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The Start |
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At all times, three separate humanities. The first contains those who
live within the five senses and never suspect that further senses
exist. The second contains those who suspect "something" but for whom
the "something" remains a theory, a myth, an unease in the blood,
plausible or implausible but never confirmed. The third contains those
who know, not as theory but as experience.
Perhaps within a zodiacal year, the proportions shift. At the
beginning, a very few know and the merest handful suspect. All others
live wholly within the mundane life. Later more suspect. Towards an
Era's end, it may be that a sizeable proportion begins to suspect and
press forward, milling incoherently towards confirmation.
Some 20 years ago, almost as though the sand in the hour glass of an
era had begun to run out, changes emerged explosively in the social
scene. Initially these seemed unconnected with any psycho-kinetic
situation.
Kerouac and Ginsberg had become the founding fathers of a social - or
anti-social - movement and a young generation, apparently seething with
energies they could not rationalise, seized upon it as something that
would offer a focus of response to the turmoil within them.
The Hippy and Beatnik ethos was essentially negative. It was
anti-Establishment in a crudely emotional way. Then, in 1953, Huxley's
experiences with psychedelic drugs were published and overnight the
Hippy scene knew the direction it had to take. The Door of Perception
burst open.
Within ten years a million "trips" had confirmed the existence of a
universe beyond the senses.
The Mysteries were no more. The content of a higher sensorium, hinted
at in the sacred literature of every age, disguised in oblique
symbolism in a thousand cultures, was available as personal experience
at the cost of an ounce of mushroom or a few cc.s of mescaline.
There were, of course, muted protests from knowledgeable occultists;
hints of danger, warnings of disaster. There were back doors to
expanded consciousness, they said. There always had been. Heaven could
be taken by assault. It had been taken by assault in the past. But
Heaven so taken might be an infra-Heaven. Or it could prove to be empty.
The Turned-On Society not unnaturally regarded such intimations (when
it heard them at all) simply as the trade unionism of the men in
possession. Apparently there was an Occult Establishment as well as a
Capitalist Establishment. Establishments, by definition, were damned.
Under Timothy Leary, the Scene consolidated, made its discoveries, laid
down its philosophy. Finally it staked its claim to a respectability
outside the Square Canon and in the decade 1960 to 70 attained a
reluctant de facto if not de jure recognition.
So everything in Paradise was lovely? Well, not quite. By the early 60s
the first feeble flicker of doubt had begun to show in the drug scene.
Odd "value-considerations" like Meaning and Purpose had begun ever so
slightly to cloud the ecstatic vision. Mescaline certainly opened the
door to a secret room but was this the only room in the house? And was
volitional entry to this room of delights (and horrors) the end of all
achievement? For many, the experience ultimately became one of barely
supportable rue, of ineffable nostalgia, finally of despair. There had
to be something else.
Perhaps these doubters - and they seem to have been few - were
approaching from bitter experience the standpoint which P. D. Ouspensky
had taken from the beginning; that there are many cheap excursions to
Knowing; but that knowing without doing is the ultimate futility.
One of the doubters was Dr. Richard Alpert of Harvard.
In 1961, Alpert was at the peak of a successful all-American academic
career. He was a bachelor, a successful publish-or-perish academic,
delivering ex-cathedra pronouncements on human motivation, Freudian
theory and child development. He had research contracts with Yale, two
cars, a yacht and a private aeroplane. He drank and he smoked pot. He
had it made.
The Kind of doubts that Alpert was to have five years later about the
Psychedelic Revelation were, at this time, showing as doubts about the
Freudian Revelation.
He had himself gone through analysis (it cost him $26,000) and in his
heart to hearts he didn't believe a word of it. For one thing it
appeared very successful in fitting him for the Top Table Academic
Circuit but he was close to deciding that the Top Table Academic
Circuit was as phoney as hell. The whole thing, he felt, was based on
pretence - the pretence that those who were teaching, knew.
Acceptable psychology papers were so often conjobs. They skillfully
combined the thoughts of other writers who in their turn had combined
the thoughts of other writers. Everybody took in some body else's
washing and successfully conned the world that It Was All Significant.
"Something was wrong" Alpert wrote "and the something wrong was that I
just didn't know - though I kept feeling that somebody, somewhere, must
know, even if I didn't. The nature of life was a mystery and all the
little bits of molecular stuff I was teaching didn't add up to wisdom."
Part of Alpert's honest doubts centred on his own conviction that he
wasn't really a scholar - he just came from "a Jewish, anxiety ridden,
high achieving tradition." Yet this, within the parameters of the
All-American Academic Scene was enough to ensure acceptance and
success. The standards of the day were such that the pseudo could
masquerade as the real with almost universal approval. Fraternising
with other academics, he continually felt an eerie feeling that
everything was less than real, all intellectual fun and games in which
subjective pretentions rated as objective truth.
