Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  The first manifestations of any extraordinary psychic gifts came slowly, and only gradually did his parents realize that Carl had capacities beyond the ordinary. When Carl was between seven and eight, they began to notice that when, for instance, his father or mother were looking for something—a newspaper, a pen, a glass of water—more often than not Carl would appear almost immediately carrying what they needed.

  They put this down to coincidence at first. But then it became so frequent and, at times, so eerie that they set out to determine whether it was merely coincidence. After some weeks of close and discreet observation, they concluded that Carl did know in some way or other what they were thinking at times.

  They might have brushed even this aside if they had not one day overheard his brothers asking Carl to bend some nails. Obligingly Carl bent and twisted two one-inch nails by “feeling” them with his index finger and thumb.

  Carl's father consulted a psychologist. A long series of discussions followed. Carl was brought by his parents to that psychologist, to another psychologist, and to a psychiatrist. The unanimous decision, after some testing, was that the child had incipient psychic gifts of telepathy and telekinesis. They maintained that he should not be made to feel out of the ordinary. His parents should endeavor to get him to recognize his gifts as nonordinary and to restrict their usage.

  The difficulty with all this decision making behind Carl's back totally escaped Carl's parents and even the psychologists. For, without realizing fully its implications, Carl knew what they all thought and knew their decision. In a subtle recess of his child's mind he decided to go along with the entire plan. But from that day on there began in him that “aloneness” that marked him in later life.

  Carl obeyed his father's suggestion that he bend no more nails, that he no longer tell people what they were thinking, and that he take no more initiative due to any telepathic knowledge he had of their wishes. By his eleventh year, as far as his parents could see, all manifestation of psychic powers seemed to have ceased in his external life.

  But, in reality, Carl had now got a command over these powers in himself that no one realized and that he guarded almost as a jealous and lonely secret. Only occasionally did he slip. In a fit of temper he might smash a cup in another room or shout at a companion some boyish insult to match the insult the boy was about to launch.

  In spite of this continued connivance on his part, Carl's excellent relationships with his father and mother were genuine. In later years, after his parents divorced, Carl remained closest to his father.

  As the eldest child, Carl was looked upon by his two brothers, Joseph and Ray, with something approaching awe. The three of them had an intimacy and openness with each other that lasted beyond childhood. It was within that framework of boyhood intimacy that he told Joseph and Ray of his vision at the age of sixteen.

  From their accounts and Carl's recollections, it appears that the vision took place in his father's library one evening as Carl was preparing his homework. He glanced at the clock. Dinner was served punctually at six o'clock each evening. He had, he saw, one minute to go, just enough time to find a particular volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and open it to the article he needed for his written composition.

  After he found the information he was looking for, his consciousness underwent a peculiar change. He was not frightened; instead, the change put him in what he describes as a great hush. He no longer saw the book in his hand or the shelves of books in front of him. He no longer even felt the weight of the volume in his hand. He did not feel the floor beneath his feet. But he did not miss them. They seemed no longer necessary.

  He did not perceive all this directly. Only on the periphery of his consciousness was he aware of perceptual changes and of his lack of any need for physical feeling of his surroundings. His attention was riveted on something else, something totally different from, but in a mysterious way intimate to, all his experience up to that moment of his life.

  It was, first of all, an atmosphere. There was much light, but, he says, a dark light. Yet, that darkness was so brilliant that no detail escaped him. He was not looking at something or at a landscape; he was participating in it, so clear was every detail shown and conveyed to him. What he saw was dimensionless: no “over there,” no “up” or “down” or “large” or “small.” Yet it was a place. Objects were in that place, but the place was nowhere. And the objects located in that space were not found by coordinates, or seen by the eye, or felt by the hand. He knew them, as it were, by participation in their being. He knew them completely. Therefore, he knew what they were and where they were. And even though they had a relationship to him and to each other, it was not a relationship of space and distance and comparative sizes.

