1984 – 1986 Initiation 6: Decision

INITIATION VI: DECISION (1984-1986): The Tenth State: Shiva Consciousness

Part I

The new revelations resulted from a question I had in meditation. I had read innumerable books on the various magical and religious cosmological systems; surely they all held much truth. But I wanted to get back to basics, to create my own world: What was my truth? I decided to meditate, and not get up until I knew the answer. I was sitting on my bed in Oneness, the Great Absolute That, and I thought, “Yes, well, I know all this is That, and That is all very good, but how did all of this relative world come to pass? How did the One appear to manifest the Many?”

Immediately, the Ocean I was sitting in began to ripple! It then laughed, or sneezed itself into an infinite number of little pieces, like countless shining stars. These stars then started interconnecting in constellations, geometric patterns, of larger and larger groups — so that while there was still only a field of reflections of the One, now there were groupings: a single One, Two Ones; Three Ones; Four Ones, etc.

The very numbering — the Oneness, the Twoness, the Threeness, etc., of each of these clusters was itself different states of consciousness; essentially different Angels. In the flash of a single moment, I was given sutras or verses for the qualities of the first 18 unfoldments of consciousness: from the “Point-source” of One, or “I Am” (Cosmic Consciousness), to a line connecting the “Attention-flow” of Two, or “Thou Art” (God Consciousness; the Astral Kundalini), to the triangle connecting the “Relationship” of Three, or “It Is” (Unity Consciousness; I and Thou are One; fusion with the Mental/Causal Angel).

Next came the Tetrahedron connecting the “Environmental Context” of Four, or “We Are” (the utter Buddhic depth of Brahman Consciousness), then the seeded Tetrahedron connecting the “Creativity” of Five, or “You Are” (the quickened Atmic bliss of Krishna Consciousness). Then came the Octahedron or double-pyramid connecting the “Physical Boundaries” of Six, or “They Are” (the Monadic level of Shiva Consciousness).

Next, the seeded Octahedron embodied the “Incarnation” of Seven, with its central seventh point focusing a triple cross to the outer six vertices (the Logoic level of Christ Consciousness). This appeared to be the pyramid I entered during my subtle-body ascension in the Bahamas. Seeking to unite the three primary Rays — the three inner axes of the centered Octahedron — I entered the point at the center, and flowing up its vertical axis inside I emerged at the topmost vertex which indeed, like all vertices, contains in Universal Space terms a potential “Master-Council” or cluster of twelve radii or Rays.

This was followed by the “Communion” of the Cube (8), the “Regeneration” of the seeded Cube (9), the “Perfection” of the second-order Tetrahedron (10), the “Imperfection,” or “Memory,” of the seeded second-order Tetrahedron (11), and the “Information-Storage” or “Completion” of the Icosahedron (12), which completed one cycle of Consciousness; I quickly saw the relationship of this to the zodiacal unfoldment of the twelve houses of human experience and their twelve planets.

A new cycle began with 13, a higher-order “I Am,” that incorporated Spatio-temporal travel/creativity, and continued up through 18, which, if I remember correctly, was the capacity of the system to forget its own essence, and go into ignorance.

I had long burned to unlock the secrets of levitation and Ascension, and I felt these geometries of consciousness to somehow hold the key. Fascinated by their magical potentials, I started avidly reading both volumes of Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics, and began making models of the various shapes to further explore their properties: first with toothpicks and clay, which quickly collapsed under their own weight; and then with straws and scotch-tape, which worked very well. I found that the 13-pointer was a Vector-Equilibrium (VE) matrix, a figure with a central point equidistantly surrounded by twelve more.

The properties of the VE matrix were utterly riveting; here was the archetypal geometry behind my egg-serpent-stars vision of the spiritual potential of the earth: A sphere of three tiers (two polar triangles of three vertices each and an equatorial seeded-hexagon of six vertices and the center) were the earth’s upper, lower, and middle realms respectively. They were encircled by a zig-zagging series of twelve lines (the serpent, or World-Dragon) that connected all twelve of the VE matrix’s outer vertices (the gates of the celestial Jerusalem; the months of the year). These vertices were connected by twelve radii (the Rays; the branches of the World-Tree; the twelve DNA strands of the immortal body) to the centermost point (the glowing heart of the inner sun, the World-Grail). The twelve radii could be shot from the center out through their twelve vertices or “gates” to connect with Universal Space — my Cantabrigian vision of beams of light shooting out of the serpent-embraced earth-egg to connect with the stars. I felt that if I could completely become this VE Matrix, I would fully master space-time and ascension.

I also received material on the polarities of the Cosmic Egg — it was electric blue and “male” at its north pole; deep red and “female” at its south; while a golden band flowed around its equator in a kind of Solar balance. This golden band seemed to be related to the Solar Wheel of the Year, about which I was now receiving so much information. I also saw the Universe of Space-Time as a giant disk covered with a gorgeous pattern of small jewel-like points of colored light, which would flare and dim in sequence to produce the illusion of movement and progression through time.

Now, as I walked around Seattle, I dicovered I could simultaneously time-travel in my subtle body. As the passage of the days accelerated, the sky would flicker light-dark-light-dark, faster and faster, finally settling into a uniform grey. I noticed a thick golden band appear overhead in the sky, like a giant ring around the earth. This band wobbled; about every second it would fall towards the horizon, and then rise back overhead again.

With a start, I realized the golden band was the sun itself, appearing to spin so rapidly around the earth that it had become a single light-streak. The ring’s wobbling marked the sun’s climb and fall through the seasons; in the space of a second I was traversing a year. As I walked, I saw phantom trees suddenly appear, grow, and disappear before me; buildings climbed and fell; the very earth itself flowed beneath my feet: all this while I was walking around, experiencing “normal” reality, as well. The dual time-flow was a property of consciousness of the VE Matrix, which was really the Monadic-body of the Creator-Self, the Imaginer of Space-Time.

I was now completely on fire with these revelations, and closed down my counseling practice, referring my clients to another rebirther I felt was capable. The months flew by as I began working on this material full-time, waking, dreaming, and sleeping. I spent all my sleep-time in the celestial ashrams, temples, and libraries gathering information, and when I awoke, would spend nearly all of my waking hours remembering and synthesizing this material, and writing it down. I painted erotically-charged pictures of various forms of the Goddess and of my various geometrical insights. I was particularly fascinated with the 12 color-Rays, and saw them as a council of Atmic Demiurges, or Archetypes, each with its own specialty. Now, instead of being an Atmic Master, I could see the potentials of being the Monadic cluster of 12 Atmic Masters. I began to identify with a figure I had read about in Alice Bailey’s books — the Avatar of Synthesis.

My meditations deepened. Now, I would close my eyes and feel my base chakra sitting as if in a lotus, which somehow incorporated the entire world. At the same time, my Higher Self was sitting on my head, in the lotus of my own crown chakra; I could easily move my identification back and forth between these two selves; more and more they merged into one. I now began operating in concert with the council of Masters I had briefly joined while in the Bahamas. We would sit together, open to the essence of Divinity that was pouring through us — what did Divinity wish to express today? — and decide how to manifest that Divine Idea into earth, creating a physical “metaphor” for Divinity’s emotion so that those who had forgotten the subtler realms could still participate in the Divine plan. This energy would pour down through my body, out my base chakra and manifest into earth, creating the physical-world event in a matter of two or three days.

The first Divine emotion that I/we felt was a kind of Divine anger; we decided this would best be manifested as an erupting Volcano. The eruption took place a few days later in Mexico; no one was harmed. Another one I remember well was a Divine irritation that humans were treating nuclear weaponry so lightly; I/we reviewed plans to explode a missile in its silo. We noticed that several people would die as a reult; was this all right? We looked at their “dossiers:” yes; these Souls were willing to die in this manner. So be it. A few days later, I read of the missile accident in Germany that killed several soldiers, and was struck with guilt: I had caused that! Seeing the results from the human perspective was so different than seeing them from the Master’s. I decided not to remain on this level; I felt as if I would become a discarnate God if I continued on that path; and I wanted something which incorporated more humanity. The last manifestation I/we did was one of Divine Love which appeared two days later as a UFO that flew alongside a Soviet passenger plane for some time, flooding it with a beam of bright green light.

