1977 – 1978 Initiation 2: Baptism
INITIATION II: BAPTISM (1977 – 1978): The Sixth State: Celestial Consciousness
In late June of 1977, I arrived at Livingston Manor, New York. The TM facility there was beautiful, an old Catskills hotel set amidst a huge expanse of fields, woods, and lakes. Much as in a residence course, we were given a program of asanas, pranayama, and “rounds” of extra meditations, along with many hours a day of taking notes from videotapes of Maharishi and other TM teachers. We also had to relearn the checking notes.
After a few days of “rounding” I noticed that something odd was happening — as I was lying down after meditation, I felt a cramping and tingling in my left big toe. This current increased and flowed up my leg, and then, whenever I was resting over the next few days, I started feeling a slow pounding, like a second heartbeat, at the base of my spine. At times it seemed to shake the bed. Could this be the Kundalini I had read so much about? (See John H. White’s Kundalini, Evolution, and Enlightenment for the best work I’ve seen on the subject.)
The pulsing quickened, so that it could no longer be mistaken for a heartbeat, and began moving up inside my body. As it reached my loins, I felt a definite sexual awakening. Yes! This was it! Over several days, as it reached each new level — pelvis, mid-back, heart, throat — it would pause, as the vibrations quickened and became ever more powerful. At times, the growing energy frightened me, but I continually reminded myself to surrender to the divine flow. I could now “see” colors inside of me — a whole spectrum, along my spine. Finally, as it reached my throat, it became overwhelming and caught up my consciousness, so that as it rose up through my head, so did I.
I soared up, past a glowing, butter-colored mass of petalled light resembling a beachball-sized artichoke, which must have been the famous thousand-petalled lotus. I expanded up and out into a blissful cloud of awareness, and gradually realized I was floating high over the hotel. I could look down and see everything. I was free. Eventually, as I was returning to my body, my third-eye opened and I saw countless geometric visions, in rapid succession, all with little “subtitles” under them. Most of them I forgot almost immediately. The two I remember now are “this is the wheel of heaven,” and “this is the throne of God.” For several months thereafter this immense power continued to pour through me, especially when I lay down, in psychosexual maelstroms that were almost overwhelming, but I remained celibate. I never seemed to sleep anymore, but somehow arose feeling fine. I finally realized that I had been sleeping, but my Inner Self was always fully awake. Often when I was sitting in class, I would feel the power gently rocking through me, and would literally feel ten feet tall — as if my “real” body were larger than my physical one. In the days and months to come, I noticed a new clarity and bliss in my consciousness, as if God-intoxicated, but still did not feel fully “enlightened.” I discovered later that I had undergone the Intiation of Baptism, where my Higher Self descended as far as my Throat, and my Lower Self had ascended as far as the Sex Center or Astral Subplane, the electromagnetic Realm of Water. After transiting and retrograding for nearly nine months, Saturn too had finally undergone its “baptism” on July 1, 1977, moving then into 15 degrees of Leo (Taurus-Equinox Virgo).
Once, in meditation Maharishi appeared inside of me, and I could feel his/my lips saying words to the effect of, “Very good … you have now reached the stage where we are in direct, inner contact; from now on, your master is within you …” although I was never sure if this was truly Maharishi, or some kind of holographic recording that he had left in the subtle planes that would automatically trigger at a certain stage of a disciple’s development. It seemed similar to the experience John had told me of in India, though, where he had become Guru Dev.
Now, in nearly every meditation, I would find myself floating up out of the body, and going on various adventures in time and space. Sometimes I would merely float around the hotel. Once, I became a sphere, lifted out of the body, paused, and dropped down into the skull of a hominid — small, long-limbed, with silvery fur, flat face, and large jaw — and looked out through its eyes from a small cave onto an African savanna. This was my very first Earth incarnation! For some time afterwards, while walking around the Livingston Manor grounds, I could still feel those large teeth.
I graduated from the Course — they gave me an award, “Lighthouse of the Age of Enlightenment” — and returned to Harvard in September, 1977 for my final undergraduate term. I had belatedly decided to do a thesis, on Neoplatonism in Titian’s Venus Paintings, and had only one term to do it in. I had never experienced true dorm life, and (as a final-term senior) I had drawn first choice in the coming term’s housing lottery, so I chose a wonderful southwest-corner room in North House’s Holmes Hall, off Linnaean Street. The Taurus freshman who had been my current love had chosen a nearly-adjoining room. But she broke up with me on my return: I had been her first lover, and she had reacted to me exactly as I had done to my first lover — withdrawing to regain a sense of self, and to take things more slowly for a while. Despite my appreciation of the karma, I was deeply wounded, but did my best to remain friends. To compound the pain, she now started seeing another TM’er who lived right down the hall from me. This really hurt; at night I was still feeling the intense ecstatic rush of Kundalini, but now with an overlayer of acute agony. An interesting blend!
