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.
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 dare
d 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 independent 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.
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