1982 – 1984 Initiation 5: Mastery
INITIATION V: MASTERY (1982 – 1984): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part I
Just before Christmas of 1982, I returned to Boston, and stayed on Commonwealth Avenue in the apartment of my brother John, who was finishing up a term at the Boston Architectural Center. I met Annie, and was dismayed by the cloud of smokey gray that had almost completely enveloped her aura-field. She still wanted us to reconcile. I had forgiven her, realizing that her affair was merely a stimulus for further growth; our marriage had been stagnating and nothing else would have pried me loose into the infinite. I loved her still, but impersonally; I felt no desire to take up my old life again. That man had died. She nodded resignedly. She was disappointed, but had been considering her options; she asked me about a man she had recently met, the owner of a bookstore in Boston. Did I feel he might be the right one for her? I channeled for her; yes, he had specific issues to work out (which the Guides enlarged upon), but was potentially a very good mate. I worked on healing her. She had a serious case of asthma, and the Guides succeeded in temporarily relieving her suffering.
I spent several days simply walking around Boston, still deep in the profound emptifulness of Divinity. Once, sitting quietly amidst a crowd of teenagers on the granite steps of Quincy Market across from Faneuil Hall, I suddenly realized I was Krishna. I said nothing, but the light laughter that quickened my whole field of perception was apparently noticeable to others; almost immediately, the group of teenagers to my left started chanting “Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna!”
More and more, I learned to trust Divinity. I was led to speak with total strangers, and had interesting and moving conversations, communing directly with their Souls. I had very little money, and my Guides told me to give twenty dollars to the old blind musician in the hallway of the Comm. Ave. subway entrance. I did, and the feeling of blessed delight was almost overwhelming. I had deep conversations with my brother John, who was wary of the power flowing out of my eyes — he asked me once not to stare at him so intently, and with a start I realized I had been giving him shaktipat, transmission of Divine power, all unawares — but he was reluctantly fascinated by a channeling I gave him unfolding a previous life that confirmed some inner experiences he had told to no-one.
I also went to the esoteric bookstores in Cambridge, and discovered some of the Alice Bailey material: Initiation, Human and Solar, and The Rays and the Initiations. Alice Bailey had purportedly channeled this material in the 1920’s and 30’s, from a Tibetan master named Djwal Khul. While at first glance I found most of it incomprehensible, still it “sang” to me and I made a note of it.
After an enjoyable Christmas with my mother and step-father in Maine, I returned to Iowa in January of 1983. I allayed Kerry’s anger and fears — no, I had not slept with Annie; no I didn’t wish to stay married. I investigated divorce proceedings. It would be easiest to get a divorce in Massachusetts, and there would be a six-month wait. I wrote to Annie, sending her the money for the divorce, and asking her to file the papers. She did, and sent me several of Alice Bailey’s books. I began to read them non-stop, having found therein a map of my most recent experiences and a sketch of the realms ahead.
Shortly after my Crucifixion, my Guides showed me a vision of myself dying as an old man. They told me that I was now “half-done;” that I had resolved 50% of my karma, and now I wouldn’t need to reincarnate if I were to die. They recommended working on refining the enlightenment of the physical body, as progress could be made much faster in physical form than on the other side. I was told that now I had gone “up and out” as much as necessary, and it was now time to come “down and in” to Earth and into the physical body, blessing and indwelling it all from the point of view of Spirit. While part of this reiterated what Carla’s guides had told me only a few months earlier, now I was ready to hear it. The Alice Bailey material confirmed that I had completed the Fourth Initiation or Crucifixion, which opened onto the Buddhic planes, and was now working on the Fifth, or Mastery, which opened onto the Atmic planes. Where the Buddhic planes seemed more concerned with Constellation levels of love-awareness, I saw the Atmic planes as Galactic levels of ecstasy or Divine Laughter, the bliss of the Spirit. More and more, I felt as if I had an inner needle pointing to this bliss; I also enjoyed a tremendous energy-burst when someone else would mention an option that happened to carry the imprimatur of their own bliss.
I often played a kind of after-dinner game with Kerry: She would tell me the name of someone from her past whom I did not know, and I would “manifest” the person for her, feeling my face assume that person’s face, and my body-mind emerge from bliss to become the body-mind of the other. I/they would speak, gesture, and walk around in the other’s manner, to Kerry’s delight.
I also received a brilliant vision of my part in the Master Plan for the earth — glowing centers of light blossomed in beautiful places all over the world, and we were flying from place to place, helping to start the centers, and teaching and healing people in them. Some people remained in one center continuously as permanent staff, while others — myself included — were more like free agents, circulating, and cross-pollinating as temporary faculty. There were twelve primary centers spaced around the planet; these were equated with the twelve gates of the celestial Jersualem and the earth’s twelve chakras. For me, it was as if I were being shown that I had twelve ashrams or wonderful resort-homes. These centers each had many rooms and many healer/teachers on staff, to offer the full spectrum of healing to body, emotions, mind, and spirit.
About this time, Nancy M. won a trip to Paradise Island in the Bahamas and took Kerry with her. They returned full of excitement, refreshed and inspired by the healing waters of the Caribbean. We had been thinking about opening a Healing Center; perhaps the Bahamas would be the right spot? My Guides were most supportive, and suggested Governor’s Harbor, in Eleuthera, predicting that Nancy would meet a man through the church there who would help establish the Center.
At this time, I really didn’t want to have to do “normal work” for a living any more, and I didn’t want to have to charge for spiritual work if someone needed it and couldn’t afford it. I decided to let go of the quid-pro-quo belief-system I had grown up with, and to assume that the Universe would take care of my needs independently of specific work I did, while I would continue to follow my highest bliss in serving the Universe. This called for the release of a lot of old “programming,” and I manifested God in front of me to talk this over with. I decided to presume that if God were big enough to be the Great Immensity, Brahman, then He could be big enough to care about His creation, and to assume a personal form to talk with me.
At first I tried being polite with God; this didn’t work too well, so I dropped the facade and let Him have it straight from my heart. I was angry. That worked! The love deepened between us, and my God listened lovingly and patiently as I went through my arguments and cleared inner objections one after another until I hit bottom inside, and I finally knew that I deserved what I now desired: to have an independent income so that my needs were met. “Fine,” said God. “You’ve got it! ” Within the month, a small trust fund I had started receiving some months prior was suddenly increased from $100 to $400 a month, and I was a “rich” man; my needs were met.