Since that time, I have come to realize that this level of “Mastery” is one that all humans visit unconsciously, in their deep-sleep bodies, to help co-create this combined masterpiece that is life on Earth. To the degree that we are willing to take full responsibility for our entire reality, we can consciously remember and assume our Higher-Self Mastery.

I was walking down the sidewalk of East Fifteenth Street one day, coming home from one of my frequent visits to the Seattle Art Museum, when I felt so strongly like the Christ that I glanced up at a large raven sitting on the nearest telephone pole. “Am I who I think I am?” I mentally asked the bird, not really expecting any reply. The bird gave me a piercing glance as I passed him by, and then swooped off the pole, flying down to barely clear my head and then up, alighting again on the wire a bit ahead of me. As I passed him again he repeated the swoop, again and again and again as I strode down the block! “YES! YES! YES! YES!” the bird appeared to be saying. “All right, all right! I get it! Thank you!” I mentally replied, and the bird instantly flew off elsewhere.

The exchange quite took me aback; this was before I had read any books on animal communication like Machaelle Small Wright’s Kinship with all Life, and while I had heard of such feats by Indian yogis and various saints, still they had always seemed somehow too exotic to incorporate into my reality. I had now glimpsed a doorway to communion on a scale I had not dared to desire.

In the late Spring of 1985, Kerry’s mother telephoned us from Governor’s Harbor. Nearly everything the Guides had predicted about the healing center in the Bahamas had come to pass now. After we left, she had started attending church services, and had met one of Governor’s Harbor’s richest men: a giant young Bahamian who was in the construction business. There was a deep connection between them; he had fallen madly in love with her, had shown her the best sex she had ever had or could even imagine, and had offered her several gorgeous Eleutheran houses for a healing center — mansions which some Germans had commissioned him to build and then reneged on. She loved him too, but was wary of his Scorpio jealousy, and felt some strings attached to his offer. She wasn’t interested in seeing other men, but her “main man” was God, and her lover was jealous of God.

By the way, she continued, she was curious: She had been wondering who she was in her immediate past life, and at that moment a child’s school-paper floated by with the name ROMMEL written across the top. Did that mean anything to me? “Oh…my…..God!” I said. “The Desert Fox! That explains the tank I saw around you!” I told her what I knew of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the German tank-commander of the Afrika Korps in World War II. I described the visions that had so puzzled me in the Bahamas, and remembered the feeling I had had that we were two generals butting heads. Another click: “Then I must have been Goering …” This really fit. I knew Goering had been Air-Marshall of the Luftwaffe and had been declared Hitler’s successor; this would explain my old feelings of following the Messianic Hitler, providing him with a cadre of flyers, being promised his kingdom, and eventually being betrayed. I immediately took out biographies of Goering from the Seattle Library, and pored over them.

Many small, circumstantial details — none convincing by themselves — seemed to fit together to hint at a possible soul-survival. I had always “known” as a child that my “real” name was Herman; Goering’s first name was Hermann. I was called “Gorey” as a child by my classmates; my long-suffering brothers had called me “little Hitler.” Photographs of Goering as a young man, before he became obese, eerily resembled photographs of me as a young child. Between the ages of eight and ten, I became engrossed with World War I biplanes, sketching and making models of the Allies’ Nieuports, Spads, Sopwith Camels and S.E.5a’s, and the German Albatros and Pfalz D.IIIs and Fokker D.VIIs. I had avidly read about Baron von Richthofen’s Flying Circus. After von Richthofen died, the leadership of the elite squadron fell to his successor — Hermann Goering, who was a highly-decorated World-War-I flying ace. I have never piloted a plane in this lifetime, but have always loved flight-simulators and shown an immediate instinctive grasp of them. During World War II, Goering had supervised the bombing of allied Europe; as a child I would generally approach my brothers’ miniature twig-houses with the drone of a bomber, and callously drop rocks on their creations.

Goering had served as Hitler’s roving ambassador, doing everything he could to avert the impending war; as a child I had been sure I would enter the foreign service, and had also detested war, and even competitive sports, until I started enjoying baseball at the age of nine. Goering had also systematically dismantled the democratic structure of Germany’s Reichstag, so that Hitler could come to power. I had always felt like a global citizen, and had not been moved by American patriotics, nor by my teachers’ panegyrics to American democracy. It is only as an adult that I have came to value America’s unique gifts to the world. Goering also established the dreaded Gestapo, or secret police; I had always enjoyed starting spy organizations among my childhood friends, practicing techniques of surveillance, shadowing, message-drops, codes and ciphers, etc. The last one I started, circa age twelve, was called TALONS — The Agency for the Liquidation Of Neighborhood Sin.

In my boyhood I always loved looking at fine art — Titian, Reubens, Raphael; I had finally majored in Art History at Harvard, afterwards working in the Fogg Art Museum. Goering had been addicted to collecting art masterpieces, first buying the works at reduced prices from Jews his Nazis had forced to emigrate, then looting the art museums of conquered Europe to fill his own private art museum. He was also Master of the Hunt and of the German forests, setting aside large natural preserves. As a child I had repeatedly made my own museums — usually of natural history, though the first and most ambitious also included a large diorama of a World-War-I airplane dogfight over France.

During his often-stormy meetings with Rommel, he would hold a handful of jewels — much as I had done with my healing-stones in the Bahamas — and Rommel regarded his effeminate behavior with barely-disguised contempt — much as Nancy had regarded me in the Bahamas. Even our different counseling-styles fit, as Nancy pointed out: Like tank-commander Rommel, she was interested in making horizontal “breakthroughs” (note the term’s martial overtones), while I delighted in providing “air support,” working in the vertical dimension and providing general overviews.

Even amid the downfall of Germany, Goering had attempted to maintain a high morale among his war-weary compatriots. This relentless cheer was also a part of my own make-up; my brothers often complained that I smiled all the time. After he was condemned to hang as a war-criminal at Nuremburg in 1946, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide; throughout my youth I found it most difficult to swallow pills, becoming irrationally terrified as they reached the back of my throat.

The biographies also contained photographs of Goering’s first wife, the young Karin von Rosen, a languorous Swedish baroness who divorced her first husband to elope with Goering. The pictures of Karin were the very image of Kerry, capturing her psychic atmosphere as well as her physical likeness. I noted too that like Kerry, Karin had delighted in playing the piano and making desserts.

A final clincher came a few years later, as I was watching some footage of World War II on educational TV. It included actual movies of Goering in the Reichstag, and I gasped as I watched him dance back and sideways to make room for Hitler’s passage. Even in his obesity, he moved exactly like me, something I have never seen in anyone else.

But he was a Nazi! I had never hated, or even disliked, any group of people — how could I possibly theorize a soul-connection with Hitler’s second-in-command? I read that some biographers, at least, did not consider Goering a total monster — he was not a rabid anti-Semite, and had saved many of his second wife’s Jewish friends from the concentration camp or worse. He was certainly no Oskar Schindler, though, and I had to come to terms with his potential for evil in me. He was at best a weak and ruthlessly ambitious man, who had let himself be subsumed in an enormous evil. Like him, I had taken the crucial first-step of believing that “outsiders” — in this case non-meditators — were subtly inferior to ourselves, the enlightened “elite” whose job it was to save the world from itself via a simplistic world-plan. And wasn’t it this same mind-set that so disturbed me in religious fundamentalists? I again noted wryly that I had judged most harshly those very issues in another that I had not resolved in myself.

I had never understood Hitler’s power over his subordinates; now as I psychometrized early photos of Hitler talking with Goering, I was bemused by the deep bond of charismatic love that flowed from Hitler to Goering. This reminded me of the charisma I felt from Maharishi, and again the parallels between the two movements struck me: Hitler one-pointedly followed an idealistic Master-Plan, reminiscent of Maharishi’s World Plan. Hitler taught that his own followers were the elite, and so did Maharishi. At the same time, Hitler privately saw his followers as pawns, and so (I believed) did Maharishi. Both Hitler and Maharishi were devoted occultists. There were many who said Hitler was a conscious channel for a great power; certainly Maharishi was also a conscious channel for a great power.

