Marcia. No, one time it was Japan.
Howard. Yeah, yeah, It was Japan one time.
Marcia. I still don't know what it is about Egypt. Did you get a contact high?
Howard. For sure. I really did.
Marcia. That was just perfect because there wasn't any time I wasn't sitting up. But I needed something to lean against. Howard. Well there was a time when you were noncommunicative. You were in a light surgical state of anesthesia. You had a lid reflex but it was very slow. Your jaw was relaxed, but you didn't speak even when I spoke to you. People do surgery in that state. Next time I'll have to do it in a light where I can look and see whether your pupils are constricted or dilated.
Marcia. Does it bother you to have me say I don't want to come back? I didn't really know what it meant.
Howard. I knew you didn't know what it meant. But I'm also an anesthesiologist so your being in that state doesn't scare me. But it would frighten a lot of individuals. They'd think, "This person has gone insane."
Marcia. It's controlled insanity. But it's definitely insane. It's like an insane person at the very height of his worst lunatic seizure.
Howard. It didn't frighten me because I knew you were coming back. You had no choice.
On the evening of Saturday, December twelfth I was feeling so oppressed by a welter of booknotes, tapes, and unanswered correspondence that I decided not to tape this session. I just wanted to enjoy a brief low-dose holiday and look at the candle without having to worry about the deeper implications of what we were doing or about what people might think. Since I already had a mental overload I neither expected nor wanted anything new to emerge. Apparently the goddess Ketamine agreed that the time had come to take ourselves more lightly.
Session 10
"I feel very satisfied with my life," I exclaimed. "These are butterfly times. I'm seeing this big beautiful cosmic butterfly. Now I understand why my friend Isha calls me a cosmic butterfly. I'm seeing such beautiful fluttering wings as the butterfly flutters by. Down here I'm just a grub grubbing along, but in the bright world I am the cosmic butterfly.
"Metamorphosis. That's my initials. M.M. stands for metamorphosis. Only I can't stay there. The butterfly becomes the grub and the grub becomes the butterfly, and it goes on and on back and forth so that in the long run they exist simultaneously. My big and little selves. It's so hard to keep the balance between them."
After about ten minutes of sporting with the butterfly I found myself being drawn back through the inexorable portal, still contemplating the duality of my own being. "It's so appropriate that God gave us two voices, a big voice and a little voice. We can speak or we can whisper…" This was a brand new thought and I ruminated over it for some time.
"Now I'm feeling sad. It isn't enough just to be a butterfly or to achieve samadhi. If that were all there was to it we would remain in that state. The issue is not to escape the bonds of earth, but to link the two worlds, even if that means that my body has to remain in this grublike condition." Still holding onto the image of the butterfly it seemed evident that the contact was intrinsically worthwhile even if it was only a temporary transcendence. Taking flight may dissolve rather than solve mundane problems, but even a temporary upliftment may be the key to a lasting resolution if it gives a new perspective.
Returning to the grub stage I had a vision of Howard's "Sunny" self looking remarkably like one of the bemused little boys in the comic strip "Peanuts" by Schultz. This was easy to imagine because during our various partings Howard had plied me with Snoopy cards. Consequently, these personages had a special place in our hearts. Thereupon, I launched into a long-winded rambling story about "Little Sunny and the Cosmic Butterfly."
The gist of the tale was that Little Sunny had spotted the Cosmic Butterfly passing through the sky and decided that he wanted the creature for his collection. Thereupon he had mounted his stilts, taken his butterfly net and, much to his astonishment, actually caught the winged insect. But once he had it, the question was what to do with it. After all, it was only a worm with wings. Even though it was nice to know that a worm could have wings, it was an awkward sort of pet to have to feed and maintain. The tale ended with a perplexed Sunny leading the now docile butterfly by a leash attached to a pretty jeweled collar and saying, "Oh dear, what do I do now?"
The entrance of Sunny and the Cosmic Butterfly into our private pantheon of role-playing characters turned out to be of importance because it brought out the intriguing issue of subpersonalities. It seems probable that in any prolonged use of ketamine these fragmentary selves are apt to pop up, since it is the nature of the medicine to bring everything into the unconscious boiling to the surface. This animation of the diverse aspects of the psyche also occurs in hypersentience and to some extent in any form of psychotherapy.
Presumably some subpersonalities arise out of the memories of former existences, while others like Sunny and the Cosmic Butterfly are symbolic or archetypal. For now it is enough to think of them as personifications of our diverse habits, attitudes, foibles, and idosyncrasies and leave it at that. They represent the roles we adopt in response to varying circumstances. Regardless of whether we adopt a reincarnational explanation for the antics of these ofttimes importunate denizens of the netherworld of the mind, they exist and demand recognition. What we need to remember is that a human personality is not a monolith. Rather, it is like a tree with a complex labyrinth of roots which merge into a single trunk and then branch out once more in diverse directions. We are both one and many with roots in heaven as well as within the earth.
In our cases certain subpersonalities seemed particularly dominant. In Howard there was the almost simultaneous emergence of Orphan Boy and the Warrior. These were balanced by Old Mary and the Egyptian Queen. Then later the archaic substratum or our personal mythologies burgeoned with the supporting cast of Mini and Mickey Mouse, Sunny and the Cosmic Butterfly, Wonder Boy and the Bionic Woman, and the priest and priestess of the goddess Ketamine. Most of the time these subpersonalities came in pairs of opposites. This is a phenomenon that is also characteristic of our reincarnation research where regressed subjects tend to experience pendulum swings between such characters as nun and prostitute, warrior and pacifist, beggar and aristocrat, inquisitor and witch, or administrator and outlaw.
Recognition of these subpersonalities made it decidedly easier to adjust to each other's passing idiosyncrasies. We found, for example, that Orphan Boy and Old Mary were great pals, especially in the kitchen. By the same token, the warrior and queen hit it off famously, especially in the bedroom. However, Orphan Boy simply did not relate to the queen, while the warrior was in no way turned on by Old Mary.
It soon became apparent that these evolving relationships could ramify into an exceedingly complex form of transactional analysis (a system dealing with the child, adult, and parent selves in each of us) which could become as tricky as three-dimensional chess. We had to learn, for example, to banish Old Mary from the boudoir and the queen from the kitchen. The warrior, who was also a charioteer could be delegated to drive the sports car, but since he had an extravagant streak he was well advised to defer to Orphan Boy on payday. Cosmic butterfly might flitter freely over my typewriter keys but was better off slipping back into the grub stage when I sipped tea with our solidly Christian landlady. Wonder Boy and Bionic Woman could and did move mountains, but their exertions were sufficiently exhausting to leave the molehills from which Mickey and Mini-mouse might creep. However, even Mickey and Mini had their proper places as reminders of the mundane plane where people did not go into samadhi every weekend.