I felt, meanwhile, that there was work to be done in Cambridge — a number of my friends had expressed interest in this channeling and healing that we were doing. I asked Kerry to come back East with me, and we went to live in Harvard Square. Annie was now living with the man she had asked me about, and she sublet her apartment to us: a potentially awkward situation, but it worked out well. It was large, gracious, and situated right upstairs from one of my favorite esoteric bookstores — the Sphinx and Sword of Love.
Kerry got a job at Cardullo’s around the corner — she loved gourmet foods, especially sweets — while I went to work right downstairs in the Sphinx bookstore. I didn’t really need the money, but had always wanted to work in a bookstore. I greatly enjoyed acting as “reference librarian” for the wonderful people I met that summer.
I started a healing-circle with some of my oldest friends in Cambridge, and some new ones that found their way to us. I now did most of my spiritual work for free. Annie and the others learned to do healing and channeling. Kerry attended sometimes, but was often bored. However, Kerry and I both loved crystals, gems, and semi-precious stones; we went to a New-Age expo in Boston where I was blasted by the powerful crystals; we bought large assortments of semiprecious stones and experimented happily with their healing powers.
Cambridge was rife with various spiritual cults, and I would go when they invited me to gatherings — not as a seeker, but to familiarize myself with the signature-energies of each group, to see if, and how, they fit together in the Master-Plan. Followers of Nichiren Shoshu invited me to a devotee’s apartment for a prayer session before their Gohenzon, the shrine containing the Buddhist scripture most sacred to them. We chanted a great deal, especially their famous mantra NAM MYO HO RENGE KYO, and I “saw” a very large Buddha appear before me in red robes and connect the two of us with fine threads of gold light, reminding me vaguely of the famous painting of St. Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata from the Seraphic Christ. I was not overwhelmed with devotion, however; it felt more like a meeting almost of two equals, and I did not return.
I also attended an introductory lecture by devotees of The Mother, a Hindu avatar. I enjoyed their sweet energy, but was disappointed when during the discussion afterwards they warned me against Maharishi: The Mother had said the levitators were demonically possessed. I defended TM; I might criticise my “spouse,” but no one else could!
My inner work continued. I received a profound vision of the Earth as an egg in the coils of a huge serpent; suddenly rays of light shot out of the egg from all sides and reconnected it to the stars. I wrote this down, as it moved me greatly. I would receive greater understanding of the vision in the following years.
As the Angels had taught a few years before, I now found my own body to contain vast numbers of small awarenesses, and discovered that as I worked on the little beings inside of myself, coming to them as an Avatar or Christ and enveloping them in love, at that same moment I was myself enveloped in love by my own Avatar or Krishna or Christ self — that somehow it was like a gigantic Moebius strip or Klein bottle, where the Self healed the Self healed the Self. This was another demonstration of the Divine Law of Service — that as one extends loving help to others, one truly opens to loving help of the Self.
INITIATION V: MASTERY (1982 – 1984): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part II
While walking one day in Harvard Square, I realized I could, with eyes open, resolve the whole “movie” of my perceptions back into the primal white light of the “projector” of my own consciousness. Everything — the sidewalks, Nini’s Corner, the skyscapers, the quickly striding bankers and strolling students — faded and dissolved into the overwhelming radiance of Divinity, until, for fear that I would lose this world permanently, I let go of the attunement, and watched the world reappear around me. I was growing tired of “channeling” and wished to integrate both worlds fully, with eyes open, but this didn’t quite seem to do it.
In September of 1983, Kerry and I attended a reunion of sorts in the apsidal theatre of Harvard’s Memorial Hall. Dr. Richard Alpert, better known to many as Ram Dass, and Dr. Timothy Leary gave a talk on the twentieth anniversary of their expulsion from Harvard for unauthorized LSD research. Memorial Theatre was packed with skeptical Harvard students, who watched as the two famous gurus spoke of their separate paths through the intervening years since their removal.
I had long revered Ram Dass for his classic Be Here Now, which I had first read at a distance of only one decade and about 150 yards from this very spot. At every pause in the conversation, Ram Dass would close his eyes, and his face would light up, glowing in blissful radiance. To my surprise, others saw his light; one student criticised him, asking him peevishly if Ram Dass wasn’t merely escaping by going off to some blissful realm when so much work needed to be done here. Ram Dass cheerfully pointed out that when one needed something, one went to the place that offered it; then one could bring it back to where it was not. A most sensible answer, I thought, but I was not as impressed with Ram Dass’s handling of Tim Leary, who was emitting a kind of brittle brilliance of his own — with eyes open. An advocate of physical immortality and space-travel, Leary was most excited about the possibilities of the computer revolution for consciousness expansion, and felt that Ram Dass was being a bit too traditional in his spiritual fundamentalism.
Leary was like a perennial Irish gadfly, who flew circles around Ram Dass and delighted in continually biting at Ram Dass’s bovinely patient adherence to his Hindu path and guru. I noted with surprise the drama unfolding between them; Leary seemed much like a boy continually teasing his younger brother. Ram Dass bought into it; he attempted to cling to his self-posession, but gradually his aura-field got darker and redder under Leary’s continual verbal stings. While I still regarded Ram Dass highly for his spiritual work, I came away from the reunion respecting Leary slightly more than Ram Dass. Ram Dass was a devoted follower; Leary was an original thinker who had done his best to individuate himself fully. Leary’s radiance seemed more integrated than that of Ram Dass, who spoke easily of transpersonal calm but gave in as easily to personal rage when his beliefs were challenged. However, to be fair, I knew my preference might stem at least in part from the fact that I was myself an older brother, and could more easily identify with Leary’s role than Ram Dass’s: While no longer delighting in cruelty, I still loved to stir people up, to challenge their limitations, as Leary had done to Ram Dass. As I think back on them now, I would have to say I respect them equally.
By September, Annie’s lease was up, and we had gone a few miles north to Fresh Pond to live with Jeanie, an old classmate of Annie’s from Governor Training, who had come with her husband to live with Annie and me when they first moved to Massachusetts. She was now separated from her own husband, and in need of some healing. To my delight, they eventually reconciled.
