1975 – 1977 Initiation 1: Birth
INITIATION I: BIRTH (1975 – 1977): The Fifth State: Cosmic Consciousness
By the summer of 1975, my mother had rented out my old room to a tenant, and so I felt less and less tied to Bath, Maine. I was truly reborn; Saturn too underwent its “Birth Initiation” that summer, passing into 22.5 degrees of Cancer (Taurus-Equinox Leo) on July 16, 1975. I spent most of my vactions working in Cambridge at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library, and when I did come home, I lived in temporary quarters upstairs in the near barn. Here, I would often hear strange phenomena: Once, in the middle of a quiet rural night,a loud conversation seemed to erupt from just outside the barn, about fifteen feet off the ground; it started and stopped as suddenly as if a radio dial had been turned. I would also hear footsteps on the floorboards of the antique shop downstairs; once I grabbed a flashlight and descended to investigate. I traced the sounds into the far-barn — they were loud hoof-clompings from the horses in the stables. All very well, but the stables were empty; we hadn’t boarded any horses in years.
Over the next several years, my experiences continued to deepen, both in meditation and out. My “witnessing” became more and more grounded, so that I would have days and nights of uninterrupted consciousness of the Higher Self underlying waking, dreaming, and even deep sleep. I noticed that other gifts were coming — that my doodling in the margins of my notebooks in class were often precognitive sketches of things I was actually taught a few hours or days later. I could now go into the library to do research, and the right book would “jump out” in my awareness, and the book would open automatically to the exact page I needed. I now could simply sit down at my old Sears manual typewriter and write the polished version of my papers with no preliminary drafts; a handy skill, since if had I wanted to insert an afterthought near the beginning of the paper, I would have had to retype all the subsequent pages. My recall was also improving to the point of being photographic, a trait I had had as a child and then lost.
My social life also improved; by January of 1976 I even had a sex-life. My Taurus lover was brilliant, beautiful, humorous, and sensual. She was an accomplished linguist, and loved food and dancing. I found, not surprisingly, that with the right woman, sex was terrific, and was yet another way to experience Divinity. Floating back to Cambridge from her Allston apartment early in the mornings, I would feel as if the brick sidewalks were made of foam-rubber.
However, she was eight years older than I, and though we remained close friends for many years, neither of us considered this to be the love of our lives. Just before spring break I decided to fly solo again for a while, to regain a sense of self. I couldn’t imagine bringing my friend home to meet my family; I wasn’t ready to be seen as part of a couple.
I returned to my childhood home in Bath, Maine, for the last time that spring; by now all my brothers were in college, and my mother and sister really didn’t need a large 1840’s Cape with five bedrooms, two barns full of antiques for sale, and assorted outbuildings on five acres.
While standing in the upstairs bathroom and gazing out of the skylight over the barns, pasture, and Kennebeck River, my eye was drawn irresistibly up to the sun. I closed my eyes and felt the sun loving me as a conscious entity, filling me with warmth and love as I breathed its energy into me. I then turned around as I opened my eyes, and the mirror showed me completely enveloped in a large aura of brilliantly clear turquoise, which streamed more than a foot out all around my body. I squinted, goggled, shifted my eyes back and forth. The image remained steady; this was not some kind of retinal after-image. I hadn’t seen an aura this clearly in years, and I had never seen such radiant energy around me! Somehow the sun had “fed” me. Perhaps, too, it was a final embrace from the house I had loved so much.
By July of 1976, I was staying with my mother in Topsham, Maine, while I had my wisdom teeth out, and there encountered my second love, Annie M: the woman who had taught TM to my brother and sister in 1974, and who had introduced me to Yogananda’s wonderful Autobiography of a Yogi. We now became very close friends; I had never laughed so much with anyone before. I had always deeply admired her enthusiastic spiritual devotion, and now I greatly enjoyed her Scorpionic sexual intensity! I could feel us merging in Tantric waves of bliss; I came to love her as the Goddess, but was puzzled by her periodic bouts of black depression and lack of self-esteem. I had all but forgotten my own turmoil of a few years before; I was now “witnessing” nearly continuously, and very happy indeed.
