Howard. Well, it took it away while you were under.
Marcia. Yes, while I was under I felt nothing, of course. I was out of the body. But it was a very beautiful pain. When I said it was like the grain in the wood I meant it was something one should treasure-like a resource. Taurus is the sign of resources and Scorpio is the sign of pain, trial, testing and death. I hadn't thought of pain as being connected with resources, but somewhere up in the archetypal realm-that big rose window where all the opposites meet-there's a link between pain and resources. I don't understand it at all. But I know it is necessary for us to suffer. Most of this is going to have to come through my mind; I'm not going to be able to do it on tape.
By the time I was all the way back most of the pain had ebbed away and did not recur except in momentary twinges. Later, thinking about the pain/grain enigma it occured to me that the grain in the wood serves as a measure of growth, and that up to now it has been the lot of humanity to grow through suffering. Somehow the soul of the wood was reflected in the pattern of its grain. I also remembered the earlier session in which it had so forcibly struck me that pain was a forcing process whereby material objects are opened up and rendered permeable by the divine light of significance. Evidently the goddess Ketamine was patiently endeavoring, lesson by lesson, to teach me something about the purpose of this earthly school for souls, but my mind was still so dense it was hard to bring it through.
Four days passed before I had time to play the tape and hear Howard's jocular remark made when I was out of the body and totally engrossed in the deepest of deep cogitations. However, that night as we were falling asleep I suddenly laughed and said to Howard, "This must be a drag for you. You do anesthesia all day and then you come home and do it at night."
6: Let the Soul Seep Through
ACTION
Elevation of blood pressure begins shortly after injection, reaches a maximum within a few minutes, and usually returns to preanesthetic values within 15 minutes after injection. The median peak rise has ranged from 20% to 25% of preanesthetic values.
Increasingly our kindly counselor Ketamine was taking on the guise of the guru in the bottle. Each encounter had a different lesson to convey and her curriculum seemed limitless. Often instruction was imparted by means of analogies, parables or humorous vignettes featuring our various subpersonalities as dramatis personae. She was fond of puns and her language was so alliterative it would wear out an editor's red pencil. A more considerate teacher could hardly be imagined, yet there was an enormous urgency behind her velvet touch. It often seemed as though she were a boundlessly loving mother saying to fractious humanity, "I have so much to give. Please, my children, accept this love medicine so that you may grow up to care properly for one another."
Thus far there had been no bad trips, nor did this contingency seem possible as we were treated to a continuing series of peeks into the production line of a smoothly automated universe. Regular use had convinced us that the substance is about as addictive as meditation. One might crave it the way one might crave to take a walk in the woods, visit a beloved friend or watch a superbly produced movie show. Physically however, it made no demands as long as it was used in moderation.
In many respects the low-dose sessions were more satisfying than the high-dose sessions. Twenty-five milligrams would open the door to an easily remembered esthetic archetypal realm of of purely sensuous enjoyment, whereas fifty would still wring out tears of frustration at my continuing inability to make the connections between the "here" and the "there." Regardless of the dose level the flights became progressively more pleasurable as I learned how to take off and land like an experienced pilot. Coming back was now a familiar process of de-amplification as I glided in stage by stage without that momentary jolt of fear of never being able to function again. Each time the reminder was given that only a minuscule portion of the nectar I had gathered could be solidified into the honeycombs of communicable information, but this necessary limitation was now acceptable. I was learning to be more appreciative of terra firma simply because of having seen it from above. From an airplane even the ugliest cities can look beautiful, and this was how I now felt about the whole earth.
As the seeds of ideas drawn from the bright world slowly took root in the plowed-up soil of my psyche their consolidation seemed comparable to the grounding of electricity in the earth. Between the original tapping of the lightning and the illumination of the planet through a neural network of galvanic impulses more than two centuries elapsed. Apparently, the analogous rewiring of my own nervous system would have to be correspondingly slow. In my imagination the powerlines that girdle the globe resembled a vitalizing vegetative system. Telephone poles became the trunks of a forested complex of interlinked circuits raying outward from their central generating plants. Transmission towers linked by taproots of subterrnean cables propagated their currents through hedgerows of houses and out through a luxuriant foliage of extension-corded appliances. Telephones, TV sets, lamps and electrified apparatus of every conceivable variety ramified like the vines, creepers, tendrils, stems and branches of the burgeoning underbrush of civilization
The electronic jungles of earth are now being dynamized into one glowing planetary organism. Could, or should, the same bioelectric effect be produced within the human body? If so, what flowers of light might eventually appear? If such an evolutionary innervation were possible, then I would offer myself as a space cadet. What better experimental subject could be found? I had written my books, paid my karmic debts and had no dependents. Even if this artificial lightning ran amuck humanity would be the wiser. After all, someone had to eat the first oyster, undergo the first appendectomy and land on the moon, despite the hazards involved. To join the elite vanguard would not only be a challenge, it would be a privilege and an honor.
In some ways this undertaking seemed like constructing an external nervous system that could reach outward to the heights and depths of a sentient cosmic organism. With just one jab of a needle a psycho-astronaut could now transcend the confines of the body. By dialing the right number, so to speak, he could plug into the feelings, thoughts and conditioning archetypes of other states of being and thereby become part of the numinous nexus of ideational processes that interfuses existence with the light of meaning. Could it then be that at some evolutionary omega point, we might all be unified into one "galactosapiens" encompassing the entire life of the galaxy? Already I seemed to be standing in the penumbra of a serried host of shining intelligences into which the qualified members of mankind were being initiated one by one. Now, with each new synaptic flash of recognition the incentive was being provided to move on.
As we continued our explorations, the places and spaces to which we went were remarkably diverse. Particularly fascinating was the manner in which the theme for every jaunt was set by an immediate state of mind or external cue.
For example, one evening early in January I took off into the bright world from our waterbed while Howard watched a medical documentary on TV. Although I had no cognizance of the program itself, in my inner-dimensional sphere I seemed to be attending a telepathically conducted medical school in which it was being demonstrated that all disease stems from just one basic source-the disharmony between inner and outer realms. There were enormous depths of profundity in the lesson being taught but, as always, the sublime significance of the concept deflated to a simple cliche on being reduced to words.