This whole period of time was difficult for Kerry, more difficult than I knew. While she had rebelliously wanted to leave her mother and the small town of Fairfield behind, she had now jumped into very deep water. No family or friends of her own, living in Annie’s old apartment, participating in healing circles with Annie, and then living with Annie’s closest friend — it was wearing on her. Furthermore, her job at Cardullo’s did not go well — the owner did not like her much, and vice versa. Kerry, a vivacious, fresh-faced girl of barely nineteen, began to look more and more like her own boss — a squat, severe sixty-year-old. She still projected her habitual facade of brilliantly precocious competence, though. I knew she wasn’t completely happy, but it was many months before I learned to penetrate this facade to empathize completely with her deeper feelings.
In September, Nancy called us — she had been staying on Eleuthera at the Club Med near Governor’s Harbor for several weeks, and had now found a beach-house right in town. Our share of the rent would be $300 a month. Were we interested? We were!
We gave notice on our jobs and flew down in October: a 727 to Miami, and then a small 8-seater flying low over the Caribbean — we could see the underwater masonry of “Atlantis” near Bimini — to a very small airport north of Governor’s Harbor on Eluethera. Still dressed for New England’s autumn, we were dazed by the tropical heat as we embarked in an ancient taxicab for Governor’s Harbor. Glorious sea-vistas peeped through the palms on our right throughout the taxi’s mad dash south. What a paradise! The house was spacious and stuccoed, with a porch overlooking the Gulf, and Nancy welcomed us warmly.
Within a few days, however, Annie called — our divorce was being processed, and if it was to be no-fault, I had to come to Lowell, Massachusetts to see the judge and sign the final papers. I flew back to Massachusetts. The judge was somewhat puzzled when I cited irreconciliable differences: Annie wanted to stay in one place and be a house-holder; I had received a calling to travel around and teach and heal. “Could you heal me?” said the judge quizzically. “Yes….” I replied, thinking, “If you really wanted it, and were open to it…” “Hm!” said the Judge. “All right!” and he stamped the papers.
When I returned to the Bahamas newly divorced, I received quite a different reception from Kerry’s mother than I had gotten the week before. First, they hadn’t been sure I was really going to Massachusetts to get a divorce, or that I was coming back! Secondly, she had now talked to Kerry about the last six months, and was furious with me, blaming me for Kerry’s Cantabrigian misery. We talked quite a bit, and things eased up some. Nancy had had a very rough marriage to Kerry’s dad, an alcoholic who had mentally abused her and lied to her about his multitudinous affairs. She was carrying quite a bit of mistrust and resentment towards men in general. I was not Kerry’s dad and was quite trustworthy, but I had definitely been insensitive to Kerry’s plight; I would try to be more sensitive in the future.
Nancy seemed to be going through a great deal of emotional turmoil over the next few months, but I really wasn’t sure much of the time if it was hers or mine. I could acutely feel the emotions as if they were mine, but they didn’t feel like mine, and they seemed to be coming from Nancy. I was aware of them no matter how far apart we were, but proximity intensified the suffering. I could feel obsessive jealous attachment to Kerry, hatred and envy and lust for me, loneliness and a childlike love of God…often all mixed up together. In an odd way, when I “saw” her praying to God, it was as if she were praying to me! On the surface she seemed relatively sunny and calm. I could not figure this out. I was being shaken apart by the almost constant silent storms! Nothing I tried — cutting the subtle “cords” between us, etc. —seemed to help. Meanwhile, we all swam nude in turquoise seas, sunned ourselves on fine white sands, and took long walks past lacy gingerbread houses nestled among the palms and casuarina, amidst fragrant profusions of jasmine, hibiscus, and bougainvillea. We played cards, and talked, and read, and ate, and meditated, and swam some more. Kerry shed the accumulated sufferings of Cambridge, and bloomed again.
The Bahamians were wonderful people, but it was a little odd being one of the white minority. Eventually I began to feel as if our trio were also black, and was surprised by the occasional white stranger’s face I saw. The Bahamian women, especially, taught me a lot: In the U.S., most people returned my smile; here no woman did. They looked at me quite disapprovingly. I looked inside, and found that I was accustomed to carrying around an American facade; my polite smile masked a slightly fearful inner distance. I dropped the facade, and presented myself psychologically naked. The women responded immediately, beaming great loving smiles at me thereafter — another teaching, all without a word being spoken.
October became November, and my inner work deepened: At times I could feel the agony of the whole Earth as it longed for healing; I was touched to the core by sorrow and compassion. A very dense little being, an Elemental about four feet tall, “appeared” in our room and offered me the wealth of the world. I had read that this was a normal stage of temptation in one’s enlightenment, and that it was best to refuse politely. I refused politely. At about this same time, I channeled a vision of myself as Cup-Bearer, offering what appeared to be the Grail to Kerry. I believe now that the Elemental and the Cup-Bearer were both aspects of myself.
I continued reading the Alice Bailey material, meditating on the descriptions of the seven rays. Four minor rays were permutations of the third, the Ray of Active Intelligence, while the second was the Ray of Love-Wisdom and the first was the Ray of Will. I was sitting in meditation, and I wondered: What would it feel like to fuse these three main Rays of Intelligence, Love, and Will?
Instantly, in my subtle body I was sitting in a pyramid, which held a large, yellow-green column of fire up through its middle. I approached the flame, and was told that it was my own DNA; I could change it if I wished. With some trepidation, I entered the flame, and was quickly pulled up inside. Time stopped, and I ascended, up through the top of the pyramid, into a large circular portal which was vibrating OMMMM very loudly. It was the note of my own Soul, or Monad, sounding through the Universe.
I fused the three rays again in the next meditation, and repeated the sequence. This time I went through the vibrating portal, and emerged into a council of brightly-robed Masters! I was now one of them. They were arrayed in a circle, with a leader in the middle. I immediately identified with this central figure. Somehow, he and I were one. This was my Fifth Initiation, or Revelation, where the Higher Self descended to the Navel and approached the Sex Center, and the Lower self ascended to the Heart and approached the Throat Center or Atmic Subplane, the Realm of Ether or Vibrating Space.