  Not only was normal spatial dimension in abeyance as nonextended time. It was not that time seemed to be suspended. There was no times no duration. He was not looking at the objects for a long or a short time—it could not have been seconds. Neither could it have been an infinity of hours or years. There was no sense of duration. It was timeless. Yet he did clearly, if indirectly, perceive a time. But it was, again, an internal time and seemed to be the total existence of himself and of all those objects without perceptible or receding beginning, and without an ending or an approaching ending.

  As for a description of that landscape and the objects “in” it, Carl could only speak vaguely. It was a “land,” he said, a “countryside,” a “region.” It had all you would expect-mountains, sky, fields', crops, trees, rivers. But these lacked what Carl called the “obscurity” of their counterparts in the physical world. And, although it had no apparent houses or cities, it was “inhabited”: it was full of an “inhabiting presence.” There was no sound or echo, but the soundlessness was not a silence, and the echolessness was not an absence of movement. It seemed to Carl for the first time he was freed from the oppression of silence and rid of the nostalgia produced' in him by echoes.

  As he took all this in, or as he was embraced by all this—he could never distinguish exactly which was a truer way of speaking—there was in him a sudden desire. That desire had a purity and a sacred immunity that freed it of any aching and did not imply a want in a way we normally understand. It was a summary appeal, but without request. It was desire as its own confirmation. It was substantial hope as its own trust. Yet it was desire. He would describe it at times as a “Show mel” or a “Give me!” or a “Take me!” or a “Lead me!” arising in him. But, he said, none of these expressed the bones and marrow of that desire. And over all his desire and desiring self there was an all-satisfying acceptance and acceptability.

  Then the whole focus of his vision changed. It was the highlight of his real wonder. He was listening to a small voice and seeing a face he cannot describe. He heard words and saw expressions he cannot put into language. The dominant trait of the voice and face was expressed by him later in the word “Wait!” He did not know what that “Wait!” meant or what he was to wait for. But the whole idea was intensely and deeply satisfying.

  Carl does not know if the vision would have “lasted” and carried him farther or not, for he was suddenly jerked out of it. “You've exactly one minute to finish.” It was little Ray. “Hurry up!”

  An immense sadness welled up in Carl at that moment, an indescribable sense of loss. He saw the cold books, the long, hard shelves, and his little brother's face. He felt the volume in his hands and the floor beneath his feet. He glanced at the clock. It was one minute to six o'clock.

  As he hurried to his table, he had tears in his eyes. But, afterward, he could not make out whether they were tears of pain or thankfulness. He never knew.

  Before going to bed, he confided in Joseph and Ray. “Perhaps it was Grandma telling you something,” Ray suggested helpfully. Their grandmother had died the previous year. “No,” said Joseph, “it was from God. They told us in Sunday school that God sends these things to show you what's going to happen.”

  Carl often wondered subseque
ntly about this unique event in his life. What was he to wait for? Who or what had been talking to him? What had he been so desirous of at that moment? But, in spite of these questionings, the vision remained in his memory with a sweetness that nothing could dispel. And it made one subtle difference in him which many noticed but few understood. In his own mind it separated him from all others. He was never quite “with” others, never fully together with them. At parties, dinners, meetings, lectures, he would see himself essentially separate from the others and on the sidelines.

  He was, indeed, waiting. Only years later did he know what it was he had been told in the vision to expect.

  Carl entered Princeton in 1942, got his master's degree in psychology in 1947, his doctorate in 1951, spent six more years studying and doing research. Four of those years saw him in the United States and two in Europe. He returned only in 1957, to take up a permanent teaching post on a Midwest university campus. In those 15 years, from 1942 to 1957, some major changes took place in him.

  The first and probably one of the most important was due to the influence of a fellow student, a Tibetan, Olde by name, whom Carl met in 1953. Olde gave Carl a firsthand introduction to “higher prayer,” as Olde called it.

