1973 – 1975 Cosmic Physical: Threshold
COSMIC PHYSICAL
INITIATION 0: THRESHOLD: Part I (Summer 1973 – Summer 1974): The Fourth State: Transcendental Consciousness
While all my life I have read everything I could find on magical and subtle realms — the realms of subtle body and soul — I especially remember that in the early ’70′s — the first years that I was consciously on the Path — I also voraciously read everything I could find on the Path’s milestones of spirit.
In my senior year at Morse High School (1972-73) in Bath, Maine, I came across the Edgar Cayce material, specifically the landmark There is a River by Thomas Sugrue. How inspiring Cayce’s life was; how I wished that I had clairvoyant gifts like his! I was voted “Most Talented” and “Most Studious” by my Senior classmates, but my own gifts of art and writing were so mundane. I had wanted to be a doctor as a child, but now flinched from the physician’s continual exposure to suffering, as depicted in some very graphic medical books my father had helpfully found for me at auction. Edgar Cayce’s life-path as psychic diagnostician seemed to be the perfect solution! But I could find no such subtle gifts in myself.
The book also first exposed me to the Perennial Philosophy: that we are Souls who have emanated from Divinity, and descended into various bodies until we landed on Earth, where we have spent many lifetimes learning balance and love, preparing us for a return to Divinity. There is no injustice; only a balancing of all of our Soul’s countless actions, both “good” and “bad.” I intuitively felt the truth of this, which led to a study of deeper layers of the Bible, and the Upanishads. While reading the Upanishads (“I am not the body, I am not the emotions, I am not the thoughts, I am not the mind”), I consciously transcended for the first time, and momentarily awakened a deeper Self. It seemed to be “behind” my usual self, witnessing everything while pouring its presence out of my forehead, in the region of my third eye. I was now on fire with the idea of spiritual enlightenment, and I attempted to meditate on my own, with little or no success.
On March 23, 1973 I began a mantra-yoga called Transcendental Meditation (TM), and had a wonderful initiation experience of transcendence — an inner laughter plunging into a pure, silent openness inside. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened: I hadn’t been awake, nor had I been dreaming or asleep. I was later informed that this was the fourth state of consciousness, transcendental consciousness; beyond the “normal” three states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. It was described as a state of very deep rest, deeper even than sleep, together with a heightened inner awareness: a mind fully awake, but with no thoughts coloring that awareness. That sounded accurate; I only knew that it was good, and I wanted more. I believe that this was my Threshold Initiation, where the Higher Self descended as far as my Crown Chakra, and the Lower Self ascended as far as my Foot Center or Elemental Physical Realm.
I then spent the next year faithfully practicing meditation twice a day, every day, with few obvious results, except for one terrifically ecstatic experience of soul-fusion with a bunch of birds singing on the roof above me, and a newly-focused decision to enjoy life by adjusting my attitude. Some of my shyness disappeared; that spring I mustered the courage to telephone my classmate idol, the exotically beautiful Margaret, asking her to walk with me at graduation. She said Yes! The immensely popular “Tie A Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” burst into my brain with new, deeply meaningful resonance; I too felt as if “the whole damn bus was cheering” as I ran out onto our front lawn in amazed gratitude at being found acceptable in the eyes of my goddess. My memory also improved somewhat; on having to stand before the entire town (it seemed) at graduation to deliver my essay on “Esperanto, a World Language,” I found to my dismay I had left my notes outside the gym, but managed to give the entire speech from memory with only one three-second eternity of amnesia.
As I let go of worry, anxiety, and moodiness, incidentally my headaches, stomach-pains and insomnia also disappeared. I also discovered while lying in bed one night, that I could consciously stop my heart: by relaxing, merging my consciousness with it, and stopping “myself” — not by exerting any muscles; just by pure intent. When I released my attention, it would restart, beating quickly for a bit and then settling down to its regular pace. During this time I also attempted Astral Projection and Telekinesis, with few results.
