of the Bicameral mind?

My own search for knowledge has led me full circle to a point where doubt is my prevailing belief. Doubt is the only certainly I have. And for me as well as the billions of others who share this planet and this kind of mind, it will be all we ever can know for sure.

When all is said and done, however, it's apparent that there is something in us that wants - that needs - to believe that there is more to this life than just the little time that is allotted to us - and more to us than just the atoms, molecules and tissues that we are composed of.

Certainly some of the greatest evil has been and still is being done in the name of "God". Yet we must also recognize that much of the greatest art, literature and ideas have come from the idea that there is a greater good and a greater "mind" at work in the universe than we can know or understand.

Humanism is an idea that precludes any necessary belief in a god or a supreme being and it seems that in the face of the fact that in the entire 13.5 billion year history of our universe, there has never been any absolute proof in the existence of God or supreme being, we should be able to create a world of human relations that has a moral code that doesn't need to incorporate a belief in God. Yet it seems that this is not how the mind of Man works.

Geneticists have recently discovered a God gene that apparently predisposes our species to a belief in a power greater than ourselves. Why has this gene survived since it first came into being?

If we believe in the ideas of natural selection, there is a survival reason for this gene still being with us. Nature doesn't keep things around it doesn't need. Even so, perhaps vestiges of our evolution like the appendix, the eye's nictitating membrane, muscles in the ear and the coccyx (tailbone) show us that at some point, this gene will stop working and become just another piece of "junk" DNA.

Until then, I find it hard to believe that even the most hardened atheists have never uttered the phrase, Please God, help me! when faced with one or more of life's many difficult and eventual crises.

The 99th Monkey and Me

2009-02-08T13:33:00.005-06:00

I just finished reading a book called The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments.

Intrigued by the title, I purchased the book and read the opening paragraphs to discover what the term The 99th Monkey means.

There was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys -- the irrepressible Macaca fuscata -- living on an island in Koshima in 1952: incidentally, the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain unpleasant grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo discovered that if she took her potato down to the water's edge, she could rinse off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier meal. Imo taught her mother and playmates the trick, and gradually over the course of six years, one monkey after another adopted the practice.

Then in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing monkeys reached what is called a "critical mass" -- 99, say -- and when the next potato was washed, it caused a tipping point, and suddenly, not only did the entire monkey population on Koshima Island start performing the new procedure, but all of the monkey populations on neighboring islands spontaneously began washing their potatoes as well.

"The 100th Monkey" became the name New Agers and futurists used for this unusual phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey experience to show that this is also the way the human community makes dramatic, collective paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking, being and behaving. Once a critical mass of people have transformed their essentially materialist worldview to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride.

Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey. If you don't get me, you don't get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age simply through my continuing to be a resistant little putz.

After reading The 99th Monkey, I had to give its author, Eliezer Sobel, his due. It wasn't for lack of trying that he finally concludes that he is that pivotal 99th monkey. In fact, Sobel has spent that last 30 years exploring, workshopping, and even teaching all the things that should have propelled him to become that critical 100th Monkey. But during all those 30 years, there was one thing holding him back.

He just didn't believe it: any of it. Oh, he tried. He tried mightily and earnestly. Along the way, he met some of the most famous (and infamous) spiritual teachers in the world and became a disciple to many of them.

I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est [Erhard Seminars Training] in Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desperately trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans, healers, and gurus; stay in ashrams and monasteries; sit for long hours on meditation cushions; chant in foreign tongues; and live up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat.

I experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient spiritual techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged, shitsu-ed, and rolfed; took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential seminars and self-improvement courses; sat with psychics, channels, and tarot readers; experienced Primal, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies, and anti-depressants. And that's the short list. (The complete one gets embarrassing. Suffice it to say that it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality weekend -- you don't want to know -- as well as having an obese female therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could re-experience being smothered by my mother.)

The following video actually does give a more complete list as Sobel enumerates his spiritual "misadventures".

Thus begins a very funny and revealing memoir of a man who has spent his entire adult life trying to become something he came late to realizing he can never be: enlightened. In fact, he concludes that no one can and that the irrepressible desire to believe in something larger than ourselves is mostly an exercise in self-delusion.

Yet he is quick to point out that his psychological neuroses, (he was actually diagnosed as being a borderline personality by one psychiatrist) might simply prevent him from achieving that state of being that he - and so many others - strive for.

He has wonderful things to say about many of the people he has met, including Ram Dass, Werner Erhard (of est), shaman and dance therapist Gabrielle Roth and the Dalai Lama, of whom he tells this story of a retreat he had in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama.

At the conclusion of the retreat, the monks arranged for us to have an informal audience with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, in his own living room! We filed in, and His Holiness engaged us in a 90-minute informal question and answer session that was filled with laughter and delight. Afterward, we each approached him individually to have a "moment" and presented him with the traditional white "kata" scarf that he ceremonially placed around our necks.

It was perhaps one of the most profound and wonderful seven seconds of my life. It's as if the Dalai Lama's gaze instantly melted everything within me that wasn't radiantly free and happy. And the sensation wasn't so much that I was looking into the vast empty eyes of a living Buddha, it was the spontaneous awareness that I was looking out through the vast empty eyes of a Living Buddha: my own. It takes One to know One. And that's why he's who he is: he has the capacity to look right into the living Buddha essence within each person that crosses his field of vision. I left the encounter beaming from ear to ear. After we had all greeted him in this manner and had begun to depart, His Holiness stood on his front porch laughing and waving goodbye, just like my grandmother used to do, until every last one of us was completely out of sight.

I like that in a living Buddha.

One of the special features of the spiritual quest is to have this kind of experience. I've read of many instances of moments like Sobel describes. Perhaps the most famous for Westerners is when one of the most infamous exponents of psychedelics in the 60's, former Harvard professor Richard Alpert journeyed to India to explore the relationship between what he had discovered with psychedelics and what Eastern sages have been talking about for millennia.

When he and others met Neem Karoli Baba, who would become their guru, they felt such an emotional and spiritual connection, many gave up everything to stay with him and be his disciples. Alpert himself spent two years with the guru then returned to the United States as Baba Ram Dass and would spend the rest of his life teaching what he learned from Neem Karoli Baba about love and compassion.

Ram Dass is still alive, but suffered a serious stroke - which he has since called Divine Grace - in 1997 that left him somewhat incapacitated and has greatly affected his speech. Still, his intellect is sharp and he continues to inspire with his books and talks.

I want to talk a little about the journey now: especially my own journey.

As someone who has been working full time since I left college, I have found it difficult to attend most of the events I've wanted to these past three years.

First, they are often multi-day workshops or seminars that extend into regular work weeks.

Second, they area seldom inexpensive. Costs can range from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars. And this doesn't generally include lodging costs.

Finally - and I've lamented about this previously here - the fertile heartland of America can be a vast desert when it comes to spiritual gatherings. The West Coast, the East Coast, Santa Fe, Boulder, India: these are where one must often go to meet others on the spiritual journey. So include air fare in the costs of anything one wants to attend and each workshop or seminar can become a rather expensive affair.

Just last year, I estimate that I spent nearly $3000 on just a few of the conferences and workshops I wanted to attend - although admittedly, my trip to Switzerland to participate in the World Psychedelic Forum was as much vacation as spiritual adventure. But you get the idea.

It appears to me that most of those who attend these things fall into two categories. Now I could be way off here, but these are my observations. The first group of people who attend are, let's call them trust fund babies: the idle rich who can afford to spend days, weeks, even months on their own spiritual journey. Often these are the ones who can fly to India or Nepal and spend an extended period of time in an ashram or searching for a guru.

The other main group is made up of self-employed people like psychologists, social workers, therapists and the like who can juggle their work schedules to accommodate these events. Often, it seems, these can present a financial burden to members of this group, yet it emphasizes the commitment they have to their spiritual quests that they can and will do this. I have a massage therapist friend who falls into this group and I know how difficult it can be for her to give up paying clients to attend the conferences and workshops that mean so much to her.

Another observation I've had is that the majority of people who attend these events are women. I don't know what this means. Perhaps it is simply an indication that for one reason or another, they have the time to spare to do these things.

I've talked with a number of women who attend these events and while many are single, there are many married women who attend alone, without their husbands. Many I've talked to have said that their husbands aren't interested in these things, don't understand them and can even be somewhat hostile to them.

This can be difficult because the more one becomes interested in things of the Spirit, the more he or she wants to discuss these ideas with others. This is my case. My wife has no interest whatsoever in any of this and probably the main reason I began this blog in the first place is to have a place I can discuss my newfound interests.

I've often mused on how much more interesting it would be to have a partner who is on the same path; and how fulfilling it would be to attend these workshops and conferences together. But more often than not, spiritual "awakenings" don't happen to couples at the same time, so for most, it can be a lonely journey.

All these things have created a sense of conflict in me that led to where I am today. I, too, feel like the 99th monkey in that the struggle to exist in the everyday frenetic world of 21st Century America has made me feel like something of a failure on this journey.

I've had wonderful adventures in the past three years and have experienced things I never thought I would. I've written about them here and every word I wrote was heartfelt and true to what I have experienced.

There have also been painful episodes associated with this journey, but they too have taught me a great deal about life.

Along the way, I've met some remarkable people and have been impressed with the commitment all seemed to have to their own spiritual quests.

It's very easy in this secular world to ridicule those who have beliefs in things unseen and unknown. I, too, have displayed some of this in my discussion of astrology in Star Treks. I explained how the scientist in me simply can't accept the importance placed on celestial body locations as to how our lives play out.

I'm still of the same mind today as I was when I wrote that post, although I must admit that I never finished the book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas I started just before I wrote that post. The book, which reads like a college advanced course textbook has, frankly, been difficult for me to get into, so this would be a failing of my own rather than in the book or subject itself.

A few days ago, as I was writing this, I found an article on Reality Sandwich from Eliezer Sobel called Small Moments, Many Times (after which is also a comment by me called The Mighty Almost Always Fall). The article is something of a followup to his book, The 99th Monkey. In the article, Sobel talks about "his beloved old friend and colleague, as well as a mentor at times", Rabbi David Cooper, about whom he says,

I have spent over 30 years exploring and diving into nearly every approach to "waking up" that came down the pike, often going to what some would consider great lengths in my quest. But while I was busy traipsing around the globe collecting exotic spiritual experiences, David was mostly being a disciplined meditator, digging one deep well, as it is said, in contrast to my numerous shallow holes. He would often spend between three and six months of each year on silent retreat, sitting on a cushion, and maintaining an unbelievably austere schedule of arising at two or three in the morning and essentially meditating all day until ten at night, then sleeping for perhaps four hours and beginning again. He would maintain this schedule for up to 100 days at a time.

Beyond his commitment to silent sitting practice, David, like me, was also at times drawn to some extreme experiments on his journey: he did what the Tibetan Buddhists call a "dark retreat," which, like it sounds, involves being in an absolutely dark room for extended periods of time; in his case, 23 days. Apparently, all notions of night and day disappear, the boundary between sleeping, waking and dreaming begins to blur, and one discovers the infinite capacity of the mind to create vast worlds that appear as real. David also did a "homeless retreat" on the streets of New York City, in which the participants were instructed to show up with just the clothes on their backs, no money, food or water, and they were set loose to survive in the city for five days, relying on their wits, grace, and the kindness of strangers.
So if anyone can speak about and exemplify the value of genuine, committed spiritual practice and meditation, it is Reb David. He has more than earned his teacher status, and being 14 years my senior, he has also been at it longer than I have, for about 50 years. At our recent retreat together, however, I heard him say something I'd never heard from him before, and it both startled me and shook me up. After delivering an evening talk one night, he concluded by stating, "And this is the best I can offer this lifetime. These are the highest teachings I've come to after 50 years of practice, and I no longer expect to discover anything radically new or different."

Sobel goes on to say how this statement made his heart sink and he felt demoralized. Did the good Rabbi mean that there was no use trying to attain "enlightenment" in our lifetime? Was all their effort for nought? Sobel goes on.

We all have brief moments of experiencing our lives like that, of breaking through our fog and seeing our present reality (no matter what it is) in all of its hidden splendor. Such inspiring awakenings can occur when witnessing the birth of a child, coming upon an extraordinary vista in nature, experiencing a high after meditating for 20 days, or really anything at all that triggers a spontaneous glimpse of the Vast Silence that we inhabit. Yet we keep bouncing back into the daily humdrum view of life, like a rubber band that is stretched and snaps back to its original form; we always seem to come back to "just this," and it's often a huge disappointment.

That's why I was dejected when I heard David say that what he has already offered as a teacher is as good as it gets. Because I know that he also gets bounced back. In fact, he has advised us to reframe our expectations about attaining some permanent state of enlightenment that never goes away, and to think more along the lines of "Small moments, many times." But most of us persist in hoping for some big, final moment of epiphany from which we never return, saving us at last from this world of suffering and our relentless human minds that seem to be running, and often ruining, our lives.

Small moments, many times.

I mentioned above that I've had my own small moments on this journey: small moments that I thought might portend larger, more permanent periods of seeing through the fog, but they didn't persist. And so at times I, too, have thought, was any of it worthwhile?

But when I go back and read through the posts I've written here, I can feel the enthusiasm I felt during those all-too-brief moments and can only feel grateful that even though they were small moments, they were very meaningful moments.

One of the things I've come to realize only recently is that whereas I used to just let important moments pass as if there will always be another important moment just around the corner, I know that these moments don't come frequently enough and that it is important to "be here now" during those moments.

So even though friendships may end, it is important to remember the small moments that gave those friendships such joy in the first place.

And when one becomes reacquainted with long lost friends, it's important to bask in the joy of that renewal, because ultimately, it is only the love of friends and family that make this crazy life meaningful and worthwhile.

Most religions say that God is Love. But those religions have it backwards. What I've found in my short journey is that Love is God. Everyone searches for God. Yet God exists right there in every person we love. I think that this is the most important lesson I've learned on my journey.

I don't know where my journey will lead me now. I feel that in a sense I have returned to my starting point. I've tasted the fruits of many disciplines and ideas and would have liked more "profound" experiences from them than I found, but I must admit that I started very late in life and perhaps like great artists and scientists whose best work is often done when they are young, in the spiritual area, too, a young and supple brain is perhaps the best environment for important spiritual events to occur. Or perhaps I, like Sobel, simply have too many neuroses fighting for dominance in my mind to allow entrance of (or escape to) other realms of reality.

Yet, I don't regret a moment of my journey and I sincerely hope that I am not done with it. It will be interesting to see where I go from here. I'm at something of a standstill right now. I just don't know where I'm going. Nothing is pulling at me. I feel like I just need to sit back and reflect on where I've been. Maybe by allowing the focus of my third eye to relax, something will enter the field of its special vision.

Om Namah Shivaya!

The Tortoise and the Hare (Part 2)

2009-01-03T12:53:00.020-06:00

Thousands of years ago, Egyptian Pharaohs declared mushrooms sacred and reserved them for their own godly use. They were also called "the food of the gods" by Romans--and even today psilocybe species of mushroom are sacred to some Indians in Mexico, South America, and the North America southwest, where they are used to induce religious trances and hallucinations.

In 1962, a research project was conducted with students from the Harvard Divinity School. Known as the Marsh Chapel Good Friday Experiment and under the supervision of Professor Timothy Leary, 20 students were administered either psilocybin or the B-Vitamin niacin in a double-blind experiment to test whether the active ingredient in "Magic Mushrooms" could induce religious and mystical experiences in students predisposed to believing in these states. According to this article, "almost all of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences, providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences."

The second opportunity I had this past year of trying a psychedelic substance occurred when an acquaintance offered me some dried "magic mushrooms" he had grown himself. He was excited to have me try them since we'd discussed my interest in experiencing this "food of the gods".

So one warm summer evening he got a small bag of mushrooms out of the freezer and told me that they were all mine.

"What?" I exclaimed "You're not going to take them with me?"

He told me that there wasn't enough for both of us since it had been a small crop, but he said that there should be enough to give me a very interesting trip.

"Cool!" was all I could respond with, although I did feel a tiny bit of anxiety that he wouldn't be traveling with me on this trip. On the other hand, I thought, if I did have any kind of problems, he wouldn't be so into his own trip that he couldn't respond to me. So that made me feel better about soloing on my first flight.

I'd been mentally preparing for this adventure for quite awhile and have done a lot of research on psilocybin mushrooms. As for how much I should take, I learned that the amount suggested was that one should take about 30 grams of fresh or 3 grams of dried mushrooms. We had dried mushrooms, but my friend told me that he always just eats a certain number of shrooms. 9 was the number he used.

But I needed to be more scientific, so I insisted on weighing what I would be taking. At that point, he got out a mortar and pestle set and began crushing the dried mushrooms into a relatively fine powder.

When he was done, we weighed out a little more than 3 grams and saw that there was still a couple more grams left.

Terence McKenna, along with his brother, Dennis (and using aliases), literally wrote the book on growing and using psilocybin mushrooms, Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, made this statement about how to use magic mushrooms and psychedelics in general.

The way to do these things [psychedelics] is to do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium...and then just slam it! I want to get to the people who've taken 3 grams of mushrooms and who've taken 150 mics of LSD and tell them that they never got close to what I'm talking about even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently, they never got close to what I'm talking about. So you have to convince these people to take high doses and then take them frequently enough so that they don't forget what the deal is.

Of course, Terence McKenna was the greatest proselytizer of our psychedelic era; even going beyond Tim Leary, whom I consider more of an arrogant iconoclast who did more damage to the Consciousness Rights Movement than anything else. Sure, he popularized psychedelics, but in doing so, he antagonized so many in the Establishment that he popularized them right out of any legal use or medical research by anyone in the world.

McKenna on the other hand, had a great deal of influence on the underground psychedelic cogniscenti: those whose exploration of their minds and consciousness with these substances would not become headline news and who for the most part were themselves part of the dominant culture. Most of these people were and are still users for whom these substances are seen as great tools for exploring their own Inner Space.

Back to my dosage, McKenna used to talk about what he called an "heroic dose" of magic mushrooms to be 5 grams and above. So I had available to me about 5 grams, but since this was to be my first use of this powerful substance, I didn't want to go for broke just yet.

So I took my 3 grams and as directed by my friend mixed it in a cup of water. He warned me that I would not like the taste, but I figured that no matter how bad this "tea" was, it would taste like ambrosia compared to Wachuma.

And in fact, it wasn't bad. My friend asked if it tasted bitter at all.

"Not a bit" I replied.

"Hmmm...", he said. "I hope it's still good. It usually tastes kinda bad."

Nevertheless, I downed the entire cup and dug the remnants of the shrooms out with the tip of my finger so that I could finish every morsel of the delicacy. Waste not, want not, I figured.

Once this was done, I went out to the patio. My friend lives somewhat isolated out in the country and has a beautiful view overlooking a pastoral landscape. He had already decided to be my conductor for this journey and had set up his stereo system outside. So with me sitting directly in front of the speakers, he began playing music he'd selected for my trip.

The first CD was an astonishing discovery for me. It was Anoushka Shankar, another talented daughter (along with singer Norah Jones) of the great Indian sitar player, Ravi Shankar. Anoushka followed in her father's footsteps in that she, too, plays the sitar. But instead of playing traditional Indian music, she has brought Indian music into a richer, fuller dimension.

The CD playing was called "Rise" and as I began my journey, I was entranced by the sounds I was hearing. For a sampling of her music, go to Anoushka Shankar's home page.

But while the music was moving and potentially transformative, the awaited effects of the mushrooms were slow in arriving. When the CD was finished, I went into the kitchen where my friend asked how I was doing.

"Not much happening yet." I told him. "In fact, I think I'll have the rest of the 5 grams."

I was determined not to have this experience turn into the "dud" that my Wachuma experience had been and so I finished all the crushed shrooms.

Back to the patio and my friend asked what I wanted to hear now.

"Do you want The Dead or Hendrix?"

This was a tough decision since both were known for being influenced by psychedelics. I'd seen Jimi a couple months before he died in 1970 when he was touring with Band of Gypsies. I saw The Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia in 1975 at a free concert in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Also on that bill was the original Jefferson Airplane. How cool was that? We'd just stumbled on that concert while visiting the park one Sunday. Since The Summer of Love and the heyday of Haight/Asbury had come and gone, when Jerry sang "Truckin'", the line "What a long, strange trip it's been." had a lot of meaning to all those old hippies in '75.

"Let's hear The Dead." I finally said. He smiled knowingly and put on one of their many CD's. I never did find out which one it was, but when Jerry began one of his amazing flights of guitar virtuosity, I finally got it. I GOT IT! Now I understood why "Deadheads" crisscrossed the country to attend Dead concerts. The only way to hear the Grateful Dead was high. To which most anyone who knows The Grateful Dead would shout a hearty and mocking, "DUH!"

By now, I was pretty high, but still had not achieved orbit in a psychedelic sense. I did feel very good and had some interesting images present themselves as I gazed into the darkness.

Later, I did hear a Hendrix CD, but it probably wasn't the best one of his to hear under those conditions. Instead of one of his free-flying psychedelic CD's like "Axis: Bold as Love", my friend put on one of his favorites, "Blues". And like the title says, it actually brought me down quite a bit listening to it.

Still, it was an enjoyable experience overall, but alas, still not a psychedelic one. So now I was 0 for 2 in the trippin' column, and I had to seriously wonder if it was something about me - something in me - that isn't allowing me to experience these things.

Certainly, in both cases, it could have had something to do with the plants themselves. As my friend had feared, maybe the mushrooms had gone bad. But I'm not so sure.

So...what about the future?

I have thought seriously about doing one of the increasingly popular Ayahuasca Tours one can find advertised all over the internet. Ayahuasca Tourism has been getting some bad press because of the "faddishness" aspect of it. Well-to-do North Americans and Europeans -or at least those with the scratch to fly to the Amazon and spend a few thousand bucks and a week or so becoming indigenous and drinking the Sacred Brew up to five times.

The argument centers on motivation. Are people risking malaria and other tropical pests and diseases to participate in an ancient shamanic ritual or simply to have another experience they can add to their spiritual scalp belt? This article from Daniel Pinchbeck's Reality Sandwich website called "Will the Real Ayahuasca Tourists Please Stand Up?" looks at this debate.

To be quite honest, I probably lean toward the latter reason, although my own scalp belt is sadly barren of any trophies of my psychedelic experiences.

The thing holding me back isn't the psychological torments and inner demons I might face, but rather the fear of wasting a few thousand dollars for an experience that might fail as badly as my two other psychedelic experiences. Although I have always wanted to visit the Amazon. So I guess any trip to that exotic region wouldn't be a waste.

The other reason I hesitate is for the reasons Adam Elenbaas felt he should drink the healing medicine; i.e., because as he states, "I remember the first night I ever tried a psychedelic. At the time I was addicted to morphine and methadone, was a habitual drinker and was living a sexually promiscuous lifestyle. "

Well none of these things apply to me. Neither do I suffer from any deeply hidden psychological traumas, unless they are so deeply hidden that I can't even recognize their artifacts in my personality. I'm far from perfect, but throughout this spiritual journey I've felt that perhaps I am too normal - too undisturbed. And until and if I am ever confronted with something I simply can't envision, this is my thinking right now.

But should that disqualify me from trying to access those other dimensions of reality that are the special domain of psychedelics? I think not. In fact, I believe that as a seeker of knowledge, it is imperative to try to find it in whatever direction or by whatever means it might lie.

These are brave words as I sit in a comfortable chair in my living room with 14 degree weather outside. But when I am sitting and sweating in an Amazonian jungle hut with a wildly painted shaman singing icaros and dancing around me right after I've drunk the magical brew of the Banisteriopsis spp. vine and the leaves of the Psychotria bush, will I still be the brave soul I pretend to be right now?

I know one thing. I owe it to my consciousness to explore these dimensions. I feel guided to do it and if and when I do, I'll report on that experience here as well.

The Tortoise and the Hare (Part 1)

2008-12-14T11:16:00.023-06:00

I am at a point in my search for knowledge - the subject of this blog - where I find myself alternating between two strongly-held positions.

One the one hand, I want to prepare naturally for any mystical experiences, alternate realities or contact with The Other that might be within me by employing ancient methods of self-discipline like meditation and yoga. The downside (if there ever is a downside) is that these methods take a long time to achieve their goal - by which time you realize that there should be no goal and that to have a goal is merely a function of ego and not of spirit. Beyond this realization, there is a good possibility that any goal like this will not be achieved in a single lifetime.

In lieu of waiting a number of future incarnations to achieve Buddha Enlightenment, there is another side of me wants to achieve this as quickly as possible, and the quickest way I know of in this lifetime - save for getting struck by lightning or suffering a complete psychotic break - is through the use of psychedelics.

Achieving this thing I'm after, then, is like the fabled race between the tortoise and the hare. While in the long run, the much slower tortoise will finish the race, it's quite a temptation to bet on the swift hare to get to the finish line first. Of course, to twist this metaphor around, there's no assurance that the tortoise will finish the race at all before he dies. So he would have to be born again and again and again to finally reach the finish line.

But goddammit! I'm a middle-class American, and as such was born and raised with the idea that I deserve to have it all. What's more, I deserve to have it all NOW!.

I've already written about my experience with meditation - played in this scenario by the tortoise. My experience here has been defined by fits and starts over the past thirty-five years or so.

Occasionally during that time, however, and especially in the past year since attending the World Psychedelic Forum, I've toyed with the idea of seeing what life is like from the hare's point of view. So on two different occasions in the past year, I've actually tried the hare's quick way to Enlightenment with two different psychedelic plants.

The Doors of Perception

The first time I experienced psychedelics was in a shamanic healing ceremony a number of months ago. The substance I took during that ceremony is called variously San Pedro Cactus, Huachuma, Wachuma, Achuma and even Cactus of the Four Winds. It, like peyote, is a indigenous medicinal plant that contains the psychedelic molecule, Mescaline.

Mescaline! Cool!

This is the hallucinogenic substance contained in peyote that Carlos Casteneda used to discover A Separate Reality on his Journey to Ixtlan through The Teachings of Don Juan, Casteneda's legendary brujo or shamanic sorcerer.

While much has been written by now about the questionable authenticity of Don Juan Matus and therefore Casteneda's entire series of anthropologically-based books, there is no doubt that they were the impetus for innumerable people around the world to begin searching for the own Ixtlan using psychedelics.

Fifteen years before Casteneda's first book was published, however, a seminal book was written that would bring a re-enchantment to the West; that is, an imperative for artists, writers, poets and other intellectuals to experience psychedelics.

The book was called The Doors of Perception (full online version), and it's author was the esteemed writer Aldous Huxley: author of Brave New World and The Perennial Philosophy among many important literary works.

The title for the book The Doors of Perception came from William Blake's , The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, wherein he wrote:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

The Doors of Perception is Huxley's account of his own Mescaline trip. He described his introduction to the substance this way:

By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail [of a chemical basis for mental illness]. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results.

He wrote that his goal was to "change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about."

So what did Huxley experience?

Like all psychedelics, Mescaline is a psychotomimetic -a drug that tends to produce symptoms similar to those of psychosis. The idea of learning about these disturbances from the inside was an intriguing idea for researchers and psychonauts like Huxley in the 40's and 50's.

Here he speaks about the "mad" wife of an old friend who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

One day in the early stages of the disease, when she still had her lucid intervals he had gone to talk to her about their children. She listened for a time, then cut him short. How could he bear to waste his time on a couple of absent children, when all that really mattered, here and now, was the unspeakable beauty of the patterns he made, in this brown tweed jacket, every time he moved his arms? Alas, this Paradise of cleansed perception, of pure one-sided contemplation, was not to endure. The blissful intermissions became rarer, became briefer, until finally there were no more of them; there was only horror.

Most takers of mescalin experience only the heavenly part of schizophrenia. The drug brings hell and purgatory only to those who have had a recent case of jaundice, or who suffer from periodical depressions or a chronic anxiety. If, like the other drugs of remotely comparable power, mescalin were notoriously toxic, the taking of it would be enough, of itself, to cause anxiety. But the reasonably healthy person knows in advance that, so far as he is concerned, mescalin is completely innocuous, that its effects will pass off after eight or ten hours, leaving no hangover and consequently no craving for a renewal of the dose. Fortified by this knowledge, he embarks upon the experiment without fear - in other words, without any disposition to convert an unprecedentedly strange and other than human experience into something appalling, something actually diabolical.

For some eight or ten hours, then, Huxley experienced "only the heavenly part of schizophrenia" and recorded his impressions of both the outer world as well as the inside of his own mind; the latter being by far the more interesting read. He would later transcribe his experience to paper in minutest detail.