Despite these eerie similarities, the overall effects of the two movements were diametrically opposed; Hitler’s message was overall one of hatred and enslavement, while Maharishi’s was generally one of love and freedom. In both their samskaric similarities and their compensatory oppositions I sensed a subtle connection; but perhaps in the larger sense both movements merely served as illustrations of cult-mind, in all its potential for ecstatic idealism and for horrible degradation. Starting around this time, I began to read everything I could find on the rise and fall of various cult-leaders — Jim Jones, Rajneesh, Prabhupada, L. Ron Hubbard — to try to comprehend the cult-mind. I too was charismatic; there was a large part of me that still wanted to be a Maharishi, though I always pulled back and away when I saw someone’s too-ready tendency to worship me.

I’m not sure why I was so obsessed with finding parallel details between Goering’s life and mine; partly because this was the only possible past-life I found that contained physical evidence of such details; Goering’s life had been so exhaustively researched and documented. I was aware that perhaps such parallels could be found between any two lives, related or not, but I still found the circumstantial evidence electrifying. To this day I do not know whether Goering was actually a former lifetime of mine, or whether this whole Nazi introspection was simply the need to understand my capacity for evil. As I was writing this section, I came across a quote by Mother Theresa to the effect that it was not until she had seen an Adolf Hitler in herself, that she had dedicated herself to doing good. She makes a beautiful point, but for me it is still more a question of learning to understand evil in oneself, that one learn not to judge it harshly in others, destroying one’s link to Divinity’s unconditional love. It is precisely when one stops reactively judging it, that one no longer unconsciously acts it out. I have contacted Goering many times in meditation, but it is easy to contact any soul; they need not be a part of one’s own soul-grouping. Regardless, I have done my best to lighten and heal the incredible density of Goering’s body-mind.

Meanwhile, I wondered if my continued bouts of poverty might stem from an unconscious soul-guilt of Goering’s greed and larceny. The problem seemed very complexly multi-layered, and I did not always enjoy the clarity of mind or the grace to heal it immediately.

NEXT: Part II

INITIATION VI: DECISION (1984-1986): The Tenth State: Shiva Consciousness

Part II

About late August of 1985, Nancy came to stay with us for awhile, having ended her affair with her Bahamian lover; his smouldering jealousy had finally erupted into violent rage, and she had decided to escape. She had done a lot of teaching there, and we had all experienced a lot of growth there, but we couldn’t say the center had materialized as we thought it would! Kerry, Nancy, and I now had a great time together, but Nancy’s powerful presence further disturbed the precarious truce between the two housemate couples. To our embarrassment, we also were two days late with our September rent payment — the first and last time this ever happened — and Rick and Beth seized this excuse to ask us to leave, deciding to take the whole house for themselves when our year was up. I was angered by their decision, but had to admit that it was undoubtedly for the best.

By October Nancy had returned to Fairfield, and Kerry and I moved down the hill to 11th Street, where we took an apartment for ourselves. Our new place gave us ample privacy, yet was in a house that was full of other New-Age explorers. Though closer to the busy downtown, it had a peaceful back-yard with a fig-tree.

It was here that I was finally inducted into the mysteries of Dungeons & Dragons; Steve M. tried his hand as DM for the rest of us: Kerry, John, Vicki, and me. We spent most of the time constructing our characters, but when we finally played, I was immensely moved by the game’s archetypal power. I felt as if I were dreaming with my eyes open! It seemed to me that this was how reality itself was constructed — with a group of souls assembling and agreeing to dream it together, and then incarnating as characters specifically constructed to cooperate in exploring that reality’s potentials. The implications for group-magic seemed very exciting! I was titillated by the possibility of using the material I was working on as a framework for a role-playing game, so that the players could actually learn the laws of magic and get to know their inner Council of Masters while they were playing. The potential has continued to haunt me over the years. We only played that once, however; another twelve years would roll by before I played again.

We were pretty happy, but continued to experience poverty; we paid the rent and the bills, but for a while we had no food. I was seeing a few clients, but not quite enough to pay all the expenses my trust-check didn’t cover. We hadn’t mentioned our plight to anyone, but our good friend Carolyn gave us about eight bags of grains of various kinds: rice, soy, millet, wheat, amaranth, etc. We thanked her and Divinity gratefully, and we lived for about a week on pan-fried bread. Shortly afterwards, Kerry went to work for her favorite company in Seattle, Pacific Desserts. She was much happier, and our money problems were over.

I had continued rebirthing myself over the months, and the process had become easier and easier as more old trauma was integrated and healed. I had recalled many suppressed layers of fear and pain, and I now had full conscious memory of myself emerging from my mother’s womb, feeling massaged by the birth-process as I emerged into a cluster of doctors — they seemed almost like a constellation of stars to me — and then being lifted up by my heels and spanked into breathing. Were my subtle-body ascension experiences — passing through the vibrating portal, emerging amidst a cluster of masters — distorted memories of my own physical birth? While the theory held a tempting simplicity, and certainly a Freudian would explain them thus, still it did not seem entirely true to me; perhaps all births — physical and spiritual — shared a certain archetypal deep-structure, but that did not mean they were identical. Now, during that Autumn, much of the time I felt as if my whole body were being completely accepted and massaged by the surrounding Universe: the loving vagina of the Goddess.

In late November a rebirthing-client of mine invited me to a meeting that Sondra Ray was holding in her apartment in Seattle. I had by now read and used many of Sondra Ray’s books in my counseling practice, and I wanted to meet her to express my gratitude for her work in the rebirthing field. Her apartment was luxurious and spacious, with beautiful views over Seattle. We were served salmon, which I ate with gusto; ever since the Bahamas, I now occasionally varied my vegetarian diet with chicken and fish. We sat around and shared our rebirthing experiences; I excitedly shared mine, and nodded when Sondra said some of us might even be experiencing some rebirthing memories at that very moment. I was indeed; I felt as if I were in my mother’s womb, and could feel her heartbeat. Sondra Ray was as enthusiastic in person as she was in print, and I enjoyed her presence greatly.

The tenor of the meeting soon shifted slightly, however. Sondra Ray was teaching a new course and we were invited to participate. The cost was something like $300. I had obviously made a good beginning already; wouldn’t I like to sign up? “No,” I told her regretfully. Why not? Hmmm, I thought, looking inside myself. The money? A client’s appointment already booked for that weekend? Both true, but not the root of the matter. I simply didn’t feel that I needed any more courses. I said to her, “I am not moved.” I felt on the one hand like a very small child — perhaps this was my baby-self, wanting to stay in the womb — and on the other, like an incarnation of Shiva, pointing out that He was the Unmoved One. “You are not moved?” she asked me incredulously. I looked inside again. That was all Shiva had to say on the matter. I repeated, “I am not moved,” with an apologetic smile. “Hmp!” she said, and moved to speak with someone else.

At the close of 1985, I was still deeply immersed in unfolding the Canon, painting countless watercolors with calligraphic text to illustrate and explain the various sacred geometries: Now, I was consciously dwelling all the time in the realms I had briefly glimpsed on my return through my third eye in my first Kundalini experiences. By this time, I had evolved the twelve Buddhic Archangels of the Months, discovering the Planet and Sign for each of the twelve color-Rays, and I was now further subdividing them into a calendar of 144 Causal or Solar Angels, the symbols whereof I was trying to discover (I had most of them, but could not establish the correct sound-values for the Angels of the Atmic Realm). Furthermore, I had clearly felt there were to be twelve healing centers erected on the twelve major power-spots of the world: one center for each color-Ray. Where were these to be?