A few weeks after I typed these events of fourteen years past, I was unusually drawn to buy the current issue of Gnosis (No. 44: Summer 1997). A portion therein of Richard Smoley’s article, “Masonic Civilization,” throws some light on the Fifth-Initiation experience: On p. 16, he speaks of the Master Mason ritual, which re-enacts the slaying of Solomon’s chief Temple architect Hiram Abiff by three “ruffians” who demand the Master Mason’s secret from Hiram, and kill him when he refuses to divulge it. Hiram is equated with consciousness; the Temple of Solomon he was building is the True Self; and the three ruffians are the ordinary functions of thinking, feeling, and doing, which attempt to attain the goal of integration, but fail:
Interestingly, the three ruffians are named Jubelo, Jubela, and Jubelum. The first part of these names is obviously akin to Jabal, discoverer of “the Science called Massonrie,” while the suffixes resemble the Latin masculine, feminine, and neuter endings. But as [Harold W.] Percival [in Thinking and Destiny, pp. 680-686] notes, there is another dimension to these endings. If you put them together, you have “Aoum,” or the sacred syllable “Om,” which Percival equates with the true Mason’s word. That is to say, the three ruffians, the inferior functions of man, possess part of the secret of consciousness. But they do not have the secret of integrating them and bringing them to the higher level symbolized by the Temple.
Had I , then, spontaneously undergone the inner Initiation of a Master Mason? By fusing or reintegrating the three separate Primary Rays or “ruffians” (Active Intelligence or “thinking,” Love-Wisdom or “feeling,” and Will or “doing”), had I not appeared in a perfect Temple or Pyramid, ascended to a higher level through the reformed Master’s Word of AUM or OM, and emerged amidst a Council of Masters? The parallels seem too striking to deny! (In my paper on The 9 Chakras and the 81 Subcastes, I describe different tier-stepping arrangements of the 81 Initiatic subplanes; the one-step, 17-tier arrangement aligns the 5th tier-Initiation with the subcaste of Cup-Bearer, and of Master Mason, and also with the Royal Council of Knights.)
In subsequent meditations, I was shown a whole “stacking” of Masters or Higher Selves above me, one topped by another topped by still another. As I went through a given Initiation, my Higher or future Self went through that Initiation’s higher harmonic, an Initiation of his own; while his Higher Self did the same on his own level. In fact, we were all one, and I could choose to identify with whatever level of Mastery felt right at any given moment. Time and space were ultimately illusory.
My mother wrote me that a very old family friend was dying of cancer in Maine; despite the woman’s advanced age, this felt “wrong” to me. Since distance was an illusion, I felt I could heal her as if she were present. I sat down on the bed, closed my eyes, and aligned with the First Ray of pure Will. As I focussed it through the woman’s field, I could feel her heating up, burning off the impurities, and knew that the power flowing through her now would either kill her quickly or heal her completely. I believed she would most likely heal. I found later that she had indeed run a high fever for those several days, and then gone into complete remission. She lived for many years thereafter.
I maintained correspondence with distant friends, channeling both for my mother and for several friend/clients I had helped in Fairfield, especially Karen from Wisconsin. It was a pleasure to see Karen growing so quickly; it had originally been painful to psychically enter the clouds of fear and anger pervading her house, but she had been applying the truths of the Guides for over a year now and her domestic subtle weather was now relatively calm and sunny.
Once I disobeyed my intuition, and went swimming in the Gulf on an overcast day when the water felt very unwelcoming. I never saw what stung me; it may have been a manta ray or the tentacles of a Portuguese man o’ war, but suddenly my right arm was in acute agony. As I climbed out of the water, my arm now bore a long, puffy reddish-purple streak, looking and feeling as if I had just been branded with white-hot iron. I went home, and sat down on the bed, and began to focus and relax into the pain, breathing through it, treating it like a rebirthing session. Almost instantly, the acute agony became acute ecstasy! As long as I stayed intently focused on the sensation it was sheer bliss, but as soon as my mind started slipping away it wailed back into agony. I stayed with it for about an hour and a half, until it needed no more attention. The pain was now completely gone, though the long welt remained for a few days. I had never tried rebirthing pain that was physical, and was most impressed that the technique worked as well as on psychic pain.
My relationship with Kerry deepened; I could “hear” her praying for her soul mate, and I told her so; it felt as if she were tugging on me! I felt deeply that I was that man; we were both so brilliantly Celtic, easily dwelling in the same faerie and celestial realms; we both loved art and poetry and astrology and mythology. It was puzzling, though; it seemed on subtle levels as if Nancy also expected me to marry her! I was repelled, and did my best to ignore this complication, assuming that it came from some past-life memories we both had of ancient Greece. Kerry’s and my love-making was very good, and sometimes when she slept, I could see her dreams; it was odd, because she saw things differently than I; her perspective was sharper and the dreamscape’s curves more abrupt than mine were.
One night we were standing on a pier over the Gulf at sunset, surrounded by the shell-pink glow of another gorgeous tropical evening, when I asked her to marry me. We hugged, and she accepted. We left the date vague, but began thinking about a 15th-century pagan-style ceremony. Kerry, like me, was fascinated by royalty and English folklore, and was dreaming of a wedding that included gilded rosemary with gaily-colored ribbons, mantle-pieces with swags of evergreen, and tea-roses everywhere.
Meanwhile, the tension with Nancy continued. Confusing images arose: I saw her sitting in a huge World-War-II tank; another time an iron eagle, wings rigidly outstretched, appeared on her brow. Again, it seemed as if we were two generals butting heads on the proper plan of attack. I mentioned none of this to her. The entire time, I was deluged with “her” emotions. I felt her scorn and contempt like physical blows, or like a rip-tide that I was attempting to swim against — I was often physically exhausted just being in her presence. She appeared to think I was effeminate and lazy, an unworthy provider for Kerry. It was as if Nancy expected me to be like her father, or her own husband, typical mid-century business tycoons whom she greatly respected and yet whom she hated. I really couldn’t win. At the same time, I found I could not think even the subtlest judgemental thought about Nancy; the instant I entertained it, I felt physical pain in my subtle body-mind. I eventually drew up a private “Bill of Rights” for myself, giving myself permission to be imperfect, free from judgement of myself or others. That helped, but the inner tension continued.
I finally gave up trying to figure out if the stuff was hers or mine, and decided it was a pattern between us — and at that moment, my consciousness expanded, and I became huge. People’s minds were now completely inside me; I was the thoughts and feelings — the minds — of everybody within several blocks of me. I realized now that it was O.K. to embrace imperfection as well as perfection; I was all stages of growth — all beings — simultaneously. I now felt the slate between Nancy and me was wiped clean. It seemed our Bahamian “Healing Center” had been for healing ourselves! I realized I had finished the healing I came here to do, and made plans with some relief to return to New England.
