Pihkal

by Alexander Shulgin

  As visitors strolled by us, I told Sam what had happened.

  "The only explanation that makes sense," I concluded, "Is that there's a basic - that people need to be in contact with living things, and when they're surrounded only by stone and metal and glass, something drains out of them. It felt awful, Sam. I was actually coming down, out of the magic, losing everything."

  "Why didn't you say something?"

  "I wanted to test it out first. That's what I was doing. I thought I'd just see what would happen if I walked over to where there were a lot of living bodies, and I was right! It worked, Sam! As soon as I was within a few feet of the line - those people waiting for the astronomy show - the hole in my center began filling up. I could feel it, like an empty mouth being fed. And I was going up again."

  "How are you now?"

  "I'm feeling wonderful. Everything's repaired."

  I looked around the rotunda, at the little children with their shiny yellow or red Christopher Robin raincoats, at the people leaning over the railing around a huge depression in the floor over which a great pendulum was slowly swinging a large metal ball, at a small child who watched the shining sphere with open mouth; I saw people waiting in a new line for the astronomy show in the Planetarium, some of them reading pocketbooks to pass the time, others talking.

  I knew that I could tune in to anyone I could see; all I had to do was reach out in my mind to a particular person and open myself inside, so that what they were and what they felt could reach me. I only had to be open, making no evaluation or judgement, in order to experience anxious tightness, impatience, or contentment.

  I examined myself and felt my body humming again and knew that in the middle of my chest there was a radiant center of energy, and another one just above my navel, and that they were probably what the spiritual teachers of India call chakras. I couldn't remember how many there were supposed to be, altogether; five or seven, maybe. I was certainly aware of two of them, anyway.

  Sam said, "I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to?

  Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility.

  Most of them say afterwards that they'll never do it again."

  "Jesus! Right now, after what I've just gone through, that sounds worse than awful."

  "Not all of the research is being done that way, thank God, but too much of it is."

  "What a shame," I said, saddened by the picture, "What a shame!"

  "Ready to go exploring again?"

  "Sure. Where shall we go?"

  "I'd like to see the Japanese Tea Garden, for a start. How about you?"

  "Oh, yes," I said, "That's a lovely place. Don't think I've been there for several years."

  We stood outside the front door for a moment, looking around. The rain had stopped. Every tree shimmered faintly with the light that permeated all growing things, yet each tiny leaf and twig was outlined sharply in the clean air.

  We walked across the road outside and down the steps to the park. On the other side of the great circle, we stopped at the big lotus pool in front of the entrance to the art museum.

  Leaning over the edge, we looked down into a world of dark green and black water; there were copper reflections here and there from the bottoms of lotus leaves. An occasional blur of orange-gold in the depths reminded us that this was a home to fish. We lost ourselves in the jade and copper world, watching insects and leaves and grasses and jeweled beetles as if they were the inhabitants of a separate planet.

  Finally, Sam moved and took my hand, "Let's go," and I walked with him down the road to the Japanese Tea Garden, where we paid the small admission and I practiced ordinary-face until we were past the people at the gate.

  It wasn't very crowded, probably because of the rain/ but there were some patient, raincoated visitors who were obviously used to this kind of weather and we would have to expect them around every turn, so I kept my mind at least partially on maintaining normal body-language and making sure I did not glance directly at faces coming our way on the narrow paths.

  Strolling the gardens, we stopped every few feet as one or the other of us was struck by an outline of rock or an exquisiteness of blossoming color. I had appreciated the garden before, but I understood it, now.

  There was a deliberate juxtaposition of shapes and textures which captured not only eyes, but emotions. I could follow the unfolding of an inner experience created by the gardener, as he sculptured with moss-covered stone, fleshy plant leaves, delicate ferns, moving water and subtle gradations of color in the pebbles that drifted across the floors of the various water bodies. All this, I had in earlier visits glanced at; now, I was truly seeing it, giving grateful acknowledgement to the insight of the person who had so lovingly formed all this for others to see and feel. I said to Sam, "What an extraordinary work of art!"

  "I had the same reaction, when I first saw it under the influence. Quite an experience, isn't it!"

  I nodded, tears in my throat.

  "By the way," said Sam, once, when we had been standing for a while, looking across water at a young willow rising from a bed of coral-pink flowers, "Have you noticed how time stops when you really focus your attention on something?"

  I hadn't been noticing time. I said, "Give me a second, and I'll see."

  He chuckled.

  I concentrated on the willow tree poised at the tip of its peninsula of garden, watching its own reflection in the water, and felt the stillness. There was no here-going-to-there, only willow, water, me, in a Now that eternally folded itself into itself.

  Time moved again with Sam's hand on my shoulder.

  We walked on and came to a low stone wall, where Sam stopped to rest his elbows. "Come and see this," he said, and I looked over the wall, down a slope of grass to a mass of vivid spring flowers. I could feel his eyes on my face as I flinched and stepped back from the impact of red, orange and bright purple. The colors were physically painful to my eyes, unless I squinted.