Jack Potticary and his fiancee had gone north, to live in the reclusive compound of investment-millionaire Dick Tuck on Orcas Island in the San Juans. Orcas was a wildly beautiful place, and home to many millionaires. Another was Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, and many other best-sellers; his ultra-light plane could often be spotted flying high overhead. Kerry and I visited Orcas with John and Vicki, and we were introduced to the beautiful Madrona Point and several other power spots by shaman Jim Hardman, who had lived on the north shore of Orcas all his life. Somewhat resembling a mythical faun, Jim was a very talented potter, painter, and New-Age music composer. His mate, coincidentally, was my favorite teacher from my TM-Teacher Training Course back at Livingston Manor, the humorous and delightfully-human Carol O’Brien. John and Vicki were enraptured by Orcas, and ended up moving there a few months later. I too was most impressed with the sanctity of the island; I felt Orcas was to be the Lunar (Cancer) healing center of the world, containing the global temple-library. When we returned to Seattle, I bought a globe and began inscribing a VE Matrix on it, to establish the locations of the other eleven major gates.

During the first months of 1986, I became sensitive to the VE-Matrix as a system of four great-circle ley-lines surrounding the globe, intersecting at the twelve “concentrative” power-spots. Each of these power-spots was to center one of the twelve major color-Rays. I stretched and tied additional strings around the globe, and discovered 14 additional “distributive” power-spots, centered in each of the VE Matrix’s 14 faces. Now, I would often feel myself skating along these ley-lines, almost like monorails of light for my consciousness as I traversed the globe. I was aware that psychics would “see” my conciousness as one or a group of UFO’s flowing over these ley-lines. I also received a brief glimpse of the entire starry universe as my own body, but its awesome poignancy was too intense to sustain; I dropped it quickly. This all may have been the beginning of my seventh or Resurrection Initiation; Saturn was “resurrected” or “anchored” at 7.5 degrees of Sagittarius (Taurus-Equinox Capricorn) on January 27, 1986, but reversed and crossed retrograde on May 13, not finally recrossing until October 24, 1986.

At the same time, I was personally plagued more and more by flashes of Kerry as a White Goddess, an aloof Snow Queen with bone-white skin, of poetic inspiration but also of freezing hauteur and denial. These powerful visions disturbed me; I didn’t know what to do with them, so I ignored them, for the most part. Our relationship seemed overall to flourish; our souls continued to dwell in the same celestial realms, while our bodies experienced ever-greater trust in Tantric fusions that often were multi-faceted, involving several dimensions or lifetimes simultaneously. Several times during love-making we were also both aware of ourselves as Priest-King and Priestess-Queen in ancient Mesopotamia, making love as a sacred rite to increase the crop-yield. As I was making love with Kerry, the ancient Priest-King was loving his Priestess-Queen and ploughing the fertile earth simultaneously, reverently watching her body ripen into sheaves of grain.

At other times our sexes were reversed. As my femaleness was well-developed, so was Kerry’s maleness. While I, though, was firmly heterosexual, she was strongly attracted to women. She had experimented a little as a teenager, and knew she would make love with some, one day. I found the idea exciting; sometimes we joked about a menage-a-trois, and spoke approvingly of open marriage. I don’t think either of us suspected, though, that by my thirtieth birthday in March we actually would find ourselves deeply enmeshed in a threesome.

NEXT: Part III

INITIATION VI: DECISION (1984-1986): The Tenth State: Shiva Consciousness

Part III

Around my thirtieth birthday, Kerry and I incorporated one of our closest friends into a menage-a-trois. A Scorpio, she was a divorced mother of two, around ten years older than I, and 18 years older than Kerry. She had been a rebirthing-client of mine for some months, until around the new year — I was then habitually seeing her in her Goddess form, seated on a subtle lotus, and felt I could take her no further as a counselor. We mutually decided to end the counseling relationship, but remained very close friends. While visiting her house one day in March, I noticed a rich, warm, erotic energy flowing from her towards Kerry. On the way home I mentioned this to Kerry, who said she would be interested in exploring that. Kerry had always been interested in expressing her bisexuality someday; now seemed like the perfect time. We spoke with our friend a few days later, and before we knew it, we were a threesome.

For several months, this was heavenly — the flow of love between us all was perfectly triangular, and would simply build and build as it circulated among us. There seemed to be no end to its depths. After lovemaking we would go out to eat together, feeling that we shared a secret others would not understand; it was if we were a sovereign nation of three. Traditional mores seemed simply irrelevant, no longer applicable to us. Our friend also enjoyed exploring her bisexuality, and her face took on a slightly more masculine cast over the next few months.

Her love often felt very maternal to me; it was rich, oceanic, and nourishing. Unfortunately, this threw the White Goddess/Snow Queen aspects of Kerry into still stronger relief; it was if I had somehow assigned my two lovers the separate roles of Good Mother/Bad Mother. I could actually see myself projecting these images onto them from out of my own lower abdomen, but that didn’t help much. One day in June, our friend invited us to visit for an evening of lovemaking, and Kerry declined, insisting that I go anyhow, though. She swore she wasn’t jealous, and I believed her — she took great pride in being a free-thinking Aquarian. This worried me: it seemed to be changing the rules too much; I did not wish to participate in adultery. I went, with a divided heart. We made love, but I felt too guilty to enjoy myself much with our friend; the dynamics were different. I came home a short while later. Kerry seemed aloofly puzzled when I told her of my feelings of guilt.

She, meanwhile, had become good friends with a male thirty-something Libran co-worker at Pacific Desserts; they shared a whole world together of rich food and sensual dining that simply wasn’t part of my nature. Kerry suggested that we introduce her co-worker and our threesome friend; perhaps they would hit it off together. We went out on a kind of double-date; our friend seemed puzzled and pained by our efforts; she evidently felt no particular chemistry with him. I found myself protectively walking and talking with her, while Kerry paired off with him behind us: the two water-trines in front; the two air-trines in back. This was a turning-point in our relationship. Kerry began spending more and more evenings with her co-worker, leaving me to be alone in our apartment or to be with our friend. While I occasionally went out with her still — as we had done while a threesome, now she and I sometimes still went hot-tubbing with other friends of ours — I no longer made love with her, and found myself choosing to spend more and more time by myself; I could not in good conscience go out with our friend simply to distract myself from the pain I was now feeling.

As Kerry’s and her co-worker’s relationship deepened beyond platonic into romantic and sexual, I scanned my emotional body to see what was happening. While rationally I was in favor of open marriage, emotionally I found it excruciatingly painful; I was wracked with jealousy. It was obvious to me that this was a replay of Annie’s affair; that I had not done my homework fully in processing my own unconscious motives in co-creating that adultery, and so here it was again. Hm! Beneath the layers of anger and jealousy, there was still the eternal hum of bliss. As long as I had that, I would let myself feel my other emotions completely, and finish this pattern once and for all.

I found myself watching “who” was in pain in me. That “me” seemed to be about two years old, in frantic pain as “Mother” Kerry chose “Father” co-worker over me. How unoriginal! I was abashed to find myself suffering from Freud’s famous Oedipal complex; I had always thought I was above all that. I suffered this child-me’s acute unworthiness; his fevered certainty that Kerry found her new lover preferable in every way to me.

What most angered this child-me was that he — I — had absolutely no control over Kerry whatsoever. Nothing worked. No matter how much I told her I disapproved; how much I pleaded or yelled; how much I tried giving her what her lover gave her, taking her to romantic restaurants for dinner and paying lovingly close attention to her, she still kept seeing him. She was going to do what she pleased, whether I cared or not. It pained me to see that she was deadened, lifeless, around me, while the mere thought of seeing her lover filled her with light-hearted effervescence. Why couldn’t I give her that? I grudgingly had to let her follow her own bliss, much as it pained me. Oddly, much of my anger seemed to be part of a drama she needed; I would find myself screaming on the phone in utter rage when she called to say she would not be home that night, to find the anger completely gone as I hung up — just switched off when she could no longer hear it.

Meanwhile, as Kerry came home with another male’s scent, wrapped in another’s auric field, I found I could no longer make love with her. She said her lover was interested in including me in a menage-a-trois with them. I refused. I liked him but didn’t respect him; he was an alcoholic, and I couldn’t stand the emotional qualities Kerry was bringing home with her, when she finally did come home. To be honest, I probably would have felt the same with any man; I had no particular homosexual leanings. In retrospect, I feel it is at least possible that her lover was a reincarnation or soul-relative of Kerry/Karin’s first husband, the Swedish baron, whom she had abandoned to elope with me/Goering. Wouldn’t that be a perfect karmic balancing!