  Olde had been born in Tibet, reared there until the age of ten, then educated in Switzerland and Germany, and had come to the United States for doctoral studies. He claimed to be a member of an ancient Tibetan religious order, The Gelugpa (“The Virtuous”), and that he himself, as his father before him, was one of the sprulsku or reincarnating lamas.

  Olde's first personal conversation with Carl took place when Carl happened to hear Olde reading a precis of the thesis he was writing. The subject was the relationship between Yamantaka, the god of wisdom, and Yama, the god of Hell. Carl asked in all innocence why statues of Yamantaka always showed the god with 34 arms and 9 heads. Olde's answer, a seeming nonsequitur, struck a strange echo in Carl. It was one answer Carl never forgot:

  “The more arms and the more heads Yamantaka is seen with, the more you can see the other. And only the other is real.”

  The other? The other? The other? Didn't he know the other? What or who was the other?

  Carl looked at Olde. And he understood quietly without effort: each extra arm, each extra head was meant to make nonsense, literally, of an arm and a head as a real thing. Any thing, an arm, a head, a chair, a leaf, any thing in itself was unimportant, was significant and real only because of an other, the other. Thingness was in itself a negation. It was the non-thing that mattered, because only the non-thing was real. And he seemed to see also that this was why, ever since his vision, he had had a tendency to withdraw, to remain on the sidelines, away from involvement with things, removed from being wholly occupied with their thingness.

  In a gentle dawning within him Carl felt a surge of the same sadness that had gripped him when little Ray had burst in on him years before and his vision had been rudely terminated. “It [that moment with Olde] was the most maturing moment of my life up to that point,” Carl muses in retrospect today. For, during it, he felt again not only that sadness, but his ancient boyhood desire, felt all the pains of nostalgia as a most acceptable suffering, and at the same time heard again down the corridors of his memory that still, calm, reassuring “Wait” replete with its promise and guarantee of fulfillment.

  Carl and Olde saw much of each other. And before long Olde was initiating Carl into “higher prayer.” From his own family life and Sunday schooling, Carl had learned the ordinary modes of prayer. It consisted of set prayers, hymns, and the occasional spontaneous self-expression used during grace at meals or when he prayed in private.

  Olde overturned all Carl's ideas and habits. Words, he said, and, even more importantly, concepts impede “higher prayer” and all true communication with what Carl as a Christian called “God” and what Olde called the “All.” Carl, he said, would have to train himself for “higher prayer.”

  Day after day, Carl sat beside Olde, while Olde trained him in the basic attitudes of body and “tones” of mind. The conditions of body were simple to grasp. Quietness (early morning before sunrise or late at night when no sound disturbed the campus), elimination of any distraction—a comfortable sitting position, loose clothes on his body, as little light as possible. But all this and the steps still to come were merely preparatory and temporary. Olde explained that, if Carl progressed, he would leap definitively over all physical difficulties to “higher prayer.” And he would be able to “pray” while surrounded by 20 jackhammers pounding away in the middle of a bronze-walled room. (This was Olde's image.)

  Carl quickly attained the required physical quietude and concentration. The next steps took time—and they ushered Carl to the threshold of parapsychology. As Olde explained it, Carl had to be clear and clean of any “thingness.” It was easy for Carl to understand how to void his imagination of images, how to close off his memory so that no memory images passed in front of his mind, and how to eliminate even the most peripheral image consciousness of his body position, of the clothes on his body, of the warmth or the cold of the atmosphere around him, of his own breathing. But for quite a while he balked at the ultimate step. Olde instructed him that at this point he might go around in circles forever and never get any farther at all. Most people, in fact, did just that.

  The ultimate step was to eliminate his own conscious realization of—therefore his concepts and images of and feelings about—his very condition at that moment of prayer. For a long time he had no control over his mind to keep himself from realizing he was emptying his mind; and he had no control over his will, with which he kept desiring to empty his mind. It all seemed a vicious circle. You disciplined your mind to think no thoughts, your imagination to indulge in no images, your feelings not to feel. And you did this by your will. But then, it appeared to Carl, his mind was full of the idea “I must have no thoughts.” His imagination kept seeking images of itself without images. His feelings kept feeling that they had no feelings. Around and around he used to gyrate until he emerged tired and strained and disappointed.

