Richard Grossinger

News Notes and Queries

Richard Grossinger — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 20:04:58 +0000

News Notes and Queries

Up to now, this website has been a blog in the sense that my most recent post has made up the front page and stayed there until the next most recent post. These cumulative posts are still all present on the site (to the right, see the vertical column). For those who want to skip these notes and go directly to the most recent post, it is the Valedictory Address. Either access it in the righthand column or click immediately on:

http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2011/05/valedictory-address-for-amherst-college-class-of-1966-45th-reunion-version-delivered-may-28-2011-hamilton-house/

I will now regularly update the home page with news, feelers, and outreach:

In Gualala, California, April 27-29. In Berkeley then till May 26 or so. Leaving for the East Coast around June 7.

My psychic group meets on Wednesday nights in Manset when I am in Maine. Please inquire if interested.

New, Current, and Forthcoming Publications

The Bardo of Waking Life, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, and New Moon are now in e-book format and available. For The Bardo of Waking Life, I corrected typos and added a note indicating where the gap in the book takes place during our trip to Europe (http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/trip-journal/).

For 2013, I corrected typos and wrote a different conclusion to my Introduction on the 2012 cosmic shift.

For New Moon, I removed the entire last section (“The Alchemical Wedding”), restoring the book to its original form. I also returned the names of many of the people to what they actually were, fixed a confusion of narrative version early in the book, and added a note to cover sections omitted in the “Teen Tour” chapter (in the print version too, as part of the transition from Salty and Sandy, my high-school novel, to New Moon). I also added an Afterword explaining all these changes and related issues; it is available on this website: http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2011/04/afterword-to-e-book-version-of-new-moon/.

The one book which I am substantially rewriting for e-book format (as well as a small print version) is Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger’s. I have restored most of the material removed from its original manuscript and placed in New Moon (“The Alchemical Wedding,” as per above), I have rewritten some sections from the North Atlantic Books history on this website and placed them in the appropriate spots (replacing anecdotal snippets and lists), and I have generally edited and changed the weaker parts of the book. I have always thought that Out of Babylon was a promising novel in a Faulknerian tradition (even if nonfiction), but it was unfinished and flawed. The e-book opportunity has given me at shot at fixing that. I am presently looking for proofreaders and feedback on the draft, so write me if you are interested and willing.

I am now working on the following new book, to be published in mid-2012 in three volumes. I am glad to share a Word file of the current draft with anyone who asks me for it until six months before publication:

Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness:

The Convergence of Physical, Philosophical, Psychological, Psychospiritual, and Psychic Views

Table of Contents

Volume One

Movement One

The Neuroscience, Evolution, and Ontology of Consciousness

Introduction

Chapter One: What the Fuck is This?

Chapter Two: The Scientific View of Reality and Consciousness

Chapter Three: Consciousness: Everything and Nothing

Chapter Four: Degrees of Consciousness: Protoconsciousness, Preconsciousness, and the Freudian Unconscious

Chapter Five: Systemic Consciousness: Nonconsciousness and the Loss of Consciousness

Chapter Six: Qualia or Zombies?

Chapter Seven: Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon: The Psycholinguistics and Phylogenesis of Meaning

Chapter Eight: The Quantum Brain

Chapter Nine: Ontology and Cosmology of Consciousness

Chapter Ten: The Subtexts of Science

Volume Two

Movement Two

Introduction

Chapter One: Theosophy and the Hermetic Tradition

Chapter Two: Psychic Tools

Chapter Three: We Are Already Psychic

Chapter Four: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Human Home Energy

Chapter Five: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Frequencies Above the Range of Ordinary Experience

Chapter Six: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Tuning Outside the Axis of Human Home Energy

Chapter Seven: Surfing the Operation of the Real

Chapter Eight: Focusing on What Is Happening

Chapter Nine: Buddhism and Theosophy: A Comparison

Volume Three

Movement Three

The Crisis and Future of Consciousness

Introduction

Chapter One: Demonic Entities and Their Symbols of Transformation

Chapter Two: Fear Has an Intelligence

Chapter Three: How Did Evil Get into the Universe?

Chapter Four: One Encounter, One Chance

Chapter Five: Converting Thoughtforms and Riding Synchronicity: Roses, Tarot Cards, and Scapula Bones

Chapter Six: Family Constellations and the Karmic Seed

Chapter Seven: The Cosmic Eternity System

Chapter Eight: We Are In Existence

Hyperlinks

End Notes

Updated Features on this Site

I am starting a second list of recently read books as an addendum under http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/my-favorite-novels-and-other-fictions-and-narratives/. You need to go to the righthand column for this under Life, as I can’t get WordPress to underline–it’s above my rudimentary skill level. Here is the first one:

2011 on

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson

This book caught me totally off-guard, which is the best way to take in an extraordinary work of literature. I knew nothing about it—no opinions, no press, no reputation, no hearsay. It was one of several unabridged CDs I procured randomly for car listening—pass on to someone else if you don’t like it. From the title and a brief scan of the jacket description, I made a guess as to what it would be; I was going to treat it as a genre page-turner with maybe a bit of depth. After the opening pages, I had no reason to change my prejudice, though I felt that it was brilliantly executed; it reminded me a little of Beckett in its dark but pure view into existence from a ravaged body, at the same time far more graphic and medical than anything the author of Malloy and Malone Dies attempted. Its gruesomeness led me to consider it one of the books that I would listen to on my own rather than share with my wife, as I didn’t think she’d want to go through the long opening graphic scenes involving a car accident, medical evacuation, and tissue-by-tissue account of the victim’s treatment. Yet she happened to catch three minutes when I wanted to finish my band (for easy relocation) before changing to our shared book, and she was hooked. We listened to the next band and, before our errand was done (and since I myself was only on CD3 out of 16), I went back to 1, and we proceeded to spend the next two and a half months savoring this novel.

From the moment in Chapter III when Marianne Engle, a seeming schizophrenic from another ward in the hospital, finds the narrator after having sneaked into his room and tells him, “You’ve been burned again. This is the third time….,” the book changes radically. It adds a layer, and then another, and then another. It is no longer just an existential novel (though it is) about a venal pornographer much of whose body (including his penis) has been burned off in a car accident; it is a grand and complex epic of reincarnation and eternity, including a near impossible retelling of Dante’s Inferno inside its own narrative while alternately becoming a traditional Japanese fairytale and an Icelandic edda—each leap fully realized and complete. Finally The Gargoyle is as explicitly and brazenly about love as the only survival, the only bridge between life and death as Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey.

None of this should work; yet it does. It is wildly ambitious, daring, compassionate, imaginative, hilariously funny, and starkly sobering.

The book’s brilliance mainly lies in its language, tone, and discrimination of detail. Everything in the plot has been done before, of course. I find strands of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Max Ehrlich, T. H. White, Yukio Mishima, even James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov (the former in the use of multiple languages and etymologies, the latter in the self-witnessing voice of obsession). Davidson’s word choice is continually surprising and original, and he’s not afraid to take the most risky leap of faith, and he’s just about never makes a false step.

Irony and witty nihilism are set against wonder, grace and prayer; wry sarcasm is set against indomitable epiphanies and acts of courage, selfless sacrifice, and atonement. In that sense the narrator’s muddle of antithetical emotions and belief systems fuels a suspense that becomes a window through which the darkest and bleakest visions pass alongside visions worthy of Meister Eckhart (who is also a character in the story and under whose epigraph The Gargoyle was written).

The Guide to Cinema is regularly updated with new films: http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/a-guide-to-cinema/ See righthand column for this under Life.

Here are the most recent films added in 2011:

Biutiful, directed by Alejándro González Iñárratu (2010). Alejándro González Iñárratu opened and closed his film Biutiful in a snowy forest of bare trees. The main character Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem, is approached by a young man. When we see the scene for the first time, we do not know who these people are or what is transpiring between them. In fact Uxbal has just died, and the young man who approaches him resembles the father he never met. In flight from Franco a generation earlier, Uxbal’s father left his wife (and Spain) and arrived in Mexico, only to die there three weeks later at the age of twenty of pneumonia. His embalmed body, shipped back to Barcelona and buried, was exhumed for cremation as part of a cemetery relocation within the time-span of the film. Uxbal gets to see him a second time as a mummy.

The story considers the weight of a life in the context of the the memory of the dead by the living, as well as vice versa: how the dead will recognize each other without their bodies.

Biutiful did not actually open in the forest. The scene was preceded by a brief anomaly a flash-forward from just before Uxbal’s death when he gave his daughter, a girl of about ten, his own mother’s ring. Afterwards he pleaded with her to stare at his face and promise not to forget him. The actual request occurs in the the body of the film’s narrative, not in its prologue, which has only the hands, father’s and daughter’s, and the ring changing fingers. He did not make a similar request of his son Matteo, a boy of about six at the time.

Just before Uxbal’s death, the terminally ill father visits his son, finds him sobbing on the bed and, though ordinarily gruff, comforts him. Matteo has been punished and denied a trip with his sister and mother (Uxbal’s estranged wife) to see the snowy woods of the Pyrenees.

So the young man at the beginning of Biutiful is not—or not only— Uxbal’s father frozen at twenty but his son, Matteo, grown up. But how does Uxbal recognize Matteo when he last saw him at six? How does he know that the youth that so resembles his father is not his father?

Matteo’s unique and timeless signal is the forest and snow, a phantom enegetic reality made of symbols, symbols that Uxbal will forever identify with Matteo because they represent an absence the needs to be filled—an unfulfilled trip to the Pyrneees. A very beautiful brown-and-white owl is lying dead on the snow, its feathers rustling in the breeze. As Matteo approaches, he says the exact words he will say (or had already said) at six, “Do you know that when owls die they spit a hairball out of their beak?”

Uxbal completes the encrypted exchange by saying that the sound of the ocean scared him as a child because he was afraid of the bottom of the sea and the things that live there.

It is not a real dead owl either.

The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell (2010). This movie is a lot about Reality, but it is neither Reality TV nor Cinema Verite. Mark Wahlberg, Christian Baile, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams, and crew reconstruct the extended families of Lowell, Mass. boxer half-brothers Dicky Ecklund and Mickey Ward. They do this onsite in Lowell with the “originals” present as models and to help reenact historical reality on the spot (and to be in the film as extras). The different layers of the real and the acted meld brilliantly to produce something that is beyond real (and certainly beyond the illusion reality of Reality TV and lives on websites) and also beyond just acting, though it is consummate acting. It is a gem, a perfect piece of complex art working at many levels–as classic and Shakespearean as it is avant-garde and Warholian. It also has that exquisite, irreplaceable texture of lower-class Eastern Massachusetts that permeates Good Will Hunting, Outside Providence, The Town, and numerous other Matt Damon/Ben Affleck dramas. Adams does a picture-perfect University of Rhode Island dropout bar skank with a heart of fire (and gold). Various actresses play the chorus of Ecklund/Ward sisters (and they are legion) as if this were Sophocles or Euripides. Leo captures the the fighters’ fierce, narcissistic, vulgar, outrageous but devoted mother—my favorite scene is her duet with Baile/Ecklund, reenacting together the BeeGees’ “I Started a Dream” to defuse tension in a car.

White Irish Drinkers, directed by John Gray (2010). The year is 1975, the setting is Brooklyn. The moment that I knew this was going to be a special film was when the family’s younger son Brian, a college-age teenager not in college, gets together with his three long-time neighborhood buddies, one of whom has enrolled in college for computers, and the attention focuses on a particular girl (Leslie Murphy) at the bar. Brian, played brilliantly by Nick Thurston, likes her but felt ignored by her in high school, so he isn’t one of the guys going over to hang with or hit on her. Instead he goes to the bar’s outside-facing store-front window and, in the steam on the inside of the glass, slowly paints an astonishingly accurate portrait of her. One by one, people start to notice, and eventually the whole bar is watching as the camera focuses on her stunned abashed face in the center. The second most remarkable moment is Thurston’s and Murphy’s one love scene, which begins with them running naked in the graveyard and ends with one of the best simulations of passionate fucking in cinema history (at least my history of viewing). But it doesn’t quite end there. It ends with her looking at his paintings and trying to explain to him that he’s got something special, and then walking out abruptly before she can fall in love. The evolution of interactions between Thurston and Geoff Wigdor (who plays his brother Danny) is also powerful, culminating with each of their admissions of what the other means to him. They both play it just right, articulation bursting out of (mostly) inarticulateness (like early Brando). Karen Allen has grown from the teen siren in The Wanderers to the mother and trapped in White Irish Drinkers, but she brings that same fresh spirit to her role. The life of this film is the heart of its characters and the fact that they all have good hearts, even the nastiest or most banal of them. The dialogue, rhythm, pacing, and sound track are also pretty much without a false step.

The Future, directed by Miranda July (2011). As Miranda’s father, I can say that she seems to have been born with a sense of how to move in and out of time, and also how to stop time. That’s why the movie Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeves and Jane Alexander became so special to her in adolescence; it awoke her innate power over time. This is a film in which all different slices of time and reality intersection and fuse in a symphony that is completely real and also a parable. A local LA man interviewed by Miranda for a piece on Pennysaver vendors ends up playing himself in the film, and not only playing his real-life role as seller of a $3 hair-drier but the voice of the Moon, which is totally involved in the stopping of time. The movie’s cat also speaks in Miranda’s voice both inside and outside of time. Miranda has also imbedded the cat and herself twice (herself as the cat’s voice and as the lead actress, and the cat as the cat we (her parents) had before we were married and well before she was born, and herself as our unborn child speaking in the voice of a cat, giving us needed advice from outside of time). But I don’t mean to imply that this is all tricks and aliases and symbols; it is completely a film of the heart adorned with brilliantly intuited metaphysics. I also pick up echoes of Prelude to a Kiss (which Miranda saw but didn’t remember when making The Future) and The Fantastics (which she never saw but which played the role of the The Future for us, her parents).

Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones (2011). This is an intricate, perfectly structured labyrinth of time travel qua alternate realities. A continuous eight-minute loop of reality from a dead man’s brain is re-run inside another dead man’s brain in such a way that the second man’s consciousness is restored (though he has no idea how the hell he got inside a commuter train entering Chicago and as a different person from how he was last aware of himself flying a helicopter around Khyber Pass, Afghanistan). According to the technology’s Dr. Frankenstein-like inventor, alternate source codes are created through “quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus.” Needless to say, actual science is nowhere close to such an application, but this is a cautionary tale.

The practical goal of the particular “source code” insertion (we eventually find out) is to prevent a second terrorist bombing, the first explosion having just occurred, resulting in the death of the man carrying the “code,” whose extracted memory traces have just been implanted in a new carrier’s brain—the eight-minute track that always ends with the blast. The memory transplantee, a trained soldier, has been sent in to sort through the virtual landscape and find the perpetrator, but his brain is running someone else’s recording.

Once inside the code, he can alter “hard” objects—cell phones, guns, his train ticket, the people around him—but none of these realities are “real,” not even the capsule in which he gets debriefed before and after each eight-minute mission, not even the explosion that does occur at the end of each segment (returning him to his “capsule” and setting the terms for his next reinsertion until he can finger the perp). They are memories, already past and complete. The capsule is his brain’s adaptation to its situation, its compensation for not having a body or moving in an actual external environment; it is a projection of reality across the brain itself, using projections from reality into itself. The landscape and events of the mission may have been transferred into his brain from another brain, but they are recreated by binding, cross-cueing, and dialogue in his brain.

But how is our own “real reality” different from an appearance archived in our brain? Source Code simply takes this notion to its natural conclusion.

Initially the point of the assignment is not to stop the original attack, which can’t be stopped because it has already happened, but to get information in order to prevent another, more serious bombing.

The reason that the mission can be run countless times (in the sense of playing a different episode with the same characters and props) is that each of the people within the eight-minute memory track has independent existence and free will, while the “source code” can be reinstalled and run as many times as necessary to find the bad guy.

By the end of the story we understand that each playback has its own ongoing energy basis and integrity and cannot be violated or expunged. The pilot, involuntarily enlisted, decides finally to buy into an alternate reality; he breaks ranks and takes independent action in order to save his new “self” and the girl seated across from him (both of whom are already dead in the original source code). He literally escapes into the archive of his own brain, which becomes reality.

The Tree of Life, directed by Terence Malick (2011). Three Quick Things:

The experience of childhood was proposed and shot from within a form resembling the actual sensation and phenomenology of existence on this planet, so was a stark and ecstatic rendering of a psychospiritual fact without ever calling attention to it.
That family experience was set against the mystery of the cosmic frame in which it arises and into which it vanishes, which was offered not as a metaphor but an explicit and evident thing beyond our ken, but not beyond hermetic intimation and intuition: “As Above, So Below.”
Like Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Malick concluded in the only way either of them could have, by breaking with the space-time continuum and letting everything happen at once such that each moment is eternal and a manifestation of the one unity truth.

Family

My Wife: Lindy Hough had a new collection of selected poems come out in the spring of 2011. It is her first book since 1976 and is called Wild Horses, Wild Dreams. Check it out:

http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Horses-Dreams-Selected-1971-2010/dp/1556439628/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1309394777&sr=8-3

It also has a video trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PG3FF3Mysw

My Daughter: Miranda July’s new movie is The Future: http://thefuturethefuture.com/.

My Son: Robin Grossinger is writing a book on tNapa County for University of California Press publication in spring 2012:Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas.

My Son-in-Law: Mike Mills’ new movie is Beginners: http://www.focusfeatures.com/profile/mike_mills

Travel Considerations:

These are places that Lindy and I would like to go in the next few years. We won’t get to all of them but hopefully some. Trips are challenging for us (as per the journals on this website), and we’d be interested in any local contacts, hopefully ones leading to readings, talks, or time with local writers, artists, psychospiritual practitioners, etc., or just friends and/or readers. Please write me.

Main list: Turkey, Greece, Ireland, Croatia.

Secondary list: Scandinavia, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal, Jamaica (for reggae)

Valedictory Address for Amherst College Class of 1966 45th Reunion (Version Delivered: May 28, 2011, 9:15 PM, Tent Behind Hamilton House)

Richard Grossinger — Sun, 29 May 2011 11:56:01 +0000

Valedictory Address for Amherst College Class of 1966 45^th Reunion

Bear with me. I’m going to tell a few campfire tales, and I don’t want to rush through them.

In my correspondence with Jon Huberth and Dave Browder, the entertainment group for this establishment, I called my offering a valedictory address, tongue I hope in cheek. When Jon wrote back, “Hey who went and made you valedictorian?” I replied, “By the 45^th you can appoint yourself valedictorian, and we can have as many as volunteer.”

When Elliott Isenberg and I were discussing our upcoming 45^th reunion, he said, with a trace of macabre glee, that attrition was setting upon us. Over the next ten years we will approach the mean life span for American males of our time, and we will be talking more and more about who’s no longer here. We are squarely in the yoga of mortality

That’s quite different from watching the march of the classes ahead of us. It’s the difference between hearing Jeffrey Hoffman talk about his stints in space, and being shot into Earth orbit yourself.

Elliott’s subtext was that people are going to change in light of core vulnerability and mortality, so it is worth going to reunions to witness and support those changes in each other, to be part of a class body, to see in others what we can’t completely recognize or permit in ourselves, and that the situation, the asana is inescapable; to share its wonder, its terrible joy, the joy of company, in completing whatever this is, together; in giving up our ancient rivalry as men, to become, gradually at last, the same thing.

Reunions are also going to be about the dead as much as the living. As we are a class of both the living and the dead, we start to become a sangha in a much more serious way.

But it was always serious; it was serious when we showed up in September of ’62. We just didn’t know it yet.

The universe hasn’t changed in its view of us or its plans for us, and the universe is a serious mutha. We are now shifting into a deeper awareness, individual and collective, of the real ceremony, the actual reunion cycle.

Dusty Dowes called our attention to this matter, perhaps first among us, in 1991 with shocking abruptness and awesome throwaway clarity. He got it. As hilarious as he was sobering. I will give my version. Toward the end of the banquet in Valentine, a mike was left open for toasts from the floor. After more than an hour of miscellaneous pronouncements, and two minutes during which everyone assumed the speeches were over, a large, bearded leprechaun strode to the podium and broke the silence: “I was on the campus the other day and I saw this guy at his 70^th reunion. Last living member of his class.” He paused. “I wondered, was he afraid?” He paused again, for what seemed an eternity; then he thrust his glass upward: “I propose a toast to the last living member of our class. Don’t be scared buddy; we’re all with you.”

I can’t improve on that. That was our real valedictory address. I think it’s worth letting it sink in anew: from Dusty to all of us—from each of us to every other one: “Don’t be scared, buddy! We’re all with you.”

This is where it begins to get serious, but this is where it begins to get real.

My high-school alma mater opened with, “We were strangers met in friendship,/now we’re kin to one and all.” The Whiffenpoof song replaces its blithe geniality with a darker backwash of college days: “Gentleman songsters off on a spree,/doomed from here to eternity/Lord have mercy on such as we.” In the “parting glass,” the Amherst reunion-goer pleads that as long as he has one more cup to share with his classmates, as long as he can sing the verse of camaraderie one more time tonight, time itself will halt. Then the truth finally sinks in: “We are poor little lambs who have lost their way./Baaa, baaa, baaa!”

Our class exists as a ceremonial body because there is no alternative to it or replacement for it. For most of us here, there is no equivalent, more sacred clan or peer group of initiates into adult life.

We are not as tight as a Hopi corn-mother fraternity initiated in a kiva, nor did we go through a ritual of transformation like a Zulu warrior guild, Australian Emu clan, or Tibetan monastic order. We shared no overnight vision quests in caves or among wild animals; we didn’t touch a weasel or bear with our index fingers; we did no group meditations on emptiness and the Great Void; we ingested no sacred poisons. Amherst College Class of ’66 was what we had, so it served for each of us as our priesthood, our baptism into manhood, our ingestion of the serum of mortality. We learned that we couldn’t order life to come to us or just go charging after it, though we may have thought we were doing precisely that. Instead, we got behind the eyes of a creature we wanted to call to us; we became the objects of its desires. We became not who we wanted to be but who we had to be. We arrived as children, novices, wise guys, assholes; we left as pretty much the same, a bit chastened and cooked, redirected from our innocence onto the path from which there is no return.

The various rituals, gauntlets, and transmissions of ancestral knowledge that we underwent, we experienced together with a tacit recognition that we were a brotherhood, and would remain so for the duration: “Now we’re bound by ties that cannot sever/all our whole lives through.” When we return to Amherst each five-year orbit, we come to honor the spirit of our initiation, the negligence and grunge of our undergraduate training relative to a real sacred clan or warrior guild. We come to honor, acknowledge, and witness the holes as well as the truths in our training and life practices. We went through the Cuban Missile Crisis together, which contained its own meditation on the Great Void and annihilation. We went through the Kennedy assassination, an esoteric watershed on the trans-American cruise. We experienced the prodrome of the Civil Rights movement, the birth of the counterculture and Aquarian watershed, the founding of the Liberation News Service, Marshall Bloom’s Total Loss Farm just down the road.

Even if one were only peripherally involved in these events, we all passed through their vibrational field, their bow waves and quincunxes together. We shared the transformational trigger and transmission of the Vietnam War, with its aftershocks, reverberating even now. We experienced the hints of a breeze in a way that would become completely obscure to those who followed us, because all of the above arose out of the rich, mysterious, romantic, guileless density of the fifties, and then explicated and resolved it into something else.

Only those who were there understand the chilling innuendos of Senator Paul Douglas’ graduation speech when he told us that our next mission was to defeat the Communists in Asia the way his generation had fought the Nazis, consigning us to the wrong war, to his own past, while an oracular future was exploding just in front of us, a future that is still cresting, as Marshall and Elliott led a white-armband protest and then a walkout during the awarding of an honorary degree to Robert McNamara.

Who could have foreseen McNamara’s later abrogation and atonement? Who could have foreseen the multiple waves of cultural transformation, changing everything: love, work, gender, hope, reality; mission itself? Who could have foreseen the visitations of the shadow, from Charles Manson to Jim Jones, from Waco to Oklahoma City to 9/11? Who could have even foreseen Marshall’s suicide a few years later at Total Loss Farm? As different as these events and their scopes were, they were all contained in chrysalis at our graduation; we felt their tremors then. We were thinking, almost certainly, that we were feeling something else, and we were, too. Each of us had our own apprehensions and dreams for life, our own nostalgia for what was lost and left behind, always. That was just as true when cars pulled into the timeless time of the Quad, fall of ’62.

We are bathed now in nostalgia, perhaps even regret, but it is not because things were so good or promising then—we were nostalgic then too for something else. Nostalgia always reveals hidden forces present at any time, abeyances and possibilities that we can’t perceive at our phase of awareness and can neither excavate nor staunch. Those hidden forces are still at work, and some deeper, inscrutable part of us and the world continues to tinge everything with a mythological and enchanted glow. That is the awareness and realization potential still in us, and it is big, as big as the universe itself. I will get back to that.

I will say now, there can be no regrets. We were whole and complete in ’62 and in ‘66. We are whole and complete now in 2011, a little more cooked, a little more cured, a little more sober, a little more street-smart. Each state of existence celebrates its own special, inviolable integrity—gaps, miscues, and all.

No regrets. We did what we could. Everything is still possible. Don’t be scared, buddy.

‘You can’t take it with you’ means consciousness and its goods, all this shiny and lit stuff, meaning anywhere, across these tundras and plateaus as well as the barrier where ye shall pass and walk that lonesome valley, ya gotta walk it by yourself. Not as a penalty or a debt that you owe the universe for having lived but because you are unique, and it is out of your uniqueness that you develop anything like the capacity for meaning or a Soul.

There is no other option. If you could, would you stay here forever? Would you be an immortal on Earth? That would be its own purgatory, or hell.

If we didn’t die, we wouldn’t find out who we are. We die to liberate the part of us that is real.

And don’t think for a moment that it isn’t terrifying, hideous, outrageous, unbearable, the universal draft without mercy or deferment. We are meant to be terrified. We are meant to undergo an incredible transformation. You know that. I know it. I think about it all the time. No way out. There never was. We have to change. We had to change as callow freshmen. But thank goodness the Cuban Crisis passed over and left us a little more time to cook. Here we all are.

There are moments in life when a shape of its stunning, unwelcome oracle is imposed on us. About fifteen years ago my wife Lindy and I were advised by our lawyer to write a will because otherwise, he said, the State would make our decisions for us.

Lindy and I threw in together late sophomore year. After her graduation from Smith we drove out of Northampton. Our class’s 45^th reunion is our own 45^th anniversary, shy a month. When we made an appointment with an estate lawyer, we assumed that we were making out our will. We had shared a household, raised kids who are now approaching middle age themselves, built a business together, and been through huge joint revelations and upheavals, losses and recoveries of our bond, discoveries of what it really was that brought and held us together, despite everything. The estate lawyer couldn’t have put it more bluntly; we were making out individual wills, including disposals of our bodies, because, she said, “It’s never happened yet in my practice that both members of a couple die at the same time. One dies first.”

The notion was disturbing and unthinkable, so I pushed it away, but I have been meditating on it the last fifteen years. No different from October 1962, just more awake, more intense. That’s why I am here. Our group solidarity, our shared fates, our empathy and compassion for each other. The “don’t be scared, buddy” mantra.

I can’t speak long enough now to encapsulate all of this, and I am already imposing on my allotment. But I do have some things I want to get said, not because I want to say them but because I want to put their resonance into our group context, class of ’66, living and dead.

When I use a word like “initiation,” I mean it in the most profound and specific sense. We were the naive youth of an elite America dispatched into the fire of our times, our own subincision rite and ritual blinding. It was an initiation because Amherst and our classmates were all we had with whom to get down-and-dirty and do the stuff that was necessary then. And it got done; a lot came out in the wash by graduation.

Some of you know the story of how I was locked in my room fall of freshman year, 407 James, the door knob rigged by James Higbie to come off in my hand; then lighter fluid was poured under the door and people lit matches and sent flames across the floor. Nothing really caught, but there was smoke and some dorm-mates stuck their heads out of windows and yelled for me to jump. Enraged, I took my hockey stick and swung at them, smashing a few windows. Then Sid Schwab and Al Powers broke it up and rescued me.

I have many interpretations of this event, none of them bad or maudlin, none of them making me personally innocent and martyred. It was a ceremony. We each did what we had to. Yeah, they were, even by their own admissions, being douchebags. But I was a total jerk too, a latent provocateur goading them with my ingenuous false piety and subversive righteousness. I got a lesson, a gift, in that I got awakened from a long daydream and whacked toward my identity. Something happened for each of them too. But this was my passage, my surprise party. The ceremony was conducted for my benefit, even in rage against me, which is finally the purest form of selfless teaching. Thanks, guys.

Higbie came to the 30th and turned out to be a surprisingly cool dude; that is, given the Unabomber/Goth personality he cultivated in James Hall. He walked right up, shaking his head, identified his ass, and said, “Sorry for that incident freshman year.”

There is always an esoteric undercurrent, an archetype from which the opposite of an explicit event emanates. There is a way in which most of the important, the real stuff, that any of us does is unconscious. We are on missions of great importance to the gods, and the only thing that stands in our way, really, is the most powerful, devious, and indomitable of our enemies: the self-saboteur.

Believe what you want—innumerable psychics report ghost carolers in post-9/11 New York. They see the spirits of the slain chanting dirges alongside their slayers on the now-sacred burial ground of the World Trade Center: suicide bombers and stock brokers and airline passengers, sharing ballads in a dialect beyond all languages, a karmic state that precedes bodies and ideologies, because they have no other choice and nothing else to do—not now, not any longer; not even then. It is why 9/11 was a birth rite as well as an act of infamy and dance of terror, an awakening as well as an apocalypse, a rough-hewn muezzin as well as a writ of war.

The only institutional response from Amherst to my hazing was a bill for the broken windows, a reprimand in Dean Esty’s office, and a phone call from Dean Wilson to my high school, castigating them for not warning Amherst about me.

Andy Pinkowitz got kicked out of Amherst senior year for not completing his PE requirement, but that was only the cover story, it was really for marijuana, because the administration had no idea what was coming down the pike and they thought that they could nip it in the bud. Pretty funny in retrospect.

Elliott found and contacted Andy recently, and he tried to secure an admission and apology from Amherst, writing President Marx and copying Andy, who was immediately furious with him for acting without his permission. He felt that Elliott had no right to speak in his name or disturb ghosts. Fair enough, but because of Elliott, Andy got a written apology.

During this shared email flurry, Andy wrote that he is now a rabid squash player, two or three times a week, a few decades too late (he reckons) for his gym requirement. He also informed me of a double correction necessary on my website: “It was ‘pot’ not LSD (and certainly not “LDS” [sic]) that was the culprit in my expulsion for non-compliance with the physical education requirement.”)

In my writing about our Amherst years I recall many poignancies, sorrows, and epiphanies. Everything was so intense and cogent then: the calls of the birds, the fall leaves covering the Quad, mixers at Smith and Holyoke, the smell of mown fields, pumpkin stands, hot showers, the land of snow, flower petals and seeds in the air, malted frappes. One reverie from the time serves for me because it holds an epitome. It was on a day sophomore year that two upperclassmen, Jim Koscis and Larry Lundwall, drove me and Schuyler Pardee, who was my best friend then, and our dates to a pond north of here, and we all went swimming. Soon after, I wrote: “I felt an ancient wistfulness, as Lindy and I lay on our backs in the grass…clouds blown apart in the jetstream. I was chasing the bare eclipse of a form, itself a shadow. Beyond the hill, the land dipped precipitously into the unknown, an obliquity that masked a dream. Something indelible was lost; something equally remote still beckoned.” That remains true, though something has been realized and revealed by our lived lives.

Two years later Schuyler was completing his BA, residing in Belchertown, married to a different Smith student, an alumna. He was a wonderful guy: sassy, brilliant, funny, with a great wife. Lindy and I had broken up temporarily at that time, so I envied him everything he was and had and had been able to pull off. He was my hero. When I visited the couple in their cottage by the lake, the song of everything and nothing resonated then: “Try to remember the kind of September….” Yes, “when grass was green and grain was mellow.” Talk about a heart-rending profundity whose source is everywhere and nowhere. “…when you were a tender and callow fellow.”

Give me a moment, and we can all go there.

Fast forward two more years. Lindy and I were living in Ann Arbor, newly married, when we found out that Schuy, having split up with his wife before graduation, rode his motorcycle off a road in southern Illinois with his then-girlfriend, probably a suicide. She survived, to bear his last testimony.

Soon after our 25^th reunion I was east, taking our daughter to look at colleges and I followed a tip that Schuy’s ex-wife had subsequently married Professor Townsend in the English department and then gotten divorced from him and was living in the area. I looked her up, and we had dinner. She told me an amazing story. Twenty-three years after my friend’s death and twenty-five years after their divorce, someone gave her a gift certificate to a psychic for her birthday.

“I don’t believe in that sort of stuff,” she said, “but I didn’t want to insult her, so I went. The moment I sat down, the lady told me, ‘I have a message for you from your husband.’ I assumed she meant Kim, but she said, ‘No, your other husband, the one who rode the motorcycle. He wants you to know: he’s happier without a body.”

I have studied the occult my whole life, as a writer, an anthropologist, a spiritual seeker. I have met many mediums, remote viewers, and astral travelers. I am not bowled over by this sort of stuff and have a normal degree of skepticism. Yet this message from alias Schuy meant something important I couldn’t quite grasp. Through the rest of the ‘90s, across Y2K, I kept returning to it my mind.

I was telling the story to a hiking buddy in 2004 when chills went down my spine because I knew I finally had it, the missing piece.

I had always figured I would die young or, if not, that everyone I loved would be taken away, making life intolerable—but, no, neither had happened; I had stayed and aged.

Schuy once had youth and spirit and limitlessness, but he elected to wager these on a throw of the dice against death, refusing to postpone the existential encounter, a heedless gamble that something unendurable in him must have required. Did his false valor come from cosmic grief or an even more profound ennui? How did desire, artless adolescent desire, lead him to the executioner?

“Goddamnit,” I found myself shouting, “he had such a beautiful body. He had style. He was charismatic, a great athlete, bright, irresistible. But he didn’t want it. He didn’t want his body. But I must have wanted mine. Because here it is, thirty-five years later, and I still have it.” Lindy and I were almost sixty; our children had become adults. It was Schuyler who remained fixed and invincible at twenty-three, having left his wife behind in a cabin in Belchertown.

We all obviously wanted these bodies, desperately in fact. So I’d like to propose a collective exercise, a journey. Of course it’s optional. Feel free to join or drop out at your discretion.

Let’s be here together in a silence, a profound and holy silence that is louder than any sound or thought, beyond the low grinding sound of the human mind that scares most spirits away. Reflect on that for a moment without any of the usual trappings or belief categories. I don’t mean the sort of Zen exercise where you free your mind of the past and all worries, distractions, desires. Hold onto any or all of those, including impatience with my talk and the wish to get onto the next thing. Take a chance. Deepen with everything here. With everyone. Everyone. Those who have passed as well.

I think of existence as having the steady-state buzz of metabolism, mixed with wandering attachments of consciousness, background claims of the body, things we chronically want, our urgencies, and also, at the edges, a lingering terror because our existential situation is impossible—and euphoria because likewise our situation is impossible.

It is terrifying because the universe is so vast, our place threatened, our time in this state so succinct. But it is our party and epiphany too because nothing really had to happen at all, ever, and certainly not us.

What I am asking is that you explore the terror and astonishment, to whatever degree you feel it, but at the same time, explore the sheer joy and beauty, the wonder of this, in each other’s immaculate presences. Allow this amazing situation to sink in. We will die, but we are alive at this moment. We are individual, unique, aware, on a planet, in a circumstance we didn’t create, at least not consciously, that has no context to explain it, or us. I am not asking you for anything more than to feel it as exquisitely and dangerously as you can, and I am emphasizing not the fear but the exhilaration. To loosely quote an old guy making a backseat Taxicab Confession on the HBO show of that name: “We are in existence. Which is a fucking big deal. We made it. We got in.”

I am suggesting that we share a moment of wonder and gratefulness and awe and recall that we are strangers met in a ceremony that transcends us, that we are bound by ties that cannot sever; that we made it, that we got in, and we’re still here.

Then I am asking you to consciously invite and include those classmembers who have passed, from the beginning of our affiliation, the early sixties, and allow them to be here too. Don’t sabotage it. Don’t sabotage yourself. It is not impossible. It is our choice and their choice too. Because if existence is possible, a class of the living and the dead is also possible. Have this crazy belief in us. Believe it not with your mind but with your heart, your whole being. That is where it happens, whether you understand it or not. That is where sabotage occurs too, always.

At reunion, by definition we are one.

Go to the magnificence of your own being, into that deep place where no contrivance can help you, where a novice gets bitten or killed, or comes away with the whisker of a jaguar and the jaguar’s loyalty and keeping forever. In this life and after this life. Only it is not a jaguar. We all know this, at our core, beyond what we tell ourselves we believe or don’t believe.

Then one last piece to this exercise. I want to ask you to drop any objection, just for a moment. Humor me. Forget who I am. Forget who you are. Do this: find the larger unacknowledged space around you, around us, the part of the universe that is untenanted, undesignated, but that holds your future, your real limitless future, holds eternity in it. Allow our collective presence to open that space and bring you into it, as though you are bumping this whole thing, this manifestation, this emanation, this goofy, somber state of being, up a few frequencies. Change your own vibration, and then join us in changing the collective vibration. Here we are,

Class of ’66, at the Jeff.

Valedictory Address for Amherst College Class of 1966 45th Reunion (Unabridged Version)

Richard Grossinger — Sun, 29 May 2011 11:32:58 +0000

Valedictory Address for Amherst College Class of 1966 45^th Reunion

Bear with me. I’m going to tell a few campfire tales, and I don’t want to rush through them.

I do want to do it. I want a challenge to speak from the heart.

Reunions are also going to be about the dead as much as the living. As we are a class of both the living and the dead, we start to become a sangha in a much more serious way.

But it was always serious; it was serious when we showed up in September of ’62. We just didn’t know it yet.

This is where it begins to get serious, but this is where it begins to get real.

It is that crucible we return every five years to mark. It doesn’t matter if our individual passages crossed each other’s or if we even knew each other here back then. We were the band of recruits. There is no other brotherhood, no competing code, no substitute inner journey across America of our time.

The various rituals, gauntlets, and transmissions of ancestral knowledge that we underwent, we experienced together with a tacit recognition that we were an affiliation, and would remain so for the duration: “Now we’re bound by ties that cannot sever/all our whole lives through.” When we return to Amherst each five-year orbit, we come to honor the spirit of our initiation, the negligence and grunge of our undergraduate training relative to a real sacred clan or warrior guild. We come to honor, acknowledge, and witness the holes as well as the truths and profit in our training and life practices. We went through the Cuban Missile Crisis together, which contained its own meditation on the Great Void and annihilation. We went through the Kennedy assassination, an esoteric watershed on the trans-American cruise. We experienced the prodrome of the Civil Rights movement, the birth of the counterculture and Aquarian watershed, the founding of the Liberation News Service by Marshall Bloom, his Total Loss Farm just down the road.

Even if one were only peripherally involved in these events, we all passed through their vibrational field, their bow waves and quincunxes together. We shared the transformational trigger and transmission of the Vietnam War, with its radicalizing aftershocks, reverberating even now. We experienced the hints of a breeze in a way that would become completely obscure to those who followed us, because all of the above arose out of the rich, mysterious, romantic, guileless density of the fifties, and then explicated and resolved it into something else.

No regrets. We did what we could. Everything is still possible. Don’t be scared, buddy.

There is no other option. If you could, would you stay here forever? Would you be an immortal on Earth? That would be its own purgatory, or hell.

If we didn’t die, we wouldn’t find out who we are. We die to liberate the part of us that is real.

When I use a word like “initiation,” I mean it in the most profound and specific sense. We were the unwashed youth of an elite America dispatched into the fire of our times, our own subincision rite and ritual blinding. It was an initiation because Amherst and our classmates were all we had with whom to get down-and-dirty and do the stuff that was necessary then. And it got done; a lot came out in the wash by graduation.

Some of you know the overly-iconicized story of how I was locked in my room fall of freshman year, 407 James, the door knob rigged by James Higbie to come off in my hand; then lighter fluid was poured under the door and people lit matches and sent flames across the floor. Nothing really caught, but there was smoke and some dorm-mates stuck their heads out of windows and yelled for me to jump. Enraged, I took my hockey stick and swung at them, smashing a few windows. Then Sid Schwab and Al Powers broke it up and rescued me.

It is interesting how that event has played out at reunions since I started coming back at the 25^th. Several participants have apologized. Higbie came to the 30th and turned out to be a surprisingly cool dude; that is, given the Unabomber/Goth personality he cultivated in James Hall. I wouldn’t have recognized him with his beard. He walked right up, shaking his head, identified his ass, and said, “Sorry for that incident freshman year.” He went on to claim that it wasn’t his idea (or the idea of any of the people who apologized); it was in Higbie’s words, “a blond Aryan Nazi on the floor”—a guy I haven’t seen at any reunion, so I don’t know, but it could go either way. There was a boy in my grade school who had a torture kit of pins and tweezers; well, he ended up a big-deal interrogator in the Navy, which I know only because decades later Sam Bartos became the piano teacher of his sister.

Elliott found and contacted Andy recently, and he tried to secure an admission and apology from Amherst, writing President Marx and copying Andy, who was immediately furious with him for acting without his permission. He had long ago made his peace with the event, had gotten his degree from Columbia and, in addition, his daughter had babysat for Marx’s kids when both were at Columbia. Andy felt that Elliott had no right to speak in his name or disturb ghosts. Fair enough, but because of Elliott, Andy got a written apology.

During this shared email flurry, Andy wrote that he is now a rabid squash player, two or three times a week at the West Side Y; it is the single-most passion of his life, a few decades too late (he reckons) for his gym requirement. (Another sidelight, my personal vignette of Andy under the “lost friends” category on my website gave as the unspoken reason for his dismissal, LSD, which I mistyped. After I got back in touch with him through Elliott, he informed me of a double correction necessary: “It was ‘pot’ not LSD (and certainly not “LDS” [sic]) that was the culprit in my expulsion for non-compliance with the physical education requirement.”)

In my writing about our Amherst years I recall many poignancies, sorrows, and epiphanies. Everything was so intense and cogent then: the calls of the birds, the fall leaves covering the Quad, mixers at Smith and Holyoke, the smell of mown fields, pumpkin stands, hot showers, the land of snow, each snowball, flower petals and seeds in the air, malted frappes. One reverie from the time serves for me because it holds an epitome. It was on a day sophomore year that two upperclassmen, Jim Koscis and Larry Lundwall, drove me and Schuyler Pardee, who was my best friend then, and our dates to a pond north of here, and we all went swimming. Soon after, I wrote: “I felt an ancient wistfulness, as Lindy and I lay on our backs in the grass…clouds blown apart in the jetstream. I was chasing the bare eclipse of a form, itself a shadow. Beyond the hill, the land dipped precipitously into the unknown, an obliquity that masked a dream. Something indelible was lost; something equally remote still beckoned.” That remains true, though something has been realized and revealed by our lived lives.