My mother was remodeling her new house on Great Island; for a few days Annie and I slept and loved there, trying to leave in the morning before the carpenters came. I was sleeping one night when I realized I was still conscious, sliding out of my physical body and gliding belly-down in a subtle body, about two feet off the floor in a room now eerily silvery-gray. When I realized I was astrally projecting, it was so exciting that I immediately awoke, bouncing back into my physical body with a shock.
More and more now, in meditation I would find myself in a larger, more fluid body, still basically aligned with the physical, but able to “see” this silvery-gray world while my physical eyes were closed. My intuition also developed; when my mother called upstairs one day saying, “Rory, I’ve got something for you!” I clearly “saw” what it was and blurted excitedly, “It’s a whale’s tooth!” While my mother in her antique dealings occasionally found antique ivory for me to scrimshaw, still it was a rare ocurrence and I was belatedly sorry my foreknowledge had disappointed her desire to surprise me.
That summer before I returned to my summer-job at the Fogg Art Museum, I stayed with Annie for a week in the TM Center in Portland, followed by a week camping out on Martha’s Vineyard. My paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother were both Vineyard natives, having been born there while their families summered at West Chop. We could perhaps have stayed with any number of my relatives, but we were unmarried. We preferred to sleep out under the stars in rural Chilmark until rousted by the police one night, whereupon we slept in Annie’s car in the parking lot in Oak Bluffs. I worked on that summer’s second scrimshaw; I taught Annie to draw and paint and was gratified at her immediate development of a beautifully strong personal style; we read Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to each other and made love on the beach amid the dunes.
Annie and I took advanced techniques in TM in Cambridge in September, 1976. For me, it had the desired effect of slowing down the mind’s plunge into transcendence, so that the subtle celestial layers along the way could be appreciated and enjoyed. I began to “see” energy-fields around trees, and my psychic abilities continued to develop. Since 1975 I had held a work-study job in the Fogg Art Museum’s Fine Arts Library Visual Collections, where I would sit in a fluorescent-lit basement and bind slides, mount photos, and refile slides and photos in the library stacks. By now I would often know exactly how many photos were in a pile (which often comprised hundreds), or even how many slide-dots were still in a package — without having to count or even see them, as I demonstrated to the amazement of a skeptical co-worker. I was now beginning my Baptism Initation, although I did not know it yet. Saturn too underwent its “baptism,” entering 15 degrees of Leo (Taurus-Equinox Virgo) on October 13, 1976, retrograding back through the degree again on January 16, 1977, and finally crossing again on July 1, 1977.
Annie and I broke up in the winter of 1976; she lived in Maine and I in Cambridge; the distance was too much of a strain, and she felt I didn’t love her enough to make the effort to come see her. I didn’t have a driver’s license, and begrudged spending money on the bus. We remained good friends; we would later reconcile and marry!
Meanwhile, the following spring I found my third love, a brilliant and charming freshman at Radcliffe. Of Anglo-Irish descent, she was a Southern belle who loved English, but decided she loved the field of medicine more. Like my first love, she was a Taurus. We feasted on grapes, brie, and french bread, on a picnic amid the wildly blooming crab-apple trees of Radcliffe Quad. Cambridge in the Spring was a wonderful time to be in love. A great admirer of T. H. White, she had always wanted to see Maine, and when school ended in May, I took her home to Great Island to meet my mother, who loved her immediately. We took long canoe trips among the Maine islands, often accompanied by a very friendly seal.
But the real fun began in June of 1977, when my maternal grandmother gave me some money, and I decided to become a TM Teacher. In those days, the TM Movement had just broken the teacher-training program into three phases. Phase I was an initial three months of in-residence training, whereupon one would graduate as an Associate Teacher, and begin Phase II: helping to advertise the technique by setting up symposia, doing radio interviews, etc. After fulfilling certain requirements, one could then go for Phase III: some additional months of training with Maharishi in Europe to become a full-fledged teacher. The Associate Teacher’s course cost about $1800, and was given at old luxury hotels around the U.S. which the Movement had bought. The one nearest to me was in Livingston Manor, New York, so that’s where I went.
