Marcia. Now I never thought of that before, but I suppose every scarab has its shadow side. Every scarab has its cockroach. At the moment it seems as though that had cosmic significance. There's always a shadow side to things. In India they always used to say, it's darkest right under the lamp. There's that beautiful Egyptian scarab and there's a cockroach just under it. There's always a "dweller on the threshold."
Howard. Boy, I've fought him, I really have. You have no idea. I say you have no idea but you do have. He really battled me.
Marcia. It was a monstrous battle. I knew, but I couldn't fight it for you. I have the same duality. There's the big M.M. goddess and then there's the little Mini-mouse personality and it's so hard to get those two together. The goddess, she's everything. She pours forth glowing golden abundance of love, money-everything. And then Mini-mouse scuttles around and gets upset. It's so hard to bring those two together. But by God. when you do, then the power comes through. You always have to have the two to bring in the power-like positive and negative or male and female. It never occured to me that a scarab looks like a cockroach. The most sacred thing looks very much like the thing we detest the most. Like if you spell the word lived backward it makes devil. If there's going to be a bright world there also have to be shadows. And you can't just let that shadow pull you apart because the brightness is there. Brightness can live without shadows, but shadows can't live without brightness. That is, those cockroaches on the under side-in a sense even they are testimonials that there is a bright world. The bright world goes on and on without any shadows at all. But you can't have any shadows unless there is a bright world. Oh dear, I'm not saying it right. That's what's bothering me because I'm coming back to the shadow world now. And I know there's a better name for it. This world is beautiful.
Howard. There's no question that it's beautiful. That's what we're working on. We've taken a long scenic tour away from the fact that you should not call this the gray world. What should planet Earth be called? Why not just planet Earth. It's funny, as I'm talking to you with my eyes closed I see the eye and beak of an eagle.
Marcia. You and I are such clean people; we're both what you would call "clean freaks." It's very hard for us to accept that we can have cockroaches in our house. Even when they're only the shadows of scarabs. We're going to have to learn to deal with that. Because a great deal depends on us two Gemini pillars. If you and I can hold up and be those two twists of the spiral we'll be a power. But alas, we have cockroaches under our scarabs, and we must realize that the Sun is there shining all the time even though the cockroaches scuttle away from it. I swear to you, in this lifetime I never before associated a cockroach and a scarab. But obviously they do look the same, don't they. That's not a hallucination. They really do. I never thought of that.
Howard. I can't believe you never thought of that.
Marcia. No, I never did. To me a scarab has always been a purely sacred symbol. But you know, the word "sacred" is the same as the word "sacral." The sacral center is the sex center. It's the highest and the lowest, like Scorpio. If people want to tell dirty jokes the lowest of the low is sex. And yet it's the highest of the high. It's God the Father and Mother Nature coming together and creating worlds. And yet there's nothing lower than dirty sex. The best corrupted always becomes the worst. The scarab becomes the cockroach and the sacred becomes the sacrum-down here at the gut level. The thing we must realize is that these two worlds have to be bound together.
Howard. Well, I really like that picture better now.
Marcia. It doesn't matter whether the scarab reminds you of a cockroach. The reverse is also true, the cockroach can remind you of a scarab… We have such a clean house, with all those white walls. And every time I go out I get some new kind of detergent or bleach. I'm all the time trying to make things whiter and brighter. And its very painful to have cockroaches sitting under the scarabs. But if we realize its only a reflection of the bright world we'll bear with it, because we have such important things to do. And Mini-mouse down there really is the ultimate worry wort. She's a cockroach. I'd like to sweep Mini-mouse right out of this house. But at least I know how to deal with her. Maybe that will be enough.
As we gradually returned to normal consciousness Howard became aware of a strong feeling of energy pulsating through his fingertips. This gave rise to a discussion of the possible uses of ketamine in pranic healing. The general after-effect of this session was to strengthen our conviction that this medicine could be exceedingly helpful in marital counseling and group therapy.
I have never failed to feel cleaner, healthier, and more relaxed after a samadhi session. However, as one busy day followed another it was very hard to keep the memories of the bright world fresh in mind. It still seemed as though my spiritual roots were too nonporous to make the connections with that realm where there are no separating surfaces. The situation reminded me of the plight of the two tropical plants on my window sill that I was trying to propagate. While in sunny Ojai I had snapped them from their stems and put them in water. Now, plunged in alien soil the stalks were striving to put forth a new substructure. Often I would brood over those poor plantlets, so rudely severed from their mother bush, wondering if they would ever be able to recreate the fibrous network required to sponge up the nourishment they needed.
Fortunately for these languishing sprigs of greenery Howard took it into his head that he was going to become a plant doctor. Each morning he would place his outstretched hands authoritatively over the drooping petals and command, "Heal, heal!" Amazingly enough the pair of them did perk up, even while a sibling plant in the livingroom turned brown and shed its leaves.
During this period I had a series of dreams that clearly mirrored my concern with piecing together our various realities. In one dream I was trying to give a lecture but was unable to start because the audience was spread out in four or five different rooms. In a second I was worrying about my clothing. The top and bottom halves of my wardrobe wouldn't coordinate, even though plenty of both were hanging in my closet. In still another dream I was struggling with a desk constructed in such a way that the lower drawer was locked when the upper drawer opened, and vice versa.
What my mind seemed to be telling me was that fulfillment can never lie in getting from here to there, but rather depends on bringing the here and the there into a conscious unity. Reaching up to the High Self can be no more or less important than helping that overshadowing Presence to grow down and take root in the personal self. The impulse which makes a flower grow is surely as sacred as the impulse to cast it upon the altar where it soon must die. If, therefore, samadhi therapy is to succeed it must be presented not as an invasion of the exigencies of daily existence but rather as a way of integrating formerly disparate modes of being.
It is easy to find God in that which is high, noble and manifestly divine. But if the world is to be saved we must also seek His presence in that which we deem to be low, base and beyond the pale. Increasingly it seemed to me that the ketamine trips were enabling me to look down as well as up, to see the glory of the creation of each atom of matter and to appreciate the designs into which these particles are drawn. What bliss I achieved was not the gift of the inmost source that we have termed the cosmatrix. There the multidimensional wheel spins on, the movie screen shines whitely, the sound reverberates monotonously and the substance of which existence is woven just is, devoid of emotional content or even of what I would normally think of as "spirituality." This undifferentiated state cannot be truly joyous because there is no one there to exult in it, nothing to praise, to appreciate, or even to love. For that kind of veneration we need a separate observer.