Give me a moment, and we can all go there.

I was telling the story to a hiking buddy in 2004 when chills went down my spine because I knew I finally had it, the missing piece.

I had always figured I would die young or, if not, that everyone I loved would be taken away, making life intolerable—but, no, neither had happened; I had stayed and aged.

We all obviously wanted these bodies, desperately in fact. So I’d like to propose a collective exercise, a journey. Of course it’s optional. Feel free to join or drop out at your discretion.

Then I am asking you to consciously invite and include those classmembers who have passed, from the beginning of our band, the early sixties, and allow them to be here too. Don’t sabotage it. Don’t sabotage yourself. It is not impossible. It is our choice and their choice too. Because if existence is possible, a class of the living and the dead is also possible. Have this crazy belief in us. Believe it not with your mind but with your heart, your whole being. That is where it happens, whether you understand it or not. That is where sabotage occurs too, always.

At reunion, by definition we are one.

Class of ’66, at the Jeff.

Afterword to E-Book Version of New Moon

Richard Grossinger — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 18:36:01 +0000

Afterword

I began to write New Moon in 1960 when I was sixteen. Back then it was an autobiographical novel called Salty and Sandy, composed mostly during the last two years of high school and completed during an eight-week “teen tour” on which I was dispatched for the summer prior to college.

I continued to add to the manuscript through my first two Amherst years, never sure if a new tale belonged to the original novel, another book, or was its own short story. I submitted portions of it for freshman English assignments, worked on it sophomore year under the tutelage of Catherine Carver at Viking Press, then defected to experimental prose junior year. This “betrayal” took place after I met Robert Kelly (and his circle of avant-garde poets) and changed my literary and philosophical stance. CC never forgave me.

My vestigial novelistic ambitions came to an end with a transitional short story, “New Moon,” published in a 1966 issue of the Chicago Review. Thereafter, until 1975, I put my narratives and personal tales into nonlinear, projective, metaphysical scrolls out of which I eventually carved Solar Journal, Book of the Earth and Sky, Spaces Wild and Tame, The Continents, and six volumes of the “Cranberry Island” sequence (from Book of the Cranberry Islands and The Provinces to the acme of the form for me in The Windy Passage from Nostalgia and The Slag of Creation).

I returned to the autobiographical genre briefly in 1975–1976 to write Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, but I wrote no personal narrative between 1977 and 1988. During that time I researched and assembled three books: Planet Medicine, The Night Sky, and Embryogenesis. All told, I set aside the source material and narrative context of New Moon from before I got married till after my children were almost grown up.

When, out of curiosity, I decided to look at Salty and Sandy, it was a rubber-banded bundle of pages that I had not unboxed since 1964. In fact, the rubber bands had dried out, cracked, and melded in Braille-like characters to the outer pages.

As I read the manuscript through fresh eyes, two things jumped out at me: One, I was shocked by how pretentious and cumbersome the writing was, especially given the praise I got from teachers and editors of high degree. I wondered how CC thought we could turn it into a publishable item for Viking. It seemed indulgent and primitive (embarrassingly wussy and asshole in spots too).

On the other hand, it was guileless and profound and conveyed the feelings and mystery of its times. I had forgotten many details of my early life and, more significantly, I had forgotten their tone and moods. I could never have depicted childhood and adolescence without reconstructing some of their events while I was still close to them.

I worked on Salty and Sandy for several years, trying to protect the book’s sense of wonder while weeding out its pretentiousness and unexamined teen obsessions. Leaving many parts exactly as I wrote them, I attached the high-school novel, which ended with the “Teen Tour,” to later narratives (like the story “New Moon”) to make the first draft of New Moon, which ended, as this e-book does, with the chapter “Angels.”

The major way in which New Moon differed from Salty and Sandy was in abridging the teen tour while adding on college years after it, thereby enclosing a period from my earliest memories to just before my twenty-first birthday.

However, as I continued to rewrite the manuscript during the early nineties, I impulsively chose to expand it by another five years, taking it to 1970 with a three-chapter section entitled “The Alchemical Wedding.” Then, on top of that, I added an “Epilogue” that brought it to 1987. The original closure (at age twenty-one) now lay short of even the halfway point of the new chronology (age forty-three), with the additional twenty-two years condensed at an accelerating rate into just fifteen percent of the text.

The 1996 version of New Moon concluded with the decision to write it: “I went back to the narrative Katey Carver once loved and rejected. I opened the carton that held Salty and Sandy. Robert Kelly’s warning about confessional prose had kept it sealed for twenty years.”

To create “The Alchemical Wedding” and “Epilogue,” I had to pilfer large excerpts from Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage and Out of Babylon. I also took sections from several other texts, notably six of my experimental prose books from the early seventies: Solar Journal: Oecological Sections; The Continents; Book of the Cranberry Islands; The Provinces; The Long Body of the Dream; and The Book of Being Born Again into the World. Trying to squeeze my life into New Moon, I essentially cannibalized these other books as if (in the case of the already-published experimental prose) they didn’t exist or (in the case of the new memoir writing) wouldn’t ever be published.

Bad idea. As New Moon grew by almost a hundred pages, it turned into a different book. It lost its shape, structure, and ending.

There was a reason, kind of. At the time, I had no premonition that I would salvage most of my other autobiographical prose, as it seemed too private to publish. Instead I tried to transfer as much of the “okay” stuff as I could into New Moon. And the experimental-prose books were dead in the water, marketwise anyway.

While I rewrote the book during the nineties, I circulated this manuscript in bound photocopies to about a hundred people, rewriting (rexeroxing and rebinding) it numerous times along the way. It was like an old-fashioned, privately circulated mimeo. A few New York editors to whom I submitted a draft of New Moon liked it enough to recommend it to their bosses (one said it was her second-favorite novel ever), but it was turned down by every publishing board. The so-called super-editor of Pynchon and Breslin, Cork Smith, rejected it quickly, saying: “It’s so straight. Couldn’t you at least put one kink in it?” But it was a campfire tale, meant to be witnessing and wonder, not some pseudo-Márquezian, magical-realist squeeze, and Cork was already infatuated by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

I finally brought New Moon out under Frog, the companion company to North Atlantic Books, in 1996 because a number of the marketing folks at our distributor, Publishers Group West, read the photocopy version and believed that they could make a hit out of it. And Andrew Harvey, the British-raised spiritual writer who was the Frog imprint’s lead author then, hyperbolized that it was one of the five best books he had ever read by an American. He said, “You should have the courage of your convictions.”

No hit, the hardcover print version of New Moon may have had plenty of epiphanies among readers and reviewers, but I gave away far more than the five hundred or so copies that sold.

My choice fifteen years later is different. I have removed the last ninety-eight pages (“The Alchemical Wedding” and “Epilogue”) from the print version, reinstating the original shape of the novel. I have also made some other small changes. On pages 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12, I have attempted to restore the text to its original intent. Either from my inattention at the time or an uncaught reversion of computer files, some material appeared in a form that, if perused closely, doesn’t make sense. I didn’t discover the glitches until 2011 when I read the finished book for the first time.

Then I added a few sentences on pages 281–282 to handle the fact that I cut so much material from the “Teen Tour” that it lost its frame of reference.

For this e-book I also returned many of the pseudonyms used in the print version to their original names, as a number of people from the past complained that I had made it difficult to figure out who was who (if you had been there). I found the “wrong” names discordant too, as if New Moon were a memoir trying to masquerade as a novel (when it really isn’t either). Sometimes too people’s names carry their own innate music.

I didn’t revert all of the names, as a few of my acquaintances needed to be protected (“Murphy,” “Keith,” “Monica,” and “Diana,” for instance), while other reversions would have been confusing because another, nearby character had the same name. In re-reading I also discovered two instances where an original name, changed everywhere else, slipped through. (I recall being similarly startled by an appearance of the real “Gary Snyder” instead of Japhy Ryder in one of Jack Kerouac’s novels.)

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage is the continuation of New Moon, extending its narrative from 1965 to 1975. That’s why its early chapters were such tempting fodder for “The Alchemical Wedding” when I went for an enlargement of New Moon’s frame.

The main body of Episodes recounts the evolution and awakening of Lindy’s and my marriage during our first nine years. While it maintains the thread of New Moon, it is a departure from a coming-of-age memoir written by an adolescent, and falls somewhere among Robert Creeley’s The Island, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, and perhaps a less vulgar and less narcissistic—I hope—version of the popular confessional novel of the time, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. In Episodes I was also espousing Robert Kelly’s mythopoetic themes, the radical truth-telling of peer poets like Charlie Vermont and Bill Pearlman (notably the latter’s lunatic Inzorbital Freak), and the free-wheeling aesthetics of some of my wild Goddard College students.

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage has nuances of movies of the time too like The Graduate and Annie Hall, but in place of their comedy and slapstick, a nod toward Creeley’s gravitas and narrative transparency. (In fact, my first widely circulated piece of writing was a 1967 review of The Graduate as seen through the filter of P. D. Ouspensky’s occult novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.) Like New Moon, Episodes is a psychospiritual narrative, but it is not New Moon, and my taboo against publishing it has remained.

When you get married very young (Lindy and I were twenty-one), you not only don’t know who the other person is, you don’t know who you are. In order to make marriage a real thing, you have to live through each other’s and your own shadow selves and fantasies together; you have to experience the unrevealed parts of yourself and your partner until you each know exactly who is in play and what you have gotten into. Then you have to commit to the relationship anew, at levels of intimacy and acknowledgment unforeseen during its troubadour phase.

So if you were to imagine New Moon continuing after “Angels” through the hippie era with the same degree of frankness and romantic-magical inquiry, that would be Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, not “The Alchemical Wedding,” which was excerpted, in part, from it. Conceived during the seventies, Episodes was innocently candid, reflecting sex-positive attitudes in both the counterculture and our literary world. But so many sex-negative and sex-idolatry plagues followed it that the book has become not so much dated as ardent, plaintive, callow, earnest, melodramatic (no one word covers it), at least by comparison with later sensibilities and discretion.

This tangled legacy also explains why “The Alchemical Marriage” didn’t work as the conclusion to New Moon. Selectively expurgated out of Episodes, it tried to cast not just a happy but a copacetic resolution. Everything dangerous and edgy was edited out.

Lacking his radical and passionate elements, my character became pat and self-congratulatory and didn’t grapple with the real issues and turmoil of the time. And even if I had wanted to keep all that plucky stuff, it would have made the book too long. It truly belonged in a sequel with its own scale and pacing.

Instead parts of Episodes were puréed into the back end of New Moon. As one droll reviewer remarked, a subtle novel suddenly turned into lists of my graduate-school courses and the contents of issues of Io, and I lost my innocence as an observer.

That was what came of raiding Episodes for single chatty out-takes instead of keeping it a separate book.

After finishing New Moon, as I continued writing (and rewriting) personal narrative in the mid-nineties, my initial task was to make a new draft of Episodes, pulling it back together after the concession of material to “The Alchemical Wedding.” Then I reengaged another batch of abandoned prose, my writings about my larger family, especially my brother Jon’s vision quests and the world of my father’s resort hotel. This project, half of which I created from scratch after the publication of New Moon, became Out of Babylon, published in 1997 with a subtitle, Ghosts of Grossinger’s.

Out of Babylon encompasses five generations of my family, from the imagined lives of my great-grandparents to the adolescent years of my children. It is a literary homage as well—to William Faulkner of Absalom, Absalom! at one level, Charles Olson of The Maximus Poems at another.

While New Moon properly stops in 1965, Babylon/Ghosts has subplots continuing into the mid-nineties. It discloses mysteries and outcomes concealed in New Moon, re-tracking parts of it from a more spacious perspective and at a different pitch.

When I eventually prepare Out of Babylon for an e-book, I will restore roughly thirty pages taken out of the Episodes/Babylon pool to make “The Alchemical Wedding.” I will similarly try to return chunks to Episodes (if I ever rewrite it).

Reconstructing altered texts is not a straightforward deal, since pieces of “The Alchemical Wedding” were sanitized and adulterated in order to be written into New Moon and cannot be simply reinserted back where they came from. They must be rewritten again, and then space must be made for them where I fixed and sealed the gaps that taking them out created.

Most of the rest of what was used in “The Alchemical Wedding” remains in print in my early experimental prose books and in issues of Io, so I am content to let it remain there as well as (of course) in the still-available hardcover of New Moon.

“Leave well enough alone” would have been good advice in the first place.

When asked for a New Moon sound bite, I describe it as a record of the enchantments through which one passes en route to adult life: initially board games, candy bars, toys; then school daze, baseball, summer camp and color war; then the watershed of adolescence, dating, and romance; initiation, apprenticeship, marriage, kids, a career. Each enchantment breaks a prior trance while opening another. New Moon also captures the evanescent moment of a young writer trying to create a novel out of the materials of his own unformed consciousness.

Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage is the grail of forging an emotionally real marriage out of an idealized alchemical one.

I “sound bite” Out of Babylon as: why do people in families do the horrible things they do to each other, even while claiming to love them? Its epigraph comes from a college drinking song: “Now we’re bound by ties that cannot sever/All our whole life through….”

The title itself is a variant of a reggae song that my brother Jon invoked as an epigraph, decades later, to our growing up on Park Avenue. He put a pin serving as a needle on a scratchy record on an old victrola on the floor of his trashed Second Avenue flat while he pointed up and to the west. The music that filled the hollow room was “Stepping Out of Babylon” by Max Romeo and the Upsetters: “One steppa forward; two steppa backwards….” Yes, always.

I deepened some of New Moon’s themes, particularly those in its first eighty pages, in books and essays between 2001 and 2011. By then I had a more nuanced and transparent view of early childhood.

A few of these breakthroughs actually came while composing Out of Babylon, with its second pass over “The Child in the City,” so they appear there. Others emerged in subsequent years through events that invoked old memories and traumas, particularly my brother Jon’s suicide in 2005.

When I reviewed New Moon in February 2011 to make corrections for the digital edition, I was disappointed that those revelations and my current perceptions were missing. I kept looking for passages that I knew I had written, but couldn’t find them. I had subliminally nursed a fantasy that the pages of every copy of the physical book were being updated by magic as my insights got subtler.

Of course they were not. The text was right where I left it in 1995, not a terrible thing at all, but lacking some significant recalls and realizations.

In New Moon I skirted the surface of my mother’s household and its oppressions, never really getting under it the way I did in later writings. Yet the version in New Moon is true to how I chose to see the past for a long time. It is not wrong, just missing a level that came into recognition later.

My mother’s realm and the extreme nature of her indoctrination and hexing were under unexamined interdict when I created a Proustian, stylized version of my childhood in New Moon. In the last fifteen years the full shamanic and karmic implications have hit me.

My new insights and retellings constitute a different look at the place of loyalty and terror in our family agon; they reenact early childhood panics (aliens, demons, dungeon stairs, and spooks) and my mother’s inquisitions: how she taught us to scare ourselves. They also encompass Hebrew School (and being Jewish), childhood games and number compulsions, rock music, baseball (both playing and following it and not playing other sports), the transition of symbols from Zest soap ads to the tarot, and my relationship with my brother Jon up to his death. They take retrospective glimpses at incidental matters like the first Easter egg, childhood candy bars, the morning of my first day at Horace Mann, and the summer of the cabin in Aspen.

If I were to rewrite New Moon today, I would not change most of it, but I would fuse some of its narrative with these later takes on the same events. That would be my perfect version, though I have no inclination to start tearing apart manuscripts again.

The books into which I wrote these childhood addenda are (otherwise) medleys of diverse topics: On the Integration of Nature: Post-9/11 Biopolitical Notes (pp. 150–158, 177–181, 276–277 for “New Moon” narrative); The Bardo of Waking Life (pp. 73–80, 83–84, 95, 138–144, 203–232, 246–258, 283–284, 352–353, 401–408, 429–476 for “New Moon” narrative); and 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (pp. 90–91, 152–156, 268–275 for “New Moon” narrative).

On the Integration of Nature also has a fuller version (pp. 236–260) of the story of Schuy, “Diana,” and me, some of the material for which comes straight out of the sections of Episodes that I chose not to include in “The Alchemical Wedding.” It also puts the story of Catherine Carver, Salty and Sandy, freshman English, my ingénue literary career, and my apostasy in a larger context.

The Bardo of Waking Life (pp. 196–197) completes New Moon pages 359–365.

Another offshoot/synopsis of New Moon/Babylon, this one originally written for the magazine The Sun and dealing with paternal issues, appears on my website:

http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/father/

My essays with “New Moon” addenda are “A Phenomenology of Panic” in Panic: Origins, Insight, and Treatment edited by Leonard J. Schmidt and Brooke Warner (pp. 95–163), and the first two chapters and last section of The New York Mets: Ethnography, Myth, and Subtext— “Endy’s Catch: Retrospective from the 2006 Playoffs” (pp. 1–69), “Playing Catch with Terry Leach: Baseball as an Act of Transgression” (pp. 71–141), and “The Ultimate Game” (pp. 289–292).

“Endy’s Catch” goes back to the birth of the Mets in 1961 and includes a short version of “The Prom and Rod Kanehl” (pp. 17–20), a chapter totally removed from the “New Moon” rendition of Salty and Sandy.

I am also currently (mid-2011) working on a manuscript entitled Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness, which re-tracks some of New Moon’s territory, notably in its chapters “Fear,” “Fear Has an Intelligence,” and “One Encounter, One Chance.” It is scheduled for publication in 2012.

***

In the “Notes” to the print version of New Moon I made these two observations, which still stand:

I have always been ambivalent about publishing this material. I offer it finally as a statement of consciousness and memory, not as an autobiography or memoir.

There should be no illusion that I am telling anyone’s truth but my own.

Grossinger’s: Myth, Manor, and Ruins

Richard Grossinger — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:07:03 +0000

Not long after meeting him for the first time, I told guerrilla photographer Jon Haeber that I was glad he had picked the remnants of my family’s hotel to shoot his portfolio rather than some other defunct Catskills resort (or random exotic ruins on the Earth); he was likewise fortunate to have happened upon an American antiquity with a homeboy whose sensibility complemented his own.

This self-congratulatory quip stays with me because it pokes at a deeper verity: Jon and I are not only parallel appreciators of Grossinger’s but fellow pilgrims to its shrine. Journeying there from dramatically different points of origin along equally divergent courses, we are separated by almost two generations as well as by the fact that I haunted the grounds when its terraces and lobbies were flourishing with activities, buffets, and buzz, while he examined only the debris: a rummaged carcass. They are ironically layers of the same meta-archaeology.

In forty meteoric years Grossinger’s morphed from the folksy Longbrook boarding house (opened in 1914 in Ferndale, New York, by immigrants from Poland, who were more recently refugees from the Lower East Side) to a rustic lodge and bungalow colony (1919, with the purchase of the nearby Nichols Estate and Terrace Hill House) to a small city with its own zip code (12734) outside the town of Liberty, to a fabled bastion of pomp and circumstance. It flatlined through the mid-fifties into the early sixties and then began a precipitous twenty-five-year decline, unravelling from gala resort and diamond of modernity to rambling barrio pimping oafishly on its reputation. Its decomposition was as unexpected and sudden as its blossoming. It happened so fast that Jon and I within the span of two generations could attend different levels of an excavation that usually takes a millennium or more to unfold. Somehow, despite our very different paths and spiritual commitments to the post-Grossinger landscape, he and I have arrived at approximately the same view. That is, as outsider and insider, respectively, we attend one transpersonal, transhistorical event: an abandoned crypt of exposed and evolving archaeologies.

The semiological layers generated by the Grossinger’s wreckage now trump any insider scoops or privileging of actual Grossinger-ness. Plus, as middle-class white boys, Jon and I already occupy this sadly imbalanced planet’s top percentile of ease, luxury, and power. So, despite our disparate lineages and trajectories to the G., we are equally kin and heir to “Grossinger’s as dowry” or “Grossinger’s as heirloom.” The meaning of my formal time there is balanced by Jon’s time at other anterchambers of Uncle Sam’s giant banquet hall qua transcontinental yardsale. At their summons we are Homo sapiens, raised inside the Americana dream where myths and realities flaunt each other’s illusions and converge. We have all—that is, the majority of our generations (and those in between and on their way)—been guests at the Dirty Dancing/Holiday Inn/Great Gatsby “Grossinger’s of the mind.” And much like The Eagles’ legendary Hotel California, “you can check out anytime you like/but you can never leave.”

Our links to Grossinger’s are also as time-warped as our childhood benchmarks of Cold War referentiality: e.g., the Sputnik era for me and the fall of the Berlin Wall for him. A few years before the G. went out of business for good in 1987, Jon was born a universe and a half away in California’s oil-and-gas badlands as they were transitioning from petrol boom into Mulholland’s well-irrigated orange groves. Soon vast tracts of So-Cal suburbs would cover the plowing under of trees and ranches, a slow-motion flash flood. If Grossinger’s ballroom-danced with Eleanor Roosevelt, Iwo Jima, and Ethel Merman; Fillmore, CA, of Jon’s adolescence moonwalked with Ronald Reagan, Chernobyl meltdown, and Michael Jackson.

In fact Jon first learned of the G well into the post-9/11 aughts, during W’s second term. His maiden visit there took place almost a quarter century after the demolition of the Main Building. “Grossinger’s after Grossinger’s”—cluttered fields of bizarre eroding tablets and cenotaphs—had become an Andy Goldsworthy experiment in the interplay of culture and nature. Its signature remaining menhirs—the Barney Ross and Milton Berle, the indoor pool, the Annabelle, the Baby Anabelle, the Lyman, the laundry, the Jenny G, the ice rink—had begun to collapse from disuse, neglect, and the elements; the effects of gravity, shear, and wind (not to mention the encroachments of generations of local creature life carting off reuseable and metabolizable booty while reclaiming the space to the degree that their anatomies allowed).

This advanced mortification followed the sale of the property to the first in a series of owners, none of whom had the imagination or financial wherewithal (let alone a bare-bones budget) to restore or maintain the G. or, failing those, at least to raze and clear its crumbling hodgepodge for fresh construction. Instead, they allowed a small town’s worth of buildings and plazas to decay and molder into a field of artifacts, an extended three-dimensional gallery of innate charm and intelligence for outlaw artists to scavenge by optical and digital device.

The ruins are weirdly aesthetic, not by their own original parameters or ambitions of refinement (according to which they are ugly ugly ugly as well as disgusting and sad—or worse) but according to the absolute erosion and descent of objects, again under wind and gravity and water against differential integrities, artistries, and implicit fatigue and fault-lines of their original, mostly machined craftsmanship. They have been recontextualized in a sculpture garden of cultural objects immense and tiny—some of them very large indeed (whole houses) and others as small as a piece of hanging plaster or a torn patch of wallpaper.

Jon and his colleagues recognized the exhibit’s strange and unique beauty, the comeliness that occurs as the Earth undresses the haberdashery of man and returns the land to its natural anatomy and rhythm. Each stage of this burlesque, especially while the strip-teaser is still more adorned than naked, is exquisitely and tantalizingly evocative of some hidden meaning or long-neglected rebus, some overlooked runic quality bedecked and denominated for transient seductive mirage without civilized awareness of its actual caliber under governance of Sun and Moon. Each relic is a seme, a meme, and a trope, located somewhere among the histories of metallurgy, industrial design, and social fashion, and the imagination of fun and romance. See how heavy metal pipes decompose into the eros of rust and rusted-out, en route to the meiotic syzygy of mere molecular mass.

What my professor Leo Marx called “the machine in the garden” back in 1962 during my stint in his classroom freshman year at Amherst College (and is still, under an anachronism of insufficient regret, calling “the machine in the garden almost fifty years later as an emeritus at MIT) by 1997 had become “the machine is the garden”, and then “the garden is eating the machine,” not only at Grossinger’s but across an extravagantly synthesized and grueled planet, in the crowded favelas of Rio and Mexico City, in the slums of Nigeria and Kenya, in polities built on landfill as other nations vanish beneath globally marned glacial melt, at illicit Asian dumpsites of toxic American computer garbage (hardware and software both), in the outskirts of Fargo, Topeka, Galveston, and Cincinnati as well as Liberty, New York, by 2007. It has become the “mutation in the jungle” and “the copse sucking marrow out of the midden.” But what is machine and what is garden, what is salvageable and what is septic forever (or indefinitely proxied and extinct) will need 2107 to tell our descendants for sure.

With its fake aristocracy, ephemeral wealth, high kitsch, and wanton braggadocio, Grossinger’s was the flagship once of a Borscht Belt principality, a milieu’s casino of winners and losers. (Despite the absence of actual blackjack tables and slot machines—gambling still isn’t legal in Sullivan County—a series of purchasers of the post-Grossinger’s property and jurisdiction tried to buy low and cash out high in hopes of the roulette wheel stopping at game-changing legislation during their tenures: all thus far have tired of waiting for the politicians to get greedy or desperate enough and bailed at a loss.)

My father Paul Grossinger—PG on the vanity plates of his black Cadillacs followed by a fifties upgrade to fashionable white Lincolns—enjoyed the trappings of post-War opulence in spades. Surrounded for years by his futuristic toys, he staked his entire fortune to the Hotel, never diversifying, so he died indigent after an auto accident in 1989, leaving zero inheritance for either me or my half-brothers (despite the fabulous claims and hopes that dominated our childhood).

In a riff in my 1997 book Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger’s, I “cast” PG to be played by Jackie Gleason of The Honeymooners (that is, if the Grossinger tale were ever to be scripted cinematographically). I would cast a different actor now in a role that didn’t exist at the time: James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. My father was Tony Soprano lite. PG, God forbid, didn’t “do” anyone or racketeer and steal (at least at mafioso scale), but the character study is otherwise on tune: proudly cynical and self-aggrandizing even when dead-wrong or caught lying; delivering pseudo-intellectual, well nigh smarmy sermons about power, entitlement, workers, dames, danger, obligation; dog-eat-dog, male prerogative, particularly in relation to younger women; chubby and smiley; strong and relentless as a bull; lewd streaks of prankish sadism; rage and violence intermittently erupting as his default posture against a patina of casual sentimentality. Dealt an insanely lucky hand, he blew all his chips in record time. Not entirely his fault, but it did happen on his watch—he was Grossinger’s biggest loser.

In the conventional version of this fairy tale I am PG’s first (and only) natural son, himself the only son of the daughter of the founder, that matriarch being Jennie Grossinger, the birth mother of iconic Grossinger’s. Soon after I came onstage in 1944—a late World War 2 Grossinger Tatler headline proclaiming me “His Majesty!”—my mother left PG for Bob Towers, his best buddy and the tummler at Grossinger’s, after which she raised me in Manhattan with my half-brother and half-sister as if we were all Towers (Bob changed his name from Ruben Turetsky to seek his fortune in the Catskills after breaking his Lower East Side family’s heart by not training as a rabbi and cantor).

I didn’t hear of the G. until I was eight; I didn’t see it until just before my ninth birthday. Until age twelve I was Richard Towers of P.S. 6 and 96th Street (to myself and the world). But Towers-to-Grossinger was only my first metamorphosis.

After my initiation to the sprawling pleasure dome, I explored its halls and alcoves, lawns and facilities, myriad plazas and pathways, labyrinths of lobbies and underground tunnels. I hung out on the fringes of its celebrity sightings, its celebrations of the invention and uses of fun, its thousand-person banquets, seders, and bar mitzvahs, its living splendor. I became a fanatic Grossinger apostle and cheerleader, a troubadour chanting its praises to whomever I could commandeer from among schoolmates, teachers, camp counselors.

What child summoned into Richie Rich Land from a darkly Dostoevskian family of more modest means (the Turetsky clan) wouldn’t herald likewise?

However, as a young adult, I switched sides to become a radical Grossinger detractor and muckraker, decrying its phoniness, abuse of immigrants and staff, crimes against humanity. From then on, Grossinger’s hung in abeyance for me, as I wavered between enjoying its merrymaking and beneficence, exploiting my privilege and status (sometimes shamelessly), and being disgusted by its grunge, greed, and gluttony, renouncing it both in the world and in me, as I fled it for other climes and identities.

When I was thirty, my mother committed suicide, jumping out her window into a courtyard off Park Avenue, an event that she was unconsciously planning even before she dated PG and put in seven years as spurious Princess of the G. I discovered in the aftermath of her death that she actually had me by an affair while married to Paul.

It took me a year and a half to sleuth out the identity of my genetic father. Initially I had high hopes for one of the luminaries of the era (like Ed Sullivan who sent her secret love letters that she saved and prized, though not Ed himself mind you). My progenitor turned out to be neither athlete nor actor, not a politician or a famous balladeer—instead (depending on who is purveying the myth) either a fancy businessman, lawyer, and real-estate baron, or a mobster and pornographer. “A shape-changing scoundrel, “a pinky-ringed piranha,” chided one observer of the era. ”That wasn’t a man; that was an animal,” someone else declared in the same book. “He’d take young film-makers and then he’d screw them.”

Maybe that reporter had an axe to grind, for I have been told by other witnesses my progenior was a man of honor, a loving father, a generous boss, a mensch. He was probably neither as quixotic nor dastardly as reputed, but I have no firsthand knowledge: he was never willing to meet me.

Because of my triune paternity, I neither grew up a Grossinger nor was blood-related to the Grossinger family. My once-prized Grossinger pedigree (“His Majesty!”) is both a chimera and a fraud. I am even less a true Grossinger than my adopted half-brothers who at least were natives, born and raised there. I have a Manhattan childhood, a snobby prep-school/Ivy League education, and an elite literary ambition. I didn’t ever even really live there as my home or make the resort’s universe remotely congruent with my own.

On that uncertain and ambivalent basis I have composed two books encompassing my Grossinger identity (each with hundreds of pages on the resort and my adventures there). New Moon is a revision of a cumulative teenage/early-adult memoir, reclaimed some thirty years later. Out of Babylon, assembled a decade after the 1986 demise of Grossinger’s, is a bricolage of five generations of my family, maternal and paternal, known and unknown. In the course of these two texts, I have exhumed Grossinger’s triumphs, scandals, hoaxes, phantoms, romances, and shadow dramas. Nothing I can add here would recover the hotel’s complexity, texture, or scope as recorded in these texts, so I will not even try.

The books were written as literary nonfiction, representing my aspirations as an author in the lineage of Melville and Faulkner and transcending my Grossinger heritage. Their paternity owes more to Carl Jung and Charles Olson than Selig and Harry Grossinger. In that sense too I share a cross-cultural, semiological agenda with Jon. We are all scions of Andy Warhol when we gaze back at the world as artifact and icon.

Much of the upbeat pap was staged news and planted gossip spun from PR myths orchestrated by Milton Blackstone and precocious Madmen in collusion with house celebrities and our original Reality star, hotelier Jennie G.

It was (mostly) a well-intentioned, magnanimous scam, as those who created and fell for it needed a hangout like Grossinger’s, a saloon for their parties, a melting-pot stage for their undiscovered talents, an Arcadia for their romancing, for cooling out and celebrating after the Big War, a platform for nouveau riche exhibitionism. Grossinger’s provided a venue for fast-track naturalization into American pop culture, for catapulting from shtetl onto Main Street, for creating a country club more fabulous and glitzy than those from which they had been excluded. It evolved into a fabulous neutral zone to which Rocky Marciano, Nelson Rockefeller, Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jackie Robinson could return as honorary sons and daughters of a Jewish grandmother from Baligrod, Poland.

Beneath the hoopla and hype, Grossinger’s also had actual substance and pith. After all, there was a real, if brief (by dynasty standards) aristocracy, with real guests, real fake Tudor buildings, real rhumba lessons, real love and betrayal, real children from couples who met during Singles Weekends, real romance and love, real lucre.

The decomposing ziggurats may be ostentatious husks of pseudo-Tudor emulations, but they are the gingerbread detritus of actual lives, vital exuberances and poignancies, like the shells of creatures washed onto beaches, or fur on bones along a highway. They are the relics, insignia, and runes of those same creatures, resonating with their exotic secrets and uncanny hopes, the marks of something obscure actually lived, synapses into ganglia.

In fact, it was realer by far than the Reality soap operas and bachelor-bacherlorettes of the present day, for it exuded the mysterious resonance and depth of the fifties during which the cosmos and night sky shone through our petty dramas and rituals into the kinds of inner spaces elicited by Hardy Boys searching for the Tower Treasure and Sinister Signpost—morphing along subway tunnels against Castro’s Cuba and the insistence of air-raid sirens into Janis Joplin singing “Bobby McGee,” into “the Wanderers” and “me and you and a dog named Boo, travelling and a-livin’ off the land….” We felt the deep cosmic jazz and scrumptious enigma of Earth’s incarnation. Each tarot card drawn in our era, even the terraces and lobbies of Grossinger’s, was its own reflection in a kaleidoscope of mirrors within mirrors, images within images…into infinity. Now it is truly the Clue in the Embers.

Grossinger’s is also like Jorge Luis Borges’ story of Samuel Coleridge’s unfinished poem of Kubla Khan’s unfinished palace. Though the actual resort was ostensibly finished and luxuriously provisioned (it must have been for its slogan to read “Grossinger’s has everything!” and for its semiology to be so vast and inscrutable), its actual substance and meaning were never disclosed before its derogation, and now the map is a pillaged remnant.

Neither of “Kubla Khan’s” ancient pleasure domes was finished, so their meanings lie in alternate versions (castle, poem, dream, story, rock song, virtual reality, science-fiction trope) of an ever-incipient manifestation. Likewise Grossinger’s remains unfinished even though an edifice and a façade were built, for there were many G’s: my Grossinger’s, Jon Haeber’s Grossinger’s, but also the Grossinger’s that Eddie Fisher took back into the cosmos, the Grossinger’s of Barney Ross and Irving Berlin and of the guests who vacationed in cottages named after those superstars—even the insipid Grossinger’s of Tania Grossinger’s six-decade-long whine (Growing up at Grossinger’s) about how badly (boo-hoo!) she was treated there as a child and how she might somehow cash in the rags of the sleaziest gossip that her crone brain can still remainder or reconstruct.

Borges wrote:

“The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace…. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end…. Perhaps an archetype not yet revealed to mankind, an eternal object, is gradually entering the world.”

Grossinger’s is an eternal object too, still entering the world even as its rubble suggests that its license and tenure have come and gone and are now elsewhere. Each new dream—Kubla Khan’s palace, Disneyland, Vegas, Neverland—arises necessarily within the Buddhist World Illusion. But, as myriad “Buddhist Marxists” and Judaeo-Christian Buddhists attest, reality’s ephemerality and illusion do not in the least undermine Marx’s materialism or his critique of capitalism. This may not be real, any of it, but that’s not the point. I defy you, having declared it not real, to figure out what goes in its place, and to put something else there as convincing or irresistible.

There is not a gap of meaning (or anything else) between Grossinger’s as grandiloquent pleasure dome qua utopian mirage and Grossinger’s as early mall plexus of cheap and decaying architectures of mid-twentieth-century nightmares—the sheer stark and skeletal beauty of the City of Refuge and Illusion (to give it Jon’s tag). He and I are once and future visitors to a dream, a map, a geography, a myth, and an archetype of an eternal object not yet revealed. Not yet revealed!

In late July of 1999, our family—moi, my wife Lindy, our adult son and daughter (Robin and Miranda), Robin’s wife Erica, and Miranda’s partner of the time, rocker Calvin Johnson—went on a group sightseeing escapade to the ruins of Grossinger’s, a side pilgrimage off a longer one from California to see Miranda perform her multimedia piece Love Diamond at Lincoln Center—that is, at the cusp of our children’s leaving home and inventing their own universes, the great-grandchildren of Grossinger’s writing new myths well beyond any legend or reverberation of Jennie. The next afternoon we reconvened ninety miles northwest at the foot of Grossinger Hill, ancient signage and entry kiosk still marking the grand threshold. This was a portal to the past, and each of us entered at a different vibration.

More exoterically Lindy and I arrived from Poughkeepsie in the company of Albert Rosenblatt, a judge on the New York Court of Appeals. From 1954 to 1960 Albert paid his way through college and law school by working, mostly as a bellhop, at Grossinger’s. After reading Out of Babylon, he contacted me and we talked on the phone a number of times. In our fourth conversation he proposed exactly such an expedition for a future undetermined venue and occasion. He knew about illegal forays onto the grounds, as he had already participated in several himself. Grossinger’s was private property (and not our property anymore), but Albert guessed that a member of the State’s highest court would be an ideal accomplice if we were confronted by the constabulary.

There was little need for concern. Though eight years earlier I had tried to enter and been stopped by a guard who refused to admit me to my family’s burial grounds (despite my picture ID California Driver’s License denoting at least the obvious), now the kiosk was unmanned, all 1,200 acres apparently a free zone, unpoliced; we soldiered right in and probed wherever we wanted for almost three hours. During this unauthorized raid Miranda came away with props for future art pieces: guest cards, stray photos, staff records. Robin liberated a still-working manual typewriter.

Grossinger’s in its half-life was both shocking and ordinary. As we fashioned our own tour the grounds, indoors and out (insofar as there was still a distinction), I found the landscape soporifically familiar, yet surrealistically eerie, in part because I hadn’t been there for thirteen years—the longest diaspora of my life. The basic constellation of buildings was exactly as I had recollected them, but everything is more capacious and sententious in memory. Though distorted and shrunken, the map itself was basically intact.

When one dreams of a former habitation that no longer exists, populated with people no longer alive, the landscape takes on a mysterious transdimensional ambience, as shifting layers of chronological distance introduce lacunae of other orders. Time and meaning complicate inextricably, leaving the intimation of something crucial forgotten or undone, inaccessible. The actual layout becomes a toy subset: a model train or architectural mock-up in a plastic case, a depleted semblance or facsimile of an imaginal one. One proceeds in a trance as if everything were normal except for that UFO-abduction classic cue: “missing time.”

Having softened already in my dreams, the stelae of Grossinger’s were now unravelling as plaster and sun-lit mosaics, monoliths lauding dilapidation and casualty.

We have all seen, firsthand or on video, ghost towns and disaster zones. Jennie’s cornucopia had become one of those: a petri-dish fossil, kin to Tombstone, Arizona, or Chernobyl, USSR. Viewing the mutilation of my once-beloved childhood sanctum, I felt longing and sadness with tones of other uncategorizable emotions and nostalgias. Those were archived deep in me for, even when Grossinger’s was operating at the top of its game. Even when flooded with its luxury, dazzle, and the epiphanies of delight, I would feel homesick there, for some other secret, magical place. It was as fake and cloying and wedding-cake in 1959 as in 1999’s sunlit cameo.

As we walked along, Albert likened the metamorphosis at hand to Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series, a series of paintings of the same site in five phases of evolution and devolution, from hunting grounds to Arcadian village to colonnaded marble temples to barbarian invasion, destruction, and desolation. Course of Empire was set metaphorically just miles down the Hudson River from Grossinger’s, on a scale of centuries rather than decades—but America’s empires, like its trademarks and shops in their ceaseless corporate takeovers and incestuous mergers and bankruptcies, have become as synoptic as they are evanescent.

To me, Grossinger’s 1999 evoked a precinct of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone: cryptozoological entities might pop out at any minute from behind façades and wreckage, odd little mome raths and tribbles, an occasional small yeti. I was reminded of the made-for-television flick of Stephen King’s The Langoliers in which sleeping people on an LA-to-Boston red-eye pass through an electromagnetic disturbance over Nevada and end up slightly displaced from the continuum of time such that they arrive at each instant a few minutes after it has already happened. When they finally land at the deserted airport in King’s adopted hometown of Bangor, Maine, the scenery is dead, stale, and empty, though its stanchions and human edifices, stale doughnuts and coffee cups with coffee remain.

However, since King is a raconteur of horror, this falsely reassuring residue is about to decay and be eaten by merciless creatures, the langoliers, who inhabit the interzone between presence and memorabilia, feeding off vestiges of concrete moments after they have passed. What the langoliers cannibalize are the energy bodies of molecular records, since the actual artifacts persist (like Grossinger’s) to degrade in a more conventional way. Langolier Grossinger’s hovered at a frequency of the secular landscape’s garbage-dump-modern emanation.

Grossinger’s always opposed its legend, as its were was never more than a fusion of tawdry junk and elegant and alluring props—sentimental compositions, menial attitudes—a cramped composition of human possibility. It was never a real Fontainebleau or Shangri-la with priceless imports and antiques, actual marble and rubies; it was cheap drywall and maché replica. Yet Grossinger’s still somehow harbored solace and grandeur—an actual joy factory and oasis was sequestered inside the bogus one.

I loved this place despite its “fun” tropes and saccharine Jewish provinciality. I loved it as a child when I first came there—a candy-cane, baseball-card village; a gentle rendition of Oz and Alice’s Wonderland. That tarot card held an eternal Christmas morning with new snow on evergreen branches.

I loved it again as a daydreaming teenager hanging out in the Nightwatch at the fringes of its jukebox dating ritual, watching celebrity concerts by Leslie Gore, The Tokens, and endless wannabe pseudo-doo-wop/”Dion-and-the Belmonts” groups ferried through by Hartford disc-jockey Gene Kaye. It was still always special by being Grossinger’s.

It was my sanctuary to which I brought my girlfriend and wife-to-be Lindy Hough in 1964 and, after scaling the coffee-shop partition, made six-flavored milkshakes for us past midnight (my prerogative as a family member). I renewed my loyalty and fondness during our many visits as a married couple with young kids. In the hotel’s shabby and senescent era, we brought our growing children to sweet, faded paradise from homes in Maine, Vermont, and Northern California, for weeks at a time. That migratory pattern ended abruptly with the distress sale of the entire dominion on the verge of bankruptcy when Robin was sixteen and Miranda eleven.

Now we and they were back on the grounds together, at a different phase of each of our lives—no more Grossinger daycamp, no more chocolate Christmas-tree cookies, no more raids on the goodies, no more milk shakes and searching for turtles around the lake. Just the rinds and dirty dishes and other clabber.

The compass of Grossinger’s, while spacious and intricate, is not complicated. A main road hooks right after entry and then scissors at a fork by where my father used to live in a sunny three-story house, home base for many of the definitive events of my childhood and adolescence. One branch of the road continues from there up the hill onto the Lakeside Inn property annexed in the late fifties and turned into a children’s camp, staff quarters, a softball field, and holes for a second golf course; the other veering left and downhill to a second fork at the entry to the ice-skating rink, its lower branch of mixed plazas and neighborhoods proceeding past the laundry and back of the kitchen and tennis courts to the gardens and outdoor pool; the upper partition traversing a greenhouse, handball court, toboggan, and the original clubhouse and golf course before, after a long dogleg right then left, arriving at Grossinger Lake.

PG’s house is still there, in fact better preserved than any other structure, for it serves as the golf pro’s domicile, and he is the overseer of the sole office of Grossinger’s still in session: thirty-six holes of luxury sport. The global economy doesn’t throw away whole links, for golf is now a primo destination of corporate jaunts and jets—quite a turnabout for a game once played (at its advent centuries ago) with a makeshift ball and wooden clubs by peasants through wild fields and farming towns, the holes and pars changing from year to year (it is played that way now only in expanding-universe sectors of Alaska).

