by Bull, Rod;
I decided, after much dickering, to try going farther with the astral projection, using the body of light to at least get out of the room! Part of my failure to do so was that I was scared of breaking the silver cord that connected me to my astral double, but after many crash landings, it had not broken. This quelled my fears somewhat.
A new approach was needed. Somewhere I had heard that just by thinking about a place, the astral body of light would automatically go there. I tried to remember my dream about the dragon and bird fight, tried to recall something about the landscape. I could recall nothing, just a room or something. Hovering above my body, remembering my dream, I was suddenly in a strange land with all kinds of beasts big and small: huge dragons with multiple heads, 100-foot-long dinosaurs and crocodiles, all fighting each other. No humans were in sight, but something kept catching my eye—a tiny bug-like creature hardly visible to the eye. Nothing was attacking it. Every so often, one of these creatures would attach itself to one of the monsters and slowly the monster would grow drowsy, then fall asleep. All this time, I was hoping I could not be seen. Either I was invisible or the beasts were too busy fighting to bother with me. What was this tiny bug? Why was I so interested in it? Somehow, it had something to do with my dream.
Maybe I should try to catch one, but that meant manifesting in some way. The moment I thought this, I must have become visible, as one of the dragons came for me. Sheer panic took over. Having no control over my body of light, it started going wherever it pleased, trying to ride the dragons, jumping on their heads, pulling tails, anything to get them mad. Every-thing was getting out of control as my astral double took on its own identity. Out of sheer will, I thought of my physical body in my room. Immediately, I was back in my body. What a relief!
The whole episode frightened the shit out of me, and I still had not found out anything about my dreams, just this fascination with the tiny bug. What was it?
Spying
Maybe I should use this new spying talent to get a job in MI5 and make money. This thought jogged my memory to the time my brother’s room was raided by the police. Who were the bowler hats, and what had my brother seen that made him yell and scream?
I was having some success with photography; maybe I could use this as a front. Actually, I had already sort of been paid for spying. Travelling on the train to London, a group of businessmen and stockbrokers would play bridge in one of the train compartments, smoking pipes and cigars, producing smog so nobody would bother them. Hanging out in the corridor pretending to read the paper, my job was to eavesdrop as they played bridge. They would talk about what shares would be doing that day, and I would pass this information on to friends of my father for a small fee. Now I realize that it was early insider trading! Because I was sixteen at the time, they did not suspect anything.
A few years later, working in the building trade in London, my boss asked me to try to find out who was stealing, as materials were missing. Also, some workers were charging for hours they did not work.
Most of these blokes were Irish, with very short fuses. I had seen the results of some of their beatings. It was not pretty. One bloke was pushed from a roof for not paying a gambling debt! He died later in the hospital. Was this worth it for a few quid? I had to think of a plan to not get killed or lose my job. I decided to tell them the boss was onto them, and luckily this worked; the stealing stopped, and I kept my job.
This spying work was a bit dodgy; it would only be worth it for good money.
Because of my work with the Irish, I would hear a lot of talk at the pub about jobs going down. One of these was about a bank robbery to sponsor the IRA. One of the blokes I worked with had a brother who was involved. The organization sounded a bit off. The bank was in a very busy part of London and how to get away was the problem; the traffic was impossible. Maybe using bikes—but then how to carry the loot? Maybe the Underground. It all sounded very pony. One of them was saying, “We need a shooter,” but nobody knew where to get one. It did not sound very IRA-like. Maybe these blokes were beginners.
In England, you needed good money to get a gun, or one that worked anyway. “What about one that doesn’t work? We only need it to scare people,” the leader was saying. Eventually, they paid 500 pounds for a gun with no ammo. The gun was too old; they had stopped making bullets for it years ago. Just as well, they would have most likely shot each other any-way! The question was still how to get away.
They decided on a Number 31 bus, as this was the most reliable and frequent, passing close by. The timing would have to be perfect, and this would be tricky as the buses in London were not an exact science. The outcome was predestined. They were nabbed before the bus arrived. The whole operation was flawed from the start.
The Jamaican-Irish conflict about who was higher on the ladder was causing problems. Violence was common. Drugs, guns, the IRA . . . Somehow Chris was mixed up in this. At the bar one day, I was approached by a bloke I didn’t know. He started to buy me drinks, asking me what I knew about Chris Grey. Why was he always disappearing, and where did he get his money; he never worked. The bloke was starting to get on my nerves.
“Ask him yourself,” I spat out. “There’s money in this,” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” I said and walked out.
Walking home, I started thinking maybe I could work this without getting Chris into trouble.
There was also a plan going on within the LSD movement, which would involve making huge quantities of LSD, put-ting it in the water system, and getting everybody stoned. They hoped this would stop the violence!
During this time, I had been photographing Chris getting high for a magazine article. The police raided his place and found these photographs, with my name stamped on the back. Tracking me down at the pub, the police thought they could pressure me into telling them what Chris was up to.
I told them about the acid plot instead, knowing they would not believe a word of it. “What were those photographs about?” one of the cops said.
