Preparing to begin I set a poster-sized picture of the Indian superguru Sai Baba on a chair about three feet away and propped myself up so that it would remain in view. For some years I have been convinced that Sai Baba is the highest being alive on this planet today. In India millions worship him as an avatar of love and truth. But what exactly does the word avatar mean, I wondered, reaching for my Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. There I discovered that the word is derived from the Sanskrit ava meaning "down" and tarati meaning "he who passes across." Tarati is akin to the Latin trans. The word is defined as "the descent and incarnation of a deity in earthly form." In other words, an avatar is a transpersonal being who brings the lightning down from heaven and channels it through his own body in order to make it available for the use of mankind. Alice A. Bailey's A Treaties on Cosmic Fire states, "An avatar is a ray of perfected and effulgent glory, clothing itself in matter for the sake of service." Intellectually, the concept was clear enough, but what did I really know of avatars? Would the injection I was now giving myself help to clarify the issue?
As the medicine took effect the image of Sai Baba began to glow three-dimensionally. The enlarged photograph shows him clothed in his saffron robe, seated on a platform and looking down meditatively. It seemed now that he was brooding contemplatively over the whole earth and I felt the love that was emanating from his serene eyes. For him this was no unimaginably remote nirvana, no mere blanking out of the mind in order to transcend to cares of earth. Rather, he seemed to be stirring love into the world the way one might stir honey into a vat of foaming porridge. The whole brew was being sweetened with his tender concern. This love was synonomous with consciousness-they were one and the same. It also had a cohesive quality, as though he were holding the universe together through the inclusiveness of his engaged attention.
For a while my mind dwelt on the one peculiar attribute that has characterized every one of my samadhi sessions. Always there is a sense of beating, blending and mixing. Frequently this beating is associated with the fluttering of wings and the riffling of feathers on those wings. In this instance, however, I was seeing not only the manner in which the energies of creation spiral up and down, drilling their way through successive levels of being, but was also understanding that the purpose of this motion is to produce a commingling of elements. In the dim recesses of my mind I had a vague recollection of an incarnation spent as a whirling dervish. Previously I had thought that the members of this bizarre Muslim religious fraternity spun around in order to make themselves dizzy and thereby induce a trancelike condition. Now I saw the rationale for their gyrations. Through their twirling they were alining themselves with archetypal modalities. They too were trying to whip the clotted forces of the material world into a more effervescent concoction.
For a long time I simply allowed myself to be permeated by Sai Baba's love. Then the telephone rang and it seemed as though someone was knocking on the door. (Actually the knocking was next door but in the samadhi state all sounds are amplified.) I had no intention of answering but the interruptions set me to musing on the subject of connections. Here, snugly ensconced in our well-fortified home, I was able to serve as a spider of light only because the outer openings were well sealed. Whether we close the doors of our senses or of our homes it is necessary in some way to bolt the gates in order to slide out upon the inner web of the bright world. Every idea is a connection and the entire universe is spun of strands of ideas. When we say that nine tenths of our intelligence is unused, what we actually mean is that nine tenths of our possible connections are unmade.
For the most part we deal only with the logical, rational threads of causation which ray forth from the center of the web. However, these alone are insufficiently cohesive. It is the longitudinal synchronistic cross connections that really hold the universe together. There seemed to be a key in this thought that I was just beginning to grasp. Here on the inner level we make our own good and bad luck, but here too we are responsible even for apparently chance happenings. In ketamine's kingdom every incidental circumstance becomes relevant to the overall design.
Opening my eyes I felt entirely peaceful. No longer was I weeping at the portal of return; my mind was purged even without tears. Gazing out the bedroom window on the right the view was now quite different. Several days earlier our hardworking landlady had cut down the branchy entanglement of boughs that separated our house from the cottage next door. I had called them "thorn trees" because of the way they pierced the sky, but actually they were maverick plums that had sprung up on their own. Most of them had needed to be cleared away and she kindly gave me an armful of the branches which I arranged in front of the carved Indian screen in our livingroom. Behind I had tacked a card lettered with an old Japanese haiku which read:
The clipped off shoots had just started to burst into a froth of white blossoms which picked up the mother-of-pearl inlay work on the screen, and the whole effect delighted me beyond measure.
Now where the plum trees had once been I could see clear through to the sloping roof our our neighbor's small house. As is common in Seattle's humid clime, the roof was alive with moss. Most of this massy covering was green, but clumps were shot through with reddish tones.
"My roots in heaven! They're really there now. I've finally got my roots right up in the sky."
The next stage would have to be that of the flower. Rowers of service with fragrance wafting far and wide. Was I just fooling myself about the roots? No, on a day-in-day-out basis I was actually becoming more permeable. It was a peaceful feeling with few ups and downs. My soul note now seemed more like a steadily oscillating sound current, a happy hum of rhythmic activity and rest. I felt very contented and hoped that the quality of that contentment would be communicable to others.
7: Gentle Magic
ACTION
Ketamine has a wide margin of safety; several instances of unintentional administration of overdoses of Ketalar (up to ten times that usually required) have been followed by prolonged but complete recovery.
It was becoming increasingly apparent that this was not a book we were writing as much as a book we were living. In the samadhi state we had seen how the entire universe is controlled by thought. That is, the outer crust of phenomenal appearances is simply the defining limit of the life-energies which ray forth from an omnipresent cosmic vortex. These originating emanations percolate down through a formative gridwork of archetypes from the God-made to the angel-made to the man-made until all at once they freeze into the congealed contours of matter. In the end, as in the beginning, there is nothing but consciousness; we change the world only to the extent that we can modify our awareness of what is going on "out there." Now that we were starting to understand these rules of the game it was up to us to try to direct these conditioning energies on higher causal levels where they were still fluid.