The astonishing thing to me in 1999 was that, as I stood at the nostalgic crossroads in front of my father’s house on the hill overlooking the wooded countryside where Grossinger’s was born as the Nichols Estate and Terrace Hill House, the spot from where my life once unfolded with mysteries and wonders, I experienced an elation and epiphany; I was filled anew with powerful emotions and intimations.

On the surface, I felt despair and outrage at the trashing of Grossinger’s, plus guilt for not stepping in somehow to prevent this carnage (as if I would have had even the impact of a butterfly’s wings in Tokyo). I found it so damn sad that my adult children had not known the Hotel in its glory years and then had lost it so soon after they came enough of age to appreciate its weirdness and wonder. I regretted that the extended Grossinger family had heedlessly squandered its reunion headquarters and clan hearth.

At the level of my pilgrimage to the clan cemetery I was a witness to more than the dismemberment of a palatial country club and palace. I beheld a shrine, the collective symbolic corpse of my kinfolk (blood and genes aside), and a violated and picked-at one at that.

Yet at the same time, on a spiritual level, no doubt on another plane, I experienced something entirely opposite—that not only had the landscape’s intrinsic beauty and joy not diminished, but it had increased exponentially and bountifully, and the land was even more lovely and primal without the “burden” of Grossinger’s, its vestigial debris and dismemberment notwithstanding.

Grossinger’s had occupied unknowingly an elf and fairy spa, a pure astral zone and wonderland to which native American scouts had probably come pre-1492 to meet spirit presences, on which other inns and estates, forerunners of Grossinger’s, had been built with uncomprehending capitalist fervor; on which Grossinger’s itself had arisen and come to fruition as the prototype luxury lodge and “holiday inn” for a generation or two.

It had never been just my family or a mythological Catskill resort or even the alembic whereby the G. became transcendentally the Jewish Yale and Harvard as well as the Jewish Broadway and Polo Grounds—though it was all those things too.

New Moon and Out of Babylon were prescient in a way I didn’t come close to realizing in writing them. They hinted at how Grossinger’s was a cover story, a mnemonic trigger for something else—something truly luminous and sacred—not only for me but for my family, generations of guests, and even the staff living in slums, even the underpaid Puerto Rican Polish, and Chinese workers.

In an epitome episode from around age thirteen, one of the few seams along which New Moon and Out of Babylon overlap, I depict my arrival at Grossinger’s, after a lonely, hazing-filled summer at nearby Camp Chipinaw. I was making a stab at the enigma of the pleasure-dome, Grossinger’s of my imagination. First I wrote in New Moon:

“It was rapture, just to walk by the sparkle of the pool among the chattering crowds, to look up into the sky and watch the white cumulus exploding forever.”

By Out of Babylon the memory had deepened and come to its apotheosis, so I went for the essence:

“The next morning, strolling past tennis courts en route to lunch at the pool, I felt as though the Earth had changed utterly, from a pit of hell to Shangri-La. I had a different body, so much denser, crammed with joyful, excited feelings, each one different and strange, rolling inside like oceans off a far horizon. It was amazing, beautiful, tropical, not just because of luxuries and gala events all around but because I could feel myself floating up into the blue sky across cloud armadas that tinged the horizon far beyond Grossinger’s. It was the best that things ever got, happier than happy, more colorful than blue, red, yellow, more golden than Indian summer, more euphoric than September wind eddying in maple and oak, because everywhere I looked, peace and hope extended inside me, all the way to P.S. 6 and Chipinaw, even to my brother Jon, even to the Cropsey Maniac….

“Grossinger’s was where Yankees came as real people. It was where Milty shut the canteen in order to throw me balls and I made impossible diving and leaping catches among the marigolds because I suddenly had the energy and timing of Superman. It was where Grandma bought clothes for poor workers. It wasn’t Grossinger’s. It was creation, but Grossinger’s was where I had to be for it to happen.”

The site itself, 1999—bare, disheveled, rolling transdimensionally, populated with wildflowers and frogs—had numinous power. The spirits of these hills and the tiny loch bulldozed into a lake for scenic boating, despite turds of blasphemy and golf-course fertilizer that had been deposited on their doorstep, the desecration of their abode on the physical plane, were so gracious, compassionate, and forgiving, so irrepressibly generous, that they had made a gift of “Grossinger’s” to the human race and were continuing to, and would do so again. That is why it rose once and again as a paradisal and ecstatic kingdom above its funky assemblages and institutionalization. That’s why it became a sort of archetypal mini-Jerusalem in our kabbalistic apostasy. That is why it has been resurrected as a nouveau salon and art gallery rather than just blotching the landscape as a vapid dump.

The Jewish habitants back then mistook it for their own mecca rather than a local condition of nature spirits who were too high and ecumenical to favor any tribe. Perhaps that’s why they lost it, in grasping what wasn’t theirs. Those unnamed entities were initiating me back into their wisdom and conferring on me their absolute grace. Now that I was no longer distracted by the “Hotel” or the legacy of my name and ephemeral heritage or the curse of my lost inheritance or the eyesore ruins, I could simply appreciate the majesty and wonder of the Earth itself, the awe-evoking blue-green planetoid with its DNA legerdemain and esoteric mounds and springs.

That was the home vibration resonating through that site; it had filled my heart as a child and teenager, without me knowing what it was, though I tried to photograph it with box cameras and then my first Minolta as a teenager and with an 8 mm. Bolex in college (Jon finally got it under the surface decay). I smelled the vapors of hot tomato leaves as I picked their luminous fruits (1954), played solitaire roofball with a Spaldeen for hours at a time (1956), photographed berries with winter snow on them (1959), and had the courage to make my first date with a girl from a phone in our bright yellow den (1961).

Put more simply, I realized that the Grossinger’s site had great feng shui and had always had it. Not just great—super-incredible, Sedona, Heart Chakra, Stonehenge, Damanhur, Ayres Rock, Dreamtime-level feng shui—and this had made the wealth and luxury and Joy Factory, the fame and romance of Grossinger’s explode in place as elucidations or disseminations of the archetype. The invisible astral geyser drew Babe Didrikson, Florence Chadwick, and Irving Jaffee, Michael Spinks, Jo Stafford, and Ingemar Johannsen; Bob Towers and Eddie Cantor; Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, and Joey Gray, plus millions of other guests and pilgrims. And then the elementals had taken it away in order to fashion something else of great depth and beauty.

Enter Jon Haeber. His photographs are planetarium-quality galactic imagings of the Zone in the sense of recording the new stars and mini solar systems being born out of the debris of old ones. In the Grossinger litter he has uncovered an emergent embryonic landscape.

Jon has brought me up-to-date on a fad that has boomed exponentially since Albert Rosenblatt’s and our foray, one that has come to characterize “Grossinger” eponymies of the post-hiphop, meta-digital era. The G. is the site not just of Jon’s own portfolio; it has become a magnet for freelance photographers of ruins, Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) aficionados, increasingly so each orbit of the Earth. It is now a museum, not only a museum with standing exhibits but a museum constantly altered and recreated by weather, gravity, animals, and spirits in hyperspace, constantly changing its exhibits and rearranging the random kaleidoscopes in the halls of debris that have already been made signature and famous.

An iconoclastic cadre of pure Grossinger’s hobbyists and connoisseurs—all in all, hundreds of documentarians, voyeurs, raiders, conceptual artists, and memento-collectors—swarm over the grounds unlawfully. Whole websites are devoted to documenting Grossinger’s decay. As long as it is posted, you can check out my favorite: http://www.joe4speed.com/grossingerhistory.htm. Joe Lehman discovered Grossinger’s as a boy, the young son of the Florida executive dispatched by Servico, the proximal purchaser of the resort from PG and Elaine, to oversee the renovation of the property from a chrysalis, the first of many, ever-more-feeble attempts to restore and improve the grounds.

Servico may have done little other than to blow up a few buildings (on their second or third try) and erect some ersatz concrete that came right back down, but Joe grokked the real mission; he got the bug and served the indigenous leprechauns, exploring and documenting the artifacts with the enthusiasm of a colonist on Mars. He and his growing legion of colleagues continue to uncover the treasures of nature emerging with culture to ply obscure symbols and hybrid glyphs. For instance, at the time of my writing this epilogue, you can take a video tour (with postcards and flashbacks to the fifties scenes): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5fAdKshdaI.

As long as it is playing online, you can also take the Yahoo tour entitled “Grossinger’s abandoned resort”: http://beta.news.yahoo.com/photos/grossinger-s-abandoned-resort-1308604839-slideshow/.

So the Hotel is a mecca anew, but this time for curio tracking by “guests” who, mostly, weren’t born or hadn’t heard of the G. in its heyday. These nonpaying aficianados don’t require Simon Sez or Dirty Dancing; they are conducting art, hermeneutics, and bricolage of an entirely different order.

I find Jon’s portfolio (http://www.terrastories.com/grossingers/) and his Grossinger’s: City of Refuge and Illusion (Furnace Press 2010) absolutely stunning, though the G is but a single chapter in his overall oeuvre documenting the interaction of nature and culture, land and its use, the raw and the cooked. He had previously photographed ghost ships in Suisun Bay’s mothball fleet, a vacant art-deco skyscraper in San Francisco, Cold War missile bunkers, missile launch sites and gantries, and the shuttered theme park rides of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He worried initially that I might be offended by the invasion of privacy implicit in his photographs, especially as some of them spy on the degradation of Joy Cottage, where my father and stepmother dwelled at the end. But I don’t look at them that way. My only pique is with the publisher of Furnace Press who made such a big fucking, self-aggrandizing deal out of not including this preface that I wrote, at Jon’s invitation, for his book, and never even bothered to call me back, as promised, to tell me so. She is the one who abused the dead, not Jon. She is the one who wanted to claim the material for her own use and essentially told me that it was her property now—thanks! A menial, grabby spirit still haunts the grounds, just like then, only downsized from the corporate to the curatorial level. (Okay, that’s out of the way, but it glosses where this essay comes from.)

In Jon’s documenation I see a number of layers and scales all at once and sequentially: the evolution, interpolation, and deterioration of human landscaping and archaeology; the ubiquity of pure form (and color) in nature (even where nature is artificial and culturally circumscribed); the shifting meaning of form and object when symbol and language underlie them in multiple tiers; plus a just and respectful rendition of the macabre decay-crumble of Grossinger’s in its current mega and micro states, ten years further down the road from our Love Diamond/Halo Benders tour docented by Albert Rosenblatt.

As discouraging and deflating as the present lay of Grossinger’s with its reliquaries is on one level, it is beautiful on another in the gaze of Jon’s lens. There are chiaroscuro pinks and pale yellows of tiles and shower curtains with the fancy G. insignias, now in a dirt setting; luxury guest-rooms turned into campsites with plaster indistinguishable from blown snow; crappy wall prints converted into exotic art by fungus, with the sheet rock behind them under redesign by the same cosmic artist; numbered barrels of Leo LeBel’s fifties barrel-jumping triumphs crushed into tinted numerology; exquisitely soft new cushions of snow on barstools; rainbow-rust bathrooms; icicled lounge chairs (in yellow); former guest-rooms that are now Jackson Pollack canvasses; vast interior plazas that have become a literal deconstruction of one-time construction sites that were finished, lacquered, sealed, and decorated, now back to girders, platforms, and mounds of plaster; plus hosts of miniatures: mimeo paper; wallpaper; irregular patterns of keys on hooks as crisp as a Hopper intaglio; arrangements of stripped tile, paint, wallpaper, rust, and shredding; patches of blue, violet, indigo, and lavender at various scales and degrees in blended smudges of biology and synthetic decay; and assorted windblown, thermodynamic splatter, spill, and spray.

Jon captures the stark electric-chair agenda of the average beauty-parlor station clawed to its essentials by the paws of time. Machines of cooking, laundry, heat, and ice-making have become dead robots, seeking new identities in a cyborg future. They linger amid views from unshot Al Jolson and Jimmie Stewart films in lobbies and arcades stripped of upholstery, conviviality, and light, hence drained of density, texture, and meaning, taking on new light, emergent subtlety, unexamined allusions, colors not in any familiar palette (a promiscuity of midtoned oranges, grays, browns, and tans, intrusions of midnight black and bleached white). In decrepitude their iconography has become intrinsic to the local landscape. In most of these shots, outdoor nature, resplendent and naked or peeking through crusts of rubbish retains its bright, fresh Kodachrome intensity: blue skies, virginal clouds, and verdant trees smiling innocently across wrecked foregrounds, stages and plazas and pods of abstract impressionist stains and litter. Some of the old rooms look more like exotic mass-murder scenes beyond forensics than mere dehumanized cubicles.

My favorite Haeber is the outdoor pool and its veranda. In 1999 it was already a humungous incipient pond; now it is a completely overgrown Roman aqueduct qua Mayan temple, or perhaps something that might be found on an extinct planet of Alpha Centauri—a mixture of the hieroglyphically stained off-whites of the original concave surface and surrounding pavement, glyphed with two- and three-dimensional clusters of photosynthetic green. Photographed as a diagonal in a rectangle, the panorama is classic enough to hang in the Louvre, yet as ciphered as a barcode and intricate in fine alphabetic detail as the embossing on a money note. Every nuance is indispensable and indelible, yet none of them mean anything. Each one encompasses atomistically a million of the old-fashioned postcard-blue, bathing-suit pools. Like in the Big Bang, the cosmic returns to the atomistic, which gives birth to the cosmic again.

For me Jon’s portfolio stands in most absolute balance with my book New Moon, for if you were to reverse time and do a speeded-up lapse cinema, the overgrown foliage would retreat, the pool would fill with antiseptic robin’s-egg water, and the beautiful and not-so-beautiful people would return from my pages and engage in their daffy and erotic intrigues. I believe in my interior version as much as I believe in Jon’s depiction of the post mortem crime scene. Anyway I never could get at the secular fun palace and fleshy Grossinger’s that so many people, most of them now dead, honored and indulged as their favorite bacchanalia and country club—and he never had to, thank goodness.

I would like to believe that my Grandmother Jennie, the person most identified with and committed to the conventional success and maintenance of this property (but also no slouch intellectually and a grand woman in unexpected ways) would have, yes, been shocked by the demise, saddened to the root of her soul by the loss and deterioration but, after one viewing of Jon’s portfolio and a moment’s contemplation, would have shaken his hand and, with tears in her eyes, thanked him for preserving the integrity and dignity of her manor. After all, he had nada to do with the disarray (others plentifully oversaw that), but he addressed it at exactly the level required to keep it real, to give it the honor it still had, to render it “Grossinger’s.”

Our group spent several hours during our 1999 gambit uncovering one curiosity after another. The overall incursion of vegetation, mold, and wildlife was the most phenomenologically radical and compelling element, ceaselessly confounding what was indoors with what was outdoors in unimaginable ways, hastening the transformation of what had been taken from the earth as mineral and stone, alloyed and molded subsequently into resort props and commodities, now in the process of being swallowed back into the earth in fresh, toxic veins of mongrel chemistry (paint, rug filaments, wallboard, plastic, early fiber optics, etc.). Among the items that stick in my mind are the exorbitant, no doubt lethal fungi on various soaked carpets and dissected walls, the endlessly crumbling plaster and broken glass in decadent poses, states of affairs left in process as if the mythic neutron bomb had been exploded there and even the skeletons had been vaporized, leaving the furniture and paraphernalia intact for successor occupants, invaders who never came.

More than Alpha Centauri 2999, Grossinger’s had the mood of the Earth after the extinction of man, as viewed by visitors from another Solar System. Intelligent creatures greeting them at the outdoor pool were frogs, lily pads, birds feeding on cracks in patios where jungles were growing up—outdoor and indoor natatoria merely the most recent of “manmade” ponds. This fate will befall all of civilization sooner or later—New York, Caracas, Teheran, Lagos, and Mumbai likewise, to be scrubbed and razed by the brush of time that has worked on the probably apocryphal Monuments of Mars: 500 million years or so of its swooshes (by meteorite count anyway).

As noted, the golf course was intact and thriving at the end of the twentieth century. We stopped by the clubhouse, where players were gathering competitively as if the collapsing monuents around them were of no concern (they weren’t). I understood that Japanese Koreans owned the place at the time and ran golf holidays there for mostly tourists from Japan, as rolling pastures with water to spare for eighteen holes of indulgence are harder to come by than excursion rates in the suburbs of Tokyo. However, on this weekday, there were no Asians, only locals, some of whom I recognized through a glass darkly; for instance, Alan Gerry. He used to arrive in his battered van on house call to repair my father’s TVs; now he was a hundred times wealthier than PG ever was, from the profits of a cable-television empire. He looked more than a few decades wasted in his golfing duds, but at least he had ascended from “go-fer” to elite guest.

I will acknowledge here that PG was right about manufacturing a second course out of perfectly good hill and dale. At the time, I thought it was a scandalous waste of scarce capital and a heretical trashing of local wilderness and green space, but in truth the golf component of Grossinger’s was all that survived the denouement in operating mode.

To its Asian owners Grossinger’s was no longer “Grossinger’s,” but “The Famous Grossinger’s Resort,” a slab of Americana now owned by proud descendants of samurai from the Pacific Theater of an era when George Gershwin and Babe Didrikson Zaharias traipsed heroically through these greens. Though it wasn’t showing on that day, I was told that the owners occasionally ran the movie of my Aunt Elaine’s wedding over the karaoke bar, a celluloid spool they had found somewhere among the storerooms, basements, and attics, dusted off, and transferred to video.

Here is a strange aftermath: a number of years later, as I was telling people about my visit to the ruins of Grossinger’s, I described how trees had grown up through the tile floor of the beauty parlor, lifting the old-fashioned hooded driers into the air, along with cans of beauty products like dada decorations on Christmas trees. Likewise in the coffee shop, tables had been raised by branches, the last ice-cream sodas and milk shakes hardened in their glasses stuck to the formica.

I wondered why I never saw such things thereafter in the many online galleries. Then, after looking at Jon’s work, I guessed the truth: these actual events didn’t exist. Yes, trees had compromised and breached the architecture, and faded bills and menus were strewn in various states of parchment and mosaic splatter. A few caked plates and half-emptied glasses had been left by the last waiters and busboys, their fossilized debris hard to characterize culinarily. But no branches were hoisting up whole tables, glasses, and driers. So why had I remembered such surreal hangings?

It was because I had dreamed them and then conflated the dreams with my memories of the 1999 excursion. That is the way the unconscious settles: oneiric spells cast alternate landscapes that strike at essential truths; they embellish reality with its latent aspects, as they carry the intrinsic energy of scenes onto different planes and into different mediums.

The converted and sublimated quality of degraded and concealed Grossinger’s landscapes was mutatitive enough under alien sorcery that it was hard to distinguish “meta” from physics inside my dreamlife following the 1999 tour. Energetically, hair driers were suspended from trees: in this regard the magical realist version is more correct than the photorealist one.

I am reminded of another anomaly. Though New Moon and Out of Babylon contain mainly my personal accounts of being “a Grossinger at Grossinger’s,” they also retell stories and calumny I merely heard. Jon retells a few of these in his own narrative, proving that he and I share obscure and perhaps apocryphal sources, plus he includes one that is whistle-blown by me: the account of the disappeared millions from my grandfather’s vault.

Because I reported this stuff, elevating rumor to factoid, several family members associated with the event will no longer talk to me.

One of my adopted half-brothers will have nothing to do with me either; in his case, apparently because of my portrayal of our father, though I don’t know for sure because he won’t talk.

My picture of PG was a honest rendition of my memory of him—not only “Tony Soprano” but a charismatic Babe-Ruthian benefactor, a joyful scamp, a corny and sentimental patriarch, and a Dickensian hotelier with his own eyepatch-wearing barrister Jaggers named Lazarus Levine (a barrister more akin to Algonquin J. Calhoun of Amos and Andy than Hunter Thompson’s Raoul Duke and who sold PG down the river with assorted execs in the end). Other myths and legends, including ones of PG and other family members, are tidbits that I was merely passing on. They might be true, partially true, or narrative traces that stand for quite different myths embodying their own truths.

I think that this is finally the enduring and archetypal value of Grossinger’s: it transcends time and space, dream and reality, use and interpretation. It always did, but now that is all that is left. And so the artists of another generation flock to it the way that Eddie Fisher, Rocky Marciano, Kim Novak, and Roger Maris did in their time—for curios and mementos, for jewels and heirlooms, and for memes of the elusive and illusory American paradise.

2010 Kaua’i Trip: 4

Richard Grossinger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:55:18 +0000

July 24 (Day 13) | Go to Day 1

For all the talkiness and ostensible candor of this journal, the major things that have happened to me here are personal and internal, between me and the spirits of this place. Kaua’i is a cutting-edge realm, a dirt-covered, jungle-pollinated, boat-people-colonized psychic lava field in the middle of the Pacific amid healing waters in trade winds, bearing soul memories, dream-bodies, collectively unconscious vestiges. In my odyssey from Po’ipu to Noniland lies a whole universe, a life passage, a precis of my time as an American. But it could not be unfolding if I had not already been incubating and working on it for decades. The island triggered its fruition and, through its landscapes, vibrations, and gods supported a shamanic and psychosomatic change. In a very profound way I don’t feel like the same person anymore, and that kind of transition at any time anywhere is rare. Yet it has an edge to it, like the psychic version of a hurricane or volcanic eruption, wiping the zone clean and making a fresh start. That is what followed the visit to the temple.

The morning of the night after my luminous visions at Kadavul Temple I had one of the strangest and most powerful dreams of my life. I awoke around six AM, looked around, saw the clock, heard the birds, and then slid into a different level of dream. I had been placed on a bed in my father’s old house at his hotel like a corpse on a slab. I was alone now. I was not only alone, but I had no context—no parents, no wife, no children, no calling, no identity. I knew that this was the end. I was stunned beyond fear or hope. Amnesia like a cold poison seeped from my feet up my legs, and it was about to devour all of me into the Great Dream when I awoke and was relieved and ecstatic to find myself back in the world, still alive, still holding onto an identity, still with a bit of time to live. The cold serum did not only numb my limbs and then torso like an embalmer’s anesthetic. It made them into a corpse that was not part of my being. And then the zone of my existence began closing down from the bottom up like a guillotine lens.

The dream was stunningly short in narrative, but its actual occurrence was deep, complex, and invariable. I was not so much in linear time as a timeless phenomenological state. Except for the transition of numbness upward from my feet to above my knees, the dream had no chronology and no content. It was more my deepening awareness of a body, which was my body, in a way I had never felt it before, as though it was an object like a scarecrow, a bundle of decrepit layers pulling me down into muy death. I was simply a lab report or x-ray imprint of my own being; there was nothing to anchor onto, no place to attach my identity or experience or empathy. It was over. But what was over?

I understood the core proposition of dying, but this was nothing like my imaginings of death. It was matter-of-fact, procedural, merciless. The reason that I wasn’t more afraid was that I felt something inside me that I had never felt before, a seed. And, even while I was dying, I was discovering—in fact experiencing—a core that was deeper than my thoughts or concerns for my health and being. It was not as though I wanted to go there, not at all. I went because it was more compelling than anything else and I knew, when everything else fell away, it was the lifeboat, the lifeboat and the passenger in the lifeboat as well. Whatever it really was felt as impersonal and final and cold as death, and I hated it and shunned it, but I couldn’t deny its profundity and insistence on being, on being me. It was the other, the great change, that allowed me to survive, survive myself. There was no way simply to concede and give up, because there wasn’t any emptiness or void beneath me. There was “it.” The finality of the situation revealed a different angle on existence.

In that sense it wasn’t a dream. It was more like a direct proposal and invitation out of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, as it demonstrated a basic reincarnation meditation practice. Its proposition took me into the rainbow-cellular structure of my body, starting at my feet and moving upward. It suffused me with a kind of Etheric intelligence, even confidence, while telling me, though not in words and not even as an entity, where my body and personality were rooted at every instant and where their consciousness in this life unequivocably ends. It felt like death itself. It wasn’t amusing, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good part was that the dream made it seem possible to either live or die at any time, not just possible but was was happening like the flicker light that birthed and sustained my existence. It was a pupa dream, a resurrection dream—but I’ve got to tell you, it was also as terrifying a nightmare as I have ever had visited upon me. It wasn’t a dream about dying; it was an actual symbolic death, and I experienced it as death, creeping up from my feet toward my head. When it reached my brain, I would no longer exist. I knew that. I still know that, beyond time.

What person would choose to have an Egyptian mummy/Avatar-like embalming proposed inside his own mortal fame? I say no one. (And I say “Egyptian” instead of “Tibetan” because there was no narrative, no staging, no bardo. It was direct and explicit, irrefutable—a single demonstration or instruction. There wasn’t a ticket booth, an exit after the show.)

The pictures in the temple during the day—the autonomic cinema—were light Hindu sitcoms, playful and sacred, compared to the kundalini arising of the mummy-yoga-dream body of the collective unconscious. No mere trailer this—this was the sarcophagus.

If my visit to the Hindu temple wasn’t like being touched and awakened by the Yogananda guru, this dream—in its anonymous autogenesis—was. An imperceptible, anonymous seed was planted in me there at Kadavul, programmed to burst into projective holography in the dream-body.

If I received an esoteric transmission of the highest degree, older than Egypt, it said: “If you think that you are living as opposed to dying or dead, that is not right. You are already dead and, when you die, it will be no different; the thread of identity will not be snapped, so assimilate the intelligence of your existence now, while there is time, while there is no time.”

I will restate that: You have to give everything up, every memory, every breath and heartbeat, every cell, every treasured molecule, every trace of life, of love, and that way you give nothing up. You will lose what you are, what you have. But in the larger frame—cosmos, creation, soul—you remain precisely what you are. Not as persona but the great silent torrent beneath persona. There is a part of you that is indestructible. Know it. Feel it. Let it scare the hell out of you. Let it settle you into your body and life. Let it give you solace.

Right, it was more than a lucid dream; it was a pupa dream; it was a pupa, an active resurrection—a lesson conducted by another intelligence or my own higher intelligence. Good to know that either or both exist and are present inside me to help and to scare.

I mentioned that the dream took place a room in our house at Grossinger’s, my father’s hotel: more precisely the large upstairs guest bedroom, a site from the fifties that no longer exists. I was brought there at nine to be taken into a second, previously unknown family. My body was brought there, my ego-self. It had to change its name from Richard Towers to Richard Grossinger.

The bedroom had two spooky double closets inside of closets, one to the left and one to the right of the gigantic doublebed. Their second doors, when I dared to open them, revealed ghostly artifacts: dusty paintings, trunks, hardcover books, bottles. They seemed originless and ownerless. They seemed numinous, which back then I would call dangerous. They worked their way into my childhood dreams as dormant toxins and monsters, homesickness-inducing amulets, though I had no true home for which to be sick. They were anti-pied-pipers, calling me into exile, the exile that is life. They took away my purity and innocence and contaminated me even by their intelligence and knowing.

The overall set-up was a daunting room in which to place a nine-year-old who was already on a supernatural journey. Yet I changed into Richard Grossinger; I had to. I changed from one boy into another.

Now at Noniland in a house of wizards, on on Kaua’i, a volcanic island, I was put in a crucible again, this time a dream version of the Grossinger’s chamber congruent with a smaller room, a room with empty closets and sand on the floor in which my sleeping body lay.

Over a life I had moved from birthbody to childbody to languagebody to baseballbody to dreambody to waking body to adolescent body to adultbody to marriage body to sick body to well body to ecstatic body to terrorbody to visionary body to craniosacral wavebody to aurabody to initiated psychic body and, in my dream, to intimation deathbody. Together these comprised the pupa.

In the shadow of the Hindu temple, this bedroom emanated as a false front to the Grossinger’s room, to my first public bathhouse at Long Beach, New York, where old men and young boys shed wet bathing suits to hairy mortal nakedness back to the fashion of street clothes, and together they pointed to the larger room in which we undress and dress again, or not, and either way, become something different, something “else”: the funeral parlor, the crematorium, the dream creamtorium, symbolic and real, always and again.

We are led once and forever led into fundamental circumstances of pupa change, asked to become someone else, something else, to marry something else. But this is the way of resurrection, the only way.

I walk in a new body today, the pupa created in the dream that I watered alchemically everyday in the salts of the ocean—in childhood and again these last two weeks. It the body I have dreamed and sacrificed to the atomic furnace and regained as cellular DNA folios, then reawakened to, each morning like the first glass of apple juice ever. It is a body I finally earned in an ordinary way through years of non-ordinary practices.

The message took this much time became it came in my blood and cerebral fluids. It wasn’t a thought or even an insight. It was a serum. It was the revelation that the serum contained. It was the serum transmitted through the crystal mindedness of the overseer brain.

I lay in bed for over an hour after awaking, considering what had just happened to me and where I had been bounced. I was making sure that I really got my body back and still had it and would get to keep it for a while, even as I must have wondered and made sure on entering the womb-body, again upon being born. Then I rose gingerly, to continue this life.

I still smell and taste noni in the air here. The odor is persistent and irreducible, and I am drawn to its mystery and depth, out of curiosity, out of respect for its healing powers and interest in overcoming my shyness in its presence. Visitors to Noniland have commented on the totem’s abiding presence, something not rationally explicable by either the fruiting trees or the jar of fermenting fruit inside. It is a ghost smell.

I feel a bit foolish writing these epistles. To whom? Why? Who am I kidding? And who am I pissing off?

So I am grateful to Robert Phoenix today for his most recent comment: “Richard, truly outstanding. You’ve tapped into a deeply elemental muse there. Thoroughly enjoying these vignettes from Lemuria.”

Lemuria, that’s right. Lemuria the undine land. Lemuria in the modern Pacific. Lemuria in another body on another plane.

There have been other enjoyable comments the last few days, like Marilyn Handel’s squib on the Rock Quarry: “I see you made it to my favorite beach, the one with the river. Interestingly, it was really gentle when I was there. I loved the river next to it as well…sounds like you and Lindy are having a marvelous time…moment by moment.”

Perhaps a little too moment-by-moment, sorry—but not really. No, I am not trying to document everything. Whenever I step over that line, my witnessing gets in the way of living. Done however like this, at the end of each day, my notes are a way of processing and practicing. It adds another layer, more texture; it connects me to the world of literature, of Charles Olson and William Faulkner and the old “boys”; it restores me to the comfort and company of others—all of you. It allows me to critique myself through my readers’ eyes, and I do, and your unspoken cavil vibrates back into my experience, continually changing its frequency. That’s how energy works psychically when you write.

Ellias visited us this morning for tea; we sat on the Noniland porch for two hours talking—first just me and him; then Lindy, him, and me; then various combinations of habitants and him and me. He got a Nick Good flyby. We talked (in different combos) more 2012, astrology, children, family constellations, karma, Kaua’i, publishing his future books, plans for changing times. Here is a smattering of what got said by Mr. Lonsdale:

“I’ve stopped trying to explain myself to other people because I’m really just explaining myself to myself. I mean, I’d wonder too. Why does he live in this way? Why does he have four young children at his age? It makes total sense to me, but it doesn’t to most other people. When I explain it, they don’t get it anyway, so I don’t bother.”

“You guys lucked out here at Noniland. This is the real Kaui’i; it’s not that easy to find the real Kaui’i. People usually end up in places like what you had in Po’ipu. This looks like Hawai’I; it’s a working organic farm, very Kaua’i.”

“You have gotten a deep dose of this place. Kaua’i is a water-element land, a realm of watery spirits, so whatever is water in you, which is a whole lot, gets brought to the surface and worked on.”

“The gooey sweet world of our childhood and our parents’ America is gone. It was nice, in a way. But from here on, it’s going to be a powerful ride. Are you ready?”

“I’ve had to unlearn who I am and learn new ways. That’s not a problem because I’m not someone who’s interested in having his expectations fulfilled. I am not looking to be comforted. I’m not interested in confirming what I already know. When I was younger, I was hot-tempered, but it wasn’t personally directed at anyone. What it had to do with was that the world didn’t conform to what I wanted it to be. But why should it conform? It’s for me to find out what the world is, not for the world to be what I want it to be.”

“It’s especially dangerous to be hot-tempered with children. They are willful, spirited, irrepressible, and adventurous beings. You can’t deny them or it just builds up resentment. Anger accomplishes nothing; it makes them feel rejected. Instead, I have to tell them that I want something with them to be different while at the same time communicating, either in words or telepathically, that this is not about denying them. It’s just that right now they have to do it another way. I read my children’s charts so, aside from those particulars, I know that they have different missions and karmic challenges, and I try not to get in the way.”

I confided something sweet that Curtis confided to me during our visit yesterday, “I’m not a big fan of kids; I’m not a kid person, like they’re cute or something. People don’t associate me with kids. But those kids of Ellias’s are special; I love them.”

“Yep,” said Ellias, “they have many fans around this island, and people are usually fans of one or two of them, and not ever the same one or two.”

As Ellias was leaving Noniland, I stopped to introduce him to Kohta by the coconut-chip/honey room. There Kohta lamented he would probably miss the going-away party for Lindy and me because he was attending a celebration for the gap in the Mayan calendar between one 28-day cycle and the next. “It’s when we celebrate ‘Time is Art’ rather than ‘Time is Money,’ and it’s big all over the Hawaiian islands. Mr. Arguelles, you know.”

“I know about that,” Ellias said. “I am familiar with that ceremony. It’s also the first full Moon in a while that hasn’t been eclipsed, so it’s a very powerful time, high energy, edgy. In fact, the next four weeks are filled with transits, so a lot is going to change on this world. We’re going to have some big-time changes coming to the Earth. The old world is dying, but a new world is being born.”

“I know too,” Kohta chuckled enigmatically.

“The collective only hears that the old world is dying because that’s all they know how to hear,” Ellias continued, “so they think apocalypse and destruction and collapse. The collective, especially here in America and in Northern California, is collective anxiety. They don’t hear the other half, that a new world is being born. That’s because they don’t understand the new world; they have no reference for it. But that’s why it’s new—and why it’s being born.”

“Yes, I know this too; this is true,” Kohta chuckled again.

Lindy and I set out at ten for the Hanalei Farmers Market, a gala community event every Saturday on the North Shore. The drive to Hanalei, so treacherous in the dark and rain, is pleasant on a sunny morning, and we got there quickly. The market was being held on a ball-field in front of jagged volcanic mountains piercing the clouds. Cars were parked on the grass.

I grasped at once that our thus-far-unrequited desire for native music had come to a sudden happy fruition. The sounds bubbling out of the market were pure Hawaiian, a smooth island lilt.

It turned out to be three young guys on a kind of open-air quonset pavilion, all playing electric guitar, one of them a ukele. They were singing in Hawaiian and English, and the Hawaiian sound was delicious, all those “pu’u,” ha’ke,” “he’le,” “oo-a,” “nu’e” and “me’ke-mo’o-ka’a” glottal-stopped syllables inside a trade-wind melodiousness with occasional huffed and puffed insertions that gave an inimitable indigenous accent to the phonemic thread.

It didn’t take me long to realize how rad the lyrics were. This was no old-fashioned tourist shit; this was Hawaiian Power, naked and bold: all about bringing back the gods from the clouds, reentering the Dreamtime, praying to the taro root, sailing the old canoes, reclaiming the stolen land from the Anglos, getting rid of the destroyers and polluters, bringing peace to the islands and then the world: “…seven generations/must become a nation.”

With the mountains in the background and farmers gathered around with stacks of coconuts, lilikois, papayas, purple sweet potatoes, mangoes, pineapples, greens, goat cheese, edible flowers, and kitschy souvenirs, it was a rhapsodic event, as we lay in the shade of spacious umbrella material stretched over poles to make a viewing zone and from there watched the performance. Naked kids played, everyone seemed enchanted, and people (us included) strode up and dropped dead presidents into the basket before the stage.

Eventually the music boys brought up an older, more rotund Hawaiian, and the four of them jammed together in a sequence of complex drumming sessions, some with mournful flute accompaniment. It was a different genre of music; the mellifluous element dropped and replaced with the shamanic and divinatory power of the drum and its varied beats, both hypnotically regular and sharply discontinuous: aserial gaps followed by rapid reentry passages.

We eventually got ourselves over to the booth of Island Bakery and its baker and proprietor Susan Fein, the object of our visit to the market. Robert Phoenix had urged us to hook up with his soulful first wife—”truly beautiful and deeply real” were his words. She had resettled in to Kaua’i from Austin in April and had started her own organic bakery. She considered this place her spiritual home, as she had lived on the island for a good deal of the seventies.

After we introduced ourselves, she excitedly told me about her childhood visits to Grossinger’s. “You even look familiar,” she said, as though childhood personae would translate into adult ones. “I’m sure I saw you. We went there five times a year. My father was a big bridge player. He was good friends with your father. It was incredible, the best part of childhood.”

“More for you than for me,” I said.

“Well yes, it was my home away from home.”

“You know,” I said, holding my hands apart. “If Grossinger’s is here, then Robert Phoenix is out here, like in China. That’s how far apaart from each other those two are for me. I mean, I discovered Robert when he was secretly living in our warehouse with his dog Cosmo in the nineties, reading tarot on the streets of San Francisco. And Grossinger’s….”

“For me too,” she replied. “That’s the full scope and distance of my life: Grossinger’s and Robert Phoenix.”

She offered us a piece of any cake in the display. Lindy chose blueberry coffee, and I picked a ginger cookie. When Lindy opened her purse to pay, asking how many dollars (as Susan hurried off to meet a bulk customer), her assistant said, “No dollars.”

The girl from Grossinger’s later joined us in the shade by the musicians, and we had a rambling conversation to be picked up on the morrow when she is not “fried after two whole nights of sleepless baking.”

Robert, to her, was a beautiful, spiritual guy, very gentle. It was twenty or so years ago that she and he were married. Since then, she had been in Austin mostly: “The first two years were great; after that it felt like prison.” She had just gotten herself free of a deteriorating four-year relationship there.

As we tracked across the time of our lives, she was astonished to discover that Lindy and I were twelve years older than her, as she gauged us roughly the same age—which we are in the broader sense: different-phase baby-boomers. As we opened the counterculture, she fell in the middle of the stew. So, no she probably didn’t see me at Grossinger’s.

She still considered Robert one of her closest friends. Her answer to the question as to how such an unlikely pair of individuals met was that he was in the same men’s group as an old friend of hers. “The trouble was, he wanted to move to Washington right away, and a land where it rains ninety percent of the year is no place for an island girl.”

I said next that I had a bad feeling about his most recent marriage from the moment that I met the woman.

“Of course you did. I had a bad feeling when he told me about it. He said, ‘She’s totally opposite anyone I’ve ever hooked up with.’ That was a recommendation? How could Robert think to be with someone who wasn’t doing a spiritual practice, who wasn’t spiritually awake and didn’t even want to be? He got a son out of it, though, and he always badly wanted a son.”

“Yeah, those two are great together. Otherwise, he’s back out on the great vision-quest.”

Then Susan took up, saying, “To be continued tomorrow.”

As the musicians were putting away their instruments and equipment, I walked up to the stage and asked one of them if they had a CD. “No,” he said, “we’re making one now.”

“Can you let me know when it’s out if I give you my card?”

“Sure.” He took it and looked it over. “What sort of publishing?”

“Mostly mind-body-spirit, but we do other things too: art, politics, literature.” Silence while he pondered. Then I asked, “Do you write?”

“Yeah, I wrote all those lyrics.”

“I mean other stuff.”

“Sure, lots of stuff. Reclaiming our native land. Getting the right to visit our ancestors. Burying the beached orcas on the sacred ground. Making a new treaty with our Polynesian brothers and sisters. Building a sixty-foot canoe like the old days. Bringing the Hawaiian nation back together. Navigating from Polynesia to Hawai’i, using old techniques, by the stars. Does any of that interest you?”

“A lot.” I told him. “Will you write about it?”

“I am writing about it. My book is about native Hawaiian culture and regaining our land.”

“Well then we should talk.”

“Ka’imi,” he said, extending his hand. “And you’re Richard?”

“Richard,” I confirmed.

We walked back to his car and he got me his group’s brochure. They were called Ku Halele’a. He invited me to a Polynesian cultural and political meeting at which they were performing in Kapa’a later that afternoon. ”Hawaiian royalty is coming soon from Polynesia. It’s time to start to put the kingdom together. It’s time to return sustainable living to the land.”

The encounter reminded me of how we followed a random meeting in Prague (1993) to a dinner of former exiles and radicals. When traveling in strange lands, accept bids and follow the mystery. (See “1993 Europe Journal” on this site.)

In the early afternoon Lindy and I went together to Rock Quarry Beach and stood in the surf. It threw us around, and Lindy quickly had enough, so she went back to lie on a towel on the sand. I put in another fifteen minutes, then decided to try to swim again, for the first time since the evening we arrived.

From the I Ching of waves, I must have picked a powerful one for, as soon I dove underwater and began lotusing my arms and legs like a frog, a huge wave swallowed me up and rolled me over in it. I swallowed a noseful of water. More startled than scared because I knew that it was headed rapidly in, I had one queasy moment as the undertow sucked out, then the next wave arrived and I got deposited unceremoniously onto wet sand.

It was cleansing, right through nostrils, brain, throat, and mind. The ocean had done the most gentle massage of which it was capable.

But that was enough!

We set out at about 4:15 for the Hawaiian sovereignty-movement meeting at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Kapa’a. We had no idea what to expect and told ourselves that it was only fifteen miles, so we could hang out and then come back if it wasn’t right.

When we got there, we found that event time was at 5:30, not 4:30 as we Ka’imi had imparted, but we learned too that the public was welcome and we were encouraged to stay around. Luckily we ran into Curtis and KatRama coming out of Papaya’s, confirming their dictum that that grocery/restaurant was the primary meeting place on the island (Papaya’s was also where Layla ran into Trevor after the loss of her belongings and got invited to stay at Noniland).

We convened at a table where, after both of them described their recent trips to New Zealand and Mantak Chia’s complementary healing center in Thailand (bloodwork with ozone and stem cells), Curtis filled us in on the many levels, variations, and complications of the sovereignty movement in Hawai’i. For a start, he said, there is not one sovereignty movement but several, and this one here tonight is the most radical because it does not seek American-Indian-style recognition and restitution; it wants to reunite with the Polynesian kingdom.

The argument is that all of the Hawaiian Island chain was illegally seized by the United States during the nineteenth century, by which time Hawai’i was already recognized by the international community as a sovereign nation with a legitimate king and queen. The queen in fact had toured Europe and was accepted there as representative of an old royal lineage.

So whereas other native Hawaiian movements were working through the U.S. Congress to acquire special status like the American Indians and sought casino-culture recognition and capitalist spoils, the separatist sovereignty movement wanted the land restored to its native lineage and ownership. From the separatist standpoint the American Indian situation is entirely different for, though they have clearly been colonized and their rights stolen too, they are North Americans and were subjugated before getting international recognition, whereas Hawai’i was already an established Pacific nation, recognized by France, Spain, Holland, etc., and could not be legally seized. They don’t want gambling resorts; they want sustainable development, a return of the sacred.