Kerry and I returned to Maine in late November, 1983, and spent a month in my mother’s house on Great Island, not far from Brunswick. One day, my mother and step-father wished to photograph some antiques to meet the deadline for a sales-brochure, but there wasn’t enough light outside. It was raining out; the sky was heavily overcast, and the forecast predicted more of the same for the next few days. I thought this would be a good chance to put my abilities to the test! A year or two after I started meditating I used to practice dissolving very small clouds, but I had never tackled a whole sky. My mother told me not to bother; it wasn’t that important, but I was bound to try.
I went up stairs, sat down, and lifted into the clouds. I immediately met the rain-God, Indra, who wanted me to wrestle with him. I did, and beat him. Then I rose above the clouds, became the sun, and dissolved a hole in the clouds over Great Island. I did all this in the subtle realm, and returned to consciousness feeling very spacey. I went downstairs and said I had done my best; it should be clearing up very shortly. The rain and clouds were as heavy as before. A few minutes later, though, I looked up. It was light out! We went outside. I had never seen anything like it — the grey-black clouds had been neatly pushed back in a tremendous circle almost to the horizon all around us, leaving blue sky and bright sun overhead. My parents took the photographs.
During this time, we also played a lot with psychometry — my stepfather had collected an immense number of artifacts, from paleolithic to Roman, during his years in England. He would lug out boxes of these treasures, and I would hold a piece in my hands, and then pick up some of its history — I could feel myself becoming the person who had used the tool, see and feel how the tool was used, and often see the environment around. Once, holding a large paleoloithic hand-axe, I was moved almost to tears — it held the holograph of a number of Cro-Magnons sitting around a camp, laughing together — the unity of consciousness they enjoyed was so perfect! I saw how much we had lost in the past 40,000 years.
I also continued the experiments in manifestation that I had begun with John C. in Fairfield; once I attempted to manifest a small aquamarine in my hand. It was still invisible, but present aetherically, when Kerry came into the room. I asked if she could “see” what I was creating. “Mmm….an aquamarine!” she said. I never did acquire the patience or knack to materialize these things completely into the physical, though.
Kerry and I went apartment-hunting in Portland, Maine in late December, and found a nice studio in a large Victorian house on State Street for $300 a month. We took it, and moved in on January 1, 1984.
INITIATION V: MASTERY (1982 – 1984): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part III
Though I did not know it yet, I may already have been entering the sixth Initiation, that of Decision; Saturn moved into its “decision” initiation on January 16, 1984, crossing 15 degrees of Scorpio (Taurus-Equinox Sagittarius). However, it quickly went retrograde, crossing back on April 7, not finally recrossing until October 6, 1984. Kerry and I spent the first six months of 1984 in Portland, Maine. I continued to experience others’ Souls as aspects of my Self, but intermittently and less vividly. It felt a little odd to be living just around the corner from the old, palatial TM center on Spring Street where I had lived and loved and laughed with my new best-friend Annie for a blissful week in the summer of ‘76. Just over the hill lay Deering Oaks Park, where I had sat engraving an exuberantly intricate scrimshaw including the very fir-tree I was sitting beneath, while waiting for Annie to finish her shift at the Sew-Fro fabric store on Forest Avenue.
Full of the new delights of sex, I had boldly put four haloed, naked nymphs around the ivory tooth — one European, one Chinese, one Native American, and one African — joining hands in a world-embracing dance, and supporting the roundels containing the scrimshaw’s main scenes. I had been “witnessing” pretty continuously day and night by then, and was very satisfied with my unbroken Cosmic Consciousness. But for the most part, those memories felt as distant as one of my former lives. Now I was living with Kerry, and it was 1984; Portland radio had gone from playing Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” to Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon.” I wasn’t too inspired with songs like that winter’s “Here Comes the Rain Again” by the Eurythmics, and I spent a lot of time listening to WBOQ, Portland’s classical station. I even won a few tickets to classical concerts!
The winter was a particularly cold one, and we wondered why we had felt so impelled to leave the Bahamas before spring. We also felt rather pinched by poverty; neither one of us had a job, but were both busy pursuing our bliss. Kerry was learning how to make lace; I was holding the usual classes in healing and psycho-spiritual development (I named our school Mirabilis), but few people attended, and still fewer paid. Portland seemed to be at least ten years behind the times; most people were as yet uninterested in “New Age” phenomena. There was a funky health-food store nearby, the Good Day Market a few blocks over on Brackett Street, but the food there was pretty expensive. We walked across the long, windy Million-Dollar Bridge to South Portland to buy most of our groceries at Stop and Shop, carrying the paper bags back through the bitter cold to our cozy apartment on State Street.
I didn’t know it then, but I was also living only two blocks from where my great-great-grandfather, Reverend Daniel Freeman Smith, had opened his own Episcopalian school for spiritual development — St. Augustine’s School for Boys — 114 years before. At that time Episcopalianism too was new to Maine, which was predominantly Congregational; and he too had been living a life of genteel semi-poverty and spiritual enthusiasm.
We did meet a charming fellow named Gawaine who was a Wiccan, Cabbalistic magician, and very astute astrologer; we traded sessions with each other, and he gave me his copy of Isaac Bonewits’s lovely classic, Real Magic, which I still own. Gawaine introduced us to B.B., a well-known fashion model and aspiring rock singer. Her apartment was walled with countless framed magazine covers depicting her, each photo apparently a completely different woman — she was protean, assuming varied personas with mercurial ease. She knew Rod Stuart, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, and the Stones very well, and had a daughter by a famous rock-star.
Meeting her was surprising, because my mother, being an antique-dealer, had somewhere picked up a stack of decade-old Playboys, and while living with her the previous month I had leafed through them. I had come across the centerfold and bio of this very woman, read of her associations with various rock-musicians, and idly wondered what she was doing now. And now here she was! After she first called me for a channeling appointment, I scanned her field, and was literally thrown backwards by her very forceful guardian-daemon. The channeling went well, though, and we met several times after that. Her daughter, who must have been about five or six, is now a famous movie-star in her own right.
We held several largish circles of eight or ten people and did some significant work, but I mostly remember spending a great many hours doing research in Portland’s brand-new Public Library downtown: spiritual books, mostly, of course, though I did some pen-and-inks of Portland in the nineteenth century, working from old photographs in the Library’s Portland Room. I was also working on another illuminated MS. on angels, and spent a lot of time writing poetry and doing pen-and-inks for that. Around that time I bought what became our new Bible, Barbara Walker’s marvelous book, The Women’s Dictionary of Myths and Secrets, and Kerry and I would read this to each other constantly. Kerry was an ex-Catholic, and the book fueled her anti-Christian and anti-patriarchal rage while it dazzled us both with its glimpses of the pagan archetypes that had been “borrowed” and incorporated into Christian mythology.