These people, he thought, are the blind leading the blind. They are not
evolved human beings. They do not know the things they teach. Yet they
were the best that Western culture could apparently produce. From their
ranks came holders of power, advisers to Governments, moulders of
contemporary thought. In a sense they weren't totally dishonest since
they were not rejecting a best to promote a less than best. There was
no Best. Or if there was a Best nobody had access to it.
The search for truth had become merely a search for rules that let you
win a game. The professor's game was to make his own synthesis from
existing material and give it out as lectures. The student's game was
to give it all back (carefully slanted in the direction of professorial
bias) as exam answers.
Sometimes the system took on the nature of self actualising prophecy.
Rogerian patients ended up making positive statements. Freudian
patients discovered the significance of their mothers. The System
distributed enough reinforcement clues to ensure that its own
procedures would be self validating. An analysis subject would
sub-consciously notice what associations aroused the interest of the
psychiatrist. And on sound whip-and-carrot principles, he would chose
the maze run that contained the reward pellet.
Alpert began to feel like the old lady with shares in a brothel. He
liked the income but he could not approve of where it came from. The
income certainly was attractive. He had his own academic empire and had
even helped to design the building for it. He had two secretaries and
teams of graduate and research assistants on call. In terms of his
family's Jewish standards and in terms of current academic standards he
was a High Level Achiever. And this was how it was when one day he
discovered a minute office down the hall. It was big enough for one
desk and one man. The man at the desk was Timothy Leary who seems to
have been incorporated into the organisation on no very clear academic
basis. Alpert was struck by the extraordinary intellect Leary disposed
and the pair became buddies-and drinking companions. Leary, it
transpired, had a trip planned to Mexico and Alpert said he would
finish some chores and fly to Mexico and join him. Unknown to either,
the psychedelic age lay just ahead.
When Alpert reached Cuernavaca a week after Leary, he heard an
extraordinary story. Frank Baron, a psychologist who had connections
down Mexico way had introduced Leary to an anthropologist friend
working near Cuernavaca. The anthropologist had mentioned a queer old
witch-woman he knew in the mountains who ate a certain kind of mushroom
and who apparently had extraordinary experiences as a result.
The party had made contact with her and had come back with a selection
of the Tionanacyl mushroom, the "Flesh of the Gods". Sitting round a
swimming pool they had experimented. Leary had eaten nine!
When Alpert arrived, mushrooms were off the menu but the topic was very
much on. "I have learned more in six hours than I learned in all my
years as a psychologist" Leary told an incredulous Alpert. The party
split up and returned to their respective homes and universities but
the world was never to be the same again.
After a spell away from Harvard on a visiting professorship, Alpert
returned to find that Leary had started a considerable research project
in psychedelics. He had been in touch with Aldous Huxley and together
they had interested a chemist in isolating the active ingredient of the
mushroom and finally in synthesising it. The drug was called Psylocybin
and Leary and a group of graduate students were taking it and recording
effects. Alpert was invited to join the party.
Initiation was on March 6, 1961, at Leary's home at Newton. Alpert says
he was not nervous because although he felt that Leary might be
destructive at the level of institutions he was "interpersonally
positive, constructive and loving." The bottle was handed round and
Alpert took 10 milligrams, a very low dosage. The drug was Psylocybin,
the synthesised version of the active ingredient of the mushroom.
Alpert settled back in his chair. The hearthrug began to move and a
picture on the wall to smile-sensations which were not frightening at
all but delightful. Less enchanting was the family dog which had come
in from romping in the snow and was panting. Alpert saw the dog as
something in the last extremities before death and he wanted to carry
it four miles to a vet. This alarm faded instantly when the dog,
jumping up to play with one of the children, stopped panting.
Then, eight feet from him, Alpert saw a man standing in cap and gown.
With a shock he recognised it as himself. One of the "I's" of Alpert,
the professorial "I", had apparently dissociated and exteriorised.
Peering into semi-darkness, Alpert saw another figure and recognised it
as Alpert the socialite whiz-kid. This faded and was replaced in turn
by Alpert the musician, Alpert the airplane pilot, Alpert the Casanova
and so on. One "I" after another exteriorised and each time Alpert had
the sensation that the aspect of himself materialising before him was
an accretion, something irrelevant, and as each disappeared, he agreed
inwardly that he "didn't need that one, anyway."
Then a new figure appeared and with a shock he realised that this was
the quintessence, the Alpertness of Alpert and he was suddenly in
panic. "I couldn't do without that". Then resignation. Perhaps he could
do without it. He could make a new social identity "as long as I have a
body". Then horror. He noticed he had no legs. Progressively he had no
thighs no torso no neck and finally no head. As the last scrap of the
basic of existence melted away, he knew real panic, the panic of
spectating at his own dissolution. At this moment he hit the jackpot.