Curtis’ rendition proved to be pretty accurate, as you will see.

First, however, we took seats in the hall and listened to another rousing Ku Halele’a concert.

Some bands have a kind of charismatic power for me, and these guys really let loose the magic. Intoning their Hawaiian and English lyrics, spirituality- and sovereignty-based, going hard on the electric guitars and ukele, and throwing in their warrior-like kiais “Who!” and “Ha!” between stanzas, they held me riveted the way that some reggae or country and Western bands have in the past. Lindy found “who” and “ha” as sexy sounds as she ever heard coming out of a band, both energizing and transporting. I can listen to the Skatalites or Dave Insley and the Careless Smokers with rapt attention and chills down my spine as they create and synergize instruments and sounds. Add Ku Halele’a to that group. Plus here they were playing not at a commercial farmers’ market but on their home field.

When the guys were done, they introduced the leader of the sovereignty movement whose name I got as Dayne. The introduction was done as such: Dayne came up on the stage and walked its length with triumphant arm gestures like a preacher or football player after a touchdown. As he did, he bumped heads with each of the three musicians in a manner that suggested this was part of their cultural repertoire as well as an act of respect. They were pretty solid head whacks that caused me to wince; yet they did not seem to hurt. The bumps said, in essence: “We are native Hawaiians, bump.”

Dayne was a stocky middle-aged guy with a pony-tail and ceremonial leis. He opened by declaring that this meeting was about the creation and restoration of the Hawaiian kingdom and its sovereignty but even more than that “how we come to represent the light of God.” He spoke briefly about his mission and then he introduced his aunt. She intoned a long prayer in Hawaiian, which people in the hall received with heads bowed. By then, there were maybe fifty or sixty in attendance, not a huge turnout for such a watershed movement and also such great music.

After the prayer, Dayne riffed, rambled, and answered questions for the next hour. It was a compelling if somewhat bizarre, disjointed presentation during which I learned a lot of diffuse but interrelated things—sort of like coming into a movie that was more than halfway through. The talk was interrupted by an Australian visitor named Derrick, who was summoned onto the stage to do his riff. Dane was also frequently redirected by his aunt who broke in with back stories, side tales, and prayer-meeting-style cheerleading such that it became a combination lecture, ceremony, revival meeting, political rally, and caucus. Here is some of what I got:

Hawai’i belongs to Polynesia, not America. There is no hope in restoring land rights or getting back what was stolen by going through the American judicial system or Congress. It is necessary to appeal to a higher law. On the one hand, that higher law is God, in whose name all things will be set right eventually but, on the other hand, it is the Circle of Pacific Island Nations, of which Hawai’i is a charter member and from which it was unnaturally and unjustly and illegally seized and dragooned into American jurisprudence. One can try to undo some of this through the American courts, but that gambit will never be more than a delaying action. The legitimacy of the Hawaiian claim must be established through Polynesia, the ancestral home—through the genealogy of those remaining descendants of royal lines, through the prior recognition of Hawai’i as a separate kingdom by the world’s nations and now the UN, and finally by the authority of Polynesian law, which is prior and superior to United States law and has the only real jurisdiction here.

If you think that this is a marginal fantasy movement without any chance of success, especially given the small turnout tonight, then think again. You need to hear that Dayne and his sovereignty group have deputized an army of native Kauian body-guards and paramilitary warriors, and they show up when they need to in order to protect indigenous interests. Though this entails a confrontation with the State, the County, and various levels of police and the military, there is apparently an understanding between the Pentagon, the FBI, and the native Hawaiian militias, and, as long as the Hawaiians are not breaking Federal or State laws, they will receive cooperation and support from branches of the constabulary. In a very mild way, these folks are like Taliban being backed by the Pakistani intelligence services for uses that transcend ordinary judicial authority.

Kaua’i is far and away the most radical island, and its militia has engaged in civil disobedience from the beginning. Dayne’s radicalization and journey began many years ago when he was arrested for trespassing on his ancestral land. “The light came on in his head and in his heart,” his aunt inserted. “He knew this wasn’t right and it had to change.”

Though they practice mostly nonviolent resistance, they play right at the edge. They engaged in civil disobedience in order to block the superferry from coming to the island and bringing more tourists and commerciality, and they used it again to try to stop Monsanto’s from sowing GMOs. In the latter case, after the police negotiated an end to their blockade, the militia stayed seven hours past the negotiated departure time because, as Dayne put it, “we wanted to make the point that this was our land and we would leave when we were ready.” Monsanto was too big to stop, but, yes, they made their point: they weren’t going away, and they would be back.

Maybe not in ten years or fifty years or even a hundred years, but in two hundred years or five hundred years, Hawai’i will rejoin Polynesia and the Pacific nations. America won’t last forever. It is falling apart already. Mexico, from which much of the American West was similarly stolen, is telling you that in a louder voice than Kapa’a, illegal immigrant by illegal immigrant, drug lord by drug lord. That is why the Hawaiians are practicing nation-building now, setting the terms, the long terms, for their children’s children’s children and those beyond them. It is not about settling for crumbs or placing politicians in office or getting short-term political results or fighting losing battles and ending up in the hoosegow; it is about lighting a torch to carry forward, even if that torch is still a tiny candle. It is the diametric opposite of how politics are practiced in America now. Those waffle from month to month and poll to poll. The attention span and meaning of the sovereignty movement transcends all of modernity by a factor of at least five. They will wait six hundred years if need be, so they are cultivating that level of patience, but they will rejoin Polynesia, and they will get their islands back from the corporations, the resorts, the tourists, and the movie stars, unless they want to join the people. The power of being willing to wait for the distant future beyond your lifetime while meeting and planning in the present is akin to the power of the suicide bomber: it changes the game, it changes the rules, and it transfers power silently and irrevocably and spiritually.

Dayne is who he is because he personally has been recognized by the Polynesian confederacy as king of Kaua’i, a role he takes very seriously but does not lord over anyone. “I’m not even anti-American,” he says. “I come from a military family. I served; my father works at the base. No one can take that heritage and identity away from me either. I’m American; I trained and fought for America; that’s mine too.”

He represents Hawai’i at the Polynesian court and in deliberations of the confederacy. He understands that not all native Hawaiians accept his rank or representation of them, but he is acting on the basis of recognition of his genealogy by Polynesians who have researched the matter thoroughly.

Derrick’s role, obscure to me, was apparently to indicate that Dayne’s ascension to the throne represented the end of a twenty-year search in Kaua’i for the rightful heir to an ancient Hawaiian flag that he (Derrick) held for some reason because he had inherited it from other royalty. I didn’t really grok that part.

The once and future political name of Hawai’i is the Polynesian Kingdom of Atooi (PKUA). Literature handed out at the event states that “by the royal decree of our Alli Nui, Aleka Aipoalani (Dayne) proclaims that all lands, waters, and activities under this nation’s stewardship shall transition to being sustainable.” The document went on for pages to delineate the basis of this sustainability.

Sustainability and “the requirement to build your own spirituality” were in fact the central and only prerequisites for citizenship in PKUA. This meant that members of all races, including Euro-Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans, American Indians, etc., were potentially part of sovereign Kaua’i. It was no longer just Hawaiian, for Kaua’i had become not a nation based on ethnicity but a meta-nation based on a value system, a kind of futuristic Pacific ecotopia highlighting environmental livelihood, organic farming, care for its children, and the promotion of peace throughout the planet by cultivating a balanced spirit. Kaua’i had become a transcendent future nation of the Aquarian Age.

“Those who believe in it can stay,” Dayne’s aunt announced to cheers, “but anyone who desecrates the land has to go, and we will see to that.”

I am sure she has ways. “Maybe we don’t have the power to kick out the rich, the powerful, and the exploiters of the land now, but ultimately we will have that power, and it will come from the Pacific not from the mainland.”

There are presently fifteen Pacific nations in the confederacy, including the natives of Australia; Tahiti; Tonga; the Fiji Islands; the Polynesian Triangle, made up of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia; and New Zealand (the Maori are considered lineal descendants of Hawaiian boat-people, and the sacred map of New Zealand has been interpreted as a transposition of spiritual Kaua’i onto a southern ethnoastronomy and geography). Six other nations—not named—are about to join.

The power to enforce natural and Hawaiian law will eventually arise from this Circle of Nations. They will defend the land and establish a higher international and divine law. The kings and queens of Tahiti and Polynesia will regain their moral and traditional authority over Atooi at which time they will establish a kingdom of aloha everlasting.

For now it is a matter of building a constituency, honoring God’s law, and waiting for the end of this corrupt world age. If conditions change enough, the present power structures keep crumbling, and enough transits follow, PKUA can and will happen. Nothing is permanent, and ancient centers of influence tend to reestablish themselves after the waning of present kingdoms.

A thousand years from now, the United States of America with its deep-rooted transnational corporations and its formidable black-magic military will be an ancient memory, and the old kings and queens rule the Pacific again. It is necessary to prepare for that time and begin to dream that world back into being. First now with a song and a prayer….

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July 25 (Day 14)

I was getting rid of some of our stale bread this morning, trying to break it in crumbs for the chickens, especially a one-legged hen who moved me to tears with its struggles to get around. All animals are brave.

But these are really wild birds and probably know that they are mega-unpopular hereabouts. In fact, where aren’t they unpopular except among tourists? Unlike at Waimea Canyon I couldn’t get anywhere near the Noniland chickens. Because the crumbs seemed to disappear in the grass, I tossed crusts, but the birds took off from my motion with such a squawking that you’d think I was the one chasing them with coconuts and a beebee gun.

The chicks really show their lineage. These guys are baby dinosaurs, very, very old animals with a meta-reptilian knowledge of the Earth.

The gigantic size of the leaves here stops me in admiration. They could be landing platforms for Astral faery craft or used effectively as mainland umbrellas.

Wonderful comments from Robert Phoenix this morning.

After I had asked his permission to write about him, his response: “Go for it!” Now today: “On second thought maybe you shouldn’t put me in there. Nah, great stuff. I think there’s a career for you in the travel writing thing. Sort of a blend of Gerald Heard, Least Heat Moon, and Larry Durrell.

“Glad you met Susan. I think she’s sitting on a good cookbook somewhere in there. I wanted to turn her into the spiritual Martha Stewart at one point.

“The amazing thing is that our signal is as clear as when I first met her.”

I went to Rock Quarry Beach early while Lindy was still sleeping. The bright sun from the east made the foam even whiter. Blinding light created extrasensory overload.

Water is always baptism. We are baptized whenever we enter water with an offering of self. We baptize ourselves. Christ baptized by bringing his aura together with water. That act is still done in his name over two thousand years later, but the resonance of his aura is all but depleted in most modern circumstances. That gives a sense of its original power, though.

It is interesting to think about baptism as offering oneself in and to the intelligence of the ocean.

Yesterday’s dream really stays with me, and it always will. It seemed to address the slumber of many births. It seemed to want to imbue me from within with a recognition that dying and being transformed by the events in life are phases of a larger metamorphosis—a literal transubstantiation. It taught me all that in a way and with a lesson that will always be with me. A pupa.

It said, “Live are like dreams; that’s all. Except you forget everything and start again. This luminosity is just a station on the dial. It is a single world illusion—a present lucid dream. When you get sucked out of life into the wind tunnel, you get sucked into another dream.

“As you wonder what it will feel like to be extinguished and silent, a mystery passes into your awareness and forms the bridge into the unknown. Everything stops, and what starts after everything stops is the meaning, the root of being. Yet for now be calm and assured. You are not drowned or annihilated. You are merely being blown by great winds from one lattice across another.”

The dream said: “You are this, whether you are alive or dead, but when you are dead you enter a black-hole singularity; then my dream begins again, a different dream.”

This is an indestructibility that can’t be conferred by words or promises; it has to be drunk, brewed in the cells, earned somehow from within. Anything else is just an idea that evaporates like fog before the onrush of world sensation.

I have followed Avocado’s barefoot imprimatur as much as possible. I have walked Noniland pretty much shoeless the whole week, negotiating the pebbled dirt road carefully, planning my routes ahead to avoid too many crossings. I have traipsed up to the cattle pasture; I also walk to and from our car in the guest parking without shoes. I pass barefoot back and forth between the car and the beach, which involves rocky terrain.

Ions and alkalinity aside, I like this exercise for its boost in consciousness. With all that sensation, even the ouchy stabs, there is a kind of pleasure, a Braille as the ground and the stones write their pagan bar codes on gravity-rooted flesh. The body-mind changes; the connection to the planet-body changes. This is something that I have known for a long time, but I don’t get many chances to practice it with any continuity. I will return to Berkeley on awakened feet.

As David said, riffing off his famous aphorism, “This is going to be the best vacation ever.”

Nick gave Lindy and me a lesson in chopping coconuts with a machete so that just a few strikes leaves a perfect nipple with very little spill. “Thousands of repetitions,” he explained. “That’s my art.”

I’ve found Lindy’s transformation here especially remarkable. She covered it in a group email today:

“I just want to say what a marvelous gift it’s been to stay at Noniland and get to watch and be immersed in not only the Sunfood Diet, but the way these fifteen or so young people have embodied the ways of living David describes. They are amazingly positive, even in the face of adversity. I have never felt myself changing so much and so fast as being among them. Yes, it’s hot, but they don’t surround themselves with expensive fans, they move along—barefoot.

“I also admired the way buildings were constructed in Po’ipu to let the trade winds in (it was by the ocean, so had continuous ocean breezes) with wooden slat windows you crank open to let in more, or less….”

A second visit today to the beach and the waves. This activity is of unending interest to me, for every wave is different and it is hard to pull away. I wait for one more, and then one more, and one more. It is clean, ancient, medicinal water—not longer just as knowledge but in the experience of it, of feeling one’s own alchemical beginnings. Even if it has been sullied by civilization, we are still on the innocent side of the tipping point.

The day was very hot, the water was cool. That simple a meme—yet it is what Mad Men aspire to with their every beach commercial, touching the sacred part of people’s desires.

Late afternoon we went to visit Susan Fein at her house on the river in Anahola, about seven miles clockwise from Noniland.

Most of our conversation was about our paths, and I won’t go into that (except to report that Susan has had a remarkable odyssey as an itinerant gourmet chef cum free spirit/divine seeker, stops in New York City, Paris, San Francisco, Honolulu, Kaua’i, Seattle, and Austin). However, here are a few Kauaian notes arising from our time together:

The 1991 hurricane occurred on September 11 (a key local date, the first numerological 9/11); it generated some of the highest wind speeds ever recorded on Earth. Not only did it scatter the chickens, but it drove the Star Wars project off the island, at least temporarily, because there were suddenly no roads or water or anything sufficient to support the military infrastructure. Believe what you will, but the hurricane was not supposed to come anywhere near Kaua’i; it was headed for Oahu—then it took a last-minute 90-degree detour. The residents had only five hours to prepare for it. Buildings and cars were blown to smithereens and washed away, but no one was killed. All that was left of Susan’s geodesic dome and auto was the meditation room in the house. So the islands got rid of a serious intruder.

(Later, I got some additions and corrections from someone else about the hurricane: “Not true that no one was killed; we lost five people, two Japanese fishermen in their boat, another man hit by flying debris. It is considered quite a miracle that the toll wasn’t much higher. The locals felt that Iniki was ‘called in’ to get rid of the invaders—us haoles, or at least some of us. The hurricane went over our island twice; it made a U-turn. There were small tornadoes within the hurricane.”)

The GMO project was not deterred in the least by the native Hawaiian sovereignty movement and its blockade. In fact, Monsanto pretty much rules the Western side of the island, past Waimea Canyon. The corporate military-industrial monster provides jobs and, like Blackwater, pays well, so they are not going anywhere. Genetically modified materials are now in the trade winds and the sea. O brave new world!

All sorts of very high-vibration and spiritually developed people are arriving independently on Kaua’i these days, whatever that portends. They are coming from different places and for different reasons, and they are not making themselves obvious. The vibration of the island is drawing them, and they are changing that vibration.

Susan, Curtis, and KatRama came to our farewell dinner. Nick led a prayer circle in which he told Lindy and me that we were now members of Noniland and would always be welcome here. He said he was pleased to observe our met-a-morph-osis (as he put it) over the week, “but that’s what always takes place at Noniland.” Lindy, he said, looked luminous and beautiful, and Richard had let loose his inner playfulness. “You better watch out,” he added, “because Noniland might add a few years to your lives.” Then he thanked various gods, devas, elementals, and resident spirits, and led a native Hawaiian chant. After that he captioned the papaya salad with its enzymes, the shiitake and avocado dishes.

The evening closed with a so-called talent show, Nick the continuing emcee. Lindy began it with four recent poems; then a bunch of Nonilanders performed spiritual and love poetry, raw and from the heart (and almost to a one, from memory, with some strategically-enacted rhyming)—and “perform” is the operative word. They opened their heart chakras and blasted the hell of those poems.

Nick’s selections exploded with passion, mantra, ecstatic love, romantic love, divine love, childhood nostalgia for the crossing of two rivers in Lincolnshire, the joy of existence. We heard surfer love poems, belly-dance love poems, living-on-the-land love poems, evocations-of-animals poems and, of course, cosmos poems.

This is our last night in Kaua’i; tomorrow we return the clunker to Island Car and get on the plane in Lihu’e.

Nick: “I heard the rumor that you two changed your plans and you’ll be staying in Noniland ”

“Maybe someday,” I said. “We’ll be back.”

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July 26(Day 15)

Morning awakening is different because today is about returning, not staying here any longer. I have no temptation, as I thought I would, to visit the beach for a last “swim.” My mind has let go of it. Instead I walk around Noniland letting go. I let go of the coconut shed. I let go of the giant leaves. I let go of the chickens, the doves, the flowers. I let go of banana trees, the limes, the lilikois, the noni trees, the men, the women. Not an overdetermined exercise, just attention to what is already happening inside me.

The signature image in this process comes from the numerous flattened bodies of giant frogs run over on Noniland’s dirt drive. Even the recent ones no longer stink of life, or death. They are just cards on the platform of nature; the spirits, the frogs are elsewhere. Too bad their careers were shortened. Too bad cars are such a rival to animals and give none of the cues of a predator, certainly not on the proprioceptive level of a frog.

In reminding myself that the frogs are gone, I send my attachment to pictures from the last two weeks in the same direction. I stand in the Kauaian sun and salt breeze of Now.

Nick and I sit at a table on the lanai and talk about future projects on which we can collaborate. After a while he asks my permission to change the subject to something personal and, when I say okay, he asks me about my practices. I lay them out: psychotherapy, psychic work, martial arts, Jungian dreamwork, craniosacral, a bit of zen, chi gung and yoga in Maine.

Nick’s occupation, beyond being the foreman, as it were, of Noniland is as a personal trainer—a psychospiritual dietary coach. He runs people—business executives, athletes, and Hollywood types among them, a Lehman Brothers guy for instance after the collapse (but he didn’t do his homework: big surprise!)—through his CD-directed 21-day SUNPOP (Success Ultra Now Optimization Program) program; then he brings them to Noniland and initiates them into the warrior arts on site.

Now he is interested, not so much in selling me the program, as giving me a ten-minute synopsis of the training and its benefits plus a future bridge to his assistance or guidance if I ever need it.

In response to a range of his questions, I tell him about my issues with anxiety, panic, demons, my mother’s and brother’s suicides, and then I confess the amount of energy that I have to use to deal with all this. Yet I am basically positive and happy, I add; I get out a lot out of my encounter with the shadow; it just uses too much of my time.

Nick lets me know that he appreciates and understands the power of the shadow. “It’s horrendous. It’s dark. And it’s not just personal and family trauma; it’s all of humanity you’re experiencing. It’s the pain and chaos and confusion on Earth.”

“The collective psyche.”

“Bro, you have a blessing and a curse to be open to it, but that also gives you the possibility of making a great transformation in yourself, for everyone, here and across the universe. That’s the great work, mate.”

“It’s also not just human; it’s animal, it’s plant, it’s stone. It’s the cosmic unconscious.”

“That’s right. But at the bottom it’s all love; it’s only love. The negative stuff, the fear stuff, is just love twisted. You have to come at it with love, honestly so, fill the breath, fill the heart, keep approaching it with love, because that’s the only way to change it, to make it into love, for yourself, for the planet, for us. Love and spiritual practice are the way you neutralize and convert demons. Then they go into energy; they go into acceptance, release. That’s the path of personal and global transformation.”

“I feel that I have been doing that my whole life. It’s the only thing that has saved me, that has given me intelligence, skills, happiness. I have been trying to make my life sacred because it is the only alternative to its becoming traumatic. I haven’t been doing it the way that you did it or that you would teach, but I have still been on it, working on it, everyday.”

“The thing is, bro, you’ve got to get right to the roots where the ego and the psyche part ways. You’ve got to go down into the psychic source below the ego like swimming into one of those dark caves at night. You get below the personality, where there is no Richard, no self. Just go at it. Go with love, go with courage, go transparently. And you will change. I guarantee it. Your love will be rewarded and come back to you transformed, a thousand-, a million-fold.”

“I understand. It’s a great teaching you’re embodying. I feel it.”

“But you can’t do it as Richard. You’ve got to teach yourself to meet those demons, to bring your energy to them. You do it by SUNPOP: diet, swimming, running, praying, more diet, more cleansing, sitting in silence, meeting everything with love. I’m going to send you off with that, mate.”

“I’ve been picking up on your transmission all week, so I have it with me regardless.”

“Remember, the battle takes place in the heart. Your only weapons are love and nonattachment. You have to close all those openings, your holes, with heart power. You have to be a warrior. If you leave any holes, the demons, the dark forces will get in. I know. I know what they are like. They are relentless; they are pitiless. They will devour and eviscerate you. But they can be converted by an open heart and the courage of a warrior. Love, bro. Love always.”

And that was goodbye.

However, later in the morning he blended Lindy and me a parting drink for strength in transit: ground pumpkin seeds, mushroom tea, sprouted chia seeds, and perhaps a dash of noni, papaya, coconut. It didn’t taste what I would call wonderful, but I swigged it respectfully as a medicine drink.

We got in our battered Hyundai, drove it to Lihu’e and found Island Car. One of the native guys received the keys and then ferried us back to the airport. First I asked him if he was going to use the same car (so as to know whether or not to take our baggage out of the trunk), and he respond with a great laugh: “What! Not in that death trap!” Then we all laughed.

“No purple potatoes on the mainland.” The agricultural x-ray machine caught my one, and I was asked to dig it out of the center of my suitcase and repack. Very reassuring that the software found one potato amidst my clothes.

Taking off from Lihu’e, I am a nervous flyer but am struck by the beauty of the water and the beaches. Blue and green and all their intermediate blue-green shades are more like rich pigments of paint than water. This is a magical place. For a short flight (a half hour), Lihue-to-Oahu is not trivial. The winds really whip, and the descent into Honolulu, when the plane crosses from ocean and clouds into Oahu airspace, is intense.

The agricultural attendant between inter-island and mainland flights has us eat our two Noniland bananas so he won’t have to take them away.

Rising from Oahu…it looks like Los Angeles—an entire city of skyscrapers beside a volcano.

So many waves below us, headed somewhere. So far to Oakland.

Mahalo.

Go to Top | Days 1-4 | 5-8 | 9-12

2010 Kaua’i Trip: 2

Richard Grossinger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:53:32 +0000

Undines are denizens of the Astral realm but, being water, they can shape-shift into any motif they choose. They ramble all over the Etheric too, and they likewise can step down further, take on physical form, and become human, though they never lose their undine quality. When undines flow into human shape, they retain undine values and belief systems. Any personality container for their energy is more or less incidental and carried by affect rather than sincerity. Becoming physical, they seem to take on male or female personae, but they are merely play-acting at traits and motives, under social pressure and by mimesis. That is, they cultivate human behavior but not based on human phenomenology.

Bill plans his next book to be a series of biographies and photographs of human undines.

Elemental energy has no morality, no contrition, no sympathy for the human plight. It just wants to be, to frolic and flow, forever.

Undines don’t empathize; they are empathy. They have no conscience, no purpose or meaning. They do not ask the question, what they are here for—it is meaningless to them; they are just here and have always been here and will always be here.

They extend unlimited love but do not love individually or commit to partnership. What is exclusivity of love or marriage to an elemental?

Undine women, though telepathic and sensual and often exotically beautiful, do not want to get trapped in bonding or partnering. Their wave nature wants to flow. Undine disinterest in commitment frustrates men who fall in love with mermaids who have taken on human form.

Do not become infatuated with a mermaid or, if you do, understand who she is! Her flow is not personal; it is water, elemental liquid.

The human race will not always be here. Undines are aware of that situation and they are in regular communication with those who will follow us. They see our mischief and coming demise, so do not take our imperious reign on their planet all that seriously.

Our successors feel about the same in regard to our sojourn.

Undines have tails, yes, but—a key point usually misunderstood—not in their physical state. In their physical state they look like other women (or men). When they appear with tails, your hand will pass right through them (fishermen who encounter mermaids don’t always report that detail). If you are a fish, you need a tail more than feet, even in the Astral.

When I presented Bill with Robert Sardello’s criticism that he is mainly interested in what we can get from nature rather than what we can give back or co-create with her, he responded that his is a magical system as per Bardon, a flagrant body-snatching walk-in; it is not an ethical or moral system.

The elementals as a group (including gnomes, sylphs, faeries, salamanders, etc.) have no qualms or any notion of what responsibility is. They simply attract, as a magnet attracts loose metal. If you approach them without a goal or a plan, they will suck you in and use you for whatever momentarily engages them. They will turn you into them. In that sense, they are very, very dangerous beings and it is foolhardy to invoke them and ask what they want of you because they will let you know in spades and then bind you into their service. You have to approach them with a definite agenda and let them know right away what you require of them.

Many humans have become possessed or hexed by elementals without even realizing it because they treated them as rational beings with a scintilla of decency, fairness, and compassion.

In addition, some spiritual teachers, Bill continued, pick up a version of the same sort of elemental magnetic energy. They don’t consider whether their practice (their Buddhism, their ritual magic, their aikido, their yoga, their asceticism, their guru-dom) is a good match—one size suits all—for someone else’s vibration. They don’t engage in psychological or psychic transference or real transmission. They simply attract, proselytize, entrap people in their system and personality; they are psychic magnets.

July 16 (Day 5)

There is a pernicious tendency on “vacation” to think that you have to keep doing lots of investigative or sightseeing things in order to justify the various investments, financial and logistical, in the experience. This morning I woke up with that urgency at red alert, but I caught it at the bud and got underneath it. Then I experienced the lovely base-level quiet of just being here.

It rained. It rained early. There were several storms—the first one a downpour from a luminous gray sky near dawn, playing percussion on the roof, followed by sunrise. Then the cumuli piled up, and it rained again, a soft watering-can, droplets fluttering in the wind. It rained and sunned three times before nine o’clock and then the day turned humid and mega-bright.

Being here in Kaua’i entails a dream-deep psychosomatic shift that I can feel without name or language, a transfer and transformation of energies at subcellular levels such that the subtle modulation encompassing me is re-toning my mind-body frequency. I find myself reaching for beneath the bottoms of dreams and wanting to crawl in there and sink into forgotten sleeps inside sleep. At moments I feel an ease of old tangles and core anxieties, not altogether, not even very much of them, but enough, perhaps just a suggestion of the way in which they would release if they did.

It always surprises me how uncomfortable it is to let go of something that itself is so painful that it hurts at some level all the time. The act of letting go initially hurts more than the thing, which is why one rarely is drawn to the ordeal of letting go.

The osteopathic formula generally holds true—I go toward the pain, into the torque, feel worse, much worse; then a release comes. Waves of anxiety swell and pass like a giant cloud dissipating in the sun. I feel momentum going in the softer direction, even during the pain, even as pain. This also has a homeopathic moniker: healing crisis.

Today it matches and is met by the morning rain. It integrates the subtle vibration of this island in a way that seems intuitively right to me though impossible to confirm or make tangible. And, again, it’s not that the tangle goes away; it’s that I feel it differently and experience its meaning and possibility in a new, hopeful way. If possible, its grip is stronger and yet lighter at the same time. It is stronger because I feel just how strong it really was, and it is lighter for the same reason.

Doing nothing is great. Finding sleep anew at odd moments is great.

Lindy herself slept late and said she had amazing dreams. Then she worked for the entire morning, so I went on three early walks and a noon one, and, in between, I lay in hypnagogic catnaps, all the time aware that I was trying to find or land in something elusive, something profound and receptive that I had lost somewhere along the way but was given access to again by being here.

Externally I explored the immediate neighborhood first—the adjacent condo apartments. Its parking area had some rickety and loose steps leading down to our side of the turtles’ cove with an “at your own risk” sign. I held the railing tightly in the rain, stepping over a hanging-loose initial stair. As I reached bottom, I saw crabs instantly scurrying in their fashion over different-sized rocks and balls of black lava like a choreographed wind-up display until all motion stopped and no crabs were visible.

Returning to the street, I walked around several blocks. I saw bumperstickers (mostly Obama liberal, anarchist, or save Koloa, save Kaua’i); papaya, banana, coconut, palm, and kakui trees; flags, flowers, beach rental units, plus the random activities of Turtle Cove: badminton, someone selling a car on a porch to an elderly couple, a gigantic dead toad on the road, the reflection of lavender flowers and blue sky in a puddle, giant butterflies, tropical birds in flight. I felt periodic warm rain in gentle breezes.

At moments ordinary habitats reminded me of Hopis in Tuba City or movies of middle class native Polynesia or New Zealand.

All of this accumulated in a gentle aesthetic, like eloquent poetry or a didgeridoo concert. In fact, certain repetitive bird sounds were reminiscent of the opening bars of a familiar didgeridoo piece.

On my second walk I went in the same direction in a larger loop and passed two beaches noted for snorkeling and surfing. The surf was high, the light bright, and there was too much energy for me to absorb—more than I could receive without feeling too dense and small. I sat in the rocks along the first beach, which was totally empty of players at this early hour. I watched the action in slurps of surf that came up over the first tier of rocks and oozed into tidepools. I stood just beyond the Pacific’s demise, though occasionally got splashed. I noted fish, snails, crabs, but mostly the underlying pattern of sea around rocks.

The black lava on the beach looks as though its pieces could just be lifted up and removed. Yet even small ones poking through the sand are attached to the mantle of the Earth. They are not separate stones; it is one big lava flow.

The second and larger beach, Lawa’i, was already full of wetsuits, surfboards, and snorkelers, at which I stared as if a travelogue of Hawai’i.

On my third walk, I headed back up the road toward the market and took out my iPod and earbuds. I was delighted that the angel who oversees such divinations immediately provided “Hawaii” by the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, a song that I don’t remember ever coming up before out of 2200 or so on my shuffle. It made me chuckle. Probably a coincidence, but a compelling one in a universe too big to map…. Probably not a coincidence….

Each of my three short walks was like a myth cycle comprising tension, apprehension, discomfort or stiffness of some sort, and then a release. That’s why I got into doing them. I could not have tolerated a second day like yesterday, laboring to achieve a high-profile tourist venue. And I would not have gotten this level of depth. So I kept walking and returning while Lindy worked at her laptop.

For my fourth walk I decided to try to get to where the turtles were. The cove is their station; they come early with the tide and depart in late afternoon. There were six or seven today, the largest number yet. They are huge, yet they just float. When their heads come above water, it is especially beautiful, as though geological ages are rushing past as we are the mere briefest of visitors to a cosmic event.

I undertook this outing a bit in frustration because I couldn’t interest Lindy yet in doing something more with the day. At her suggestion (and to buy time) I was working myself into an irritable state by trying on the cottage’s snorkel equipment—a rigmarole with mask and tube in the mouth. It seemed too overwrought and acquisitive of experience compared where I was. I didn’t want to get motion-sick again, especially since I was carrying the last swim and the hairpins to Waimea Canyon in me. Their aftermaths were creating a light latent nausea with a capacity for spaciousness and depth, a promising neural range and mindset.

It turned out to be a mistake to aggravate that mood by washing mouthpieces and trying to get them between my teeth. I had lost a fragile equanimity and was experiencing vexed feedback loops. That’s when I figured I’d try to visit the turtles as a way to snap myself out of it.

I knew that it was selfish and willful to bug the reptiles, especially for a narcissistic reason, as an antidote to irk and aggravation. They are content doing what they are doing on their primeval turtle clocks, and they don’t need to be interrupted by a human amusing himself on human time. Yet I also had a childish and vain disposition that they would understand my admiration of them and good intentions.

Ridiculous! I have observed countless tourists bugging the turtles over several days now, and I have been quite pissed at all of them, even the sweet father and daughter who swam down the lagoon this morning in snorkels and dislodged the beasts by trying to say hello to them and then swimming with them as if it were “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Then there was the matter of getting to the other side of the cove. A few days ago I tried the feat of climbing down vertical hillside through the foliage to reach the water. I did make it to the bottom of the slope without serious mishap, but I ended up much too far into the freshwater for turtles. Then my maneuvering to get back toward the saltwater left me with wet sneakers, relieved that I didn’t stumble and splash altogether.

During the prior two days, though, I had seen dozens of tourists on the rocks beside the turtles, including ladies in high heels with drinks in wine glasses and elderly couples with cameras. I know they didn’t scamper down the hillside.

The answer turned out to be to follow the road along the cove to the boat landing—a ten-minute walk from our cottage—then to go down to the water and work myself back on the lava rocks into the freshwater stream by hopping from stone to stone.

While not a stroll in the park, it was only slightly more challenging than hopscotch. It had been foolhardy not to explore the topography and just to charge down the hill.

Up close the turtles look older, more alien, and less friendly than from afar. Their expressions are beyond diffident, but I wouldn’t call them either aggravated or serene, though they have qualities of both. What they carry is not a human emotion; it is a mix of imperiousness, dignity, profundity, ferocity, wisdom. I don’t mean that they are smart in a human sense, nor do I want to inflate them in anthropomorphic terms. But they are massively intelligent. Their wisdom is the wisdom of their species, their longevity and their acquaintance on a daily basis with the sea and its mysteries.

Their heads are like shaman masks, their eyes reading the cosmos at their own frequency of cognition. The leathery necks and their movements of them suggest a model for E.T.

The sea turtles were not out of water long enough for me to tell if all of their splotches and bumps were their own tissues or attached crustaceans and other biology, but these beasts were as marked and hieroglyphic as Melville’s whales. Their breath as they surfaced, raising their crania out of the water, was guttural and rude. It had an audible hiss that sounded like rough industrial steam or Darth Vader. It reminded me of their cousins the snakes.

I engaged with three turtles, and each had a distinct look and personality. The largest was the most diffident and imperious. It registered my presence slowly, unafraid, and responded finally by floating off such that I never saw the impulse to move and be gone. A perfect t’ai chi ch’uan yield.

Its almost-as-large partner was never fully beached, so it gracefully propelled away with a light flip.

Further into the cove, a smaller, striped turtle tolerated my closer presence and allowed me to flatter myself with camaraderie as I edged right above it and knelt down to stare face to face. No amount of psychic attunement in the Etheric or Astral, either along the usual frequency or off to the right side of the plane (where animal consciousness purportedly resides) gained me anything more than a sarcastic gaze. Perhaps the animal remotely intuited what I was trying to do and viewed my shifts with disdain that I was attempting to intrude in its range. Kind of like, “As if they weren’t bad enough doing their own stuff, and this one flatters himself that he can actually vibrate with us. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

I reached down twice and touched its shell. I was surprised at its lightness and aliveness, a bit like a drum. At that gesture it sank a bit and seemed to levitate away, another perfect martial move, out of the handbook of “needle at sea bottom” or, more accurately “rollback left.”

The touch had been a discourteous imperialistic gesture on my part.

After a while, around 2:30, Lindy concluded that she had worked enough on her piece (spiritual activism for a Sufi chivalry anthology) that she was willing to try something else on the day. We debated about experimenting with the snorkel equipment at the nearby beaches with rockier reefs, and concluded that neither of us was particularly drawn to the logistics or the activity, and it was getting quite blowy by then. The wind was coming in great long gusts, calming, and then puffing hard again. That reinforced our reticence, Lindy’s from concern about lack of swimming skill and mine from predispositions to vertigo. So we selected the other option: Maha’ulepu, better known as Shipwreck Beach.

Ellias had recommended the place where Luminara and the children had gone while we visited; he called it the best beach on the south side of Kaua’i. In fact, after their visit I had set out to find it but had given up a little way down a dirt road. It was too late in the afternoon to be in that remote an area, and I wasn’t sure that the car could handle the surface. The beach was far more inaccessible than I had presumed.

The journey to Shipwreck involves a series of abrupt transitions. Going into this outing, I knew about the first few from my earlier foray: the road to Po’ipu Beach runs along a shopping center merging into a residential neighborhood. Then, past the beach, the real estate gets increasingly more luxurious with top-of-the-line condos, a Hyatt complex, and a self-proclaimed pro golf course. After the course, you drop, it seems, off the edge of the planet or at least of gentrified Po’ipu. Virtually nothing out there is chaperoned. Lava cliffs face the foreground, but the distance to them is imponderable. The road degrades from pavement to dirt. Smooth initially, the dirt becomes washboard and accordioned such that the car bumps freely from shoulder to shoulder. On either side are long fields to the horizon, mixed agriculture, a dump site, and mines, but even the agriculture looks untended and experimental, as if someone set a field out to grow and would be back in a few months to check it.

Then the road deteriorates further to potholes, some of them fucking unbelievable, as though the car might get stuck for good in one if you were going too slow. And it is impossible to gain any speed without feeling as though you might rip a wheel off. I used low gear on the automatic and maintained something like two miles an hour—it was still jarring.

After a while, the surface got even worse, as it alternated between potholes and cragginess, as if three-dimensional barcodes of rock had been imprinted into the road. All this time, the surrounding landscape grew more untended and barren. We were tempted at several junctures to turn around, but even a U-turn looked difficult to negotiate.

The road we were on dead-ended into other roads twice with some uncertainty as to which way to turn, and we made ninety-degree guesses onto feeder trails. Though there weren’t any follow-up markers after the first dirt road, the way to the beach was self-evident. We passed beachy SUVs and jeeps and later-model cars coming in the other direction, a tight fit which consigned one to the right side of the road at half a mile an hour. At the rockiest section, I rolled down my window and called to a passing SUV as to how far the beach was. A jovial native Hawaiian teenager smiled back, “Not far.”

Lindy shouted past me, “We don’t have four-wheel drive.”

He responded kindly, “You don’t need four-wheel drive. Mahalo.”

The whole trip from Po’ipu Beach to Maha’ulepu probably wasn’t three miles, but it took about twenty-five minutes. Following Ellias’ directions, we passed through two gates, then we skipped the main parking lot and followed a narrow road out of it. When we reached the beach proper, the activity in situ looked surprisingly normal for the remoteness: people cooking, tents for camping, eight or ten other cars.

Shipwreck was in truth a beautiful beach; it provided a zen moment, something like, ‘You really are in Hawai’i now.’ A wide-open vista of Pacific jumped the senses. Fine sand alternated with rocky sections. Faraway one could see different inlets in which surf was exploding. By now the sky was a rich blue, sailing classic cumuli. The breeze was sharp but warm.

Maha’ulepu was healing. Everything muddled and vexed in me seemed to clear at once and gradually in the surf. We stood there for about ten minutes, feeling the variation of the waves and getting the senses doused by water.

Strange as this might seem, a lot of old garbage swirled up to our spot: burnt wood, bottle caps, worn plastic, and a coat hanger, and yet it somehow didn’t seem to diminish the purity or overall healing capacity of the Pacific. It was more just outrageous and sad and left a deep regret for how mindlessly (and maybe not so mindlessly) destructive my species’ habitation of this planet is, how dismissive its treatment of the goddess, how blind to the delicate matrix from which we were alchemized.

“Entitlement” is the operative word. Epidemic narcissism. Sociopathy. I know it is impossible to stop this crud under the present rules of engagement. What are you going to say to a billion Chinese and East Indians? Nothing. What about the hordes of Westerners and Japanese on vacation with beers and sunscreen?

It will come to its denouement eventually.

Then the feeling of the sea created such a sense of bigness that the entire evolution of life and consciousness fell into a vast perspective of compassion, acceptance, and neutrality.

Redemptive though the spot was, it made sense to get out of the eddy that was cycling and clearing junk.

We moved about two hundred feet down the beach, away from the main populace and a little past a rocky section, and there we found fresh sand and continued our bath in the surf.

I always get a lot out of just lying at the edge of the ocean. I did it for hours at a time as a child on Long Island before the adults started sending me to those fascist Zionist boys’ camps. I have returned to the sea, looking for that delight and wonder when possible ever since.

Until this moment Po’ipu no ocean was ever as warm and inviting as my natal Atlantic of the late forties, so I lapsed into Proustian mode.

I remembered our cottage on Beech Street, the time I got lost when my mother sent me two blocks back to get our Nanny after my brother’s baby carriage was stuck deep in the sand. I walked past our house because the hedges had been trimmed that day and I didn’t recognize it. By the time a construction worker found me crying and then drove me around the neighborhood to look for my home, my mother had a collection of policemen on the porch and was hysterical. She wanted the man arrested. But it was her error to begin with: I was only three and a half. I can still remember the progression of feelings as I became aware that I didn’t know where I was. I was still young enough that I switched into a cosmic sorrow rather than fear.

I remembered too the nearby house with the large lawn in which Uncle Nook and Aunt Alice lived, with Uncle Moe their occasional guest. It was a splendid and magical place. They always produced a round pitcher of pink lemonade and had the ballgame on.

More than sixty years later, I understand the script. That friendly abode wasn’t where they really lived; it was a rental cottage too. Nook and Alice were not relatives but my stepfather Bob’s college friends, and Moe was Alice’s brother.

My stepfather, Bob Towers, had just married my mother after running off with her and getting her pregnant. She was still married to my father at the time of her affair leading to my brother. Twenty-three years later she would similarly leave Bob for Moe Kornhauser; yet she only stayed with the wealthy recluse and supposed confirmed bachelor for somewhat more than a year before moving back in with Bob. Soon thereafter, she committed suicide by jumping out her living-room window. She was officially still married to Moe, so she died as Martha Kornhauser. My brother, who was in a mental hospital at the time, got out after her death; he would become a street person on a vision quest for three decades until he too committed suicide, with a knife, thirty years and two months later.

The bittersweet imprints of these memories—our sensuous days at Long Beach with their unprobed malignancies and obscure romances imbedded such that they played as a dark fairy-tale in the mind of a child—left a mysterious and poignant residue of untold profundity and texture, impenetrable in its riddles and enigmas, omens and bottomless melancholy.

My own kids are now full-grown adults, busy in their professional and domestic lives, for this was so long ago as almost not to be of this epoch. Even our times at the beach in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, with our baby son Robin in the early seventies are themselves an eternity ago—forty years. Robin has a son older than he was then.

I scattered my brother’s ashes in the Atlantic in June of 2005.