I did have several mind-blowing afternoons of perfect and repeatable telepathy with my brother John, as if we shared the same inner TV screen — always on the full moons. We found that for hours on end, with eyes closed, we could visualize shapes, numbers, colors, even write out whole words and phrases on our inner visual screen, and as we did so, the characters would appear clearly and simultaneously on the other’s screen.
While I knew my father as a psychologist would be interested, I also knew his innate skepticism would have ruined our telepathy; even the essentially-neutral presence of our youngest brother Mark completely disrupted the transmissions. This was my first brush with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which roughly states that on quantum-mechanical levels of reality, the perceiver affects the perceived with his very choice of perception-frameworks. Theoretically, with meditation and attunement our minds can consciously partake of the normally sub- or superconscious magic of quantum reality from which they emerge; perhaps we were consciously resonating with quantum levels while experiencing that perfect simultaneity of telepathy. And on the other hand, a dedicated skeptic could actually use his own quantum-field to deny his conscious participation in that very field! In this way we might all share the unconscious hypnosis of the skeptic’s self-imposed exile from the magical quantum-field paradise, to live in a Newtonian illusion of separate billiard-balls randomly colliding in a harsh vacuum.
We weren’t allowed to watch much TV; I spent most of my indoor free-time reading, drawing, or listening to the huge, antique radio that I had bought at auction. Finely crafted of polished wood in a round-shouldered art-deco style, it resembled nothing so much as a 1930′s jukebox, and when I turned it on it always surprised me a bit to hear the modern world emerge. Somehow I always expected it to broadcast the ’30′s music it was crafted to play. It could bring in AM, FM, and shortwave; I often wandered the world, watching the radio’s glowing green eye pulsate as I fine-tuned stations from Canada, Spain, and even the U.S.S.R., while dreaming of a career in the foreign service. More often, though, I tuned its enormous speaker to our hometown WJTO, bringing in the latest rock-and-roll hits. That summer of ’73 one of my favorites was “Shambala” by Three Dog Night; I soared to its Utopian vision, but little suspected that Shambala actually existed on the subtle planes, nor that I would indeed come to find the secret of perfect bliss through walking its halls with the Masters about nine years later.
I read The Science of Being and the Art of Living and The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation and Commentary, both by TM’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and the wonderful Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda, which opened my eyes to a whole realm of spiritual possibilities. I still had a deep case of “Seeker’s Burn” — the painful desire for enlightenment.
Meanwhile I worked around our farm that summer, painting and clapboarding the barns with my youngest brother Mark to earn money for college; middle brother John was spending the summer as a tour-guide for the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake. I also bicycled the twelve miles into Brunswick three times a week to attend a driver’s ed class. I got my permit by summer’s end but never did get a license: I had gotten a scholarship to attend Harvard College that fall, and moving to Cambridge with its marvelous system of subways and buses rendered driving unnecessary — and I found the Massachusetts drivers to be too chaotically suicidal to trust my own abilities behind the wheel with them.
In the fall of 1973, I began my freshman year at Harvard. To this day, the Rolling Stones’ ballad “Angie” evokes the bittersweet feel of that autumn for me. My parents had no money to spare, and I was on a scholarship, “with no money in my coat.” I had left my old world behind; my childish dreams had “all gone up in smoke” like October’s burning leaves. But Cambridge was intoxicating; “ain’t it good to be alive?” I was surrounded by a paradise of bookstores, some open until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. Harvard paid my tuition, and I paid my room and board with loans and a work-study program. I could not afford to buy unnecessary books, so I would read them in the aisles of the bookstores, often remaining right up until closing-time. Most of the booksellers would let students read for hours, but if one manager regarded me fishily, I could always walk across the street to a competitor and resume the book where I had left off in the first store.
I read The Seth Material, channeled by Jane Roberts — I first experienced a past life while sitting right there on the floor of Paperback Booksmith, upon reading Seth’s words on the simultaneity of all “past” lives. I closed my eyes, and was instantly in a small, damp cell: a nun from fifteenth-century England. I read Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe; much of the Eckankar material, by Paul Twitchell; and — as always — everything I could find on astrology, myth, tarot, kundalini and the chakras, magic, symbols, — the list was endless! I took the information that inspired and made sense, filed away what didn’t make sense but still “sang” to me, and discarded what did not inspire.