My next-door neighbor, a quiet fellow with wiry red hair, was evidently a Jackson Browne fan; his second-hand record-player was flush against our common wall, and so I was subjected almost continuously to a maddeningly off-key “Doctor My Eyes.” I honestly couldn’t understand how anyone could sing that poorly and be so popular; it was months before I realized that the fault lay in my neighbor’s record-player, not in Jackson Browne. In self-defense I kept my own radio on a lot; and my sufferings were amplified by the constant repetitions of songs like “How Deep Is Your Love” and “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” But the deepest wound was always dealt by Steven Bishop’s “On And On,” an extremely popular song that fall:
… Poor ol’ Jimmy
Sits alone in the moonlight
He saw his woman kiss another man
So he takes a ladder
Steals the stars from the sky
Puts on Sinatra
and starts to cry …I got the sun on my shoulders
and my toes in the sand
My woman’s left me for some other man
Aw, but I don’t care
I’ll just dream and stay tan
Toss up my heart
to see where it landsOn and on…
I just keep on trying
and I smile
when I feel like dying
On and on…
I threw myself into my thesis.
I was also still doing a lot of astral projection. One night in late September or early October, I was led to go to bed early — around 9:00 p.m. I immediately got pulled out of my body, and was rushed across town in a subtle body to the Hospital on the Charles River — which I entered through a wall — and found myself in a room where a friend of mine, Pam Jimenez, was at that moment dying! I watched as in a glowing light-form she lifted out of her body; she emanated an immense feeling of joyous satisfaction and relief. I had known she had a brain tumor, but the last I had heard she was in remission and doing fine. I had recommended that she try TM, which she did, but quit because her headaches were too intense. To me, this was “proof” enough of survival after death, and that the astral body is not a delusion that dies when the body dies — though I was aware that my experience would convince no one else.
I finished my course-work and my thesis, and graduated Magna cum Laude in early 1978, while Cambridge was paralyzed by a tremendous blizzard. Businesses and public transportation were all closed down; people were sauntering and even skiing down the middle of the empty streets in a pervasive mood of carnival. I was now living in a three-decker on Line Street in Somerville, next door to Cambridge and just behind the Youville Hospital, with three TM’er friends of mine: one from Harvard, one from Tufts, and one graduate student from B.U. Annie M. and I renewed our love-affair, and we got engaged to be married in the fall. Meanwhile I went to work full-time at the Fine Arts Library in the Fogg Art Museum, as Assistant Supervisor of the Visual Collections. Annie got a job as clerk at Lauriat’s Bookstore in downtown Boston. That summer we rented our own apartment — the entire ground floor of a ramshackle Victorian house on Linden Street in Somerville. Over the next year, we would enjoy an unending stream of house-mates — my brother John, a TM’er named Beth, Annie’s TM’er-friend Jeannie and her boyfriend Terry, and Annie’s co-worker Mary Ann and her boyfriend John.
I occasionally dropped in on Greg Bodine, Elaine Papafrangos, and Kim, my closest friends still at Harvard, and found that they had abandoned our traditional games of Hangman and Scrabble for something new: Dungeons & Dragons, which actually allowed you to role-play fantasy characters in an imaginary world. I was consumed with envy. I had been waiting for something like that all my life! I had even tried to devise similar games as a child, but had been stymied by the complexity of reducing free action to quantifiable moves. And now here it was, just too late for me! I philosophized that it was probably just as well; had it come out when I was in school, I would have gotten no work done. It would be seven more years before I finally had a chance to play.
By this time I was feeling uncomfortable in my role as Associate Teacher of TM; I had attempted to reproduce some of their research on TM’s beneficial effects on short-term memory and found it highly skewed. It was becoming rather clear to me that TM was not for everybody; and as an Associate Teacher it was my job to insist that it was. I decided to discontinue my efforts at becoming a Teacher — I loved enthusing about TM, but didn’t want to be a salesman.