In the Pacific at Kaua’i, it all feels present, immediate, charged with active energy. That is why I like feeding myself to the procession of waves. The more of it I feel now, the more I embrace and embody its grief in the irrepressible joy of sheer existence that overcomes loss and sorrow. The ocean holds that capacity for me; it can rescue and redeem memory; it can find my lost bodies and primal hopes and desires and raise them into possibility again.

For growing up in Denver, Lindy is less familiar with the sea. Despite our years in Maine and trips to L.A., this was possibly the first time she ever joined me sitting in the surf and receiving the waves. Amazed at how she got pushed around, she could not suppress a childlike delight. Though she didn’t want to stay in the water long, that one gesture of hers made our coming to Hawai’i a blessing.

Ocean water is of course a great healing medium, grounding and alkalizing (as David Wolfe reminded us). Being in such a vast cradle, rocked invisibly and mysteriously by the unassuming half-moon, playing possum up there among the sunny clouds, is as simple and pleasurable as it is unconditional and absolute. We don’t understand gravity, but it is omnipresent from the imperceptibly tiny to the imperceptibly huge; it rules every moment, every molecule and every cell.

We returned to Spouting Horn for sunset and saw some truly monumental geysers, the water hanging in the air before reappearing on the rock as if by magic.

Friday night. Our upstairs neighbors are gone, but it’s getting noisy in a frat-row sort of way. I learn later that an adolescent Southern California crew has hit the neighboring condo for the weekend; they turn up the music and smoke on their deck. These actions invade our space. Po’ipu might not have been the greatest choice, after all, during a weekend in Kaua’i. Luckily they export their growing party elsewhere.

Our one dinner out was budget-breaking, so we are cooking our vegetables and sweet potatoes, eating the avocados and papayas, etc., from Hanapepe. Yes, there are enticing restaurants in the vicinity, but we might as well not waste the ample stock we already have from the farmers’ market.

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July 17 (Day 6)

After a while, you just are someplace; everything isn’t gaga and new. In fact, the earnest enthusiasms of my previous days’ epistles seem a bit artificial and over-revved now.

We went on a walk in the neighborhood in the morning and discovered some overlooked little beaches and beachfronts just a block or two from our cottage: narrow passageways in between luxury houses ($7000 a week rentals as announced by fliers in boxes outside). Each alley led to a patch on the ocean, rocky or sandy and, by law, public-access. We explored a couple of those such that, after a while, we saw the ocean peeking, glinting, and exploding everywhere. I came away with a sense, incremental and cumulative over time, of the original global sea, omniscient and vast. This is different from an intellectual knowledge and sequential viewing of the same phenomenon—a series of snapshots and ritual ebulliences. It is more a deep absorption and collective internalization of the many views and scapes of waves and big surf, sky and clouds and horizon. The deeper, subliminal image taking root has elements that are indigenous and archetypal, imposing a sense of Captain Cook Land, Mark Twain’s Sandwich Islands, old royal Hawaii, or even islets in the ocean of creation itself.

I realize now that I actually had to see Hawai’i to get beyond a cartoon cliché of hula kitsch. That’s overstated, but it reflects a guilty truth.

What else on our walk? The distinctive style of local houses, not every single one but as a predilection toward a style—low and flat and square, thatch buildings made perchance of plaster and wood, elaborate peaked roofs that squat over the whole building like too big a miter, curling up very slightly at the perimeters with an elegant lilt, turning an ordinary bungalow into a small temple or shrine—a vague intimation of Pacific Northwest plank houses. I have heard that the local law decrees that nothing can be constructed that is taller than a palm tree; I have also heard that the hoteliers get around it by greasing the palms of legislators so that the first floor doesn’t count.

Continuous sunshowers, ‘liquid sunshine’ proclaimed as a greeting by strangers on the road. Maybe seven different weather systems whipped through by noon, ranging from hard rain to oven sun.

Our last stop on the walk was the cove across from our cottage. Three diving schools were conducting lessons at the landing, so we had to thread ourselves among oblivious and piqued students and their teachers in order to reach the rocks and get a look at our porch from the other side of the inlet.

I had been there; Lindy hadn’t. She chose to meditate on the sight and not hop on the lower-lying rocks to the turtle hangout, but I wanted another visit with the totem beings.

The big old guy was parked underwater in an indentation next to the shore, taking in the sun through the aqua. He was placid today, indifferent enough that I was able to lie down on my belly on the rocks and eye him through the transparency.

I got a real sense of his presence. His body was radically covered with barnacles and parasitic DNA like tattoos or badges of initiation marking his dominant elder status.

I had a strong desire to clean him. What I thought was his strange agog left eye was actually a shell attached where his eye-socket was and completely covering any organ of sight. I wished I had the training or gumption to remove the shell, but then I wasn’t sure there would even be an eye under there anymore or that he wasn’t at truce with the barnacle. I didn’t want to interfere with a being so old and of such high rank, and I also didn’t want to get summarily bitten.

Once, he brought his mask and reptilian neck above the water, to take a quick husky breath, perhaps to deign notice of me, then return to siesta.

We spent the whole middle chunk of the day (five hours, counting driving time) visiting Ellias, Luminara, and the Lonsdale tribe at their home up the mountainside in Wailua. Getting there, we lost the way. The official mileage was under twenty but, as was becoming typical for Kaua’i, it took over an hour. The main source of our confusion arose from three distinctly different streets beginning with the letters “Puu.” On the mainland, that spelling would have been a gimme, but here it was orthographic commonality (I later remember that the street of our condo also begins with “Puu”). Of course, all it ever takes is one wrong choice for all of the subsequent directions in a sequence not only to be rendered useless but to lead one into a maze of compounded errors that becomes hard to wind back out of. We finally got to Puupilo and followed it to the house at the end.

Before we got lost on roads outside Wailua, we did manage to stop at ‘Opaeka’a Falls. The moment was particularly rainy in a sunshowery day, and we stood in a warm downpour, staring over the ravine at the stately feng shui of descending water against jagged lava peaks—delicate silver on black. Rain was traveling in a stiff wind across the canyon, adding emphasis to the elemental appearance. It was a perfect moment to seek undines. When I tried to change my frequency to the Astral while looking at the waterfall, I had a remote inkling of a laughing water gnome, akin to Istiphul or Amue. But I wasn’t in an advanced enough state of practice or a sacredness deep enough for the queen to allow more than the quickest, wave-particle glimpse of her royal self.

The four Lonsdale children struck me again as visitors from an emerald realm or a distant galaxy. They are enchanted as elves and yet as earnest and straightforward as monks. Though Savitrie still didn’t voice any of her fabled French or Chinese when we were there, we were assured once again that she did so periodically, with an impeccable accent. Despite the fact this was her cranky day she had a disconcertingly knowing twinkle in her eye. Kalky hugged us and the other company repeatedly as he circled the patio, and then he, Allie, and Rafael engaged Lindy in a complicated game involving races, climbing trees, tumbling, dancing, and group embracing.

Their company was another couple who were invited to drop by while we were there, countercultural friends of Ellias and Luminara from just down the hillside. Curtis McCosco is big soft man with a Queequeg visage who floated like a cloud or friendly ghost, a Mayan-culture expert/one-time Yucatan explorer/adjunct Hollywood technician on Kaua’I, before that a San Francisco digger who took his sixties calling East during the seventies to run a food project in Boston. He had been on Kaua’i for twenty-one straight years and rarely left the island for the mainland.

His partner was KatRama, older than Curtis and as chiseled and tight a little wire as he was a cloud raccoon. If he was a tropical snowman, she was a candelabra. Long ago, as a child, she and her family escaped the holocaust by a back route, fleeing Germany by way of Shanghai and then, as the Japanese invaded China, La Paz, Bolivia. This multiple escape across childhood was emblazoned in her otherwise unflagging joy, giving it a brittle spunk and buoyancy. Now the couple conducts spiritual weddings with astrological readings on Kaua’i.

Oddly they met Ellias and Luminara because Curtis receives review copies of books from our press and happened to get the 2012 book written by Ellias’ disciple Mark Borax. He doesn’t particularly fancy astrology, so he passed that one on to KatRama, the astrologer of the two of them. She was so taken with it that she wanted to contact Ellias at once. She called the number listed in Santa Cruz and got a voicemail saying “Aloha, I am in Hawai’i,” and giving the number there. Only when she rang it did she discover that he was on Kaua’i, living three blocks from her sister in Princeville. He has moved much closer to them since.

Curtis and KatRama shared the second half our time at the Lonsdales, during which our conversations ran along metaphysical, nostalgic, and New Age gossip tracks, re-evoking in particular the Summer of Love, but also a lot of 2012 stuff, Curtis’ particular long-time forte. He had tried to make a documentary film of the Maya and their calendar as far back the seventies and now was a major 2012 blogger.

Ellias said that apocalyptic ideas interested him a lot, not because he believed in them but because he was taken with their energy. He was speaking particularly of various recent “end of the world” scenarios based on the oil spill and methane exploding in the Gulf.

The conversation meandered through the esoteric nature of families, the karma of adult children, Kaua’iana, astrology, and the fake Intelligent Design crowd that uses 2012 as a Christian Fundamentalist trope. The children, insofar as they participated, took it quite seriously and even supplied some free-association thoughts. It was play, but on some level it was real for them. The tone and the subliminal message, if not the transitory meanings, clearly touched their beings.

Curtis and Ellias were both in San Francisco during the summer of ’67, and they agreed that it was rightly named, not out of romantic or sexual love, though those too, yes, but actual love—love emanating from the universe.

“I came out from college at Binghamton to see what was happening,” Ellias recalled, “and it was like nothing I had ever imagined. People were actually practicing love, loving one another. What a thing!”

“I thought it was going to change the whole planet,” Curtis went on. “I was wrong, but I was so young and naïve.”

“It did change the planet,” I offered, “but as a seed. It is now everywhere, but the plants haven’t yet grown.”

“They called us ‘flower children,’” Ellias added, “but we were actually seed children. It wasn’t flower time yet. It was only planting time.” He laughed at the notion.

“We missed the whole thing,” I mused. “Back then we were in a totally different context and frame of mind, stuck on the Hopi reservation, trying to do anthropology. It wasn’t the summer of love there. It was something far more cosmological and ominous, but part of the same larger vibration. After all, what unfolds in decades for us subtends centuries and millennia of Hopi time. And they reflected that end of the scale.”

“What was wrong with our assessment,” Ellias glossed onto that, meaning ‘as different from the Hopi,’ “was that we each thought that we were the center of the universe. We each had such a powerful vision we thought it was the vision. Whenever two of us got together, it was a kind of a battle to see who was God. That ended eventually, as it had to. I was a slave to my emotions then. Since that time, I have learned to live from wisdom, from what I have learned, because without wisdom, you just react, you go in circles. You believe whatever you believe, as though it is also real. When you and I met in Vermont in ’75, I was just a bundle of ideas and emotions. I had to learn to become the thing I was studying, and that took years.”

He spoke again, as at our earlier meeting, of his children as spirits rather than egos. “I know their beings far more than I know their personalities. In fact, I hardly know their personalities. But that’s because I don’t read them only on an emotional level.”

As we departed, the children pranced around, hugging us goodbye again and again. When I explained the origin of our Island Motors white clunker, Curtis remarked, “I love Joel, but I would never rent a car from him, ever.”

Tonight we resisted the temptation to go to the 12th Annual Sunset Ho’olaule’a at the Sheraton Kaua’i across the cove. Instead we sat on the porch for a couple of hours, sampling warm breezes off the Pacific, watching clouds move and stars appear (Scorpio the proximal constellation). We could see the turtles swimming before it got dark.

Then Planet Earth was marked by the lights of night divers, as we listened to their calls and splashes—flashlights over the rocks and phosphor glows in the sea.

A stream of car and bus lights headed to the free concert, as sounds of the bands wafted in the wind over the water or were blunted to the point of silence by the same wind, its thrashy miked rock not very enticing, yet oddly appealing as an intermittent buffeted note in the general night mix.

The mélée of the sounds made a pleasant John Cage adagio in the theater of Pacific astronomy, the wind the dominant and consummate instrument providing delectable sensations as well as myriad drums against trees and the cottage. The darkness was penetrated with different degrees and kinds of light, moving and still—above, in, and across the water. It was pleasant enough to sit there forever, thinking one’s own thoughts. The breeze never stopped its entertainment, and that was finally more on our wavelength than it would have been to have driven into the rumpus across the cove.

It became a pathway to luminous, esoteric dreams.

As the hour turned late, sirens filled the air, alongside the music, as all of the ten or so officers rumored to police this island must have gone into action. Earlier in the evening five of them had a roadblock outside of Po’ipu for breathalyzer tests. We were waved through.

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July 18 (Day 7)

Last day in the south. Sunday. We went down the nearest alley and sat in a patch of ocean between two super-condos. Public access was almost totally camouflaged there, but you might as well hide cake wrapped in a napkin from ants. Several other people were on this small but exquisite sandy beach. It rained on and off, even with the sun out.

Lying in the tide never loses its charm or sensuousness. One of the supreme pleasures here is ten or fifteen minutes in the cool ocean, then a hot outdoor shower to wash off the sand.

In the afternoon we tried the shopping centers—Old Town Koala and then Po’ipu Village—expensive and tinselly—but Lindy likes to walk the stores at least once every place we go.

We were suddenly immersed in tourist Hawai’i. Po’ipu Village could have been in Fort Lauderdale or Monterey, except that everything carried an air-cargo surcharge. Crazy to buy something that was just flown in and then fly it back out, but that’s the human footprint in these paradoxical times.

Perhaps the most interesting moment, other than watching teenyboppers try on surfing gear, was inspecting the old barber’s chair and toilet in the open-air Koala Museum, little more than a flea market with a museum sign.

Fourteen turtles in the cove. Definitely a record. The previous high was seven. I guess it was Turtle Sunday. Five giant ones lay side by side, their shells drying in the sun. They lazed around, swam, beached again. One got caught between rocks and was flailing away with all four legs, making a distressing scratching sound, and I was going to rush down and save it (it would have taken me ten minutes to get to where it was), but Lindy convinced me it could handle the situation. It wasn’t easy to watch it struggle nor was it in any way elegant how it extracted itself, but it did, and, projection or not on my part, I think it was happy to be swimming again as it bobbed up and down, water-dancing in celebration.

I spent a lot of the day watching the turtles and writing. I was still absorbing vestigial car and ocean motion-sickness, slowed down and suffused with the relics and reflections of a lifetime. I savored them in a light malaise—what Sartre perhaps meant by “nausea,” the world blending with the vestigial self and its vague ambitions.

Most things about my life I recognize happening to other people, more or less. One thing I don’t is the way I get totally overwhelmed and spooked by sheer energy and situations—nothing in particular, at least nothing that can be tied to a discrete event that explains or legitimizes the feeling), just the sheer alien-ness and impossibility of life in this strange creation.

We are all of the same psyche and genome, so I suspect that this state is not as idiosyncratic as it seems, though I usually feel as though I am the only one in its purgatory and everyone else circulating around me is more or less of the world and hunky-dory.

A place can be wonderful and still too much. There were plenty of moments on this Sunday when I preferred to be back home. My internal life sends unexpected curves through each day, no matter where I am, and against an exotic backdrop, it sometimes can be hard to process self and landscape together. The basic conflict is more profound and excruciating because the surreal landscape adds a soporific, dreamlike overlay.

It is a slight degree of undifferentiated anguish or disorientation, experienced silently while carrying on life as if normal, in the parody of shopping centers or merely interrogating the existentiality of objects in sunlight. At once, it is a challenge and really an extraordinary thing, but so is its potential for rebirth.

This has always happened, at some level or other, even in childhood before I had a name for it and it was just “that feeling.”

I have to ride it through, even if it paralyzes or terrifies me. On the other side of it, I tend to be refreshed, my perspective shifted, a different person. There’s apparently no way else for me to shift except through the active core. So the engagement with the shadow is a net gain. It reminds me of an old homily: “He was ultimately on the side of the angels, but his way of getting there was enough to make the angels weep.”

Kaua’i has a distinct latent energy, and some of what I am encountering is the vibration of that broadcast. On some level I feel as though I am receiving a high frequency, both disturbing and healing, joyful and desolate, and it alone is more than my consciousness can assimilate. I process what I can, enough gradually to come out of my funk.

That is mainly what I have been working on today, using the tools and initiations I have accumulated over a lifetime—psychological, Buddhist, psychic, somatoemotional, yogic, imaginal. All Sunday I am in survival mode.

What else? Doing the laundry in the condo’s rusty coin-op machines. Plotting out meals to finish up the last of the vegetables and other fare. Striking up a conversation with the Hawaiian gent around the corner about his life up to the moment, then my life, the mainland, his bonzai trees. It’s always good to get unisolated. Humans feed off the energetic filaments of connection, even when they’re vague or superficial.

Watching the lizards on the porch. Tracking the complicated bird calls (they get into your head like catchy tunes). Trying to wake up all day. Struggling with nebulous uneasiness: the noise, the heat, the brightness, bursts of wind, cars, leaf blowers in condo-land, constant tourist energy, imposed fun, all the land’s contradictions and anomalies. In fact, I met the man watering his lawn because the operation of a leaf-blower right alongside our cottage was giving me a splitting headache, both physical and epistemological, and I went for a walk.

Our author William Mistele flew over from Oahu for an evening visit and chat— first, our eggplant-squash-papaya-spinach dinner, then a walk to the moonlit ocean. His book Undines came out this month; it is a treatise on elemental water in nature and human personalities, the basic mermaid.

Bill talked about tracking down undines among men and women, mostly women, and interviewing them—human mermaids and mermen. He was collecting their back stories and past lives in other bodies. He considered the undine a previously undiscovered psychological type, missed by Jungians as well as Freudians.

I asked him why just water elementals, and he said because the other elements (earth, air, fire) are fully expressed and present in the contemporary world, but the water element with its timelessness, empathy, and neutrality has been pretty much lost. Fire and electricity dominate the planet and its casino-capitalist culture, so water—the spectrum of undine and mermaid vibrations—is needed to balance it.

Bill is a quirky, mellow, story-telling dude, a notch younger than us. What was most fascinating was his own autobio. He was born and raised in a super-prominent, wealthy (and evangelical) Detroit family whose fortune was based on the conversion of the key twentieth-century elemental—the salamander: oil and gas (“Everywhere I looked in Detroit during my childhood I saw trucks with my name ‘Mistele’ on the side”). His parents socialized with the Fords and Kresges. He raced sailboats in his youth, was brought up to be the family lawyer or financier, at least to excel in conventional terms. His mother, for instance, pulled off a triple major, geology, economics, and meteorology, at Michigan, plus she had many later accomplishments—she was even present when the Wright Brothers tested their plane. Bill feels that he has spent his life fleeing and honoring his past. He has been in Oahu since 1982, married a Chinese lady, his empress and queen in previous lifetimes, he says, and he raised his kids there.

He has both a highly educated and a completely funky air, so it was as though I was being addressed on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue by a professor of philosophy and a gabby street person in one solicitation.

Over the years Bill has trained himself esoterically, first in Hopi shamanism (he learned the Hopi language, something I tried and failed to do in graduate school in 1967); then he mastered Franz Bardon’s system of magic. A legendary Czech psychic and evoker of elementals, Bardon, according to Bill, chose explicitly to be born at a particular time and place, after World War I, to help confused and aimless humanity, to teach dissatisfied souls who felt they had been robbed of their divine birthrights. To accomplish that mission, he walked out of the aether into some kid’s body, inherited his karma because that’s the way cosmic law works: You take a body, you owe that body’s karma. He taught his magic system from within the karma of the “stolen” body (he made other arrangements for the kid), so all the bad things—chain-smoking, illness, imprisonment—that were going to happen to that body happened to him. But at least he got his teaching done. Again, that’s the story.

Just another back story on a day of back stories and fairy tales: undine back stories, Bill’s life narratives and his past lives of mermaids, my own lingering shadows. Such stories are not about whether they are real or make-believe; their point is only to be heard and experienced and to reveal things that wouldn’t be otherwise known.

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July 19 (Day

This being our last morning in the South, I decided first thing to go into the water. Bathing suit, towel…stroll down the street, narrow alley…beach. The little stretch of ocean on Hoona Street is a gem; a rocky breakwater catches and dampens the waves, turning the last two hundred feet into almost a wading pool. One can still watch the explosion of ocean on the rocks beyond.

How big a medicine the combination of light, waves, sound, and elemental energy is I didn’t realize (or need to realize) in my childhood. I just drank it in with bottomless attention and capacity. Now each oceanic encounter seems sacred, requiring modulation, care, restraint, or I leave myself too open and get more than I can ingest. That is why lying in the waves is an internalizing practice more than a joyride. That’s also why it’s good to think about mermaids, inside personality and outside in nature.

Bill came by at nine for an hour-plus of more undine talk; a few things stand out:

Before Bill left, he shook hands with me outside our cottage and solemnly passed on a transmission. It rang true and also startled me for how clearly he was seeing Lindy and me. He had an internal picture of our meeting and the forces at work. Beneath our surface propriety and intellects, he said that he saw the many different fires burning in both of us and wished us godspeed in containing them.

It’s always a gift to have a teacher open truth lines behind the face of the world.

The subsequent transition to Noniland was a major one because it entailed geography, climate, and culture. We went from the beach to the hills, from more sun and heat to more clouds and rain, but mainly from the American recreational manor with its industrial and commercial hubbub to the communal world with its silence, wind chimes, and prayers.

When we arrived, Nick Good was conducting a group circle for the dozen or so people working the farm, making the superfood products. They were discussing productivity and work schedules and how to put their spiritual practices into the business. They broke briefly to say hello and greet us, as we gradually got our stuff up to the second floor.

There has been a remarkable eight-minute-or-so alternation of rain and sun here such that it is baking hot and then the clouds burst in a downpour—sun then deluge, sun then deluge. I was lying on the grass in the delectable heat when the first one hit. I decided to continue to lie there. I could see sunny sky off to either side, but thick cumuli were welling up and darkening above me. Their droplets were so fat that I followed them out of the distance from the sky.

Making the panorama all the more complex, bees from the Noniland hives swarmed among the droplets, as though taking a bath too.

The sound of the rain on the tropical leaves was like a thin hollow drum or an awning—each leaf a distinct frequency. In less than a minute I was soaked. Someone up on the lanai commented afterward that they wondered how long it would be before I moved. I said that I was mainly worried that Lindy would call for me to come in out of the rain. “You can take care of yourself,” she snapped.

“It’s good ormus,” added one of the young guys, meaning good orgone: alkalinity, ions, electrical neutrality. Ormus is a psychic alchemical element—technically (and metaphorically) monatomic white-gold nanoparticles or metals in an altered atomic state.

At Noniland there are great bananas everywhere. Fresh out of bunches off trees and hung on the lanai, they have a sharper, more lemony taste than store-bought ones and are not quite so mushy sweet. Most of you know that. In fact, I did too, but I experienced these anew with beginner’s mind.

If all the books floating around in piles and pods in this house were assembled into an organized library, it would be a strange amalgam of conspiracy theory, tree houses, earth houses, radical architecture, sacred architecture, raw food, longevity, tribes, peak performance, and occult sci-fi. I spent twenty minutes on a couch with David Icke’s recent book, illustrated luxuriantly in Disney color by Neil Hague. It is basically the story (or myth or paranoid fantasy or what-have-you) of the captivity of the human soul and body-mind by a reptilian conspiracy embedded on the Moon in another dimension. In fact, the Moon is asserted to be an artificial alien object, both a portal to elsewhere and a control center for the Earth. Everything down here is ruled by the reptilian brain, which keeps humankind on a sensory download such that people are manipulated and separated from the truth and real energy of the greater universe.

This cosmology brings together the Illuminati, Bob Frissell’s Luciferian conspiracy, the Martians, Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger, the Trilateral Commission, the Rothschilds, the “Zionist Main Frame,” the UN, the Bilderberg Club, the Neo-cons, the so-called Demo-cons (updated to include Obama with a cartoon of the same puppet strings attached to him as to Bush), the tenth planet Nibiru, the war in heaven, the creation of the asteroid belt, the simultaneous rupturing of higher human consciousness, etc. As a story, it is a mishmash, indulgently crazy and fake. Then Hague’s illustrations are like some Satanic Alex Grey on ayahuasca cum Rube Goldberg, but they lay it out in Gothic splendor. As a trope for the present state of things, it’s brilliant, innocent, and ecstatic: like our daughter declared of Bob Frissell once: nothing he says is true, but it’s exactly how things are.

When I asked people here about the book, I learned that Icke used to be a European football star and then he started doing this stuff a few years ago. Though I’m not sure anyone takes him at face value, he is a Noniland icon, and the single copy of the book is well-beat-up, in prominent display on the lanai.

Community papaya salad, manna bread, and goat cheese—an afternoon repast.

This is a tree house too in a way. The shower is set up high, looking out on trees and garden, so the sense is of bathing in a glade.

A girl downstairs is training the Hawaiian fire dance….

Lindy and I hiked up to the top-of-the-world meadow among the cattle and then walked a third of the way through the high grass to the nearby sacred hill. It still resembles a castle in the Astral.

Trying to cook organic spinach pasta and organic tomato sauce at a raw-food place is not only embarrassing but a challenge. No can-opener. Finally Trevor stabbed the can successfully with a knife.

Raw pumpkin pie made by Magic. Pau d’arco mint vanilla leaf tea. The energy level picked up after dinner. Of course, everyone is much younger than us, but people are people and we talked in to the dark with a candle, great Avocado stories, shared histories and pasts.

There was a white owl circling, and the waxing moon in the trees added to the enchantment.

One very sweet young girl with long braids and a strong, wise face named Layla is staying at Noniland because she was robbed of all her belongings while hiking on the island (there is a new epidemic here of meth-head crooks). Giving her account on the lanai, she was astonishingly forgiving of them, alive in her practice of extending compassion and love toward the perpetrators, also toward the callous police whose attitude, she described, as pretty much: “So the little girl got careless and lost her backpack and cell phone; what do you want us to do?”

She seems completely clear in her heart and head, no spiritual bypassing or New Age acting. She says that things were meant to happen this way because, if she hadn’t gotten robbed, she wouldn’t have ended up in Noniland; she wouldn’t have made all these new friends.

For a long while Lindy and I sat separately with Nick Good on the lanai, debriefing his view of Avocado’s whole scene as well as his own spiritual journey. I realized, as I listened to him, that Avocado is this high-energy combo of imp, satyr, boy-child, shaman, healer, jock, one-time Iranian royalty (before the fall of the Shah). With the raw-man not present, we got to see him through the other people’s eyes. His reality arises in the distance, and he is more here for not being here.

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2010 Kaua’i Trip

Richard Grossinger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:53:03 +0000

July 12 (Day 1)

Lindy and I are in Hawai’i for the first time. Today we flew from Oakland to Honolulu to Lihu’e Airport on Kaua’i. The trip was planned six weeks ago to celebrate our forty-fourth wedding anniversary as well as Lindy’s retirement last Friday. We picked Kaua’i because our raw-food author David Wolfe (a.k.a. Avocado) invited us to stay at his communal farm, Noniland, on the North Shore for a week this month and also because our long-time friend and psychic author, Ellias (a.k.a. William) Lonsdale, ended up here. Another inducement was the presence of warm-water ocean. That had long been my acme of hedonism, and we also wanted to do something more adventurous this time than just another drive down the coast to L.A. or San Diego.

Our location is not on the beach proper, as I thought it would be. From the online promo, photos, and my talks on the phone with the lady who owns this condo, Lori, I pictured Turtle Cottage alone in a small environmentally protected cove, and I worried a bit about isolation. No worries there. In fact, “Turtle Cottage” is an ordinary condo on an ordinary residential street lined with other condos and beach cottages on a hillside looking down into Turtle Cove. At four times the price maybe we could have been on the beach.

I don’t like flying. I can’t relax in a living room that is really a cushioned metal can packed with explosives and propelled through the sky 37,000 feet above the ground. I’d be happier if they stripped out all the upholstery, the food, the entertainment, the flight attendants, and euphemisms, and transported us like troops. That would at least cut the macabre “twilight zone” ambiance of a soporific environment. The inside of a commercial jet flight is too much like a dream or perhaps a theatrical skit, as pernicious in its way as other rigged institutional settings from hospitals to public schools to funeral parlors. When you suppress and mask the shadow, the shadow is suddenly everywhere.

A quotient of my anxiety was my North American provinciality, never having flown west of California or over the Pacific before. It amounted to a disbelief that there was anything out here before Asia. One accepts the putative geography intellectually (volcanic islands), but it is still a stretch to image a noncontiguous state of the Union in the middle of vast ocean.

A few weeks before we left, I stared again and again at a satellite photograph of North America at night in a book at a friend’s house in order to reassure myself by the smidgen of habitation lights in the Pacific and also to verify that they weren’t all that far from the mainland if I held my thumb on the scorched San Francisco Bay megapolis and my forefinger on the faint glow of Oahu.

Yet when we flew out of Oakland this morning, I had the unquellable sense that we were going to vanish off the edge of the world, that there would be nothing there. What if the plane missed the Hawaiian isles, mere tiny specks amid all that water? What if the land failed rise out of the deep to meet our descent?

I also remembered Stephen King’s line about there being “no breakdown lanes in the sky” (as an explanation for why he doesn’t get on planes to go anywhere—clearly Hawai’i is not in his future plans). There are no cities or airports or even fields in the ocean, should the plane encounter twin engine problems. It’s an act of faith, but unless you commit private acts of faith along the way, you never get out of your habits and ruts, or life’s doldrums.

Our two pilots were hanging around the gate, so I got up my courage—as it was a little embarrassing at my age—to ask, “This is my first time going to Hawaii; is it generally bumpy or smooth?”

The guy’s answer was predictable: “Depends on the day. Today should be calm, but I’ll tell you what, we’ll try to make it as smooth as possible.”

This is, after all, America.

After the big roar down the runway and burst into the sky, the flight was in fact fairly mellow—long stretches of calm punctuated with mild turbulence, two sudden drops that were over before I could dwell on them. I consoled myself by how fast we were moving compared to any wind-speed on the Earth—a missile through transparent fog.

The ocean below didn’t read as ocean; it was too far down. What I saw were armadas of mostly cumulus and cirrus clouds to the horizon above an amorphous blue field. The flight was actually most bumpy when there were no clouds. There were also long quiet stretches in which a blanket of low mist covered the Pacific.

After five hours the outlying streets of Honolulu manifested suddenly out of the ocean and, as a land mammal for last several hundred million years, I found the sight of conventional streets and buildings utterly beautiful. It was a tad challenging for those guys to corral the big bird at five hundred and seventy miles an hour and bring the metal down onto the runway, and we bounced once before settling.

At the Honolulu Airport we took the so-called Wiki Wiki shuttle bus from the mainland and international section to Kaua’i gate. I have never witnessed such anarchy before in an airport as the random particle motion across the inter-island section where Honolulu is a hub for flights to the other islands. It was a madhouse cacophony—too many kids, too much carry-on luggage, too many cheap stores and fast-food patios—though I’m sure that most of the Third and Fourth World would make it look prim and regal by comparison. You can’t fly directly from Mau’i or Molokai to Kaua’i, but you can, by way of Honolulu. So it was more like a bus depot than an airport.

The Oahu to Lihu’e flight was listed as 37 minutes on our itinerary, so I tended to discount it—sort of, if we make it to Honolulu we’re home free. However, the smaller, older jet rattled so much on the runway before take-off, making an inconsistent sound that I had never heard from a plane engine—like a broken vacuum cleaner in reverse—that Lindy was led to remark: “I hope they service these.” Also our one pilot looked as though he had just tossed aside his surfboard, suited up, and hurried into the cockpit.

Getting into the air on this vehicle was much more mechanical, as though we were motoring through water. I wondered how high we would climb. After all, at a half hour from an airport planes usually begin their descent. Yet we kept going, up above the clouds, quite bumpy in stretches. The tiny atolls and isles made a distracting vista.

It was not reassuring when the single male steward started beverage service at fifteen minutes into the flight. It made me wonder if we were on the right plane.

Kaua’i is not that far from Oahu, but the route follows a kind of S-curve, winding out of Honolulu and across Oahu, then across the ocean, around Kaua’i, down into Lihu’e. We started to descend at about twenty-five minutes. Then I saw the peaks of Kaua’i in the distance.

Lihu’e Airport read as out of a World War II movie, tastefully decorated with botanical themes.

As instructed by the printout from our auto-rental agency, we phoned a taxi for the one-mile ride to its facility in an industrial park.

Car rentals are very expensive on Kaua’i (no economy of scale—they’ve got to transport vehicles to a somewhat inaccessible locale). At the advice of our colleagues at Noniland, we phoned their favorite cheapo rental agency, Island Car, and made what-amounted-to-a-reservation over the phone. At $20 a day it was less than a third the cost of the lowest other firm. I say “amounted to” because they didn’t want a credit card (“Pay by cash or check when you get here”), no last name either (“‘Richard’ will do”), no model selection either. And their phone had no answering machine and was only picked up on the seventh ring just before I hung up on my third try over two days.

Now the other shoe dropped. We were handed a single key to a Subaru with a smashed front windshield (in two places), a missing back window (cardboard in its place), and the trunk key broken off in the trunk keyhole. You had to laugh: this was charming and hilarious in its own way.

Just to get operating metal robots onto this island is a big deal and leaves a financial as well as a carbon footprint. Smashed windshield, missing rear window, trunk key stuck in the slot, broken fuel gauge too, but the old gal ran, and you don’t throw something like that away once you got it here.

Making do with bricolage is part of the culture.

Lori, the lady who owns this condo thought it was pretty funny when she came by to check on us (“you must have gotten their best vehicle”), and so did upscale guests sharing the condo with us (“I thought you might have a friend on Kaua’i who loaned you his old car”).

Even though we had “reserved” our vehicle over a month ago, it turned out that there were no more unrented cars left on the island, at least according to Island Car honcho Joel, an exceptionally laid-back chap out of a Coen Brothers’ version of a Cheech and Chong movie. He was in no hurry at all and seemed preoccupied with anything but us. He gave us forms to fill out and about forty minutes in which to do it. Meanwhile he held two interminable conversations (as his rang consecutive times), conducting something other than the car business, exchanges in which the other party would blab (ostensibly) for a minute or two and Joel would finally provide two or three spacey, offhand words like, “Yeah, okay.” Finally, when Lindy protested, first that we needed attention and then that the car was too funky and probably not even legal, Joel agreed and offered us his own car for another $5 a day.

“What will you drive?”

“I’ll drive that one.”

That didn’t feel quite proper, so we decided to wait to see if he could come up with another by tomorrow.

In the Island Car one-page printout, it says explicitly, “If you are high-maintenance, take your business elsewhere,” but “high maintenance” could be extended to mean anything, including any legitimate complaint. At one point Lindy protested, “I’m not high maintenance, unless you consider wanting a windshield that’s not cracked in two places high maintenance.”

“I hear you, but I don’t have any other cars.”

She pointed to one.

He smiled sagely: “My employee who owns that wouldn’t like me renting it.” Then he waved wearily at another, fairly normal-looking if old vehicle. “If I can find some tires for that, I’ll have it ready tomorrow. See, the tires are too small.”

Then why were they on the car?

“When will you get new tires?” Lindy asked, playing her game of “be definite,” a game I never have the gumption or enough ambition of assertiveness to play.

“This afternoon I hope.” By then it was only around two PM local tiempo, for we had gained three hours by flying 2500 miles west. We decided to take the Subaru and come back in the morning.

It seems very old here in Kaua’i, a bit like the fifties. I can’t explain that impression because modernity displays itself everywhere—on the SUV-dominated roads, in the road-sign subtexts, and among the ubiquitous flashy resorts. Yet there is an interior sensation, seeping up from the beaches and the fields, of long ago and faraway, like not just the past but a storybook country that I might have visited in childhood. The landscape is cinematic in its strangeness—the generous light, the high grasses, the wanton trees packed with giant fruits. And, yes, I have always wanted to swim in a warm ocean.

Lori, our hyper-chatty landlady, a Canadian so originally from Saskatoon that she will never stop congratulating herself for ending up in the sun, gave such up-tempo, rapid-fire instructions about where to find groceries, beaches, and restaurants that, by the time she was done, all the routes and streets with Hawaiian names had blended. I did want to nail the nearest beach, so I got her to repeat that one. She had described what seemed like a wonderful Sheraton site less than a mile away. When I wondered whether we needed to be guests of the hotel, she explained that all oceanfront in Hawai’i is public land. “And anyway,” she added, “the Sheraton is just an extension of Po’ipu Beach. Take your first right out of here; go to the end of the road, as far as you can. Then park. If you want, you can also go just beyond that right, back into the roundabout, and the first right out that will take you to the main section of Po’ipu.”

Then, wanting to make sure that we saw Turtle Cove, she opened the curtains and sliding glass door and led us out onto the porch. Sure enough, four giant sea turtles, big as life, were basking in the sun along the far shore. Another was swimming alongside them, thrashing its legs in an effort to dock.

First thing after Lori left we visited the local market, less than half a mile back on the road, and stocked up on stuff that would be bearable to consume. The place did have some organic vegetables and a small natural-foods section; the prices, as rumored, were astronomical (by mainland standards), about 25-30% more for anything in a package or can. There is a premium on these goods from hauling them there across water usually twice (mainland to Oahu first).

We bought a small cut of local ono (fish) to base dinner around and, otherwise, got salad stuff, crackers, bread, cheese, yogurt, a pineapple, and mineral water.

It reminded me of Lindy’s and my first shopping expedition together, during the summer after junior year of college, 1965, Aspen, Colorado—long, long ago. No natural foods then on the horizon; it was Goodman’s Noodles, Campbell Soups, Borden’s Cheese, Pepperidge Farm brands, stuff we took for granted then as eternal objects. Not even a clue of the great exposé that was coming, for us and the culture.

The best part of the Po’ipu grocery run was the girl on line ahead of us who, when asked her point of origin by the cashier, volunteered that she had just arrived from Greenland.

Island to island, ice to tropics, jets crisscrossing Holocene Earth.

After we stashed the food, I figured the sun was still enough above the horizon that I put on a bathing suit under my pants, got in the clunker, took the first right, and parked in a public lot short of where Lori had directed me to. I didn’t bother to lock the car. That would have seemed overkill.

I walked the length of the Sheraton, just beyond its rows of fashionable resort guests, dressed for the Riviera on their lawn chairs, sipping their evening drinks.

I spent a half hour lying in the waves,

This was what I always planned to do someday in mythical Hawai’i if I ever overcame plane-phobia and got myself there. Such big crashing waves on such soft dark brown sand. Surreal.

We have two weeks on Kaua’i, the first in the tourist part, Po’ipu Beach, the south; the second at Avocado’s communal farm Noniland up north. We’ll go see him tomorrow (Tuesday), as we want to catch him before he leaves for the mainland on Thursday. Then we are spending part of Wednesday with Ellias, who lives in Wailua up past the airport.

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July 13 (Day 2)

An island. That is always compelling. I have been on many special islands, and they have an ineffable quality in common. Mount Desert offers the most compelling comparison: an island with mountains. Lindy and I have tried to guess how much bigger Kaua’i is than MDI. She thinks five times. I think it is more like two to three. The mountains here are certainly bigger, far more jagged and foreboding, like gapped, irregular teeth of an ogre.

I am also reminded of Iceland (where we went in ’06): the volcanic blackness of the rock, the seeming uninhabitability of large sections of land, the high food and gas prices.

We have been told many times in just a little over a day to have the aloha spirit, by ordinary people over small things. Be happy! Whatever is fucked up, you are on Kaua’i. What could be bad?

The ocean is the most remarkable part of the landscape to me. I don’t know how to describe the smell. Obviously it is salt—saltwater. But it is so much richer, thicker, saltier, like the soul of salt or baked salt. It doesn’t even read as saltwater to my senses. It smells like ocean from another planet. Also its color is green. The sand is so fine, soft, orange-gold.

Po’ipu is a commercialized, beachy district, we have been told, not the real Kaua’i. We were forewarned by those who come here often and frequent the North Shore: “Po’ipu has been ransomed to the corporations.”

Certainly a picketed resort-construction racket fills the morning air. I don’t know why trucks have to have that backing beeper. Are they going to run pedestrians over on a construction site? Are they going to crash into each other? Are they that stupid or heedless?

Insurance companies and lawyers have taken over this reality, and no one even notices anymore. Industrial psychopathology has been mainlined and institutionalized, and we are indulging superstitions and rituals as crazy-mad as anything in Mel Gibson’s pseudo-Mayan Apocalypto blowout.

The couple upstairs in this condo are decent enough—middle-aged, friendly, outgoing people, but she started doing business on the East Coast at three in the morning, patching into some sort of conference call because she works for Stanley Tools out of Rhode Island. Three in the fucking morning! I could hear every word—inventories, copyrights, mergers. I had to stick my head out the side door and shout upstairs, three times, each louder, before she registered my existence and unhappiness.

It didn’t end the call; she just continued her capitalism more quietly. After all it was nine o’clock business time, and a sacrifice to the boss was probably necessary to pay for the trip. Or maybe she was the boss.

I loved just lying in the water yesterday evening. I took it in like elixir. I went right back again this morning and repeated the activity, getting beaten around by the surf. Then in my exuberance I decided to swim in the waves, which was too much motion and chaos for my nervous system.

I am susceptible to motion sickness, motion just about from anything, even looking to intensely for a lost object or a back-leaning yoga pose. I got drop-dead motion-sick in the waves at Po’ipu.

I don’t know whether my susceptibility is neuromuscular, vestibular, metabolic, psychosomatic, or (likely) some combination of all of them. Habitual posture and mind-body organization obviously play a role, as I tend to protect myself all the time unconsciously against extra motion. This sudden swimming must have ripped those holds and precautions out of the body armor supporting them. I staggered onto the beach and lay down with the world spinning.

Then I trudged barefoot back along the Sheraton paths to the car. I could barely steer it. I tumbled in the door, announced my condition, ran a hot bath, immersed myself in its woozy succor, and then I crashed, slept for two hours, and was still shaky afterward.

A lot of energy shifted, and I arrived in a deeper, more grounded way. Yeah, it was a hard landing, but a lot of stuff cleared and I ended up quite placid, less wired. Cool. Aloha.

The second part of our day, starting around 12:30 local time, began with getting the Subaru back to Island Car.

In trying to find our way on our own through the industrial labyrinth around Lihu’e Airport, we made several mistakes among warehouses and small factories but, after realigning ourselves to the map, found it on our third try.

The auto switch itself was informal. Joel wasn’t there. A wryly smiling native Hawaiian silently handed us the keys to a very old white Hyundai Elantra with one battered side. This cratered moon looked like a Lincoln Town Car compared to what we had just turned in (250,000 miles plus the above-mentioned defects—the Elantra showed 1900 miles, but it was perhaps the third time around the odometer or it was broken). Lindy asked about the gas; the gauge in the Subaru had been broken and was frozen just above empty, keeping the same spot after miles of driving and also after the addition of a bit of gas (not much under the circumstances). The guy said, “Whatever it’s at, return it at that.” That sounded reasonable enough. Some more aloha spirit!