My freshman year I tried drunkenness twice, both times with some more worldly dorm-mates who lived downstairs. The first time was in December; they escorted us to Trader Vic’s after the Boston premiere of “The Exorcist,” which I had found powerful but not as disturbing as rumored. After I had imbibed two Fog Cutters and felt nothing, I realized I might as well relax and give the alcohol a chance to work, or I would have wasted my money! It instantly kicked in; a sensation of disoriented uncoordination that was interesting but not particularly edifying. For years afterwards, hearing “Tubular Bells” on the radio would make me slightly dizzy.
At my room-mates’ behest, I also experimented briefly with marijuana shortly after my eighteenth birthday in March. We smoked 40 bowls of very potent Panama Red over four nights: While my room-mates were rolling around on the floor in blissful abandon, I felt nothing. Finally I realized that, as with the alcohol, I was holding the drug at bay with my own resistance; I consciously relaxed into it and immediately felt a shift in perception. Along with some emotional mellowing, space became more tangible; I could “flip” chairs inside out, so that their front legs seemed to be behind their back ones. I closed my eyes as intricately vivid visions flashed by in rapid succession; the only one I remember now was a stepped pyramid with flowers flowing down its sides. I also noticed a great appetite and enhanced sense of taste; a 2:00-a.m. foray across Mass. Ave to Store 24 for a Hostess Blueberry Pie brought the most exquisite gratification imaginable.
About this time I re-read Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, which crystallized my will to focus everything on spiritual enlightenment, and provided a handy “cookbook” of suggestions for self-improvement, including breath-work or pranayama, body-postures or asanas, the practice of innocent harmlessness or ahimsa, and vegetarianism.
Shortly after adopting these practices in the spring of 1974 (in addition to the mantra-yoga, which I still practiced regularly), I felt a new inner lightness, and noticed a blissful sensation pouring through my third-eye area much of the time. I also noticed that light itself had fine fibers; by attending to these I began to see rainbows around street-lamps. I noticed, though, that the rainbow always stayed absolutely the same size, so that it appeared to shrink as I approached the light: The rainbow was in my own visual processing, therefore; not actually around the light itself.
I prayed to Jesus for the ability actually to see auras; in my inner vision, a being I assumed to be Jesus appeared and granted my wish. For some time thereafter, I would sporadically see rich colors around people — my Spanish Lit. teacher was immersed in a gorgeous field of rich azure; a tall woman going to class in front of me emanated an odd brown; and so on. Unlike the rainbows, these color-fields obeyed the rules of perspective, appearing to be actually present around the people. At home on Spring Break I noticed that my brother Mark had a clear yellowish field around his head; out of curiosity I tried teasing him and watched the clear yellow disappear as his field darkened. I explained to him what I had been doing, and marveled as his light slowly returned. Clearly seeing the metaphysical effects of my habitual older-brother routines sobered me; I resolved to try to honor the light in others from then on.
Just to make sure I had given alcohol a fair chance, I tried it again in the spring, combining ample amounts of marijuana with six beers and numerous stale pretzels, only to lose the whole mess ignominiously in a snowdrift outside our dorm. So much for the Dionysian path! I never got drunk again. I abandoned marijuana as well. While it enhanced the senses and appetite delightfully, it turned my own aura — normally (at that time) a clear turquoise — into a murky green, like thick pea-soup, and adversely affected my ability to transcend in meditation — as if my mind had frozen, and the mantra was like a pebble skipping on the ice, unable to sink into the depths. I decided to continue on the path of meditation.
Meanwhile, my first year at Harvard was an emotional see-saw. I enjoyed days of sheer giddy delight in the Cantabrigian freedom and knowledge; our spirits were often high, and we delighted in playing practical jokes on one another, usually involving water-balloons dropped from the superior vantage point of third-floor D-32 onto unsuspecting heads below. It might have been in self-defense, therefore, that the Straus Rape & Pillage Society — a motley collection of house-mates who indulged in weekly processions around the Yard, marching in mismatched finery to the drone of bagpipes and bearing large signs proudly identifying their Society — also took to sporting opened umbrellas even in clear weather.