“Oh, those are just a setup for a magazine article, totally fake,” I said.
Luckily they believed me, giving me the money they promised. When I told Chris and Dave about the meeting, Dave said he had changed his mind about turning on London with LSD, thinking it would be better to turn on his friends instead.
Chris had already started to change his operation. He had decided to move to Paris.
What is it that turns people against society, son against father, daughter against mother? Not wanting to be like them! To get out from under mediocrity, live dangerously, yelled Rimbaud. “Come alive, wake up!” Certainly living on the edge, with a knot in the stomach, brings a certain awareness. Is this hyper-awareness a kind of animal instinct? Or is it mixed with a higher awareness, as sometimes there seem to be moments of precognition?
Cockney Nick
I arrived in Sydney late in the evening, not knowing anyone. Not finding anywhere cheap to stay, I lay down in my sleeping bag in a parking lot, between the cars. I awoke in the morning to a totally empty lot, which had been full the night before. It felt very strange, lying there in this huge deserted lot. How somebody didn’t run over me, I don’t know. I decided that these were not good sleeping arrangements.
I was told that there was a YMCA nearby and signed in. That evening I got drunk and couldn’t find my way back so I asked a cop. They said that they didn’t know of a YMCA in that area but would take me to the address I had given them in their patrol car. I think they thought I was some kind of criminal, giving them a fictitious address, and seemed quite disappointed to find that there was a YMCA at the address. But they still wanted to know if I was actually signed in. When they found I was, it really pissed them off. After this little run in, I made sure I knew my way back. But it had been nice getting a lift in a cop car.
Sydney is a fantastic city with a beautiful harbor. I spent a lot of time at Circular Quay drinking in the pubs while pretending to look for work, usually getting pretty pissed. One day
during my hunt from bar to bar for work, who should be there but this English bloke I had met in Darwin. He told me that a bunch of Cockneys were renting a house together across the harbor, and I could rent a room from them if I liked.
The Cromeys were a true Cockney family, really sticking together. You did not want to cross them. Once their daughter’s husband ran off with someone else, and her brother Nick went looking for him with an axe.
Nick was big and very strong. Fighting was one of his specialties. I was having a drink with him once, and he wanted to take on the whole bar. Luckily I talked him out of it. Once I accidentally walked into his room and he was naked with a hard-on, with a pair of army boots tied together hanging over his cock.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Growing my cock,” he replied. “My girlfriend said it’s just not big enough.” She must have been an Amazon. It looked pretty big to me.
All of this drinking and carrying on was okay, but I was running out of money. So Nick and I thought we could start a business together. He used to work for an undertaker in London doing a French polishing technique on coffins. We put ads in the local newspapers, but we didn’t get many replies.
“What’s the matter with this place,” says Nick. “Don’t they die here?”
After many other drinking bouts, one of them at a place called King’s Cross, where we’d been drinking until three o’clock in the morning, we got back to my car. I tried to get it out of the parking space. It didn’t seem to want to move. I thought I had the brake on or something, but this was not the case. Eventually the car started to move very slowly. I had gone about 100 yards down the road when Nick shouted from the back seat, “There’s a car following us very close!” He shouted again, “The car’s getting closer!” Suddenly he realized that we had a car hooked on our bumper, and we were dragging it down the road! I stopped the car, and we managed to unhook the car and put it back.
Pretty soon I’d run out of money. It had been fun while it lasted. The first job I interviewed for was at a mental hospital. They didn’t ask me very much, and I got the job right away; this should have told me something.
The day I started should have been my last. I was helping one of the other staff, giving showers to the inmates and cleaning up shit again. The guy I was working with started screaming, hitting, punching, and pushing the patients into the showers, pulling their clothes off, shit flying everywhere. The whole thing was disgusting.
“You don’t have to treat people like this,” I said. “It’s the only thing they understand,” was the reply.
The place was more like a jail, old and dilapidated. I felt that at least I should try to be kind to the patients, which seemed like a totally alien idea to the people working there.
“They’re just animals,” they would say.
But the more they were treated that way, the worse they became. In fact, it was very difficult to know when some of the inmates were actually sick or acting. This was also true of some of the nurses.
One morning at tea break, we were talking about willpower. Our chief supervisor was telling us you could do any-thing with willpower, and then he said, “This morning coming to work, I walked across the Paramatta River!”
This statement sent me into a tailspin. Everybody’s crazy here, I thought. Getting back to work, my head still spinning, I bumped into one of the patients who was supposed to be schizophrenic. He seemed perfectly fine to me. He kept saying that he wanted to get out, that there was nothing wrong with him. So I thought, To hell with it, and opened up the side gate. “Okay, off you go!”
At first he just stood at the gate, and then he slowly walked out. He looked around some, and then came back quickly, saying that he didn’t like it out there. I realized that something was definitely wrong.
