Journeys into the bright world

As my concentration deepened a new mantram was beaten into my brain. This did not come like an ordinary idea but rather branded itself into my consciousness in a blaze of light. The words were, "And so it is-my heart becomes the chalice into which the injection must flow." Later I would have to try to figure out what that meant. Now all I could do was to experience the influx of energy into the region between the shoulderblades where my own heart seemed to be growing wings.

I sensed that some kind of alchemical operation was being performed and remembered that the word alchemy meant literally "of the land of Khem," Khem being the ancient name of Egypt. The Egyptians with their obsessive preoccupation with death and resurrection were the originators of the Hermetic tradition, of which alchemy is the finest flower, just as the Chaldeans were the originators of the astrological tradition. The Egyptians were also the great anatomists, largely because of their skill in mummification and in the arts of medicine. If Howard and I had been there in former lifetimes no wonder we were so concerned with the conquest of death!

It also flashed upon me that the King Tutankhamun exhibit of ancient Egyptian artifacts would soon be coming to Seattle. It seemed as though there had to be some mystical significance in the ceremonious conveyance of these highly charged relics to the various regions of the United States. Why was the populace reacting with such fervor to the display? Could it be that this gift from Egypt symbolized the far greater gift of the knowledge of human immortality now being offered to people everywhere? Through hypersentience, and now through ketamine therapy, techniques for transcending bodily limitations are becoming ever more widely available. The art of soul travel which in Egypt was reserved for initiates is in the Age of Aquarius becoming something that multitudes can comprehend.

Once again the swirling colors of the beads danced before my eyes. Ah yes, life was the great bead game with all the globules melting and fusing together. But the beauty of that creative process depends on the leaden outlines that shape the patterns. This lead was the formative agency which made it possible for the golden radiance of the sun to filter through the multihued panels of glass. Why was I wanting to change that lead's consistency when its value lay in being exactly what it was? The softness of gold and the denseness of lead needed each other to be complete.

In my flight of fancy it also came to me that words, the tools of my trade, are like leaden molds into which thoughts are cast. Indeed, printers' type is traditionally made of lead which, like the letters themselves, can be melted down and reused. My own Moon and ascending sign, Cancer, rules containers while my Sun sign, Gemini, pertains to communications. No wonder I had spent my life pounding words into solid encasements for ideas. I was well back to earth now but still marveled at the extent to which purely objective astrological factors can delineate a person's subjective bent of mind.

Later, taking a bedtime bath I laughed at my ineffectual attempts to create a replica of that winged heart. The effort seemed as absurd as the scene in the current hit movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which a man whose mind has been imprinted by visitors from outer space maniacally insists upon replicating within the confines of his livingroom the contours of the mountain he must reach. Now I really understood that compulsion to scale the macrocosm down to microcosmic size and to superimpose an abstract archetype upon a specific human cell. It had seemed so desperately important to fit those glass beads into their proper places.

The warm water in which I was luxuriating was feeling extraordinarily good. Suddenly I sat up and exclaimed, "Eureka! Now I know how to leaven lead. You make it into stained glass so that the light can shine through."

Unquestionably I was becoming perfused with the spirit of alchemy. This development was particularly surprising because alchemy had never intrigued me. Yet when I first felt my guru's eyes irradiating the nether-regions of my psyche the words which had come were, "Ah yes, he is the old alchemist!"

My next ketamine session took me a few more steps along the same path. It began with a twenty-five-milligram dose which, since I had eaten well that day, produced a state that could better be described as a meditation than as a "trip." At the start I was looking at a picture of a mountain with a cave at the base. The usual buzzing sound was now reminiscent of a drill, impressing me with the idea that as esoteric anatomists it is our job to drill deep into the depths of the organic substance of the universe. All matter is carved out from within, not shaped from without. I had witnessed this peculiar process of inside-out creation in virtually every session but the idea had seemed too complex to verbalize.