Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  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 précis 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 explain 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.

  “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 lec
turer 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 rapid 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.