Being the intellectual he was, Huxley examined every part of his experience and related it to mind events such as his encyclopedic knowledge of art. Here is an example of the first picture he looked at in an art book he found at "the world's largest drug store" in Los Angeles.

I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair" - that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.

It is when he begins to muse on another aspect of representational art that he truly begins to wax philosophical.

I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.
This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.
Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake - or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric - the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation - inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand - of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.
But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli - and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.
This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, how things really are."

The remainder of Huxley's intellectualized mescaline-induced meanderings take on a similar style.

On the other end of the experiential spectrum are the incredibly intrepid (and sometimes foolhardy) psychonauts who relate their own experiences on websites like The Vaults of Erowid.

For instance, under the San Pedro vault, one of the trips described begins this way:

So it was 11:30 when I drank the first cup. I lay back in my car at an elementary school parking lot (it was a cloudy Sunday), and listened to a mixed CD I made specifically for my trip (I would listen to the same songs again and again later on).

It tasted bad, but not nearly as bad as everyone says it tastes, but that is probably because I diluted the cactus with a huge bottle of squirt it would have been nice to get Cactus Cooler, but they don't seem to really sell that anymore. I felt a little sick, but other than that, nothing really happened.

I left to use the restroom at Wendys, and found myself starting to get a little anxious at the sight of city people in their natural habitat. Going back to my spot, at around 11:50, I somehow managed to drink the rest both cactus juice and squirt. All in all, not that bad.

Then the sickness started. I laid back in the drivers seat, and began to feel very heavy, and nauseous but it was ok because I expected that. I was waiting for J to be free so he could be my sitter for the day, and I was getting very anxious waiting. My anxiety was increasing as time was moving slower and slower, and I was starting to feel heavier.

At about 1pm, I was feeling a little less nauseous, so I went for a drive around Js neighborhood (note: driving while on a psychedelic is a BAD idea -please do not do this - I won't again). Suddenly everything seemed absurd and comical, and I started to laugh nearly uncontrollably.

I drove past this fat little girl, and laughed at the way she waddled not out of spite or pity, but just because, I dunno, she was ridiculous. I also saw this old man sitting out in front of his driveway, wiping his nose with this big oily cloth like with such enthusiasm. I could only chuckle at the way his indifferent grandson or whatever fumbled with the dead machinery of their car.

The anxiety was increasing and I was feeling a little paranoid like there were too many people. I couldn't just sit somewhere and be left alone. Blue minivans and mustached men in trucks kept swarming around wherever I was, throwing insipid faces at me, grimacing, questioning or that is how it seemed.

After a very detailed description of everything he did during his experience, our narrator finishes in a more thoughtful tone.

Lessons: Most of the stuff I thought about I already kind of knew, but it was very different in its depth and power over me. Philosophical knowledge is sometimes useful in everyday life, but it was absolutely necessary in the psychedelic state. It wasn't whether I turned left or right that it was important, it was whether my subconscious wanted to live or die, to love or hate that was important at every moment. Being in that state also brought me to a whole new level of empathy for other people and animals that I have never really felt before it was really amazing, insightful, and awe-inspiring.

I didn't see God/the void, but I felt momentary union with it/her/him as I was able to let go of my stubborn ego, and become one with nothingness, with the paradox. It was amazing to feel how it is to be in between things, between you and the tv, between the music as objective notes and your perception of them, and then to become the music, to move from apprehension of chaos to union with it. There is simply nothing on this earth (that I have found) that compares to that.

With that said, however, I don't exactly want to go back there for a while. It was awesome, but at that same time it was constantly verging on horrific, because it takes so much energy to hold yourself together to keep from letting your ego be completely dissolved in the void. And it may not be that bad, but, considering I don't really know how I'd be on the other side of the event horizon, I'm not ready to try it. I felt completely exhausted and vulnerable the day after, as well as a little depressed just a little. But I do intend to do it again, and, most likely, with a more potent dose.

For Erowid trippers, one of the things that always struck me as being just a bit crazy is how oblivious many are as to what they are taking and how it will affect them. Most at least note the amounts of the drugs they take, yet many mix different psychoactive and psychedelic substances in the same trip.

One such person described himself as "an 'experienced' tripper. Not a voyager, or a pioneer, and definitely not a 'psychonaut', but definitely more than a novice." One weekend, he and a friend drove to a national forest and proceeded to take not only San Pedro, but also two other psychedelic plants: Syrian Rue and Mimosa tenuiflora!

This is not unusual for the contributors to Erowid's vaults. The impression I have after reading many of these experiences is that most of the contributors are simply looking for the most radical experience they can have and nothing more. Many speak of touching "the other" on their journeys, but it's apparent that this is not their motivation or intention going in.

Still, it can be said that many, if not most, Westerners began their psychedelic experiences with little more than curiosity or because their friends were doing it. Depending on what they experienced, a good number of these people, including perhaps the most famous, Richard Alpert, who later became Ram Das, were so overwhelmed by their psychedelic journeys that they spent the rest of their lives pursuing the lessons and heavens they experienced on their mind excursions.

In our government's eternally-discombobulated policies on drugs, San Pedro Cactus is perfectly legal to own as a plant, but if you grind up a foot or so and were to ingest it, you are potentially committing a felony. I say potentially, because as of this writing, there have apparently been no convictions involving San Pedro. Peyote, on the other hand, is prohibited by name in the Controlled Substances Act and there have been arrests and prosecutions for the use of this substance.

In 1990, a very interesting U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding the firing of a Native American man for using Peyote, led to Congress passing an amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act stating that it is "legal for peyote to be used for ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of traditional American Indian religion...the Native American Church."

The Healing Ceremony

The ceremony I attended brought together ten people to spend the evening and early morning hours participating in an ancient shamanic ritual. The shaman who presided over this experience has had years of experience working with Amazonian plant medicines and the ceremony was both otherworldly and quite beautiful.

The setting for our ceremony was on an old farmstead in a lovely rural area. At about 5 in afternoon, inside the barn that had been converted for a variety of purposes by different groups, we all gathered in a circle where the shaman began the ceremony with prayers and some sacred indigeneous songs in preparation for the work we were to do that evening.

Following this opening invocation, he and some other went into another room to prepare the Wachuma. In a few minutes, they came back with 11 big cups of the substance. One whiff, however, and we knew that it was going to be a difficult chore to down the entire 12 ounces of the foul smelling cactus juice.

Okay, I'm going to describe the Wachuma as I've described it to everyone I've talked to about this experience since then. To me, the drink had the look, the texture, the smell and, alas, the taste of nothing so much as vomit. Its only saving grace was that it was mixed with pineapple juice, but even that didn't help much. We were instructed to drink it as quickly as possible so as not to prolong our gustatory torment.

I gave it one last look and breathing only through my mouth chugged the stuff, then quickly sucked on a lemon that had been provided for the purpose. It would take some of the others - most of whom had never done this before - a good half hour to get it all down. But finally, we'd all consumed our portions. We were also told that most, if not all of us would probably purge ourselves of the Wachuma before the evening was done, but that we should try not to do that for at least an hour and a half.

We were told that it might take from 45 to 90 minutes for the plant's effects to be felt. After about a half hour, we began our "walkabout" through the farm files surrounding us.

It was a clear but muggy evening when we left the barn. Dusk was quickly descending over the land and I could feel an unmistakeable altered state beginning to settle in. The first thing I noticed was that in the diminished light, while most colors were being overtaken by the impending darkness, a few colors stood out. Certain hues of greens, yellows and orange, especially, took on an almost inner glow and suddenly I realized why day-glo colors were so popular during and after the psychedelic era of the '60s.

Dusk can take on a mysterious presence at any time, but under the influence of the Wachuma, it seemed even more mysterious. As we walked around the field on a path at the edge of a wooded area, I noticed this very alien-looking plant.

The red-purple vines were stunningly bright and the green buds stood out like individual sentinels to the mystery inside them. I don't recall ever seeing this plant before. Yet there were many, many of these plants along the edges of that field. What the buds looked like to me more than anything else was little peyote buds. Perhaps it was the spirit of the Wachuma seeming to recognize a relative.

I learned later that this particular plant is called Pokeweed and while the plant is toxic, the leaves can be prepared by boiling them three times to reduce the toxin. The result is a staple of the Southern U.S. and is called Poke Salad or Poke Salit. Remember the '60's Tony Joe White song, Poke Salad Annie?

Okay, probably not.

Anyway, then came the moment I wasn’t looking forward to. One of the men opened the gate that led to a swampy pond along a set of railroad tracks and we all ambled through it.

"Well", I thought "here they come. The bane of my life on summer evenings: mosquitoes."

How right I was. There were swarms of them near that pond. I heard them all around me and swatted them away as best I could. Yet the others didn’t seem to be bothered at all by these tiny pests as they were well into their own very personal journeys.

Oh yeah, the headache!

I'd had one of the worst headaches in a long time before the ceremony, probably because I'd fasted for the day and probably didn't drink enough water. Besides that, I was in the middle of a three-week body cleanse and was eating only fresh, organic raw fruits and vegetables.

My headache was so bad, in fact, that I seriously considered not going through with the ceremony and I refused to take any artificial painkillers. But after doing some holotropic breathing, I felt the headache release its grip enough to convince me that I shouldn't pass up this unique experience.

Now, however, perhaps because of the work of the plant's medicinal qualities , it suddenly occurred to me that the headache was completely gone. Besides, by now I was much more preoccupied with the mosquitoes that were assaulting me from every direction.

It was dark now and prime mosquito witching hour. Still, no one else seemed to be bothered by them like I was. Almost everyone else either stood quietly or sat down in the grass and just went into themselves, but I continued to walk around.

During this time, an fascinating moment occurred. Across the pond, a deer saunted into view then stopped and looked across at what must have been a very odd sight: a small tableau of people standing or sitting very still and in complete silence. Every one of us had noticed the deer and there was a quite palpable exchange of consciousness between our two species for a few moments until the deer simply looked away and continued its solo journey.

It was probably an hour and a half into the experience and I still wasn’t feeling anything that I would call psychedelic, and when the shaman came up to me and asked if I was feeling the medicine, I had to tell him that I wasn't. What I meant was that I wasn't feeling the psychedelic effects Huxley had written about.

He didn’t respond, but simply walked away. He had mentioned earlier that sometime if people didn’t’ seem to “get off” with the amounts given, he’d give more, but we were well away from the barn and besides, I wasn't feeling that well by now and thought that if he did offer me more I’d probably refuse it.

We’d been told earlier that the cactus was an energizing substance and was used by Andean natives in a way similar to coca, which gave them great stamina to trek through the incredible sacred mountains of Western South America.

I, however, had only felt increasingly tired since our walk began. Finally, I just sat down in the grass and continued to swat away the mosquitoes. I was glad that I’d changed into long pants and shoes and socks instead of the shorts and sandals I’d worn to the ceremony. Now it was my scalp that most concerned me. I had brought mosquito repellant with me, so I sprayed my hands and arms, but don’t like to get the spray near my face. I did spray a bit on the top of my head, since mosquitoes seem to be especially attracted to my naked bald dome.

I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes while sitting there in the grass, because suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder and said that we were leaving the pond area. When I looked around, I was the last one sitting and quickly got up and to rejoin the nomadic band.

Now, however, the physical effects of the cactus were beginning and my stomach was feeling queasy. I knew what was coming, so I hung back a little on the trail and then…spewed, tossed my cookies, upchucked, heaved and all the other euphemisms for that most unpleasant experience.

Yet, like so often happens after purging, I felt much better and quickly walked back to the group which was heading for the fire pit where we would continue the actual healing ceremony.

By the time we arrived at the fire pit, it was totally dark and we quickly gathered up any wood that we could find to start a fire. That done, we all sat down and the shaman began by saying prayers to the spirits of the East, West, North and South as well as Pachamama, Mother Earth and Pachatata, Father Sky. He also sang icaros: sacred songs (click for an example).

Now that we were away from the mosquitoes for the most part, I observed how I was feeling more closely. The first thing I noticed were the thousands of shooting rockets of embers that came off of the fire as it popped and sputtered with the old and new, wet and dry wood that we’d thrown into it. The tiny fiery trails they left as they rose in the air was something I’d seen before, but not quite as spectacularly as this.

Almost from the moment we left the barn, there was almost no talking between any of us. This continued at the fire. The shaman was the only one who spoke, but only occasioinally. Then we were all back in our own interior worlds. I knew that I was feeling the effects of the medicine because of the feeling of serenity that had fully come over me. Yet my thinking was as clear as ever—perhaps more so.

Over the next few hours, whenever the fire would nearly die out, the man I called The Fire Keeper would walk over to it and add more wood. His image at those times was quite interesting to behold. He wore a baseball cap backwards and had some Peruvian beads around his neck. He made a primitive, yet reassuring presence as he dutifully performed his task throughout the night.

I was fairly tired by this time, but didn’t want to leave. The weather had cooled considerably since the heat of the day and toward the end of the ceremony, I wished that I’d brought a jacket…and again was grateful that I’d worn long pants, sock and shoes. But before that point, the weather had been almost perfect.

One thing that occurred frequently during the night was this. Suddenly down the hill at the bottom of the valley, we’d hear the sound of train gates sounding their alarm. Then we’d hear the approaching train’s blaring horn. And because of how we were sitting there above the tracks, the trains sounded like they were just a few feet away as they roared by us. Most were very long freight or coal trains. Yet they didn’t seem to disturb anyone particularly. In fact, some mentioned later that they had viewed them as a symbol of their own lives rushing by.

The thing that was most disturbing during the night was the occasional explosion of fireworks someone apparently had left over from a 4th of July celebration. Some of these included large bomb types that made an incredibly loud booming report. Fortunately, these were fairly infrequent and didn’t dampen our spirits...or scare away the Spirits.

I knew by now that I would not have the kind of full-blown psychedelic experience I had wanted, so I settled back to simply enjoy the feelings engendered within us by the ceremony and the warm and inviting fire in the midst of a beautiful natural setting.

About this time, I noticed that the shaman had gone up to one of the women and was speaking with her. He then performed some rituals using tobacco and fragrant oils. He also sang some sacred songs. This was all done quietly so that the others’ reverie was not disturbed. Yet we were all quite curious about the different elements of the ceremony and most of us would glance over occasionally to see what he was doing.

There were five men and five women in our circle and I thought as he went to the third woman in a row that this was just a bit strange…such was my own mind’s musings at the time.

“What’s this guy up to?”, I recall myself thinking.

I guess that I’d read too much about how some “religious” and cult leaders used their positions of power to exploit the women in their charge. Was this what was happening here?

As it turned out, however, the shaman’s intentions were perfectly honorable. For when he finished with the women, he began going around the circle and performing his healing rituals with the men as well.

What interested me was that each person received a personalized healing ritual. When he got to me, I told him about my own issues about being open to Spirit because of my background: my lifelong commitment to scientific rationalism and a long-held skepticism and cynicism of all things non-ordinary.

He understood my problem and said that one way to open up to Spirit was to sing. So as he sang a song in Spanish, I quietly followed him as well as I could. Fortunately, the tune was simple and the words were ones I knew from my very limited Spanish vocabulary.

In these songs, he invoked the spirits of the sky, the sun, the moon, the earth to come into my soul. He then used tobacco as is done in many South American indigenous cultures and placed a few drops of a fragrant oil in my palms for me to inhale deeply. I didn’t quite hear the name of this oil, but as I searched for this substance on Google, I thought that he'd called it agua de Florida. In any case, it was a very sweet and wonderfully fragrant mixture of flowers and I inhaled as deeply as I could.

As he went on to the rest of the men, I thought more about what exactly I was experiencing. There was certainly a peace and calm and I caught myself smiling at different things that happened and as I glanced around at the others. If I was “high”, it was relatively mild, yet there was something very interesting and unusual happening here.

Then I recalled the first time I ever got “stoned” on marijuana many decades ago and I realized that this was a very similar feeling. There was a surreal quality about the evening and one thing that was quite pronounced was the intensity and diversity of sounds. Above us were thousands of tree frogs chattering in the canopy. The crackling of the fire along with the occasional train sounds bearing down on us all contributed to a very aural experience; much stronger than the previous visual effects.

The main difference between this “high” and my old pot highs was the fact that with pot, one’s thoughts flit around endlessly; lighting on this idea or that sensation and all-too-soon it passes on to the next thought or external sensory event. In addition, with this substance there was never any sense of the paranoia that one often experiences with marijuana.

In fact, for whatever personal reasons it happened, the last time I smoked a joint some twenty years ago, I had a panic attack, which frightened me enough that I didn’t risk it again. Actually, I have to confess that I did try a one-hitter a few years ago and I very much enjoyed the old feelings. It was much like meeting an old friend. Yet, since I left my youth, I’ve seldom felt the need to use pot, and except for that one incident, have only the fondest memories of that remarkable plant substance.

A couple of times during the night while we were around the fire, the shaman brought out his drum and began beating it at the appropriate rate; a rate used for thousands of years in almost every indigenous culture to drive the minds of its listeners to a brain-wave state that resembles deep meditation.

Brain Waves

Over the past few decades research into auditory driving has found that there is significant reason to believe that what the shamans knew about the use of drumming to induce trance states can be done in a number of different ways. An entire industry has grown up around the very interesting concept of binaural beats to do the same thing.

Using two different tones just slightly out of phase with each other, an impression is created in the brain that a beating has been created, even though there is no actual beat in the tones themselves. But these “beats” can then be manipulated to bring the brain's waves from our normal awakened Beta states which is generally at a rate of about 20-40 cycles per second down to 4-7 cycles per second which is the state of deep dreaming sleep or deep meditation.

I have used this type of technology to emulate deep meditation since I have always found it difficult to create the deep focus required to create that inner state so desired in deep meditation. Is this cheating? There is great debate over this question. My thought about this is similar to the whole question of using psychedelics to achieve mystical states. If this technology (or natural method in the case of psychedelic plants) is there, why not use it?

There is the whole issue of the hectic and busy nature of life in the modern world; with stimuli from many different sources constantly bombarding us. We are no longer living in the forests and plains as primitive peoples did. And most of us don’t have the opportunity or inclination to spend our lives in a monastery where the pace of life is designed to be slow and contemplative.

For better or worse, this is the world we find ourselves in today, and if some can discipline their minds to create these states using their own will and attention, more power to them. Others of us find this difficult, and I don’t feel any compunction not to use technology. In our hemisphere, especially, indigenous cultures have used and still use both drumming and medicinal or psychedelic plants to achieve their most transformational states.

Meanwhile...

...after about five hours the shaman told us that it was time to move indoors to close the evening’s ceremony. So we walked slowly and quietly back through the woods and returned to the converted barn we’d be staying in for the night.

Once we were back inside, the shaman said a few more prayers to thank the spirits for making our experiences meaningful and for bringing to each of us what was needed in our own healing.

After that, we all began to drift off to sleep. Unfortunately, I hadn’t brought the best sleeping equipment. I had a nice sleeping bag, but most people, more experienced to the world of camping, had brought with them inflatable Therm-a-Rest mattresses which provided an air-cushioned few inches of padding between them and the bare barnwood floor.

For me, it was a less than satisfying night of sleeping as I missed my well-padded mattress. Still, I got through the night reasonably rested and in the morning, we all had a potluck breakfast with things we’d all contributed.

Before breakfast, however, there was one more piece of business to complete. This was the psychological integration of our previous evening. This involved each of us sharing his or her experience - at least as much as we cared to discuss.

This process was almost identical to the evening assembly of our small group following our Holotropic Breathwork session in Houston. We did much the same thing insofar as we all shared our experiences with each other and since the group was nearly the same size then as now, it was intimate enough that you didn’t feel like you were sharing your very personal experience with the whole world.

My impression after listening to the others that morning was that perhaps only one or two had what could be considered transformative psychedelic experiences. Most, I think, felt like I had to a more or lesser degree. The visuals and the aural effects were pronounced for most, if not all, of us. But what we were processing mentally and emotionally about our own lives was the greater and more important things to each of us. Perhaps this was because, like me, most were new to Wachuma, although I never found out if they were also new to psychedelics as I had been.

During a good conversation I had with the shaman after we got back inside, I told him that perhaps it was because I was expecting “magic” that I’d initially been disappointed. But then I told him that if I looked at the substance in the spirit of which it was given, as a medicine, I couldn’t really expect that anything substantive would take place immediately. Instead, like most medicines, it could take some time to achieve its purpose and my hope was that it would have a long-term positive effect on me.

Maybe I didn't feel any great sense of magic during my experience with Wachuma, but my next experience with psychedelics would definitely involve magic: magic mushrooms!

Stay tuned for Part 2.

[Update: I've often written here about the history of psychedelic use in the modern age. I just read an article in Reality Sandwich that gives an excellent overview of this subject. Before Tim Leary spent a good portion of his outrageous life giving psychedelics a bad name, there were Albert Hofmann, Stanislav Grof, Gary Fischer, Myron Stolaroff, James Fadiman and a host of others who pioneered the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy. (For more information, I highly recommend reading Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.) For nearly 40 years now, while mental illness has increased dramatically in our increasingly dysfunctional society, worldwide research in this field has disappeared and almost been forgotten - until very recently. David Jay Brown's article highlights the promises, benefits and potential the future holds in this very important area of research. ]

Breakdowns and Breakthroughs in the Bicameral Brain

2008-11-28T08:27:00.018-06:00

I often extol the benefits of the technology was are participating in here called the Internet. The range of information, entertainment and personal expression available as a result of this technology is so vast as to be overwhelming. Yet every so often one chances upon a website so extraordinary it makes everything else on the Internet seem, well, just ordinary.

This was how I felt when I discovered TED Talks about a year ago. TED Talks bring together some of the greatest minds of our age to share their wisdom. Since I first stumbled on this site, I've watched many of the compelling videos found there. I've listened to Cosmologist Brian Greene discuss String Theory; the brilliant and eccentric computer scientist Clifford Stoll talk about pretty much everything, iconoclastic co-mapper of the human genome, Craig Venter, explain his desire to create synthetic life; comedian, atheist and ex-Saturday Night Live regular Julia Sweeney entertain with songwriter Jill Sobule in The Jill and Julia Show; Physicist and energy expert, Amory Lovins, propose a wonderfully simple way to withdraw from our addiction to oil; French Biochemist and Buddhist monk, Matthiew Ricard, explain why he's so, well, so fucking happy; and many, more from similarly intriguing, inspiring and entertaining people.

What TED Talks is to me then, is like a field of beautiful diamonds where hundreds of these sparkling gems are just lying around waiting to be picked up by anyone. Best of all, through the magic of the Internet, the number of diamonds never decreases. In fact, there are more and more diamonds all the time.

Another way to look at this website is as a modern day Library of Alexandria, where every book is small and concise, yet all the ideas expressed are able to be understood by anyone who takes a mere 18 minutes to immerse himself or herself in each book. Best of all, the books of this library are never out, missing, on-hold or lost.

This is from the TED website:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 [actually 341 as of today] talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.
Our mission: Spreading ideas.

We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we're building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world's most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other. This site, launched April 2007, is an ever-evolving work in progress, and you're an important part of it. Have an idea? We want to hear from you.

Perhaps the most interesting TED Talk I've watched was one by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who described in exquisite detail the morning she had a massive stroke and how she - ever the scientist - tried to both understand the fascinating experience she was having, as well as try to determine how to get help since she was quickly losing all knowledge of how the objects in her world functioned.

So while she was bleeding into her own brain, she spent well over an hour trying to call her own office because she'd now lost the understanding of what the little squiggles on her own business card meant and about how to use the thing she knew she had to use to contact someone for help: her phone. She did know, however, that if she failed at these once-simple tasks, she would probably die.

Jill Bolte Taylor has been featured a number of times on Oprah's Soul Series webcasts. Oprah, of course, is "the source authority" for Self-Help, Human Development and New Age philosophies in our popular culture, and while some of the ideas promoted on her television show might want to make most scientists throw their televisions out the window, I am personally gratified that her show is popular enough to counter the unenlightened, nonspiritual, dogmatic, and generally selfish thrust of conventional religious culture in America today. Also, it wouldn't hurt some of those scientists to listen to Dr. Taylor talk about her own Self-discovery and open up to a few of these unscientific ideas themselves.

Dr. Taylor wrote about her experience in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. In her TED Talk, she describes what happened to her this way:

On the morning of my stroke...I looked down at my arm, and I realized that I could no longer define the boundaries of my body.

I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect is this energy...energy. And I'm asking myself, 'What is wrong with me? What is going on?'

And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left-hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent; just as if someone took a remote control and pressed the mute button. Total silence. And at first, I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind, but then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous...and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was. And it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden, my left-hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, 'Hey! We've got a problem, we've got a problem! We've gotta get some help! And I'm going, I've got a problem! I've got a problem!

So it's like, okay, I've got a problem. But then I immediately drifted right back out into the Consciousness. And I affectionately refer to this space as 'La La Land'.

But it was beautiful there.

Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to your external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to my job is gone. And I felt lighter in my body.

And imagine all the relationships in my external world and any stressers related to any of those, they were gone. And I felt a sense of peacefulness.

And imagine what it would be like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage. Ohhhhhhhh! I felt...euphoria!

When I finished listening to this talk, I knew that I had to get her book. So I clicked over to Audible.com and downloaded the full book. As interesting as her 18-minute TED Talk is, the complete story of how this young woman lost total functioning of her left-brain and began to rebuild her life step-by-step is both gripping and powerful.

One of the most touching episodes in the book is how Jill's mother flew to Boston to be with her immediately after her stroke. Jill didn't recognize this woman from Adam...or Eve, but somehow her mother just instinctively knew what her damaged child needed at that most vulnerable moment. So she simply climbed into the hospital bed with her and held her just as she did when Jill was an infant - just holding and rocking and loving her.

Thus began a long, painful and arduous road back to full functioning that would take eight years for Jill to become the person she was before her stroke. As I've already mentioned, every step of the way involved relearning everything that she had once known.

Jill's left-brain, the hemisphere that represents who we are in our physical world and how we adapt and react to it was gone. This half of her brain which processes past and future in its familiar linear fashion had simply been erased. Fortunately, it hadn't been physically destroyed. The neurons were intact and fired normally. It's just that all her prior programming had been wiped clean from her brain's "hard drive".

The most intriguing result of her stroke was that this brain scientist was able to independently view her mental existence from both compartments of her brain - called the bicameral brain - which normally work so marvelously together to create the complete human beings we are. It was as if Jill Bolte Taylor, this wonderful communicator and brilliant brain scientist, was given the task by God - or Spirit - to bring to humanity a remarkable insight about who we all really are; an insight that it took someone with her unique perspective and understanding of the brain to grok.

It is in her description of the mystical Oneness of her life in La La Land, however, that I became most intrigued and fascinated.

This is the state that has been the focus of much of my journey. It is a state that generally arrives in a person's life as a result of great psychic pain and suffering - or through years of dedication to a discipline like meditation. Or it is possible to achieve this state very quickly using psychedelic substances like DMT, Psilocybin ('magic mushrooms'), LSD or other hallucinogenic agents. Once one arrives in this state, it appears that it is extremely difficult to remove oneself from; such is its all-encompassing peace and beauty.

Nevertheless, Dr. Taylor's personal and scientific explanation of a biological cause of the mystical experience, i.e., the shutting off of the chatter from the left-brain, gives rise to more questions about the phenomenon of this experience than it answers. I will explore Mysticism in a future post, but back to Jill Bolte Taylor as she tells of her own mystical experience:

So a little while later, I'm riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to Mass. General Hospital and I curl up into a little fetal ball...and just like a balloon with the last bit of air going...whooosh...right out of the balloon, I felt my energy lift...and just felt my spirit surrender.

And in that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life...or that this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I awoke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life.

My mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape because I could not identify the position of my body in space,

I felt enormous and expansive like a genie just liberated from her bottle and my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.

Nirvana! I found Nirvana!

Then I remember thinking, there is no way I could ever squeeze the enormousness of myself back into this tiny little body. But then I realized, I'm still alive. I'm still alive and that I've found Nirvana! And if I found nirvana and I am still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana!

And then I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be. What a stroke of insight this could be to to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we?

We are the life force power of the Universe - with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be in the world.

Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where I am...the life force power of the Universe. I am the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form...at one with all that is.

Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow...separate from you.

I am Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist.

These are the we inside of me.

Which would you choose?

Which do you choose?

And when?

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.

And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.

I highly recommend reading or listening to Dr. Taylor's book, My Stroke of Insight. Her TED Talk below is a brief introduction to this brain scientist's incredible experience. It is both entertaining and very moving. Her telling of it is like watching performance art.