Several times I found myself stalking them, spying on them; they loved to roller-skate in Greenwood Park. I once met them face-to-face on the sidewalk. Surprised, they said “hi;” my face flushed in rage and humiliation as I returned their greeting as civilly as I could. Kerry told me later that her lover had mentioned that I seemed angry. He actually thought I approved of their relationship! This blew me away. Air signs!

As June crept into July, I discovered a new herbal compound at the health-food store. It looked like a little packet of soft road-tar. It tasted of licorice. It was called “Competition Leather” and marketed as an energy-supplement for athletes. Made in Hawaii from a whole plethora of Chinese herbs including Dragon’s Blood, various mushrooms, and several kinds of ginseng, it opened an inner throttle to levels I had never experienced. Something like an immense adrenalin-surge, or a rush of Kundalini, it also lit up myriads of tiny micro-chakras in my subtle-body, so that I felt something like an animated Christmas tree.

By late July, I found myself jogging around the Reservoir every day a few blocks from our apartment; this helped me process and smooth out my emotional turmoil around Kerry’s affair. I increased my jogging by 1/2 mile every day, levelling off when I reached four miles after a week. At this point, I took some “Competition Leather” just before jogging. As I finished my run just at twilight, something impelled me to sprint the last leg of the oval. I shifted “gears” up to a sprint, and suddenly felt a large subtle cord running from my navel out ahead of me, off somewhere in the distance. Suddenly, the sprinting became effortless, and I shifted up to another “gear” I had never known. It was like horizontal flying; my feet barely touched the ground in an odd gait like a roadrunner’s as I glided along the subtle cord; the trees beside me streaked by as if I were in a car. I seemed to be going easily twice as fast as I had ever sprinted. I found, though, that I could not turn the corner of the oval; the cord went straight ahead. I reluctantly let go of the flow and stopped as quickly as I could; I had run out of the oval and across the street before I could fully stop; luckily there was no traffic! I believed this horizontal-flying phenomenon to be identical to what certain monks in Tibet have practiced for centuries; thereafter I termed it the “Tibetan stride.”

When I jogged again the next night, the process repeated itself as I shifted up from jogging to sprinting to the Tibetan stride. I was now very excited, as I felt that the “Competition Leather” was in large part responsible this breakthrough. It had felt as if I were very close to flying, and I knew that no TM’er had yet succeeded in actually levitating. Perhaps the “Competition Leather” might just push them over the hump! I was fed up with waiting for Kerry to come back to me; I now felt I deserved better than this. Perhaps it was time to go back to Fairfield for a while, and introduce the TM-sidhas to “Competition Leather.”

I mentioned my feelings to Kerry, and she agreed it would be good for me to go to Fairfield. I telephoned the “Competition Leather” company, and asked if they needed a representative in Iowa. They were happy to have me introduce their product there; I was given a wholesale price and a sample-pack of various wares. By August of 1986 I was off to Fairfield.

Deplaning in Iowa City’s airport, I caught a limousine to Fairfield that the University had provided for some new students coming to M.I.U. It was odd; while I knew the tribal rituals and code-words of the TM’ers thoroughly, I now felt like an imposter; I had not used my mantra since my Crucifixion into Brahman in 1982.

On Kerry’s mother’s recommendation, I spent a few days with Steve and Annie Miller, who were old friends and sometime students of Carla Gordan’s, and fringe members of my own Fairfield healing-circle. Steve now had his own channeling and counseling practice. Ruefully I explained to them that Kerry and I had often spoken of open marriage, that I had drawn Kerry into a menage-a-trois with another woman, and then freaked out when she had wanted one with another man. I knew I had been unfair to Kerry, but I couldn’t help how I felt. They were compassionate but incredulous; Steve lost no time in spreading this hot new gossip around town!

After several days Steve and Annie kindly helped me find a small guest-room to rent in the nearby house of Don Porter, a TM Governor who had been expelled from the Movement when he became a channel and New-Age counselor. He was going home to Canada for a few months. Luckily the room was already furnished; all I had with me were my clothes, some herb samples, and tapes of my favorite music: Bach, Grieg, Chopin, Mozart, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, the Beatles, and folksinger Gordon Bok. Don was renting his master bedroom to Gene Garfin, who had begun meditating in 1967, was a professional drummer, and knew the Beach Boys personally, having grown up in Laguna Niguel. Gene too was a channeler, for an entity called Vywamus. In fact, he would be channeling Vywamus that very evening.

Gene said he was awed to meet me, and was somewhat afraid to channel for me! “Why?” I asked, astonished. He explained. Fairfield had changed a lot in four years; the people we had taught to channel and to develop their subtle gifts had in turn taught others who had taught others; unbeknownst to me I was now a legend here, having been Fairfield’s first verbal channeler and in a sense the “grandfather” or param-guru of scores of channelers and counselors I had never even met.

From being a town full of fear, where meditators were wary of even admitting they had read non-TM material, Fairfield was now rife with excitement; countless channels and counselors had begun openly exploring and sharing their eclectic discoveries. At present, the newest “discovery” was the Tibetan Foundation, which acknowledged a pantheon of channeled entities, including Vywamus, who was supposed to be a kind of Higher-Self of our planetary Logos. I didn’t know it then, but the Tibetan Foundation was rooted in some of my own favorite studies — the Alice Bailey material.

I did my best to allay Gene’s fears, adding that I really didn’t channel much anymore, and I attended the session he and Vywamus gave to about twenty people. The topic was upcoming earth-changes; Vywamus was counseling people to drop their fear and follow their intuitions; they would be guided to safety. I felt my customary anger and impatience when in the presence of a Master I wasn’t personally channeling, and abruptly asked him why he didn’t teach them to take full responsibility for their co-creation by breath-work, affirmation, and visualization; after all, we were actually making these earth-changes ourselves!

Vywamus conceded my point, but smilingly noted that I appeared impatient. “Yes, I am!” I replied. Thus far, I had not completely integrated and healed the pain of my tendency toward angry impatience, which had always nagged at me, but had deepened after learning to levitate, and had exploded on Maharishi’s ill-fated New Delhi course. I was not ashamed of the tendency; somehow I thought it was appropriate. However, hearing my own complacent admission sowed a seed in me: perhaps there was a better way…? Like me, Gene was a semi-trance channeler, and I hoped he would not take my arguments with Vywamus personally, disrupting his connection with the Master! He didn’t, and the session ended well.

Currently, the latest thing on many people’s minds was the “Soul-Merge” — after Gene’s channeling I must have been asked half a dozen times if I had experienced it yet. I had to say I didn’t know; I was unfamiliar with the terminology, and people were a little hazy in describing the experience. I suspected it might be identical to the fusion with one’s Solar Angel which I had undergone some seven years prior; this turned out to be correct.

Shortly after we became house-mates, Gene held a course in Tibetan overtone chanting, offering material that he had learned from Jill Purce — wife of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, whose ground-breaking book on morphogenetic fields I had recently read. I was one of four students. We quickly learned the basics and were soon immersed in bliss, breathing deeply and carefully emitting the eerie harmonics of overtone chanting. Gene told us that overtones were responsible for our discernment of the various vowels; and that moving the tongue from front to back produced the overtones corresponding to I-E-A-O-U, which the Tibetans associated with five chakras from crown to base. He further pointed out that running the tongue back and forth in one complete cycle produced I-E-A-O-U-O-A-E-I, which he equated with YAHWEH. This reawakened my interest in the Solar Calendar; here was the information I had been missing on how the sacred geometries of the Monadic Realm vibrated into the bliss of the Atmic Realm.