Some of my jokes were more psychological. During mid-year exams I sent carefully-typed “form letters” on photocopied — photocopied! What a wonderful new technology! — Harvard stationery of Dean of Freshmen Burris Young’s (on which I had cut and pasted a “Veritas” seal for extra verity) to our three neighbors across the hall, who were a very close-knit bunch. The letters told them that, due to the large influx of incoming transfer students from other Universities at mid-year, they were being reassigned to other quarters for the remainder of the year. With another typewriter, at a slight slant, I then typed in their new addresses, sending them off to the most remote and unpopular dorms: Greenough, Stoughton, and (shudder) Radcliffe’s Currier House. Because this was in the midst of mid-term exams, the letters continued, they were being allowed a full three days to move their possessions, instead of the ususal 24 hours. I finished the three letters very late at night, and slipped them into their mailboxes downstairs.
My room-mates, who were in on the joke, awoke me gleefully the next morning to revel in the anguished screams coming from across the hall: “Radcliffe! I’ve been sent to Radcliffe!” We grinned at each other. But when I heard one of them calling his mother long-distance, I took pity and knocked on their door. “Umm…did you get some letters this morning …?” I asked innocently. “You too?” Mike Duffy screamed. ” Where did you get sent?” “Er, no …” I grinned. “I sent them.” After it registered, he threatened to defenestrate me, but only half-heartedly; his delighted relief was palpable. The one who was phoning his mother gave her the update, and all ended well. He later told me his mother had said, “I can’t believe Harvard would do that! Notre Dame, yes, but not Harvard!”
Russ, the third of the trio, mentioned afterwards that he showed my handiwork to Dean Burris Young, who was a good friend of his. The Dean took one look at the letter and said, “Oh, no…How many of these went out?” He had nightmarish visions that this was a brainchild of the sadists at the Harvard Lampoon, who would indeed have sent them to every freshman at Harvard. The chaos would have been unimaginable. I had had dreams of sending them to other freshmen, and had photocopied a whole stack of Dean Young’s stationery, but decided to have mercy on those too remote for me to relieve personally after a few moments of agony.
Despite these giddy days of pure freedom, I also plunged at times into great depression. Our dorm was all-male, and I missed female companionship; I was still too shy to do more than glory silently in the energy-fields of the beautiful Radcliffe women sitting next to me in darkened lecture-halls or in the Freshman Union. As it had for some three years, Playboy faithfully continued to provide me with illusory lovers for self-gratification. I knew I was not yet emotionally ready to attempt a mature relationship with a woman.
Never the best of letter-writers, I had maintained a desultory correspondence with Margaret A., whom I had loved from afar in high school, and with whom I had walked at graduation. She was attending Bowdoin College in Maine, and we made plans for her to visit several times, but they always fell through. I had little privacy; the best I could offer her was a spot on the floor of our suite’s living room, where I myself lived — my two dormitory roommates, who were far more sophisticated than I, had arrived before me and taken the two private rooms in Straus D-32. Bill Emerson, a very-long-haired trumpet-player from Syoset, had arrived first and was royally ensconced in the suite’s single. At first I had double-bunked with Jed Roberts, my jazz-loving room-mate from Chicago, but he accused me of snoring and evicted me. I took the bunk-frame and the lower bunk out into the living room and draped a bedspread over the high bunk-frame, like a Conestoga wagon, to give me the semblance of a private alcove. I found the lack of privacy to be difficult at times, particularly when my room-mates wanted to indulge in late-night social revels in the living-room when I wanted to sleep. Once or twice, when the noise was simply too loud, I took some blankets and a pillow down to the basement to sleep. It was clean, warm and dry there; and very quiet.