The book expands on this talk by relating how difficult it was to relearn everything about the world again, from how to move her body, how to take her first steps and then walk and finally about her arduous process of learning to read and understand language again; the use of which is the primary function of the left-hemisphere.

I'm certain that you'll enjoy watching this video. Just click on the image below to view it.

Energy in eMotion

2008-11-17T14:52:00.087-06:00

Matter is energy. Energy is matter. This means that even though we exist in this universe as material entities, we are, in fact, merely another form of energy.

At an age that varies widely from between the fourth or fifth month to the thirtieth or thirty-sixth month, the psychological birth of the infant occurs. In developmental psychology this stage is known as the separation-individuation phase and is said to designate the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother.

Others believe that before this stage, our psyches are still basking in the remembrance of the Oceanic Oneness from which each person's consciousness emerged. This stage is also when we experience our own energies only as forces that exist without any psychological overlay whatsoever.

When an infant is hungry, then, the energy of that hunger is released immediately through crying. When an infant feels joy, that energy is expressed in immediate smiling or laughter. An infant's emotions are naked and direct. It is only when that inevitable period of individuation occurs that he or she begins to be socialized to the idea that some energies must be repressed or delayed and that others are perfectly okay to express - at the right place and the right time.

Thus begins our lifelong struggle to become psychologically healthy human beings. From the moment of our individuation, every event we experience and every person we encounter begins to add layers to our psychological makeup. Our psyches can be likened to an onion; but one that grows in reverse. Instead of growing from the inside out, our psyches develop from the outside in, with the oldest parts of our psyche being the most deeply hidden.

This helps explain why childhood emotional trauma can be so difficult to discover and heal and why dozens, perhaps hundreds of different modalities have been created over the centuries to help reveal these hidden psychological wounds. Many of these modalities are spiritual; others are psychological. More recently they are increasingly pharmaceutical.

In a few of my posts here, I've written about my own struggle with depression and anxiety. I never trusted the idea of psychoanalysis. This may be because as a man who has never felt comfortable having heartfelt discussions with anyone, I never believed that spending perhaps years merely talking out a problem with a so-called professional (and one who more than likely got into the profession to deal with his or her own issues) could be beneficial. Also, I've never made enough money in my life to entertain the notion of spending up to hundreds of dollars a session to discuss my life. It seems like becoming a crack addict would be cheaper and maybe just as effective!

Then twelve years ago, I decided to try the SSRI, Paxil.

Almost overnight, most of my depression and anxiety disappeared. For years afterward, I became a great advocate for these next-generation anti-depressants. Targeted specifically on serotonin, the most important psychoactive neurotransmitter affecting our well-being, SSRI's have restored a sense of equanimity to millions in the past twenty years.

These drugs, however, are not without side effects. The most severe, in Paxil especially, are the sexual side effects, which include erectile dysfunction in men, diminished libido and can include total loss of ability to have an orgasm.

Like major bummer, dude!

Just a few of the other reported side effects of SSRI's are:

anhedonia
apathy
nausea
drowsiness or somnolence
headache
clenching of teeth
extremely vivid and strange dreams
dizziness
changes in appetite
weight loss/gain (measured by a change in bodyweight of 7 pounds)
may result in a double risk of bone fractures and injuries
increased feelings of depression and anxiety (which may sometimes provoke panic attacks)
tremors
autonomic dysfunction including orthostatic hypotension, increased or reduced sweating
akathisia (the inability to sit still or remain motionless)
liver or renal impairment
suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide)
Photosensitivity (increased risk of sunburn)

Obviously, these have only been observed in a minority of people who take SSRI's or the FDA wouldn't have allowed these agents to be on the market.

Yeah, right!

Still, my experience with Paxil had been positive for the most part until I realized that I'd spent the greater part of twelve years in something like an emotional fog. For me, though, this was fine. In fact, it was more than fine if I could live each day free from the obsessive thoughts I'd experienced for years over a litany of complaints I dwelled on constantly.

Then a couple of years ago, I began this spiritual journey and it soon became obvious that I didn't want to be in a fog of any kind. So I ever-so-slowly weened myself off of Paxil, since this drug can be a real bear to withdraw from.

By August 2nd of this year, I was off Paxil completely. Then for the next month, I experienced what I can only call the most manic phase of my life. Without doubt, my withdrawal from Paxil was the trigger for this upheaval, but there were other, more provocative reasons for much of the stress I encountered during this period.

Then, a month after I stopped Paxil completely, I realized that I was fighting a losing battle with my many neuroses. Depression was seeping back in through the cracks of my psyche, and I made the decision that regardless how it affected my attempts to be more open to the goals and intent of this journey, I had to restart the old fog machine.

The first couple of weeks back on Paxil were tough. While withdrawal can be an absolute bitch, bringing those levels back up to an effective level can bring with it its own unique problems.

For weeks, I was very sensitive to touch around my neck and upper chest. I could barely stand to wear shirts and was constantly tugging at my shirt collars to remove the "pressure" of the cloth. Yet even without a shirt, I had similar phantom sensations. Thankfully, it was still summer when this occurred.

Slowly, these symptoms disappeared and the familiar psychological salve of the drug took over once again.

Then with my "mania" quickly forgotten, I again felt that I was giving short shrift to the journey of self-discovery I've been on for these past few years. So I decided again to decrease my dosage - and this time the consequences be damned. But when I reached the most minimal amount I could take before stopping altogether, I decided to try something else.

I felt that since my inability to produce enough serotonin is undoubtedly a problem for some reason within my nervous system, I wondered if there was something that would help produce more serotonin rather than just prevent the recycling of the limited amount that was being produced by my body.

In doing some research on this idea, I read about something called 5-htp, which is the precursor chemical to serotonin and is a metabolite of the amino acid tryptophan, which is found in many foods.

5-htp is sold as a food supplement and is therefore unregulated by the FDA. This means that while it is questionable in its efficacy, it doesn't carry the high cost of pharmaceutical research. So I decided to purchase a quantity of capsules and supplement my now minimal amount of Paxil with them.

It has been about a month since I started this regimen and I've been pleasantly surprised by how effective this combination seems to be for me. What has surprised me most is that during this past month, I've gone through what I can only call the most emotionally turbulent period in my life. Yet, during this time of great turmoil, I've still been able to maintain an equilibrium I never would have expected or believed.

I can't give all my credit to the 5-htp, however. I've done something else for perhaps the first time in my life. This is to seriously explore the power of prayer. The reason I say that this is the first time is because I frankly never really believed in prayer; even as a dutiful and serious seminarian on my way to becoming a Claretian Missionary Priest.

I can't recall ever praying to God or Jesus or the Virgin Mary as my Catholic upbringing taught me; at least not with any serious intent and expectation that anyone was listening on the other end. I still haven't prayed to these Christian ideas during this time. Instead, I've used other modes of prayer I've learned about during my spiritual journey like offering my distress and emotional pain to Spirit and to create an intention to move beyond the pain I was feeling and to then expect that my intention would be realized.

Michaela Torcaso

As if to prove that I was on the right track, I was then given an wonderful gift.

This gift was given to me by my daughter, Marin, who quite honestly been as much teacher as daughter in the past few years. Whereas during my life I've clung stubbornly to an old and sterile scientific belief system, Marin has always been open to the mystery, joy and wonder of life. She has tasted the fruits of many of the world’s great philosophies and religions from the joyful emotionalism of Fundamentalist Christianity to the most ascetic practices of Buddhism and others in between. Moreover, she has been nourished in some way by each of them.

So when in the past I discussed with her my frustration at not being able to get beyond my left-brain dominance to experience the ideas I've been studying for the past couple of years , she told me that I should take a class at some point with a woman named Michaela Torcaso, who runs a school of massage and energy work in Madison, Wisconsin called TIBIA (Transformation, Intuition, Bodywork In Action).

While a student at UW-Madison, my daughter had what Dr. Stanislav Grof would call a Spiritual Emergency. It is called an emergency in the sense that while the experience can be terrifying and feel incredibly threatening to the ego’s grip on its version of reality, the individual’s Spirit is actually trying to emerge. It is this emerging or Emergency that has been called The Dark Night of the Soul by mystics.

Marin credits the love and power of Michaela’s intuitive and healing abilities for midwifing her through her own psychic birth canal. Out of that experience was born a young woman who now carries within her the wisdom of a very old soul. However, some of these ideas are still difficult for the scientist in me to begin to fathom.

Fast forward to last weekend. My daughter emailed me a few weeks ago that Michaela would be having her last introductory seminar for the year to what she calls The Foundation Workshop: Freeing the Power to Heal. On the TIBIA website, this workshop is described this way:

In this class, we distinguish between our automatic defense mechanisms that we have previously thought of as our Selves, and the authentic Self from which everything unfolds naturally, with grace and ease. We learn to move from "helping others" to allowing healing to occur for ourselves and those around us.

With this somewhat vague description (or maybe it's my own denseness), I still didn't get what the Foundation Workshop was about. I certainly didn’t understand what energy work was about, but I decided to attend mostly because Marin felt that I could benefit by it.

For two days last weekend, then, I explored my energies, my ego, my personality and its many ego-based subtypes and about the idea of centering. But most of all, I explored a part of myself that exists deeply hidden in my subconscious. This is a region of our psyche we all possess because we are all human beings living in the same physical world, and who share many of the same wounds and scars that are endemic to us as the thinking monkeys.

By the end of the first day, I felt that while all this energy work was interesting and relaxing, it had the same effect on me as a couple of Reiki and acupuncture sessions I’d had recently: close, but no cigar.

As I lay on my bed in the hotel room that night, I wondered if there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t feel whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling during these sessions. Maybe I was just too old and too set in my ways for all this stuff! Maybe senility was peering around the corner and the connection to my right-brain has been broken or damaged. I just couldn't understand why nothing was happening with any of my efforts to experience things just out of reach of my five senses.

This has been a complaint I've had most of my life, but especially since I attended a shamanic journeying workshop a year ago, as well as with the Reiki and Acupuncture sessions. It has also been a problem with my meditation experience over the years.

Then, on Sunday, during the final energy session, lying with my eyes closed, listening to songs selected only by the intuitive sense of Michaela herself, I felt something stir. And as the gentle souls who were assisting Michaela as facilitators for the weekend applied intuitively-selected essential oils and used their own powerful sense of transformative touch to work with my subtle energies, I began to weep. This weeping became more intense as the minutes passed and soon I was crying uncontrollably. What's more, I couldn't understand why this was happening.

But somehow the combination of tools and techniques brought together by Michaela allowed wounds that had been hidden for decades to suddenly become exposed. And when these wounds were finally allowed to exist in the Now of that experience, they just seemed to clear away.

It was a remarkable weekend for me. I honestly feel that in a sense, it was my own re-birth from the pain and darkness of a life lived only in the mind into one that now feels more a part of all that exists. Since then, I've felt lighter, more buoyant, much less isolated and now feel that the island I’ve always felt myself as inhabiting alone in this world has been discovered by people who love and care about me.

Throughout the two hour drive home Sunday evening, I kept flashing on people's faces from the workshop. This person would pop into my mind, then that one and I realized that instead of missing anyone in particular I'd met over the weekend, what I would really miss is the collective energy of the great work we all did together. It was an environment where "souls could be bared" and emotions displayed within a safe space we all helped create.

One thought about the demographics of our little group. There were about twelve people in the workshop; all but three were women. The ages ranged from those in their early twenties to well into their 60's.

As one of the only males in the group, it was difficult to watch a few of the women reconnect with childhood incidents of sexual abuse during the workshop. What was demonstrated so forcefully to me a number of times over the weekend is how long-lasting these acts of physical and psychological violence against a vulnerable child are. People deal with many kinds of wounds from growing up, but the intensity of the pain of sexual abuse - once it is allowed to surface - is difficult to bear witness to. Yet, I believe that it is necessary for the healing process.

While boys as well as girls are sexually abused, the majority are obviously girls and then these sweet little damaged souls must learn to process these traumas early on, or bury them. Nevertheless, there is no way to bury the damage it does to the psyche and to the personality that evolves from it.

More than once over the weekend, then, I felt an odd but very real sense of guilt by the very fact of being a male in that group and of knowing how brutal my gender has been in this regard for perhaps as long as the human species has existed.

I can only hope and pray that this becomes one of the first areas we as human beings evolve beyond as we move ever-so-slowly towards an enlightened evolution.

A few more words about TIBIA. Much more than just a massage school, TIBIA's mission is to teach its students how to use the powerful energies we all possess - but seldom use – in the spiritual evolution of humanity itself.

This is a lofty goal to be sure, but Michaela wants to create this ideal in one person, then another, and then have those people go out into the world and do the same thing until a critical mass is reached. Only when this happens can humanity truly approach its evolutionary imperative to create what French Jesuit Priest and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. Wikipedia describes de Chardin's idea of the noosphere as follows:

[It is] a sort of 'collective consciousness' of human-beings. It emerges from the interaction of human minds. The noosphere has grown in step with the organization of the human mass in relation to itself as it populates the earth. As mankind organizes itself in more complex social networks, the higher the noosphere will grow in awareness. This is an extension of Teilhard's Law of Complexity/Consciousness, the law describing the nature of evolution in the universe. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, added that the noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the goal of history.

I believe, then, that it is through the work of people like Michaela Torcaso, her students at TIBIA - as well as its non-profit offshoot and ultimate goal of Creating a Peaceful World - that we as a species are moving inexorably towards this goal.

I feel incredibly grateful that the light of this wonderful experience was allowed to shine on me. I still have a very long way to go on my own path. But I feel today that because of that small enlightenment, my way has been made clearer.

For me to do nothing now or to feel that I have little to offer toward creating a peaceful world would be a terrible disservice to myself, the people who guided me so lovingly and ably last weekend and ultimately to humanity itself.

Carolyn Myss

Finally, as has happened so often during this journey, just when I needed a teacher, one appeared. I now consider Michaela Torcaso to be one of my teachers. But in another example of a synchronicity that happened with me, I stopped at the library Friday before the workshop weekend to pick up an audiobook to listen to while driving the two hours to Madison.

As I was browsing the selection in our library, I spotted an audiobook by Carolyn Myss. Some time before I began this journey, my sister recommended one of Myss's books for me to read. She had been quite impressed with this woman, whom she described as a medical intuitive. As soon as I heard this term, however, my skeptical observer surfaced and as I listened to the book at that time, I kept thinking how self-delusional this woman was - or that she was simply just another New Age charlatan.

But while listening to Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential this past week, I kept trying to remember what had turned me off so much about Myss, because I became very intrigued in what she was saying about the contracts we make with other souls before we are born.

She describes it this way:

Our spirit made contracts with other spirits to come into our lives after we are born because when at the time of our birth, our souls break into a thousand pieces and we forget these contracts. In order for our souls to become whole again, each of those contracts represent a piece of what our soul is missing.

Certain people - but not all - we meet in our lives are the fulfillment of those sacred contracts whether they affect us positively or negatively. The idea is that they bring to us something that we need to learn in this life to restore our soul to its wholeness.

Returning to the issue of childhood sexual abuse, however, I simply can't accept that all victims of abuse are working through some kind of karmic legacy or that these traumas are the result of some kind of destiny contracted for before birth. I certainly don't claim to understand the workings of the Universe in these kinds of things, but I have to seriously question a God or god or Spirit that would simply allow this kind of damage to occur. So besides this being a very real problem, it is also one of the most difficult of philosophical and metaphysical questions to ponder:
why does God allow bad things to happen to good or innocent people?

Back to Carolyn Myss, in addition to sacred contracts, in her book she discusses an area I find truly fascinating: that of archetypes, which are those interior "personalities" we all possess. The four archetypes she says that we all share as humans are The Child, The Victim, The Saboteur and The Prostitute. She explains that we all possess the four because they are necessary for survival. Besides these four there are innumerable others, but she filters them down to about 75. In her book, she teaches a divination technique determine to your astrological or zodiac wheel using the twelve archetypes we decide most resonate with ourselves.

Since finishing Sacred Contracts, I find myself listening to many of the free talks and videos found on this prolific writer's website. Carolyn Myss claims that one of her strongest archetypes is that of The Teacher, and watching any of her videos will show how accurate this is.

She is an entertaining and even demanding teacher, yet will impress you with her knowledge, her wisdom, her wry wit and humor and her powerful sense of caring. Carolyn Myss gained fame as a medical intuitive and while I'm not quite ready to completely throw over my skepticism of this concept just yet, I've opened to many ideas that once seemed ludicrous and irrational and this may be one more that I am learning to accept.

So while continuing to maintain my sense of doubt, I also feel increasingly able to intuit the ideas that incorporate the Truth of our existence.

This leads to another area, which I will expound on at a later time: the idea that so-called gurus and spiritual teachers can be both highly-evolved spiritually yet possess personalities and habits that seem counter to their spiritual states and reputations.

I've learned that one must mine for the gold in areas of Spirit and spiritual ideas. The gold, of course, is Truth and is not found only in the richest veins, but must also be teased from low-grade ore.

Whereas formerly I would dismiss a teacher entirely if his or her lifestyle didn't conform to my idea of an enlightened soul, today I am more willing to seek the gold within that person even if the ore seems worthless or adulterated at first glance.

Energy and Intuition are subtle concepts that Science doesn't deal with well, if at all. The information about Intuitive Healing from The Skeptic's Dictionary is a good example of how 'Science' views such issues.

Yet there are people and institutions that are attempting to bridge the gap between Science and Spirit. The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) is one of them. I've listened to Dean Radin, Senior Scientist at IONS, discuss these issues in the past and along with quantum physicists (e.g., David Bohm, F. David Peat, Fritjof Capra and Fred Alan Wolf) who initially brought my thinking around to the idea of a separate reality, this gap has closed considerably for me.

Looking at it another way, as this gap was closing, another was opening for me. This gap led to an acknowledgment within my own thinking that we are only in the infancy of understanding the material universe and invisible reality behind it.

What we do know is that Einstein's famous equation, E=mc² is a physical truth that allows the mind of man to attempt to understand the mind of God. To deny that the mind of God exists is a rational irrationality that I can no longer accept.

My own hope as I move forward on my journey, is that my ability to feel the subtle energies that move within and without us will become more focused, as will my ability to discern these energies. This kind of intuition can be brought to the surface by learning from people like Michaela Torcaso and Carolyn Myss.

This is not magic. It is simply applying age-old principles to bring out abilities we are all born with, but forgot immediately after each of us crossed our own Lethe or River of Forgetfulness. Some souls remember them quickly (often as a result of traumatic events), while others may take decades to even begin to understand what they've forgotten.

I am at this latter stage. I pray that I continue to be open to the "miracles" we are heir to, and one of the things I am more and more certain of is that my life will never be the same again. I've reached a point of no return where there seems to be too much to do to help our species evolve and I must now determine what role I am to play in this evolution.

For me, this is goal number one. In Sacred Contracts, Carolyn Myss says that there is an idea that 40 days (a number very important symbolically throughout the Bible) is the time it takes for Spirit to work with an idea, prayer or intention. Therefore, when we feel we need to know what direction we are to take in our lives, we should pray to Spirit to reveal to us what we are to do on our spiritual journey. Once we do this, we are to wait 40 days and when this time has passed, look back at anything or anyone who energized us in any way - positively or negatively. In those instances, she says, our role or job will have been revealed to us.

And so I've taken her suggestion.

Yes, this lifelong skeptic now has 31 days to go before my own revelation is manifested. I believe that this will happen, and when it does I will write about it here.

Stay tuned!

Image by Javad Alizadeh

The African American

2008-11-09T07:54:00.058-06:00

The Great Black Hope

I awoke this morning at 4am - which happens more and more these days - and while trying to drift off for a few more hours of slumber, began thinking about one thing and another.

Suddenly the face of Barack Obama floated into my mind's eye. This may have been because since the moment he was declared victor last Tuesday night, I've been intending to add my own two cents to the millions of dollars worth of words that have been written in this country and around the world over this quite unbelievable and historic event.

My intention was to write a very pithy and profound analysis of what the election of this man means to America and to the world; about how his job now is to lead our foundering Ship of State away from the shoals of internal self-destruction and almost inevitable economic disintegration. But the pithiest thing I came up with was that our newly-elected President is perhaps the defining African-American. He is, in fact, perhaps one of the very few black people in this country - a country that horribly abused black people for so long in so many ways and through so many generations - that is pure African/American. His African heritage is indeed African, with his father having been born in Kenya, East Africa. His American heritage , on the other hand, is the most American of American, as his mother was a white woman born in America's fabled heartland, Kansas.

What Barack Obama represents, then, is a black man whose karmic heritage has never included the horrors of slavery, nor one that included the rape of young negro women by white men driven only by their own lust and savagery.

Perhaps, this utterly unique African/American can help cleanse our nation of those terrible sins because his heritage only includes the pride and strength of two strong and powerful people who found each other, and through love alone were able to ford the turbulent river of hatred and intolerance that a black man and white woman had to cross in America in the early 60's.

Perhaps the greatest thing these two people had going for them, besides their own unique strengths and love for each other, was that they had the good fortune of meeting in Hawaii; a place which has always been the true melting pot of America.

In an Amazon review of his wonderful book, Hawaii: A Novel, I found this, which truly does reflect author James Michener's love for his adopted state:

This book is the history of Hawaii. It's well arranged, first there are 17 pages of geology, then the Polynesian settlers get 100 pages. Next, we head forward a thousand years and the first Christian missionaries from the east coast arrive (and insisted on wearing wool clothing!) Then came the Chinese, and leprosy. Next the Japanese, and Pearl Harbor. Finally, the golden man emerges a mix of all these races and a good dash of Aloha spirit.

I see Barack Obama, then, not as black nor white nor (a term I feel is quite ugly in sound and meaning) mulatto. No...I see Barack Obama as being a true representative of Michener's golden man and in a very real sense, perhaps the perfect alchemist to transmute the dross of fear, hatred and violence which are the base elements of our world today into a golden future where humanity will finally work together towards its own true evolution and the ultimate realization of what Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere.

As we all know, the horrors of September 11, 2001 created an amazing and quite wondrous global response of love, sympathy and phenomenal good will throughout the world. Then in an instant, it seemed, all of that was squandered by a few self-important people whose immense sense of fear and xenophobic hatred created an environment that became increasingly ruled by Jung's concept of The Shadow.

But there is no doubt that we witnessed a brand new global phenomenon emerge on November 5th, as spontaneous joy, hope and unbridled exuberance became manifested in people of every color throughout the world.

It seemed that everyone could take a bit of pride in our election, but especially those from the disparate areas that helped form the heritage of this golden man: the tiny hamlet in Ireland from where one of Obama's Irish ancestors hailed, to the ancient, primeval grasslands of Eastern Africa where proud Luo tribesmen now celebrate one of their own ascending to become the most powerful chief in the world.

While I was writing this post, however, I decided to put it aside as I celebrated the joyous online reunions of three old friends. After I finished that post, it was once again time to tell those who stumble upon this blog what this election meant to me.

However, while I was writing my post about reacquainting with my old friends, something quite remarkable and unexpected happened that made me question if I really wanted to continue this as I had intended.

What happened was that my younger brother, Rick, wrote an email to friends and family dated 9am the morning after the election. In it, he related what the election meant to him. But more than that, it was about how we must now become partners with President Obama and work to create the kind of society that was envisioned by those amazing visionaries who got together in Philadelphia on May 15, 1775 and over the next 12 years created the principles of the most revolutionary and evolutionary political confederation of humans in the history of mankind.

Then after reading his email, there seemed to be no real reason for me to write what I had planned to because Rick had said all I'd wanted to say and more.

These, then, are the few paragraphs I read the morning of November 5th, 2008 that seemed to encapsulate what I had intended to say so much better and more concisely than my usual prosaic wanderings.

Dear friends,

On this morning after the Barack Obama win, I was heading up to my studio to begin another work day as if nothing of real importance had just taken place, when my emotions took over. I realized -not without some previous awareness- that I had been suppressing any hope or excitement over the Obama candidacy throughout these many long months of Presidential campaigning. This -in part- was due to the overwhelming disappointments of the last two presidential elections, and also because I know that Obama, like anyone else, is just a person. I was also concerned with the fact that the last administration has left this country so torn and disabled that all failures to repair the problems (post haste) will be blamed -not on the administration in cause- but on the administration in office ... and four years later we might be blessed with a warmed over Bush administration in the guise of Sarah Palin.

However, aside from any complacency I might feel about these next four years, another -stronger- feeling has bubbled to the surface. No matter what happens from here, no matter what President Obama might (or might not) accomplish, no matter what scandals might erupt; in this moment right now I feel proud -again- to be an American. I have not felt that for some time, and I am going to indulge in it for a little while. Not only have we shown each other and the world that as a society we really can overcome hundreds of years of civil strife and racism (no: racism is not dead, but it really has officially been relegated to the most primitive part of our societal brain), but we have also spoken loud and clear that we really do want someone with obvious intelligence, self-control, and vision (and not just someone we feel comfortable to drink and yip with) to lead this country into an uncertain future.

President Obama may not have all the answers to our most troubling problems, but it seems that he has the intelligence and vision and -hopefully- the will to search for and implement ideas to help us get there. Help us get there. Barack Obama's job starts in a couple months ... ours starts now. If we really think we have any chance of accomplishing some of the work that needs to be done now, we really need to be ready to participate ... in the same way that many worked to get him there ... which I think means -first and foremost- keeping our elected officials accountable and on the right track by becoming involved ourselves in whatever way we can. If nothing else by being informed and contacting our government representatives whenever an issue we care about arises. Maybe to let go of some of our smaller, more self-interested concerns right now, and focus on community and the larger environmental problems that possibly affect us more deeply and crucially. Are we still -as a society- able to create the equivalent of a moon project or Manhattan project for something that will really make a difference -not necessarily right now- but in the future? Can we build an alternative energy infrastructure and get off foreign oil in the next ten years, for instance? Can we create jobs with living wages, re-vitalize a middle class in America, and reduce poverty and destitution? Have we finally learned that unfettered consumerism may not be the noblest form of Americana, and does have terrible repercussions? Can we offer health care to all Americans as a right and not just a ruse? Can we repair our broken relationship with the rest of the world? Can we find innovative ways to work with all the world citizens in finding solutions to world problems? Can we do all this and strengthen our economy as well? Can we do it without continuing to damage the environment and our health? These are the dreams that Obama was expounding during his presidential race, and must be the dreams that we who voted for him hold on some level. Do we believe it? Do I believe it?

Well, I guess I am going to allow myself to be hopeful about it today. I know it means I have to get over my complacency and lethargy and do something about it, but what the hell ... it feels good to be excited again.

Oh Brother, There Thou Art!

As Rick's wonderful words sink in, I must take some time here to relate a little about him. I know that he will not be thrilled that I do this because he is a very private man. Yet, his life has been filled with more adventure, drama and change than any three lives I know.

As the older brother - the oldest of seven, actually - I spent a great deal of time tormenting Rick while we were kids. And to be honest, tormenting is too mild a word for some of the crueler aspects of sibling rivalry I fomented on him.

For reasons still hidden in the deepest recesses of my psyche, I was an angry child as early as I can remember, and Rick became my whipping boy for a long time. Until, in fact, we both ventured off - one summer when I was seventeen and he was sixteen - to become lumberjacks in the great verdant forests of the Wisconsin Northwoods.

But we soon discovered that the lumber industry wasn't too eager to hire a couple of city kids from Iowa with no experience to help fell old growth trees for the paper industry. We did, however, find work as farmhands with a 900-head dairy corporation just outside of the resort town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. So for three months we labored in the fields driving tractors, baling hay and filling barns with those heavy bales. Sadly, we never had the energy, after our long days, to enjoy the fruits of our labor in pursuit of the sensual pleasures promised by all those nubile, young Chicago area girls who flock to Lake Geneva's sandy beaches every summer.

What that summer meant to the relationship between my brother and I, however, was that Rick went from a rather frail and skinny 135 lb kid to a well-muscled 165 lb man, and never again would I be able to bully my "bean-pole" of a brother. Although, truth be told, Rick and I bonded a lot that summer. We were more friends than brothers when we returned home just in time for school. And over the years, that friendship and brotherhood has developed into a great mutual love and respect for each other's talents and personalities.

Somewhere in the mid '70's, I believe, I began searching for something other than the dead-end jobs I was hopping between after leaving college without my degree.

I became very impressed with the book Autobiography of a Yogi (click here for full online version) and the life of Paramahansa Yogananda. So I began looking into moving with my wife to Ananda Village, a Hindu community located in California's Sierra foothills and begun by Yogananda's closest disciple.