There was no longer any personality and no longer any body yet he was
still aware-proof apparently of the mystics' assertion that the ego is
more than the sum of its attributes. This awareness which existed
independently of all function, also knew. It was, he says "wise rather
than just knowledgeable". Now and forever Alpert would need only to
look within for the answer to everything-to the place where he knew.
Looking up from the fireside he ran outside, into the snow, laughing,
ecstatic, triumphant. "In a moment the house was lost to view but it
was all right because inside, "it knew".
He went home and started shovelling the snow from his parents' front
garden at 5 in the morning. And there he made a discovery which could
be a very important discovery indeed although it has been little
remarked on. The noise brought his parents from their beds and his
father told him to come in for heaven's sake and not lark about in the
middle of the night.
Alpert recognised this as the voice of ordinary life. Inside him the
New Thing said in a calm quiet voice. "It's quite all right to be
happy."
So he went on shovelling snow and getting wet and happiness bubbled up
inside him. A little later he looked up at the window ~e and to his
astonishment saw his parents watching, they too, laughing and happy.
Alpert realised that a High can be transmitted by contact.
A second lesson, less positive, soon emerged. While he shovelled snow
and transmitted his "High" by contact, he felt completely assured.
Never again would he be in a condition of doubt. The higher "I"
uncovered by the drug would now be always available. It would, from now
on, be necessary only to look within for infallible guidance. He had
established contact with the Overself and it was all wise, all
knowing-and all loving.
Yet in a few days the whole thing was in the past tense. The Beautiful
Thing as he called it, had gone back into seclusion and was
experienced, not as immediacy but as memory. The other "I"s of Alpert
came back. The house had been swept and garnished by 10 mg of
Psylocybin, but it wasn't staying swept and garnished. Could the last
state of man be worse than the first?
Alpert and his co-experimenters recounted their experiences to others
in the academic circle and interest in the new, instant Samadhi was
intense. Further trips were taken and detailed records of experience
recorded. Then Alpert made an interesting observation. Progressively he
found that he was in closer rapport with his fellow-trippers and less
and less with his Square colleagues. Like astronauts who had been to
the moon, the drug takers had the common ground of a shared experience.
With the non-trippers it became more and more difficult to find common
understanding of the things described and discussed. There were those
who had been to the moon and those who hadn't; those who knew and those
who had only been told. They began to separate. Communication broke
down. A cult was forming.
Leary began "naturalistic" research. He gave the drug to 200
people-musicians and metaphysicians, ministers of religion and junkies.
The first analysis of the questionaire which they had all to complete
pointed to one common factor. Experiences were related to personal
orientation-and to expectation.
A common denominator began to emerge.
1. It heightened sensitivity.
2. It shifted the viewpoint. You saw the similarities of others to
yourself rather than the differences. Difference appeared more as
different varieties of dress upon a basic common human-ness.
3. A pooling of identity. Self mingled with other-self and the
separateness of people diminished or disappeared.
An extreme extension of this last phenomenon occurred occasionally
where communication seemed to become open ended. One person asked a
question and another answered but both had the sensation that each had
done both.
A very few people, about 3 per cent, seemed to get outside form
altogether and experienced merely a homogeneous field of white light or
pure energy.
Alpert had experience of this state on one occasion when he was part of
this homogeneous energy field for a continuous four hours. A dark wave
of red colour then began to seep across his field "like a mixture of
the Wave drawing by Blake and something by Bosch." The intruder, he
realised, was all of his identities. He held up his hands in horror,
crying out "No, no, I don't want to go back." His identities seemed
like an intolerable burden which he did not want to re-assume.
The Trippers' early expectations were not realised. A High, however,
high it was, produced nothing permanent. On the drug road to
Enlightenment what goes up must come down. It seems however to have
taken a tidy while for this lesson to sink in-something like five years.
Among Alpert's fellow experimenters there seems to have been a strong
resistance to this admission. Perhaps if they increased the dose . . .
or kept continuously Up for long enough . . . ?
Five of the group locked themselves in a house for three weeks and took
400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. This apparently wasn't as
suicidal as it might seem. A tolerance to LSD is quickly built up and
although by now the group were no longer bothering to measure doses
exactly and were almost literally drinking out of the bottle, they had
a tolerance which apparently ensured an effect ceiling however much the
dosage was increased.
At the end of three weeks these five people had seen heaven and hell
and there was nothing much hidden in the Mysteries of old that had not
been revealed to them. Yet within a few hours they had all come down.