I decided instead to become a Siddha: a graduate of Maharishi’s new TM-Sidhis course, which — for several thousand dollars — taught the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, enabling one to master the siddhis: paranormal abilities like clairvoyance, invisibility, levitation, etc. I had studied Patanjali, and was having some spontaneous experiences of specific siddhis already. Once I awoke and in the transitional clarity was trying to remember what I had just been thinking about. I relaxed, let it go, and wham! I was in the middle of a constellation of about 60 previous lives. I had time to enter two or three and experience them unfolding like a 3-D movie, before the experience ended. I had had some glimpses of other lives after reading the Seth Material and in meditation, but nothing like this! Upon re-reading Patanjali I found: “By performing Samyama [a blend of transcendence, concentration, and contemplation] on a previous thought, one attains knowledge of one’s past lives.”
In those days, the TM-Sidhis course had a prerequisite of some preliminary weeks of intensive residence courses. I took my three weeks of Sidhis-Prep courses in the summer of 1978, at a dormitory in SMU (Southern Massachusetts University), while Annie received the siddhis in Switzerland on “Governor Training:” a course which taught the siddhis to TM teachers. Once a TM teacher received the sidhis, he or she was termed a “Governor of the Age of Enlightenment.”
The Sidhis-Prep course gradually built up to a good deal of “rounding,” and my experiences concurrently intensified. Within a few days, I was vividly seeing a large, parachute-like radiant mass of light about four feet over my head, which floated directly above me wherever I walked. It measured perhaps three feet across, and was a lovely white-gold, with a dark blue center about eight inches in diameter. Almost like a celestial jellyfish, it had fine threads of gold light coming down from its center into my head and heart. When this first appeared, I also noticed two “butterflies” of white light — each with a wing span of maybe eight or ten inches — fluttering around this mass, as if sipping its nectar. Spiritually, I was now in terra incognita; I had never read or heard of anything like this. It felt wonderful, though — I wasn’t worried!
Annie returned home from Switzerland a new-fledged Governor, and began happily setting up house in our new apartment. My course moved to Barrington, Rhode Island, for the final week, and my experiences continued and intensified. By the end of the course, the gold threads had thickened to strings, and my heart center had ignited into an inner Sun. It was very blissful. The course ended, and as I was coming home, I again suddenly ran a high fever, and spent my first week in our new apartment lying on a mattress on the floor, emanating so much heat Annie could feel it from over a yard away. Somehow, I had contracted double pneumonia in the middle of July.
I remember while sick I was acutely worried about having enough money to pay for the wedding and honeymoon; it seemed we needed $700 more than we had. A few days later, I was well, and somehow the money had just showed up in our bank account. I told the bank they must have made a mistake; this money wasn’t ours. They assured me it was. Neither they nor I could find any error, nor even when the money had been deposited. Our first miracle!
About this time, “angels” — they looked like vague, glowing humans — started appearing in my meditations and teaching me in a series of visions; I wrote and painted a small illuminated book of their lessons. I learned that a spiritual body is “quintessential,” made of a fifth “element” beyond and pervading the four common ones of earth (physical, pragmatic), water (astral, emotional), fire (mental, rational), and air (buddhic, intuitive). I learned that an angel, and indeed every being, is in truth a group-consciousness, with a harmony of smaller angels inside it, each of whom in turn has or is a choir of still smaller angels.
Likewise, each angel or human co-operates with others to form a group consciousness which is itself a large angel, and so on. I was shown planetary angels dancing their planets through space, and emanating song that sounded like a finger on the rim of a crystal water-glass. I was shown the Goddess, whose body is the night sky adorned with countless stars, each of which glowed with its own consciousness.
Annie had now received all her siddhis, and was bringing a whole new level of bliss into our meditations together: In the midst of meditation, she would spontaneously assume odd, flowing Yogic postures, and suddenly burst into clear, ecstatic song! This would dissolve into hilarious laughter, and she would then slip back into deep silence. All the while, the energy flowing through her was electrifying. I was afire to receive the siddhis myself, so in late August of 1978, I wheedled another week of leave from the Visual Collection’s long-suffering Curator, Helene Roberts — she agreed; the students would not be returning for several weeks yet, and work at the Library was comparatively slow. My boss, the Supervisor, had retired, and I had been chosen as his replacement. When I returned, I would be taking up my new duties as Supervisor of the Visual Collections. I had promised them that, if hired, I would stay for at least a year; I was not sure the job would hold my interest for longer than that.