Then we went off in search of Noniland. In Kaluaea on the North Shore, it was supposed to be another forty minutes at the top of the island.

We got to the vicinity in much less time than that, but finding Noniland or even proving that it was a real place took the form of a grail quest. You see, I hadn’t had a pen when I heard Avocado’s directions, so I was going on memory—and the mile marker where the fine details began, unknown to Avocado had been wiped out. Measuring where it should have been by the odometer coming back from the next mile marker, I took the closest right.

I won’t go into the whole search, but I had forgotten one key turn, so we ended up at the end of the wrong road facing a fork onto two private properties.

While we were standing outside our car, considering options (and after I got only a taped message on Avocado’s cell: “I rarely check voicemail, so don’t leave a message, and have the best day ever!”), an SUV pulled up to the left fork and halted to our waves. A chubby, nondescript guy, he had no idea. He was a guest at a cottage up the fork. He suggested that, since his rental was down the left way and he had been there a while and never heard it called Noniland, we should try the right fork and trust to the aloha spirit. We did.

After a series of bizarre encounters with two women and a dog, almost suggesting nonordinary reality, we were told by the owner of this estate, a female doctor who left treating a patient to address us, that she had been there twenty-five years and there was nothing like Noniland and no one named David or Avocado Wolfe in the vicinity. She was oddly decisive on this point.

On our way back down the fork, we decided to chance asking a man riding a lawn mower in the large orchard. He turned out to be an older woman who looked more like a farmer or shaman than a custodian—even as our taxi driver from the airport to Island Car had turned from an elderly man into an elderly woman with the removal of a bandana (this was a perhaps a Kauaian trademark: instant transformation of age, gender, and occupation).

In Delphic fashion, she assured us that she knew where David Wolfe lived but would not tell us without receiving something in return. Unprepared for this response, I was struck dumb. As I stood there mute, she asked for a dollar. Her lawn mower was being trailed by a flock of egrets, some riding on the mower, others on the grazing cows, and now they flocked about her, giving her a numinous charisma. She was a hag who seemed to have popped out of a Celtic riddle (David told us later that she was the mistress at the core of the famous book, The Secret Life of Plants).

I have to admit that both Lindy and I got pretty uptight and, despite the fact that this was clearly an oracle of some sort, we mumbled a version of ‘thanks but no thanks,’ and had turned to leave, when she left loose a whoop of laughter and asked if we had no sense of humor, no aloha.

“What’s life without a sense of humor?” she proposed. ”Cool out, people. You’re on Kaua’i.”

There was a silent hiatus while her gaze interrogated ours. I smiled hesitantly, but Lindy said, “Are you going to tell us?”

She would, in her own time. First, she repeated our request, “So you really want to find David Wolfe, do you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you have his permission?”

I nodded.

Then she inserted the missing piece into the route and reviewed the steps back from where we were several pedantic times, almost punitively, before letting us go, with another aloha.

We entered Noniland, passed guest parking, wound around a curve, up a hill, and stopped at an open shed where three young men were chopping coconuts with a machete. After we identified ourselves, two more giant coconuts were opened, uprighted as juice shot out, and handed to us to drink. I am a major fan of young coconut juice, and Lindy is not, but she is a fan of being gracious, so we both began sipping. The guys introduced themselves as Trevor and Nathaniel, and the third guy standing off to the side said, “David Wilcock.”

A grin came over my face. “Our author David Wilcock?”

“Your author David Wilcock!” In 2004 we had published his book The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, which was mostly ghost-written by Wynn Free, a goofy journalist for the Drunvalo Melchizedek website.

“Do you live here?”

“My girlfriend and I are visitors while I finish my next book.” He smiled curiously. “The president of Dutton himself contacted me and offered me $70,000 to write a prophetic book on 2012. We’ll be here after you arrive on Monday, so let’s talk then.”

That was surprising and sudden information on lots of counts. I took it in without volunteering much back, except a polite “Wow” and “Congratulations.” I imagined, though, that his smile was meant to convey that he was quite free now of us and Wynn and was being appreciated in the big show. Later in the afternoon he added to this impression by citing the spectacular numbers of hits on his website, up in the millions.

Back then it had always been a forced and inconvenient marriage: him, Wynn, Wynn’s girlfriend, and us.

I asked where Avocado was, and Trevor said that he had realized we were overdue and gone out looking for us. Just as he finished saying that, my cell rang. I held it up for all to see “David Wolfe” on the screen. As I answered, Avocado’s voice echoed from two directions, as he called, “Far out. You’re already here. That’s too funny.” And he appeared on the veranda of the adjacent house and came running to the shed.

He led us into the house itself and quickly offered us fresh lychees, demonstrating how to bite into the rough skin and get the fruit out with teeth and suction, so we sat there nibbling lychee jelly while chatting. Then we accepted a tour of the grounds.

The direction was mainly up the hillside. Avocado narrated as we climbed. There were lots of fruit plantings, both new and mature: papayas, bananas, cacao, noni, mango, avocado, mangosteen, many of them just sprouts. We stopped briefly at a ritual fire-circle site with an ash-pit and then stepped through an opening in a fence onto the next property. We passed from the shade of trees into bright sun and a high cattle ranch with an Ayres-rock or Tor-like sacred site for native Hawaiians: a jagged hill about a kilometer from us that seemed charged with difference and importance. David explained that the owner of the ranch lived on Oahu, was in some kind of trouble with the Kauaian authorites, so others took care of his cattle, barely—they just kind of grazed.

The view was classic: in one distance was a ring of blue ocean; in another were the jagged lunar mountains and the Tor; above, a blue bowl filled with active cumuli.

“We pretty much walk up here as we want. There’s usually not much happening. But one day we were really surprised; we were hanging out when an entire Hawaiian motorcycle gang showed up; they were going to the sacred site. Even if it had been restricted land, the site still belonged to them, the ancestors. They were going to hold a ceremony, pay homage to the gods of the hill. Those were some pretty intense dudes.”

“Like the Maori gangs in Once Were Warriors, I guess.”

“You know, the Maoris are just Hawaiians.”

“On a long sailing trip.”

“These are the source islands for the Maori warrior tradition. The hill’s recognition goes back a long way, before Captain Cook.”

I stared at the sacred site and then tried to travel mentally up the ladder of planes, into the Etheric and then the lower Astral. At a higher subplane of the Astral, I fleetingly saw a castle of greater complexity and magnitude than the hill, but it was impossible to hold myself in its range.

Back when I was at the Tor in Glastonbury in 1998 I had no psychic training, but I felt surrounded by something poignant, alien, and sacred. Here I saw flickers of a city hive, an object of immense density into which creatures scurried like bees. Giant winged things of some intelligence sailed in and out of openings. The hive was luminous, a bit silvery, and quite volcanic and cinder-like. It had a slightly celebratory quality like Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue at Christmas.

I checked my practice by trying the view at different subplanes and other vibrations, but I saw nothing like the castle, though there were intimations of subtlety and high activity. The vision returned only at one frequency.

I also tried random spots in the surrounding landscape, like a pile of sticks and brush, and the ocean, and picked up nothing.

Each time I went back to the rock, I faintly saw the same numinous metropolis. It doesn’t mean that I couldn’t have manufactured the whole same thing by suggestibility and wishful thinking, but at least it was stable by apparent octave and placement.

I am a rank amateur at this stuff. Those with shamanic training, probably the motorcycle gang, see a whole other landscape interpenetrating this one, and they maintain their cognizance of it relatively stably across visitations and periods of time. It is not the world that we are ordinarily in, but it has a lot to do with that world and contains that world’s fortune at large.

I am guessing that something like what I glimpsed is what the Australian Aborigines look for and observe at Ayres Rock and across the entire Dreamtime. And it is what Icelanders and Celtic perceive in the fields and hillsides when they point toward seemingly random rocks and trees and identify them as the houses and churches of faeries, trolls, and other elementals. They are viewing other planes autonomically and reporting what they see—what they have been trained traditionally to see.

On the way back down the hill, David had picked a couple of ripe papayas and handed them to us to eat. Of course, there were no napkins or utensils, so it was a matter of busting them open, clearing the seeds with fingers, and then devouring, quite a bit of juice landing on our faces as well as in the appropriate stomodea.

“We live like pigs here,” David propertly noted, “and we love it. We’re just a bunch of children. Sweat, papaya juice, dirt, no shoes, ouchiness [as he demonstrated a quick hop and skip across the Noniland driveway]. It’s paradise, the best life ever.”

I forget quite how it went but, as we walked, David ranked the plants such that one was the rook and another was the knight. I asked if papaya was the queen. “Papayas’re maybe the bishop. Mangosteen is the queen.”

Back at the house, we convened first downstairs and then upstairs in David’s room with some of the habitants and other visitors. The scene across the remainder of afternoon was raucous and vibrant. Lots of people came and went, every one of them dazzling in some way or other—more men than women. I would describe the event as tribal, alchemical, shamanic, magical, although that doesn’t quite get the real zany energy and diversity.

There was a lot of serious discussion—and I mean serious—about diet, foods, herbs, telomeres and aging, neutral flow, alkalinity, grounding houses electrically (without attracting lightning), astralagus as a miracle herb, making rain, stopping rain, making clouds disappear, assorted miracles of healing and paraphysics. The topics changed, the cast changed, the activity changed. At one point David demonstrated his room’s yoga trapeze by hanging on it and doing somersaults; then he showed the set-up for grounding wires on the beds and furniture.

The talk went on: cells, aliens, Dune, angels and demons, Children of Dune, channeling, 2012, consciousness shifts. … Nick Good, David’s coauthor on Amazing Grace and the source of that book’s nine Huna principles of natural magic, burst into the room with a typhoon of Celtic male energy and hugged everyone as if he had been away a month; in fact, he lived on the grounds. Meanwhile David Wilcock comedically floated between a secular identity and his Edgar Cayce reincarnation.

The star of the show was Patrick Marcus Osborne, a charismatic Jamaican actor, martial artist, and track star, friend and disciple of David. He laid on us intermittently a wild Rasta narrative spotted with revelations about satanic devilry in the Hollywood film industry (“That’s why I had to get out of there and follow the way of love and my brother here, Avocado, who saved my life. He and I are united in Rasta” [fondling his dreadlocks and then David's].

He choreographed his talking in a continuous dance mode that came naturally and was not self-conscious until he actually acted out a history of martial arts, doing a few moves from each, flowing posture into posture: karate to judo to taekwondo to aikido. As he put a reggae beat into every sentence, he had a number of riffs going simultaneously—cloudbusting, upgrading track stars so that they really knew how to run, growing body cells from minerals, why the native Hawaiians are so large, opening the heart to the universe, turning prana into muscles without protein, acting in dark martial-arts flicks, teaching his parents the new consciousness.

Stunning and mega-entertaining to watch the drama unfold, the characters engage with one another.

We left around five. It was already eight in California and eleven on the East Coast. At David’s suggestion, we grabbed dinner on the way back to Po’ipu at Papaya’s, a health food store in an outdoor mall in Kapa’a, a few towns south of Kilauea. It was very good fare—carrot-ginger soup, spanakopitas—plus a beautiful setting: we got to sit by a fountain in a little park and watch boys with drums and girls with hulas go in and out of the Polynesian Cultural Center.

There are chickens everywhere in Kaua’i, all over the roads, the shopping centers, the fields, Noniland, in industrial parks, at Island Car, in the cove by the turtles, on the Sheraton Beach. You have to stop for them regularly while driving; you have to especially look out for them when parking.

Now it is almost three in the morning in New York and midnight in Berkeley. I hope our condo colleagues don’t have any EDT conferences planned.

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July 14 (Day 3)

Birds: I am watching ones that look like sparrows or robins but are more exotic up close, little splotches of yellow or red differentiating them from those on the mainland, one small visitor with a tiny orange-red tuft that would have done Woody Woodpecker proud. He landed on the porch while I was eating sunflower seeds and boldly snatched the ones I dropped.

The small birds at Po’ipu Beach pick at the sand for yummies, landing in populous flocks that strafe the beach, surf, and people’s towels, picking once or twice even at threads.

Tiny fish jump out of tidepools.

I have abandoned long pants. I am wearing a stringy pair of khakis that Lindy cut off below the knees where it was torn from a bike spill.

All day starting at sun-up I take in sounds of birds chattering in foreign languages, making monkeylike and shrewlike sounds.

Perfumes spread: the aromas of flowers—large, luxuriant purples, yellows, pinks. The odor of dead wood and rocks in the cove: mysterious, tropical.

When we went to Po’ipu Beach proper this morning, I realized that the strong marine smell of yesterday was particular to the Sheraton strip. It apparently requires salty surf on the volcanic rocks. What I experienced there was a mixture of succussed water, high salt content, and volcanic stone. This information came by chance from a local.

The faces of native Hawaiian farmers and dancers at the Farmer’s Market near Turtle Cove are reminiscent of Pacific warrior traditions that stretch from Melanesia to the Maori.

Purple Okinawan sweet potatoes seem like a truly sweet potato, their rich purple sustained to the core. They recall old graduate-anthropology days: cultures of the Pacific, New Guinean pigs for the ancestors: boars digging up the sweet potatoes, setting off clan feuds.

Sea turtles come up the cove daily and try to nest on the rocks and sun themselves while the tide is low, often lying atop and akimbo one another. They are really too big for these stones and can’t get enough of themselves out of the water for their satisfaction, so they stalk on one another.

Then the afternoon tide pours down the cove, disturbs their saunas, and washes them back out to sea.

The ubiquitous chickens give new meaning to the name “free range”; apparently they were scattered by a hurricane almost twenty years ago (this from a different local source), and now they are everywhere, mating, hatching, marching brazenly down the streets with their chicks, picking fights with each other in parking lots—and no one has any initiative or gumption to round them up.

They filled the parking lot beside Spouting Horn with such a mélée of chicken music and scuffling that they almost were more of a tourist attraction than the Horn itself, a broad layer of volcanic stone that the surf gets under, producing pressure enough to send up three or four geysers a minute through a hole. There is enough hollow space under the mantle that the release bursts out with an echoing roar, a sound like the escape of gas. At different spots other smaller and more diffuse spouts syncopate sporadically.

It’s a phenomenon like Thunder Hole on Mount Desert, but more spectacular visually because of the height of the geyser and the spectacular crown of foam that comes crashing down on the black rock. A huge volume of water gets airborne and then fractalizes.

We spent much of the day with Ellias Lonsdale, some of it with his family (his partner Luminara and four young children) but most of it with just him. I have known William/Ellias since 1975 in Vermont and have watched him grow in phases, from a hippie astrologer and poet, to a beginning psychic reader, to an anthroposophical teacher, to an Atlantean reincarnate, into his true esoteric being, which he now lives unwaveringly. I believe he is one of the most clear-sighted and balanced prophets on the Earth. He sees the planet at a very deep level, yet while also never losing sight of pop culture.

Much talk over the late morning and early afternoon, too much to gloss on here. Ellias has a prophetic read and a story about the Earth phase that is different from anything else I hear these days.

He remarried twelve years ago in Santa Cruz and has been in Hawai’i for most of the last six years, three of those on Kaua’i, earning his living by doing psychic work and astrological readings for individuals locally and by phone. His method of tapping into both is original and quirky, cobbled together from different teachers and traditions and numinous journeys.

Luminara hails from outside Putney, Vermont, the daughter of a renowned Swedish biodynamic farmer as well as a line of female seers. She and her family discovered Ellias through his books, which were part of a reading list for their anthroposophical study group in Vermont. Eventually they all went to see him in California, and Luminara at once understood that her destiny lay with him, though she is a woman in her early thirties, whereas he is in his sixties, and she is his fourth partner and the third with whom he has had children (“A serial sperminator,” one of his female ex-students tweaked last year).

Ellias’ 39-year-old daughter who works with AIDS patients in Boston comes from his relationship, as he put it, with “the queen of the oldest hippie commune in Vermont.” Then he had two more daughters with Diana, his former wife, a brassy massage therapist, to whom he was married when I met him in Plainfield, Vermont. One daughter lives in D.C. and does NGO work in Africa. The other is an artist in Oakland.

In between his former wife and Luminara, his partner was Sarah, renamed Theanna after her death about fifteen years ago. During their relationship she and Ellias ran a mystery school in Santa Cruz, tapping into Atlantean and other transdimensionalia. Once she passed, Theanna continued channeling through Ellias and, whatever your beliefs about that activity, the transmissions themselves are pretty powerful stuff. Her encounter with Christ was particularly poignant and radical. I wrote a synopsis of it for my 2013 book, an earlier version of which appears on the Abode of the Message website: http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/article/meditation_on_christ.

Ellias and Luminara have four offspring ranging from Rafael at age nine to Savitrie who is twenty months. The most Indigo of Indigo children I have ever met, they seem right out of Childhood’s End: their own tribe, gentle and wide-eyed, addressing adults with a sincerity, clarity, and open-ness that is startling. Ellias tells me that Savitrie speaks languages she was never taught (certainly not in her mere twenty months), though I never heard any of them.

I thought that the children would be quickly bored in our two-room condo, but they rushed to porch and were incredibly excited to view the turtles. The three older ones spent a long time discussing turtles in general; then they found a kakui-nut tree, well watered by the outdoor shower and, though the insides of the ping-pong-shaped balls are not generallty recommended for ingesting, they did so without apparent gastric distress. Ultimately Luminara and her crew headed off to Shipwreck Beach, leaving us to visit and talk through the middle cusp of the day—and that we did at various sites.

We ranged over books, mutual friends, onto the meanings emerging from inside the Earth and changing archetypes imposed by the stars. At one point, Ellias critiqued the Berkeley Psychic Institute, the center where I began my own studies, as “taking the wonder and mystery out of the cosmos and turning it into an object of manipulation.” He hit the nail on the head. Whatever the complicating favors, that was the real reason I eventually left there.

He also remarked that he and his family are unlikely to stay much longer on Kaua’i because, as he put it: “It’s a sleepy place, and we’re very awake and want to stay awake. There’s no context for us here. Kaua’i is a dream. It’s a very beautiful dream but still it’s a dream.”

Of course, we’re all in a dream, but within that dream are degrees of awakeness.

Lindy and I are content to sit on the porch for an hour or so after dinner, doing little but watching the stars and feeling the different breezes off the Pacific. No need for Netflix here.

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July 15 (Day 4)

A touristy day had some recurring themes that are hard to capture without sounding colonial or smarmy. We set out for Waimea at nine in the morning. A much talked about, “can’t miss” sight, Waimea Canyon makes Kaua’i the equivalent of a tiny Uranian moon with one of the more complex and exotic gorges in the Solar System. At ten miles long by two miles wide by 3600 feet deep, Waimea is a baby Grand Canyon. An island in the Pacific Ocean is a weird place for the universe to hide it.

The route to Waimea meant continuing southwest around this side of the island, clockwise into new territory. If you figure the airport at Lihu’e is around 4:30 and our place outside Po’ipu sits at 6:00, Waimea Canyon stretches from about 8:30 to 11:00 (Noniland, by comparison is around 1:30). But Kaua’i is a squashed oblate clock.

What we thought of as a quick half-hour drive took more like an hour and a half from a combination of winding roads and long stretches of potholes amid 25-mph signs,. The unfactored drive from Waimea on the coast to the staging area for entry to the canyon added an extra twenty or so rugged miles rising from sea level to 4000 feet. I don’t know why we thought we could magically just enter the canyon from the highway.

The western side of the island is more classically Hawaiian—drier, very rural, rockier, redder, and poorer, without the evident mange of condos, timeshares, resorts, and tourist shops. Hence the mood changed. I was tossed in a Proustian mood-warp back to other times and places in my life, notably our two weeks on the Navaho and Hopi reservations doing graduate anthropology in the sixties (e.g. the intersection of native lifestyles with explicit poverty); our 2006 travels in rural Iceland (the stark, isolated industrial robotry, commercial enterprises lost in time such that machineries and marts read like ugly lunar stations among shops either too warehousey or shack-like for their advertised purposes): and Oaxaca (the retraction of a softer interior life under a mercado shell).

In our ascent to the lookout we rarely saw another vehicle but, once we got to the parking area, we found it inexplicably mobbed—and I mean mobbed: Hawaiian, Japanese, Polynesian tour buses, the entire lot stuffed with cars (so that we had to park our jalopy on the dirt with other latecomers). Humans were packed so thickly that there was no option except to get on a slow-moving line to reach the canyon viewing posts and, even then, it was hard to stay out of people’s entitled tourism and invasive group portraits. We felt like the last arrivals at a July 4th tailgate gala.

Abundant chickens ran wild in the parking lot, in fact all over the site—dozens of hens with retinues of fuzzy chicks, a mixture of ordinary chickens and exotically dappled ones, imperious roosters belting out trademark chants. The scenario was quite comic and musical. I fed one chicken family from my bag of organic sunflower seeds purchased in Berkeley. Lots of tourists wanted to see the chickens fed but apparently didn’t have appropriate food or choose not to break into their larder, so my seeds were the condiment of choice. The chickens thought so too, in great numbers—I drew quite a crowd of tourists and fowl before it started to get insane and I had to stop.

You take in Waimea Canyon all at once, and it is spectacular and otherworldly. What struck me was how deep and holographic it is, how many different dimensions, complications, and individual landscapes it encapsulates, as they rise from within it like a model of a primordial kingdom. The hues run a red spectrum from orange to iron and umber to brown. Hidden labyrinths of concavities suggest something that Escher might have drawn. Convexities in the form of tallowy towers, castles, and candles of rock seemed to rise from inside the earth like inner organs growing beyond its skin. Each ridged pyramid or tetrahedron wrote its own hypothetical Gothic trilogy, tales of chthonian kingdoms coming to their apotheoses in the imagination. (As to what is really down there, I heard later from my friend Robert Phoenix that he hiked to the bottom of the canyon years ago when a young man; there he encountered edgy native Hawaiian wild-boar hunters “out of some Dreamtime gone very wrong who were like the Polynesian version of Deliverance“—he ended up getting robbed and feeling as though he barely escaped with his life, not as though he really did, just that it felt like that, wilder and more dangerous than any block of Oakland.)

There are geologic sites like Waimea throughout our Solar System. This particular gash was quite Martian except that it had rivers and verdant stretches and, faraway, birds floating in its depths, as tiny as moths as they deepened the holograph.

The canyon is indeed a huge, complex pock on a very small island moon.

We crossed the site to a second, western lookout from where Ni’ihau Island was visible. We also glimpsed its outline from the highway, a giant palisade in the Pacific, hazy at the horizon, so Lindy looked it up in the guidebook, and here’s what we learned, pretty interesting stuff: The island is seventeen miles beyond Kaua’i; entry there is limited to the Robinson family (whoever they be), which owns the place, and the roughly two hundred Hawaiians who were born and maintain their culture there. The island is very dry with little rainfall; it is the source of exotic shells, sheep, and fruit.

One tends to think of just the major kingdoms in the Hawaiian chain (Oahu, Mau’I, Hawai’I, Lana’i, Moloka’i), but there are innumerable smaller islands, even inhabited ones, that get little press on the mainland. For the natives who live on Ni’ihau, Hawaiian remains their first language. I found myself gazing at it as a wonder I long to visit but never would.

We continued from Waimea Canyon State Park to Koke’e State Park, which is its extension. Lindy was interested in checking out the lodge there for lunch. First we spent some time in a little genre museum/souvenir shop that displayed one-off oddities ranging from stuffed birds to tattoos to old charts. After scoping the fare and buying a hiking map, we split. I preferred to wander around the outdoors than to cross the mainstream threshold into the cafeteria, so Lindy headed there by herself. I ended up feeding more chickens with sunflower seeds, drawing tourists who wanted to get their kids close to the birds and/or to photograph them. I adopted one particularly beautiful family: a speckled hen with her chicks. I enticed them into a safe feeding area by the museum, away from cars and the competition of other chickens.

But chickens apparently can read food being doled out by humanoids from hundreds of yards away, and others began showing up in legion until I had about fifty, a mixture of activated hens, chicks, and a few very imperious roosters who kept shouting their syllables at me when I wouldn’t feed them, though they wrested plenty anyway from the hens and chicks. I heard that they are descendants of cockfighting roosters who bred with their distant cousins.

The chicks tracking dropped sunflower seeds reminded me of a swiftness usually referred to as white on rice. That’s how quick to the draw they were, less like cute little dolls and more like prehistoric dinosaur eating machines.

As the competition for food waxed, the birds became more aggressive and hysterical, flying at each other with claws. My original hen turned out to be quite ferocious in trying to drive off all intruders, as she considered me her find. It got pretty chaotic and screechy, a nearly criminal cockfight. Then Lindy returned.

We chose a “strenuous” trail (according to the map) that the lady at the museum assured us wasn’t strenuous, the entry point 1.2 miles past her building. It took ten minutes to get to it because of the potholes. No matter how slowly I went, it seemed at moments that I was going to destroy the car. Even four-wheel drive SUVs moved gingerly.

Our trail was called ‘Awa ‘awapuhi and was supposed to represent native forest, used for production of medicines, houses, and boats, but I couldn’t tell the useful plants or guess their potential uses. The trailhead started at 4200 feet and descended rapidly. A runaway kid named Doug passed us like a herd of buffalo, and then we heard his parents shouting his name from faraway amid the bird calls for most of our walk down. The first unseen birds bandied a tune with three distinct passages: a whistle sequence, a bridging trill, and a simple flute.

What was most notable was not the vegetation but the changing temperature. We began in hot sun and gradually entered the damp and chilly underworld. The plants changed too; their medicinal aromas deepened. The original bird talk was replaced by different complicated songs.

After about a half hour we realized that we weren’t going to get to any sort of lookout and we would have to climb every step we took back up, so we reversed course. The return hike became so arduous that we broke it into five-minute stretches with two-minute breaks, partly as a diversion. After four such stretches, I made a wild guess that it would take five more to get us out of the valley, and that turned to be right—we were relieved that it wasn’t eight or ten.

When we rested on old logs, I appreciated the silence—a primordial stillness with an occasional bird insert, a low background hum of insects that we never saw. Though humans have intruded pretty much everywhere, the basic Earth is a zone of silent, deep, inscrutable places with background mantras and degrees of profundity of silence even amid the sounds. Our mindedness and pretences are the exception here.

On the way back to Po’ipu, we stopped at the town of Hanapepe, about 7:00 on the Kaua’i clock. As we left the car in a parking space, we saw that something was developing on the central green. We thought it was a farmer’s market, but then it turned into what looked more like a big community picnic, so we headed onto the main street where we got caught up for an hour in art galleries and curiosity shops, snippets of the Pacific of Captain Cook and Herman Melville, plus the usual coconut, pineapple, turtle, bird, and warrior icons.

We visited a long wooden swinging bridge to the taro fields, noted in the Fodor’s as, if not the most exciting thing on Kaua’i, good for a thrill. When it started to swing (and it was quite long, maybe 100-150 feet), I decided that I didn’t need the thrill and retreated summarily. After all, I wasn’t going to pick taro; all I would do at the other end was turn around and come back, plus there was a healthy channel of water underneath.

As is usually the case, Lindy was more enchanted with the shops than I was, so, while sitting on a bench in the shade, I discovered on my iPhone that our son Robin and daughter-in-law Erica had their second child, Joey, a bit early. The news came in a dramatic email (with photo) from our daughter Miranda, as she passed on the narrative of the birth night and expressed her relief that Joey was finally in the world.

We headed back to our parking space where our original guess that the developing situation was not a private enterprise but a farmer’s market turned out wonderfully to be the case. It was a back-of-the-pickup-truck/SUV farmer’s market with a Mexican mercado flavor. Separate of the main group at its juncture with the gallery area sat a pie lady and, since that was Lindy’s hankering, we peeled in different directions, meeting up only after I had a bag of purple sweet potatoes, papayas, lychees, avocados, and tomatoes that cost cumulatively all of $9 and Lindy had a coconut-pineapple-macadamia pie.

We were hot and tired by then. She was for eating her yummy right away, and I was for drinking one of the papayas Noniland-style. It was messy but worth it—a celebration of the Now.

Afterward we circled the vendors for about an hour and bought all sorts of things for low prices, especially given the exorbitant cost of same items in the markets here. We got twelve bananas for a dollar, a humungous papaya for $1.50, an even more humungous pumpkin squash for $2, two giant avocados for $1 each.

All the farmers were native Hawaiian, and almost all of them were ancient, older than us, without that commercial American vibe. To a one, they were joyful and hilarious and offered free fruits and vegetables, wanting us to taste what they had grown.

When I asked the initial woman from whom I had made my purchases whether the papayas and tomatoes had been sprayed, she mimed a giant, outraged scoff, with a glance at her friend with whom she was carving up and munching a mango. Then she responded in singsong story-telling cadence, “Now why would I poison my plants when my dog likes to eat my papayas, and I would have to pay the vet a lot more money if I put spray on my plants.” That was followed by native words and a second imperious scoff.

As good-spirited and touching as the event was, the full gist of it did not get across to me until Lindy realized that she had lost her prescription sunglasses somewhere in Hanapepe. We checked the galleries, the pie lady, most of the vendors, the routes that we had covered separately and together. Only after that did I suggest we try the banana man, a site L had rejected as a possibility. It turned out that she had left them there, and the old guy told her that he had brought them to the market manager.

Ultimately we figured out who that was: a younger native woman. When she produced the glasses, Lindy was so relieved that she hugged her. Then I bought additional spinach and eggplant from a nearby vendor out of general potlatch spirit. The manager had just explained that this was a new market and its participants have so few sources of income; it was really special for them to take from their own gardens and their handful of trees and be able to make some extra money.

It was sobering and a sense of gratitude and wanting to do more. But finally one heads home; everyone in fact packs up and heads home.

We managed to have our 44th wedding anniversary dinner, almost a month late, at a gourmet natural-foods restaurant called Merriman’s, where we were assigned a super-lively waitress named Hollan from Redwood City. Once she figured out, by sheer chattiness, that the David Wolfe we knew (and who had, to her astonishment, a farm on the island) was the same David Wolfe she idolized, she became almost a third party to our meal.

The headlights of the Hyundai Elantra are so old and scratched that they have the power of a weak flashlight. That, plus the fact that we were just too tired, kept us from a David Wolfe/Nick Good/David Wilcock extravaganza with music and dancing in Kapa’a.

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2010 Kaua’i Trip: 3

Richard Grossinger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:26:28 +0000

July 20 (Day 9)

Tania, a long-time Noniland steward and aficionado from Australia, has made a noni-juice concoction with blended fruit, honey, and vanilla. For the amusement of the locals I just smelled inside the giant jar of fifteen or so fermenting nonis; it is like rotten cheese or an old shoe. Avocado described noni as tasting like a Dr. Scholl’s footpad. Green and cone-like on the trees, the immature fruits look like oblate limes or toy hand grenades. In the jar they mimic large monotreme eggs or skinned octopi.

Tania’s blended drink is pink and pretty, and I am encouraged to sample some. Kohta has graciously carved me out a coconut with a long reed-like papaya-stem straw. The proposal is that I can wash down the noni with coconut milk if I need to.

It is a bit of a gauntlet, but I concur that I can’t stay in Noniland without at least honoring the totem plant, so I accept a small glassful along with my coconut drink. The taste is foul and medicinal as advertised, and I ingest it in short intense sips.

Noni is a major topic of interrogation and initiation here. Nathaniel, while woofing it down, insists that after a while the body craves it more than anything, can’t do without it. But Aurora, David Wilcock’s girlfriend, complains that noni is hard on the colon—don’t drink too much or you’ll regret it.

I ingested most of my offering, and it didn’t make me sick, but it did have a residual olfactory effect. For the rest of the day I could smell and taste noni everywhere. Every damp corner, mulch pail and pile reeked of the fruit, as did the row of shoes along the balcony and the entire kitchen after Aurora discovered that an algae drink she had brewed in a plastic bottle and forgotten had turned rancid, so poured it into the sink. The noni taste had been internalized for me. Even things that smelled sweet or neutral continued to evoke noni. Probably that is the first step toward craving it.

This noni adventure occurred while Lindy was still asleep. I got up early at seven and, in addition to my drinks, I hiked around Noniland, did my t’ai-chi set a few times, and engaged in conversations ranging from the practical and dietary to the highly esoteric.

People here are deeply interested in nuances of food, assimilation, and nutrition—in other words, the cell alchemy of metabolism and high performance. The discussions were wide-ranging; for instance, soy was vituperatively trashed as an industrial by-product that American corporations have put into everything so-called natural because they have to find a use for a crop that was overplanted in South America (and, additionally, for markets that have since dried up). Thus they have turned it into paint, ink, building material, and—the big scam—health food. No one in the discussion ate or drank soy if they could avoid it, out of principle at very least.

I knew that soy had a bad rap, but I can’t say if this particular rumor is any more true than David Icke’s reptile broadcasts from the Moon. Both of them, true or not, bear prophecy and oracle.

Thai young coconut milk was trashed next as polluted with industrial toxins. That made me squirm because I have drunk a lot of the stuff the last few years while considering it healing. Today it was branded variously as too purple-tinged, permeated with plastic overwrapping, artificially sweetened, and rigged for every coconut to taste alike. Australian papayas were then contrasted to Hawaiian and Philippine ones; Tania considered the Aussies the finest because of being exposed to frost as well as heat, plus they turned ugly while still delicious, so were cheap.

Puffs of tropical out-gas are punctuated by sea breezes, nostalgic and ancient. An unbroken music of roosters, doves, and other birds comes from near and afar. Huge cumulus clouds commandeer big sky, filling and dissipating over the ocean. Small lizards, geckos, crawl on the walls and ceilings.

At eleven, Lindy and I headed out on an excursion that was meant to include a nearby beach and then an itinerary to Kalauea, Princeville, and Hanelei, all within seven miles. We started by looking for the beach that Nonilanders call Rock Quarry, or Kahili in the guidebooks. Following various people’s directions, we somehow missed the dirt-road turnoff and ended up at a spiffy botanical garden. We thought to explore that instead, but entry turned out to be by guided tour only, at forty dollars a head, and none till late afternoon. But we got instructions there and found the dirt road, which ended where a river skirted the shore.

This beach was totally different from previous Kauaian ones. Enormous waves crashed unimpeded with resonant thunder, white explosions from them like detonations. Lindy was worried about me getting washed away, plus I had emailed warnings from Bill Stranger, a recent visitor here, that there are many native spirits, not all of them benign, so tourists drown every year for mysterious reasons. This area was also posted as dangerous: “If you have a doubt, don’t go out.”

An apparent extended family with young teenagers was making castles and dams with adults reclining in lawn chairs, as other generic surfers and swimmers filled the distant beachline. The kids had also drawn a deep trench in the sand around their turf, as if to mark off an exclusive cabana, which I thought was kind of nerdy. But it wasn’t that at all, as we were soon to find out.

Unabated waves had carved out a small smooth valley at a certain level of the sand, and the tide either fell short of its hill or rolled a little way over it, vanishing into hot sand. We put down our towels well beyond that line.

I started by sitting on the hill and receiving the last gasp of the surf on my legs, but eventually I moved down to the edge of the waves. Huge amounts of surf exploded around me and threw me back and forth. The waves varied; some were towering and momentarily terrifying as I tried to clear my eyes and nose, regain my spot, and keep from getting pulled back in the wash. Others just galloped in gently and surrounded me.

I felt a cleansing of mind, body, spirit, aura—an elemental bath.

Lindy surprised me by coming right down and going even further out than I did. She made me nervous, as these waves were huge, bumptious creatures that were pulling us into their dance without any regard for how small and fragile we were—undines. Ten minutes were quite enough for both of us.

Afterward we lay down on our towels on the sand and were resting when suddenly we were surrounded by water. For a second we didn’t know what was happening. It was all we could do to grab our clothes (including wallet, cell phone, and car keys), peel up the soaked and sandy towels, and get to higher ground. Not a single subsequent wave came anywhere near that far.

That was what the line around the “cabanas” was all about. The surf had traveled into it, filling it like a fast-movin g canal which elegantly detoured around the book-reading sun-bathers and their belongings—and they were considerably closer to the ocean than we. The sandy hill absorbed most of the water, and what rolled over it in their vicinity was easily handled by the moat, maintained by delighted, cheering boys.

We hung out at Rock Quarry Beach twenty minutes longer, partly to get our towels and clothes minimally dry. I made another pass at the waves, standing in the surf this time, feeling grateful for the salty soaking and massage, easily forgiving the prank. There were no malign creatures here today, though David Wilcock later reported being stung by jellyfish at this spot.

Our misadventure with towels and clothes induced us to return prematurely to Noniland, only a few minutes away, in order to wash off the sand, hang up the towels, change, hack a can of soup open with Nick’s Swiss Army knife, do a brief lunch, and take off again.

Kilauea Lighthouse: many species of sea birds array among the rocks like a resting army in the trees: gulls, albatrosses, and long-tailed tropic-birds. Single ones take long glides in the wind, as the ocean crashes in slow motion far below.

Hanalei Fields: from the hills above town, laid out in perfect squares, some filled with water, most with taro. It looks like ancient Filipino rice paddies.

That isn’t a dog but a wild pig sniffing alongside the road.

Hanalei itself is a bustle of tourist activity with characteristics of every beach town I have ever visited, from the boardwalk at Long Beach, New York, to the shops in Santa Cruz, California. A series of connected shopping centers along the road wind away in village-like clusters, which adds up to a lot of souvenir, junk-food, art-gallery, surf-shop activity and a mass congestion of tourists with overworked cameras, cigarettes, ice-cream cones, most of them dressed for the generic high-priced, upper-class Western bazaar. Like in all beach towns, there is a slightly haunting undercurrent, a bit of Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes or David Milch’s John From Cincinnati. Surfers, large Pacific tattooed thugs, and lost souls wander among oblivious, tranced-out crowds of astonishing vulgarity and corpulence with a few beautiful children and natives.

We surprisingly conducted meaningful commercial activity, though not what we planned.

After spending futile time in tourist shops looking at overpriced native Hawaiian t-shirts and amulets—and Lindy trying on a sarong that didn’t fit—I decided that we had to return to the paraplegic man who was painting with his mouth and selling his art. It bothered me that the throngs were ignoring him, as he was an uncomfortable vignette in the midst of programmatic shopping and tourism. His paintings were surreally bright and colorful.

We ended up not only buying a print for $60 but talking with him for twenty minutes.

His name is Moses Hamilton, and I guess he is about forty, forty-five, though I couldn’t tell because of his condition, which was in more than just limbs and torso; his facial features were twisted too. It was not disturbing; actually his eyes and mouth were raised into a spirit state, elevated beyond his body so that he seemed a grounded angel, paint brush in mouth. Finished tarot-like icons of Kaua’i appeared on the display table beside his wheelchair.

Mo was born and raised in Taylor Camp, a famous renegade commune down the road in Haena near Ke’e (site of the Na Pali trailhead). The State closed it and burned it to the ground several decades ago, everyone dispersing (shades of Waco and Avatar). His family move temporarily to Oahu but eventually found its way back.

I say “famous”; I had never heard of Taylor Camp until Mo mentioned it, but after he did, the name came up repeatedly in conversations—synchronicty or had I zoned it out before? “There is a book about the place by a man named John Wertheim,” Mo said. “It includes a shot of my parents and me. I’m just a nursing babe in my naked mother’s arms.”

On a night in 2002 he was driving plastered drunk when he ran into a tree.

“One door closed; another opened,” he pronounced, “just like that.” He wasn’t even a painter yet, but taught himself to apply fine details with his mouth. “The talent was there, but I only did sketches before.”

Finally he spat out his long oral contraption and got into serious conversation: “What could be better. I’m on Kaua’i. I’m a real artist. When I’m painting, I forget everything else and just get into the picture. I’m a beginner still. In another five years, I’ll be good. There are mouth painters in India who put me to shame. But it’s a gift just to be alive, to get to come here and paint every day.”

He did seem pretty blissed out, as he took his brush back up and showed us how he put in the details orally with finely controlled strokes. We took his card, and he told us to stay in touch and spread the word. Okay, it’s: http://www.mosesart.org/.

With the spirit of commerce in the air, we returned to Havaiki, an oceanic and tribal-art store (www.havaikiart.com) where we bought a wooden bowl of monkey-wood from the Solomon Islands that we had been eying earlier; it was carved so as to represent a turtle on its back embracing the concave shape of the bowl—virtually the least expensive and most attractive item in a store where most things ran over $500—a bargain at $125. It plus Mo’s art amounted to four and half days saved on Island Car over Alamo.

We ended up talking for a while to the proprietor of Havaiki, a catlike middle-aged woman who, once coaxed, spilled many beans. She lived in a small town in South Africa but came to Kaua’i periodically to visit her son Dylan Thomas (yes) and help him with his shop. It had taken Dylan a long time to find a calling; finally he hit upon it starting in 2002: yachting around the Pacific, 40,000 miles out of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Island, meeting native craftspeople, befriending them, buying their wares. Then a shop in Hanalei turned out to be his ideal occupation. According to Dylan’s Mom, he even picked up a beautiful blonde American wife somewhere in the ocean (it seemed) and an eight-month-old boy.

She figured that she had spent enough of her life with her two daughters in South Africa; now it was time to hang out with the prodigal son and his family. In a couple of weeks she was going back to South Africa but would probably pack up and return here for good.

It downpoured big-time in the late afternoon at Noniland, so I took off my shirt and ran outside to get a dose of ormus. Then I lay on the lanai, watching the sky change and gradually turn dark.

A dinner party seemed just to kind of develop, though I learned later that Tuesdays were open-house nights at Noniland. Candice had told us that there would be a communal dinner, but no one seemed in much of a hurry, as preparations were intermittent, sporadic through 8, 8:30, 9. People were standing around, chatting, enthusing, drinking tea, then mead. They were in low-key mode, nonetheless fixing all sorts of spectacular raw entrées: another papaya salad, flax crackers, kale-wrapped vegetables, pumpkin-seed sauce, and assorted coconut, mango and avocado dishes. Quirky guests began showing up, a few making dramatic entrances with speeches or pronouncements. A guy with a tilted chapeau who could have been played by a young Johnny Depp grabbed a guitar and began riffing. A professorial type held out a coconut platter, practically all evening in fact—coconut in six different forms—and made a speech about only eating one food at a time, made the same speech over and over.

Before the dining began, people gathered in a circle holding hands, maybe about twenty of us, and Nick led a prayer that was brilliantly and weirdly improvised, slow and patient to include a wide variety of spirits and elements, backtracking with elegant inelegance to pick up loose items he had missed. Then he summoned us to send a great chant out over the Pacific. After our Om settled, he announced the menu, dish by dish calling out ingredients, and thanked the spirits behind their planting and the food. By this time it was well after nine o’clock. Lindy and I were invited to start the food line. A banquet and jam session began.

Eventually a raw strawberry, banana, cacao pie and fruit pudding were produced for dessert.

The event was still going on when we headed to bed, was still going on in some fashion at two in the morning as we were awakened by voices. Near five we were awakened again, this time by staccatao thumps, and went downstairs to see and feel the topical rain that was making such a din on the roof. People were asleep on couches and the floor.

