by Неизвестный
“Enemy!” he suddenly heard himself shouting after Olde.
Olde stopped, half-turned, and peered over his shoulder at Carl. His face was back to its usual repose. His forehead, cheeks, and mouth were unruffled and smooth. His eyes were calm, wide open, just gentle deeps of impenetrable light, as they usually were. The compassion in them hit Carl like a whip. He did not want anybody's compassion. He took a step back, wanted to speak, but could not get any word out of his throat. He backed away another step, half-turning away, then another step and another half-turn, until he literally found himself moving away. He told himself he had walked away, but deep in himself he knew he had been repelled, had been turned around and propelled away.
Apparently Olde too had his own protectors.
His association with Olde had important effects on Carl. Given his psychic gifts, it was almost inevitable that Olde's introduction to Eastern mysticism, with its emphasis on the parapsychological, would impel Carl down a road of research in the then relatively fresh field of parapsychology and the paranormal elements of human consciousness.
Over and above all else, Carl's time with Olde had sharpened his extrasensory ability to perceive other people's thoughts. Before his instructions from Olde, Carl did not always know each and every thought of those around. More generally, he knew very accurately their state of mind-worry, happiness, fear, love, hate, and so on; and, on occasion, he knew precisely what they were thinking. Olde's discipline had brought that more precise part of Carl's extrasensory perception into greater use and control. He found it working more frequently with everybody. And soon he was exercising it at will.
After his “training” with Olde, there were apparently only two people during Carl's university career who remained peculiarly “opaque” for him. He could never read their thoughts, and he rarely knew their inner condition. The first was a onetime girlfriend, Wanola P. The second was Father Hartney F. (“Hearty”), a priest who was sent by his bishop to study parapsychology.
In 1954, one year after his break with Olde, Carl met Wanola P., a graduate student in psychology. A tall, blonde, attractive Midwestern girl, Wanola was a good sportswoman, socially quite popular. Curiously, it was none of these things that attracted Carl, but rather a mixture of her unusual intelligence, her point of view regarding his work on religion and the psyche, and, most of all perhaps, his own inability to get any clear extrasensory perception of what she thought or felt.
As they began to date, Wanola got to know something of Carl's psychic gifts. She was fascinated by them, by his novel concepts, and his brilliant attack on various puzzles and problems of psychology. But as she got to know him, her fascination turned to compassion, and then to a fear for Carl's own sanity and for his religious beliefs. It was like a curious echo of Olde's reaction a year before, but it all went much more swiftly this time. And his rather brief association with Wanola left Carl puzzled.
At times, Wanola spoke to Carl at length about some seemingly offhand remarks he made about “finding” Christianity in its “true” or “original” state. She remarked on his growing opinion of Jesus as a simple Galilean fisherman who had been powerfully changed by God and by his taking over of God's spirit. But mainly she grew to be disturbed by Carl's ambition to subject the very spirit of religion to controlled laboratory experiment.
Finally one day, just back from a short vacation home to the Midwest, Wanola came to Carl's room straight from the airport. She had a simple bouquet of wild flowers she had picked herself before catching her plane. Curiously, Carl remembers those flowers in every detail, although he says that at the very moment Wanola entered his room and started to talk with him, his interest and attention were elsewhere. He does remember blue gentians, dogtooth violets, little-boys' breeches, starflowers, and Queen Anne's lace.
But when Wanola walked in with them, Carl did not give her even a smile or a hello. He was brandishing a small book just published: The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley. She remembers him blurting out the title. Then: “Huxley knows all about it! Mescalin! And I don't need mescalin!”
Wanola listened to his long sermon on Huxley; and when she left, she took the bouquet of flowers with her.
Carl had made a delicate choice; he had taken a step away from simple human tenderness. This he understood only after the exorcism. Wanola had understood at that moment. He called her from time to time after that day, but to his confusion she never would see him again.
Carl's excitement over Huxley's book was enormous. He grasped immediately the central point advanced by Huxley: that the mind and psyche are capable of a knowledge and a breadth of experience of which men in our civilization have rarely dreamed. Living in our urban society, the human psyche has learned to siphon its energies in one direction-coping with the material and tangible world. Huxley made a plea in his book for the development of a psychedelic (literally, a psyche-opening) drug, nonaddictive and harmless in its side-effects, by which men and women could free their psychic energies and enjoy the full range of their potential.
Carl, in the middle of his studies on dual personality, suddenly found in Huxley a window opened for him onto a new horizon. Perhaps, he now saw, what is often called a multiple-personality problem really was a case of psyche freed-particularly at least-from conventional bonds? Perhaps at least some so-called schizophrenics were really enlightened people for whom the shock of enlightenment has been too much? And perhaps such people exist in an altered state of consciousness with which they could transcend the material and tangible world around them, leap over the barriers of space and time, and enjoy genuine liberty of spirit?
This was an important moment in Carl's development. What Huxley had attempted and, with the aid of mescalin, achieved piecemeal, Carl now aimed at achieving by developing and controlling his own psychic gifts.