More difficult was the “small fish-big pond” syndrome. I had been one of the brightest students in my High School in Bath, Maine; one of only two studying Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Greek, and the only one learning Sanskrit. Now, I was surrounded by competitive geniuses who knew all these things and more. Furthermore, my Psychology, Linguistics, and Sanskrit classes, though taught by eminent scholars, were disappointingly dry, while my work-study job for a grad student in psycholinguistics — transcribing tapes of pre-school teacher-student interactions and tallying different sentence structures — was actually mind-numbingly boring.
I was becoming more interested in studying the paranormal, and the teachers at the Cambridge TM Center were frustratingly unhelpful — whenever I would attempt a discussion of auras, or past-life memories, or kundalini and the chakras, I inevitably received the same robotically-phrased suggestion to continue meditating and to ignore all phenomena! Also, while I loved Cambridge I pined for my sweetly-rural hometown. Two of that winter’s biggest radio-hits, Stevie Wonder’s “Living For the City” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” perfectly caught my discomfort with the big city and my nostalgia for Maine. Lastly, I deeply missed my family, which was going through problems of its own; my parents had finally decided to divorce, and my father moved out to live with his lover and her kids. (I was certainly not the only one to feel the strain of first-year Harvard; a housemate whom I had vaguely known from C-entry hanged himself in his room over Christmas break, to be discovered by the Janitor several days later. Not knowing him well, I thought his reaction a bit extreme, but I could certainly empathize with the depression he must have been feeling.)
For all these reasons I briefly flirted with an English cult, well-established in Cambridge at that time, called The Process. There were women there who were easy to speak with. The group offered a respite from my room-mates. They were not geniuses — no threat to my ego! And they offered clear-cut status-grades: Acolyte, Disciple, Messenger, and Prophet. Most important, they did not disguise their interest in subtle archetypal psychology and the development of psychic abilities. I was most impressed with the psychic reading one Prophet had given me by psychometrizing my Swiss Army knife; she had actually described the antique wax head I kept in the dorm, saying “I see a disembodied head on your desk — it has bright blue eyes; it looks a lot like you,” offering the further interpretation that the head symbolized my own detached psychological state. Moreover the group offered a ready-made — if ersatz — “family.” I contemplated taking a leave of absence to join The Process fulltime, about midway through that bleak, snowy winter in Cambridge, but my parents and the long-suffering Harvard Dean of Freshmen Burris Young recommended that I give Harvard a full year before deciding — advice for which I am most grateful, in retrospect.
Life got easier as Spring blossomed. The whole city seemed to stretch sensuously in the bright sunny days and perfumed, sultry nights. Some students in nearby Massachusetts Hall opened their windows wide and pointed their huge Bose speakers out into the Yard with volume cranked beyond fortissimo to “stentorian;” the pounding finale of Led Zeppelin’s beautiful classic “Stairway to Heaven” expressed my new spiritual optimism exactly.
Your head is humming and it won’t go, in case you don’t know,
The piper’s calling you to join him.
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow, and did you know
Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul,
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How ev’rything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.
Unbeknownst to me, this was a perfect description of the Third Initiation, or Transfiguration, which I would be most grateful to experience some years later.
(After the music had echoed away, those students were naive enough to hook a microphone into the speakers and ask for requests, blasting their phone number for the entire Yard to hear. We had enjoyed the music, but we seized the opportunity and called them. A visiting friend of ours with a very flat Boston accent claimed to be Sergeant Malloy from the Cambridge Police, and threatened them urbanely with prison-time for disturbing the peace. I provided suitable background imitations of a police dispatcher’s radio by squawking police jargon and hissing static into a paper-towel roll, while a third room-mate pounded his typewriter, punctuating the clatter with the occasional “ding” of the carriage-return bell. We paid close attention to detail, and our noisy neighbors were gratifyingly cowed. They apologized profusely, the next song abruptly diminuendo to a sweetly reasonable pianissimo.)