But before that came to pass, my wife became pregnant with our first child and we put the idea of moving onto the back burner until the new baby was born. Well, that notion eventually disappeared from the stove top altogether, but by then Rick became enticed by the same idea of moving to a community of idealistic and spiritually-minded individuals like himself. So he was the one who would move to Nevada City and live as a Hindu disciple of Yogananda for a couple of years.

That, however, was only the first of his unconventional lifestyle changes.

When he left Ananda - and like many other seekers of freedom and Truth - he ventured a few hundred miles west to the Golden Gate City of San Francisco; where for centuries dreamers, vagabonds, losers, saints and sinners have all found a place of refuge filled with people whose wonderfully non-judgmental attitudes have made The City by the Bay a creative and cultural mecca for millions - and the continuing object of derision by the more narrow-minded and hateful of our brethren.

Rick hadn't ceased searching, however. Instead, he wanted to experience a different kind of spiritual community, and in the late 70's there was one group of people who had an uncanny ability to find and approach these bright, idealistic and questioning souls who had migrated to the Bay Area.

This group consisted of members of perhaps the most notorious cult in America: The Unification Church, which was founded and is still led by a man who considers himself (as do his millions of followers) the 2nd coming of Christ: the new Messiah. This man is 88-year old Korean billionaire Sun Myung Moon, who claims that he is here on earth to do nothing less than fulfill Jesus' unfinished mission.

Well, it didn't take long for these folks to zero in on Rick, and the next thing his family knew, he was living in a big home in San Francisco with a number of other Moonies - which was what the members of the Church were non-affectionately known as by the heathens outside the Church.

As an aside, after my wife and I moved to the Bay Area in 1975, we were driving around looking for work, and while parked in front of a hospital in San Francisco she had applied to, we were approached by a very friendly couple of young people who were about our age. They engaged us in conversation by noting our license plates, which were still from our home of Wisconsin.

This attractive young man and woman were very warm and welcoming, and knowing that we were new to the area, invited us to a place - a farm, they told us - not far north of San Francisco where we could meet some of their friends and have dinner with them.

Now it could have been just my general, somewhat anti-social tendencies, but for me, all sorts of bells and alarms were going off. I had only the most cursory knowledge of cults at that point (I would learn much more later), but something made me wary of their sugar-coated friendliness.

So while my wife, I'm sure, would have liked to have had a nice supper with people other than me by that point, I begged off.

Still, they kept at us, and they were very good! They kept saying how they knew exactly what it was like to be new young people in a big, impersonal city like San Francisco and that one good meal with good people would be a fun and friendly experience for both of us.

Finally, as is my habit when I feel like I'm getting backed into a corner, my hackles were raised and I had to get bit nasty to finally get rid of them. (Car salesman have met this darker side of mys personality many times!)

Driving back to our new place in Berkeley after that, my wife was a little upset with my stubbornness. But I told her that there was just something about them that turned me off.

I said to her at that point, "I think that they were Moonies, and there's no way I want to get mixed up with those wackos!"

I was really only speculating about who they were, but when I talked to my brother much later about this incident, he confirmed that, yes, this was the first step in recruiting members into the Moonies, and that The Farm was indeed a Moonie outpost where the first level of love-bombing began the process of psychological "brainwashing" or programming.

So while my wife and I had dodged the bullet directed at us, Rick had been hit directly in the heart and for the next few years became a loyal foot soldier of the cult: selling flowers on street corners and doing his own recruiting of new members.

Eventually, his fortunes within the Church began to rise and he was given the responsibility of starting branches of the Church's Collegiate Association for the Research of the Principle (CARP) at a number of colleges and universities across the country. One of his duties during this time was to debate everyone from religious leaders to college professors over the relative merits of Moon's theology vs Christianity, atheism or whatever. Rick would take on all comers.

I wish I'd had the opportunity to see him in action in those days. Knowing him as a child and long after he'd left the Church, it is hard to believe that he would ever have been assertive enough to intellectually do battle with such able adversaries. I'm sure I would have had very mixed feelings: proud on the one hand, yet saddened that he was spending so much of his time and abilities on such a megalomanic fraud and all-around schmuck as Reverend Moon.

In the course of Rick's years in the organization, my mother became very active in the anti-cult movement. And more than once, she flew out to San Francisco to try to reason with Rick about his strange new beliefs.

She'd done a lot of research about Moon by then and felt that she had a lot of ammunition that Rick would respond to if he would only hear it. But getting him alone to confront him with this information was difficult at best, as the Church was extremely protective of its members; especially when they were to meet with the "devils" they once called their families. The Unification Church, you must understand, was their family now and their former families were a dangerous source of evil and misinformation which could lead to the ultimte destruction of their eternal souls.

By then, however, Rick was secure enough in his new belief system to insist to his "protectors" that he would not be influenced by anything this woman would tell him. So they let him meet her alone in a park. Yet my mother noticed during their conversation that just a short distance away was a van with people in it ready to rescue Rick from the clutches of this evil slanderer if they felt he was weakening in his resolve.

Well, he didn't do this, and while he was pleasant enough to my mother, he gently told her that he must be about Father's (Moon's) work and that he appreciated her concern for him, but that she should not worry. He then asked her not to contact him again in the future. They had had their last meeting.

With that statement, he was, in fact, divorcing his birth family.

Heartbroken, my mother returned to her life in Wisconsin. But now it was as if her second son had died. She truly wondered if she would ever see him again.

Then, in June, 1981, my father passed away after a long, slow decline in his health due to diabetes. Someone in my family contacted Rick, who by that time had been doing the college recruitment thing for awhile. When he told his associates in the Church that he was going to go to his "former" father's funeral, his status had become one of absolute trust, so he was free to go to the funeral without any kind of supervision or apparent concern.

This, of course, was something we'd all hoped for. Now, finally, we'd have the chance to sit down with him and confront his crazy new beliefs. But after so many years with the organization, we wondered if he was too far gone, too brainwashed, to hear us.

It was a wonderful and bittersweet reunion. Rick, at times, seemed like his old self. The family grieved and reminisced together. We caught up on what we were doing in our lives and Rick was proud of what he was accomplishing on the college campuses.

Yet as soon as we began to say anything whatsoever against Moon or his beliefs, he closed up. He told us that if we wanted to have any kind of continuing relationship with him, we were never to question his belief system.

Still, when those sad days were over and done with, we felt that just our re-connection would be good in the long run and we never gave up hope that he would one day see how the right-wing, ultra-conservative, faux-Christian, narrow-minded and bigoted religiosity espoused by Moon was the antithesis of everything Rick had once believed. We could only hope that the Rick we'd once known would one day re-emerge.

The next event that shocked our family was a year later when Rick contacted us and told us that he had just been married.

"What!", was our common response; none of us quite believing the words.

He told us that he had been married the previous week in New York City at Madison Square Garden along with 2200 other couples Reverend Moon had joined together for the purpose of creating many thousands of new mini-Moonies with which to create his new religious world order.

"And what about your new wife", we asked?

He told us that she was Korean and that he'd only met her the morning of the wedding. As far as he knew, he said, he wouldn't see her again for quite awhile, since he had work to do on the campuses of America, while she had already returned to Korea to continue her own work in the Church.

Sadly for Rick - at least it would have been for me since I've always found Asian women quite attractive and alluring - there was no time for even Moon-approved connubial bliss. As I recall, all brides in these massive Moonie weddings - and they still take place - were and are Asian. This is part of Moon's own eugenics movement, since he believes the Asian race to be far superior to all others on earth.

The incredible and happy ending to this low period in our family's history occurred some time after the wedding, Rick suddenly resurfaced in our lives as a free man; free physically and free psychologically from the restraints he'd lived under for so many years.

This event was so unusual, in fact, that for weeks Rick experienced his own 15 minutes of fame. During this heady period, he appeared in People magazine; on the Phil Donahue Show, on the Today Show and was interviewed in various other magazines and media.

The reason for all this attention was that no one, it appeared, had ever just walked away from the Moonie organization before; at least not as publicly. And everyone wanted to know just how and why he did it.

Then, after that brief period of media madness was over, Rick decided that he had a different, very important job to do, and that was to help others who'd been programmed like himself to have the chance to have their own beliefs challenged and to escape their psychological chains.

To this end, he spent the next few years as a deprogrammer: a controversial practice that got a number of these people into legal hot water as it involved basically kidnapping an adult and holding him or her in a locked room for some time as he or she was made to confront ideas and beliefs that had been instilled into them under the cults' sophisticated methods of psychological duress.

In this role, Rick not only dealt with people who'd been psychologically assaulted by the Unification Church, but also by many other cults, and even toward the end, he helped an increasing number of Fundamentalist Christians escape their psychological chains as well, because at the level at which all these groups operate, freedom of thought and ideas are anathema and a danger to the organization itself.

I believe that Rick, like me, believed by then that freedom of thought is the greatest gift of the Divine. It is what makes us all humans with the obligation to evolve to the highest level of spiritual attainment possible.

And it is only through the freedom to discover Truth that our beliefs merge with that Truth. At that point, faith becomes not just a system of beliefs, but is transformed into a spiritual reality that is pointed toward the eternal bliss that is our Divine birthright.

After a number of years doing that work, Rick longed to return to a kind of simple, idealistic, but less autocratic, community lifestyle he'd known in the past. He discovered just such a community nestled in a lovely valley in the beautiful Kickapoo Valley region of western Wisconsin's Driftless Area.

Since then, he has returned to his first love: being an artist. While he was a wonderful painter in his youth, as an adult he turned to photography and for many years, he has been selling his beautiful work each summer at art shows and festivals throughout the Midwest. Along the way, he has received much acclaim and many honors for his work; which depict the sublime, majestic and even mystical qualities of the natural world.

I am, and have been, quite in awe of this man over the years for his many talents. And if truth be known, I'm now in awe - and just a little jealous - of his newfound ability to paint with words.

In a goodnatured jibe to what he wrote above, I simply said this in an email reply to him:

DAMN YOU!! You’re already an incredible artist. What the fuck are you doing in my world???

Kudos, bro!

I realize I had nothing really to do with how he grew and developed into the quite remarkable man he is today, but I do take a warm brotherly pride in Rick, just as I take pride in my other five brothers and sisters. They all have unique gifts and I am filled with love and awe for each of them.

Being part of a large family can be trying at times and can limit many of the material benefits that smaller families can get more easily, but as I get older - as we get older - we've found that what we've all experienced from the day we were born has created bonds of love and support that no amount of money can buy.

As adults, our lives have taken us all in very different directions and to different parts of our state. But it was due to the wonderful feminine spirits of our sisters that, as we aged, there became an increasing need to re-connect with each other and to re-establish those familial bonds that started our journey of becoming the people we would eventually become.

So at least once a year, for the past decade or so, we've gotten together for a special long weekend we call our Sibling Weekend. Without spouses or children present, this get-together has been a place to laugh, to cry, to feel joy and to share with each other the sorrows that our lives have presented to each of us. It is a place we can all truly let our hair down (those of us who have any hair left, that is) and be ourselves; safe in the knowledge that we all shared an amazing experience growing up together with parents who themselves were quite remarkable people, yet troubled in their own ways.

Well, I've gone quite far afield from my intended topic for this post, but that is how life works, isn't it? From the global to the most personal, life is a continuous ebb and flow of ideas and emotions. It is the manifestation of the yin and yang and all we can hope for, it seems, is that all that is important, from the hopes and aspirations of our new President to those of myself, my brother, Rick, and our other brothers and sisters are being guided by Spirit to move toward the Divine that is inside us all.

I know that the Divine is inside all of us. I know it because I know my brothers and sisters and have experienced their love as a most important part of my life.

Thank you all for sharing your Selves with me in this incarnation, guys!

Just in case you were wondering, this is Rick...on a good day!

Time, Time, Time...See What's Become of Me (Part 2)

2008-11-06T05:43:00.042-06:00

We truly do live in a marvelous time, and regardless of all our attempts to stop time, delay time or rush time, it remains an inexorable force in all our lives.

What I love about this time, perhaps more than anything, is how this great technology called the Internet has compressed time so that people we knew long, long ago and perhaps haven't seen for decades can suddenly reappear in our lives by way of an email or even an Instant Message.

This has, in fact, happened to me three times in the past few months, and each time has brought a kind of joy to my life that is difficult to convey.

Jannine

The most recent example happened just yesterday, when my oldest friend contacted me by way of classmates.com. Both of us have been listed on this website for years, but except for a quick note here and there, no real contact had been made. Now, however, the Internet has matured a great deal since we first discovered each other on it, and today we have an ability to share long emails and picture albums with each other, and the fun of reconnecting is easier than ever.

When Jannine contacted me yesterday, many wonderful memories emerged for me.

We met in 5th grade at our town's only Catholic grade school. I was the new kid; having just moved to that town over the previous summer.

5th Grade: ten years old and just prior to the angst and torment of puberty. I don't remember if I ever talked to Jannine in the 5th grade. We might not even have been in the same classroom, but I noticed her. How could I not? She was the pretty little blond girl who even at that innocent age was beginning to turn the heads of boys who weren't even sure why at that age.

It was the next year, 6th grade, when we finally got into the same classroom. Sister Jean Marie - a young, very slight and nervous nun - had been given the task of herding in the burgeoning hormones of the boys and girls of her class. Jannine sat next to me and the very first time she asked me a question about a math problem, I was smitten. Boy, was I smitten! At the same time, I was very shy; something that has plagued me all my life.

My objective: how could I get to know this wonderful creature better? My solution: I'd establish allies in my quest. I'd befriend boys who were bolder than me and perhaps get close to Jannine through them.

Well, it wasn't hard to find them. Most of the boys in the school thought Jannine was the cutest girl around. I remember two in particular though who were just as crazy about her as I was. We spent a lot of time discussing our innocent mutual longings for her. One even wrote a poem to her that began, "Jannine, Jannine, the girl of my dreams...". I doubt if he ever gave it to her though. He wasn't that bold!

Then I discovered Ed. Ed lived very close to Jannine and often walked home with her. I'm sure he liked her as much as the rest of us, but he had an advantage over us. He was already friends with her! So there was no need for long discussions with Ed about how much we both liked her. As far as I was concerned, he already had her. I mean, he knew her family, and got to go into her house and everything! Well, I just had to get to know Ed better so that I could finally have a way of meeting Jannine away from school.

And that's exactly what I did. In a short time, Ed, Jannine and I were all walking home together; even though Jannine's house was almost in the exact opposite direction from my house and we always walked back and forth to school through all kinds of weather. On the best of days, this happy detour probably added a half hour to my daily trek home. But I didn't care a bit. In fact, I simply floated home after being with her. And if I was drenched or frozen when I got him, so what?

What a treat it was for me, then, that I got to be with this sweet, young beauty almost every night as I carried her books. Sometimes, Ed couldn't walk with us and my bliss was made complete.

We did become wonderful friends. We even participated in our local Children's Theatre where we were in plays together. But the greatest part of that experience was when we began doing puppet shows around the community. One of the little skits we did had just the two of us behind the puppet stage, delightfully close to each other and performing a fun little playlet that had two characters - I can't even remember what they were exactly - complaining to each other about this and that. This was performed to the exotic Martin Denny number, "Quiet Village". I can still hear the strains of Denny's wonderful band playing along with the bird calls and other wild sounds in the background. What great fun that time was for us.

But "just friends" is what we would ever be.

Jannine was tall, lithe and athletic. I remember playing basketball with her behind her house against her garage. Yes, she always beat me, and sadly for me, she was always attracted to the athletic types; something I most assuredly was not. Instead, I was the somewhat chubby, bespectacled boy who would soon be plagued with bad skin and a fairly prominent Mediterranean nose. Not what any girl would have called "a hunk", for sure.

I'm pretty sure that the first real heartache I experienced with Jannine - and in my life - was when she started going with the 6th grade basketball center in our school. Maybe she wasn't actually going with him, but it was apparent that she was very attracted to him.

This, then, became my relationship with Jannine; destined to be just friends. After 8th grade, I went off to a couple of private schools, but in my senior year of high school, I returned to our town's public high school, where Jannine had been attending the entire time.

It was nice to fall back into our easy friendship that had been interrupted for three years, but whereas I was once again the "new guy" at school, Jannine had become that girl! You know...the head cheerleader, Sweetheart Queen and overall school heartthrob!

Still, she had changed very little. She remained the delightful, friendly, bright and modest girl I'd always known despite her popularity. All of these had been the qualities that had touched my heart so many years earlier. She never put on any airs. She was genuine and if you were her friend, you remained her friend. Even to this day, even if years have gone by, they melt away very quickly when we contact each other or meet at the occasional high school reunion.

And while both of us have gone through our own personal crises over the years, we both seem to be in a good place these days. She has gone from being a small town Iowa girl and grown into the successful and involved wife of an increasingly-renowned CEO of a growing Chicago consulting firm. Both are civic leaders and enjoy the results of years of hard work. Jannine, herself, works hard to raise funds for HIV/AIDS families in the Windy City area.

Most satisfying and joyful to her, however, are her three - soon to be four - grandchildren her two beautiful daughters have given her. What a strange thought that the little girl I met as a 5th grader now has grandchildren not much younger than we were at that time.

Once again, time is ever-present in our human existence, and while it's passing can bring sorrow and pain as well as joy and happiness, it is indeed the golden thread that brings out the beauty and majesty in the tapestry of our lives.

Gary

But Jannine's contacting me wasn't the first surprise I received this past week.

Classmates.com again provided a welcome link to my past when my best friend in high school dropped me a note. The year I met Gary was also in my senior year at the local public high school. I hadn't known Gary before then, but in a way that escapes me now, we met during one of our activities - perhaps during tryouts for the school musical, My Fair Lady. And surprise, surprise, he too was rather enamored with that same pretty young cheerleader, Jannine. So the pattern of my grade school had continued in that my friends and I were at the same level of adoration for her.

As a disclaimer, Gary might argue this last point after 33 years of marriage to the same wonderful woman and mother of their four beautiful daughters, but this is my blog and my memory, so sorry, Gary, if I'm not remembering this all quite that same as you might.

Gary was one of those guys who always seemed to have everything going for him. He was very, very bright, good-looking, self-assured, got top grades and his family was pretty well-off - certainly by my family's standards. In short, he was what most mothers would call a great catch. And he was Jewish; which for me - the boy who'd only attended Catholic schools - was as exotic as befriending a Hawaiian Kahuna.

When I think of how easily I could have fallen into a different future if I'd had a different kind of friend the year prior to the absolute freedom of college, it is sobering to consider.

Fortunately, in 1969, the more destructive trends of the so-called Youth Movement hadn't quite hit our area. When a couple of classmates were busted for pot, this was as shocking as if they'd been indicted for arson. Even alcohol didn't seem to be as prominent at the time as it is today; not that kids weren't always trying to get it, but Gary and I weren't motivated by getting wasted. Hell, we were just beginning our lives and we wanted to be as alert and lucid as possible so that we could savor all that life had to offer.

After a last summer at home which included some travel to exotic lands (Okay, it was just Wisconsin), we went our separate ways; he to Iowa State University in Ames and me to Marquette University in Milwaukee.

Yes, alas, I was back in a Catholic school!

The next summer, however, would find us both pursuing an adventure together like you only find in books. We became carnival barkers - carnies - and spent that summer travelling around the Midwest, meeting and having fun with girls in every new town; getting thrown out of other towns (not that we were involved in these incidents...well maybe once); and meeting a mob godfather to get his "blessing" and to pay him a quick thousand bucks under the table for the "privilege" of setting up our concession at a Catholic Church festival in one of the most mobbed up suburbs of Chicago. If we had a problem with paying him, we learned in no uncertain terms, he would not be responsible for any consequences to our concession, the bus we hauled everything around in - or to "our physical personages".

So why would anyone play this carnival under that kind of duress?

It was all about filthy lucre, folks! We made more money in those few days than at any other time that summer. And damned if we didn't feel safe under the watchful gaze of the Holy Mother and the Unholy Godfather!

After that summer, Gary went back to Iowa State and I returned home, but switched to a less expensive school, since the scholarship I'd received for Marquette was only for one year. Instead I attended the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

I was commuting from a small town my parents had moved to which was about 50 miles away from UW-M when the engine of my VW Bug blew up one day on the way to school. Who knew that those amazing little cars needed oil??

I decided to just write off that year. Besides, I'd had too much fun being a carny and quickly got my job back.

But now, instead of working the Midwest, it was time for the great southern circuit. So I was flown to Shreveport, Louisiana to join my brother, who was there running a concession at the Royal American Shows. From there, I went to Florida for a few weeks, then to Texas's Rio Grande Valley, where we managed to get into far too much trouble than I can relate here. One day, I intend to tell all the stories about that crazy time in my life.

Gary, on the other hand, disappeared from my radar screen for a number of years. In fact the only times I've seen him since that carnival summer has been at a few reunions. Par for the course, I know, but I have always wished I'd lived closer to the guy as we entered our adult, married, middle-age and now nearly-enfeebled life phases.

Actually, with this most recent reconnection, he sent some pictures and as difficult as it it for me to say it, he still looks great. Of course, I would never tell him this.

Well, maybe if he says the same thing to me first!

Claudia

The person who started off these joyful little reunions a few months ago was the lovely woman who helped make me a man in high school: Claudia.

Maybe I better explain this lest others regard Claudia as other than the wonderful, sweet and innocent girl she was as a high school junior when I dated her.

As I mentioned earlier, I'd spent 11 years in Catholic School before discovering how much fun public school could be without the constant threat of bodily harm from sadistic and sexually-frustrated nuns, and priests of the same ilk.

Okay, that's a damned lie and I'm sure I'll burn in hell for even suggesting such ignominious behavior from those dedicated souls. Truly, I have no complaints against any of the nuns and priests I encountered in my Catholic school years. That doesn't mean that I escaped the occasional ruler or other kinds of discipline imposed in those days. But I know for a fact that I was a hellraiser from Grade 1 and the only way I was spared more drastic disciplinary action was due to the great patience and forbearance of the good sisters and fathers I constantly provoked during my formative years.

The thing is, my freshman year in high school was spent in something called a preparatory seminary; which, of course, only had boys in attendance. My pubertal surge of hormones, however, convinced me that the celibate life would never be my true calling. So my next two years were spent in the Catholic high school located in a larger city a few miles away from my hometown.

This school was not coeducational, however. Instead, it was called coinstitutional; which simply meant that for the most part, boys stayed on one side of the building and girls on the other. The twain in which we met consisted of the cafeteria and certain classes that required the delicate mixing of the two newly-libidinous sexes.

There were dances and mixers, of course: well-chaperoned ones, but this ex-seminarian had lost all ability to even talk to girls by that point. Something surely happened to my personality at puberty and I barely spoke to a girl in two years at that school. As Gary would have said, "Oy ve!"

So it was indeed a wonderful feeling to get back to our public high school, where many of my grade school classmates had gone and where the boys and girls mixed freely in an atmosphere rich in the heady mix of estrogen and testosterone. Besides, it has always been much easier for me to get to know people if I have even one "in" with whom I can use his or her coattails to help me overcome my inherent shyness.

So this is how it went: because I knew that Jannine was going to be in the school musical, I wanted to get into it too. It was here that I met Gary, who introduced me to others and so on and so forth and by the time the year had ended, my dearth of male and female friends had ended...until the next year when I was once again the new kid who knew absolutely no one at Marquette and who subsequently spent a very lonely year; mostly in my dorm room.

Shout it again, Gary.

"Oy ve!"

Before that sad episode began, however, I met Claudia. Just how we met and got together I can't recall exactly, but I know that it was on a bus trip to a state music and dramatic contest that we became a couple. And it was all I could do not to shout "Hallelujah!" from every church top in town because for the first time in my life, I had a real live girlfriend!

"Woowoo!!"

And at age 17, it was none too soon.

Sadly for both of us - and more to my detriment, I suspect - this relationship was short-lived. After school ended and I graduated, I wanted to spend more time with Gary travelling and hanging with him than with Claudia. I still feel that I treated her pretty shabbily that summer. I liked her very much, but I felt that since I probably wouldn't see her again after I went to college, I didn't want to get too close. As it turned out, my family moved 200 miles away after my freshman year in college, so I never did see Claudia again.

So it was a wonderful moment when she contacted me on classmates.com last August. Just a quick note, but it was great to hear from her. As is my wont, I wrote her a long recap of the many years since we last saw each other. That day, she wrote a beautiful piece in her own blog about our reacquaintance and also wrote some of her own more personal story to me in a separate email. I hope Claudia doesn't mind, but I think that her posting is wonderful and I'd like to reprint it here:

This has been quite a morning After I finished my work and emails I happened to go on a website that allows you to peek into the lives of people you once went to school with. For me, high school, well, that's been a long time ago. Faces, really not recognizable if met on the street, however faintly familiar, are attached to some of the names. Thank goodness maiden names were there for the women. And some I still didn't remember. I left a few hellos not knowing if these will in fact ever be read by their profile owners, but my friendly nature compels me to do so. To my delight I was contacted by a friend from the late 60's that I'd left a hello to. I must say I had a terrible crush on him in my junior year in high school, and he even attended a picnic with my family out near Iowa City on a hot summer's day. Fleeting is a word that would describe our relationship as he was older and off to college. Our paths have not met since that summer, yet I smiled as I read his words. He is on a journey to find enlightenment, and I am on a journey to live each day as a gift. We are not so different, yet our paths are, I believe, very different..... I guess, simple is the word that delights me, I live very simply, yet I believe I stretch each day to it's fullest, and give all the glory to my Lord. I know that I'm not the wisest person on the planet. However I choose to go for the truth, or the truth as I know it. It makes my days longer, my eyes clearer and my sleep sweeter. I am neither judge nor juror. I am excited about life, the good and the bad, the ups and the downs. It's part of the rhythm of life. At times I whine, but then since I have no cheese, I quit....ha ha. I've had moments of deep sadness that have made me a better, stronger person, more caring, less judgmental I believe. I enjoy an even keel, a calm sea, and a gentle breeze. I hope my friend finds what he is searching for. He'll find it in quiet, peaceful times, and gentle smiles for those that love him. Peace.

I said that I suspect not having kept in touch with Claudia was to my detriment. Reading this again convinces me of this. What a lovely and beautiful outlook. Obviously, she is still a wonderful spirit. Like most of us, her life has had its ups and downs, but I am very glad to hear that currently her life is good. She lives in a beautiful part of the country and has her own business as a very talented jewelry designer. I wish my very best to you, sweet Claudia.

* * * * * * *

As I've gotten older, I've slowly learned a lesson that I should have taken to heart when I was very young. We live in a society and culture that offers an enormous amount of material benefits. Unfortunately, that same culture elevates money and status to an exalted place in the promise that we can all achieve them in America if we work hard enough, are lucky enough or become famous enough.

Yet, the downside of life in 21st Century America is that much of that which makes life truly worth living is set aside or ignored as we reach for the fabled brass ring.

To move toward that goal, many of us leave home and family, move far away and quickly get caught up in the rat race. Parents, always wanting more for their children than they had themselves, will work tirelessly to achieve success, when real success involves the love you give and receive from your children. And when their children leave home to set out toward their own promised future, the cycle begins anew.

It is said that every seven years, each of the trillions and trillions of cells in our bodies has been replaced. Yet, those wonderful, ethereal entities we call memories - especially our most treasured ones - remain with us until the day we die. I believe also that they become a part of our karmic legacy and that those closest to us in this life have been close to us many times before in many previous lifetimes. So even if when we age, our minds grow dim and dementia defines our final mental state, the joy we found in those closest to us will follow us into the next reality.

Joy, then, is what life is about. Our human evolution is all about reaching toward the joy that Spirit, that the Universe, that the Divine, has given us the privilege of participating in with our physical bodies. Call it joy or call it bliss, I believe that it is our destiny and our obligation to achieve it.

What has always been remarkable to me is how many in this world resist joy. The battle between Ego and Self is never ending. Ego is rooted solely in this reality. It views the world as me vs. you. Self, however, is about us, because at the level of Self, there is a realization that we are all ONE, and that the unfathomable quantum event that took place some 13.7 billion years ago at the moment of the Big Bang created the amazing eternal non-local connection of all matter regardless of how far apart each atom is from all the others. At the level of matter where we come into existence, then, there is a very real connection and shared consciousness to everything and everyone in the Universe.

THIS is what mystics, shamans, artists, poets and other spiritual travellers have known since time began. Its revelation is what all religion should be about. Yet sadly, most religions are only about the Ego. If this were not so, there would never be religious wars or conflicts because the idea of wanting to destroy another Self is as absurd as wanting to destroy our own Self. We are all the same Self as well as the same Spirit. Moreover, we all share the same Divine Consciousness.