At the close of the course, each of us in turn sat surrounded by the other four, in a quincunx, and simply listened while the other four chanted his name over and over. When my turn came to sit amidst my name-chanting, I found myself rising out of the body, up to a circle of four Divine Beings, who were pouring their combined spiritual force into the center of their ring. This force coalesced to make — Me! I was conceived among them as a huge column of white light, which then poured down into my body as a conscious Avatar. I felt utterly purified, transformed; a childlike innocence had completely dissolved my characteristic impatience. The egg of my being now embraced the entire Universe; even with eyes open in Don’s living-room, I could clearly perceive my boundaries embracing the countless galaxies within myself.

I stayed in this innocence for about a week after the course ended; during this time I had absolutely no preferences as to what to do or where to go, and Gene and I became good friends as he showed me his world. It seemed he intimately knew everyone in Fairfield. Gene was a large, earthy, funny Gemini, maintaining an ongoing stream of mischievous patter that had me laughing almost continuously. We spent a great deal of time chanting together, glorying in the spontaneous overtone harmonies that Krishna danced between us.

He was endearingly open about his vulnerabilities and feelings; once when he was angered at something I had done, he sat down with me and told me so; his unblaming honesty was so beautiful that where I had always felt threatened by men’s anger — my dad, almost as huge a man as Gene was, had been a “dry alcoholic,” moody and at times terrifyingly abusive — I now felt the solid warmth of Gene’s love behind his anger, and could not help but laugh in delight. He grinned and laughed too, and his anger evaporated. He had boundary-walls, but they never seemed to fully close off our connectedness. I had frequent memory-flashes of Gene and me in priests’ robes in an Atlantean temple, teaching our Initates with crystals and chanting.

The sense of personal mastery deepened; once, I was acutely feeling the hot flat bleakness of late-summer Iowa, when I remembered: Time and space were illusions! I could be anywhere I wished! Instantly, my subtle-body was in Babaji’s ashram in the Himalayas — such bliss; such instant fulfillment of Soul! Of course I had often travelled to these places in dream-state; I had never thought to do so while awake. My Iowa-self walked outside, enjoying the grass under my bare feet. I looked down, and my eyes widened: My feet were a Master’s feet! They weren’t mine; they glowed. Had they actually belonged to someone else I would have bowed reverently.

Meanwhile, my frequent phone-calls to Kerry weren’t going so well; over the months our separate stances had hardened into opposition. She continued to see her lover regularly, and in addition to enjoying fine food and sex with him, was also spending a lot of time playing the piano. She was angry with me: I seemed to be waiting for her to change. This was true; I was waiting for her to tire of him. I had been completely celibate now for four months, waiting for her to come back to me. While I was happy that she seemed content, still her intransigence angered me: what kind of marriage did we have when we were spending all of our time with others? I told her that I now realized I needed something more traditional, a wife who actually liked being with me. She was less than thrilled. I experienced a peculiar doubleness while I was speaking with her; I could feel both the lively intent of my words, and the dulling, deadening way she took them. The marital state I longed for felt excitingly committed and cozy to me; to her it felt suffocating. Obviously, our life-delights no longer coincided. I grieved, but slowly began to open to other options.

Now, I realized I desired only love; in meditation I found myself creating a round-table of Masters on the physical plane, drawing them together by way of the fine golden threads of light that connected us all. Gene took me over to Janet DiGiovanni’s house, where she and Susan Shumsky were putting together a course in Tantric sexuality. Joanna Cherry was visiting from San Francisco to teach a course on Ascension, but she would also be assisting at Susan’s and Janet’s course. While Gene and Janet talked in the kitchen, the rest of us went upstairs to a guest-bedroom where music was playing. Would I like to dance? I told Joanna I really couldn’t dance — a trampoline mishap in High School had snapped my back; it had quickly healed, but now my feet really didn’t spontaneously move to music. She ran her hands down my energy-field; I felt the subtle wound heal, and we all danced happily for some time, flowing as one with the music. Afterwards we rested on the bed; I found myself lying on my back, with one arm around Susan and one around Joanna. I told them of my desire to know only Love, and my vision of the fine gold threads connecting us all, and we lay there peacefully: I for one was supremely content, basking in the sweetly divine love-field that embraced us.

During these months, I had attempted to interest the Movement in “Competition Leather;” they said that since it didn’t come from Maharishi and the Ayurvedic Tradition, it wasn’t trustworthy — a response that really shouldn’t have surprised me. The Movement had never been interested in any wisdom other than Maharishi’s. Throughout August and September I sold the packets in bulk at several of the health-food stores in town, and individually to people, by word-of-mouth. It was fun; I felt a little like a legitimate drug-dealer, carrying packets of the “stuff” which I would exchange on street-corners for crumpled dollar-bills. As they swallowed the herbs, I would often notice their subtle micro-chakras light up as mine had. Don Porter said he also experienced the Tibetan Stride after ingesting it.

As far as I know though, no one actually levitated. I little suspected that I myself would finally be granted my age-old desire, and find myself fully levitating in my physical Ascension the very next month.

NEXT: Part IV

INITIATION VI: DECISION (1984-1986): The Tenth State: Shiva Consciousness

Part IV

About the end of September 1986, Joanna Cherry had come to town from San Francisco, to offer a course on Ascension. “Have you ascended?” I asked her curiously. “No,” she smiled; she was simply passing on information she had received from the Ascended Masters. I was nonetheless impressed with her “youthing” skills; she said she was in her fifties, and looked to be twenty years younger. I liked her energy-field and decided to attend her course-introduction.

I was tickled to hear her speak at the home of Randy and Jane, who had been devoted members of our original channeling circle four years before. They were now out of town, and were offering the use of their house in absentia. The house, which they had still been building when I left Fairfield, was situated in the woods off the East Glasgow Road, about five miles east of town. At the close of her talk, she and most of the audience dispersed to return to town; at around midnight, only four of us remained on the driveway — Gene (who was a Gemini); Celia, a lovely fellow-student of Gene’s overtone chanting course (also a Gemini); another woman whom I had met the day before (a strong-willed Celtic Pisces); and I (also a Pisces). We all stood around, wondering aloud what it would feel like to be an Ascended Master. We were all experienced channels, but actual physical ascension was difficult to imagine.

Suddenly, we noticed a group of pale-yellowish, luminous, cloud-like disks floating silently up over us from behind the trees to the west. I would guess that they were each about four feet in diameter. Three of these misty disks positioned themselves in a triangular formation perhaps ten feet over our heads, while three or four more stationed themselves over the fields about thirty yards to the east. “Do you see them too?” I asked; they looked physical, not subtle, to me, but I wanted a reality-check. Everyone saw them. The three over our heads then started pouring subtle energy onto us; I felt as if we were being bathed in celestial milk: life-giving, exhilarating, blissful, and yet peaceful and soothing at the same time. I mentioned that the energies felt Pleiadian to me; I believe the others agreed.

Next, the cloud-disks faded out and reappeared several times, but we felt their presence continuously. They seemed to be demonstrating ascension and manifestation — raising their bodies out of, and then lowering them into, the visible spectrum: dipping their hyperdimensional “fingers” out of and into our third-dimensional fishpond. Their bodies, even when invisible, were still perceptible to our subtle senses; this whole time we were being bathed in bliss, feeling our vibrations tuning higher and higher.

Personally, I was awe-struck — I had felt and seen higher-dimensional energies countless times; but this was the first actual physical manifestation of “angels” for me, or for any of us. Along with my awe, though, there was a curious knowingness — as if somehow they were my own “fingers” up there; the cloud-disks definitely felt like aspects of my Higher Self, or Monad.

Next, the disks overhead were playing geometric games — at one point, they elongated out into rods and connected with each other to form a glowing triangle! Then they reformed back into disks again. I was suddenly reminded of a recurring dream I had as a child, of people dancing around on a hillside, holding hands in a circle, who suddenly lifted off and began to fly.

I quickly described my dream to my friends and said, “I think we can do this now.” We held hands, danced clockwise in a circle, and we lifted off! Then our bodies disappeared, and the earth disappeared, and we were floating in a sea of stars. I could still feel my friends’ hands and sense their presence. We spoke, also, comparing our perceptions.