Cassiopeia, or what looked like a piece of her, was already emerging back out of the clouds.

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July 21 (Day 10)

I have gotten salient feedback from many readers, and today begins with oracular words from Robert Phoenix:

“Kaua’i is potent. It is like a dream generator–think Lathe Of Heaven. If you are conscious and kind, it will reveal great secrets. If not, it will masticate you. Also, it will test your commitment to principles and belief systems. ”

I am reminded of an exchange I had with Nick the first day we stayed here:

“Where do you live?”

“Where do I live? In the house, the big house.”

“This house?”

“You mean, where do I sleep, mate? On the land. We believe in natural.”

On my morning hike up to the cattle pasture to view the sacred site, I passed Nick wearing only tattoos, conducting a morning ceremony and prayer to the Sun.

In a simple and powerful way, he opened my heart, not only in respect and empathy for his bold act but in regret for my own unlived life and the lost wild-man.

The thing that is wrong with this entire grabby, self-important civilization—to state the hyper-obvious—is that it is blasphemy, at the simplest and most basic level. And what makes it blasphemy is that the most innocent and well-intentioned creatures are sucked in and given no venue for their deeds. There might as well be a reptilian generating station on the Moon.

Nick bowing the Sun was a clue to what this entire planet could be doing if it were sane and awake.

It turns out that we missed a whole David Wilcock riff session last night when we got tired and retreated to our while the party was still going strong. David and Aurora got back around 10:30 and then held forth till well past midnight.

David and I managed to have a long talk this morning, partly in a shifting group and partly in private, as people circulated in and out of the kitchen. A lot of it was shop talk, as there was a mare’s nest of misunderstandings left behind from our having published his first book in the form of a hybrid document that was essentially ghost-written and imposed on him by another author while he was in his early twenties and naïve as to his options. Naïve no more—David has plenty of colleagues and advisors, and no one is happy about what happened or its consequences.

Getting the history clear, then figuring out had to deal with it was essential for any talk or relationship between us to go forward. That had been evident from the moment we arrived here a week prior and met in person for the first time in the coconut-milking shed where his greeting was both coy and quixotic. And it had been reestablished directly in comments and by innuendo many times since we became resident guests in adjoining rooms upstairs in the Big House.

My guess is that David didn’t wanted to talk metaphysics with me until our old business got straightened out, not in any punitive or leveraging way but because that had been in the forefront of his thoughts about me for so long that he could now taste the opportunity. Though he had been marginally pleasant and even funny about it, it was still unfinished business. Since he and Aurora were leaving today, this was our chance to clear the air. We did.

As for the greater conversation, I will touch on a few high points. My reporting is rough and will not be wholly accurate, as I was not taking notes. The Wilcock logos is its own tangled web and operating on more than one level of reality and transmission simultaneously. The universe according to Wilcock:

•There is a whole special-ops, men-in-black meta-government with an extraterrestrial technology and commerce in full operation clandestinely. The vast majority of humans are not the least bit aware of it: star gates, wormholes, UFOs, transdimensional products, assorted interplanetary and intergalactic machines. Whistleblowers in the global corporate military-industrial secret-cartel keep leaking out critical information, often to clear their own karma for malign deeds to humanity, but the truth gets corrupted in the general information discharge, not only by over-eager bloggers who scare the “deep throats” but the secret government’s intentional planting of disinformation that negates any revealing leaks.

•DNA is a universal intelligent design and cosmic information system, not just something that arose on Earth by Darwinian selection. We should expect to find it operating everywhere in the universe and to find DNA creatures in all the galaxies. Those chaps flying UFOs are human because DNA is human. Their complexions may be every shade of the rainbow and they may range from a foot and a half to fifteen feet tall, but they are part of the same biological matrix and cosmic reincarnational pool as we are and are additionally members of an interplanetary exchange network in which we are now active partners. Most of them are benign or neutral, but not all are. There are some very bad players out there, and power-hungry humans have made trade deals with very nasty folks like the Centaurians.

•The whole “David Wilcock as the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce” deal is absolutely true, DW says, but not all that a big deal; people have inflated and misinformed views of reincarnation. “Obviously I am Edgar Cayce,” he says, but “I am David Wilcock now, and that’s what counts.”

A very profound notion if you dwell on it for a while, and of relevance to all of us.

I threw out the notion that we probably don’t reincarnate individually but come out of group souls, clusters of karmic potential and intelligence. Thus, he didn’t have to be Edgar Cayce in a literal reincarnate sense but could be connected to that karmic cluster.

He agreed, more or less, and added that, although it is not common, a soul can also reincarnate in more than one person at the same time, so “Edgar Cayce” wasn’t even a singularity.

Over the course of our conversation he spoke plainly and in a contemporary and ironical tone about his “Edgar Cayce” incarnation: a big book is coming, a screenplay will follow, then the blockbuster movie. It might have read as boasting or hyperbole in other chaps, but David laid it out with bemusement and conviction. His subtext is that he is an important human and has been through many rebirths and knows it, but who cares, there’s so much to be done in the universe now with 2012 imminent and he’s just a small part—a messenger.

When I probed further about the Cayce proof, he cited the resemblance of him and Cayce at every age such that no one can tell their photographs apart, the near-identical birth chart of each of them, and the remarkable congruence of looks and birth astrology between five or six Wilcock family members and key Cayce associates. “The example is astonishing and unique in reincarnational lore,” he asserts, “one of the most striking cases ever. People who make it their business to know about this kind of stuff say they haven’t seen anything else like it, ever.”

The reincarnation of Edgar Cayce as David Wilcock, the young blonde man standing in the Noniland kitchen bantering with me, is a living example how the greater universe works, whether it goes by that recycling denomination or not. (And by the way he is standing there right now because his girlfriend Aurora is best friends with one of Avocado’s former girlfriends, Love.)

When Wilcock said again that too big a deal is made out of reincarnation, I suggested that it is partly because right now we are so wired into this body that we have only its comprehension of the world and meanings and how it even sees the places and events of past lives. What is past is literally past; spirit moves only in the present, no matter the circumstances of its past lives. Those lives are no longer recognizable to it as such.

David agreed; he said that the whole point of being alive was to be here now, not to compile a past-life archive or collect former-life memories which are not active anymore. It would be better, he concluded with his confident wry smile, if in the long run Edgar Cayce were ultimately viewed as the preincarnation of David Wilcock, and people said, “Wow, that guy Edgar Cayce turned out to be David Wilcock.” It was said with with earnest, even insouciant sincerity, but the ambition biting the mask behind it was slightly demonic. He was writing, or living, a strange hagiography.

Back to Rock Quarry Beach, on my own this time. The sheer force of the waves mixed with the ocean’s chi makes for a shamanic encounter. Every wave is different. Sometimes they intersect each other in twisty patterns. Sometimes they just pop open and surround me with homeopathic foam. Sometimes they caress and play. Sometimes it is like being inside a waterfall. Some are actively squirrelly and aggressive. They are all undines,

I feel as though I am doing an old guy’s surfing, just sitting in the sea and let it toss me around. That’s plenty for this man.

I could come here for twenty minutes a shot every day for the rest of my life. I won’t because I won’t live on Kaua’i—but I could.

Whatever else this trip is about, I realize that I have happily lost the thread by which I came here. I am in open space.

An opera of bird sounds keeps going all the time, a background to transformation, inserting data about life and death that I don’t absorb except subliminally. It is such an urgent, unconscious cipher—chirps, didgeridoo-like buzzes, rattles, instruments picking each other up. If you listen carefully from a human rhetorical sensibility, it is ridiculous: monotonous, gibberish, desperate and terrifying in its closeness to the beginning of meaning and life, yet the simple fact of tropic speech. And as much as any alien transmission from a station on the Moon or download through a transdimensional gate, it is the voice of creation, the sound of DNA, and the chatter of the divine. Here it issues a song of revelation and consciousness shift, as it is inserting its own intelligence on a continuous basis, stuffing it into our nervous systems along with subtly shifting tiers of psychic vibration whether we are listening or not.

And don’t let anyone tell you roosters only crow at dawn. On Kaua’i they are at it all day and on and off throughout the night.

Lindy and I set out in the afternoon for the famous trail along the Na Pali Coast. We knew that it involved extraordinary cliffs, deep valleys, and was far longer and more challenging than we could handle (people routinely spend a week camping along it). But we planned to spec it out and hike a small section.

The day’s reality took us in a different direction. We got maybe five miles beyond Hanalei when the traffic backed up, and all parking disappeared. We didn’t make it to within a mile of the parking for the trailhead. Instead we considered ourselves lucky to grab a space along the lava cliffs that shoot straight up from the road by the Tunnels Beach.

We lay on the dry heat of the sand, watching the activity in the surf. We hadn’t brought bathing suits, a mistake any day anywhere in Hawai’i.

Then we made a small picnic from our food in the adjacent park. I have forgotten till now to report how tame and sweet the little doves on Kaua’i are. Fearless as they curry food, they allow close pedestrian approach. After I scattered some crumbs on the table, a hesitant dove chose to dine with us for most of the meal.

Under the cliffs across the street from the beach was a deep slit in the cliffs, a tunnel or cave. It didn’t actually read as a cave. It lacked cave phenomenology—you wouldn’t look for a bat or a stalactite in it. It was more like an underground garage—you might expect to find it filled with cars or dumpsters. It was as if someone had excavated a basement out of the bottom of the rock or as if the lava had risen with a bubble in its base and then the molten flow had popped, leaving a gap.

As we walked into the slit among a crowd of tourists and squealing children, I was reminded of the Salt Lake, into which people stroll as if it weren’t a lake because it is so shallow for so long. I am guessing that this hole was Waikapala Cave in the guidebook.

Other mementos of our thwarted Na Pali drive: seeing many houses on stilts (protection against hurricanes?), at least half a dozen one-way bridges with no traffic control except courtesy (six or seven cars at a pop the local custom, according to posted signs). In general, it was slow-going, as the lava spill’s gigantic towering peaks pretty much crowded road and habitation space here to a sliver.

Back at Noniland, David Wilcock was doing an youtube interview on Sunpop Radio, Nick Good the emcee. Nick started the exchange with a secret Noniland handshake, and then two began teasing each other. I left as Nick was engaging David on Jung and the psyche because I had arranged to trade bodywork/psychic healing sessions with Layla, the girl who lost her belongings while hiking.

I had already figured out both intuitively and ordinarily that she was an amazing spirit going through a high phase. Standing on the lanai the previous evening, we had talked about consciousness and energy systems, and she was sober and on a roll. I felt as though I were talking to a made shaman who was also still a little girl, barely out of her family home. She spoke, alternately, as child and teacher. She was like a daughter, even a granddaughter, but she wasn’t my daughter; she was a companion traveler. I felt her presence on many levels: anima, archetypal female, tomboy, androgyne, Noniland movie star. She was both a beautiful seed woman and yet outside the realm of either conventional beauty or eros. It was empathy and heart energy that she expressed and projected, not charm.

It is amazing to work with subtle energy. The longer you train it, the subtler your awareness becomes. I hadn’t attempted either craniosacral or psychic healing with a stranger for about eight months, yet my awareness had deepened on its own in that time, and I instantly clicked into its wavelength. She had picked out a spot in the arbor at the entrance to Noniland, near a tent where she had set up housekeeping for her four days here. We ended up working on each other on a rusty lawn chair that had ended up there through the lost history of objects.

Her body was both delicate and tough—fluid, in part because she had been a competitive gymnast, in part because she was wide-open and always practicing flow. But she also was a mere chrysalis and still had her original birth shell.

She totally engaged my curiosity, as she had from the moment I first saw her and heard her speak, and I was grateful for an opportunity to work on a direct level with an enchanting, even glamorous being. This is a culture that forecloses and taboos such encounters as inappropriate or unsafe. Yet years of studying the channel of conscious touch had given me dispensation and permission. Long ago I yielded doubt and self-mistrust. I knew what I was doing and could take responsibility for my boundaries. I didn’t any longer question myself on a subconscious level.

As practitioner, I was able to find imbalances in my partner, holes and blank spaces, seeds of future beings. I worked on releasing and integrating them. I went from finding and following the cranial rhythm in her head to tracking the zone of her jaw, adam’s apple, and throat, to enaging the rhythm at her satyr-like feet, hardened from so much barefoot hiking. I can’t say how I did it because I was half-receiving from an imaginal healing master, half-following tissue and aura tendencies and patterns that drew me in, and at the same time trying hard not to overthink or overchoreograph my movements. I simply knew that it worked, and Layla backed that up with a description of how she felt afterward as well as the colors that arose for her internally.

Her own modality was Reiki, and it was engulfing and penetrating. I am close to three times her age; yet the practice of spirit is timeless and ageless. Her Reiki was so profound that I felt myself in the care of an ancient spirit, an air being whose native realm I glimpsed neutrally in inner movies during dreamlike passages of the treatment. It looked like a garden world with vast forests that had yet to be inhabited by anything other than elementals and invertebrates. Her hands were ancient and supporting, as I felt literally carried through a numinous realm.

I had a number of awakenings during the treatment, as I went through fugues, some of them made out of the shuffle of healing elixirs and vibration-hues onto me, others like hypnagogic dreams in which something in a narrative went wrong or clashed and I awoke, or more accurately, switched levels, with a troubled start. I saw a litany of internal colors, including the deep blue of the throat chakra, a pink-red from the lower chakras, and a bright ochre at the solar plexus where Layla told me she saw a torrent of energy releasing. What I experienced more accurately was a luminosity beyond conventional hue. It had a tannish radiance as well as a pinkishness and might have represented several of the lower chakras in tandem or their source nadis.

This is definitely a better planet when two people from different realms can just team up like that, using what modalities they carry, and exchange treatments. It doesn’t happen often, or often enough, but it should be taught to children in grade school so that we gain other ways of connecting and touching than the limited repertoire that is now sanctioned by society.

After the treatments I followed through on a related promise to do read her tarot. I had brought my deck along on the trip, figuring it might come in handy at Noniland. Trevor served as our audience on the lanai.

I understand that any cards that get drawn fall into some sort of a teaching story, so I can’t rave about the accuracy of the particular pattern of a draw; still I never cease to be surprised at how prescient a picture the cards can cast. Layla’s being robbed of all her belongings (various swords), her equanimity in loss (the two of swords crossed in harmony before her), her imminent start of graduate school (The Chariot), her emergence from her happy natal family (the paradisal ten of cups with its dancing clan and rainbow), and her goal of being more practical in the future (The Knight of Pentacles in the final position, transforming the Knight of Cups as my chosen significator) were written so explicitly that one didn’t need to know the cards’ meanings to get it. Those facts were strung together in the pictures, and Layla read most of her own fortune straight from them.

Another issue hung in the contradiction between the four of cupst,at her base (four cups sequentially offered out of a cloud to an uninterested recipient) and the four of pentacles as her future influence (a man grasping, sitting on, and holding coins on his head). Once she integrated the given meanings, she deduced that this opposition described the precise dilemma she had posed to the cards: nonattachment (I can refuse anything, no matter what you offer) versus possessiveness (I refuse to relinquish control over anything).

You could put down a thousand random card layouts without getting one so on target. I know because, in the hours since just as an experiment, I have been imagining other layouts and cards that might have been drawn, and they are banal by comparison.

In the big house I continue to be startled by geckos on the walls, crawling around corners, coming out suddenly and blasély out from behind pictures and cabinets.

The crew here has been involved in processing honey from their bees while listening to a spiritual performer unknown to me, Snatam Kaur. Her deeply karmic voice has been permeating the house with haunting and timeless kirtans.

A planned literary reading from my book 2013 and my ongoing Kaua’i notes kept getting postponed, from 7 to 8 to 9, then finally to 9:30, because things happen here when they do and there is no way of enforcing hard schedules or deadlines around dinner or community time. You have to let them evolve as the day delivers, no matter what was planned or set up earlier. The wait from 7 to 8 was for the honey, from 8 to 9:15 was for people to eat and then improvise a consensus desert from bananas, coconuts, cacao, and other ingredients in a blender. Then we waited another fifteen minutes for Nick to roar up in his car, a climatic outcome that amused all because we had been forewarned that we would hear him well before he was on the Noniland grounds. For the reading I had about twelve listeners: Trevor, Layla, Tania, Nick, Lindy, Kohta, Nathaniel, Kate, and others whose names I forget.

Disconcerting but, I suppose, inevitable: these notes from Kaua’i are in many respects well beyond 2013, which it took me two and a half years and hundreds of painstaking hours to compose and edit. That makes me happy because I have changed, but it also makes me sad. Reading aloud to others is a real truth test of voice. Tone and meaning are indisputable in the raw.

My newly published book is already obsolete.

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July 22 (Day 11)

The pumpkin milk has run out, so Nick decides to prepare a new batch for breakfast upon entering the Big House in his robe this morning. He turns the process into a how-to lesson for raw-food provincials like us.

I had read yesterday’s note about him aloud last night (the squib about sleeping in nature and his prayer to the Sun in the buff), evoking group merriment, hence the following dialogue ensues:

Me: “So you just put the seeds in a beater, no juicer or anything like that?”

Nick: “Mate, this is no beater, and if you wrote that in your notes, you’d be dead wrong. This here is a Vita-Mix Blender. And we should really be doing quality control to get the rancid seeds out of here—see, the ones that have come out of their shells and adversely affect the digestion—but we won’t be picky this time.”

He spun the lauded machine around to face me. Then he proceeded: add purified water to the ground-up seeds, squeeze the pulp through a cheesecloth bag “to imitate the actions of your internal organs like the kidney and liver, see, like that.” He held the oozing bag up. Then he added Himalayan salt, cinnamon, fresh honey, and vanilla. Lindy put it right on her retro spelt flakes, and I did the same, even though I never have milk on cereal.

Today we decided to try to get to the Na Pali Trail for real. Layla declared at once that she’d love to join us and pronounced herself ready to go—even though she had already hiked and camped the whole eleven and a half miles just a few weeks ago. Actually we engaged in a bit of a miscommunication, as she thought we would do the far end of the trail. That would have taken three hours of driving just to get the trailhead, like circling clockwise from around one-thirty all the way to eleven rather than counterclockwise fifteen miles through Hanalei to one-forty. We didn’t have that kind of energy, but she figured she’d accompany us anyway.

On the way to our destination, we learned a lot about Layla’s escapades, both her recent ones on Kaua’i and previous ones elsewhere during her relatively short human span (she was hatched in 1987). She had been hitchhiking and camping the Big Island and Kaua’i for the past six weeks without deleterious mishap until the theft of her backpack; she had been caught in a mudslide and washed downhill in Kilauea; she had worked in a Berber village in Morocco; she had volunteer-gardened at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah (though oddly thought that Berkeley and Oakland were right by LA); she had lived in Belize; she was initiated into a Sufi order in Sarasota, Florida (Layla was her Sufi name, her birth name turned out to be Lindsey Marie)—and you already know she is a Reiki master and an active practitioner of love and forgiveness. I am not inflating her gratuitously; this is leading up to a one-liner.

She spends most of her life barefoot, eats raw, is respectful and nonjudgmental of others, and wants to devote her life to helping people through life crises. She is going to start the Naropa Buddhist Psychology program in three weeks.

We were walking the road to the trailhead, discussing crystal books that we copublish with Heaven and Earth in Vermont, when Lindy mentioned the recent joint title Stones of the New Consciousness.

Then I added, “The next big book stars Layla; it’s called Girls of the New Consciousness.”

Then we passed the slit cave (Nick told us over pumpkin milk that it’s where people used to retreat for safety during hurricanes). We drove by a companion cave that was totally different: filled with water.

Despite Layla’s claim that she had great parking karma we didn’t find a space in the main lot by the trailhead. When I saw half a dozen cars lined up waiting for people to leave, I said, “We won’t find anything here.”

“Well, certainly not with that attitude!” she chided.

We turned around, drove back, and parked just beyond the second cave in a marginally informal lot that other drivers had created out of what was probably a turnaround. Parking was pretty much chaotic here anyway, and you had to hope that they didn’t enforce it. The long walk from the lot to the trailhead extended our hike by a little bit.

The underwater cave was foreboding, almost sinister, like a sleeping cobra, a signature of the psyche or the unconscious mind. Its sequential portals and darkening water evoked the realm from whence dreams come, the threshold between unconsciousness and consciousness, death and rebirth. It was more than just a symbol; it was a concrete psychic representation in stone and stilled aqua of an actual inner passageway. Occasional drops of elixir plunked from the ceiling into the dusty, dark water, the cumulative deposit of moisture and minerals oozing down like pumpkin milk over god knows how many moons. The outcome above was a complex mural, a speckled, whorled representation—Jackson Pollack meets Yves Tanguy—the cave’s own Sistine Chapel.

To the right of the portal through which the water flowed in near stillness, the wall looked as though an intentional painting had been executed millennia ago and was still visible if faded; it was (take your choice) Etheric beings manifesting across a dimensional interzone, the birth of a Polynesian Christ, giant prehistoric penguins, or alien contact on the ancient beaches of Kaua’i.

Another cave, apparently, just above the one we were looking at, held “the blue room,” one of Nick’s favored initiation sites. In fact, he offered to take us there at night, but the ceremony was over my head: you have to swim across the cave, go a ways underwater, and then come up in a room of blue crystals. That was the mission. He didn’t say how far you had to swim.

In fact it was my mention of the blue room, recalling Nick’s proposition earlier in the day, that led to our discussing stones of the new consciousness on our walk.

At the trailhead was a crowded beach, full of people and chickens, a reminder that there’s virtually no spot on this island where free-range fowl haven’t made themselves at home. Beaches are perfect for them because of picnics, but I’ve got to say that chickens and roosters running around people on towels look out of place.

The Na Pali trail goes straight up—no messing around or preliminaries for this one. It is pure lava palisades with jagged and knobby summits. While not a radically steep climb, the escalator is continuous. It reminds me of some of the trails in Acadia on Mount Desert Island but multiplied by five because everything here is vaster.

Peaks loomed overhead, many of them bare, others covered or partway covered with vines and ambitious vegetation. Their shapes were more protuberances than typical mountain crags, so they had an uninhabitable Martian look.

This is young terrain, gangly lava rather than old windy buttes—cathedral-like and cindery, not rounded mesas. It’s alien, Mordor-like.

We ascended through central-casting tropical vegetation, lavish and lush. At times looking out at the view, I thought that someone might shoot a new album cover here for a remake of South Pacific.

The difference between being here and seeing a guidebook color shot of it is ontological, made up of many different sensations and cues, so many that it is hard to characterize them, but for a start: the narrowness of the trail; the engulfing sound of the waves; the smells of the flowers and leaves, especially the multicolored pinwheeled passifloras, whose perfume traveled; the birds in episodic uproar—but especially the wind. It got stiffer as we ascended and, at the overlook where we paused, it was blowing so hard that it stopped just about all other kinesthesias in me and I stood in place and felt it against my mass. I thought, “I have a body. I have had a body for the last 20,000 or so days.” There was an intelligence to the wind, and it called my soma to attention of its own surface and density. Initially the constant pounding and turbulence made me dizzy, but it gradually became empowering, even elating.

Later, as I climbed silently with my musings, I thought about yesterday’s Reiki session; my sense was that it had opened a fresh window in an old house. The masonry was the same. All the old windows were still there. But I was looking out a new portal at a different world. It was what Layla had transmitted from her own consciousness, her indigo planet, but it was sourced in my own consciousness. It had been dormant there for a long time, then was freed of interference by another’s energy pattern. Her Reiki served as a gate inside an energy field.

We reversed course after a bit more than a mile because—well, we weren’t going to walk the whole eleven-plus, and we weren’t even going to climb to the next height and then descend in order to get to the beach…and I personally didn’t think that it was worth going on just for bragging rights—no reason to be that acquisitive. There were other things to do in the world. Yes, it would have been attractive to hike the whole thing while camping out, but that was a different us and a different life.

Layla walked the whole trail with uys shoeless. I have done hikes in Maine barefoot without damage, so I took off my shoes for the last half of the way back. The trail didn’t look like something that the soles could stand, as it was rocky and rugged, but barefoot-hiking is akin to firewalking—you do it and somehow it works out.

Actually I thought that I would try it only for only a short stretch, but I got so much value out of barefoot yoga that I practiced it to the end of the trail. Feeling the ground with every step was immediately grounding and drew me out of my mind and the upper half of my body into my feet and the ground. It also allowed me to suck up neutral earth energy.

The rocks gave me acupressure, a meridian flow that extended palpably to my neck and cranial fascia.

The need to step carefully changed my gait to more of a jig and added consciousness to movements. I got to land on straw and silt a few times as well as stones. The highlight was two small streams that crossed the trail; I waded through them slowly and sensuously, lifting mud with my toes. The feeling of coolness on awakened feet was worth it.

After the hike we hung out at Tunnels Beach, the same one as yesterday. I didn’t see a posting that warned of a riptide, so I sat in a surf where the undertow felt like roots crawling underneath my body. Lindy frantically summoned me to move, pointing to the sign. Then she joined me in a quieter part of the beach. Even there, where the surf was mostly placid, a last wave picked me up and threw me down in an exploding geyser. That’s why it was the last.

Lindy drove us back and, as a passenger this time, I counted more like ten one-way bridges between Na Pali and the last one out of Hanalei. They called attention to themselves because we got into a bad cadence such that we were usually the lead car, three times having to stop on a dime and once, partway along the double bridge, having to back off because Lindy had hesitated a moment too long out of courtesy and the cars on the other side took advantage and started rolling.

Late afternoon, 5:15, I revisited Kahili Beach by myself. In fact, I was the only one there when I arrived, though two lone surfers appeared soon after. I stayed till almost six, taking in the waves.

Taste and smell are such a big part of the experience, the salty, rich brine getting in my nose and mouth. Blowing off the ocean, the srpay makes a fine breath visible in the Sun’s particles.

Sight is filled near and far by the procession of waves and vastness of ocean, the near crash of foam and bubbles.

The sound is deep, ancient, and sorrowful, a cosmic echo.

Touch is a form of qigong and massage but also a balm both cool and warm.

The senses of the higher planes are filled too, by the sheer elemental energy and incipient consciousness of water, bursting against the limits of this dimension.

We began here, we humans, as life forms, in sea brine. That is, our bodies originated here. Our cells were brewed and bred in primeval water. We come not out of the sea but from inside the inside of the sea. There, there is no disruptive motion or peril at all, just a cradle and a metronome: a gyroscope of molecular becoming.

As we set out for dinner at Postcards in Hanalei, it began to pour. In Hawai’i you don’t dress for rain because the air is warm and the water is warm (and usually brief) and the experience is basically refreshing.

We got pretty drenched between the Big House and the car.

Then our Island Motors clunker proved a real problem because the headlights didn’t cut through the mist.

From Noniland to Hanalei is not an easy road at night in good weather. The white line on the shoulder is sporadic, and the turn-offs left and right are marked in cryptic Hawaiian conventions like hopscotch panels. The combination of these factors, our dim headlights, the rain, oncoming car headlights, fog, and SUV lights in the side and rear mirrors periodically wiped out the center line and the direction of the road. Add in unfamiliar terrain, lots of curves and a hairpin or two, widening and narrowing surfaces, and you have a hellish nine miles. I averaged twenty miles an hour and had to pull over twice to let a line of cars pass.

I just couldn’t see the road well enough, an experience I have never had to such a degree except in famous nightmares of the same. After we rolled to a definitive stop, it took me five minutes in the front seat with my eyes closed, taking deep, slow breaths and centering, to recover enough to enter the restaurant.

Later, back at Noniland, we mentioned the harrowing trip, and Nathaniel, lying on the floor in a group riffing and playing music, rolled over as he said, “Man, those are like the worst cars ever. They’ve like died somewhere and then Island Motors gets them. They’re like, I don’t think they’re legal or anything.”

“Yeah,” someone added, “I don’t see how Joel gets away with renting them. They couldn’t pass inspection. They all have something really bad wrong with them. The one you’re driving now, like that’s the nicest I’ve ever seen. You must have the top car of the fleet.”

Postcards justified Bill and Hillary’s signed photograph and endorsement on the wall. The fried taro balls in sweet and sour sauce were the highlight for me, while tandoori mahi mahi and pineapple cake with lilikoi topping were reassuringly Hawaiian too.

The drive back from Hanalei without the rain, with less traffic on the road (Lindy driving this time) was a huge improvement.

This has become two trips, utterly different from each other: one to resort Po’ipu and the other to communal Noniland, one to 1980 and the other to 2025—South Shore and North.

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July 23 (Day 12)

We started today with a trip to the Hindu Monastery, a much-talked-about sacred site and tourist attraction in Wailua, not far from Ellias Lonsdale’s house. It was founded by an American Hindu, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, also known as Guruveda; he died in 2001.

The overall property is huge, 376 acres, plus the order is in the process of constructing Iraivan, the largest Hindu temple outside of India—target date: 2012.

We drove fifteen or so miles from Noniland and worked our way to Kuomo’o Road, same as for Ellias’, climbed four increasingly winding miles up the mountainside, then turned onto Kaholalele Road. We arrived there mid-morning, well within the 9-12 window for guests.

I didn’t have very formed expectations, though I looked forward to sitting in a consecrated Eastern temple absorbing some energy and intelligence from the energy and intelligence of a focused group meditation and traditional altar. The Hindu landscape in general is ancient, ornate, and a bit spooky—the mother of Buddhism and last surviving daughter of the Indo moiety of the Indo-European Stone Age.

People arriving in shorts had to put on a sarong, so there was a basket of new ones to choose from and, under that basket, another headed for the laundry. We had worn shorts pretty much everyday here and hadn’t thought of it as a possible issue when setting out for the monastery. So we fussed with pale blue sarongs, trying to get them on tightly enough.

No one was handling guest sign-ins, but there was a book to write in. When I saw the line of Monastery publications beside it, I couldn’t resist putting my card into the book with a note inquiring about whether they might be interested in trade distribution. A longshot, but it’s always worth starting a dialogue just to see where it goes. This Monastery is a big institution with global political outreach and tied to the worldwide Hindu movement via the Tamil Saiva tradition of Sri Lanka and South India. Who knows?

My relationship to Hinduism has been back-burner since my college years but ongoing. I discovered Vedic texts well before I explored Buddhism, taking a course on formal Hindu philosophy in the early sixties at Smith while a student at Amherst. After that I read Hindu teachings for years until I discovered Chögyam Trungpa in the early seventies and, more or less, switched my focus to the cleaner, more psychological Buddhist view of consciousness and eternity. As Ram Das said early in his career, “Hinduism always struck me as a bit gaudy.” However, the psychic system I have been studying with John Friedlander for the last two years has a significant Hindu component, as its seven planes of consciousness have roots in India. There is something about Hinduism that is less directive and more receptive to the universe’s long and serpentine unfolding on its terms. It is like being exploded slowly inside a lotus of energy and not having to effort or seek so much as chant and pray because it is all happening anyway, and is going to happen, forever in fact.

The main thing on my mind as we approached the monastery was a recollection of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi from almost forty years ago. The scene in which, at the touch of his guru’s hand, Yogananda instantly remembered his past lives dazzled, tantalized, and terrified me—in the sense that, if that happened to me, the game would just stop, right there. The game would stop because I would see the larger game:

“As I maintained a bewildered silence, the saint approached me and struck me gently on the forehead. At his magnetic touch, a wondrous current swept through my brain, releasing the sweet seed-memories of my previous life.

“‘I remember!’ My voice was half choked with joyous sobs. ‘You are my guru Babaji, who has belonged to me always. Scenes of the past arise vividly in my mind; here in this cave I spent many years of my last incarnation.’ As ineffable recollections overwhelmed me, I tearfully embraced my master’s feet.

“‘For more than three decades I have waited for you to return to me.’ Babaji’s voice rang with celestial love.

“‘You slipped away and disappeared into the tumultuous waves of life beyond death. The magic wand of your karma touched you, and you were gone! Though you lost sight of me, never did I lose sign of you! I pursued you over the luminescent astral sea where the glorious angels sail. Through gloom, storm, upheaval, and light I followed you, like a mother bird guarding her young. As you lived out your human term of womb life, and emerged a babe, my eye was ever on you. When you covered your tiny form in the lotus posture under the Nadia sands in your childhood, I was invisibly present. Patiently, month after month, year after year, I have watched over you, waiting for this perfect day. Now you are here with me! Here is your cave, loved of yore; I have kept it ever clean and ready for you. Here is your hallowed asana-blanket, where daily you sat to fill your expanding heart with God. Here is your bowl from which you often drank the nectar prepared by me. See how I have kept the brass cup brightly polished, that someday you might drink again from it. My own, do you now understand?

“‘My guru, what can I say?” I murmured brokenly. ‘Where has one ever heard of such deathless love?’ I gazed long and ecstatically on my eternal treasure, my guru in life and death.”

That, after all, is the only thing worth wanting or ultimately lasting. But was it what is really what I desired today?

Probably not. was pretty busy and infatuated inside the game.

This was some of the mental chatter and semi-subliminal backdrop under which I entered the monastery grounds. But then I forgot about it, as our excursion turned into sight-seeing, voyeurism, and reading religious p.r.

[This was also, by the way, lilikoi day. My regret at not ordering lilikoi mousse and yielding to Lindy on pineapple cake the night before at Postcards, passed as soon as I discovered, to my delight, that those mysterious unnamed green round balls in plasticky shells piling up in bowls in the communal kitchen weren't limes as I originally thought; they were Noniland lilikois. Inside a thick inedible skin, they yolked greenish jelly with seeds, mostly citrus and tangy but with an oddly sweet edge. To make up for lost time I ate three of them that morning for breakfast.

They are such weird fruits. The jellied mass sits in the center like an oyster, but it pours out like uni or egg. Bitterness with a slightly sweet undertow holds culinary curiosioty.

The shells are so stuff and shiny that the knife easily slips, so I ended up with some blood and a band-aid. "You've gotta stab'em," Nathaniel demonstrated with the point of the knife, "or just bite'em open like this" (demonstrating).

Now I found that every statue and image in the Monastery had multiple offerings of lilikois set in their crevices and hollows, placed at their bases like Easter eggs. Hundreds of lilikois—apparently the preferred gifts of these oldest extant gods on the planet.]

Something on the Monastery wall then struck a deeper chord, broke my trance, and touched the part of me that is always vast serious. I will rephrase it in the way that I took it in: “Shake the mind loose from the shackles caused by the slumber of so many births. Change ‘Who Am I?’ to ‘I Am That.’”

From a somewhat maudlin question to quantum-energy blip of being and annunciation!

“So many births….” If we keep getting reborn, life after life, our existence does become a sort of goo and a slumber. We awake in shackles and fall asleep in shackles. We never see the big picture or where we are.

But, again, did I want one of those monks in saffron robes who were pacing the grounds so close to us, to stop, reach out, touch. and awaken me? No! I preferred to be left to wallow in the mystery illusion of profundity.

Inside Kadavul Temple (remove all footware) is a Hindu stageset with familiar landscape: Siva, Ganesha, candles, shrines, mandalas. Amid the chambers, alcoves, and illuminated symbology you would only have to change the Hindu gods to Christ and Mary to have a church and a full-blown Catholic shrine.

At the entry was an astrological board with a grid in the circular design of the zodiac. The signs were marked in English (Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, etc.) and Sanskrit. On their pie sections were placed largish crystal balls marking the daily configuration of not only planets (Uranus, Saturn) but Budha (sic), the Sun, the Fourth Node, and so on. These movable balls were each colored a different rich shade—blue, silver, brown, tan, red, green. Venus was absolutely colorless, transparent. A giant marble sat in the center—the Earth, I am pretty sure, but an Earth whose continents and oceans looked unfamiliar, perhaps antediluvian.

Most astrological charts are flat and hieroglyphic; they convey celestial book-keeping. This one, probably Jyotish, projected real gravity and spheroidal energy through the three-dimensional heaviness of its balls. It was an astrological planetarium.

We selected meditation cushions and found spaces to sit cross-legged as instructed. From there I stared at the statues and luminous images on viewing platforms and in chambers, as I tried a bit arrogantly to take them to higher planes. The act seemed efforted, egotistic. Also nothing happened, so I let it go. Then I tried just closing my eyes and journeying in after-images.

I can’t say just when or how—it was not a heavy wake-up like the touch of a yogi’s hand instantaneously dissolving amnesia of past lives or a Rosicrucian flash filling my mind. That’s Hollywood, and I was not in a cinematic mode. But it also wasn’t like any psychic exercise I had ever done.

First I saw a procession of many events and scenes from my life. What distinguished them was how gently yet automatically they arose, as if pouring from a jug. Evenly paced and disparate they came randomly from my childhood, my youth, my young adult and later adult years. They came from remote cameos of infancy as routinely and spontaneously as the folios imprinted yesterday, the brilliance of which had not begun to fade. Balanced, illuminated, and connected like stills from an open-ended archive or cards of a tarot, they flowed and shuffled by. This sequence had a graceful, redemptive quality—each card a signature of its particular beauty and divine grace. It didn’t whether it felt that way or didn’t at the time. Happy moments, sad moments, embarrassing moments, incidental moments, memorable moments, forgotten moments. Each one was discrete, held in place for an instant, then released and supplanted by the next, as if a projectionist were following a set protocol.

On the rare instances when I have experienced this sort of automatic picture-flow before, I felt as if my brain were downloading its charges of neuro-debris into the mind, cameo by cameo. The condition always seemed migrainous—electrical and garbage-dumpy, close to epileptic. This procession was choreographed, like a screening of separate holographic leaves, what I imagine a drowning person might see as his life rushed by in pictures. Here it was without urgency or haste, a dance of maya.

Then individual people arose one by one in my mind’s eye, forming by the same principle of composition: grade-school teachers and camp counselors, long-dead family members and passing acquaintances from parties and plane flights and classes, college friends and high-school friends, team-mates and poets, my children’s playmates, celebrities at my father’s hotel, unidentifiable strangers, even Layla from just yesterday. I had the same abiding sense of love and redemption from and toward the people as the places. These myriad semi-random characters all seemed to be part of some script, although they were not connected to one another except through me. Though each was discrete and immaculately photo-real, their figures were somehow juxtaposed, not only on each other but on the various layers and personae of itself, its own soul life, the countenances and forms shifting too rapidly for me to grok the principle or mechanism and yet and at the same time as casually as in a stately timelapse. The speed suggested an inner atomistic transformation on the scale of cells and molecules; yet the timelapse flowed from portrait to whole portrait, each new persona reconstituting instantaneously from the debris of the previous one.

It was more than that: the personae were of indeterminate age because they were eternal incarnations, just souls; contemporaneous, from the same historic frame, morphing through phases of their own lives, perhaps even past lives, from infancy to old age, little girl to crone, but so swiftly, Heisenberg-uncertainty-like, and instantaneously that each chrysalis was itself changeless in change. Occurring on two levels simultaneously (explicit and subliminal), they were of no age or time or place—not young, not old, not even ageless. They were tops spinning so rapidly that they were motionless. Layla was an old woman and a little girl. My first-grade teacher, Patricia Tighe, was an adolescent and a matron. My ago school chums were simultaneously bearded men and cherubic boys.

I understood implicitly that the ages and incarnations melded at a soul level—a quantum component that read as speed and metamorphosis but was actually depth—intrinsic, atavistic, self-refreshing metamorphosis, the same thing that is occurring inside us inaccessibly at every moment. We are all every self and every one of our selves at each moment.

Like the procession of scenes, this cortege was neither heavy nor dramatic nor even spectacular; it did not seem special or for that matter like some flamboyant fantasy that I was conducting with an unconscious telepathic wand. It arose from my transparent mind because it had always been there. Plus I had a quiet conviction that the energy of the temple was speaking to me. Its energy was summoning up archives and folios that I was harboring subconsciously, Akashic images that were already mine and innate and thus that I could navigate comfortably, that could deliver the weight and meaning of—as it was gradually working me into its view of time and space—nothing less than soul and cosmos: soul and cosmos as the same.

I am reminded of an old joke that goes something like: a Hindu car mechanic says to a concerned Westerner: “Don’t worry, boss. It’ll get fixed. Empires rise, empires fall. Universes are created, universes are destroyed. Gods arise, gods disappear. It will all work out in the end. No problem.”

A monk in robes and a turban came in and rang bells. Did he ever ring bells! He walked around, doing slow bells, fast bells, soft bells, piercingly loud bells. He speeded up his bells to a paroxysm and then precisioned them down to a whisper. A few in the audience got up, walked to the altar, and jostled bells from the walls in response. The monk brushed some sort of ointment onto the central altar statue. Then he circled the room again, following every blast with a span of silence.

The aftermath of the bells, when their last granules of molecular presence had sizzled away, evoked deeper images and deepened the images that were arising. It seemed as though the pundit was changing the vibration of consciousness, working in a very old science whereby planes were interwoven and hyperlinked complexly by sounds. Each passage of bell-ringing switched the level, so what I was seeing interiorly jumped or sank a subplane.

I sat tranquilly watching this cinema, pleased as punch to have received such a gift. It was effortless to keep it going. It just went on; its impulse was endogenous; I did not have to push. In fact, whenever I put in effort it stopped and my mind went back to being regular and tedious. I had opened a flow that thought itself, intention even at the level of desire, halted. It was a study and practice of absolute neutrality, absolute awareness.

There were also gaps among the ringings when nothing happened at all, and I was simply there, in the passage of time, neither good nor bad, until another series of views arose: amorphous internal panoramas of hardship and violence. They contained the cumulative woes of this lifetime but also slaughter, battles, tortures, cataclysms from other places and eras. Just as autonomously arising, they seemed vibrant and real and, though ugly and cruel, they were remote, without trepidation because I knew that they were over and done, their impulse consummated. They appeared cumulatively as a kind of unprocessed grist that surged and wallowed in front of me, as if a master baker were trying to work them out of a poltergeist dough. I could recognize all the individual horrors of creation with the agony that came with them. Their karma was not resolved, but they were diluted by the vastness of the universe and the passage of cosmic time. Again, this was not melodramatic; it was spoon-fed, almost neurological in presentation.

I had the conviction as I viewed the malign stills, that the anxiety of this lifetime represents, in addition to its own legacy of trauma and suffering, the cumulative agony and grief of lives and deaths in myriad forms in different creatures and people across the Earth and even the universe, so many of them horrible and excruciating, all part of me somehow, whether they were or not, but all past—ameliorated and antidoted. It had happened, yes, but it was done. The terror was undifferentiated and collective; it was an echo, not a present occurrence.

Because the events depicted were mushed together, vast, and faraway, I experienced them in a kind of overriding sweetness like a nectar made out of their poisons. I wasn’t at their mercy or threatened by their perpetrators, and their sources didn’t matter anymore. It was all being turned into clear water and running fresh into the cosmos. Mine was a new life and, even though I had already contaminated it in so many ways, a virginal elixir lay beyond me too, in the far distance, enough of it to engulf, neutralize, and redeem anything that had ever happened to me or the world or any world. The vibration of everything bad, ever, was honey: “It will all work out, boss. No problem.”