Tragically, what I've discovered far too late, is that the joy I've always sought in objects and things is Maya: illusion. True and lasting joy is found in the smiles of children, the touch of friends and lovers and the warmth of knowing that there are people in this world who love and care for you.

And a special kind of joy, I've found, is reconnecting with old friends who meant so much in days long ago, and who all now share with you the scars of battles we all wage as we grow and mature in this life. But as has been said, scars are merely the road map to your soul, and the soul is only about love and joy.

I thank these three wonderful souls for sharing the joy of their being with me again after so many years. Namaste, friends.

What is Meditation?

2008-07-29T21:00:00.049-05:00

Practice meditation regularly. Meditation leads to eternal bliss. Therefore meditate, meditate. ~ Swami Sivananda

Transcendental meditation is evil because when you are meditating, it opens space within you for the devil to enter. ~ Rev. Billy Graham

So just what is meditation? Is it the path to eternal bliss, or it is the road to everlasting damnation?

I've been meditating for 35 years. Not daily, mind you. Or even religiously--if this is an adjective that even makes sense when talking about meditation. In fact, for at least 32 of those 35 years, I didn't meditate at all.

Let's start at the beginning.

In 1973, I learned a meditation technique that was very similar to the then-popular Transcendental Meditation called Superconscious Meditation. I was taught by a man who had been the subject of some of the very first scientific studies of meditation techniques. His name was Swami Rama of the Himalayas and what he demonstrated to the scientists who probed and poked and measured him was that the mind, when trained, can do some very amazing things. I believe the course I took lasted 6 weeks and I went once a week for a couple of hours.

Sadly, like many great and holy--yet imperfect--men, Swami Rama's very human desires were his undoing. More precisely, it was his organization's undoing. In 1997, a year after he died, The Himalayan Institute was ordered to pay nearly $2 million for the Swami's sexual misconduct over the years; but specifically with a 19-year old student.

While this is definitely not an uncommon theme in the lives of powerful and charismatic men, this was one of those episodes that makes me wonder if there are any men strong enough to overcome our powerful physiology. Having said that, however, it must be remembered that often these kinds of actions are based as much on power as sex.

I only practiced Swami Rama's Superconscious Meditation for a couple of years. Even then I missed days; sometimes weeks. So as you might tell, I am not, nor ever have been accused of being a well-disciplined person.

The reason I stopped altogether was because of the very reason I should have continued. Frankly, I was a neurotic mess.

My then-new bride and I had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, which was our dream to do before we were even married. Well, perhaps it was more my dream than hers, but that's another story.

One thing became clear to us very quickly. It isn't the wisest thing to do to move to a high-energy and expensive (compared to our former Midwest hometown) place like the Bay Area without jobs and with very limited skills. But as they, say, we were "young...and stupid!"

California was--and still is--an exciting dreamland where some people almost seem able to absorb its energy through their skin. For others, it becomes a nightmare.

For my wife and I, it simply became a burden.

Not able to afford a house anywhere in the Bay Area, or an apartment in San Francisco or Marin County, we settled for an apartment not far from the University of California campus in Berkeley. The next cheapest place below us would have been next door in the city of Oakland, but between the two most notable and notorious civic groups of that city, the Hells Angels and the Black Panthers, we opted for the relative comfort and security of a university town like Madison, Wisconsin, where we'd both lived while attending college.

My wife and met after we left school while both working at the same hospital as nursing assistants; the lowest paid of health professions. We assumed that we could easily get a job doing this in the Bay Area as well.

But after a few weeks of filling out job applications, the only job I could get was in the senior citizens ward of an ethnic hospital near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Basically, I was working in a nursing home.

This job necessitated my commuting from Berkeley across the 9-mile long Bay Bridge--the one that collapsed in the earthquake of '89--and through the busy streets of San Francisco to the hospital.

The Streets of San Francisco, incidentally, was a very popular television program at the time and occasionally I'd see them shooting an episode as I drove to or from work. But I digress.

My wife, however, couldn't find a steady job and had to settle for working as an on-call nursing assistant temp. Since we only had one car at the time, this sometimes necessitated some fancy logistics to get her to work, then me over to San Francisco so that I wasn't late.

Our life in the Bay Area was supposed to be a eternal vacation: which meant that we'd be able to visit places like beautiful Golden Gate Park or Mt. Tam and Bodega Bay in Marin County any time. Or that we could enjoy wonderful day trips to Big Sur, Mendocino, Yosemite Park, the Russian River, the Redwoods and all the other attractions that the state of California offered.

Without the kind of income that could allow us these enjoyable diversions, however, life was mostly commuting through busy traffic in the morning, then spending an exhausting day giving sponge baths and emptying bedpans, and then commuting back to Berkeley at night. On the weekends, we seldom ventured outside of Berkeley.

Soon, little things began to get on my nerves: noises in the apartment building; dogs barking and the like, and soon I felt an almost constant tightness in my throat from the stress and disappointment of my now-broken dream. It was at this time that I just stopped meditating. After all, wasn't meditation supposed to allow one to rise above these kinds of things? Well, it hadn't done a thing to improve my life!

We moved back to Wisconsin after about six months. Our life in America's Dairyland was much more mundane, but at least we were used to the pace, and the standard of living was not nearly as formidable. Our married life actually began at that point and within a few years, we'd had two daughters.

The stresses didn't end with our move back, however. Over the next fifteen years I had an average of one job a year. My inability to stick to a job that didn't satisfy certain needs in me started becoming very difficult on my family as well as myself.

I found myself lapsing into depression more and more as I would dwell on all the things that had not gone right in my life. And by now, meditation was the farthest thing from my mind.

It finally took a pharmaceutical drug that allowed me to escape from my biology-imposed prison. The stress of my life had taken its toll on the amount and availability of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, in my body.

Serotonin is vital in the modulation of physiological manifestations like anger, aggression, body temperature, mood, sleep, sexuality and appetite. Any or all of these things can be affected by the lack of it.

Paxil, the Selective Serotonin Uptake Inhibitor (SSRI) anti-depresssant was the name of the drug that came to my rescue nearly 12 years ago. Within weeks, the rage I'd felt for years boiling just under the surface, as well as my mild obsessive-compulsive tendencies that went along with my depression eased. I truly felt like a new man.

This was exactly the result I'd wanted to achieve with meditation, but never could. With Paxil, meditation didn't seem necessary and I never thought another thing about it.

Until about two years ago, when I began the journey I have written about extensively in this blog.

It took about another year before I finally felt that I'd missed something by not meditating for the previous 33 years. How much farther along toward "Enlightenment" or something approaching that would I be had I continued? How much different would my life have been all those years?

As I've heard time and time again about such questions, however, it seems that it is only when we are ready do these questions even arise. And now I felt ready once again to revisit meditation.

I began my old Superconscious Meditation routine and used the mantra given to me long ago by a disciple of Swami Rama's named Swami Ajaya, formerly Allan Weinstock, who may have been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin Department of Psychiatry while I was attending that school as an undergrad. In any case, he achieved his doctrate and has been a practicing psychotherapist ever since.

I am glad to see that he has also continued on his spiritual path in spite of the problems of his teacher and mentor. I am even more interested to see that according to his website, Being Awareness, along with the many books on Yoga and Psychology he has written or co-authored, he is writing a book on another subject of great interest to me. From his website:

Dr. Ajaya has also researched the effectiveness of entheogens in releasing dysfunctional patterns in the body-mind. He is currently writing a book that demonstrates how entheogens, self inquiry, and psychotherapy complement one another in releasing identification with the constricted self and opening to being awareness.

The ironic thing with this idea is that Dr. Stanislav Grof was doing the same thing over 50 years ago when he began using LSD as the entheogen in his psychoanalytic practice. Still, Dr. Ajaya's work is yet another example how so many of the sidepaths I have taken on on my journey all seem to converge at a place where we might discover the true ground of our being.

As for my return to meditating in the past year, I felt that so much time had passed that I was in need of a more powerful and effective method, and so my search for one began.

Vipassana Meditation

Perhaps a year ago now, I listened to an interview of S. N. Goenka by Michael Toms of New Dimension Media. For many years, Mr. Goenka has been teaching the oldest and simplest form of meditation known called Vipassana.

The technique which S.N.Goenka teaches represents a tradition that is traced back to the Buddha. The Buddha never taught a sectarian religion; he taught Dhamma - the way to liberation - which is universal. In the same tradition, Mr. Goenka's approach is totally non-sectarian. For this reason, his teaching has a profound appeal to people of all backgrounds, of every religion and no religion, and from every part of the world.

Mr. Goenka has taught tens of thousands of people in his 10-day Meditation courses, for which he charges nothing. As stated on the Vipassana website: "There are no charges for the courses - not even to cover the cost of food and accommodation. All expenses are met by donations from people who, having completed a course and experienced the benefits of Vipassana, wish to give others the opportunity to also benefit. "

This, to me, is a remarkable policy by Mr. Goenka and displays his dedication to the spiritual liberation of people everywhere, regardless of income. Unfortunately, this is a far cry from a great many spiritual disciplines and modalities in the world, and especially in the United States.

Below is an 8 minute overview of Vipassana by S. N. Goenka.

The rest of the introduction to Vipassana can be found on YouTube.com. This is the link to Part 2.

My daughter, who is living in India until October recently went on a 10-day Vipassana Meditation retreat there and was profoundly affected by the experience. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to avail myself of this kind of intensive retreat yet. Still, the technique is a simple one and for awhile I was using it during my own meditation at home.

Breathwork and Kundalini Yoga

Then this past June, I had what for me was the most rewarding experience of my journey thus far with my Holotropic Breathwork weekend in Houston, Texas. I've written about this weekend extensively in my posts, Preparing for Launch, Liftoff! and ReEntry. My first post that describes Holotropic Breathwork is called The Breath of Lives.

After that experience, I felt that the way to Enlightenment could perhaps be "expedited" with the use of breathwork. The most well known technique employed for this purpose is Kundalini Yoga, which was popularized in this country by Yogi Bhajan through his 3HO, or Healthy, Happy, Holy Organization.

After some investigation, I was happy to learn that even in my relatively small town there is a teacher of Kundalini Yoga, and I made plans to take the introductory course.

I did my homework on Kundalini Yoga and understood that it would be a very strenuous class that combined yoga postures with deep breathing and some meditation. What I had no idea was just how strenuous it was going to be.

Like many older folks, I still think of myself as being the strong, vibrant young man I once was. It is damned hard for the ego to let go of those kinds of self-images, and when I began the class, I was determined that the overweight, out-of-condition man I am would bow to the younger man I still felt myself to be inside.

How wrong I was! Within minutes and during an exercise that found me turning my head quickly left to right for a minute or two, I began to feel a familiar feeling that occurs with me frequently in boats and during bumpy airline flights: nausea.

Sadly, that one exercise began a slow, but steady downward slide toward what was to be a miserable experience for me; to the extent that after about six days of debating whether to go back for a second class, I finally "wimped out" and decided that I would have to be in much better shape to go back.

I know that the nausea itself was caused by a couple of factors; first, I have an inner ear problem that has always been a problem for me in certain types of movements. I once got nauseous on a ferris wheel at a carnival. This one didn't make sense to me because it was just going up and down rather than round and round, but it happened nonetheless.

As for the Kundalini class, besides being affected by the rapid head movements I'd also gone straight to the class from work without eating or--more importantly--without drinking. So I may have been a bit dehydrated as well. Still, I'm willing to take the rap that I did indeed wimp out!

I actually do want to return to take the class at some point, but for now I am doing my best to get back into condition and lose weight so that my body won't be so shocked at the intensity of the class; the rewards of which I feel could be great. There are certainly less strenuous ways to achieve what I want to achieve and since I lean toward being more endomorph than mesomorph, I don't know if I can say honestly that I will go back to Kundalini Yoga, but let's say that the young man inside me still wants to.

So obviously, the subject of meditation is complex and varied. In fact, an organization called The Meditation Society of America even has a page that lists 108 meditation techniques, including one called Reverse Evil to Live (#91), which is not only a meditation technique, but also uses the palindrome evil and live, and instructions for reading the palindrome are contained in the name itself. Very Clever!

2012

Recently I had a discussion with a friend about what, if anything, will occur on December 21st, 2012, which is the end of the current Mayan calendar cycle of 26,000 years. According to this website, this is the date "that our biological process is transforming, approaching the culmination of a 26,000 year evolutionary program. Bringing the return of universal telepathy, heightened sense capacity, and self-reflective consciousness, this is a return to the sacred domain of our inner technology."

2012 also plays a part in a software program Terence McKenna developed many years ago called Fractal Time or Timewave Zero. He designed this software to demonstrate his Novelty Theory, a complex theory that involves ontology, morphogenesis, and eschatology and which is built upon the classic Chinese text, the I Ching or Book of Changes,

Based on his software, he determined that 2012 would be what he called an End of History for mankind. According to the Wikipedia page on Novelty Theory,

This End of History was to be the final manifestation of The Eschaton, which McKenna characterized as a sort of strange attractor towards which the evolution of the universe developed.
His predictions for this transcendent event were wide ranging and varied, depending on his audience, and different times he conjectured the following: the mass of humanity would, by means of some technology, become mentally conjoined in a great collective; the moment in which time travel became a reality; the birth of self-conscious artificial intelligence; a global UFO visitation; and occasionally he even expressed doubt whether anything at all would happen. However, McKenna claimed that there was no contradiction between these scenarios, as they might all happen simultaneously.

For the consummate math nerds out there, this page will explain the mathmatics behind Timewave Zero. Even though only the Sigma character (?) is used on this page, it's all pretty much Greek to me.

I've already written about Daniel Pinchbeck's book, 2012: The Return of Quetalcoatl. The following video is an entertaining 6-minute overview of Daniel's idea about this momentous date as presented in his book.

Another person who has written about the 2012 event goes by what to my mind is the absurdly contrived name of Drunvalo Melchizedek, who for some reason--possibly intuition--I want to rate high on the "Huckster Meter".

Yet, this is admittedly very unfair to Mr. Melchizedek. So I decided to spent almost an hour listening to him speak about accessing the Higher Self, to which you must first access the Lower Self. In addition to these two Selves, he speaks a lot about his own life, which is fine. He has lived an interesting if not extraordinary life, but somehow after the videos were done, I didn't really know anything more about the Higher Self than I did at the beginning.

However, you are free to assess his ideas for yourself here, and while popularity in the world of New Ageism is not an assurance of the truth of the message, he does seem to be very popular and has spawned a virtual smorgasbord of New Age websites and programs that include those of his wife, Claudette, and his nephew, Ken Page.

My natural tendency towards cynicism colors my perception of Drunvalo's New Age cottage industry and I really should read one or more of his books before I pass any kind of judgment as to his veracity or profundity. As for which book to read, I guess that his book, Serpent of Light: Beyond 2012, would be the one I'd choose if I had the time.

Unfortunately, I have an ever-enlarging collection of books I need to get to for this journey that offers me more immediate intellectual and spiritual sustenance. I do, however, invite anyone who is into Drunvalo Melchizedek to comment here and tell me how I am all wet and perhaps just too stupid to understand his concepts of Sacred Geometry, The Spirit of Ma'at, The Flower of Life and Merkaba Meditation. And believe me, there are many areas of knowledge of which I am both ignorant and utterly incapable of grokking.

Meditation! Oh yeah! That's why I got off on this whole 2012 tangent in the first place. I was talking about different types of meditation, and Drunvalo has even developed his own method based on the Hebrew Merkabah, or throne-chariot of God as spoken of by Ezekiel (1:4-26) in the Old Testament.

Drunvalo states that Merkaba Mediation is "a counter-rotating field of light generated from the spinning of specific geometric forms that simultaneously affects one's spirit and body." More specifically, he goes on to say that "the Merkaba is a crystalline energy field that is comprised of specific sacred geometries that align the mind, body, and heart together."

Youtube, that remarkable library of online videos has a number of Merkaba-related videos that generally involve a spinning 3D tetrahedron called a star tetrahedron. An example can be found here.

Om Namah Shivaya

Finally, the question might arise, what meditation technique am I using these days?

I am currently meditating while chanting "Om Namah Shivaya" or Om Namaha Shiva. Chanting is very new to me, but an interesting way to go inside. As mentioned on the website, this mantra is considered one of the most powerful.

Below is a 3-minute chant of Om Namaha Shiva sung by Sheila Chandra, whose beautiful voice first got me interested in Indian music. You can hear short clips and purchase MP3's of any cut from her album "Weaving My Ancestors' Voices" at this Amazon page.

The most important question for anyone practicing meditation of any kind is, will this be of benefit to me? A greater question is, will this be of benefit to the world of creation?

As for being a benefit to me, like so many things I've worked with in the past couple years, meditation doesn't seem to have had a great deal of effect on my everyday life. But obviously I haven't really been at it that long in comparison to the total time I've thought about using it.

One of the great frustrations of working with many of these spiritual methods is an inability to know if and when they are working. Unfortunately, we can't all be Saint Paul and be struck down by God on our own Road to Damascus. Instead, attitude and intent are incredibly important in how we go into them and perceptions of whether they even work are mostly subjective.

Thus far, then, I have to be honest and say that I've noticed no great change in how I react to stress, or how compassionate and loving I am in my everyday life.

But even having said that, I must relate that over the last two or three months, I've weaned myself completely off Paxil, and I have to admit that I was on a pretty high daily dose. So after having thrown off my comforting emotional blanket after 12 years, life can be seem very raw at times. Intense emotions can rise quickly and I have felt moments of depression trying to seep into my consciousness at different moments for different reasons.

Will having restarted my meditation help me battle the negative aspects of my emotional life? Only time will tell. But besides meditation, I'm arming myself with a few other healing modalities.

Just this past weekend I had a quite wonderful experience with Reiki, which is the Japanese method (originally from India and China) of energy manipulation in the body. Whenever the word energy, or Ki or Chi or Qi are used with the idea of healing, we are speaking of matters of such subtlety that science refuses to even acknowledge them.

Since I have no areas of pain that I needed to have worked on specifically, what I experienced last Saturday was an hour of intense relaxation that was facilitated by a woman whose soothing and caring presence itself was an important part of the process. Since she is also a massage therapist, her methodology with Reiki involves a very light touching of different parts of the body. There was no manipulation involved; simply touching. Over other areas, she used the more traditional above-the-body approach of transferring energy through her to me.

Based on how enjoyable that session itself was, and how long afterwards I felt a relaxation and even joy as I proceeded with my day, I have to rate Reiki as a very pleasant surprise; so much so that I intend to have more sessions as well as try a couple of the other services offered at this healing center: acupuncture and massage therapy.

There are many skeptics who believe that nothing measurably beneficial comes from things like reiki or acupuncture or even meditation; nothing good or nothing bad. The ultimate doubters' website is The Skeptic's Dictionary, where if there is an idea that doesn't conform to modern science's methodology--as well as its biases--you will find it debunked and even ridiculed. A good case in point is its page on Transcendental Meditation.

Oddly enough, I have a feeling of camradery with the folks who produce The Skeptic's Dictionary. It wasn't too long go that I found pages like those found there to be required reading. In addition to The Skeptic's Dictionary, I frequented professional debunker and magician James Randi's website and perhaps most importantly, Rick Ross's website, which is devoted to rooting out and exposing "destructive cults, controversial groups and movements".

As a person whose brother was caught inside the Moonie cult for a number of years, the information provided there is invaluable to people who find themselves in similar situations. I still find sites like these important places to check whenever I have questions about a well-promoted person, movement or philosophy. I use them as provide some kind of balance as well as to counter excessive hype found on many of websites that provide extraordinary knowledge or insight to the human condition.

Still, there is much in and out of our universe and reality that do not seem to lie within the rigid structures of modern science. Thousands of years of human history and millions of years of evolution have brought mankind to a world we call normal, yet cannot be called so by any stretch of the imagination. An awareness of what occurs every day in our "civilized" world demonstrates this.

Therefore, while many of the things that pass for spiritual, supernatural or non-ordinary realities might be little more than "snake oil", I think that there is a positive psychic energy that happens to people on a spiritual path that is able to combine with others on a similar path and in doing so, societal memes can be modified and created that can possibly lead toward the kind of world most of us really do desire to be a part of.

In other words, Hey, it can't hurt. And who knows, it might even help!

Afterword

I decided last night to do the most radical thing I've ever done with my body--other than decide to be born--and that is begin a 3-week body purification cleanse. As a man who has abused his body for many decades, I feel like this is a gift that I can give it, and one that is long overdue.

It was a good friend who suggested this cleanse to me as she and I both realized on my last birthday (me for the first time perhaps) that I wasn't getting or feeling any younger. Fortunately she will be just a few days ahead on her own 3-week cleanse, and so she will be able to figuratively hold my hand as I proceed to face what I consider an assault on everything I know and love about eating in 21st century America.

This cleansing process involves the giving up of things very important to me like coffee, preservatives, artificial colors, flavorings and sweeteners and all foods except fruits and vegetables certain fats and oils and a minimum of 8 glasses of water; basically everything that that makes life worthwhile! This process, however, does provide protein supplements so that I won't suddenly collapse in week 2 from malnutrition.

Still, I look forward to the challenge. As opposed to the subtleties I described above in regard to determining if this spiritual approach or that spiritual approach is effective or not, I have to believe that I will know within a very short time how both my body and mind react to these new feelings of preventing the toxins we consume with every day with our food from entering this temple that is my body.

Well, actually my temple is more like the Temple in Jerusalem. All that remains of that building is the outer walls. And while Judaism has decided not to rebuild its Holy Temple, I have to believe that a little urban renewal project would be good for mine.

On Higher Ground

2008-07-24T15:57:00.043-05:00

Often in this blog, I've bemoaned the fact that the Midwestern United States is like a desert of spirituality. I understand that this is not really the case. It just seems that on the edges of this great continent, people now and throughout recorded history have recognized the sacredness of the lands they inhabited.

Much of this has to do with the great natural beauty of the rugged Pacific Coast, the awesome isolation of the inland deserts and the spectacular Majesty of its mountains. Occasionally, however, the Midwest becomes blessed by Spirit for a brief time.

Today. I had the great honor and privilege of attending an important ancient ceremony for the Dalai Lama in Madison, Wisconsin.

His Holiness has been in Madison all week speaking and teaching. Today's ceremony, however, was very special to the Tibetan people themselves.

The ritual I attended is called Tenshug or Long Life Ceremony. It is initiated by the Tibetan people for their spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, and is the first time this ceremony has ever been seen in the West.

I would love to have attended his teaching sessions, but alas, I must work like everyone else and I simply don't have enough days to be able to do all the things I want to that interest me on my journey. But I've wanted very much to see His Holiness in person for a long time.

I am not a practicing Buddhist, but there is much about the teachings of this great philosophy and religion that resonates within me. Moreover, in my mind there are few more impressive living human beings than the Dalai Lama.

He is a modest, intellectually curious man with an immense compassion for all of mankind--but especially for the plight of his own people, the indigenous Tibetans who have been treated so brutally by the Chinese government since Chairman Mao "annexed" Tibet in 1951. By 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso was forced to leave his homeland due to the serious threats made against him by the Chinese because of his ancient position as political leader of his people; a position the Chinese still refuse to accept.

At his acceptance speech for the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, he said this:

I am very happy to be here with you today to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. I feel honored, humbled and deeply moved that you should give this important prize to a simple monk from Tibet. I am no one special, but I believe the prize is a recognition of the true value of altruism, love, compassion and non-violence which I try to practice in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha and the great sages of India and Tibet.

Especially now, a mere days before 2008 Beijing Olympics is about to begin, this man has, simply by his courage, example and compassion, brought fear to the entire Communist political structure in China.

Tragically, however,when a regime as insecure as China feels threatened in any way--even by one small 73-year old Buddhist monk--the repercussions on society and the world can be grievous. The upswing of violence and repression against the Tibetan people--and especially Buddhist monks in recent months--exemplifies how, long after Mao's death, evil still rules in the incredible entity that is China; even as the greedy West grovels at the feet of the world's newest economic giant and geopolitical superpower.

For these reasons, security was tight at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison. As we entered, we were all searched with handheld metal detectors. We were also informed that no cameras or recording devices would be allowed, except for a few authorized individuals. As soon as I entered the Center, I immediately regretted this last prohibition because of the incredible color and pageantry on display there.

Despite these prohibitions, this was a day for celebration. It was a day for as many as 5,000 of the 12,000 Tibetan exiles who live in the United States to offer prayers and good wishes so that the Dalai Lama might live many more years as their leader.

According to the program we received, Tenshug is described this way:

Tenshug is the Tibetan term for a ceremonial long life offering to a spiritual teach who has chosen to be born in this life in an ordinary form. This ritual is done to request the spiritual teacher (lama) to live a long life for the preservation of the Buddhist teachings (dharma) and the happiness of all living beings. Among the many methods for making long life offerings according to sutra and tantra, the present Tenshug offering will be made by means of supplications to the Goddess White Tara, the deity of longevity.
With dedicated prayers for His Holiness the Dalai Lama to live a long life in an unshakable, continuous way (vajra-like), without any obstacles, may His wishes be fulfilled to the fullest extent.

The first thing I saw when I entered the auditorium was an enormous approximately 60' foot tall thangka wall hanging behind a huge stage. While not the exact thangka, this is a similar to the one there. It is called a Shakyamuni (Buddha) Thangka.

It was a very colorful and impressive sight indeed!

Already on the stage were perhaps 30 or 40 monks seated on the floor in their bright ochre and saffron robes. In the audience were many Tibetans, excited to give their offerings to the Dalai Lama and waiting with anticipation for his arrival. Most were dressed in brightly-colored and beautifully-designed native Tibetan clothing.

Just after 9:30, the entire hall hushed, and then I heard horns, temple bells and drums which signalled the arrival of the beloved Dalai Lama.

The small monk was guided to the center of the stage and toward a large ornate golden throne. After climbing onto the throne, he sat down with legs crossed, Indian style. At that point, the monks on stage as well as a number of Tibetans in the audience began the throaty drone-like chanting many associate with Buddhist monks. This chanting would continue throughout most of the ceremony.

For the next two hours or so, then, we witnessed a formal ritual that was conducted almost entirely in Tibetan. Even the programs we received were written for the most part in Tibetan. Occasionally, the Dalai Lama made an aside in English to briefly explain what was happening, but for the most part this ceremony was about the Tibetan people themselves and their relationship to the Dalai Lama.

During most of the chanting, the Dalai Lama, being a monk himself, joined in and sat upon his immense throne mildly swaying left and right as he chanted. Occasionally, he would give instructions to some of the monks; at times mildly chastising them in Tibetan if they did something wrong. Yet even here, his trademark humor came out.

As so often happens when the he speaks, the Dalai Lama would break into laughter or chuckling. The audience seemed to love those moments when he would "come down to earth" for a moment and share the joke with us.

Throughout the ceremony, a large number of volunteers were constantly going up and down the aisles, passing out small cups of rice and a cup of some kind of nectar which I couldn't distinguish. It tasted quite good, however. This seemed to define the ceremony as something more than just a sacred ritual. It was also a symbolic feast and a celebration not only for the Dalai Lama, but for his people as well.

In front of the stage itself was a long table full of large colorful boxes. I assumed that these, too, were part of the offerings. When the formal presentation of the offerings began, I could see that many of the offerings were small Tibetan statues and other icons as well as bolts of beautifully ornate yellow cloth. They were all given to the Dalai Lama by Tibetans who carried them on long white silk cloths. It was apparent that it was a great joy for them to give their gifts to him. In return, the Dalai Lama gave each offerant a small red silk cloth. To do this, he would lean over from his throne and place the silk around each person's neck.

While this was proceeding, volunteers began to quickly gather up the boxes from the table and hurried through the auditorium and up into the aisles where they began passing out whatever was inside.

Since I couldn't see them very well from where I was sitting, they looked like colorful Oriental packages one might see in a bustling Chinatown shop. As they got closer, however, I was surprised to see that they were the most un-Oriental of items: small bags of Ritz Bits and Cheeze-Its as well as small packages of fruits and nuts.

And thus the feast continued.

Finally, when the actual procession of offerings was completed, the Treasurer of Deer Park Buddhist Center, which hosted the six-day visit, presented the Dalai Lama with an accounting of income and expenses for the visit. The net income was in excess of $200,000 and this too was offered to the Dalai Lama. When this man finished, the Dalai Lama told the attendees in English that he would donate the money to health programs in Dharmsala, India; which is where the Tibetan government-in-exile is located and where many Tibetan refugees now live. He also said that some of the money would go to educational endeavors inside Tibet.