It was during this period that I received a Utopian vision of everyone conjoined, via computers and telephone, to form a single network in an awe-inspiring world-mind. I had not yet heard of the Internet, but my inner Masters showed it to me; little did I suspect that thirteen years later I would finally connect with it myself, and record that very vision!
The only significant meditative experience I remember during this time was of suddenly appearing amidst a huge throng of people in one of the heaven-realms; they were all chanting OM SRI RAM JAI RAM JAI JAI in a combined voice like thunder, and were all standing or bowing before an immense throne where I presumed the God Rama was wont to s it. The focused devotion of all those beings, while awe-inspiring, created an atmosphere of almost uncomfortable intensity.
In late May of 1984, our old Fairfield friends John and Vicki C. wrote to us from Seattle, where they had recently moved after getting married. A friend of theirs needed a house-sitter for the month of July. Would we consider it? Of course we would. We gave notice on our apartment, sold most of our few possessions, and shipped the rest out west. We took a Greyhound cross-country and slept in each other’s laps each night until we reached Wisconsin. We spent a few days recuperating there, enjoying the casually-friendly hospitality of Kerry’s dad, who did not seem to be quite the monster his ex-wife and daughter had portrayed. We then boarded the bus again for the last leg, finally to pass through the Swiss-like Cascades into Seattle. Smelling strongly of second-hand cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, we alit in Seattle to the waiting arms of John and Vicki, who gamely embraced us.
INITIATION V: MASTERY (1982 – 1984): The Ninth State: Krishna Consciousness
Part IV
We spent a few days in John and Vicki’s ’20’s-style apartment in Capitol Hill on East 18th Street, which they shared with another meditator, Carolyn, and her two young children. The second-floor rooms were large, airy, and warm; rose-colored walls contrasted beautifully with lush green foliage just outside generous windows. Kerry and I then took up our month of housesitting. We had never had a whole house to ourselves, and except for a slight feeling of “walking on eggshells” — it was, after all, not our house, and it overflowed with valuable breakables — I enjoyed it greatly.
When the housesitting was done, we moved back into John and Vicki’s apartment. Carolyn was a little dubious about the arrangement until she attended one of our channeling sessions; her resistance then evaporated and we all spent several months holding circles nearly every day. Love bloomed; we became a very tight-knit group, and dreamed of the service we would all perform together someday.
John also introduced me to Steve M., another TM’er friend of his whose emotional field was as damp and grayly overcast as Seattle’s skies. “What a tale I have to tell,” he began gloomily, and filled us in with the sorrowful details of a heartfelt relationship that had been torpedoed by his ex-lover. I empathized, having suffered similar rejections myself, but couldn’t help noticing over the following months that Steve, a wealthy computer-programmer who had mastered every realm of life but the romantic, was at that time so consistent in his gloom that he reminded me almost comically of Marvin, the depressed robot from Douglas Adam’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Like John, Vicki and Carolyn, though, he was a true friend: honest, steadfast, loving and loyal. Steve and I both remembered past lives we had shared together, especially one aboard a seventeenth-century Dutch privateer/merchant vessel making frequent voyages to the Caribbean. Our paths were to continue to cross ever afterwards.
About this time, my maternal grandmother, who had been listening to Annie’s tales of abandonment, wrote me a bluntly scathing letter, accusing me of multitudinous irresponsibilities to Annie and society, and contemptuously exhorting me to get a job and, for God’s sake, a driver’s license.
My grandmother was Barbara Greenough Bradley, a woman born to great wealth and prestige. Her father was Henry Vose Greenough, a witty but conventional Boston Brahmin, son of Charles Pelham Greenough and Mary Dwight Vose, and descendant of highly-respected merchants, lawyers, politicians, Boston tea-party rebels, and Mayflower pilgrims. Her mother was Emery Holden, the brilliantly creative daughter of Cleveland’s mining, hotel and newspaper magnate Liberty Emery Holden by his wife Delia Elizabeth Bulkeley, descendant of Harvard presidents, New England founding fathers, and English royalty. Emery had married late but optimistically, only to be shattered by her husband’s affairs and crushed by Greenough domesticity. She and Henry had apparently wanted another boy, and were disappointed at Barbara’s birth.
Her parents’ disappointment permanently wounded and enraged my grandmother, who was a proud and generous Leo. She inherited her mother’s artistic and literary abilities, found her household stifling, and escaped at age nineteen by marrying her West Chop tennis tutor, John Freeman Bradley, an ambitious Harvard graduate just embarking on his career in architecture in the depths of the Depression. His family was also of mediaeval royal descent and quite respectable, but had fallen on hard times. He himself was bright and talented but there was little work to be had. Two daughters came in quick succession. The strains of poverty, motherhood, and marriage to a critical and overbearing husband nine years her senior (indeed, in many ways, her relationship to my grandfather foreshadowed that of Kerry and me) were too much for my grandmother; she had also discovered she was strongly attracted to women. She suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted unsuccessfully to kill her two young daughters and herself. After some time in a sanatorium, she had divorced my grandfather, and spent the rest of her days living a bohemian but unfulfilled life of lesbianism, poetry, art, and alcoholism, and had had her own driver’s license revoked countless times.
It is possible she was drunk when she wrote me that letter, but I was deeply wounded all the same. When I had first begun to channel, it was if I had died, no longer caring what my relatives — or anyone — thought of me. Now, I was beginning to care very deeply about my family again. This woman had been a favorite relative, my mentor and financial sponsor over the years, and I was hard-put how to reply. In a way she had certainly made some valid points. I had not finished Divinity School; my marriage with Annie had failed; ordinary work no longer interested me, and I was afraid to get a license, fearing that my highway-induced spaciness might kill someone. I knew by now that I was responsible for my own reality; I was actually wounding myself here, and my grandmother’s letter was a manifestation of my own inner guilts.