The Men Gods were back to being very vulnerable, ordinary, human beings
living the mundane life. The fire in the kitchen boiler was a present
reality and the Fire of Fohat was only a memory. It seems to have taken
something like 200 trips before Alpert got the message. One is tempted
to suspect that he was lucky: many probably never would get the message
and would remain for ever in limbo between heaven remembered and hell
all too presently experienced.
Maybe Leary was mistaken in rejecting the maps of the New World that
had been drawn by religious cartographers. He would have discovered
that they knew all about it and warned most explicitly against it,
saying that it was a snare and a delusion although the trap was baited
with exquisite delights.
Increasingly there was conflict between the supernal world and the
square world. The Trippers were deeply addicted to the former but
regrettably anchored to the latter. White Light does not pay the rent.
Yet how could a man who had seen a rose as a coalescence of pure energy
be expected to take his mortgage seriously?
The Square World insisted however on being taken seriously-or else. In
Alpert's case the Or Else foreclosed. He was turfed out of Harvard.
In despair he tried to analyse the conflict. The things he knew, not as
theory but as actual experience, were in a superior dimension. Yet the
Square World could insist - was insisting - that its values were
paramount. For the first time he began to consider the possibility that
he was insane.
The Trippers had to render unto Caesar yet it was Caesar who was the
Lame brain. The High Thing was its own justification. Was compromise
possible? Could Caesar's world be bent just a little to make life in
both worlds possible? Maybe a half-Square environment could be found
where the benefits of High did not have to be set off against the loss
of - say - a professorship.
Ralph Metzner, Timothy Leary and Ginsberg may have had some such
compromise in mind when they went off to India. They may also have been
simply drawn subconsciously to an environment where the High was not an
absurd delusion but an ancient honoured acceptance. They had noticed
that the Tibetan Book of the Dead - ostensibly a 2,500 years old
instruction manual on the after-death state - was suspiciously like an
account of the very things they knew about from LSD.
Perceptively they considered that the Book of the Dead might not be
talking about physical death at all but about the psychology of a Trip;
about release, not from the body but from the ordinary senses; and
about descent, once again, not to the womb but to the sense-world of
University Senates and mortgages.
They suspected that the Book of the Dead was an initiation manual and
it may be that they took off for India for deeper psychological reasons
than they suspected.
Alpert was still in America, still trying to reconcile the supernal
world with the US tax system and finding the going hard. He was now
lecturing about psychedelics to anybody who would listen. Audiences
included such unlikely co-interests as the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration and Hells Angels.
At this point Alpert came across a man called David who once had been
his student. David was an intellectual giant who had gone on to invent
a business system which he had sold to Xerox for a fortune and was now,
at 35, retired and about to become a Buddhist. He was just about to
leave for India. Why didn't Alpert come along too?
Alpert went, taking with him in David's Land Rover, a small pharmacy of
psychedelic drugs. His own reasons for the trip are not without
interest. "Maybe I'd meet some holy men along the way and I'd give them
LSD and they'd tell me what LSD is. Maybe I'd learn the missing clue."
They "did" India, the well-heeled Hippy-Tourist India. They took
pictures and made tapes, saw the Dalai Lama and got stoned on hashish
in Afghanistan. At the end of it all, there was no enlightenment. LSD
still did not reveal its place in any scheme of things. Experiences in
India were still experiences in the same two worlds the High and the
Square. The meaning and purpose of both worlds (if there was a meaning,
if there was any purpose) remained as deeply occluded as ever.
Despair came down now with a vengeance. East or West, the senselessness
was uniform. There was nothing to be learned, no revelation that would
bring the High World and the Square World together as a meaningful
continum. All phenomena, sensory or super-sensory were separate,
accidental, random, purposeless insane.
Alpert decided he would go back to America and deliberately choose to
be a servant or a chauffeur-some walk in life which would symbolise the
deduced truth that there was no sense in anything.
He was sitting in a hippy cafe called The Blue Tibetan with his
Buddhist friend David and four or five others, Westerners, seekers,
hlppies, when a man walked in. The man was six feet seven inches tall
with long blond hair and a long blond beard. Though he was wearing a
dhoti he was clearly a Westerner. He was about 23 years
Alpert doesn't imply that there was any Paul on the Road to Damascus
thing about meeting this young giant. Nothing much happened, yet
something very strange was about to happen.
Alpert had often looked into another man's eyes with the one question
that would never let him be. "Does he know, or is he like me, Just
dealing in theories?" He never seems to have given up hope that one day
he would look into a pair of eyes and know that he had come to
journey's end; that on this teeming planet there was somebody who
possessed more than information- that there was somebody who knew. And
Alpert had never apparently had any doubt: if ever he met eyes that
knew he would know that they knew.