My experiences in meditation were deepening somewhat, and my classes became more fun, as I had switched my concentration at midyear from Linguistics to Fine Arts, where I could indulge my passion for beauty and symbolism. While retaining my year-long courses in Psychology and in Spanish Literature, I added a class in studio drawing with the delightful Will Reimann, and a marvelous course in Japanese art of the Heian period, taught by the affable Professor Rosenfield. I explored the treasures of the Fogg Art Museum, and discovered a wonderful, life-sized temple-statue of Kuan Yin, which I would contemplate for hours, deriving deep satisfaction from her compassionate serenity. Furthermore, The Process underwent schism, and my cult-mentors left town. Nonetheless I still decided to take a year off; India was beginning to beckon. Meanwhile the TM Center was offering something called a “residence course” that summer at the University of Maine at Orono; I signed up for four days in late June of 1974.
Up to this time I still had doubts about whether TM was the path for me; the residence course resolved those doubts. We were given an advanced program of asanas, pranayama, and extra meditations, and my experiences deepened dramatically. In one of the first meetings, I found myself spontaneously “witnessing” — experiencing everything from the vantage-point of the Higher Self; pure consciousness — while watching a video of Maharishi describing the mechanics of enlightenment and the different states of consciousness. This exciting fusion of experience and knowledge really galvanized me.
This “witnessing” was a taste of what Maharishi called Cosmic Consciousness; Transcendental Consciousness along with Waking-state — and I now had a name for it, a technique to deepen it, and a map of what I could expect next: after one’s inner or Higher Self was well established in Cosmic Consciousness, one moved into God Consciousness, where the senses became more refined and able to perceive the celestial values of creation. This refinement of perception culminated in Unity Consciousness, where the inner Self merged with the perception of the Self in all. I signed up for the very next course in July — this time for a week. My experiences deepened still further — I began experiencing Transcendence during Sleep and Dream states a bit, as well — and I made preparations to go to India. I decided to stay in the foothills of the Himalayas, in Rishikesh, at the Ashram where Maharishi had taught the Beatles just a few years before. My great-grandfather Henry Vose Greenough had left me $500 — this would be enough for air-fare and some of my expenses. I flew from Boston to New Delhi (with a one-day layover in London) in a grueling flight of about 26 air-hours in late July, 1974.
COSMIC PHYSICAL
INITIATION 0: THRESHOLD: Part II (Summer 1974 – Summer 1975): The Fourth State: Transcendental Consciousness
Delhi was a shock. The first sickly-sweet smell of the air as I deplaned made me want to turn around, get back in the plane, and head for home. Expecting every Indian to exude transcendental wisdom, I was assaulted by their third-world, big-city hunger for money. I took a room in a cheap hotel in Delhi, ordered lentils and orange soda (I had been warned not to drink the water), and restlessly fell asleep. The next day, I took a train north to Hardwar, in the state of Uttar Pradesh; it took all night, and I was afraid to sleep for fear I would miss my stop — all through the night, I felt the train wheels murmuring, “Uttar Pra-DESH, Uttar Pra-DESH.” A bus took me from Hardwar to Rishikesh, and then I walked the last three miles, carrying my suitcase on my head in a truly awesome heat: across the Ganges on a rickety rope bridge lined with squatting beggars chanting “Om Hari, Om Hari” to Laxman Jool — an amazing settlement, full of temples and huge, brightly-painted figures from the Bhagavad Gita — and then over a stream and through the woods up to Maharishi’s ashram.
A few years previously, Maharishi had moved his entourage to Switzerland, and the ashram in Rishikesh was now used only for teaching Indian students to become TM teachers, and only in the Winter. It was now the height of Summer — monsoon season was about to start — and the ashram was nearly empty, and in a state of quiet disrepair. The head of the ashram was a Mr. Srivasdeva; he quoted a rate of one hundred dollars for a month’s stay. This was steep by Indian standards; a guru named Shivananda had offered to put me up in his ashram down in Laxman Jool for a few pennies a day. However, it was still cheap by Western standards, and I wanted very much to stay at Maharishi’s ashram. I agreed, and he showed me a room with a bed, a functional mosquito-net, and a semi-functional toilet and shower. I also met a huge and hairy roommate — an 8-inch spider that was astonishingly quick in its reactive flight from my tentative touch with a pencil. One other westerner, an American named John who had been meditating for several years, was in residence, and he showed me his two room-mates — small scorpions in the catch-well under his sink — which I inherited after he left and I took his room. A horde of langur monkeys also hung out like juvenile delinquents on his room’s roof. They were generally obnoxious, loud and angry, and for the first time I understood Rudyard Kipling’s unflattering portrayals of them in his Jungle Book.
