by Неизвестный
Hearty quietly broke in to add that Carl, too, had a professional basis for his position. There was an unexpected silence. For that moment, some of the opaqueness of Hearty's psyche had been dispelled, but Carl could not quite make out what he perceived dimly in Hearty. Then Hearty “closed” 'up on him. He was “opaque” once again.
Carl gave a deprecating smile and made a little gesture, as if to go on to explain the professional basis of Hearty's opinion. But he stopped and knitted his eyebrows. Every member of the group felt a new tension in that silence. Hearty looked steadily at Carl.
Carl recomposed himself and looked pleasantly at Hearty. “And what, Father,” Carl finally said, “is your professional basis? In short, I mean.”
“Jesus. Jesus Christ, sir. As God and as man.” Then, without pausing, Hearty asked lightly: “And yours, Professor?”
Carl dismissed the query. Perhaps, he said, Father F. would become a subject for group study some day as he, Carl, had already become. In the meantime, they would table for the time being the motion of his entry into the special study group.
The tension was gone.
From time to time during the remaining two years of Hearty's studies, Carl racked his brains as to the “opaque” character of Hearty's psyche. What did Hearty and Wanola P. have in common? Suppose, indeed, that there was both good and evil spirit? But no sooner would he put himself that question than the entire panorama of his life would flood his mind; and always he ended with what was for him an unacceptable alternative. A doubt of the fundamental point as to what kind of spirit was leading him would mean a total revision of his work. How could he do that? It could even mean resigning his professorship and renouncing his parapsychological research.
In June 1964, after his final exams and thesis, Hearty had a short farewell talk with Carl. He said he would like to stay in touch. It was a pleasant moment for both of them. Carl felt good about his departing student, in spite of his failure to pierce Hearty's psyche.
When Hearty departed, Carl found he could not work any more at that moment. Something Hearty had said or, perhaps, done—Carl could not quite tell—had struck an unaccustomed chord in Carl. He sank his face in his hands and found himself crying unaccountably. He remained sobbing for about ten minutes, and felt intense relief.
Then a slackened wire in his mind suddenly jerked tight and stiff again. He sat up straight in his chair. His tears dried. The old mood was back. There was work to be done.
It would be almost ten years before Carl and Hearty met again.
In the next eight years Carl experienced an almost permanently altered state of consciousness. He received a similarly permanent perception of what he called the “non-thing” aura (what Huxley had termed the Non-Self aura) surrounding all objects. He had various trances. And, above all, he underwent his “exaltation.”
The first few times that Carl noticed the alteration in his consciousness, he put it down to a complex of physical causes. The atmosphere of a particular day when he sensed some change had been very clear, he thought; it had rained for four days previously, and there was a strong, blustering wind. On another occasion, he felt, the new sensation was due to a great physical well-being and deep satisfaction over the way some experimental work had gone. On still another occasion, he put it down to an exhilarating discussion with some colleagues.
Gradually, however, he acknowledged quietly to himself that some deep alteration was taking place within him.
First of all, it had to do with what he sensed—saw, heard, felt, smelled—but the newness and surprise of what he felt really lay in the fact that it seemed to originate and reach “beyond” his senses. It was “trans-sense.” Second, it concerned people, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. And, most importantly for Carl, it was theophanic. He maintained it was a manifestation of deity. (Carl in those days never spoke of “God” or of “the deity,” but only of the “divine” and of “deity.”)
The earliest stages were simple, but very perplexing. Walking in the street during the daytime crowd of shoppers, for example, or in more solitary walks away from town, he would somehow switch his consciousness away from eyes or hands or trees or—the ground. Some totality of individual traceries and patterns and meanings emerged, instead, and became the center point of his consciousness.
In the street crowd he would suddenly stop seeing eyes or faces or clothes; he would see, instead, a sort of pattern all the people traced as their heads bobbed and moved toward him, or receded behind him, or passed in the same direction as he was going.
But the sensation was quick, subtle as mercury. At first, when he tried to seize it by his full attention, he chased it away, instead. Then, when he went about his business again, it thrust itself back into his consciousness.
After a number of experiences, Carl began to realize that the traceries he saw were not bobbing heads or swaying tree branches, and he was not seeing with his eyes. He was watching something with his unaided consciousness. And what he saw was the buoyancy and fluidity and free-streaming verve of spirit. Just spirit, untrammeled by the chains of physicality.
After one of these experiences, Carl rushed back to his laboratory and scribbled an excited record of the event: “It's theophanic! I've done it! I've found the relation between psyche and spirit, between consciousness and belief, between deity and human beings. I've found it! I've found it! It's theophanic!” This entry in his notes is dated March 1965.
In the following two years, the frequency and intensity of such experiences increased. Sometimes it was the eyes of people, sometimes it was the onward movement of their feet, sometimes it was their heads. The meaning in each case was different; yet all the meanings coalesced into an awesome totality.