The tall man was journey's end. His name-his new name at any rate-was
Bhagwan Dass. Alpert's group and Bhagwan Dass stayed together for five
days in the Sewalti Hotel. The others seem to have regarded Dass as an
interesting fellow traveller and regaled him with their drug
experiences. The giant's reaction was disappointing. He declined to
extrapolate from their viewpoint. Instead he would simply say "Why
don't you do this" and recite some mantra.
The rest of the party were scheduled to move on to Japan, presumably to
"do Zen". Alpert began to wonder if he was going with them. Bhagwan
Dass (who was really an American from Laguna Beach) didn't exactly say
to Alpert "Rise and follow me" but Being apparently spoke to Being and
the result was the same.
The rest of the party moved on. Alpert stayed, long enough to collect
his traveller's cheques, his visa and what was left of the LSD
cupboard. Then follow he did, as the tall American called Bhagwan Dass
strode off in the general direction of Baneshwar.
Almost at once Alpert found himself obliged, willy nilly, to ditch his
life-long personality co-ordinates. All relationships are games and the
giant didn't play games.
"Now that time Leary and I tried a mixture of . . ." Alpert would say
and the giant would reply: "Forget the past. Just be here now." "I feel
terrible" Alpert would say, "my feet are cut. My legs are dropping off.
I've just got to rest."
"These are emotions" was the giant's reaction. "Emotions are waves. Let
them go and they'll disappear."
Dass, says Alpert, had compassion but no pity. Finally, the
ex-Professor of Harvard began to give in. When the giant said "Sit down
here" Alpert sat. When he was told "We sleep here", he lay down and
slept.
Even a desperate spell of dysentry brought no great charity. Alpert,
playing every instinctive move in the personality game-like a woman
trying flattery, guile, anger and tears in turn-could not win. "Fast
three days" was all Dass said.
"And yet", says Alpert, "I never felt such a profound intimacy with
another human being. And what started to blow my mind was that
everywhere he went he was at home." 'Be Here Now' started to - seem
more than a brand slogan.
In a Buddhist monastery of the Theravada persuasion, the giant would be
welcomed as one of them. In a Shavite settlement he was - instantly
accepted as a follower of Shiva. They met a group of Kargyupa
lamas-same reaction. The giant had been five years in India and he was
somehow at one with all its thousands sects. Or else he was in some way
Up There at a level where all the sects were the same anyway. They
walked on, apparently aimlessly, and were accepted everywhere-and fed
accordingly, a Holy Man and his Chela.
Alpert could never catch Dass asleep. If he woke in the middle of the
night Dass would be sitting there in the lotus position. "Maybe he can
sleep sitting up" Alpert thought. "Maybe he doesn't need any sleep". He
never found out.
One night Alpert got up to spend a penny. Outside, he was suddenly
aware of the stars in the heavens. He was also aware that his mother,
who had died the previous year, was also there and from where she was,
wherever it was, she could see and know things that her son couldn't
see and know and that she was encouraging him.
She knew that he was walking barefoot across India with a 23-year old
character in a dhoti who by conventional standards was a nut case.
Alpert didn't really need validation from beyond the grave but he got
it anyway, together with a "souls united" experience with his dead
mother. He went back to sleep convinced, doubly convinced, that Alpert
the seeker was right, however crazy it all seemed, and Alpert the
doubting professor was on his way out.
After some months of this Alpert realised that his visa needed renewing
and the giant agreed that they head towards Delhi.
There, the old Alpert put in a quick claim for survival. He insisted on
cashing enough travellers cheques to buy a pair of pants and a shirt
and a tie so as to appear respectable at the visa office. Documents in
order once more, Alpert, half Square, half High, rejoined his teacher.
To his surprise, Dass said that he too had visa trouble and would have
to go and see about it. Whatever his problems were they weren't solved
and he came back to Alpert next morning and said "I have visa problems.
I must see my Guru. We're going to the mountains".
They would, he said, go back to the town where David had left the Land
Rover. (He had left it in the care of an Indian sculptor called Harish
Johari) and borrow the car for the trip to the Himalayas.
At once the bit of rebellion that remained inside Alpert blew, up into
a large dark cloud. He didn't want to go to the Himalayas. He didn't
want to see any Guru. And who did this guy think he was, calmly
assuming that he could just call in and borrow somebody else's 7000
dollar vehicle ? Gurus were all phoney anyway. California was full of
them.
In spite of which, Alpert found himself walking with the giant to the
town where Johari lived and half an hour later the sculptor was saying:
"If you're going to the mountains to see your Guru why don't you take
the Land Rover?"
And next day Bhagwan Dass was driving the Land Rover and a sullen
Alpert was sitting beside him and they drove 80 miles into the
foothills of the Himalayas.