Meanwhile, John showed me around and told me stories of his spiritual experiences: he had seen a photograph of Guru Dev, Maharishi’s master, actually move, and once in meditation he had felt himself become Guru Dev, even down to feeling the silk robes and the string of rudraksha beads around his neck. Satyanand, a venerable brother-disciple of Guru Dev’s, was also in residence, and I enjoyed his presence, but was too shy to meet him. Another very aged Indian Brahmacharya (celibate) also lived there; he appeared timeless and peaceful: Even when his body moved, somehow “he” did not.
After several days, I was given permission to undergo “rounding” — to begin asanas, pranayama, and increased meditations, as on the residence courses. I also began to reread the Bhagavad Gita, and, on Mr. Srivasdeva’s recommendation, a huge two-volume set called the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, which I bought very cheap in town. I noticed that my meditations were deepening yet further, that my breathing was becoming much less frequent and more shallow, and that my resting pulse-rate had now dropped to about 40 beats per minute, and would rise to all of 60 beats per minute after a strenuous climb back up the hill to the ashram from Laxman Jool. I could no longer wear my watch; it stopped every time I meditated. I found myself waking up spontaneously before dawn, and going to Maharishi’s porch to do pranayama and meditate. The pre-dawn air had an electric quality which filled my body with energy; it made me tingle and buzz inside, and I almost felt as if I could fly. As soon as the sun came up, the energy ceased, and the air became flat again. Years later, I found that a very high saint named Tatwalla Baba had been living in the forest above the ashram, and he would have his morning “breakfast” of pranayama before dawn — I had been “eating” his electric leftovers!
I also swam in the Ganges quite often — though during the Monsoon season, when it rained torrentially for at least an hour every day, the Ganges became turgid, swift-flowing and gray, rushing down from the Himalayas full-laden with silt. I found it most delightful to swim just before sunset — when I emerged from the river, the setting sun across the Ganges would flood me with rosy rays and I felt peculiarly warm and blessed. John introduced me to some very interesting holy men living in caves down by the Ganges; one — perhaps thirty, and full-bearded, with flashing black eyes — was absolutely beaming and full of energy; I once helped him pull a huge, water-soaked log out of the Ganges and though I’m quite strong, I was hard-put to handle my end; he lifted his as if it were a feather.
John also introduced me to a blond, Western holy man who — I’m pretty sure — had guided Ram Dass to his guru Neem Karoli Baba; this fellow had a much-cherished picture of Neem Karoli Baba, and was busy studying Sanskrit texts in a small hut by the Ganges when I met him. John and I bought him some coconut and sugar, and he made barfi — a very sweet Indian dessert — for us, and gave me some pamphlets on Ramakrishna.
However, after about six weeks (and despite my taking all the recommended shots before leaving the States), I fell very ill, with what appeared to be a malarial type of fever, and then my eye-whites and urine turned brown: hepatitis. I holed up in my room, racked with vomiting and diarrhea for several days, until the ashram officials noticed my absence and came to check on me. They gave me homeopathic and Ayurvedic remedies, and patched me up well enough for the trip home. I took a boat directly from the ashram across the Ganges to Rishikesh, and an overnight bus back to Delhi. I was still suffering from diarrhea, but did not dare leave the bus for fear of being stranded. I was in a seat too small for my knees, crammed between two villainous-looking Indians, and jolted incessantly on cratered roads; the hellish appearance of soldiers holding rifles by torchlight in the towns we passed through simply added to the nightmare quality of that trip.