The final offering made to the Dalai Lama was a statement from the exile community in America.

Except for an afternoon talk to the Tibetan community entirely in Tibetan, the end of the Tenshug ceremony was also the end of the Dalai Lama's six-day visit to the Madison area. The visit was hosted by the Deer Park Buddhist Center just outside Madison in the town of Oregon. Deer Park is the only full-scale Buddhist monastery and teaching center in the Midwest.

It was the Dalai Lama's seventh visit to the area in the past 30 years. He has close ties to Madison because an associate, prominent Buddhist monk Geshe Sopa, moved here in the 1960s to teach at University of Wisconsin-Madison and later founded Deer Park.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Dalai Lama is certainly much more than "a simple monk from Tibet". He stands as a great example to the world that mankind has the ability to bridge the intellectual with the spiritual and the political with the honorable--and to do so with a great and profound compassion and love towards even those who would seek to destroy him. His very modesty and simplicity is his his greatest strength.

In this respect, he carries on the traditions of great enlightened souls throughout history like Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and a man whose ideas have been twisted and dishonored by his supposed followers for over 2,000 years; Jesus Christ.

All of these men in their way were the personification of Gautama Buddha; the man who some 2500 years ago, began teaching that all men and women have the ability and, in fact, the destiny to awaken from "the sleep of ignorance" and attain liberation by understanding the true nature of reality. This meant by means of accepting The Four Noble Truths about our unawakened worldly life and by living a life of compassion and love so that all fellow beings that share the divine consciousness from whence we were all created can return to the divine at the end of our cycles of death and rebirth.

One of the most difficult things to do in our ego-driven existence is to understand this fundamental commonality with each other. It is harder yet for most of us to accept that to strive for Buddhahood is our most important and most difficult goal in life.

Yet a man like the Dalai Lama is a great example that this is indeed possible. Perhaps more than any other reason, this is why this "simple monk from Tibet" has touched so many people throughout the world with his simple honesty, his simple love and his simple desire that all people attain personal, spiritual and political liberation; because this is most basic and blissful state of all existence.

Star Treks

2008-07-10T09:52:00.082-05:00

At the end of Dr. Stanislav Grof's book, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality, he gives quite surprising credence to the importance of transit astrology when working with non-ordinary states.

Over these past couple years, I've come to accept much that I formerly felt was too far out to consider, but to be very honest, astrology is an area that is going to take a hell of a lot of convincing for me.

So in order to begin to understand why Dr. Grof feels the way he does about what many (including himself at one point) call a pseudoscience, I'm reading a book he highly recommends called Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas.

Since I'm only a few pages into this book, I'll refer to Publishers Weekly to provide an overview in its review.

According to Tarnas, acclaimed author of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a major shift, comparable to the one wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific one: an astrological turn that can only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years. Understanding planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires "a genuine dialogue" with the cosmos, by "opening ourselves more fully" to "the other," to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even "to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure." Filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler through Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan, Tarnas's book is not only sweeping in subject but dense and sometimes painfully slow going. It requires at once a strong background in the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life today and the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we consider as "legitimate knowledge" will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the more scientifically hardheaded. Perhaps my problem with astrology is that I've only known an astrological horoscope to be something that is read in the morning newspaper over cereal, or that astrology itself is promoted in displays of small booklets I can purchase at my grocery store checkout along with The National Enquirer and News of the World.

Perhaps my problem with astrology is that I've only known an astrological horoscope to be something that is read in the morning newspaper over cereal, or that astrology itself is promoted in displays of small booklets I can purchase at my grocery store checkout along with The National Enquirer and News of the World.

I simply haven't been able to believe before now that anyone who calls himself or herself a thinking person can consider these newspaper space fillers and supermarket impulse buys to be serious reading.

So what is it that Dr. Grof discovered during his own and others' holotropic experiences that would have him incur the scorn of eminent scientists like Carl Sagan; a man who admitted to great admiration for Dr. Grof in other matters? This is what I hope to find out as I continue reading Cosmos and Psyche.

In the meantime, one person I know and greatly respect for her own very enlightened views is confident of astrology's claims and yesterday sent me a link to a website from which I can receive my own personal horoscope.

Since there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting to eceive information about oneself from whatever source it might come from, I clicked on the link and signed up for the site's free daily hororscope service.

I have to say here that I am automatically suspicious whenever the word free is used to promote something that many people have no problem paying dearly for. My position is that nothing in our culture is truly free--including Spiritual Enlightenment--which is another sore subject with me, but that is fodder for another posting.

Anyway, about five minutes after signing up for this service, I received my personal astrological profile. I was fairly excited about getting this despite my lifelong skepticism of the the wisdom of the stars.

Then I began to read it.

The first thing I saw was a list of people who shared the same star sign, Leo, with me; people like Sri Aurobindo, Carl Jung, Robert Redford and Madonna. At least, I thought, I was in pretty good company and that there was no Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Karl Rove or U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the list.

Next, I discovered that my strengths include being ambitious, courageous, creative, faithful, generous, honorable, humorous, open-minded, organized, powerful, self-aware and resolute.

Since these are all wonderful and positive traits, who wouldn't want to think of himself as possessing them, right?

Unfortunately, there are a few items on this list that just don't resonate with me and what I perceive to be my personality, but since the opposite of these strengths are nothing to brag about, I'll keep them between me and my evil twin at this point.

For all you who think you know me, you may now begin guessing which ones they might be.The next section of my personal profile was about my weaknesses, but did I really want to go there? Oh well...it was free.

So gathering my courage (which is one of my strengths, remember), I soon discovered that I am arrogant, authoritarian, egocentric, exaggerating, intolerant, jealous, narcissistic, proud, hypersensitive and vain.

Wow! That really hurt!

But wait! Since the opposite of these weaknesses are traits I'd like to feel that I possess, I don't mind pointing out what I disagree with from this unfortunate list of my supposed flaws.

First, I honestly don't think I'm arrogant. In fact, I tend much more toward chronic self-doubt than arrogance.

Next on the list is authoritarian.

Okay, I will admit that there have been times in my life when I was quite authoritarian. I'm thinking of when, as the oldest of seven children, I held sway over them both by physical proportion and by an unfortunate innate meanness. However, since I left my parents' home many decades ago, I've had little need or desire to dominate anyone. Evidently, in all my effort to control them, they went and tamed me! Those clever siblings!

Egocentricity, like arrogance (and we might as well throw in narcissism, pride and vanity here), can rightfully be claimed by those who possess a healthy self-confidence in most matters. And while I am loathe to admit it, this attribute is generally lacking in me. After all, who could possess self-confidence when one already entertains a basket load of neuroses?

Besides, from what I can tell, self-confidence can only lead to questionable circumstances like wealth, success, happiness and joy. I simply don't know what I would do with any of those things!

So far, then, my personal astrological profile was pretty much hit and miss. A batting average like this would probably bench a baseball player.

Further into my profile, I found out that I am the second of the fire signs of the zodiac, which means that I am "a strong-willed and courageous individual with great leadership qualities."

Damnit! I really like that, too!

But once again, their "knowledge" of me is pretty much dead wrong. Throughout my life, I've abhorred leadership roles because--again, as a person lacking a great deal of self-confidence--I just want people to like me. So, as a manager I was generally like, "Sure, go ahead. Enjoy yourself. Don't worry about doing your job well." So it should surprise no one that even thought I've had a number of these positions over the years, I made a terrible manager. Just ask all the business owners who inevitably fired me!

Feeling increasingly depressed about what I was discovering about myself because of this profile's erroneous analysis, I next read that "my aura radiates magnetism and dignity like the rays around the sun."

Once again, this is a wonderful and very attractive idea, but the only thing my magnetism attracts these days are swarms of mosquitoes. So if our native Culex species is looking for a new queen (would that be right?), then they've already made their choice, because those damn little critters are certainly crazy about me!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Okay, I've had fun with the little free astrological profile I received and I have to wonder if the paid services this website provides would come closer to the truth of who I am.

Another possibility is that I simply don't know myself as well as the stars do.

This, then, is my problem. In regard to many New Age-y things (yes, I know that astrology is perhaps the oldest "science"), it is far too easy to con people into believing these things, and there are far too many charlatans and hucksters around who are only too happy to take advantage of this fact!

So to begin to separate fact from fancy, I am reading Cosmos and Psyche to understand the arguments made therein that Dr. Grof finds so valid. What I do hope to discover is that the newspaper and grocery store horoscopes, books on astrology and websites like the one I went to for my profile are just New Age versions of patent medicine.

If this is the case, then like some of the ingredients found in the dubious concoctions that were sold to unsuspecting dupes during patent medicine's heyday, there just might be kernels of truth within all the New Age flummoxery and bamboozlement that exploit our species' nsatiable need to know what makes us tick and how all the ticks of our lives will play out.

As I was finishing up this post, I stumbled upon a paper written a number of years ago by Dr. Grof about this very topic called--interestingly enough--Psyche and Cosmos.It is his review of the subject, he attributes much of his knowledge of it to the same Richard Tarnas stating that "the radical change in my attitude toward astrology has been the result of cooperation with psychologist and philosopher Richard Tarnas, my close friend and colleague of many years."

Therefore, before I end Part 1 of my exploration of astrology, I'll include this excerpt from Dr. Grof's paper:

Western science portrays the universe as an impersonal and largely inanimate mechanical system, a supermachine that created itself and is governed by mechanical natural laws. In this context, life, consciousness, and intelligence are seen as more or less accidental products of matter. By contrast, the basic assumption of astrology is that the cosmos is a creation of superior intelligence, is based on an inconceivably intricate deeper order, and reflects a higher purpose. The astrological perspective closely reflects the original meaning of the Greek word Kosmos that describes the world as an intelligibly ordered, patterned, and coherently interconnected system with humanity as an integral part of the whole. In this view, human life is not the result of random forces ruled by capricious chance, but follows an intelligible trajectory that is attuned to the movements of celestial bodies and can thus be at least partially intuited.
Another major obstacle for seriously considering astrology is the deterministic thinking in Western science. The universe is seen as a chain of causes and effects and the principle of causality is considered to be mandatory for all processes in the universe. One major disquieting exception to this rule, the origin of the universe and the question of the cause of all causes,” is seldom mentioned in scientific discussions. Causality is thus the only type of influence the critics of astrology can usually imagine and take into consideration. And the idea of a direct material effect of the planets on the psyche and the world is, naturally, implausible and absurd.
Finally, the emphasis that astrology puts on the moment of birth does not make any sense for academic psychology and psychiatry that do not see biological birth as a psychologically relevant event and do not recognize the perinatal level of the unconscious. This is based on the highly questionable assumption that the brain of the newborn cannot register the traumatic impact of birth, because the process of myelinization (formation of the fatty myelin sheaths covering the neurons) in his or her brain is not fully completed at the time of birth.
Several decades of systematic research of holotropic states have generated vast amounts of data that undermine these basic assumptions of materialistic science and bring supportive evidence for astrology. These observations reveal:

the existence of transpersonal experiences that point to an ensouled cosmos permeated with consciousness and creative cosmic intelligence;
the possibility of direct experience of spiritual realities, including archetypal figures, motifs, and realms, and empirical validation of the authenticity of these experiences;
the existence of synchronicities that represent an important and viable alternative to the principle of causality;
the critical psychodynamic importance of the birth experience for the psychological development and life of the individual;
the extraordinary predictive potential of astrological transits for the nature, timing, and content of holotropic states of consciousness.

Finally, perhaps quantum physics and Carl Sagan together can help answer my questions about the validity of astrology.

If we examine Dr. Sagan's famous statement that "we are made of star stuff", we come to realize that every atom and every molecule and all the energy that exists in every one of us originated in the stars, including our own marvelous star, the sun.

If we then take into account the difficult, but proven, concept of quantum non-locality, we can begin to grasp that our atoms can still be connected in a quantum manner to the stars from which they were created. From there, it is not a great leap of imagination to understand that the stars can indeed influence our lives to an extent.

It's interesting to think that a scientist as brilliant as Carl Sagan couldn't make the connection to that theoretical possiblity while he was alive. This is certainly not an unscientific hypothesis. But then he was merely a cosmologist and not a quantum physicist. Specialization, unfortunately, can sometimes be intellectually limiting . And it is for this reason that I greatly admire Dr. Grof and his endless pursuit of truth and knowledge that can be found in whatever direction his research and experience take him.

The Problem of Evil

2008-07-04T08:47:00.043-05:00

Why is there evil?

Perhaps no other question in mankind's history has so perplexed our greatest thinkers than this one. From realms of human thought that include philosophy, psychology, religion, science and sociology, people have pondered this most troubling, enduring and--among all of life's millions of species--unique fact of human life: the existence of evil.

As I have been focusing on the ideas of Dr. Stanislav Grof of late, I am intrigued by his idea of why evil exists. Discussing the sometimes profound psychological and spiritual experiences brought about by holotropic states in his book, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness, he says this:

"As our process of self-exploration deepens, we can discover within ourselves highly problematic emotions and impulses that we were previously completely unaware of--dark and destructive aspects of our unconscious psyche that C. G. Jung referred to as the Shadow. This discovery can be very frightening and disturbing. Some of these dark elements represent our reactions to painful aspects of our history, particularly traumas in infancy and childhood. In addition, powerful destructive potential seems to be associated with the perinatal level of our psyche, the domain of the unconscious that is related to the trauma of birth. The hours of painful and life-threatening experiences associated with the passage through the birth canal naturally provoke a corresponding violent response in the fetus. This results in a repository of aggressive tendencies that we harbor in our unconscious for the rest of our life, unless we make special effort to confront them and transform them in some variety of experiential self-exploration.

"In view of these disclosures, it becomes clear that the menacing doubles in such works of art as R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Edgar Allen Poe's "William Wilson" do not represent fictitious literary characters, but the shadow aspects of an average human personality. Individuals who have been able to look deep into their psyches often describe that they discovered within themselves destructive potential that matches that of evil individuals in the category of Genghis Khan, Hitler or Stalin. In view of such shattering insights, it is common to experience agonizing misgivings about our own nature and encounter great difficulties in accepting it."

The reason I am writing about this today is because of two different stories in the news this week that manifest both personal and general aspects of evil. Both are examples of mankind's Shadow that should never fail to shock those of us who believe ourselves to be above that sort of thing. Yet we must never forget that our own Shadow selves contain potential evil energies that most of us will never hopefully display to such an extent as these.

The first story involved the disappearance a week ago of a twelve-year old girl from Vermont. Initial indications were that she had met someone online and perhaps gone off with this person. She had been dropped off early in the day by her 42-year old uncle at a convenience store. A security camera even showed her being dropped off, then walking away in a different direction.

A few days later, the story took a bizarre turn. The uncle had been arrested for being part of a "sex ring" that had used girls for this; insuring their silence by threatening the girls family with death. This uncle had been having sex with one of these girls for five years--since she was nine. There was, however, no official connection to the niece's disappearance.

This, of course, did not bode well for the missing girl, but she still hadn't been found. Then after a week, her body was discovered in a shallow grave a mile from the convenience store. Soon afterward, her uncle was arrested for her murder and now faces the death penalty.

This kind of story sadly speaks for itself. The utter depravity of a man--especially an uncle--who would do this kind of thing is shocking, yet all too common in our world. Regardless how common this is, however, we must never feel inured to sorrow for this kind of tragedy to a life, because as human beings we all share in a common consciousness where pain and suffering for one is pain and suffering for all.

I recently watched the documentary Nanking. Using both actors reading actual letters and journals as well as archival footage, this movie depicts the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and its army's violent march to the then-capital of Nanking, which had a fairly large foreign community. As the Japanese moved closer toward the city, most of these people fled as quickly as possible.

There was, however, a handful of these Westerners who decided that they would stay and not abandon the people they'd grown to respect, care for and even love. They realized that being Americans and Europeans, they might be able to affect the behavior of the invading army.

To accomplish this, they created a relatively small Safe Zone in the middle of the city, which they specifically stated--to any Japanese official they or their friends in their home countries could speak to--was under their jurisdiction and control and that no Japanese soldiers would be allowed to enter. Their intention was to safeguard as many women and non-miliary males as was possible to prevent widescale rape and slaughter which they had been told was common during the army's march from Shanghai.

One of the surprising ways this tactic was successful was that a few of the Europeans were actually Nazis and Nazi sympathizing German citizens who utilized their country's political ties as another Axis nation on the Japanese.

For quite awhile, the Safe Zone worked as they had hoped. Outside, however, Nanking had become a living hell. The wanton violence and brutality was almost inconceivable. Females of any age were subject to a violent ongoing orgy of rape followed by disgusting mutilation and death. Non-combatant Chinese men were not spared their own horrible indignities as the Japanese found that, for example, forcing them to have sex with corpses before torturing then killing them also satisfied their incredible depravity.

In fact, the invading Japanese army was nothing more than an out-of-control mob with an unending blood lust, and the people of Nanking and other cities were the tragic victims of their rampaging evil.

In China today, the Rape of Nanking is still a sensitive issue in Sino-Japanese relations. The memories of such brutality, alas, do not fade quickly.

The other story in the news this week that brought up this issue of evil involves the controversial British-American journalist, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has enjoyed being an iconoclast over the years, first as a fiery Marxist, then most recently as an ardent proponent of our glorious invasion of Iraq.

He calls himself not an atheist, but an antitheist. He latest tome is a book decrying belief in God called God is Not Great. One of his most "excoriating critiques" was on Mother Theresa. In his book, The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice, he scathingly criticizes Teresa as "a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint in order to raise money to spread an extreme and aggressive version of Catholicism." Despite these things and a number of well-known personal problems, he is still considered by many, one of the best writers of our era.

What caught my attention this week about Hitchens was a story about his article in Vanity Fair called, Believe Me, It's Torture. The following video was a part of the article and in it, my eyes were finally opened to the "officially sanctioned" but highly controversial method of interrogation called waterboarding.

The War on Terror has become for the leaders of this country an excuse to create a world that conforms to their own irrational sense of fear and paranoia. And in doing so, they maintain that what the world of nations in the last century determined to be basic human rights--rights that must be afforded to any person involved in internal or external conflict by the Geneva Conventions--no longer has legitimacy in this new paradigm of an Eternal War on Terror.

Certainly movies have offered this simple ethic over the years with the many vigilante-as-protagonist movies produced. And television shows like 24 continue to promote the idea that there need be no moral constraint when protecting America. Our national fear following 9/11 has been intensified mostly by artifice by the persistent focus on the threat of external terrorism to create in us a desire to remain safe and secure at all costs.

The rights to privacy we have already given up in the name of homeland security is very disturbing, yet there is no one--including the two presidential nominees--who will begin a saner dialog about how we want our nation to function in this new world; which really isn't much different from the old world except that we have a new public enemy to exploit for the benefit of a highly-sophisticated Military/Industrial Complex.

Evil is and has always been our enemy. And our leaders can define evil however they like using terms like "Axis of Evil" as a double whammy of fear inducement; likening current nations to the World War II Axis nations of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Yet, overnight, evil can be redefined as happened this week when North Korea was declared to be removed from the Axis of evil that once included it as well as the countries of Iraq and Iran.

But when we think of how often methods of "interrogation" like waterboarding are being used on people who may or may not have any legitimate information in our War on Terror, how can we not include ourselves in the world's Axis of Evil?

And let us never forget the sadistic indignities that finally came to light at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq or those that are still being committed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There simply is no way we can call ourselves a moral nation when evil like this is permitted by the highest levels of our government.

Certainly today, July 4th, when we take time out to celebrate the great nation we believe we are, how can we truly believe that we are the paragon of good in our world?

Certainly with innocent Iraqi citizens being killed every day and perhaps more than a million deaths overall because of a war we had no legitimate reason for starting, how can we believe that other nations should act like us?

Certainly with well over 4000 Americans killed and 30,000 Americans injured in the past five years in Iraq merely because of a few men's hubris and one man's emotional insecurity and unfortunate incompetence, how can we shout with joy as the American flag waves proudly over every government building and in hundreds of July 4th parades in the land?

Evil must be recognized for what it is from wherever it originates. Whether it comes from inside ourselves, from our political or religious leaders, or from individuals from organized or unorganized groups whose Shadow selves can merge with each other to form an infinitely greater evil force--such as happened in China in 1937.

Dr. Grof further explains in The Cosmic Game that holotropic experiences can lead to an understanding of what one of his clients called transcendental realism.

"It is an attitude that accepts the fact that evil is an intrinsic part of creation and that all realms that contain separate individuals will always have both a light and a shadow side. Since evil is inextricably woven into the cosmic fabric and indispensable for the existence of experiential worlds, it cannot be defeated and eradicated. However, while we cannot eliminate evil from the universal scheme of things, we can certainly transform ourselves and develop different ways of coping with the dark side of existence."

So in this as in so many other things in our world, it is up to us as individuals to work towards creating a better human. It is up to us as individuals to begin the energy shift away from the Shadow self that far too many in our world identify with.

And while the examples I've given here are at the far end of the spectrum of evil perpetrated by human beings, we must still recognize that all of us function at some point along this spectrum by our actions towards others and by our attitudes that create energetic patterns that merge with others in our society and in our world.

So while it is easy to say that one person can't do much about evil in the world, I think that once we realize that our consciousness is part of everyone's consciousness, we can begin the difficult journey toward the Omega Point of our universe's existence; and in doing so perhaps we can attract others to the journey by our own example and determination.

Good Morning, Sunshine!

2008-06-20T04:50:00.035-05:00

A good friend of mine who lives very far away contacted me yesterday and said that she would be spending tonight with some of her "metaphysical" friends in a beautiful lakeside setting celebrating the Summer Solstice.

I wasn't quite sure if she meant that her friends are a metaphysical figment of her imagination or what, but I immediately envisioned a lively, primitive and mysterious pagan ritual that would take place around a huge fire under the moonlight.

Since I've never attended a Summer Solstice event, I don't actually know what goes on at one of these. Perhaps my friend and her neo-pagan companions will just get into a big hot tub and simply enjoy each other's presence as our sun, this most ancient Sol, prepares to make yet another journey across the Earth and settle--for the briefest moment--over the Tropic of Cancer, thereby radiating its life-giving energy to the farthest northern reaches of its third child.

And I thought...how wonderful it is for people to gather for such an event and know that similar gatherings have been taking place all over the earth since the dawn of prehistory when human beings first associated the sun with life itself.

Living as far north as we do here in Wisconsin, the sun holds a powerful place in our minds, since for so many months of the year, it is little more than a phantom, mocking us with the promise of its enveloping warmth, yet never able to release the icy, death-like grip of winter.

We seldom hear about this important astrophysical event; the Summer Solstice. I guess this is because, as Christians, we've been indoctrinated since early on to despise and fear any ideas that aren't part of the official dogma of the Church.

Yet, the irony is that many of our sacredly-held ideas as Christians came directly from the so-called pagan religions that preceded Christianity and Judaism--or which lived alongside it until the brutal Inquisition wiped out all but small vestiges of them in both Europe and the New World.

According to the article on Paganism and Christianity in Wikipedia, "three layers of pagan influence on the Christian Church have been proposed:"

Influence on the New Testament narrative and doctrine itself. This is mainly located in Hellenistic mystery religions such as Mithraism, partly inspired by Ancient Egyptian religion, as well as the mythology of the Old Testament, but Buddhism is also named as a possible influence.

Influence on Christian dogma in Late Antiquity, that is, the doctrine of the Church Fathers in the 4th and 5th century, the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds, including the questions of the Trinity and Christology. A strong influence here was Roman imperial cult, Hellenistic philosophy, notably Neoplatonism, and Gnosticism. Christological disputes continued to dominate Christian theology well into the Early Middle Ages, down to the Third Council of Constantinople of AD 680.

Influences of pagan religions Christianized in the Early Middle Ages. This includes Germanic paganism, Celtic paganism, Slavic paganism and folk religion in general.

To counter yet validate these ideas, websites abound that warn Christian believers about the pagan origins of some of our most revered holidays (holy days) and religious customs.

This page on a website called godkind.org represents the extreme antipathy towards Christmas, Easter and, of course, Halloween that arises from the refusal of Christianity to acknowledge the common spiritual and psychological ideas it shares with --and indeed borrows from pagan religions for its own conventions and cultural milieu.

One of the more fascinating ideas proposed is that Jesus himself studied Buddhist philosophy and teaching.

In an excellent article on http://www.thezensite.com, James M. Hanson, an expert in Buddhist-Christian Studies starts off with this provocative question:

Was Jesus a Buddhist? Certainly he was many things--Jew, prophet, healer, moralist, revolutionary, by his own admission the Messiah, and for most Christians the Son of God and redeemer of their sins. And there is convincing evidence that he was also a Buddhist. The evidence follows two independent lines--the first is historical, and the second is textual. Historical evidence indicates that Jesus was well acquainted with Buddhism. If Jesus did not go to India, then at least India went to Judea and Jesus. The real historical question is not if he studied Buddhism, but where and how much he studied Buddhism, especially during his so-called "lost years."

Historical accounts aside, many textual analyses indicate striking similarities between what was said by Jesus and by Buddha and between the prophetic legend of Jesus and ancient Buddhist texts. The conclusion is that, although not identifying himself as a Buddhist for good reasons, Jesus spoke like a Buddhist. The similarities are so striking that, even if no historical evidence existed, we can suspect that Jesus studied Buddhist teachings and that the prophecy and legend of Jesus was derived from Buddhist stories.

This scholarly analysis of the question of Jesus' Buddhist background is fascinating; especially in contrast to how far from Jesus/Buddha's core ideas Christian theology has strayed, in my opinion.

Even if one is unwilling to accept that Jesus could be influenced by such an Oriental philosophy, there is still no doubt as to how little influence Jesus' original ideas have had on the Church's subsequent politically-charged theological and moral teachings--and more importantly, his influence on those who call themselves Christian.

Back to the joyous pagan event that will be celebrated by many around the world tonight and at dawn tomorrow.

While the joy and anticipation of a natural world that will soon be at the peak of vibrancy and fecundity has been lost to most of us who exist far-removed from the source of this abundant life, it is good to know that there are still souls in our world who have not forgotten Nature nor the source of all life on earth: our magnificent sun.

So whether my friend dances around a fire tonight or simply enjoys the company of her friends in a warm and sensuous hot tub, I will be thinking of her as well as my two daughters who are also very far away; with one in Texas and one in the midst of a 10-day Vippassana Meditation retreat near Chennai, India.

As I thought of them this morning, the words of the beautiful song, "Somewhere Out There" came to my mind. This song won the Grammy Award in 1988 as Song of the Year and was written for the delightful movie, "An American Tail", a surprisingly powerful and moving animated story about a "Russian-Jewish" mouse in the 1880's who must leave his home to move to New York.

One evening, sad and lonely, he looks up into the sky and realizes how much he misses his beloved sister, who still remains in Russia. While the song in the movie is a sweet lament of a little homesick mouse, the sentiment is universal and very, very human.

And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we'll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true

Image from 4 Witches Occult Shop

ReEntry

2008-06-13T21:51:00.032-05:00

Woody Allen said in one of his movies that he suffered from anhedonia--the inability to enjoy anything in life. In fact, Anhedonia was the original title of his 1977 Oscar Winning movie Annie Hall. By the end of the movie Diane Keaton accuses Allen of not being able to enjoy life enough, and with tongue firmly placed in cheek, he answers that he can't...as long as someone, somewhere is suffering.

This was said in Allen's inimitable persona of the hapless shlemazel. However, Woody is undoubtedly familiar with this particular neurosis. When I heard him say this, I suddenly recognized something of that feeling in myself, although since he hadn't called his movie Anhedonia, I didn't know that there was a even a name for it until fairly recently.

Tor years, it seems, I was so focused on my own self-defined misery that, like Woody, I was never able to feel real joy in the life that was happening around me.

The saddest part of this revelation is that as I watched my two wonderful daughters grow up into womanhood, I rarely experienced the joy that this process can and should bring to a parent.

It is only since they left out home that I have felt the joy that should have been mine when they were here with us. And now that joy is experienced only during those all-too-brief moments when we visit them or when they visit us, because both now live very far from their mother and me.

Yet, my dis-ability to enjoy their presence wasn't because I was too busy. Instead, it was simply that I was so lost in my self-imposed exile from life that I could only give them the most minimal amount of myself before I would dive back into my computer or get lost in the mindless pablum of television.

I'm exposing this about myself now because for the past few days, I've felt something that is wholly unfamiliar to me. Even saying the following words about myself sounds strange and somehow out-of-place.

So here it is. Since my breathwork experience on Saturday morning, I have had the supreme pleasure of experiencing a sense of Peace and Joy in my life; maybe for the very first time.