Alpert is angry. He (or the surviving Professor bit), feels that he is
out of his league. He has surrendered his rational universe for a
magical one where people give you Land Rovers just because the thought
'lend me a Land Rover' is floating around. He is also uptight for
another reason. He has started to find that pot gives him adverse
physical reactions and he hasn't smoked for some days now.
Presently they reach a roadside shrine and people appear from nowhere
and welcome Bhagwan Dass and they are all so filled with happiness that
some of them are crying. Dass asks where the Guru is and they say yes,
he's here, and point up the hill.
Dass is now crying like the others and there is a tangible charge of
some sort in the atmosphere. Personally Alpert feels nothing but
boiling resentment because they're all running up the hill and he is
lagging behind and nobody is paying any attention to him. In a field
facing into a valley and away from the road there is a little man of
maybe 60 or 70 sitting on a blanket with a circle of disciples round
him.
To Alpert's horror, Bhagwan Dass, the bloke from California, runs to
the Guru, tears streaming down his face and throws himself down on the
ground in front of the old man, his fingers touching the Guru's feet.
Alpert is saying inwardly 'How ridiculous' and 'I hope they don't
expect me to touch his feet'.
The old man whom they call Maharaji, looks up and says something in
Hindi and one of the group translates word for word. The Maharaji is
asking Dass if Dass carries around a picture of the Maharaji. The
answer is yes.
"Give it to him"-pointing at Alpert.
Alpert grins weakly. So he's getting a picture postcard for free. O.K.
But he still isn't lying down and touching anybody's feet.
The Maharaji, his eyes twinkling, asks Alpert if he came in a big car.
He says yes, he came in a big car, a Land Rover. It's back there a bit
down the hill.
The old man says, "You are a rich man. Will you buy a big car like that
for me ?" Gurus, Alpert thinks. Thirty seconds in the place and already
I'm being hustled. He doesn't know what to say so he says "Well, maybe."
The Guru twinkles some more then says, "Take him away and give him
food". He and Dass were taken to a house some distance away and fed
delightful food by people apparently overflowing with human kindness.
Alpert starts to thaw a little, then a message arrives. The Guru would
like to see him again.
He goes back to the field and the old man's first words shake Alpert's
professorial bit right down to its underwear.
"You looked up at the stars the other night?"
"Mmm".
"You were thinking about your Mother ?"
"Yes".
Alpert hadn't mentioned the spending-a-penny bit to anyone. Not to a
living soul.
"Your mother died of ... stomach...." The old man closed his eyes then
said "spleen".
At that, the last professor bit went into spasm, clutching around for
straws that might somehow be used for rebuilding the Harvard universe.
He rifled through old experiences and remembered one with Ralph Metzner
where telepathy seemed to be part of the Beautiful Scene. But this old
guy wasn't on the Pill.
His mind went on churning, trying to find something that would let him
file the Maharaji in a normal, acceptable comfortable Western category.
He remembers the effort and the crash when he knew the answer wasn't
going to come.
"I felt like what happens when a computer is fed an insoluble problem.
The bell rings and the red light comes up and the machine stops."
Just as Alpert's rational Cartesian world picture stopped being
possible, the old man smiled at him, his eyes twinkling and then the
whole encounter moved out of the even remotely possibly theoretical and
so into an area which the West has carefully defined as being
non-possible. The old man leaned towards him and Alpert felt a heavy
pain in his chest, the sensation of something being wrenched open. He
observed that he was crying like a baby and at the same time
experiencing waves of purest joy. He felt that the journey was over. He
felt he had come home.
People lifted him up with tender solicitude and they were all so happy
for him because now it had happened to him too, and they knew what it
was all about. They conducted him to somebody's house three miles away
and he felt confused but as light as air. Later he started to get ready
for bed and going through his rucksack he noticed the LSD bottles. The
thought struck him, "Now I can learn what LSD really is. At long last
I've met somebody who must know. He will definitely know about LSD. All
I have to do is ask him."
Next morning at eight o'clock a messenger arrived. The Maharaji wanted
to see him right away. Quickly Alpert hastened back to the place where
yesterday everything had happened. He got out of the car and walked
towards the Guru. When he got near the old man called out, "What about
your question ? Have you got the medicine ?"
Alpert did another double take. The thing about asking the Maharaji
about the nature of LSD was an idea. It was inside his own mind, his
own private thing. And here was the old man knowing all about it and
hurrying him along. He did a rapid about turn and went back to the car
for his rucksack with the bottles.
Clutching the bottles, he again approached the Guru. "This is STP", he
said, holding out one of the bottles "and this is Librium and this is
LSD".