Eyes were of a particular pattern. Over and above their color, brightness or dullness, shape, individual expressions, every pair of eyes seemed to constitute one reflection of a total seeing, an enlivening and quickened sight. And all the pairs of eyes he saw were a unified reflection of that totality, and at the same time completely individual. The pattern they traced was not of one huge eye, but of one sight, of one seeing.
It was in the same manner that in the onward movement of feet he saw the power of that one being—he now called it “spirit” in his notes. In the working of hands-holding, gesticulating, waving, pointing—it was the spirit's subtlety. In the sound of voices it was not the accent, the pronunciation, or the pitch of the voices that struck him. It was what he called the “tonality.” Each voice reflected a certain total harmony, as water, without becoming light, reflects light; or a valley wall, without becoming sound, reflects the sound of a shout; or colors, without becoming a mood, reflect a mood; smells, without being touchable, reflect surfaces and substances we have touched.
At the beginning of the following year Carl began to notice two new elements in his constantly altering state of consciousness. There was a great sense of “being with,” of “being together with.” What he was “with” or “together with” on these occasions he dared not think out too clearly, because he knew that would be the death of it all. But it was a personal “being with.” What he was “with” was intelligent, free, supreme in some awesome but not frightening way. Slowly, over a period of time, when note-taking or recording on his machine, he came to refer to “my friend.”
The second element was that the fits and starts of his experiences were over. Now all was coalescing. All the traceries and patterns, all the aspects of meaning and significance and existence seemed to come as one. He realized after a brief spell that all the traceries had always been one. But, he also realized, he could have started to know that oneness only through those initial fits and starts. Theophanic happenings thus became a theophany, and everything now was seen by him as united. Everything was an aspect of the one being.
Then subtly, simply as a suspicion at the beginning, Carl started to feel some basic differences between what he called “my friend” and this one being, this all-pervasive, free-moving, and independ
ent spirit in which all things were, but which was not itself just one of all other things.
Whenever he “perceived” the slightest smidgeon of difference between the “friend” and the “one,” some sadness he could not control entered him. He felt again as if he were going to be deprived, as he had been at sixteen when his first vision had ended. He took even more copious notes and made long recordings in order to catch and retain everything he could.
In the last days of 1965 Carl began to perceive what he called the “non-thing” aura of all objects and people around him. Until that moment, and even when he was absorbed by that totality of being in which all things were now bathed for him, Carl still did always see them as things. Their “thingness” still was a basic characteristic.
Very early one morning he was walking the short distance from his apartment to his office on campus. There was still some of the night chill in the air, but a brisk wind moving the trees and rifling the grass promised one of those zesty, sunny days Carl liked so much.
The last stretch of the walk was a path lined on the west side by a row of poplar trees. On the east side there was a wide expanse of grass sweeping away for about 200 yards to a row of buildings used by the agricultural department. Behind the buildings there was a ridge of high ground.
As he walked, Carl glanced eastward at the ridge, his eyes traveling leisurely over the trees, shrubs, buildings, and grass, taking in the fresh light that was creeping over everything.
He was so attuned and attentive to his own perceptions that he immediately noticed a qualitative change. Each thing had something more than mere thingness. It was that each one existed on the edge of an abyss all its own, a vast chasm of “non-thingness,” of what it was not.
This experience was far more absorbing than even Huxley had intimated in his lyrical description of the “Non-Self”; and its beauty was more authentic and filling than anything expressed in each physical object. This “non-thingness” was an actual aura around every object. It was dim and shallow and pale nearest to the object, but as Carl's eye drew away from the object and into the object's aura, the aura deepened and heightened in appearance and meaning.
Nothing, no object, Carl felt, would ever be banal anymore: it would never again be merely itself, have only its own self, for him. The aura of its non-thingness, its “Non-Self,” glowed always and made the thing possible. Carl made the quiet discovery that in the aura of each thing there was no difference between appearance and meaning.
As his eye traveled and the “non-thingness,” the “Non-Self,” of each object glistened and signified for him, he began to hear a vaster and vaster choir of soundless voices, and to see a greater and greater multitude of participants in worship. Each blade of grass chimed its silent “Holy! Holy! Holy!” Every tree bowed and swayed in obeisance to the supremacy of all existence, and each building stood in reverence before the mystery of allness.
All this produced no shock in Carl. He did not even stop walking. He seemed to be ready for it all. As he swung into the pathway to his office, he felt in his mind one desire: that he be once and for all exalted—even if just for a short time—to see and know that supreme existence of all things and to see the holiness of its mystery that gave all things meaning.
That exaltation would eventually come for him, but only four years later.
It was in May 1969 that possession seemed to have been extended further and deeper in Carl's life than ever before. That possession was effected through his professional interests. His attention for about two years previous to this date had concentrated on two aspects of psychic development: astral travel and reincarnation. Both were in direct relationship to Carl's all-absorbing aim of “finding out” the “true and original Christianity.”
By astral travel he hoped to transcend the boundaries of space and time, and thus to “revisit” the locales where Christianity existed before it was corrupted. By his researches in reincarnation—he believed fully in it—Carl hoped to relive some ancient experiences of his own, possibly even around the birth of Christianity.