Even when I type it here, it looks like a bad Christmas card to me. And like a Christmas card it could be taken as being merely trite.

But this is definitely not the case! I've been trying to find just the right way to define how I've felt since last weekend and peace and joy are really the only words that describe it.

This is really all I want to say about the aftereffects of my Holotropic Breathwork session. I don't want to analyze it any further, lest my left brain becomes so obsessed with figuring it out that it shoves aside this glorious feeling.

Instead, now that I've had a few days to "process" the experience, I'll describe a few of the highlights of my adventure.

My wife and children, as well as my six siblings and assorted friends and acquaintances have been curious about what I experienced, since I'd been talking up Dr. Grof and his Holotropic Breathwork technique for a couple of months now.

Therefore, since I returned from Houston, these are the words I've used to summarize my weekend for them: while it may not have been quite magical, this experience was one of the greatest and most joyous of my entire life.

I'm not sure what I mean by saying that it wasn't magical. I guess my idea of a mystical experience is one that would leave no room for doubt. As I mentioned in my previous post, even though my intention was to "go for broke", there were still those lifetime habits and insecurities that I had to overcome to really accomplish this, and I was never quite able to do this last weekend.

Yet instead of feeling bad or disappointed about it, I am encouraged by the feeling that I can go deeper, perhaps much deeper toward the transpersonal states described by Dr. Grof in his books and talks.

Even with those qualifications, however, it was truly a remarkable experience.

To recap a bit from my previous posts, the superb playlist of music was designed to merge with our hyper-oxygenated brains to force a fundamental shift from the normally dominant left brain to the un-rational, intuitive, emotional and egoless right brain.

I have already described how my hands felt; as if electricity was shooting through them and that the energy within them was incredibly intense. It wasn't at all painful, but it was certainly a sensation I've never felt before.

Gradually this feeling lessened in intensity, probably because by now I couldn't help but move different parts of my body to the beat of the music. It was like I was dancing, yet I was lying down. My hips were moving, my arms were pumping and my legs were dancing like Michael Jackson. Okay, I'm sure they weren't moving that well...but it sure felt like it!

The music then changed to a highly-charged tribal sound dominated by drumming. It was here that I first felt as if I had become part of a larger entity of individuals. While I had no visions as such, what seemed to be just out of my sight were hundreds, perhaps thousands of other beings dancing right along with me. I felt as if I could see many, many tiny pinpoints of light that represented these beings, but that was the extent of my visuals here. Still, it was a very powerful, primitive and primal experience that lasted until the next musical transition.

I recall that the next type of music that began playing was a psychedelic trance number with a hard-driving techno beat. This music quickly moved my psychic frame of reference from the primitive to the modern.

The beings dancing along with me had changed in my perception. Now, instead of a primitive tribal setting, we were all part of the modern day tribal event known as a rave concert. So even though I've never attended one, there seemed to be no doubt in my mind that this was what they were like--and I enjoyed every minute of it.

At a point some time later, the frenetic pace of the trance music slowed into something else and I just enjoyed my own body movements as I now grooved to an entirely new sound and rhythm.

For some reason, I felt that perhaps this music signaled the end of the "liftoff" phase of my breathwork experience, and after a few minutes, I opened my eyes and asked T if it was okay to start intensifying my breathing again. She smiled and said that I could do whatever I wanted to do. This was my experience.

I don't know why I felt the need to ask this question. I guess it seemed to me that what I'd felt thus far been like a wonderful massage where, when the therapist is finished, that's it. I almost felt like it would be cheating if I were to enjoy yet another journey.

Oh well...just more of my neurotic inhibitions.

So with T's go-ahead, I started working even harder with my breath. By this time, I didn't have the need to vocalize, but I could feel how much more powerful my breath was. It was at this point that I said to myself that I've spent a lot of money for the airline ticket, for the workshop and for the hotel, SO DON'T FUCKING WASTE IT!

Well, I may or may not have actually said 'fucking', but that was how determined I was. I'm extremely happy that I decided to go even further, because this point marked the beginning of the most fascinating and ethereal phase of my journey.

The sounds coming from the speakers had plateaued in intensity, and were now transitioning to a much fuller, much richer musical tapestry. I believe that this was where the music being heard was from movie soundtracks, but I'm glad I didn't recognize any of it as this might have gotten me started wondering where I'd heard the music before.

Suddenly within the music I began to notice the rich full sounds of an organ, and as I listened to its magnificent range and power, the instrument sounded more and more like a giant pipe organ like those found in great cathedrals--and that my breathing was intimately connected to the volume of air going through the large array of pipes producing the powerful sounds.

Soon, I was compressing and squeezing my entire body as the organ "inhaled" and I relaxed as it "exhaled". It was a very powerful and oddly pleasant experience considering the strength of my muscle contractions. I remember briefly thinking that perhaps I could compress all my neuroses and fears into a tiny wad, then exhale it with my outbreath.

But almost immediately it became much more primal for me. I suddenly felt as if my bodily compressions were the contractions of a womb and I was fighting to get out. I don't think I would call this a true rebirth experience because there wasn't any real pain, panic or terror associated with it as I would expect from such an experience. As I consider this further, maybe this was just a place my expectations had prepared to visit because of all the books I'd read by Dr. Grof.

Besides, my journey was continued to be guided by the unseen hands of the musical choreographer, a holotropic DJ, if you will, and soon the organ's passion and powerful resonant tones eased and slowed into an incredibly peaceful rhythm.

Here, for the first time in my life, I felt that I was experiencing true bliss; the kind spoken of by mystics and ecstatics since time began.

In this ineffable state, I had no more body. Instead, I was floating in a warm, luxuriant pressureless void. My mind had finally quieted its incessant chatter and all I knew was a sublime peace.

With the lightest of breath now, I just basked in this place, I began to think of my mother; the woman who had given birth to me as well as my six brothers and sisters and who'd also had five miscarriages. This was a woman who wanted nothing more when she was young than to become a nun and dedicate her life to God. Her God certainly had different plans for my mother!

Then my father came into my consciousness. My father was a man whose lifelong problems with depression and ADD (even before anyone knew to call it that) kept him somewhat distant from his children, his wife and his life. Yet we loved him very much. He was gentle, very artistic and sang beautifully. When he was puttering around the house or working on something, the house would be full of his baritone crooning that sounded very much like Bing Crosby; his own musical idol.

I keep going off on these tangents, but this is only to illustrate that I thought about my parents and their inability to understand each other for the entire 37 years of their marriage because of their extremely disparate temperaments.

In the 70's, when it suddenly became okay for a woman to want more than the narrowly-defined world that had limited them for untold generations, my mother began to expand her horizons. This was happening at the same time my father's health was failing due complications from Type 1 Diabetes. First his eyesight failed then his foot became infected and later amputated and finally his kidneys failed. This would soon give way to his death.

My mother divorced my father near the beginning of his slide, which sounds callous and cruel; and I guess in a sense it was. But somehow, we who were their children never felt that way. We knew what mom had put off in her life for him...and for us. We didn't begrudge her need to discover a world she'd only been able to dream about.

Even more poignant and sad that these facts is that after my mother left him, my father only wanted to go home to live with his own aging mother so that she would once again be able to take care of him as he became more physically and emotionally disabled.

And this my grandmother did; even thought she had always seemed short of true affection for anyone--except my father. She did her duty as a mother and took care of him as he struggled more and more with physical problems and slid deeper into depression.

These were the things I knew about my parents as I floated in this oceanic dreamland. As I was thinking about them, I felt tears fall from my eyes even though it didn't feel like I was making them.

T gently wiped each of my eyes and somehow this small act of what felt like love brought more tears. I thought about how wonderful this experience was and only wished that each of my parents could have had just a few moments of this kind of joy in their lives; such was the bliss I was feeling.

Soon this sadness extended outward towards all people in the world who are suffering due to circumstances they had never chosen or for which they didn't deserve. The tears continued to fall slowly on either side of my face. And each time, T would ever-so-softly wipe them away.

It's strange to say that even while I was feeling this bliss, I was also feeling sorrow, but it is true. It was as if the dualities of sorrow and joy, good and bad, body and spirit that are so much a part of our lives came together in my experience and I was feeling them all simultaneously.

Then just as quickly as it came, my sorrow faded and I was left without any thoughts at all in a wonderful oceanic bliss state.

I'm not sure how long this lasted, but at some point, I felt the slightest sensation of my shirt collar against my neck. I thought to myself that this probably did signal the end of a marvelous experience for me.

And that was the case, for ever so slowly, my body began to return to my consciousness--or perhaps my consciousness was simply returning to my body. It doesn't matter which. The experience just was.

Probably a half hour later, I felt that I had returned enough to my body that it was time for the next part of the experience; that was to create a mandala symbolizing my wordless interpretation of it.

While slowly getting to my feet, I experienced the lightheadedness and lack of stability that demonstrated the need for assistance at that point. So T took my arm and helped me as I walked a bit drunkenly to another room in the hotel that had been set aside for our smaller group of twelve.

Inside this room were a number of tables with pieces of paper in which big circles had been drawn. In the center of each table were crayons, water paints, colored pens and colored chalk. The purpose, again, was simply to create a symbolic representation of what the experience was for us "artists".

Sadly, this was one talent I did not inherit from my father and I felt some anxiety to think that I would have to do at least a halfway decent drawing of this experience using my very limited artistic skills. Still, I plodded along making clumsy images, but at least they very abstractly represented the highlights of my journey.

As I mentioned earlier, I had breathed first in the morning, so after lunch it was T's turn.

I also said that T is not a new to this by any means. She has had a number of Holotropic Breathwork sessions and many Rebirthing experiences; which is a similar breathing technique, but with little or no reliance on music to help guide the experience.

At this point, I want to make just a few comments about T's experience, and I hope that if she does read this, she will forgive me for this public description of her very personal experience.

First, let me say that being the sitter for the afternoon session was truly fascinating. For my own breathwork session, I had heard some occasional shouting, but thought that it might have come from the music itself. To witness the intensity of many breathers' sessions, however, was a true revelation.

As T began her own breathing, it was was very light. I thought to myself that she can't possibly get anywhere breathing like that. Yet, as the hours progressed, her breathing never seemed to get to a level even of a person walking fast!

Then at one point she had to go to the restroom, and when she stood up, it became obvious that she had already scaled some awesome heights on her own journey.

Imagine, if you will, the woman who has had way to much too drink at a bar, and who then decides to walk to the restroom on her own, but needs help to get there. T and I looked something like that as we walked with my arm around her making sure she didn't fall. When she finally said something to me as I let her walk on her own into the restroom , it was soft and far away sounding--which I realized was from where she was speaking.

It was quite a wonderful gift for me as the sitter to watch T as she went through this experience. While others all around me were flailing away and making all sorts of sounds and vocalizations, T continued her quiet journey with a look of such beatific beauty that I couldn't help but tear up a bit. My witnessing of her journey was an amazing privilege as well as a gift I had never anticipated.

Before long, this remarkable and strenuous day of breathwork was over. T and I went into the small group room where she then created her own mandala.

There was a break for supper after which we would all to meet with our respective smaller groups where we would share our experiences with the others.

That evening, our group got together to do just this. One person declined to talk about hers because it was apparently still too powerful and she wanted to process it further on her own. This was perfectly okay within the group as it had been defined for us. The facilitators would speak to her privately just so they could assess whether some further assistance was needed from them to help her through her ongoing process.

All the others discussed as much as they cared to with the group. The idea was that we would relate our experience and that there would be no critiques or confrontations. This wasn't to be an encounter session. When we had all shared our stories, we all felt very close to each other. It had been an eventful day filled with tremendous group energy and a wonderful sense of community and purpose.

One of the things that was emphasized at this meeting and also the next morning was that the immediate psychological effects of the Holotropic Breathwork session could last for days or even longer. The long-term effects, of course, are desirable and would hopefully last much longer. But many of us were operating in the relatively unfamiliar world of right-brain dominance. As such we were told that certain activities should be avoided for a couple of days; things like driving, if possible, and if not possible, to at least keep the radio off.

We were also warned about not making any significant purchases or decisions for a time, because the left brain logic that is so important in this modern world might not be available and that we could do things or make purchases that we might later greatly regret.

Here's my example of this effect.

Sunday evening, I was about to land at Chicago's O'Hare Airport after being delayed for a couple hours in Houston because of bad weather that had gone through Chicago earlier. It was after dark when we finally descended into Chicago. During the descent, just to the west of the jetliner was a wall of massive thunderclouds and within those clouds a magnificent light show was taking place. Yet below us it was perfectly clear.

I became literally transfixed by the beauty of the display and realized then that this natural phenomenon was most likely enhanced by the lingering state of bliss I was still experiencing.

Later--and literally moments--after I got into my car for the one hour drive home , the clouds opened up with an intensity that I hadn't seen for a very long time. So now I was experiencing not only the normally dreaded task of driving home on the Illinois Tollway at night, a highway which was under massive construction limiting the number of available driving lanes, but my visibility with the torrential downpour was very limited.

Oddly enough with these conditions, the drive itself was not a problem. In fact it was a sheer pleasure. It is only when I look back at this episode now that I realize how much my right brain was still coloring my perceptions.

I am very glad that I didn't even feel like putting on the radio. This story might have had a much different ending if I'd connected to some especially evocative piece of music and drifted off into a state of bliss again.

[Addendum: While I was enjoying the comfort of a Houston hotel for the workshop weekend, the weather outside was in the upper 90's: not an unusual temperature for late spring in Texas. However, the Midwest that weekend experienced some of the most intense rains and widespread flooding in history. As I was enjoying the light show during landing, I had no idea that this was just the latest thunderstorm to hit the Midwest in what would become known as The Great Flood of '08. Like other Wisconsin cities and towns, my hometown experienced extensive flooding that saw one city park under four feet of water for days. In the resort town of Wisconsin Dells, Lake Delton actually emptied when the dam that held back that part of the Wisconsin River collapsed completely.]

* * * * * * * * * * *

I've waited a few days to finish this narrative because of the power of this remarkable experience. It isn't one that can or should be analyzed quickly. Perhaps it shouldn't be analyzed at all.

Dr. Grof went over a few of the physiological effects that science can measure about Holotropic Breathwork, but it is the subtler effects that are of most interest here. They are defined by the additional psychic matrices that Dr. Grof discovered and gave to psychology and to mankind.

Going far beyond Freud's Victorian-era interpretation of psychological trauma arising from the psychosexual realms of our postnatal lives, he expanded even Carl Jung's revolutionary ideas of psychological archetypes and the concept of collective unconscious.

When he and others were discovering the strange unrecognized vistas of the human psyche with the administration of LSD in the 50's and 60's, the old map of the human mind simply didn't fit the new landscape.

For the first time in human history, states of consciousness formerly allowed to the very few could now be experienced by those who wanted to spend some time "going out of their minds to come to their senses".

It was Stan along with his partner Christina Grof who after LSD and other psychedelics were outlawed around the world, made the then-necessary leap from using these substances for accessing non-ordinary states to using breathwork to accomplish the same thing. This method, while not revolutionary since they have been used for hundreds perhaps thousands of years in Asia, was new to the West and especially to Western science and psychology.

Fast forward nearly forty years and well over 35,000 people around the world have experienced altered states of consciousness using Holotropic Breathwork. In addition, over 1000 facilitators have been trained by the Grof's and their Holotropic Breathwork organization.

While there are numerous methods and disciplines for enhancing consciousness and discovering the amazing realities just behind the shadows of our "normal" reality, I feel fortunate to have discovered this one so early in my journey. I plan to have other Holotropic Breathwork experiences as I strive to go deeper into my subconscious and hope to truly break through to the transpersonal.

There are so many important questions I want and need the answers to about the adventure of my life, and as I learn more about the possible discoveries that can be made using this amazingly simple technique, I want to see if I can find these answers and thereby devote greater concentration and focus on becoming the kind of person who will add to the positive energies of compassion and love so despererately needed in our world today.

Liftoff!

2008-06-09T19:36:00.016-05:00

Sunday Morning~

It is truly fascinating to consider that our breath, the very basis of all our biological processes, can sustain the consensus reality we learn to accept as tiny infants right through to the very last moment of our lives. But this weekend I'm discovering that the breath can also be the gateway to an even greater reality from which our consciousness emerged and into which it will once again be subsumed.

The workshop began at 8:45 Saturday morning and involved some 70 to 80 participants and a dozen or so facilitators. Each of us brought a sleeping bag or mat, a blanket, a pillow and water. It was to be a long strenuous day.

The room this would take place in had the look of an indoor sleepover like my kids used to have at our local YMCA. Some people were already lying on their mats with their blankets covering them, but most were just sitting with their partners and quietly discussing the day's main work. A number of the participants were new to Holotropic Breathwork, so there was an almost palpable feeling of excited tension in the room.

Shortly after everyone had arrived, Dr. Stanislav Grof, the grand old man of Transpersonal Psychology and Holotropic Breathwork began preparing us for our experience. A slight Slavic accent could be heard in his deep, gentle voice as he began the session with a guided relaxation.

After ten minutes or so and with a final, "Have a good journey", he put the microphone down and music began to rise through four large speakers spaced evenly around the large hotel meeting room.

For the next three hours, the carefully selected playlist of music led us on journeys of incredible depth, power and mystique. The first part of the musical journey included Psychedelic and Goa Trance music, Indian kirtans and primitive tribal drumming. The music was designed to be the carrier wave for our spirit to begin its ascent--and this it did very effectively. The music then gradually transitioned to slightly slower, more evocative and powerfully moving movie soundtracks. After the second hour, the mood changed significantly as ancient Hindu and Tibetan chants and wonderfully lyrical songs allowed us to explore the worlds we had discovered so far on our inner journey .

Most people are deeply affected by music. It is one the most ancient forms of expression and sacred communication. When they first developed Holotropic Breathwork, Stan and Christina Grof made a brilliant move by adding to the breathwork music's inherent energy and ability to facilitate the experiencing of transpersonal dimensions. From my limited point of view, I can't imagine being able to travel towards these fabulous destinations without it, although I know that there are many other methods and disciplines that don't involve music. Still, it was a wonderful adventure to be guided by the music.

T and I decided that I would be the first to breathe. When the music began, then, I began to breathe deeply and quickly as one of our facilitators had shown us. I started out breathing through my nose because I didn't want my throat to dry out quickly and I didn't want to disturb the process by stopping for sips of water. That plan didn't last long, however, as I realized that for me to "pump up the energy", I would have to breath through my mouth.

We had been told that we should breathe like this until the breath began to "breathe us". I didn't understand what this meant until I suddenly realized that my breath was naturally following the pace of the music. When the music increased, my breathing increased and when the music slowed down, so did my breathing.

One thing I was determined to do, however, was to breathe just as hard as I could for as long as I could. I mentioned in my previous post that Dr. Grof had spoken with me about my hypertension right before we began. He did this with about a half dozen others he was concerned with as well. He simply wanted me to know that if I felt like the energy was starting to feel too powerful inside my head, to let the facilitator know and that there were methods to release some of that energy safely. When I got back to my group, I told this to my facilitator, who is in fact an emergency room physician. He looked at me confidently and assured me that he wasn't a bit worried about it. I really appreciated this because this allowed me to feel that I didn't have to artificially throttle down my experience.

So with the assurance that I could go for liftoff, I breathed as hard and as powerfully as I could for at least an hour. Almost immediately, I felt the most intense energy in my hands, which then gradually spread throughout my body. But my hands were the epicenter of the energy. It felt as if they had inflated to about twice their size as they vibrated intensely. They didn't shake. They simply vibrated with energy.

I knew going in that I would have a problem with my ego--the I inside--that always wants to comment on whatever is going on in my life. So as my ego was going through its checklist of things to determine if my experience was reaching the transpersonal (are we there yet? Huh? Are we there yet?) I was literally telling my ego to just shut up for once and let things just happen.

But nevertheless it stayed on alert and would remind me to be a good boy and not make a scene by being too expressive or by making too many outrageous movements or noises. After all, there were people watching. Not only was T watching me as she was of course supposed to do, but there were the other sitters and facilitators also.

This is another one of those lifelong and somewhat irrational aspects of my existence: that I'm always being observed. I don't mean this in a paranoid sense, but in the sense that people are just observant beings and if I am visible I am probably being observed by someone. As a shy person, this has always kept me alert as to how I appear to others. So even though I was trying to get beyond those kinds of ego boundaries and fears, they were still there with me and I felt somewhat inhibited to move around much or to make any vocalizations.

With the music blasting away however--it was purposely quite loud--it was almost impossible not to move my body to the rhythm and the beat. So after a short time, I began making a kind of "hooo" shout on each exhalation. It felt good.

Occasionally, I could hear other shouts in the room, but I wasn't sure if it was a part of the music or from one or more of the other breathers. I would find out later in the afternoon when T was breathing and I was the sitter that there was significant shouting and even some screaming from around the room; none of which came from the music.

As far as the substance of my own internal journey yesterday morning, I will get into this in the third part of my Holotropic Breathwork experience after I've had a few days to let it all sink in.

In about an hour, we will have our final group get-together, after which we will all join Dr. Grof for a final question and answer session before returning to our regular lives and the real world.

(Go to Part 3)

Preparing for Launch

2008-06-07T07:26:00.026-05:00

It is 7:30am on a Saturday.

I'm in Houston, Texas after a thousand mile flight yesterday so that I could attend the weekend Holotropic Breathwork workshop being conducted by Stanislav Grof and Tav Sparks.

It is appropriate that I'm in Houston; home of the Johnson Space Center from where so much of our manned exploration of outer space has been controlled.

It is here that I will hopefully begin a journey just as momentous, but instead of moving outward towards the cosmos, I will begin a journey even more spectacular--one that will go further than the edges of the known universe.

This will be a journey to inner space.

I'm trying not to spend too much time thinking about what will happen today. After all, it is the left brain's machine-like buzzing that keeps up the constant chatter during my waking state and this is a weekend for my right brain to dominate.

Today is a day for my consciousness to take its first tentative steps to seek out the ground of its being. There is an excited awareness in me as I prepare to go downstairs to join with 80 or 90 other consciousnesses as they too seek The Other.

I also have some concerns, the largest of which is that nothing will happen. Yet if that is what comes of this weekend, then so be it.

A lesser concern is my health--especially my hypertension--which is more of a problem to the organizers of the workshop than to me. While it is controlled by medication, I would guess that the intensity of the breathing technique is always a concern. I was told that Dr. Grof would probably talk to those of us who have this problem about how to work with it. I found out in the past couple of years that my high blood pressure has apparently caused some vascular damage in the white matter of my brain. I have had a couple of yearly MRI's to insure that it hasn't gotten worse--and it hasn't.

I understood that one of the symptomological clusters that can result from this kind of damage is Multiple Sclerosis, so besides having the MRI's done, I've also been checked for general balance and muscular control. Physically, I've always felt healthy and the only concern I've ever had in this regard is that I don't want the ability to go as deeply into myself as possible to be affected by whatever this damage may have done within my brain.

This became one of my concerns after my shamanic workshop last November when I was completely unable to journey as my fellow participants had all been able to do. But honestly, these things really don't concern me. As Italians--and Doris Day--put it, que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.

Plus, I trust whatever inside or outside my self has gotten me to this point. It's been a relatively short journey considering. But the Holy Grail for me are those incredible non-ordinary holotropic states of consciousness that Stan Grof talks about in his book, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality.

I especially trust that the strange series of events that occurred last night when we were choosing our partners for the workshop is meant to be.

As I sat in the second row--never the first--before the evening talk by Stan Grof, I watched my fellow workshop participants filtering into the room. Besides these participants, many were there just to see and hear Dr. Grof because of his renowned reputation in the fields of consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology.

Soon a younger woman sat down next to me and my lifetime habit of trying to become invisible surfaced. I do this so that I won't have to talk to anyone. Small talk, you see, is like a small death to me. I don't enjoy it, I'm not good at it and it seems meaningless...which of course is exactly what it is supposed to be. Small talk is simply the human need to establish contact with someone and neutralize what otherwise would be an awkward situation; which is to be in close proximity to someone without speaking to each other. Yet, for some reason I have yet to discover, a sense of isolation is how I am most comfortable in most social situations.

Then, as I listened to the people around me, I thought, wait a second! These people are here this evening for the very same reason I am. So in fact if I do talk with anyone, it is not small talk. It is about this very important work most of us will be doing this weekend.

I can't actually remember who spoke first, but soon the woman I'll call D and I were talking away about our respective paths toward wholeness and spirituality, and it was rather amazing to me how quickly I became comfortable with the situation. Again, social anxiety is something I've lived with all my life, so the times I can actually overcome it I find surprisingly pleasant.

Soon Dr. Grof began to speak. He gave us an overview of his philosophy and work over the past 50+ years in consciousness research. After a couple hours, he said that the people who were not attending the workshop could leave. He then gave the rest of us, who were the actual workshop participants, an idea of what we would be doing for the next two days.

He told us that we would be working in dyads or pairs. I was already aware of this, and this, too, is one of those anxiety-producing situations that I've always dreaded. But I thought that perhaps I had lucked out since I had now connected with D. Although I knew that she was from Houston and that there were people in the room she knew, it seemed to me that we were as good a pairing as any.

I was surprised, then, when Dr. Grof said that it was now time to choose someone to work with and D quickly rose and said to me that she wanted to continue our talk after the workshop was completed. She then walked away towards someone she knew who had been sitting a few rows behind us.

Ugh! Here we go again, I thought, sighing inwardly. So I looked around for someone else I'd have to now get to know.

There seemed to be any number of people around me who were themselves looking for a potential partner, so I made a comment to no one in particular that I wondered if we were supposed to pair up with someone of the same sex--or if it didn't matter. But then when I looked around, a very attractive woman I'll call T was looking at me and asked if I was partnered with anyone yet. With an increasing heartbeat, I answered No! And that was it! I was now one half of this new word I'd never heard before called a dyad.

I must in all candor tell how unique an experience this was for me. Let's put it this way. Never in my life has what I would call a beautiful woman ever chosen me for anything; husband, lover, boyfriend, friend or even lab partner. It just doesn't happen to me. Again in all candor, I must admit that I'm not the most attractive man in the room...any room...even when I'm the only one in the room. Secondly, my social ineptitude seldom dazzles women if and when I do meet them.

Then there is the additional piece of baggage that I carry around.

I don't ever recall working with or being around a beautiful woman without becoming increasingly preoccupied with a desire to be close to her in every way; emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually and....did I mention physically?

Having been around them most of my life, I know too that most males are this way. This is comedically emphasized with the wonderful line from "When Harry Met Sally" when Billy Crystal makes the statement that "No man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her. "

This is certainly an accurate description of most men's attitude towards women, made even truer when Meg Ryan asks Billy, "So, you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive? Billy's great answer, "No. You pretty much want to nail them too. "

Jokes aside, of course this makes men seem very superficial and one dimensional, but unfortunately that is the superficial side of the male animal--human and otherwise.

So here I am walking out of the room with this very lovely woman whom I'd just found out has had an number of experiences with Holotropic Breathwork as well as many Rebirthing experiences. So it would certainly not be a situation of the blind leading the blind. Instead, I would be sharing this experience with a person who herself was very familiar with these kinds of breathwork technique.

That night in bed, I chastised myself for my usual attachment to a woman's physical appearance, but truly I had to wonder how this had happened. Even my belief that most of what has occurred on my journey thus far has been because it was supposed to happen didn't make sense based on my past experience with women.

Yet it had happened and who was I to question it? So I was determined to tame my ego as well as my libido in this regard and fully enter the experience we would both share in less than ten hours.

(Go to Part 2)

Dino's Last Gasp

2008-06-04T08:37:00.014-05:00

If you read the news or watch television every day, you know that you're inundated with dire warnings about rising gas prices, rising food prices, rising airfares, auto factories shutting down, airlines going bankrupt, sales of trucks and SUV's plummeting and something of an economic apocalypse in our near future if something can't be done. At the very same time, we hear about how we've already driven billions of less miles because of high gas prices, airlines are flying slower to save on fuel, many smaller routes are being abandoned and the so-called green revolution is in full swing.

My question is, where is the downside to this crisis?

Actually, the answer to this question is complex and vital to the future of humanity and to the earth itself.

The green revolution discovered a way to lessen our dependence of fossil fuels by turning to biofuels. The only problem is that whereas biofuels aren't pumped from deep underground and transformed into fuel, plastics, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and many other products, they do transform edible food into fuel--primarily for automobiles. This means that food prices have risen dramatically because of a diminished supply. And of course the first to feel the effects of high food prices are the poor of the world, who aren't as concerned with filling their gas tanks with non-polluting biofuel since these people generally don't own cars.