Thinking back, as he sometimes did, about the vision he had had as a boy in his father's study, he now saw that vision as a foretaste of what he could and should achieve: a perception of spirit, a participation in spaceless and timeless existence reached by a parapsychological path. The aim of all Olde's instructions now appeared to Carl to be simply a liberation of the mind and will from any involvement with sensory experiences and material trammels. It was no wonder that Wanola's disappearance from his personal life gave him no sense of loss. In effect, she would have had to go, he concluded. There was no room in his life now for a personal attachment that would involve emotions and the physical presence of another human being.
Although Carl's study of parapsychology had begun in 1953 through his association with Olde, it was about five years later that this interest took on a consistently religious character. After two years of study and research in Europe, he returned to the United States at the end of 1957 in order to take up a post as lecturer in the Midwest at the beginning of 1958.
It was an attractive appointment for Carl: it gave him a good deal of latitude for research. He found a small apartment not very far from the campus and was given perfect space for his professional needs in the department of psychology. There his life would be centered. He had a reception room, a study for himself, and, opening off his study, there was a room large enough for seminars, private lectures, and experiments.
By the following year, Carl was well settled and had attracted a small and enthusiastic group of assistants from among his better students.
One evening, quite unexpectedly and while alone, Carl had the first of what he and his associates later called “trances.” He had just returned to his office from dinner at a colleague's house. It was about 7:30 P.M. He had a great sense of tranquillity and confidence.
When he entered his study from the reception room, his eye fell on the window facing west. The sun had not yet set, but there were incandescent patches and streaks to be seen in the sky. The whole window space looked like a two-panel canvas painted in reds, oranges, blue-grays, gilded whites.
Carl crossed to the window, and as he gazed at the sunset, there was a gentle but ra
pid transformation in him. His body became motionless, as if held painlessly immobile by an unseen giant hand. He was frozen, yet without any sensation of cold or paralysis.
Then the living scene outside took on the same odd aspect of immobility and frozenness for him. Next, parts of the scene started to disappear. First of all, everything in the intervening space between the window where Carl stood and the sunset disappeared: quadrangle, buildings, lawns, the road, the trees and shrubbery. It was not as if they just remained on the periphery of his seeing. They altogether ceased to be there for him. If he were to look for them, he knew at that moment, he would not be able to find them. All seemed to have been plucked out of sight. And their disappearance seemed to him to be more normal than their permanency there in front of his eyes. For a moment he felt very much at ease, for all the bizarre nature of what was happening.
And, of course, the distance between him and the sunset was now a formless vacuum after the disappearance of the objects on his landscape. There was nothing “between” him and the sunset, not even a gap, not even emptiness. He was no nearer to the sunset physically, yet now he was knowing it intimately.
Finally the window itself faded. Carl, meanwhile, had been looking less and less at the colors and hues of the dying sun; and, when the window frame faded, he was “looking merely at the sun,” although he cannot express clearly in words the difference between those two sights or the obvious importance it had for him at that moment.
Finally the viewed—what he was viewing—seemed to loom larger and larger in his consciousness, but he himself seemed to be diminishing correspondingly. Smaller. Smaller.
A sudden panic arose in him that he, too, might “disappear” from his own consciousness, just as all the landscape had disappeared. That, he was sure, would mean nothingness for him. And, as the viewed loomed larger and more gargantuan in its weird nonphysical way, the more miserable and expendable he felt.
At this low ebb in his feelings Carl experienced the initial stirrings of what he later came to call “my friend.” He always insisted that this “friend” was personal—a person, but not a physical person. “It was a personal presence,” he maintained. It did not seem to “come” to him, but to have been there all along; yet it was unexpected, and he had never noticed it before that moment.
No words passed “between” Carl and his “friend,” and no concepts or images that he was aware of. But he knew with absolute certainty he was being “told” that, unless he “nodded” or “gave approval,” his progress into nothingness would be a fact.
The anguish this possibility caused him was awful. Still, some aspect of that personal presence seemed “deficient,” seemed to leave him with an option to say no. He had one brief, strange impulse to challenge the absolutist demand for consent now being made upon him. But a rapid confusion as strange as the whole incident dulled the impulse to fight: he did not know how to issue the challenge. In the name of what power would he “speak”? In whose name would he bear the consequences, and how could he survive them? He says now for a long time he had nourished no idea of aid or help or salvation, and he had “no one or nothing to turn to or call upon.” He had been brought to nearly total aloneness, indeed, to the brink of nothingness.
Easily, therefore, and with relief, he “nodded.” He gave his interior approval. He still did not know exactly what this approval concerned.
Immediately the sense of being reduced to nothingness ceased. Relief flooded his consciousness. Almost simultaneously he heard a voice calling from a great distance.
“Carl! Carl! Are you all right? Carl!”
The window “reappeared” and the landscape. The sunset “withdrew,” and his vision was normal once again.