And yet, I was enraged; I wanted to speak up for the beauties of my life. Dare I alienate her? I meditated on it for two days. On reflection I realized it was Divinity who was my true source of supply, and if I could be honest with Divinity, I could be honest with my grandmother. I finally wrote a passionate letter back to her, answering her accusations point by point, telling her I had been responsible to the highest source I knew, Divinity itself, and concluding with the insight that she lived in a house of mirrors, and was flailing away at fragmented images of herself. She never replied, but we have enjoyed a congenial and loving relationship ever since.
As usual I delved into the second-hand book stores, and found an unusual gem by Robert Anton Wilson — Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, which stimulated many hours of delightful contemplation. My spiritual experiences continued; in meditation I felt Yogananda’s param-guru, the immortal Babaji, pouring warm oil on my forehead and anointing me into Divine Service. I now became that very Master-portal I had passed through in the Bahamas; able to transmit a more powerful Divine grace to others. I made contact with a future Self, from another lifetime I supposed, who was working with the spiritual dimensions of some sort of geodesic architecture; this one turned out to be the “me” of only a few months in the future!
I also began to regularly experience extra-terrestrial alternate Selves: one was a human-shaped Starship Commander, dressed in a high-collared tunic of black, with silver relief. Another was an amphibious cetacean; from Sirius I supposed. Still another resembled a giant crab, with its hundreds of delicate arms navigating a Mother-ship and overseeing the correct positioning of dozens of smaller Star-vessels. Yet another — also maintaining a Constellation-ship — resembled a huge, upright bear. These experiences were valid; I knew these beings to be a part of the real me. Yet I wondered: Was I somehow merely anthropomorphizing the constellations — Cetus, Cancer, Ursa Major, or did the original namers of the Constellations also have experiences like mine, of these various alien species?
I was informed of Galactic and Constellation politics. There was an ongoing “War in Heaven,” in which two major factions were concerned with Earth. One, which had been in ascendancy for many millennia, was attempting to keep humanity enslaved in ignorance, and to keep the Earth quarantined from the rest of the Confederation. The other, to which I apparently belonged, was dropping agents surreptitiously into Earth, having them incarnate in the regular manner and serve as enzymes of enlightenment, to ferment a massive change of consciousness from within, and reconnect earth to the Confederation of star-systems. This expanded on the egg-serpent-star vision I had received in Cambridge the year before.
While on some levels I had already chosen sides in this galactic drama, nonetheless part of me remained aloof; I didn’t particularly care to be a Galactic warrior or ambassador; I preferred to be a researcher and seer. Part of me was uncertain that I really had the whole truth here; perhaps I was just being fed propaganda? Who was to say that Galactic politics were any more enlightened than Earth politics? Perhaps humanity was on a perfect path of slow growth, and too-quick change would be disastrous; I had seen the devastating effects of quick infusions of Western culture into third-world countries like India. In the larger sense, I contained both factions within myself, as I contained everything. However, I begrudgingly admitted that my heart lay with quick change; I enjoyed stirring people out of complacency and into larger world-views. This may well have been the first real stirrings of the sixth or Decision Initiation; after almost nine months of crossing and recrossing, Saturn moved finally into its “decision” at 15 degrees Scorpio (Taurus-Equinox Sagittarius) on October 6, 1984.
Two of the people I enjoyed stirring the most were my friends Vicki and John; we had endless conversations, wherein I — and the Guides — tickled them into expanding their boundaries. They responded in good grace; they were — and are — beautiful Souls, and the love and trust between us all continued to grow and deepen. Nonetheless, there was some friction, especially between Aquarian Kerry, our youngest and most rebellious member, and John, our oldest and most rigid, who was a Scorpio. Spacious as it was, the apartment was still a little too small for three couples. Even channeling and then helping out with the rent, Kerry and I stayed there too long, and we all breathed a sigh of relief when in October we finally found a place of our own — about two blocks down 18th Street. It was a modest house we had looked at weeks before; the prospective tenant interviewing us had liked it but decided not to rent the house, ceding it to another young couple, Rick and Beth. Graduate students at the University, they were also looking for house-mates, and we all got along well.
They took a one-year lease and we moved into our new house. By now I had become a member of the Seattle Theosophical Society and a frequent patron of their library. I read Gerald Massey’s divinely-inspired but poorly-organized Natural Genesis, numerous books on Theosophy, and attended a Theosophical service of the Liberal Catholic Church, offered by their bishop from Ojai, California. He included a liturgy to the Divine Mother that deeply moved me to copious tears: painful lump in the throat, embarassingly runny nose, the works. I felt the Divine Mother in my heart, blossoming in gratitude at being acknowledged. It was about this time I noticed I could nonjudgementally see the auric fields of others as rich multilayered dramas containing specific life-themes of simultaneous beauty and ugliness, like ongoing multidimensional works of art.
I also began spending a lot of time at the Seattle Public Library, reading Timothy Leary’s Exo-psychology and Neuropolitics, Aleister Crowley’s 777, Francis Hitching’s Earth Magic, various wonderful works by John Michell, and that magnificent classic, Hamlet’s Mill, by de Santillana and Von Decherd. More immediately important, in November I discovered some books by Sondra Ray on rebirthing. This reminded me of the “Prana is Brahman” bliss-qualities of the Atmic realm I had been shown after the Crucifixion; I had not really continued exploring this! Her description of rebirthing was clear and inspiring, and though she recommended learning it from a qualified rebirther, I felt confident I could do it on my own.
I went home and spent about eight hours rebirthing myself. It would have been easier and quicker with another to guide me; I kept spacing out and transcending away whenever I got close to deep areas of cellular fear and pain. I persisted, though, and integrated the birth-trauma, passing through a choking, freezing, immensely rigid terror of death to warm up into a whole new aliveness and bodily bliss. By the time I finished, the whole room reeked of ether, like a hospital; my body had exuded large amounts of old anaesthetic it had picked up somewhere along the way: most likely, when I had my tonsils or wisdom teeth out.
Now I began integrating rebirthing and meditation; they were perfectly complementary. Meditation led to ascension out of the body-mind; rebirthing led to manifestation into and through the body-mind. It became more and more obvious that I had full control over my reality; I merely needed to clear subtle blocks in my body-mind for my manifestation or reality to shift accordingly. I was getting tired of my continued flirtation with poverty, and as I was dwelling on affirmations of what I wanted — prosperity — my subconscious resistance sharpened into a very tight pain between my spine and my left shoulderblade. I began breathing through it, and I was suddenly inside the pain, in a lifetime of acute poverty and fear of starvation. It was terrifying. I continued to breathe through it, and it warmed up and healed into a feeling of utter peace, bliss, and prosperity. I knew this was a major shift.