  "I almost can't look at them/ Sam."

  "They're really quite a shock, aren't they!"

  I averted my eyes, then tried looking again, amused and annoyed at the same time. I asked him if he knew why the colors hurt the eyes, and he explained about frequencies and certain parts of the color spectrum, and about the sensitivity of the eye when the pupil was enlarged, and I nodded and said Oh, I see, knowing I wouldn't remember the explanations and that it was all right.

  What was important was that I'd been reminded that no matter how strong the spirit or soul, how flexible and complex and magical the mind, there was still a physical body to be considered, and it operated according to laws which were the laws of the physical universe, and I must never allow myself to forget that.

  Climbing a small hill behind the tea house, we came across the seated Buddha, the great golden, gently smiling Buddha which watches the upper path, and we stood before it for a long time, in silence.

  A little while after leaving the Japanese Tea Garden, we were going single file down a narrow path between trees and Sam was ahead of me, his head bent, hands in his pockets. I slowly became aware of an entirely new change in my body; something was happening, had happened. I walked behind Sam, trying to define it, to understand what it was.

  My entire spine had become activated; it was a living channel of energy moving between the crown of my head and the tip of my spine. The intensity of it was just barely tolerable. As I continued down the dirt
path, the energy charge in my back seemed to transform somehow, and I realized that I was feeling something throughout my entire body which, if I had been experiencing it in my genitals, would have been recognizable as orgasm. It was not confined to the genitals at all, but it certainly was orgasm and it was all up and down the spine, in the chest and stomach and legs, in head and throat and bladder. I was walking along like any ordinary person, experiencing total orgasm without having to close my eyes, without any loss of control or ability to think. Good grief, I thought. Ever-loving Pete! How do I ask Sam about this?

  Answer: I don't ask Sam about this.

  As I looked at his back, a few feet ahead, it occurred to me that I could reach out with my mind and actually touch him, and when I wondered how best to go about doing it, an image came of peeling layers of Sam away - like an onion - until I got to the core of him, and I would be able to touch that directly. I simply knew I could do it, and the idea seemed delightful and very funny.

  I began mentally peeling Sam's layers, one by one, gently, as I followed him. After a while, I sensed a shining thing that had no shape, in the middle of his body, and I reached out with the will to touch, and poked it at the shining. Sam jumped in mid-step and turned, both hands spread against his back. He looked at me standing there, grinning, and said, "What the hell..?"

  I apologized, not meaning it, and told him what I'd discovered I could do. I was very pleased with myself. It was like being a kid with a very powerful, brand new toy, I thought, and the message came that I should be careful and responsible, even though it was an awful lot of fun to play with.

  Sam's face was rather thoughtful, and when he asked me politely to walk beside him from now on, I laughed and promised to behave.

  The orgasmic energy continued to flood me, body and mind. I noted that I was in complete control of what I said, what I did, and I couldn't remember any time in my life when my thought processes had been sharper or clearer. I had absolute trust in my own judgement.

  We walked on together, talking now and then, most of the time absorbed in our own thoughts, until we found ourselves emerging from the woods into a field which sloped up gently on three sides, forming a shallow bowl of wet grass and red-brown earth.

  We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky and each other, then I saw something forming in the air, slightly above the level of my head. I thought that it was perhaps a few feet from me, then realized I couldn't actually locate it in space at all. It was a moving spiral opening, up there in the cool air, and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence, that I could step through it if I wished to be finished with this particular life I was living, and that there was nothing threatening or menacing about it; in fact, it was completely friendly. I also knew that I had no intention of stepping through it because there was still a great deal I wanted to do in my life, and I intended to live long enough to get it all done. The lovely spiral door didn't beckon; it was just matter-of-factly there.

  Any fear I might have had of death, of the actual crossing of the border, was left behind at that moment. I was seeing the way through, and there was nothing to be frightened of. As I gazed up at the energy-charged patch of sky, I was again aware of being unsurprised, because some part of me remembered this.

  (I still have the fear of dying before I have done all I want to, but I have no fear of the journey itself, nor of what lies on the other side of that opening. I know that when I get there, I will recognize the territory very well indeed, and that it will be truly a returning home.) Sam had been silent during the few minutes it took for me to undergo the experience. When I put my hand on his arm and told him about the gently revolving doorway, he listened, then said that he had seen the death place himself, once, during an experiment with Shura Borodin's group, but that, for him, it had taken the form of a short passageway which turned a blind corner, appearing just a bit ahead of where he was walking in a meadow.

  "I had the same impression; it was friendly, and there wasn't anything dramatic or threatening about it at all. It was just letting me know it was there. I could go around that corner any time I really was finished with this act of the play. And I said Thank you for showing me, but I still have a lot of things I want to do, so it'll be some time yet."

  I smiled at him, nodding.