  “Don't give up,” Olde consoled him. He told him it could be worse and that he was sure Carl would one day find the secret—a mere, a tiny, an almost unnoticeable adjustment. “When you make it, you will know.” He repeated these same words again and again to Carl.

  But for quite a while Carl made the summary mistake of trying to make the “adjustment.” He did not and could not know that, if you made that peculiar “adjustment,” you simply made it. Not with your mind, not with your will, not with your imagination or memory, but you as a thinking, willing, imagining, remembering self. All your thingness suddenly of itself became a transparency through which the non-thing, the other, clearly appeared. And once through that stage, you entered a shadowless, formless, thingless region of existence where only reality reigned, and your unreality, your thingness had no vogue, no role, except as the counterpart of allness.

  The moment Carl achieved that condition of “higher prayer,” Olde abruptly terminated their association. “Now, when you want to pray, really to pray,” Olde concluded his instructions, “you know how to do so.”

  It was Carl's last year at Princeton as a doctoral student. He had more leisurely years of study and research in front of him before he took up a university career. He was avid to go on under Olde's direction; and as Olde was staying on as lecturer and researcher at the university, Carl could see no problem.

  But Olde would have no more of him. Why? This was Carl's question to Olde as they walked over the campus in the early mornings. Why?

  Olde would say very little. He had, he admitted, introduced Carl to the Vajnayana, “the thunderbolt,” the vehicle of mystic power. But no persuasion on earth would get him to channel Carl further in Mantrayana, the vehicle of mystic spells. “What I have done is enough,” Olde grunted. Then as an afterthought: “What I have done is dangerous enough.”

  Carl still could not understand. He persisted, asking Olde to e
xplain or, if he could not explain, at least to suggest a direction for him.

  Finally one day Olde seemed to have no more answers. Every soul, he said, which turns to the perfection of Allness is like a closed-petaled lotus flower in the beginning of its search. Under the direction of a master or guide, it opens its eight petals slowly. The master merely assists at this opening. When the petals are open, the tiny silver urn of true knowledge is placed in the center of the lotus flower. And when the petals close in again, the whole flower has become a vehicle of that true knowledge.

  Looking away from Carl, Olde said gratingly, almost inimically: “The silver urn can never be placed at the center of your flower. The center is already taken by a self-multiplying negation.” A pause. “Filth. Materiality. Slime. Death.”

  Carl was stunned, literally struck dumb for an instant. Olde walked away from him, still without looking at him. He was about five paces away when Carl broke down. He could only manage a choking exclamation: “Olde! My friend! Olde!”

  Olde stopped, his back to Carl. He was utterly calm, motionless, wordless. Then Carl heard him say in a low voice and not particularly to him: “Friend is holy.” Carl did not understand what he meant.

  Then Olde turned slowly around. Carl hardly recognized Olde's features. They were no longer the soft traits of his friend. Olde's forehead was no longer a furrowless expanse as before, and his eyes were blazing with a yellowish light. Harsh lines crisscrossed his mouth and cheeks. He was not angry. He was hostile. That picture of Olde was burned into Carl's memory. Olde said only this to Carl, words Carl could never forget: “You have Yama without Yamantaka. Black without white. Nothingness without something.” It was the last time he ever spoke directly to Carl.

  As Olde turned away again, Carl had a sudden reversal. He seemed for a few instants to be absorbed in “higher prayer.” His surge of frustration and anger gave away to contempt and disgust for Olde. Then as he looked at Olde's retreating back, he was filled with a warning fear of Olde and what Olde stood for. Somehow Olde was the enemy. Somehow he, Carl, made up a “we” and “us” with someone else, and Olde could not belong to it.