Off I went for my first block of the TM-Sidhis course, held in residence at Livingston Manor. Returning to the compound where I had spent such delightful months the year before was like greeting an old friend. And of course, many old friends were there. I was also blessed to meet a new friend, “Ben” — a man whose Slavic features reminded me of a charismatic lynx, as he humorously described some visons he had received on the cabbalah, Abraham, and the tradition of masters to two goggle-eyed course participants. He was Itzhak Bentov, the author of the marvelous Stalking the Wild Pendulum and The Cosmic Book, who was to die in an untimely plane crash the very next year.
I had not read these works nor heard of their author at that time, and I didn’t pay him a lot of attention until he off-handedly began describing an experience of a radiant light-mass — “like a partly-deflated balloon” — over one’s head. “I’ve had that!” I exclaimed. He quizzed me on its color and shape, and I excitedly told him of my experiences. Here was someone who had been where I was! “What happens next?” I asked. He grinned mysteriously. “Next, you fuse with your Solar Angel.” “Oh!” I said. I had no idea what that meant, but it felt right and sounded very good. I filed it away.
Perhaps the most memorable experience I had on that course was my first encounter with a demon — he appeared in front of me, with very prominent pop-eyes above a snarling nose, gaping mouth, and protruding tongue — oddly enough, he seemed almost more comical than fearsome, and appeared to be teasing me. Before I could think what to do, my heart chakra shot out a huge beam of white light and evaporated him, leaving a subtler angelic body behind, which bowed to me. Two more angels came and escorted this body away! This was my first inkling that demons might in some way be angels in disguise, as it were, with a “dirty job to do.” In retrospect, I feel that this demon was a piece of my own demonic side; the “older brother” who loved to stir up trouble; after it was gone, I found it easier to begin making amends with my siblings for my youthful misdeeds.
I returned to Cambridge, and Annie and I began making arrangements with Reverend George Blackman to get married in the Church of Our Saviour — the beautiful Episcopal church in Brookline which my grandmother’s family had attended for several generations. My mother could not recollect my ever having been baptised, so Rev. Blackman baptised me. It was pleasant, and I felt clear and blessed, but otherwise didn’t experience much: In a way, I had already been most profoundly baptised on my teacher-training course the year before.
Communion, however, was often a most wonderfully radiant experience, and I began thinking vaguely about going to Divinity School. I loved the medieval Christian mysticism of Meister Eckhardt and wanted to continue investigating the ecstasies of mysticism and comparative religion, possibly integrating it with my undergraduate knowledge of art history and symbolism.
In August of 1978, Annie and I got married — it was a fairy-tale wedding. Episcopalians excel at making romantic, old-English churches, and the Church of Our Saviour was exquisite — rough-cut stone, rose-bushes around a medieval cloister, a mellow organ, and stained-glass windows by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Burne-Jones … I do not remember much of the wedding; the energies of the hundreds of people were so intense that I floated out of the body in a blissful daze much of the time!
By the late Seventies, some libraries were beginning to computerize their catalogues, and I shared Librarian Wolfgang Freitag’s enthusiasm for the possibilities offered by computers. Annie and I had timed our wedding so that we could combine our honeymoon in Europe with a week-long conference in Pisa on “Computer Storage and Retrieval of Art-Historical Data and Documents,” which I was to attend as the delegate from Harvard. We both loved art. We first spent about a week visiting all the art museums in London and Paris — Annie was tireless, and dragged me through every inch of the Louvre in under two hours, which has to be some kind of record — before going to Pisa, where the University had paid for our accomodations. Annie visited the art museums in Pisa, Siena and the environs while I attended the conference presentations, which the speaker might offer in English, French, Italian, Spanish, or German, putting my old linguistic skills to the test.
Dr. Fabio Bisogni, the conference’s charming and erudite sponsor, had assembled a marvelous computer program for accessing iconography and symbolism in Italian Art. Sensing a possible ally at Harvard, at the conference’s end he invited Annie and me to stay for a week in his luxurious apartment in Florence. From here we enjoyed the Borghese palace, the countless Florentine churches, and the Uffizi, where I would spend hours contemplating my then-favorite painting: Simone Martini’s glorious fourteenth-century triptych of the Annunciation, with its graceful figures of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel against a gold-leaf background. Dr. Bisogni even took us to neighboring Settignano, where we enjoyed the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Culture. He entertained us with stories of the I Tatti’s nineteenth-century owner, the eccentric fine-arts connoiseur Bernard Berenson. It was with great regret that I had to write him later from Cambridge to tell him that Harvard’s professor of Italian Art, the eminent Sydney Freedberg, had no interest in his computer program.