Later we dropped back to earth — I felt as if I fell heavily from a height of about two or three feet — and resumed dense form. I was shown that this physical ascension was the complete merger of spirit and matter; and was told, “Remember! Spirit and matter are one.” This felt like no astral projection I had ever experienced; but I still wasn’t sure if we had ascended in our physical bodies. They responded that even asking the question brought about unnecessary duality; I could see this was true.

I remember commenting on some pains in my legs as I felt gravity waves rippling up through me. I would alternately feel very light and very heavy as we began walking along the dirt road, following the cloud-disks, which were now moving off to the north. The road turned, but the disks continued north over a field. We followed for a bit, but soon realized our lesson was over. We were very high; one of us would say something and we would all laugh for what seemed an eternity. We felt a complete clarity and communion among ourselves. Eventually we returned to town and got something to eat at an all-night restaurant near the movie theater. Gene ordered steak and eggs; I had pancakes. We still felt immortal, bliss-filled, full of laughter which spilled over into infinity at any moment.

Afterwards, we started to feel very sexually charged. We thought of Susan Shumsky, who was now teaching her course in divine sexuality, and who had spliced together footage of genuine erotically loving moments culled from countless porn tapes. Gene suggested we go to Susan’s to ask her if we could watch the footage. But it was now about 3:00 a.m., and her house lights were off. We all went back to Don’s house, where Gene and I were staying, and we started to watch Don’s only tape, The Three Musketeers, but turned it off after a few minutes. We lay on the mattress, just resting.

The Pisces woman whom I had met the previous day said she had been celibate for a year, and told me she wanted to make love with me. My thought was: I couldn’t! As the energy of the other three channels focused on me in curiosity and compassion, a childhood memory erupted: I was watching my father criticise my mother, “seeing” him rationally slice her energy-field to ribbons while completely oblivious to the emotions she was trying to convey. My child-thought was, “If this is male energy, I’m not having any” — and then I had psychically cut my own penis off! And indeed, I had always noticed as an adult that while making love, a corner of my mind always held back, for fear that “excessive” sexual energy would hurt my lover.

My friends poured energy into me; after feeling the deep psychic wound and sobbing as if straight from my testicles, I was eventually healed. At about dawn, my Pisces friend again said she wanted to make love. Was I ready? I was.

We said goodnight to the other two, went into my bedroom, and made love for the next six hours. We made love six times, for about an hour each time, with no intervening rest periods. Each time, I felt as if I were a different facet of Shiva; with a different penis or “head.” My lover was Shakti, and the pure cosmic passion of the Shiva-Shakti energy was flowing through us perfectly. For the first time, I knew what it was to hold absolutely nothing back; every impulse was perfect, and was met by my lover perfectly; we were One. We noticed too that Shiva was manifesting an extremely rapid play of emotions across my face as divine play for my lover.

At noon my friend remembered she had a lunch appointment, and quickly dressed and left. On arising I chanced to look in the mirror, and I noticed my body was emitting a radiant glow, as if it were made of finely-woven light. My grey hair and wrinkles had all disappeared; I looked like a supremely healthy sixteen-year-old. I felt divine, as if I were the Planetary Logos, Sanat Kumara — integrated and grounded in ways I had not dared believe were possible. In short, I felt like one of the “golden-boy” athletic heroes of High School — completely flawless and self-confident — but with the full wisdom of a Divine Master. This was the completion of the Sixth Initiation, where the higher Self decended through my Sex Chakra and began to occupy my Base, and the Lower Self ascended through the Throat Chakra and began to occupy my Brow, or Monadic Subplane, the Realm of Consciousness. If Saturn is truly my guide through these Initiations, then I actually first “completed” the Sixth Initiation and entered the Seventh (7.5 degrees “Sagittarius” or Taurus-Equinox Capricorn) on January 27, 1986, but Saturn went retrograde, reversing through this degree on May 13, and did not repass into the Seventh for good until October 24, 1986. At any rate I did not take Joanna’s course on Ascension; I felt I had received everything I needed.

Years later, I read Alain Danielou’s masterpiece The Gods of India and came across entries on Sanat Kumara that throw some light on the Ascension experience. Danielou points out that “Sanat Kumara” and “Karttikeya” are two names of Skanda, a divine son and avatar of Shiva.

In yoga, Skanda is the power of chastity. According to Vasudeva Sarana Agravala (Kalyana, Shiva anka, p. 501): “The power of the virile seed, preserved through penance and complete chastity, is called Skanda (the spurt of semen) or Kumara (the adolescent). So long as, in the practice of yoga, complete control is not attained, Kumara is not born, and the mind is ever put in check by desires, that is, the gods are defeated by the demons. It is only by making his sublimated seed rise through the central inner channel of the subtle-body (sushumna) up to the ‘mouth of fire’ (vahni-mukha) in the sixth center, where it is consumed, that the yogi becomes complete master of his instincts. It is then that Skanda is born. The yogi who can master his body and his mind even in sleep can use his sexual powers for intellectual and spiritual ends. He then becomes really an adept, an image of Shiva.”

Skanda or Karttikeya is raised on the milk of the six Krttikas or Pleiades, has six heads, and is an eternal youth (Sanat-kumara); these repetitions of the number six again relate to the opening of the (traditionally-numbered) sixth center. I feel this sixth center correlates with the sixth initiation of Ascension, and the sixth or Monadic dimension of sacred geometry, perceivable through the (traditionally-numbered) sixth chakra, the third eye of Shiva. (Obviously, one does not fully attain this sixth dimension merely upon first awakening the third eye, which begins with the very first Initiations; each of the Initiatory planes awakens all the chakras for its subplanes.)
I had never been fully celibate for more than a few months at a time, but had indeed spent decades meditating and instinctively practising Tantra, directing my vital energies upwards until I was fully conscious of my spiritual mission even during deep sleep. “Karttikeya” means “raised by the Krttikas.” Like Skanda, during the Ascension Initiation I was “raised” or ascended on the “milk” or bliss-energies of the Pleiades, had six “heads” and felt and looked like a divine sixteen-year-old, as a result of aligning my sexuality completely with Shiva. That the Pleiades are called the Krttikas, the “Cutters” (translated by some as the “Castrators”), may have had something to do with the wound in the subtle sex center I experienced, the healing of which led to the full sexual identification with Shiva. The “Cutters” may also be the “Stone-Cutters” (”stones” are testicles) — or the Masons. Again, I am reminded of the terminology, “raised a Master Mason;” this Initiation was certainly the culmination of the Fifth Initiation’s subtle Ascension or “raising” through the Pyramid or “Restored Temple of Solomon” via fusing the Three Rays into the “Lost Word” of the Master Mason. Was this Sixth Initiation the celestial equivalent of the Masons’ next degree, that of Mark Master? The Mark Master is allowed to choose his own Mason’s Mark, to identify his own work; wasn’t that precisely what I had been doing for two years with the sacred geometry and the Solar Calendar — consciously creating my own highest truth, work with my own Mark on it? In retrospect I am also struck by the apparent equivalence of the “Stone-Cutters” with the archetypal Mason: the Cailleach, or Saturn, which was now in its own Sign, Taurus-Equinox Capricorn. There would thus appear to be subtle connections between the Pleiadean energies and Saturn.

Finally, Danielou adds:

In cosmology, Kumara is identified with the solar energy which dwells in the higher sphere of the earth beyond the sphere of air and gives rise to the cycle of the year (samvatsara-agni). He is thus the form of Rudra called the Blue-and-Red (Nila-lohita). (Satapatha Brahmana, Brahma khanda, 6.1.3.)
Apparently, the revelations of the Cosmic polar colors — Red and Blue — and the obsession with the Solar Calendar I had been experiencing for nearly two years now were also signature-qualities of fusion with Sanat Kumara/Skanda.

I remained in that state for several days, but finally felt it was too much for me to comfortably manifest all the time, and I consciously adjusted myself “down” a few notches. Meanwhile, I had reluctantly demurred when my Pisces friend wished to continue our relationship. She was understandably angry; I explained that it was against my nature to have a one-night stand, but I strongly felt what we had undergone was an Initiation, an essentially impersonal rite of passage, and I devoutly hoped we could remain friends.