  We left the quiet hollow and moved on for a while in silence until suddenly we were on the edge of the highway. Standing on the sidewalk, we watched cars moving at a speed which was not ours, in a space-time that was not the one we were in, knowing that if we wanted to cross the street, we would have to tune ourselves into that other space and time and act within it, remembering what red lights and green lights meant, and what the rules of crossing roads were.

  Sam smiled, "I'm getting hungry; how about you?"

  "Now that you mention it, I think I'm ravenous."

  "There's a pizza place across the street. Want to give it a try?"

  "Let me have a moment to tune into this - this aspect of the world again."

  "I'm used to it. Just hold onto me."

  I grasped his hand and kept an eye on the stoplights, and when the light ahead of us turned green, I checked and double-checked to make sure that the light that was to our right was red, and that meant the cars would stop and we could walk in front of them without danger. I muttered, hearing myself with some amusement, "Green ahead of us means okay to move across the street. Red means stop and green means go. That's right, isn't it?"

  "Yeah," said Sam, hurrying me across the wet pavement, "That's exactly right, by George!

  Couldn't have said it better myself."

  The orgasmic state was mellowing out, very gradually, to a level of energy flow less pressing, less intense than it had been before. I existed and moved in a field of light, and there was a steady flow, like a continuing note of music, underneath, that could only be called bliss - a connection with that aspect of the Great Mind, the Great Spirit, which was love and joy and laughing affirmation.

  In the small restaurant, we were careful to squint so that our eyes would not startle anyone, and a waitress led us to a table with a red and white checked tablecloth and the obligatory candle stuck in a raffia-wrapped wine bottle. It was a nice place and we were not going to disturb anyone. The menu was immense, and I suppressed a strong desire to giggle at the endless listing of pizza names and hamburger titles and salad possibilities. I was concentrating deeply on a paragraph that described a particularly well-endowed pizza, when the laminated paper in front of me burst into searing golden light, so bright that I jumped and held the menu at arm's length. I looked up to tell Sam about this unexpected event, and saw him grinning wickedly at me over the top of his menu.

  What do you know! He's found out how to do it!

  We sat and laughed out loud, and I said Congratulations! and he said Thank You, then we became aware of the waitress standing over us and we both knew that she was very uneasy and didn't know why she was feeling that way. We sobered fast and gave our orders in voices that were as monotone and mechanical as we could make them, trying to remember what it was like to talk in the ordinary world, trying to dim the light, the energy, so it wouldn't infringe on her, doing our best to wall ourselves off from everyone else in the room, to tone down our broadcasting. I thought to myself. Boy, there's an awful lot to learn awfully fast.

  Later, back in my apartment, Sam and I made love very simply and silently, for the first and last time.

  At the door, I said, "Thank you for this day," and he said, "It was a privilege, my friend," and kissed me softly on the cheek.

  I locked the door behind him and sat on my bed and cried. I thought, everything I've gone through, all the pain and grieving, all the loneliness and the dark places - they were all balanced, paid for, answered, by this one extraordinary, blessed day.

  I went to my bookcase, found Huxley's The Doors of Perception and, in the intimate silence of the very early morning hours, re-read it and cried again, sending love and gratitude to the author f
or having found the words. Then I turned off the bedside lamp and looked through the darkness to wherever that beautiful, funny, tremendously loving part of God was, thanked it with all of my being, and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 18. THE BEGINNING

  Shura and I met on a Thursday evening in the fall of 1978.

  It was the first meeting of a new weekly discussion group; at least, that's what my friend Kelly expected it to become. I was sitting cross-legged on the living room floor of an old house on Adier Street, in Berkeley, wondering how many of the 30 or so invited people would turn up. I had promised Kelly I would come to this first gathering, adding that I couldn't commit myself beyond that, and he'd said okay, he understood.

  Actually, at that point/1 no longer thought of Kelly Toll as a friend at all; he was a recent, brief involvement which I was doing my best to end - as smoothly and quietly as possible.

  He was an intense man with a striking, angular face, in his late thirties, who had met me at a Mensa gathering four months earlier. The next day, he came to my house and asked me to marry him. He explained, much later, that of course he knew 1'would refuse - had counted on it, in fact - but that he had often found proposing marriage to be an effective way of getting a woman's attention.

  There was no denying it had done just that.

  I was 48 and newly divorced, my ego as fragile as a piece of hundred year-old burlap. Being pursued by a youngster in his thirties gave me something I hadn't had in years: the feeling that I was still an attractive woman, not just a middle-aged parent.

  Kelly's passions in life were computers, good-looking older women and the creation of new IQ

  tests. I also discovered that he had a generalized contempt for humanity, referring to most people as "turkeys," and a tendency to uncontrolled explosions of rage, which often resulted in his having to apologize later for damage done to someone else's furniture or a relationship -

  usually both.

  He explained about his painful illnesses in childhood and his demanding, punitive father, and asked me to be understanding and patient. It worked for a while (I've always had a soft spot for intelligent neurotics), but after one memorable day when he smashed some of my records in front of the children, screaming at me for coming home ten minutes late from work and keeping him waiting, I told him if he didn't go into therapy, I was through.