The old man interrupted. "And these give you siddhis? (literally
powers). "
Alpert didn't know about siddhis and waited for a translation but the
old man was apparently impatient, holding out his hands to indicate
that he wanted to sample the wonder drugs of the West. Alpert shook out
one pill of LSD. It had been specially made, 300 micrograms of very
pure acid. He hesitated, wondering how to convey that this wasn't
bicarbonate. 75 micrograms was a fair starting dose. 300 was definitely
away up.
But the old boy didn't want just one. Reluctantly Alpert shook out a
second then, very reluctantly, a third. The old man took all three and
very deliberately swallowed them.
After which he went right on conducting the business of the day.
Alpert kept waiting for the explosion. 900 micrograms of acid was in
the high octane range for an addict. For a man of 70 who had never
tried it, it was . . . Alpert shuddered.
All day long the old man went on talking with his disciples, arranging
for this and that and from time to time he would look at Alpert and
something like the internal equivalent of a wink would pass between
them. Nothing, but nothing happened. And that was that.
That evening he was taken to a temple used by the Maharaji's people.
Nobody asked him if he wanted to stay. There were no conditions, no
undertakings. Nobody asked for promises or money. No commitment
whatever. Yet there was an agreement, a sort of here and now
commitment, all arranged and understood internally. Gradually Alpert
began to pick up some of the threads. The old man was in some state
called sahaj samadhi when he didn't need to seek for anything he needed
from the physical universe. Such things of this world as he needed came
towards him, gravitated in to him and sometimes had to be stopped
before they became a deluge. Somewhere on a journey the Maharaji would
stop and say "Build a temple here". There were gifts of all sorts
already in the pipeline sufficient to build a temple. So presently a
temple would go up at that spot.
All the Maharaji's people were infinitely protective of Alpert as if
they knew that something big had happened to him and he was still
vulnerable and had to be cared for.
Little bits of telepathy became commonplace. One night Alpert was
looking through his notebook and saw the name Lama Govinda (the author
of Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism). He thought: here I am in the
Himalayas. I really ought to be able to say I've met Lama Govinda.
Next morning the Maharaji gave him one of the special twinkle smiles
and said, "Since you're in the Himalayas, why don't you call on the
Lama Govinda?"
Alpert wondered if he could get away to call on anybody. Always there
seemed to be somebody around watching him as though they felt towards
him as to a little child who really mustn't be allowed to cross a busy
road till he was a bit older.
After four months with the Maharaji he needed more visa-renewal and
broached the subject of going to Delhi. Apparently he was now less
vulnerable and nobody raised any objection. He made the 12 hours bus
trip back to the Square World, alone.
Central Delhi, says Alpert, is not India. It is a little bit of soda
fountain America and milk bar England dumped down around Connaught
Place, with BOAC, American Express and other Western delights abounding.
His business completed, Alpert treated himself to a walk through some
of the posh stores and suddenly felt High; not drug High, a High of a
different kind. An lo and behold it seemed to be contagious like that
drug High in the snow outside his parents' house, because people in the
stores, total strangers said, "You are a saddhu although you are a
Westerner. It will be a blessing if you accept these goods from us as a
gift". And so on.
During his four months with the Maharaji, Alpert had been on a very
strict diet and although he felt wonderful on it, light and free, he
had yearnings sometimes for a slap-up vegetarian dinner. On impulse he
went into a restaurant and had just that. It was all strictly
vegetarian and he wasn't really breaking bounds, except that the
vegetarian ice cream had a couple of English biscuits stuck into it.
Like a small boy raiding the larder while the family were away, he ate
the lot.
When Alpert got back to the camp the Maharaji said, "How did you like
the biscuits ?"
In everyday life around the Maharaji there were occurrences that were
not entirely everyday. Alpert began to suspect that when people brought
food for the Guru, he ate it as a sort of penance. Later Alpert
understood that such occurrences as the old man eating eight oranges in
a row was connected with the Maharaji taking on somebody else's karma:
the karma of somebody symbolised by eight oranges.
Alone at night, Alpert would have the usual run of thoughts and
fantasies. When he had acquired some siddhis he'd be quite an important
person but he'd be wise with it. He'd use his power for good, perhaps
collect money for a really deserving charity. A few minutes later his
thoughts would be quite elsewhere, perhaps in a sexual fantasy.
A day or two later the Maharaji would say casually, "Would you like to
organise a really big charity in America?" This sounded good, said
before an audience, as though the old man was already judging Alpert to
be of real importance. Then a moment later, by association, Alpert
would suddenly think, "Oh, my God, if he knows about that one he must
know about.... He would be humbled; but internally; a private humbling.
Alpert would look up and the old man would fix him with his eyes but
all Alpert could see was just deep selfless love.