In his researches, studies, and experimentation into astral travel, Carl had by 1969 some proficiency in this psychic capability, but his achievements had remained within traditional bounds. He usually remained in sight of his own inert body and of locales known to him in his physical life. And in some definite way he remained tied to the time frame of the present moment. His immediate goal now was to find a way out of that time frame. There must be, he maintained, some “gate” through which he could pass to freedom.
With his two closest associates, Albert and Norman, and the student members of his special study group, he now proceeded to launch a series of experiments. He himself was the guinea pig; and, each time, one of his trances became the starting point for an experiment. Carl had apparently an enormous fund of psychic energy and was immune to the injury that others sustained in such experiences.
The experiments took place in the audition room of his campus offices. There he had had installed various machines for recording voice and actions, and for monitoring his vital functions-heart, pulse, respiration, and brain activity.
Albert functioned as chief monitor, with Norman as his immediate assistant. Albert would interrogate Carl at key points in each experiment. Until the last stages of this series of experiments, Carl answered only direct yes-or-no questions put to him by Albert. The other members of the group took on various assignments in operating the machines.
Carl's optimum time for “trancing” was in the early morning, an hour or so before sunrise. At the end of each trance session, the assistants withdrew on Carl's instructions, and he was left alone to recover his normal composure. Recovery periods lasted for any length of time between ten and forty minutes depending on the length of the session and Carl's psychic condition. When the assistants returned, they usually found Carl sitting at the table recording his memories—sensations, thoughts, feelings, intuitions.
By repeated experiments, starting always with one of Carl's trances, they found that astral travel was not to be accomplished in one step. It was not a question of one, but rather three “gates.” These he termed “low-gate,” “mid-gate,” and “high-gate.” Carl had to pass through them all in order successfully to achieve full freedom of astral travel.
Low-gate was, more or less, the initial condition of trance: an absence of all sensory reaction and feeling on Carl's part. Mid-gate implied that Carl himself felt no relationship to his body; but, nevertheless mid-gate still implied “immobility” on the part of his psyche. High-gate, Carl figured, would mean that his psyche escaped from that peculiar “immobility” of mid-gate and depart “freely” on astral travel. The rest was discovery and revelation.
The verification of Carl's passage to low-gate and mid-gate positions was accomplished by a series of laboriously conducted experiments, repeated and repeated, until they were all satisfied that objectively Carl could be said to have reached these different positions. To help our understanding of how these experiments went, we have the films, tape recordings, and the minutes of the laboratory log, together with Carl's own recordings made after each session. Some members of the group have also contributed their recollections of what happened.
Once Carl was in a trance and all physical feeling (say, a pin stuck in the sole of his foot) was negative for him, the assistants proceeded to change the objects around Carl's inert body. They introduced objects he had never seen-usually placards inscribed in another room by one of the assistants. They placed them face up and face down; they moved them around. They proceeded thus through a series of experiments, testing Carl until they were sure that his responses identifying the objects previously unknown to him were accurate and were coming from the low-gate position.
As Carl recorded it, in low-gate position he was perfectly conscious, but not through his senses. And he was observing from a position outside his own body, at every side of it as well as beneath it and above it and the couch upon which his body lay.
All knew that there was a risk involved in shedding something so basic and instinctual as the feeling for one's own body. What guarantee was there that one could resume it, how could one “return” to normal body living? Did one just escape from the relationship, leaving it intact, and then return to its bonds? Or by leaving it did one destroy it? No one knew. “But we must find out,” insisted Carl.
In late 1968 Carl had the beginnings of mid-gate: in his trances now, the relationship to his body was weakening; and, as the weakening progressed, a strange, dimensionless condition of mind and will began to fill his consciousness. Great caution was exercised by the assistants and by Carl at that stage. Carl allowed a certain degree of weakening of that instinctual bond, then returned again to full immersion in his bodily senses. He then repeated the operation several times, until he felt sure of his psychic energy and resources to help him back to psychic normalcy and then, down past low-gate, back to physical normalcy. Eventually, in the early summer of 1969, he fully attained mid-gate.
At the end of the summer it was decided that they should aim for high-gate. It was a Saturday morning. All proceeded in the orderly and controlled manner adopted from the beginning. Carl passed into low-gate and, without much delay, into mid-gate. At this point, according to the plans made at the previous night's preparatory meeting, there was a three-minute regulatory pause while they waited for Carl to attain control of his psychic energy for the next and difficult step.
When the three minutes were up, they started again. But quickly Albert found he could get no answers or reactions from Carl. After a sudden racing, pulse, heartbeat, and respiration had slowed down to the pace “normal” for mid-gate. Physically Carl was “in normalcy.” Norman and Albert looked at each other and at the rest of the group; there was nothing to do but to wait and keep monitoring Carl's vital signs. It was a risk Carl had insisted be taken, and they had all agreed.