That evening Kerry and I attended our friend John C.’s birthday party. The room was full Seattle TM’ers that I didn’t know. I began speaking with a few of them, and was filled with a radiant golden enthusiasm that suffused the room as I described that day’s discoveries. Suddenly, I noticed that the entire room of people had reshaped themselves around me! They wanted me to teach them, and I made dozens of counseling/rebirthing appointments. Overnight, I was prosperous, with a counseling practice almost too big to handle. I now charged $60/hour for channeling, and $30/hour for rebirthing.
I greatly enjoyed this work — I was sitting in pure bliss, as I had been while channeling, but now was precisely focused on the client’s body-mind, which I experienced as grounded in the bliss-self we both shared. It was my job to feel and identify the emotional-mental pains the client needed to acknowledge, allowing the client to breathe through these layers of “not-bliss,” and integrate them into bliss. Like me, the clients greatly enjoyed the process and experienced magical improvements in their outer lives, so my counseling practice continued to spread, and I was booked for weeks in advance.
During this time I continued my inner work. I was especially impressed with Sondra Ray’s theories on immortality, and I tried one of her techniques to defuse the unconscious death-urge, saying to myself, “One of the really GREAT things about death is…” and then letting my mind fill in the blank, no matter how silly the response sounded. Some of death’s “payoffs” were: a chance to rest completely, no more responsibilities, and a chance to explore celestial realms. Then I would continue with, “… and I can have that while I am alive.” This shocked my mind into examining possibilities it had previously rejected as impossible, and I would breathe my body into full acceptance of the new fusions. When I was done with this after about an hour, my inner life-light shone so brightly it bounced back off the walls, almost blindingly intense! I taught the technique to my clients as well, and recommended that they read Sondra Ray’s works.
Kerry and I had finally decided to get married on Christmas Night; John and Vicki and Carolyn had lovingly offered their apartment for the ceremony. We had just finished a practice rehearsal there a few days before Christmas when I suddenly felt dizzy and had to lie down. The feelings intensified into anguish; it was as if I were being raped. I rebirthed them; eventually the feelings subsided, and we all had dinner. When we returned to our apartment, we entered chaos — it had been burglarized! I didn’t feel particularly bad, having integrated the feelings while the burglary was in progress. Our house-mates’ losses were insured.
The only thing Kerry and I lost of value was a one-carat diamond ring that had belonged to my paternal grandmother. She had gotten it from her grandfather, Clarence S. Bement, a 19th-century Philadelphian millionaire. He had been a renowned collector of rare books (some of his collection formed a cornerstone of Harvard’s Widener Library) and antique coins (the Sotheby’s catalogue of their sale remains a classic), and had amassed the world’s finest private collection of rare minerals and gems (which now comprise about half of the mineral collection in the New York Museum of Natural History).
My grandmother had passed the ring on to my mother when she got engaged to my father, and my mother had given it to me when I got engaged to Annie. Of a rare and beautiful 19th-century European cut, this was a family heirloom, and Annie had sweetly returned it to me when we divorced. I had asked Kerry to wear it always, but she had left it home that night, and now it was gone. I was saddened, but thought perhaps it was just as well — while a psychically very powerful piece, still the diamond had seen two divorces already! I had of course psychically cleansed it, but still, you never knew …. The burglars hadn’t bothered to take our healing-collection of semi-precious stones. I had continued to buy the odd uncut gem from a wonderful shop downtown in Elliot Square, and had learned a great deal from these stones; a raw sapphire crystal was especially helpful in welcoming me to its understanding of physical form’s intensely dense bliss-structure.
More to the point, I felt the burglary had esoterically been a manifestation of the rift in consciousness between Kerry and me and our house-mate couple — we really didn’t enjoy a lot of soul fusion, the way Kerry and I did with John and Vicki and Carolyn, and I didn’t think our house-mates truly understood our “New Age” approach to life. It certainly must have been a strain on them to see the unending stream of clients coming to and from my room; while I had told them I was a counselor, none of us had expected such an influx of “strangers.” I tried periodically imaging a large bubble of wholeness around the house, but it felt only moderately successful. Also, there was our upcoming marriage — they, who were unmarried, hadn’t expected to live with a married couple. Again, there seemed especially to be friction between Kerry, who was becoming more and more angrily feminist, and Rick, who — like John — was another male Scorpio.
The wedding went ahead as planned: Vicki worked at a florist shop, and she completely transformed their apartment. Huge, gorgeously arranged medieval bouquets flourished everywhere, and Christmas swags of be-ribboned evergreen and laurel hung around every door, along the walls, and on the mantle. Our ceremony, which incorporated Solstice symbolism, was by beeswax candlelight. Carolyn’s daughters were the flower girls, who strewed rose-petals to the strains of Pachelbel’s Canon. Kerry and I had written the ceremony to include Vicki and John, who handed us the glass ewers of red and white wine which Kerry and I then alchemically mingled and drank.
Kerry wore a 1902 ivory silk wedding-gown which my mother had found for us; I wore an antique silk Mandarin’s robe with a dragon on it, which I had unearthed in an antique shop in Seattle. Another friend of ours, Jack Potticary, performed the ceremony. Jack was a high-powered ex-marine, a talented psychic who was teaching courses in creative intuition at large companies like Weyerhauser. His beautiful fiancee performed an expressive dance-piece she composed for us. None of our relatives except Kerry’s father made it to the wedding, which was, after all, on Christmas Night, on the west coast, and rather last-minute. We were surrounded by TM’er friends and clients, and the love they beamed on us was almost overpowering. I breathed it through and stayed in the body this time, though! Afterwards we had eggnog, a lovely three-tiered wedding cake, and a potluck feast. Finally, John and Vicki treated us to a honeymoon night at a charming bed-and-breakfast on Vachon Island.
Since we were now a married couple, Rick and Beth offered us the master bedroom; we were puzzled by their largesse, but accepted. Rick and I both bought MacIntosh computers. His was a top-of-the-line 512k which he got through a UW student-discount; I settled for a slightly-older 128k, which with extra disk-drive and printer came to $1800. Kerry and I both spent a lot of time writing; Kerry was assembling an immense “Onomasticon” — a compendium of names from around the world, and I soon began writing down the new revelations I was getting.