Alpert recalled a saying: "Once you realise that God knows every thing,
you are free" and he realised that through half a lifetime of
psychoanalysis he had managed to keep certain corners of his
subconscious hidden and pry-proof, because they were shameful, yet this
old man could cause Alpert to give them up so gently but so completely
that they were run off on the instant.
The Maharaji allocated a teacher to Alpert, an Indian called Hari Dass
Baba. Alpert and Bhagwan Dass were the only Westerners. Every day, in
addition to a routine of hygiene, the rigorous diet and the routine of
asanas, Hari Dass taught Alpert, using a strange sequence of questions
which weren't questions. "If a pickpocket meets a saint he see only
pockets." "If you wear shoes, the whole world is covered with leather".
Alpert began to realise that behind such odd statements (made in
silence on a chalk board) he was being shown a system of psychology of
great subtlety and power. He began, for example, to experience how
motivation conditions perception. He also realised that the teaching
resonated at a deeper level than theory. Intellectual acceptance or
rejection was by-passed because the aphorisms or whatever they were,
were designed to work at a level where they could produce only
affirmation.
He was given a little theoretical teaching: for example, the effect of
individual human vibrations on the environment. He was told the effect
of various energies: the effect of non-violence for example (ahimsa) on
animal life. Snakes, he was told, "know heart" and the real Yogi is in
no danger from cobras.
Much later, Alpert came across Vivekananda's Rajah Yoga (based on the
sutras of Patanjali) and realised that Hari Dass was in fact teaching
Rajah yoga.
The end of Alpert's story is near - or perhaps the end of the
beginning. He went with the Maharaji, Bhagwan Dass and half a dozen
others on a short trip to a Forestry camp where the Maharaji had
followers. They were welcomed on arrival by people who seemed to be in
a continuous state of quiet happiness. The Maharaji went into a hut
with some of the site workers, leaving Alpert and the travelling party
on a lawn outside. Presently Alpert was sent for. He went to the hut
and sat down in front of the teacher. The old man asked him some
seemingly irrelevant questions. "Do you like to make people laugh in
America ? Do you like to feed children ?" Bewildered, Alpert answered
"Yes".
The old man said "Good". Then he leaned forward and very deliberately
tapped Alpert on the forehead three times. Just that. This time there
was no sensation of a something being wrenched open. No physical
sensation at all. Alpert experienced only an inner turmoil and had to
be helped outside to rejoin the others. Today, now he is back in the
West, Alpert still does not know the significance of the forehead taps.
Nothing, so far as he knows, has happened except that those outside the
hut recognised that he was in a state of High when he left the
Maharaji's presence. The significance, whatever it may be, lies in the
future.
Alpert, it would seem, went by a long circuitous route to find the
start of a road that is as old as humanity. He has now been sent back
to the West with no special instructions except simply to Be Here and
Now and to avoid giving any clues to the identity or location of the
remarkable Maharaji who changed his life so devastatingly.
Already some people in America, following up clues from Alpert's
lectures and conversations have identified the old man and have
actually tracked him down, in India. Without exception, all such have
been sent empty away.
It may be that Westerners cannot now find this particular road in India
at all and that the only signpost to it exists in the Here and Now
injunction and in the presence of Alpert and the people he has
influenced.
It is tempting to surmise a number of things.
. . . that the Kerouac Ginsberg Hippy scene was promoted by some higher
Intention because out of this particular kind of social ferment, the
switch to an artificial expansion of consciousness could most readily
be contrived. . . . that the psychedelic state was a necessary
blunt-instrument proof for a stiff-necked generation: proof that
trans-sensory states exist in present fact as well as in ancient fable.
. . . that the wastage (and sometimes the tragedy) of the psychedelic
scene was necessary so that those who presumed to enter heaven with
their boots on might learn through despair that seeing and doing are
not the same and that the state a man may reach is by no means the
station he is qualified to occupy.
In brief, that the Intelligences who arrange an End may use any way
that is to hand, even if it seems devious to us.
There are those who claim that the technique whereby state and station
in the vertical ascent of man may be rightly regulated, is the greatest
of all secrets and that the Yogis do not have it.
The way to true Being, they claim, is deeply hid and rarer, far rarer
of attainment, than religionists and occultists imagine: in effect that
all Yogic ways lead to states of Enjoyment and are finally delusional.
It would certainly seem that Alpert brings something to the West.
Whether it is a major part of present world change; whether it is for
all or only some; whether it leads to the top of Olympus or merely to
the Islands of the Blessed, time perhaps will show.
by Ernest Scott
Introduction to "Doing Your Own Being" by Ram
Dass
Lectures for Transpersonal Institute, Palo Alto, CA USA
First Published in Great Britain in 1973 by Neville Spearman Limited
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