He stirred and looked around. Albert, one of his young assistants, had a hand on his shoulder. Neither of them said anything for the moment. They waited until the sun was completely down. Then, while Albert listened, Carl sat down and dictated into his recording machine.
What now emerged surprised even Carl. He spoke of the entire trance as God-manifesting, as a religious experience. Turning to Albert at one stage, and still dictating, he declared that he now saw his life's work to be the finding of true spirit-life and an accurate knowledge of God and his revelation—all by means of parapsychological research.
Carl's course was set. For the next five years he would work steadily and methodically, building his theories, testing and developing his own psychic powers, nourishing a group of students and assistants around him.
In 1963 Carl became acquainted with the second person in his university career who remained “opaque” to his psychic perceptions. Father Hartney F. came into Carl's orbit almost ten years after Wanola P., almost eleven years after Olde.
It was in the fall semester. Carl had just been made a full professor. Father Hartney F. (or “Hearty,” as he was called by his friends) was the one member of the new class whom Carl could not quite understand or “grasp” psychically. As had been the case with Wanola P. a decade before, Carl's inability to get any “inner perceptions” of Hearty intrigued him.
Hearty, however, looked completely normal, even innocuous. A large, bony man rapidly going bald at that moment of his life, and wearing thick-lensed spectacles, Hearty sat in the second row, looking at Carl intently and taking notes from time to time. He always wore a Roman collar and an impeccably clean black suit. During lectures he rarely stirred, looked around him, or asked a question.
After Hearty's first term paper, which was no better and no worse than average, and would not normally have provoked special interest in Carl, Carl took the occasion to interview his “opaque” student.
He found the priest to be at heart a very simple man with a better than average memory, robust health, thorough grounding in the basics of psychology, and an ambition to study parapsychology for what he called “pastoral purposes.” Apparently he had convinced his bishop that a knowledge of parapsychology would be particularly helpful in working with his co-religionists and for understanding some of their problems.
Offhand and, as it were, by the way, Hearty mentioned to Carl some cases of diabolic possession. And he also spoke of Exorcism. At the time it seemed to arouse very little interest in Carl's mind. He brushed the topic aside into the back of his mind, so to speak, with some remarks about the need of updating beliefs and rites in the Church.
Apparently having observed as much as he could or cared to after a fairly short time, Carl ended the interview with a brief criticism of some technical points in Hearty's term paper.
But Carl remained intrigued, and he was not unsympathetic when two of his students, Bill and Donna, who were later to go with Carl to Aquileia, suggested that they bring Hearty into a special study group Carl had formed. Their argument was that the group needed a trained representative of some Christian community because one of the group's deeper objectives was to experiment with Carl's psychic powers and gifts in order to probe the past of Christianity. Now, Hearty was the only student in the department at that time who was a cleric and who was trained in theology.
Carl decided to have another interview with this opaque cleric before inviting him into the study group. He asked his two assistants, Albert and Norman, together with the student members of the special group, to be with him.
Hearty was a very easygoing man, very affable, a little slow to make up his mind. As Albert and Norman listened to Carl's questions and Hearty's answers, they had a growing persuasion that Carl was getting nowhere. Hearty was not resisting. He was not even being evasive or vague. It was just that, in spite of his perfectly frank answers to all the questions put to him, Hearty seemed to be immune to Carl's persuasion. And the reason for this was not any mental opposition on Hearty's part or any verbal clashes between the two men. It was something else.
All present would probably have put the problem down to a fundamental difference in temperament between the two if it had not been for one unfortunate turn in their conversation, when Hearty seemed to take
over the direction of the interview. Hearty wanted to understand what basis there was for assuming, as Carl seemed obviously to be doing, that psychic knowledge and psychic activity inevitably led to spirit.
Albert conceded that it was a presupposition, but an acceptable one.
Then Hearty wanted to know if that meant that psychic knowledge and psychic activity were under the direction of the spirit?
Again, the answer was yes.
Well, then, it seemed Hearty had still another problem: unless they claimed prior knowledge—which they didn't (of course not, they all acknowledged; wasn't that, after all, why they had study groups: to find out what they didn't know?), how could they be sure they were under the direction or influence of a good spirit? Or did they presume that all spirit was good? And if so, on what basis?
These questions represented such a fundamental doubting of the position Carl shared with his group that the peace of the meeting was shattered. As one of those present recalled, up to that moment in the meeting “we had not known how pervaded our minds were with one outlook [Carl's].” It felt, for Albert and Norman, as if some accepted guest or some presence accepted among them had been insulted and had started to grumble in resentment.
All of them started to question Hearty at one and the same time. Carl held up his hand for silence. He was perfectly calm, but his eyes were glittering and his face was very pale. Hearty's “opaqueness” had become transparent to Carl, for only that time and only for those moments. Hearty was deeply opposed, Carl now understood, to all that Carl stood for.
But Carl was cool; he was composed and self-controlled. All students, he admonished his assistants, were free. And all points of view were allowed. Moreover, Father F. (he stressed the “Father”) had a professional basis for his opinion.