Hungry people have always been the most frightening to governments because when people are hungry, they have nothing left to lose, so rioting and looting become more possible and government stability is in danger.

This is why the U.N. is currently meeting in Rome this week where General Secretary Ban Ki-moon stated that the organization needs an additional $15-$20 billion each year to combat hunger around the world.

My first response is...$15-$20 billion? To feed the entire world? While this amount seems wholly inadequate, I'll leave it to the experts to determine how much it will take to help. But consider this: George Bush and the United States Congress has spent over $525 billion just on the Iraq War in a little over 5 years.

Political expert, Robert Sheer said this recently in an op-ed piece, "The Pentagon's budget for fiscal year 2008 set a post-World War II record at $625 billion, and that does not include more than $100 billion in other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget - or covert - operations."

Not that we would have ever expected this "compassionate conservative" President to spend Americans' hard earned tax money on feeding hundreds of millions of brown, black and yellow people, but come on? There had to have been some people-oriented programs he would have been willing to pay for instead of a "War on Terror", had that not so conveniently allowed him to megalomanically become The War President--something I'm sure he enjoyed waving under his daddy's nose in a very self-satisfied Freudian way. Of course everything then went so horribly wrong. But that is another long sad story.

I guess what is incredible to me still, almost 60 years after President General Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the burgeoning Military-Industrial Complex, is that we don't even question $725 billion A YEAR for the military portion of the federal budget.

Robert Sheer's article tells how the extremely costly weapons systems the military keeps wanting--and getting--have a life of their own and there is no desire by the military, the Congress or the President to stop that insane spending nearly 20 years after our cold-war enemy collapsed.

The bigger question in all this is obviously, what about the hundreds of millions of hungry people in the world? When I was born the world population was around 2.5 billion. Today it is 6.6 billion. While technology has done wonders to increase the food supply over the past 60 years, other issues like genetically-modified (GM) foods and patented seeds are causing problems in areas where farmers once relied on their own seed stock to replant each year. Now companies like Monsanto are actually suing farmers around the world who actually have seed from neighboring Monsanto seeded fields blow over to their fields.

Elsewhere farmers have been coerced into buy into the new GM seeds on the promise that their yields will be increased dramatically and the selling of their surplus will easily help them afford the yearly costs of the patented seed. Unfortunately, in many areas, the sales pitch was more hype then truth and many farmers, especially in India, have become so desperate because of their inability to afford the yearly expense that they resolved the issue the only way they felt they could--by committing suicide.

I started this off by asking what the downside was of the rapid increase in gasoline and fuel prices. From a very ethnocentric, Western point of view, I see no downside. Pollution, traffic congestion, accident rates, the numbers of wasteful oversize vehicles will all decrease and perhaps global warming will abate a bit.

On a world-wide scale, obviously there are some serious repercussions that must be met. Somehow if the amounts mentioned of $15-$20 billion a year will really reach the hundreds of millions that we know are hungry in this world, it truly is a drop in the bucket for America; not to mention the other wealthy nations of the world.

In any case, we are perhaps seeing the last gasps of a world that was based on fossil fuels--and good riddance! Whether the consumer-driven societies of the world can refocus is difficult to say. My feeling is that they won't do it willingly. They will have be forced to accept the difficult cultural changes a new economy would be based on.

But we've learned that just switching from fossil fuels to biofuels isn't the way to do it. Replacing one set of serious consequences to another set is simply a desperate attempt NOT to have to sacrifice the consumer addictions we oh-so love.

Solving these and other pressing issues involve serious and intelligent ideas. The world has always relied on the United States to provide many of these ideas. Sadly, for the last eight years there have not only been a surfeit of ideas coming from our leaders, but they have actually worked against solving many of these problems because of an overriding belief that the free market will solve them--or because an irrational use of the contradictory statements in the Bible pointed them this way or that depending on what the issue was. In any case, the answers they championed were generally the least "Christian" choices they could make.

Fortunately for the world, this stubborn reliance on dogmatism should end in January regardless of who wins. I hope that we can begin to heal the wounds of the last eight years and begin to work realistically towards a future that takes all of Nature into account as we learn to adjust to less.

God in the Machine

2008-05-11T12:57:00.009-05:00

In the book, "When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality", renowned religious scholar Huston Smith said this about early Christianity

"For the first several centuries, there would be a moment in the mass where some official would cry out, 'The doors! The doors!' That was the point where the catechumen--who were sort of learning on the kindergarten or first-grade level--had to leave, while the Eucharist was actually unveiled and participated in. So there was a clear recognition that unless you really understand what's going on, this could seem like cannibalism--when you say, 'This is my blood, this is my body,' and things like that. In other words,this could be misunderstood. So the ritual provided a structure that prevented such a misunderstanding."

I've mentioned here before that I grew up Catholic, and that I don't recall ever having any kind of significant spiritual experience in my childhood. The fact that I even went to a seminary to become a priest says more about maternal influence in my life than any kind of calling I ever felt.

Had I read Huston Smith before I went to the seminary, however, I might have starting earlier trying to discover the true esoteric nature of Christianity. Then again, perhaps I simply wasn't ready way back then. While I regret my omission now, we are taught that we will discover our teachers when we are ready. I've yet to find my personal teacher, but I feel that I've met many amazing teachers already in my brief journey.

Christians, after the days when the esoteric "doors" were flung wide open in the early centuries, have felt that the only way to God is through the the intercession of a priest or minister. And this was the way the Church wanted it, because the last thing the institutional, politicized empire the Church was becoming needed was for its flock to take to heart the teaching of Jesus when the Pharisees quizzed him about when the kingdom of God will arrive, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21)

When I read the phrase, "the kingdom of God is within you", I am struck by how this is the primary underlying Truth of many--if not most--religions. Compare this phrase with the Sanskrit Hindu phrase, "Tat tvam asi". The literal translation of this phrase is "Thou are That", which means "You are of divine nature."

Siddha Yoga's basic tenet is "God dwells within you as you." Buddhist scriptures say "Look within. You are the Buddha." A great Jewish scholar and Cabalist sage taught that "He and we are one" and the Prophet Mohammed said "whoso knoweth himself knoweth his Lord".

Finally, the Tao Te Ching teaches this:

The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.

How far we in the Christian West have strayed from this fundamental spiritual reality! But fortunately for mankind, never before has so much true knowledge been available to those who seek it than from the marvelous information source known as the World Wide Web.

I am constantly amazed at how a single reference, a single link on a web page, can open up to a myriad of sources of valuable information. Never before has so much information been so accessible for so many.

Perhaps this technology--the object of much well-deserved criticism and derision--will ultimately help us to move Teilhard de Chardin's Noosphere towards the Omega Point more effectively than anything else in human history.

Certainly from my point of view, the path I have followed on this journey would have taken many more years to have gotten to this same point--and still I would not have had one tenth the amount of information available to me as I have using the Web.

I've yet to find my personal teacher, but when the day comes that I am ready for one, more than likely, I will have found out about him or her on one of the web pages that exist like hidden jewels in the folds of the fabric of the Internet.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-10T09:49:00.016-05:00

Last week, the Chrysler Corporation threw a "Hail Mary" pass to car buyers in an effort to ward off another bankruptcy. They are now offering to cap their customers gas prices to $2.99/gal for three years. The caveat is that "the program is limited to 'fuel efficient' models and limits each buyer to the discounted price on only 12,000 miles worth of fuel each year." However, "fuel efficient" for Chrysler includes the large Chrysler 300 and Dodge Charger, all Chrysler minivans and even the Dodge Ram large truck and Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV.

Wow! Is that one big mound of dung or not?

At first glance I was thinking that this is a bad move, because it will just encourage people to buy and consume more gas. Then I read about the limitations and thought, "Hmmmm. This might not be the worst idea, since it will encourage people to purchase fuel efficient vehicles."

But leave it to big corporations to turn a good idea into a worthless and irresponsible marketing ploy. By adding the limitations to the limitations, nothing constructive is going to be done, either for Chrysler's bottom line or more importantly, for the environment and the critical global issues we are facing.

As far as Chrysler is concerned, they deserve to perish--but more likely they will be bailed out by the feds like in 1980 when Congress gave them a $1.2b loan guarantee, which to their credit they did pay back to us. Then again, Chrysler is really not an entirely American corporation any longer, is it? Twenty percent is still owned by German automaker Daimler.

This marketing move, which could have been a powerful incentive for Americans to at least consider more fuel efficient cars--as if the gas prices themselves wouldn't be--becomes moot in that they will continue to push some of their worst gas hogs within the promotion. This makes me wonder if anyone at these corporations gives a goddam about anything but the next fiscal year! Are they all that greedy...or are they all just brain dead?

So how does this relate to the focus of this blog? Only peripherally, yet, in at least one important case, a psychedelic substance has given us a more metaphysical overview of the world of gas and oil.

Ketamine is called a dissociative anesthetic and is used in human and veterinary medicine. It is also a powerful psychedelic that by its nature produces some of the strangest effects that I've come across in psychedelic literature. Dissociatives include phencyclidine (PCP), Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas), Ibogaine, Dextromethorphan (the active ingredient in cough syrup) and the plant Salvia dininorum.

Ketamine works on the conscious mind in a rather astounding way, that is, by allowing the person to experience becoming and being various inorganic objects such as a chair, a rock, a bridge or virtually anything; thereby dissociating from his or her real body. But this dissociation can also involve various other life forms as well.

Stanislav Grof, in his book, "When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Reality", recounts one of his first experiences with this drug when many around the world were experimenting with it shortly after it was first synthesized in 1962.

"I had several ketamine sessions that were so horrible and disgusting that I was determined never to take the substance again. They revolved around fossil fuels and the curse they represent for life on our planet. The following is the account of one of these sessions.

"The atmosphere was dark, heavy and ominous. It seemed to be toxic and poisonous in a chemical sense, but also dangerous and evil in the metaphysical sense. Initially, I experienced it on the outside, as part of my environment, but gradually it took over, and I actually became it. It took me a while to realize that I had become petroleum, filling enormously large cavities in the earth. While I was experiencing identification with petroleum as physical material, including its penetrating smell, I realized that I was also an evil metaphysical or archetypal entity of unimaginable proportions. I was flooded with fascinating insights, combining chemistry, geology, biology, psychology, mythology, history, economy and politics.

"I suddenly understood something that I had never thought about before. Petroleum was fat of biological origin that got mineralized; it meant that it had escaped the mandatory cycle of death and rebirth the recycling that the rest of the living matter is subject to. However, the element of death was not eliminated in this process. It was only delayed. The destructive Plutonic potential of death continues to exist in petroleum in a latent form as a monstrous time bomb awaiting its opportunity to be released into the world.

"While experiencing what I felt was consciousness of petroleum, I saw the death intrinsic to it manifesting as the evil and killing resulting from the greed of those who seek the astronomical profits that it offers. I witnessed countless scenes of political intrigues, economic scams, and diplomatic shenanigans motivated by 'petrodollars'. I saw countless victims of wars fought for oil laid on the sacrificial alter of this evil entity. It was not difficult to follow the chain of events to a future world war for the dwindling resources of a substance that had become vital for the survival and prosperity of the industrialized countries.

"In a long series of hideous and most-unpleasant experiences, I was taken through states of consciousness related to the chemical industry based on petroleum. Using the name of the famous German chemical industrial complex, I referred to these experiences as 'IG Farben consciousness.' It was an endless sequence of states of mind that had the quality of aniline dyes, organic solvents, herbicides, pesticides and toxic gases, all hostile to life.

"Besides the experiences related to various industrial poisons per se, I also identified with the states of consciousness associated with the exposure of various life forms to petroleum products. I became every Jew who had died in the Nazi gas chambers, every sprayed ant and cockroach, every fly caught in the sticky goo of fly-traps, and every plant dying under the influence of the herbicides. And beyond all that lurked the highly possible ominous future of all life on the planet--death by industrial pollution."

Whew!! Imagine risking more than one of those experiences, yet as Dr. Grof says, he had a number of them like this. Still, as a result, he states this:

"It was an incredible lesson. I emerged from the session with a deep ecological awareness and a clear sense as to which direction the economic and political development had to take should life on our planet survive."

What an amazing, amazing trip! Certainly for Dr. Grof, it was a trip to a hell on earth that should be experienced by those who continue to rape the earth and pillage her resources for the most dubious of purposes. And that is to create a world culture of materialism and consumerism that can only estrange mankind further from the very Mother Nature that gave birth to our species.

Happy Mother's Day.

Tragedy and Triumph

2008-05-03T08:49:00.012-05:00

On this, the week that Albert Hofmann--the "father" of LSD--passed out of our material reality, I've been thinking about how tragic the short history of this important molecule has been.

We must start with one undisputed fact: that human beings long for a spiritual connection to something larger than themselves. Science has acknowledged as much with concepts like "the God gene". Neuroscientists like Michael Persinger and Andrew Newberg have even created a new sub-discipline of neuroscience called neurotheology, where science is beginning to tackle this important attribute of the human brain. For now, however, most of the scientific world clings to the idea that mystical and spiritual states of consciousness are nothing more than imaginary manifestations of electrochemical processes in the brain. Eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins and philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett lead the assault on the idea that these states are anything more.

Nevertheless, while scientists debate these issues, the entire cognitive history of humanity has been guided by these extraordinary states. For tens of thousands of years, shamans around the world brought sustenance and healing to their people using visions and guidance brought about by these visionary realms. Even the four "great" religions of the modern world all had their origins in mystical states said to have been experienced by Moses, Jesus, Mohamed and Buddha.

Unfortunately, the larger these groups got, the farther removed they became from their mystical origins. Except for perhaps Buddhism, it is only within smaller subgroups of these religions does the quest for these states still exist. Within Judaism, Qabalah and Hasidism seek to attain personal mystical experiences. Within Islam, the Sufis use special techniques for attaining mystical states. And while mysticism within Christianity was not encouraged or taught, certain protestant groups like the Anabaptists and the Quakers sought divine states.

Having grown up Roman Catholic, the great mystics of my religion like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen , Meister Eckhart and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were spoken of only in advanced theology classes; never in parochial school. For Christians are taught to believe that the intercession of a priest or minister is required to contact God.

Personal "union" with God--at least for Catholics--only happens with Holy Communion, and only after the priest has completed his bit of magic called transubstantiation, where the little wafer of bread is believed to actually turn into the body and blood of Christ.

This certainly seems like a powerful idea and one could expect Communion to be a sure path to a mystical union with Jesus. Yet I've never heard of anyone who has been so moved by Holy Communion that they've gone into a truly mystical state, although I wouldn't be so presumptive to believe that this hasn't happened to some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that for hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world, this sacrament has no more spiritual effect than making the sign of the cross.

Yet isn't that what religion is supposed to do--touch our souls; to take us out of our everyday reality and into a divine realm where powerful changes can take place within us?

For over forty thousand years, some very special people have been able to do this simply by their own will or by virtual of having had near-death experiences, being struck by lightning, having epilepsy or even by being schizophrenic. Obviously, some of these methods are less desirable than others, yet the "reality" of these altered states of consciousness all exhibit a power and quality that can't be duplicated in the vast majority of human beings in our ordinary state of consciousness.

Early on, however, it was found that there were plants with which one could experience these extraordinary states for a brief time and then return to normal awareness; often having learned much about how to heal the body and the soul of traumas that occur during his or her physical lifetime.

Shamans were people who could attain these states in the service of their tribe or community. Shamans persisted in many cultures--in Europe they were called witches--from the earliest times until about the 3rd or 4th century A.D. when the Catholic Church began to exert its hegemony over a larger and larger swath of Europe and the Middle East. Pagan religions and practices were abolished wherever the Holy Roman Empire was established. Personal contact with god by means of psychedelic plants became anathema to the power structure of the Church and users of these substances were exterminated whenever and wherever they were discovered. Even the accusation of being a witch was tantamount to a death sentence.

This was because the higher members of the priestly class were gaining great wealth and enormous political power. Soon the inevitable evil of power such as this resulted in the institution of a police force called the Inquisition that would seek to eradicate any threat to the Church's power and its control over the citizens of the Catholic Empire. This meant the destruction of anyone deemed pagan or heretical. Witches, healers, shamans, were all destroyed.

An interesting side note here. Michael Harner, anthropologist and shamanic expert, claims that some 95% of all shamanic cultures around the world use drumming to help enter the shamanic mystical worlds. Yet only in far northern Scandanavia with the Sami--or Lapps--is drumming to help enter these world found in Europe. Harner believes that this is because of the Church's extreme oppression of shamanism for the past 2000 years. Yet some people still practiced the old ways, but had to do it surreptitiously. One non-drumming method was by using psychedelic substances. These substances were believed to have been used in witches' "flying" ointments and potions.

Still, mystics and mysticism couldn't be wiped out completely in the West. There were, of course, Christian mystics throughout the era. But also, in literature there were the transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in art could be found visionaries like Hieronymous Bosch and William Blake. In philosophy were people like William James and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even scientists have occasionally been given a glimpse of the "eternal"; some by accident rather than design.

This is what happened to Albert Hofmann in 1943, when he first took LSD-25 after synthesizing it in his lab. I've written about his experience in my previous post. But for this scientist, the experience recalled for him an earlier numinous experiences he'd had with Nature as a child. And it was his genius that allowed Albert Hofmann to know that this chemical offered humanity a way to experience something it had not been allowed to experience for some 2000 years.

Thus began the Golden Age of psychedelic research; a time when artists, writers, philosophers, academics, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, the sick and dying, the mentally ill and even children were given this "wonder drug"; the results of which resulted in such astonishing and successful results in the lives of these people that LSD portended an incredible new world of the mind, the body and the soul.

The book I've been reading, "Higher Wisdom: eminent elders explore the continuing impact of psychedelics", is a compendium of those years as told through the people who were there are the beginning. As I read their interviews, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the tragedy and stupidity of the United States government in the 60's when they ended all funding for psychedelic research. What's more, they created laws that outlawed all psychedelic substances known at the time...and would go on to outlaw any new one that came along.

Perhaps the most detrimental result of this ban for society at large is illustrated by this excerpt from the book, "Higher Wisdom".

"In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Bill Wilson [founder of Alcoholics Anonymous] volunteered to become a research subject for Sidney Cohen...one of the world's leading medical psychedelic researchers. After several profound and transformative LSD experiences...Wilson proposed to the Board of Directors of Alcoholics Anonymous that the psychedelic treatment model be incorporated into the AA approach. Wilson claimed that his LSD experiences were similar in content to the spiritual epiphany he had had while undergoing alcohol withdrawal-induced delerium tremens many years earlier, yet without the medical risk posed by DTs. Therefore, he asserted that psychedelics offered as safe and efficacious pathway to recovery from alcohol addiction. By the time of his proposal to the board of AA, however, disturbing reports had begun to filter out about Timothy Leary's activities at Harvard as well as of similar adventurers elsewhere, and it had become clear that this unusual class of drugs was developing a rather tarnished reputation. Consequently, t he AA board instructed Wilson to cease being a proponent of the psychedelic treatment model for alcoholics, or else face expulsion from the organization he had founded. Wilson, perceiving the futility of his efforts, abandoned his goal of bringing psychedelics into the Alcoholics Anonymous fold."

I can't even begin to imagine how many minds, careers, families and lives have been destroyed over the last 50 years by the scourge of alcoholism that might have saved had this effective method for overcoming this--and other--addictions been freely available. In my own family, alcoholism has been a dark shadow that has descended over multiple generations.

And while alcoholism is certainly one of society's major ills, psychedelic research in the golden age was shown to be just as effective in the treatment of other difficult-to-treat symptoms of the human condition.

Pioneer psychedelic researcher and psychiatrist, Gary Fisher, worked with psychotic children at a hospital in Southern California in the late 50's. The first patient he treated with LSD was an eleven-year-old girl who was so ill that she was incapable of assimilating nutrients that would keep her alive. She was literally wasting away and was so suicidal that she had to be in 24-hour restraints or she would batter herself abominably. She was totally uncommunicative and it was apparent that she would probably die soon. The idea was that Dr. Fisher had nothing to lose on that young girl. From the book "Higher Wisdom":

"During the session she started wailing like a wounded animal--it was the most chilling sound. Then she started screaming, and the pitch would increase and increase. We tried everything to make contact with her, to no avail.

"After about seven or eight hours I was exhausted, and so frustrated that I just yelled at her, 'Nancy! When are you going to stop screaming! I can't stand it anymore!' She stopped and looked at me. This was the first time she had made eye contact with anybody, and said 'I have a long way to go, so just stay out of my way.' That was the first thing she had ever said to anybody. Then she went back to screaming. That was our session."

He had broken through to the wounded child inside. Now that she was speaking, he was able to work with her more effectively. She was soon able to be left without restraints and her powerful and obstinate personality came to the fore. She had some 18 or 19 more LSD sessions and each one was productive. She no longer hurt herself and although she remained in the hospital, she got well enough to attend school.

Dr. Fisher, buoyed by Nancy's success, went on to treat a number of other extremely disturbed and totally unmanageable children with LSD. He found that older schizophrenic children responded the best to this treatment method, while the least responsive were very young children, although he says that he did treat one three-year-old child successfully with LSD.

I feel great sorrow and compassion for children who are mentally ill and exist in such hellish netherworlds. How can society wantonly ignore treatment methods that could help them escape from their hells?

Another entire class of children who exist in their own kinds of hell are those who suffer from one or more of the triumvirate of abuses: sexual, physical and psychological. More often than not, these children suffer in silence, while their souls bear the scars of their abuse. These scars run so deep and remain for so long that traditional psychotherapy bare exposes them. Yet here too, psychedelic therapy was found to hold great promise.

Dr. Stanislav Grof, probably the best known psychedelic therapist has written a number of books detailing how effective psychedelic (and his subsequent Holotropic Breathing) therapy can allow patients to work through their history of abuse. What's more, he found that traumas arising before and during the birth process itself can manifest in many psychosomatic illnesses. I've written about Dr. Grof's amazing work in my posting "The Breath of Lives".

There is a great divide in the West between the mind and the Spirit. It is an artificial divide, yet our culture has cut itself off from all that Spirit manifests such as Nature and Soul.

When we look at our violent, greedy, wasteful, aggressive, materialistic culture and realize that all of this comes at the expense of our Earth, our environment and billions of other humans, I have to wonder if anything short of near-total destruction can turn it around. Sadly, we might not have long to wait to find out.

Our Earth can't long sustain the abuse being heaped on it. When an unimaginably huge island of floating garbage can be found in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; when the life-sustaining oxygen factory known as the Amazon Basin (up to 20% of the earth's oxygen comes from here) is being destroyed at a rate that could see the end of this magnificent and vital ecosystem within forty years; when greenhouse gases continue to raise the planet's temperature while worldwide glace rs are melting at an alarming rate, the current generation that has had a chance to do something about this will probably not live to see the damage we have wrought. But it seems fairly certain that our children and our children's children will bear the brunt of our ignorance and negligence.

We certainly cannot ignore the fact that there are many, many people and groups around the world who are concerned about these things. However, the battle these people must wage against a capitalist system that has become so powerful is daunting. Another factor is that the vast majority of people in the West exist in a spiritual "dead zone".

While psychedelics aren't a cure-all for the ills of our society, they have been shown--when used within the correct "set and setting"--to help people break through the cultural brainwashing and see the truly important relationships that exist between humanity and Nature; between mind and spirit and between body and soul.

One last account by Dr. Fisher of his work with cancer patients.

"There were many cancer patients at Cedars [Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Los Angeles] who had intractable pain. The head of the psychiatry department asked me if I would conduct some LSD sessions to see if this would be effective in pain management.. And of course I did. I didn't really tell them my rationale, because it wouldn't have made any sense to the oncologists. I suspect they thought that LSD would simply reduce the pain. But I thought that if the patients had some insight into what their cancer was all about, and made peace with themselves and with their world, then the overlay of pain--which is psychic pain--would be reduced and they would have an easier death. And that's exactly what happened.

"The head of oncology was very disturbed by the results. To give you an example, one of the first people we treated was a neurotic and demanding lady who had invasive cancer. She had an amazing LSD experience. She got into all her internal conflict and her dysfunctional relationship with her family. When we saw her the next day, she had refused her pain medication. The head of oncology came to see why and she said, 'Well, I'm not having any pain.' He got quite flustered and said, 'Well, you must be having pain. I can show you on your X-rays where your cancer is, and it causes pain. You're lying to me.' She replied, 'I don't need pain medication right now. Maybe I'll need it down the line, but right now I don't need it, and I don't want to take it because of the side effects. Why should I take it if I don't need it? I'm handling everything okay.' He said, 'You either take this pain medication or I'll discharge you.' She wouldn't take it and so he discharged her.

"The physician thought we were making these people psychotic, because they didn't believe they had pain. It was a real mess. I continued to see and treat other people, but he was very obstreperous about my treating his patients. He couldn't understand what was happening, but he didn't want to know."

That story to me is a perfect definition of irony. If we look at our world and our culture, we know that it is insane; how we treat each other and how we allow ourselves to be treated by the culture is insane. Yet there may be chemical tools that can help us gain insight into ourselves and therefore into our world. And these are viewed as dangers to society.

But thanks to the persistance of many of the people interviewed for this book and especially to MAPS, there is a real hope for the renewal of research into these important psychedelic states.

The next few years could see a great leap forward in how society views these substances. I don't foresee a day soon where the average person would be able to experience psychedelic states; even under expert guidance. But as research into the benefits of psychedelics for healing purposes becomes more acceptable to the public at large, I believe that it will only be a matter of time before the general public will be allowed to freely explore their own counsciousnesses...again.

Albert Hofmann (1906 - 2008)

2008-04-29T21:04:00.021-05:00

Today someone left a comment on my blog that simply said, "Infinite love to Albert". Wondering what this meant--while suspecting I knew--I went immediately to the MAPS website. This statement was on their homepage:

"Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, passed away at 9AM CEST on Tuesday April 29, 2008 at his home in Basel, Switzerland. Cause of death was a heart attack; two caretakers were there with him at the time. MAPS President Rick Doblin said, '[Albert and I] spoke on the phone the day after the Basel conference and he was happy and fulfilled. He'd seen the renewal of LSD psychotherapy research with his own eyes, as had [his wife] Anita. I said that I looked forward to discussing the results of the study with him in about a year and a half and he laughed and said he'd try to help the research however he could, either from this side or 'the other side'".

Just one month after the celebration of his life in Basel, Switzerland, then, the beloved chemist, researcher, philosopher and enlightened being has passed into the Bardo realm he did so much to introduce to the West.

What a remarkable life! He gave to the world marvelous chemical tools and a wonderful understanding of how to use those tools. And in doing so, he dealt scientific rationalism a death blow that will have far-reaching effects. His work can be likened to a great magma flow boiling up from deep underground, which when it bursts forth as a powerful volcano on the surface of the earth changes the landscape forever.

It is ironic for me personally that just today I read the interview with Dr. Hofmann in the book, "Higher Wisdom: eminent elders explore the continuing impact of psychedelics". Obviously, while reading it, I didn't dream that today would be his final day in our material realm.

So what did this chemist, this man of science, think about LSD, which he called his "problem child"? The following excerpt is from "Higher Wisdom".

"When I was a young boy, I had many opportunities to walk through the countryside. I had profound visionary encounters with nature, and this was long before I conducted my initial experiments with LSD. Indeed, my first experiences with LSD were reminiscent of these early mystical encounters I had had as a child in nature.

"It is important to have the [visionary] experience directly. Aldous Huxley taught us not to simply believe the words, but to have the experience ourselves. That is why the different forms of religion are no longer adequate. They are simply words, words, words without the direct experience of what it is the words represent. We are now at a phase of human development where we have accumulated an enormous amount of knowledge through scientific research in the material world. This is important knowledge, but it must be integrated. What science has brought to light is absolutely true. But this is only one part, only one side of our existence, that of the material world.

"The material world is the world of our body and it is where man has made all of these scientific and technological discoveries. But science and technology are based on natural laws, and the material world is only the manifestation of the spiritual world.

"The [visionary] experience occurs only by opening the mind and all of our senses. The doors of perception must be cleansed. And if the experience does not come spontaneously on its own, then we may make use of what Aldous Huxley called a 'gratuitous grace'. This may take the form of psychedelic drugs, or perhaps through disciplines like yoga or meditation. But what is of greater importance, is that we have personal spiritual experience. Not words, not beliefs, but experience."

I'm sure he's there on the "other side" already continuing his work for us.

Thank you, Albert. Thank you from me, from the many you personally influenced, and finally from humanity itself, which can only benefit from your long life and your dedicated and remarkable work.