After six months of knowing him, he suddenly went completely AWOL. I tried to talk to him but to no avail. He was raving about the Queen of England and about the Duke coming to Australia. “Kill them, kill them,” he was screaming. At that moment, I saw a paper on the table with the headline “Queen to visit Australia.” But the paper was months out of date. I pointed this out to him, which made him even madder. The whole thing was very confusing, as the next day he was fine again and had no recollection of the day before. So much for my theory. But it really seemed there were long periods of time when he was okay. It seemed crazy to keep him locked up all the time.
It made me think about what sanity is. How much awareness at a given time does one have? It seems we just get carried off with certain obsessions, starting with a thought and then being taken by it into action. If it is a violent thought, this could lead to a violent act. It certainly seemed that you become the thought, if you let it go that far. Sometimes you could see this starting to happen. Little things would start to aggravate, then get bigger and bigger until some of the patients got totally out of control. I’ve certainly seen this in myself, where if instead of trying to stop that chain reaction, you let it go. There can be feeling of power, like a tyrant getting his own way. This is something the Buddha talked about. Watch your thoughts, as you will become them.
One of the patients had been a Russian Orthodox priest. Something had gone very wrong. Whether it had been from seeing the madness of war or his inability to do anything about it, he just flipped. He would go around digging with his hands in the flowerbeds for stones so he could use them to hit people. Our job was to get the rocks out of his hands. This was very difficult to do, as he seemed to have superhuman strength, taking five or six of us to hold him down! Sometimes he would have to be put in a padded cell. And one time he was able to pull off the window shutters, which were made of two-inch oak, smashing them to pieces. Opening the door to his cell was always dangerous. You opened it and then stood clear. Otherwise he would charge you. Luckily, there were not many violent patients. But you always had to keep your eyes open.
The ward that I worked on always won the best garden contest, and one of my jobs was to watch and keep guard over the chief’s favorite frangipani tree, which had beautiful blossoms that one of the patients loved to eat. He would always be hiding or lurking nearby, ready to spring out and grab as many blossoms as he could. One day, I was the only one on the ward when a fight erupted. Dashing away from my guard duty to stop the fight, suddenly out of nowhere came the phantom flower-eater. He proceeded to eat as many flowers as he could.
At that very moment, the chief warden appeared, screaming at me to get back to the tree. “Let them fight, let them fight,” he was shouting. “Guard the tree, stop the flower-eater!” Rushing over he started to bang the flower-eater on the back, trying to make him cough up the flowers that he had been eating, as though he could stick them back on the tree.
Another a patient had been certified insane and institutionalized by his family, but it apparently had been a set-up, as he was heir to the family fortune. Just being in the place had made him insane. One of his rituals was to roll up his week’s supply of tobacco into one huge cigarette. He did this because he thought people were stealing his tobacco. He would then smoke this thing all day long, making himself really sick. As soon as he had finished, he would then try to get tobacco from some other patient, starting all kinds of fights.
We tried different things to cure him of this habit. If you gave him small amounts, he just finished it too quickly and pestered everyone else for more tobacco. One day when he was rolling one of these huge cigarettes, one of the staff some-how slipped a firecracker into the cigarette. It went off with quite a bang, spraying tobacco everywhere. This seemed to cure him a little. He just made slightly smaller cigarettes.
All of this was rubbing off on me, and I started to have serious doubts about my own sanity. I just didn’t agree with how things were done. They used huge doses of electric shock treatment, and also there seemed to be a lot of beatings. Plus the fact that everybody who worked there was crazy. I thought I’d better leave before I went completely off my rocker.
During my time in
Sydney I made some good friends. Poets, writers, painters. It was making me homesick for the old country.
Pablo and his beautiful Estonian girlfriend were among some of the people I knew in Sydney. He had read a lot and also practiced Eastern meditation techniques. I started to read some of this stuff. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was one. It seemed to ring some bells. There was talk about another state of being, that was more relaxed and peaceful than my normal, fucked-up round of circuits and bumps.
Of course we did a lot of drinking, and things would become a little blurry, but all in all, there seemed to be some sense in what these cobbers were saying. Sometimes it was very clear, but at other times it seemed distant.
In the meantime, my friend Nick was being mesmerized by the girlfriend who had told him to grow his cock bigger. She was actually working on two fronts: a flanker. One was the sex angle, and the other was Scientology.
Ron Hubbard, or Old Mother Hubbard as some knew him, appeared to get his ideas from different sources, making up his own system, all to get you clear or something. Nick seemed a little vague about the whole thing. His girlfriend was very pleased, though, because his cock was getting much bigger. The army boots were doing the trick.
About this time, I started to wean myself from comics and Mickey Spillane. Pablo loaned me Colin Wilson’s The Out-sider, which discussed many ideas, both Eastern and Western. One particular name stuck in my brain—that of G. I. Gurdjieff. His ideas rang bells. I would find out much later what this meant.
What Is it?
Things became more and more puzzling as I tried to navigate through life. Was I building any kind of character, personality? Each time I tried to learn something from somebody, gaps appeared within me. I was on shaky ground. My observations and judgments of others started to turn inward. I began to spy on myself!