I got into Delhi in the morning, and decided to treat myself to a good hotel before leaving India the next day. I checked into the Lodhi Hotel, but as I climbed the stairs to my room, I stepped into a blast-furnace of a sharp, sudden, extremely-high fever. I staggered to my room, fell on the bed, and tried for the next few hours to use my room telephone to call a doctor. Every time I closed my eyes, I started lifting out of the body, and squirmy astral snakes were crawling around near the ceiling. I was not afraid of death, but I didn’t want to die in India, where my parents wouldn’t even hear about my death for some weeks, if ever. Looking back, I am now most grateful for the opportunity I was given to purge so many of my toxins at one time; I am certain that my trip to India accelerated my growth tremendously. I believe now that I then completed my First Initiation, or Birth, when the Higher Self descends as far as the Brow Center, and the Lower Self ascends as far as the Base Chakra, or Etheric Physical Subplane, the Realm of Earth.
I finally got though to the doctor; he came several hours later, when the fever had broken and I was feeling as if I would live. He said at that point my temperature was around 104 degrees; I don’t know what it had been before. He shot me full of streptomycin (using a rather old and dull needle, but I didn’t much care) for the next week, incidentally using up the last of my reserve cash (I had to sell my coat to pay the airport’s departure tax). I was feeling well enough then to board the plane for Boston, though my emaciated look — over the 40 days I had lost perhaps 40 pounds, leaving about 120 on my six-foot frame — won me not a few distrustful stares from both customs officials and fellow plane-passengers, who probably took me for a drug-addict. I will always remember with gratitude the British Airways flight attendant who gave me some rye sandwiches full of swiss cheese, and a British fifty-cent piece, so I could eat during my overnight lay-over in Heathrow.
Arriving in Boston under clear September skies, I was overjoyed to be home. The U.S. had its problems — Nixon resigned while I was in India — but it truly was a paradise! I went to the bank, withdrew the last of my funds — about $10 — and took a Greyhound back to Bath, Maine. I walked the last two miles home with my last fifty cents in my pocket; it did not fail to strike me that despite the various miseries of the journey, there was a kind of perfect flow involved; I was taken care of every step of the way. I got home, and saw how my mother looked at a stranger on her steps — she didn’t recognize me.
I spent the next few months at home recuperating both from the diseases, and from the cures — I had been noticing strange eye-aches, and my doctor said it was a side-effect of the streptomycin I had been given in India; U.S. doctors no longer used the stuff, and if I had continued that treatment, I might have gone blind! I ate everything (vegetarian) in sight. I had 40 pounds of body-weight to replace, and after months of an unvaried diet of lentils, rice, and curried potatoes, even peanut butter smelled exotic.
Now I was ready to return to Harvard; I cut short my leave and returned in January of 1975. I had not been given my first choice of Upperclass houses — Lowell — nor my second, nor my third, nor my fourth … I got my 13th and last choice, which was North House, up in Radcliffe. They assigned me to a private room in a semi co-op Victorian at 60 Walker Street. (This was before its exquisite period facade and ornament were shamefully butchered with plastic siding, under the House-Mastery of Dr. Oleg Grabar who, ironically, was a Fine Arts professor of presumed aesthetic sensibility!) The house was beautiful, and I loved it. I was living with about five other students, and I loved them too. I took courses in the Fine Arts department. I loved it all.
I noted with interest that the the Fine Arts Library even had one of those new coin-operated photocopiers — now, we wouldn’t have to hand-copy every quotation from a reference book we wished to cite in our papers. While the machine obviously offered us enormous time-saving advantages, I somewhat feared the potential side-effect of intellectual laziness; now we could instantly copy reams of information, bypassing our brains completely. For the most part, I stuck to hand-copying — I was also on a budget, and could ill-afford needless expenditure.
Despite my penury, life was terrific. I took a course in the Science of Creative Intelligence — Vedic philosophy — at the TM Center, and began to apply the knowledge to my study of art, with generally good results. Despite my dislike of the robotic quality of the TM teachers while they were on the job, I grew to love and respect most of them personally. They were on the whole an inspiring, altruistic, and deeply spiritual group of people. I became a TM checker — one who checks the meditations of others — and took more residence courses whenever I could.