While I told her the truth, I also privately feared that there was no way I could personally maintain the sexual standard that Shiva had set through me! I had never made love more than three times in one night before, and that had been at my sexual prime, when I was nineteen. I simply wasn’t a stud, and I was already beginning to retreat from my impersonal fusion with Shiva.

Furthermore, before I had met my Pisces friend, I had been magnetically drawn to a Virgo New-Age teacher who had come to town for a short while, and who was presently staying at Susan Shumsky’s. She liked me; I found myself falling into the depths of her eyes, and I wanted to explore that relationship. I felt slightly guilty about my proposed promiscuity, but I reasoned that since Kerry was enjoying herself, I might as well too, and follow my bliss where it led me.

For the next week or ten days, I became a semi-permanent guest at Susan’s. Her course on sexuality went very well, and her household emanated the happy aura of a divine Temple of Love — an atmosphere perfectly fusing sexuality and spirituality. I had always intuited that this was the truth of things, reading Summerhill and The Harrad Experiment when I was a child, and everything I could find on Tantric sexuality when I was an adult. It was immensely satisfying to be with others who felt the same. My relationship with the New-Age teacher was good, but there were problems we simply couldn’t surmount in the short time we had together — she had deep-set sexual-abuse issues, and could not invoke the full energies of Shiva through me. Also, I felt very child-like and vulnerable, perhaps still working out the rest of my Oedipal issues. After I let go of my fusion with Shiva, sex on the personal level just wasn’t as rewarding.

After my Virgo friend left town, I returned to Don’s house. I prayed to the Goddess in deep need, and was immediately enveloped in the precise flavor of Her love I most needed then: maternal, comforting, and erotic. About two days later, I went with Gene to a party and met the physical emodiment of that love — my chest prickled with electric energy as I saw her across the room, and I found myself walking over and talking with her. She was a tall and strikingly graceful Gemini, with beautiful cheekbones and long, almond-shaped eyes. I marveled that I was not shy in the presence of such beauty. A few problems arose. She was married, off-limits; I shook hands with her husband. She also smoked, a habit I found utterly repulsive. Her auric field, too, was cloudy and troubled. Somehow, none of this mattered; I had known this woman for an eternity, and was instantly comfortable with her. The Goddess had shown me that this woman was Her manifestation. Somehow it would all work out.

Somehow it did. By chance we met again the following night at one of Quentin Wood’s famous parties in his splendid Victorian mansion in neighboring Richland; the songs that stood out were “Higher Love,” “Red Red Wine,” and “Addicted to Love.” We danced, and talked. It turned out she and her husband had had a completely open marriage; they were now separating; he had come to Fairfield only to help her find an apartment, and had now returned to California. After the party, she invited me back to her new apartment; it was just across a small field from Don’s house, where I was staying. I was hardly in a position to quibble at her separation; after all, it mirrored my own situation exactly. Her cigarettes I tolerated, though her mouth and skin tasted bitter; I had never kissed a smoker before. Her auric field I could perhaps heal, with divine grace. Her love was everything the Goddess had promised — a new fusion of human and divine; comfortably personal and ecstatically erotic. We began seeing each other daily. I had several flashes of a previous life we had spent together in Africa, where I was a tribal prince and she was my mother. I began to think about living with her, but for the rest of October I remained at Don’s house. I regretfully told Kerry that since she was working fulltime and no longer needed it, I was going to have to reclaim my $400 monthly trust check, but that she would have our joint Visa card to use in case of emergency. She agreed, but apparently held a lot of resentment over my decision not to support her any longer. She later told me that this was when she effectively felt we had divorced.

During one meditation, I was startled to feel something nibbling on my left ear. I opened my subtle vision, and saw a large white dove, which then flew up in the sky. I went with it, and we soared to a room lined in fluffy pink-and-white silk, and then plummeted down — into the swimming-pool of the Best Western Hotel, where Kerry’s mother Nancy was floating. She wasn’t in her body — it looked as if she had drowned! Worried, I called the hotel, and got Nancy on the line. I described what had happened — did this mean anything to her? It turned out she had just been soul-travelling while floating in the pool. She did much of her soul-work in the pool, she said, and the white dove was her power-animal. Hmm!

Meanwhile, my old client Karen from Milwaukee, who had been referred to me originally by Nancy, had written to Nancy requesting an Initiation from us. I thought it might be fun to include Gene as co-Initiator, too, and the three of us spent a good bit of time at Nancy’s hotel, The Best Western, enjoying the pool and the jacuzzi while we discussed our new partnership — we called ourselves Triskelion; between us we covered the Spirit (me), the Soul (Nancy), and the Body (Gene). We decided to charge Karen $1000 for the unbroken attention of all three of us for three days; she accepted.

The Initiation process went well; on the final night Karen requested a reading from my Guides and together we completed the energy transfer she was looking for. After the Initiation, Karen returned to Milwaukee, and I began serious work on finishing up the Solar Calendar of 144 Causal Angels. I decided to create a deck of 144 cards illustrating them.

I had found that rotating the standard Western zodiac one sign forward to place the Spring Equinox between Aries and Taurus, and the Summer Solstice between Cancer and Leo, allowed the double-helix of the signs’ ruling planets to align with the subtle anatomy of our human body, with the zodiacal solstice line equating to our divine spine. Then, the planets and their signs pair off to form the polarities of each chakra: In the 6th chakra, Moon and Cancer for the left eye; Sun and Leo for the right eye; in the 5th chakra, Mercury and Gemini for the left throat; Isis (or lunar south node) and Virgo for the right throat; in the 4th chakra, Proserpina (or lunar north node) and Taurus for the left breast (heart); Venus and Libra for the right breast (heart); in the 3rd chakra, Mars and Aries for the spleen, and Pluto and Scorpio for the liver; in the 2nd chakra, Neptune and Pisces for the left sex, and Jupiter and Sagittarius for the right sex; and in the 1st chakra, Saturn and Aquarius for the left buttock (base), and Uranus and Capricorn for the right buttock (base).

This allowed me to see how each sign and chakric polarity symbolically governed or manifested one portion of a kingdom of nature: In the Monadic Realm (6th chakra; third eye), the Moon and Cancer governed the Planets, and the Sun and Leo governed the Constellations. In the Atmic Realm (5th chakra; mouth and throat), Mercury and Gemini governed Magical Names, and Isis and Virgo governed the Musical Modes. In the Buddhic Realm (4th chakra; heart), Proserpina and Taurus governed Conceptual Treasures, while Venus and Libra ruled Conceptual Gifts or Dharmic Tools. The Causal Realm, at the center of the wheel and of the Great Cross, governed the ideal Human Kingdom. In the Mental Realm, embodied by the Animal Kingdom (3rd chakra; navel), Mars and Aries governed the Beasts, and Pluto and Scorpio ruled the Birds. In the Astral Realm, symbolized by the Vegetable Kingdom (2nd chakra; sex), Neptune and Pisces ruled the Trees; Jupiter and Sagittarius governed the Herbs and Flowers. In the Physical Realm, symbolized by the Mineral Kingdom (1st chakra; base), Saturn and Aquarius ruled the Metals, and Uranus and Capricorn governed the jewels.

I had divided each sign into an entire microcosm of 12 subrays, duodeciles, or uncials, and assigned each duodecile to a Solar Angel, so that each of the 144 Solar Angels governed 2 1/2 degrees of the zodiac, or one twelfth of a sign. There were thus 12 Metals, 12 Jewels, 12 Trees, 12 Flowers, etc. — each with its own Solar Angel. I spent a good deal of time working out the subtleties of these symbolic mechanics of creation, which I saw as the Celestial Anatomy of my Universal Divine Body. Apparently I had entered the beginning stages of the Seventh or Resurrection Initiation for good now — Saturn recrossed its “Resurrection” Initiation at 7.5 degrees Sagittarius (Taurus-Equinox Capricorn) on October 24, 1986.

NEXT: INITIATION VII: RESURRECTION (1986-1988): The Eleventh State: Maharishi Consciousness