But this didn’t feel like a lasting sentiment or something I could count on or root in. I knew at once that it was an angle of impression, not a courage that I had earned or would get to keep. It seemed more like spiritual theater, for momentary comfort, an amulet to retrieve in troubled times, an overview to keep in mind at some level. It belonged to Kadavul, not me.

The lesson seemed to be that I didn’t have to get the lesson; I only had to observe that it was happening and log it as a boundary condition and background to this entire manifestation, my sensation state and the world- illusion. Like the new temple, the cosmos was under construction.

Then I saw a sequence of ancient landscapes that were clearly not of this planet or time. They were not unimaginable; in fact they were banal and kitschy. They could have been sci-fi art or movie posters or paintings from prior centuries, but what made them vivid was that they came into me as directly sensed and instilled presences of rocks, valleys, great distances, broad vistas, lived events. I was inside not outside them. Even as I thought, ‘Wow, maybe these are planets I lived on in past lives,’ they threw me out, as if to shatter such a simpleton and meddling response.

The last things I saw before the state passed entirely were a brilliant flower garden lit from within; then it became the emanation of my whole nervous system, like a galactic morn dawning inside my body; then a pinwheeling vastness, a huge fog of many layers, each tinted with subtly changing hues and expressing the spectrum from red to violet, thick and cloudy and dull, not luminous at all. I felt as though I was staring at It, at This—this life, this manifestation, from inside.

Then it stopped. It was back to existence as it is, time as it is. That was my choice. The choice I make, that I always make.

I found myself thinking about completing our tour, getting a drink from the bottle of lime-and-honey honey juice I had mixed from Noniland bees and lime trees and left on the back seat of the car. I was ready to move on.

There was a six-headed, twelve-armed figure at the end of a short jungle path to the side of the temple. The dense trees, vines, and lianas in that spot made a dark corridor to the shrine. The statue, representing different degrees of perception and illusion, sat at the center, just outside the complication of a twisted multi-branched tree.

When we retraced our steps to the starting point to place the sarongs in the basket, I asked a woman at the shop who that figure was, and she told me it was Aramuga, even spelled it out for me, but I am unsure if that’s the true name.

Our next stop was a planned meeting with Curtis and, as it turned out, the trip to the Monastery had taken us very close to his house. We did not have to return to the main highway; we simply cut across a number of streets, taking Kamalu across the edge of the mountain.

Once we arrived and settled in, we juggled a series of conversations across two and a half hours, starting at the house with KatRama and Curtis, then just Curtis (as KR went to work on a wedding), finally moving with him to the Waipouli Inn outdoors by the ocean where we ordered lunch—taro fritters, seared ahi, beet salad, sweet-potato bread.

Curtis McCosco, originally from a Boston-area farming family, was a delightful, all-purpose intellectual foil, much like friends Lindy and I have had at different phases of our life, no matter where we have lived. Our topics today covered Darwinian theory, the Kinks, astrology, Ellias’ psychic work, iPhones, Hamlet’s Mill, various mythologies and metaphysical theories of the Milky Way, Mayan ball games representing etiological myths, and the absurd New Age medicine show, for which Kaua’i is a regular stop, a gig that, according to Curtis, every huckster tries to play, the most recent being Carl Calleman just this week. He wanted eighty bucks just for Curtis to interview him. “I don’t pay for interviews,” Curtis sniffed.

Calleman’s local promoter responded by telling Curtis that Barbara Hand Clow, channeler and all-purpose New Age promoter, had just declared Calleman the most brilliant interpreter of the Mayan calendar and 2012 and an absolute genius. That led to a host of “Barbara Hand Clow” jokes that, coincidentally, all began (or ended) with her accusing someone of being a linear thinker.

That had happened to me when I met her in the late eighties at the time that we were both speakers at a conference called “Aliens, Angels, and Archetypes” in San Francisco. She declared publicly that I was a conventional linear thinker whereas she was an advanced axial/spiral thinker, which led me to respond at the time, “Who gave you the right to hand out the spiral-thinker academy awards, Barbara?”

Barbara later sold Bear and Company to Inner Traditions, which went on to publish Calleman’s rants on the Mayan calendar, so there was a link at something a good deal more orchestrated than the autonomous and synchronous six degrees and less. Curtis pronounced the guy naively fundamentalist as well as creationist with his mainly pseudo-scientific Power Points tagged by the Discovery Institute. In a recent blog CM had accused him of blending sacred geometry with the Bible and the Mayan calendar to come up with a rigged, Neo-con think-tank, fundamentalist view of the world and the sky, lacking mystery and wonder and encouraging biblical apocalypticism.

“He has no sense of sacred or cyclical time, or the karmic vision quest,” I said. “He is trying to shoehorn a Mayan system into a Western marketing scheme.”

“The funny thing is,” Curtis laughed, “he’s the linear one.”

“So why is it,” I asked, “that the linear thinkers always accuse others of being linear? Is it projection? Or are they just uneducated, deluded players who want to star on the Medicine circuit?”

“They’re ambitious. They don’t care if what they say is true. And they’re so caught up in their own ideologies they don’t even notice when they’re making stuff up.”

“They have lost the distinction between their own fantasies and the fantasies that the cosmos has on its own.”

Curtis was clear on his heroes as regards matters Mayan—John Major Jenkins and Martin Prechtel—the timekeeper and the shaman.

Best of all, at least for the publisher in me, he was working on a manuscript combining ancient Mayan thought, American Indian cosmology, and Buddhist ontology. The conversation veered soon enough into North Atlantic shoptalk, a bit abruptly for Lindy, who (after all) just retired, but we got through it with marginal grace.

On the beach just beyond where we were eating outdoors, a monk seal had come up to bathe. When that happens in Hawai’i, a monk-seal patrol gets the word and arrives to protect not only the actual animal from harm but his peaceful rest on the shore.

The whole beach was roped off around the seal, while he was happily sunning and dreaming, hopefully not of sharks. A sign posted at the edge of the sand said, “Aloha, my name is K-131 (temporary I.D. V21 on left side). I am an adult Hawaiian monk seal, one of an estimated 1100 of us left. I go to Ni’ihau to give birth. I am blind in my left eye. I have some scars, but I am otherwise healthy. To deal with sharks in the water, I need undisturbed rest. Please be quiet. Mahalo!”

His protectors, carrying notebooks and signs, two on cells, one in uniform, looked earnest and righteous, a crew not to mess with.

“Does this happen every time a monk seal comes on land?”

“Absolutely,” Curtis said. “Word goes out somehow, and dedicated volunteers show up to protect them. It’s pretty funny when you have a beach at Po’ipu filled with tourists from the expensive hotels. The monk seal arrives, and the gendarmes come out and clear the beach. The guests look as though they can’t believe this is really happening to paying customers.”

“That’s so great. The humans have to leave to let the monk seal have his rest.”

Now back in the big house at Noniland, there are seven geckos chasing each other along the kitchen wall just below the line of the ceiling.

People here have been tolerant of our cooking on the stove (of which only three out of four burners are working, two of which two always have superherb teas on them) or as a last resort in the oven (it doesn’t work except on broil with the timer). It’s not like we’re doing anything dietarily vulgar, but this is Noniland, Rawfoodville. We have cooked organic spinach pasta with organic tomato sauce; we have roasted lightly fried organic russet potatoes and purple sweet potatoes in coconut oil; we have mixed free-range eggs with pumpkin milk and beat it into a batter for local seven-grain organic bread to make French toast, also in coconut oil. With much stabbing and prying of Nick’s Swiss Army knife, I have opened a can of organic adzuki beans and a can of organic no-chicken soup. (It’s amazing what a can really is when you don’t have an opener and have to deal with it on its own terms. These things are sealed like time capsules.)

Everyone has graciously looked on, but no one has partaken of our food.

So after our visit with Curtis, we stopped at Papaya’s and bought lettuce, kale, sprouted seeds, and some more coconut oil.

A class in Hawaiian martial arts was being conducted in the little park at the center of the shopping mall in front of the Polynesian cultural center, outside the natural foods store—long-haired native teacher, all native kids. The teacher was twirling his staff so rapidly it was hard to see, a hummingbird’s wings. The kids were in awe. One boy tried and got a bit of a twirl going; then the stick fell. “You need to put the fire in your hands,” the teacher called out.

After touching base at Noniland, I returned to my favorite beach at five again today. Nothing to add except that this time I noticed how the water from the biggest waves seems to bounce a second time after exploding the beach.

Later on I was working simultaneously on a big salad with the greens and sprouts and seeds and a simmering of mixed potatoes in coconut oil on the stove when Nathaniel came in and got involved. He produced some enormous purple sweet potatoes that they had grown outside. The tubers looked like gigantic turnips from rocky soil; inside they were amethyst, purple swirling in Fibonacci-like motifs. He put them in a cooking dish and got out the Himalayan salt, acknowledging, perhaps on our behalf, that cooking was the only way to go at these babies, and it might as well be tonight. He also produced a papaya for my salad and cut up some lilikois on the side.

When Lindy came downstairs, a serious discussion she had been having earlier with him about chickens continued for my benefit. Nathaniel got down to it, “This big hurricane came and scattered them all over, and now it’s like completely out of hand. I know we’re vegan and all, and people think it’s cruel, but you’ve gotta get a beebee gun and take those birds out. Yeah, that’s controversial stuff at Noniland, but we’re trying to plant this stuff, and it’s hard work. Then the chickens come along and dig it all up. You gotta take’em out.”

“You could get a job going all over the island doing that,” Lindy teased, “getting rid of the chickens.” She was half-serious, as she had been putting her mind to trying to think up lucrative work for Nonilanders, since it is not yet a cash-generating enterprise.

“Ah, no. Not me. The ones around here are plenty. I killed one the other day, you know.”

“Really?” Lindy asked. “Did you bury it?”

“Cut it up and mulched it.”

“How did you kill it?” I asked.

“It’s a funny thing. These chickens were messing around in the coconut shed, and Tania was there with me, and she was saying, ‘You all have to do something about these chickens. You can’t have them all over the coconuts like this.’ So I picked up a coconut and just tossed it. I was thinking of scaring them, not killing them, but maybe I was. I hit this guy dead on. Heavy! I never killed anything one-on-one before. But, you know, this problem isn’t going to go away. We gotta get down with it, and it may mean killing the chickens. You know, they’re not exactly sweet peaceful Buddha beings!”

Other Nonilanders came back to the Big House and joined the conversation. Opinions ran strong on both sides of the matter.

“I like the collards and other greens,” Ra said, “but I couldn’t kill a chicken. Nathaniel’s a young dude and he’s into the action. Now that he’s got blood on his hands, we gotta get him a beebee gun.”

“Didn’t he use a beebee already?” Orion asked, joining the conversation. He’s the permaculture expert from Oahu.

“No,” Lindy said, “he hit it with a coconut. It wasn’t that bad.”

“I think that’s worse, bludgeoning it with a coconut, much worse!”

“He didn’t bludgeon it, ” Lindy objected. “He just had good aim.”

Soon Orion went on to talk about his years as a forest ranger in Ashland: “I had seven districts. That’s unheard of. Most guys had one. I wore a uniform, a badge. It was rad. I could go around telling people what to do. I was Mr. Big Deal Protector of the forest—Tarzan king. You know, without the badge, these young guys’d look at me like ‘fuck off dipshit.’ But with the badge, I could say, ‘You idiots just cut down a green tree and you’re trying to burn it. What kind of fools are you?’ And they go, ‘Oh sorry, sir, you know we’re just out here being assholes, drinking beer, doing sorry shit.’ But I made the mistake once of going into Williams. You know Williams? That’s the center of the hippie resistance. I was just going to visit a friend. No badge, no uniform, but I did have the truck. It got real sketchy, real sketchy.”

“Like they weren’t gonna let you out of there alive?” asked Nathaniel.

“Like that, and I was talkin’ real fast. Like ‘hey, I’m one of you, I’m just here visiting my friend.’”

If I haven’t made it clear already, Noniland is an amazing commune of sweet young people working on the land, their bodies, their minds, their spirits, their chi and etheric bodies, their karama. They are moral, committed, hard-working, thoughtful, funny, generous, at least to all appearances—and isn’t that about the best that any priest or monk can do? They clean the house everyday—scrub the floors, keep the dishes washed, the filtered water rolling. They dust and paint. They plant, weed, gather; do coconut, honey, papaya, avocado, and noni. They sit at the Noniland altar. They drift in daily after sundown, collaborate on communal meals, have conversations about the planet, the universe, and what’s going on, jive about the day and their work, make fun of each other and themselves. They play guitar and keyboard improv, in fact right now as I write, the hour drifting toward eleven PM, Candice, the house mother, on the guitar. It’s dark, so I can’t see who’s on the keyboard.

It is a great thing that Avocado has created here, and it is a privilege to be their guests.

Go to Top | Continue to Day 13 | Days 1-4 | 5-8

Richard Grossinger: In Conversation with Andrew Harvey

Richard Grossinger — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:30:16 +0000

A Discussion of the Ecological and Spiritual Crisis on the Planet (in the Context of Their Recent Books: 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration by Richard Grossinger and Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism by Andrew Harvey and Karuna Erickson)

The interview was conducted at the office of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley with Andrew on a speaker-phone, calling in from Oak Park, Illinois.

Richard: So, in my considering this set-up, I was thinking it might make sense for each of us to make a statement and then to proceed from there. But—what’s your idea?

Andrew: Well I’ve been rereading your book 2013 and I’ve got all kinds of linked questions for you—but if you want to do it that way I’d be happy to do it that way. Or we could just read that wonderful paragraph of Daniel’s from the foreword about 2012 and have all of us comment on it and then go into perhaps the message of 2013.

Richard: Well, any of it sounds okay to me. Let me think for a second. How about I say something first, because I’ve been thinking about this, and then we’ll go from there. Does that seem good?

Andrew: Yes, that’s fine.

Richard: Yeah, well we’ll find out. What I think about … this just seemed to me important to get said—what I think about this topic is that you always arrive at the horns of a dilemma or maybe it’s a paradox. Which is that when you focus on what is going on in the world—certainly as described in Daniel’s foreword, and it’s only been added to in the last weeks and months with oil in the Gulf, escalation in Afghanistan, enforcement of the Gaza blockade, etc., etc.—you’re pretty much fast-routed into a very pessimistic, even nihilistic and apocalyptic view of things. And I don’t see in an ordinary sense how anything is going to get fixed or is fixable at this point. In fact it doesn’t even seem to be going in the direction of getting itself fixed; it seems to be going in the direction of getting worse and worse, and the people who are making it worse getting more power and asserting more prerogative.

At the same time, I think that there is an enigma because everything that’s happening is part of the universe, part of consciousness, and an aspect of what is emerging inside the mystery out of which we’re coming too. Our presence here—just our very presence, without any thoughts or acts—is a response, a participation in something much larger that is invisible to us. Something that on some level, without having to posit extraterrestrials or interdimensionals, is connected and connecting to other intelligences in the universe and the intrinsic intelligence of the universe itself. These realms are being informed by our situation in some way—again, remove any Gothic sci-fi images: we are receiving aid, advice, and godspeed from them despite how things are going here, despite the fact that it looks as though morons and madmen and crime bosses are informing everything.

And—at least to me—that seems the particular dialectic that we’re in: things are a mess and inextricable, but we are alive and conscious and filled with the song and heart and yearning of the universe. So I think it’s important not to over-focus on “fixing” things in the ordinary sense: politically, ecologically, economically. It’s impossible. Yet on the other hand I think it’s absolutely crucial that all of those matters of stewardship and right livelihood be tended to and remediated in exactly the mechanical and practical and moral ways that are called for. We must act. We must do the right thing. Service is absolute and non-negotiable.

Yet we are impotent against the scale of physical and financial forces. As Obama says, we can’t plug the hole. And that’s the least of what we can’t plug or mend. It’s like both are true and wrapped around each other: the apocalypse and the awakening. Only the apocalypse writes itself glowingly and brazenly on the face of our times; the spiritual awakening is deep and subtle, hidden inside our gestation in the universe, our pagan, untold initiation that is written in nature—the whole of nature—and in the sky. In our cells and atoms and electrons and quarks and chakras and auras too. Written but not yet transcribed, at least not at the same clarity as the darkness. We think and feel the universe—the deepest magus, angel, avatar, lover voice it has, and that has to be enough. It is enough.

That’s where I’d like to leave it either for you to read from Daniel’s screed or for you to pick up yourself.

Andrew: I think everything that you say is very accurate. And the way in which I would frame it is that I think of this as an evolutionary crisis. Which is potentially the birth canal for divine embodied humanity. I think that there is absolutely no way in which this crisis is going to be fixed, because the whole point of this crisis is that it unravels, destroys, disintegrates, utterly, utterly annihilates all of the agendas and illusions and fantasies that human beings have created out of what you could call a collective false human self. Which is now terminally addicted to a false vision of the universe, a lust for power over every other species, a crazed hunger to dominate nature, and a totally unsustainable fantasy of limitless growth.

This collective false human self is doomed, and no solution whatever from the consciousness of that collected false human self—however noble, however self-awake, and however righteous—is going to work. What we are looking at is an appalling, dreadful, ferocious, inescapable dark night of the species, which is going to get worse, very, very fast. That is the bad news. But there’s good news within the bad news because when you understand through divine grace, and through the flicker of the divine evolutionary intelligence shining on your mind and heart, that this radical ferocious process is the sign of an enormous new potential struggling chaotically to be born, then you can begin to cooperate with that birth in two main ways.

The first is to really undergo yourself, as rigorously and as ruthlessly, and as abandoned as possible, a radical transformation which does not look like the ordinary mystical awakenings, which are essentially awakenings to transcendence alone, but is a real evolutionary mystical awakening which is destined to illumine the mind, shatter the heart open, and start birthing the divine in the cells of matter. So you can pledge yourself to the birthing transformation.

And the second thing that you can do, is through really fusing together the deepest mystical awareness with a commitment to unflinching divine action, you can become a midwife of that birth in the middle and through the chaos, and start in this atrocious dying, building consciously with others who are awake to the evolutionary potential of this crisis, the structures of the birth—cooperating with the evolutionary intelligence to build these structures of birth in the hope that humanity may not be suicidally psychotic and on a death-trip so intense that not even the pulsations of the divine will can save it from itself. This is how I see the crisis.

I think that the advantage of seeing it like this is that it corresponds to very deep laws in external nature, the profoundest laws that the mystics have discovered about the divine transformation—the transformation of the human into the divine human—and, that it really mirrors what you’ve explored very beautifully and terrifyingly and with great eloquence in 2013: the essentially paradoxical nature of the divine itself. That it works its transformations and alchemies through terrifying horror and extreme chaos and almost unimaginable violence—both on the personal realms and in the evolutionary realms. And given what we’re facing, given what we’re seeing, given what we’re living, I think we need this kind of realism more than ever. And I think that when we find the courage to embrace a paradox, it begins to free us because it gives us something to cooperate with on the deepest level, something to surrender to, something to allow to possess us with its evolutionary necessity.

Richard: Yeah, I think that there are certain traps in language, which comes too fluidly and facilely to us, good and bad . It’s like—we can be very eloquent with words, but they remain words. And then there’s the actual lived circumstance. And the two of the—

Andrew: Well I’m not speaking about words that I don’t happen to live myself and don’t live myself.

Richard: No, I understand. And I’m not—I’m not charging you with that. I’m more charging myself. With the awareness that the moment you’ve spoken the words, another moment is there and has to be lived and that presents its own challenge. An absolutely new challenge right from the core of creation. This reality is a living fire that keeps emerging. And then another moment, and so on. And what I think is, that the gap between the pathologically materialistic present and its secular, survival requirements and the illuminated divine, the divine immanence that is sourcing and feeding and transmogrifying all this, can’t be bridged on this plane moment to moment or lived fully all the time. We get intimations of it when it comes and we can fill ourselves with it then. Thank goodness for those moments of vision and grace. Because we can’t just be the fire.

Andrew: No.

Richard: Thus people need strategies for … I should say practices. Rituals, practices, prayers, communions, initiations, and ways of bringing themselves back again and again to what they have lost. And those practices and rituals and mantras and trainings and sutras and so forth have to be as subtle and as paradoxical as the dilemma itself that we’re in—

Andrew: I agree with you.

Richard: And secondly, the other thing I believe, which is a somewhat different issue, is that it’s too easy to think of the people who are fucking things up, in governments and corporations and narcissistic stupors and militias and crime cadres—as being in some sense in alliance with evil, or the devil. I mean, there are some pretty bad actions, pretty bad choices, pretty sociopathic behaviors on the loose on this planet. And yet, at some level, the energy that is flowing in to create those acts is sacred too and has to be used in our transformation.

So those people and those forces and those acts cannot be construed or put outside of us in any kind of moralistic or judgmental way. We have to find some tenet by which to understand and embrace the whole planetary event, in our words and in some way in our deeds. As you well explicate in Heart Yoga, many practices have to do with literally sending compassion, revelation, and healing out into the world in such a way that they reach especially those people who are least presently attuned to hearing it, or receiving it, and it reaches them not in an intrusive punitive or angry way but in the perhaps the one incredibly exquisite way in which they might hear it and recognize it as something valuable in themselves—something crucial and lost, lamented and secretly sought in their hearts. They need rescuing and inclusion too. They need it most of all. And they are our key to redemption.

Andrew: I agree absolutely with everything you’ve said, and I think that there are five kinds of practice that anybody who wants to be a midwife of this birth, who wants to really cooperate with the evolutionary intelligence of this moment, needs to pursue in all of its paradoxical variety.

The first kind is cool practices that help align oneself with divine being, because without being grounded in transcendent being, no one will be able to have the peace of mind to endure the shattering of the dark night.

The second is the hot practices, which I call the heart practices because it is essential to learn from the great wisdom of the mystical traditions how to keep your heart vibrant, juicy, compassionately passionate and passionately compassionate in the middle of the situation which is going to drive one into the abyss of depression and fatigue again and again and again and again, and threaten one with madness and threaten one with total desolation unless you know the secret, or can learn the secret of holding the heart in the flames of the Sacred Heart.

The third kind of practice that is going to be essential to anybody who’s going through this dark night of the species and inevitably a dark night of their own—because no one will be able to escape being excruciated by what’s happening—is prayer practice, because sometimes neither the cool nor the heart work, and as Jesus experienced in Gesthemane, sometimes the only practice that can align you with the mysterious world of your destiny is a prayer practice.

The fourth kind of practice is what I’ve been devoting a lot of time to, because in my own experience and in the experience of what I see around me in a very disheveled, disembodied, zonked-out New Age, is sacred body practices. Because without profound sacred physical practice I think there’s absolutely no hope for one to embody the divine energies at the level and at the intensity of vibration that you describe so beautifully in your book—this new, intense vibration that is trying to embody itself to give us the energy and the passion and the courage to do what needs to be done.

Those four kinds of practices will help you embody the divine human but they will not be enough for the reason you so eloquently said at the end of what you said. We cannot afford to demonize those who are unconsciously in the prey of very dark powers simply because we are all the slaves of those powers at this moment. Everyone is threatened, I think, by the five kinds of collective shadow I have identified in the hope: disbelief, dread, despair, dissolution, death-wish. And with the ways in which our individual shadows and traumas and desires for comfort keep that shadow going. So the CEOs and the mad politicians and the drug-crazed rappers are just living out on a vast, hectic, chaotic scale what is already seething and boiling within all of us. That’s the first point. The second point is that in this desperate energy—as you so clearly point out—is potentially, when transformed, a golden energy for transformation and a deep source of unconditional compassion which can even take you to the fringes of enlightenment. Because once you know that you are the Anti-Christ yourself, then the possibility of the Christ being born in you begins. The Buddha’s words just before achieving enlightenment were “Oh darkness!” Many commentators failed to really understand it, until an eleventh-century Japanese monk said the reason why he said “Oh darkness” was at the moment he entered nirvana was the moment that he saw the face of the dark one, the killer, the mad one and realized it was his own face. So there is a very deep and subtle and mysterious relationship between the claiming of one’s complete, dark, demonic, destructive shadow and the transformation into divine humanity. And this means that the fifth kind of practice will have to be mystical shadow-work, at a very deep level. Alchemical shadow-work. And this kind of alchemical shadow-work is hardly here yet, and hardly here yet at the level it needs to be here. Because they’re two interrelated levels at which it really needs to work, and work fast, and work intensely.

The first is that we all have to look at the collective shadow of the human false self, which we all participate in, and the despair and disillusion and desolation and death-wish and dread, that it has completely, almost, possessed us with which enables us to do nothing as the powers that be destroy everything. And then we have to really take an unprecedented release also into our own personal shadows. In which all of us will discover just how much our past traumas, our deluded clinging to status are buying of the myths of an entitled, unsustainable lifestyle, have made us the perfect collaborators of this death machine. And the only way that this alchemical shadow-work can be done in my experience, is through creating a mystical container strong enough to be able to stand the horror of what we have to face about the world and about ourselves. And if we can create the mystical crucible strongly enough to stand that horror, then the depth of our depravity, the depth of our total enslavement, once-glimpsed and endured and accepted, becomes, through a mystery of grace, a glimpse into the kind of power that could stream through us if only we were able to stay totally humble, and if only we were able to surrender to the divine light that is unbearably intense at this moment, and casting such a shadow, and trying to make us wake up to it so we can claim true responsibility for our transformation.

Richard: A lot of work.

Andrew: Well a lot of work in a culture that doesn’t want to do any work and in a spiritual world that is still obsessed with The fucking Secret.

Richard: And … and yet I think that it has to be—there is no magical formula. A Buddhist teacher, Lama Thubten, said to me recently, and I can’t quote him anything like exactly: ‘The problem with so many Buddhist students is that they think Buddhism has the answer or is the answer. But Buddhism is not a substitute for the complication that is nor does it have any foolproof protocol for our situation.”

This is one of the problems with the New Age: that it’s one formula after another. Even when the formula is being disclaimed, it’s still formulaic; there’s still this unreal perception of a game that has formal rules and is set up for us in advance, even for us to win in the end. Guess what: we’re inventing the game. We’re inventing it for the universe as we go along. All formulas and rules are temporary and provisional. Yet some New Agers go on playing, from one ostensible channeled message to another, one retreat and empowerment seminar to another. Who is sending these messages, really? Who is teaching the seminars?

Andrew: This is the equivalent in the spiritual arena of the flatland capitalist results-oriented mind, isn’t it?

Richard: Mm-hm. And it’s like its own Tower of Babel.

Andrew: Yes, it’s worse than that because it’s really creating a completely fake spirituality and feeding the very thing that needs to be disintegrated, which is the ego.

Richard: Right, and at some points, thus, when the real message comes, it comes through a glass darkly from exactly the sources that you think are least likely to give it: children, military veterans, hapless lovers, a guy in a factory, an Indian peasant, a boat captain, a pop singer, a kitsch poet, simple folks who look with direct, open eyes at the world they have come to be in, and don’t question or demand but do and say. Animals….

Andrew: Yes, and the messages are coming through the least likely sources: the oil spill, the crazy greed of the CEOs, the madness of children being slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands in the streets of our cities.

Richard: Mm-hm. There’s a lot of warped and sublimated divine passion in that. I think about this a lot, and have thought about it my whole life. I go back and forth between dualism—you know, this sort of classic good and evil—and a more Buddhist universe, in which there isn’t evil as such, only shadow and distortion of the primordial luminosity. At this moment I come out on the side of—that evil is not ultimately useful or self-sustaining. I think it runs out. I think it becomes tedious and vacuous even to the entities expressing and embodying it and running its many operations. I don’t think finally that there’s any luminosity sustaining it.

In another sense, though, you could say there is luminosity sustaining it, but it is luminosity behind the shadow. We still need that particular piece of the spectrum, of the luminosity, in its pure and holy form. By forfeiting it categorically to these horrendous events, we, in a certain sense, spurn its power. But these must be the only form the light can take in this present passage, this civilization and alchemical interlude. When we ostracize certain people and events and try to put them outside us and to say ‘Well, at least we’re not the bad guys,” we also lose absolutely critical keys to the power to change, keys to the nascent horror-beauty of the universe. We lose ourselves.

Andrew: Absolutely.
Richard: I think we can only change incrementally and gradually and by ascertaining each paradox and each reversal and each horrific thing as it comes.

Andrew: Well couldn’t you say that while there is no evil in the absolute, because the absolute is eternal light, bliss, and truth. Nevertheless, when there is a creation, there is a dance of opposites. And in the dance of opposites, what you could call the dark forces, the forces of destruction, play a very important role, which it is extremely stupid to ignore.

Richard: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to give that up.

Andrew: It’s essential because it reconciles dualism and unity. But the unity expresses itself mysteriously through this dualism, which also has secret relationships, paradoxical relationships—

Richard: With the light.

Andrew: Yes.

Richard: And I would make a distinction between our personal, internal experience of the nightmare, and the lazy projection of horror and blame onto other people. Because I do think that the people who are carrying out these ugly acts are living their own, albeit sometimes sterile, version of the nightmare, maybe vapid, maybe rote and compulsive, even deceptively reassuring, but it’s still a nightmare for them and it purveys its own horror and deadness.

Does anyone else want to ask a question or make a comment? They are welcome.

It’s open.

Lindy Hough: When you’re just now saying the nightmare, what do you mean?

Richard: I mean that each person, no matter who they are or what they’re doing, experiences both the fundamental ontological shadow that’s in the universe at the nucleus and core, and at the same time suffers the outer caravan of violence, shoddiness, and destruction, the gruesome acts and events that we hear of. I’m sure that we feel psychically the vectors of slaughter, massacre, rape, and defilement that are occurring as we speak all across our planet and giving off immense psychic gongs throughout our subtle fields and traveling through our gateways and energy openings. We’re all experiencing those things excruciatingly if unconsciously and somaticizing their consequence and meaning into our bodies, into cell-transmitters. Yet, when I was declaring non-dualism, I meant, ‘There is only one source energy that is sustaining all this, dark and light, ecstatic and vampiric, and that is the ground luminosity of the universe. It’s locked up in those things too, through the shadow, which is the other side of the luminosity. The stars blazing across the time-space vastness of the night sky are the same meta-photon particles lighting the murder and kidnapping of children by irregular armies swarming across Africa, the hunting of zebras by hyenas—the same interior light with all its mochas, miasmas, snarls.’ I think William Irwin Thompson said at one point, very simply, very eloquently: In effect, every light casts a shadow. Every light, however sacred, however primordial, however pure, however subtle and divine. As a koan, I think that’s well-worth remembering: the moment we let light into a world, any world, a light of any origin or motif, that’s the moment in which we introduce that same light’s shadow, all its dense and swirling knots as it hits the unknown psyche of us, and it, in this creation we share. But likewise when each shadow comes into the world, it’s indicative of some essence, some source of light, some path back to the light source.

Andrew: I think though too, Richard, something you said earlier is very important. One of the things we need to be doing is to really not only be looking at the ways in which our own shadow is collaborating with this massive shadow of the death-machine, but also really praying for those who are trapped in their roles as masters of the machine. Because from any kind of enlightened perspective, they are the ones who are suffering in obscurity and unconsciously the most. Because in killing and in massacring and in destroying the environment, they are laying waste to their own source, they are laying waste to their own psyches, they’re living in an increasingly polluted psychic atmosphere.

Richard: Right. You once told a story about how the Dalai Llama, upon hearing of the slaughter of the Tibetan nuns by Chinese soldiers, wept. When asked presumptively if he was weeping for the nuns, he responded, rather fiercely, ‘No, their souls were okay.’ He was weeping for the soldiers who killed the nuns.

Andew: Exactly, and I think that’s what His Holiness is representing in the world, that position of enlightened compassion in which his really deepest compassion is extended to the most brutal of his so-called enemies. Because he knows that what they are doing is preparing for them an enormous stinking karmic grave. And it’s time that we really—all of us, as far as we can—enter that realm, and realize that demonizing the enemy is actually a very—it’s a subconscious way of hiding three things from ourselves: first our own collaboration with the enemy through our own shadow. Secondly, the level of helplessness that we feel when we recognize that. And thirdly the enormity of the grief that breaks upon us when we realize not only what we are doing to ourselves, but what those who are doing this are doing to themselves. And somehow we have to be able through sacred practice—and this is where I think the Tibetan practices, the things like tonglen, are so important; they create a crucible in which we can become strong enough to endure what we have to endure, to hold the heart open, to hold the dark and the sadistic and the tormented at the center of our hearts and keep constantly praying for them so that they can be illumined by the light that sustains everything.

Richard: Right, and that’s where they get to contribute—where they get to alchemize to transform and contribute, those quanta of energy. I don’t care what the situation looks like at that point, however nasty or fucked; I think that’s the moment at which the healing will begin, and in which it will be set in motion, irreconcilably. But we need those acts to sweep across the planet, silently and inwardly, silently and inwardly, to begin to change things like a sudden shift of wind through grasses.

[30:45]

Andrew: Duality will have been overcome by enough people. Right?

Richard: Right, and we will have recognized, as you say, our own complicity, our own collaboration, and our own delusions—you and me right along with the rest of them as we go along here. And that reminds me that I think in a very, very tiny but an important way, because there are only tiny ways, that you and I having our own reconciliation after having had something of an impasse and conflict in the past decade-plus is a bit of microcosm of what we are evoking. Neither of us was evil then, but we certainly behaved in ways that the other person found unacceptable, and then we drifted there for over a decade until you initiated coming back together and healing what was done between us. Well there are a billion billion such opportunities, tiny and gargantuan, floating around the planet right now to be seized, opportunities for people to transform the aether and, with it, uncountable other people that they don’t even know.

Andrew: Well, don’t you think also that when shadows have bumped against each other there’s a possibility of an even greater depth of understanding.

Richard: Oh for sure. It’s like the prodigal son returns, again and again and again.

Andrew: Right. And also how can I possibly write about unconditional forgiveness for the Palestinians and the Israelis and not want to make up with someone who I have had fundamentally trivial disagreements with—it’s idiotic isn’t it?

Richard: I know but people do it. Without naming names I’ll speak anonymously of the Buddhist teacher who, after teaching so well, got in the car with me and then expelled some of the ugliest road rage I have ever seen. I called attention to it and she said, “Well oh, that’s only road rage.” And I thought, ‘Aha! The one free pass: road rage. The one allowable excuse.’ Sort of…that will be the last thing left on our wasted planet in some Mad Max landscape: they’ll be riding tanks and screaming out the turrets at each other like drivers on a freeway outside Tulsa.

But I think your point is well taken. I think that when you look at the kind of overall picture and then you look at the kind of schema that we’re both talking about, what’s going to be required for the great evolution is transformation of our view of blame and evil, our projections of our own responsibility onto others. The only thing finally more difficult than enduring the chaos might be enduring the cure. Right?

Andrew: Yeah. The truth is that we can make daily extraordinary steps by constantly being vigilant over our minds, constantly trying, with all the chaos of our psyches, to move toward compassion and true tenderness in our relationships with others, and that this is the foundation from which all manner of things can flower.

Richard: Mm-hm. I also think, as I said in my opening statement, that we’re not alone—and not in the sense that SETI and the professional astronomers propose but in the big sense. The universe is filled with intelligences, entities, elementals, souls at different stages, and probably some aliens too, some of them quite likely capable of telepathy and telekinesis without regard to distance or time, galactic or dimensional location. We are participating in a dense starry cosmos packed invisibly with wondrous and beautiful and complex beings in a way that I never would have believed possible when I first considered it as a college student who was reading Jung and Gurdjieff and C. S. Lewis in dialectic with early Carl Sagan. I now think that, to recast Sagan’s primal trope, not only is there intelligent life in the universe but every atom and molecule is participating at some octave or vibrational frequency in connection with every other, with all that’s intelligent, all that’s compassionate, and all that’s hopeful. It’s hard to acclaim that with confidence and believe it without deep self-doubt and compulsive cynicism, but it’s coming through the shadow, the darkness, gloom, and pessimism, just as strongly as it’s coming through the radiance. I think, whether we believe it or not, that we are sustained by the cosmos, as we are truly like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, casting and jousting among shadows while we just don’t see that we’re in this much bigger arena, bigger than the universe delineated by the night sky, and that’s pretty big.

All of our actions are karmic, and all of our actions are consequential—not just here, but everywhere. Wherever there’s a there. Our meanings and values radiate through matter and psyche, ceaselessly, endlessly. Wherever dimensionality reaches, wherever. It’s not just about matter, it’s not about the Big Bang. It’s not about some neat little locked-up field-theory universe that physicists in one culture on one planet have packaged conveniently for themselves and their professional resumés. It’s about this ineffable, unknown, continuously manifesting mystery and wonder that makes it bearable to be here at all. We live in awe or we live in panic—those are the choices, avoid them though we may. We live in prayer and humility or we live in terror. Any true act of empathy and compassion has resonances through known and unknown universes and domains, because everything is interrelated in unimaginable and mysterious ways.

How powerful and how wonderful a gift to go against the hexes and curses that are coming from—forgive the phrase—the other side! The materialist bankers and scientists and politicians and the mercenaries of all stripes.

Andrew: Yes because—and I would like to say that this is something that has become clearer to me and I think it’s one of the reasons why I so enjoyed your book, is that—the situation we’re enduring is particularly horrible because something enormous is at stake. And what is at stake is a birth of the divine in matter, in our matter, in the bizarre, chaotic, shadow-ridden matter of us. And why that is so immense is that if the divine can be born in a matter so chaotic and opaque and dark, then the after-effects of that birth, the rippling out of that birth will profoundly affect not only life on this earth, but life throughout the million million universes. The birth of the divine in the human through the catastrophic, apocalyptic violence of a dark night, is not for this Earth alone, which is why those forces that oppose it are so hysterical and violent. Because they may be very well beginning to understand that what this birth will enable is a subtle transformation on millions of millions of rippling-out levels. And that—do you see—that’s the natural consequence of what you’re saying.

Richard: Yes.

Andrew: And this of course is what is known in the mystical traditions, as when the Tibetan Buddhists talk about supreme enlightenment, and what happens when a supremely enlightened master leaves the body and enters the dharmakaya, the whole universe is elevated. No one in enlightenment doesn’t contribute to what the Christians called pleroma, the massive evolutionary energy of increasing fullness.

Richard: Right. Our computers represent the faintest, most primitive model of how the universe itself is caching all this data and meaning in the akashic record, in a transmolecular rainbow body of our collective planetary soul, which includes everyone who ever was, every creature and every person going back to the dawn of this sacred world.

Andrew: It’s very empowering when you begin to suspect that. I had an experience of that very recently. I was dying in South Africa, my gall bladder exploded and I was being driven across very bumpy roads and it was very agonizing. I knew I was dying, but I wasn’t in any fear. And my old Tibetan training kicked in and I decided—or it decided—to do tonglen for the world at that moment. So I was consciously sending out the agony that I was in as an act of purification, as an act of sacrifice. And in a way I cannot begin to describe, I knew at the moment that I was doing it. That if you can do it, a mystical exercise at that kind of extremity with your whole being—it has cosmic consequences because your own inner authenticity and passion burn down all the barriers between all being, and this flood of light that comes from the practice can illumine all being. It was a tremendous initiation for me because I think up until that moment, I had believed in the power of prayer and I’d believed in the power of mystical practice to help others, but in that moment, as a grace and as a blessing because I was dying and I was desperate in one part of myself, I was also privileged in experiencing the atomic power of sacred practice done from total authenticity of love. And if this can be conveyed to people and if they can become disciplined enough to experience it, then this gives a level of empowered hope that nothing else can give.

Richard: Yeah, I agree. That is the gift. Your gift is not always giving your love and your joy and your epiphanies, because it can’t always be done. The gift is being able to give your pain too, your grief, and to give it just as generously and sincerely. To be used by the pleroma, and to be cached along with all the rest, because the universe needs the pain and grief too. In fact, needs it desperately.

You’re giving your pain in love. You’re giving your horror in peace and recognition and trust, utter and ultimate trust.

Not as a retribution and not as outrage or martyrdom, but as a gift, in the way your birth and your life were gifts from the unknown divine. You give your agony and passion as Christ did: to open realms. To break down barriers between sets of meanings, as life and death, resurrection or obliteration. I mean that was the sacrifice of Christ, to use his body to break down a realm—to break down a barrier between realms, to demonstrate that transformation and rebirth are possible, and nothing can intercede.

It’s a love beyond division. It’s a love beyond reason. It’s a love beyond agenda. It’s a love beyond results. And if you can allow yourself to surrender to that love, that love has the power of resurrection somewhere within it, at its core.

And here’s the problem with the post-Darwinian scientific worldview: It’s certainly not all of the toys and machines and products and laws, although those have their consequences and karma; it’s the constant message to humanity that none of this is happening and none of this is real; that you are mere zombies, hallucinations, without consciousness or inner life. When you make homeopathic remedies, there’s nothing in them; they’re a fraud, right, because there is no transmolecular realm or higher energy than what we have deemed valid. When you say prayers by the same order, that’s just more placebo effect, or it’s tepid wishful thinking. Only what can be demonstrated as cause and effect in double-blind experiments counts and gets to be real and has a chance of serving us; only what can be patented and marketed, what can be commoditized and capitalized. It’s really a collaboration—it’s not pure science in the sense of knowledge or empiricism—it’s the collaboration of false science with capitalism and materialism and at the same time with a vast heresy of diabolism that reaches as deep into the church and the synagogue and mosque as it does into the Pentagons and boardrooms. It’s this kind of heresy that in all that odd Drunvalo Melchizedek material gets associated with the Martians and that whole little mythology of the robotic aliens and their Lucifer rebellion. It’s the strange and powerful desire to deprive us of our birthright in the sacred universe and to replace it with a bogus cyborg universe of their own.

Andrew: Absolutely. It’s the Ahriman if you like.

Richard: Yeah the Ahriman, right, the Lord Ahriman.

Andrew: This terrible, dark, demonic flattening of the whole human experience to flatland science.

Richard: I think that’s what Owen Barfield spoke of. It’s a constant war and a constant battle because we’ve all received the vaccinations, or most of us have. We’ve all been vaccinated with that worldview. So everything miraculous and everything with real light and luminosity is denied at some level to us and in us, even when we believe passionately. We are hexing and damning ourselves to oblivion.

We not only have to find the sacred again, but we have to wage constant vigilance against the nihilistic indoctrination.

Andrew: But could we look at it from your perspective and your wisdom about the shadow? Because it’s been my own experience and I’m sure it’s been yours that having to struggle with such ferocity against this truly desperately dark vision—

Richard: Deepens the universe.

Andrew: Yes.

Richard: And the universe has stretched itself out into this dilemma—obviously for esoteric reasons that are way beyond our ken, but nonetheless, it has reached into the incredibly profound depth of this paradox—

Andrew: It isn’t beyond our ken, Richard; I really do think that it’s clear. And I think what has happened is that this Ahrimanic consciousness has been allowed to expand because it is the consciousness of the human false self, and it’s being allowed to almost destroy everything because the only hope for a massive divinization process to be real is for the human being to see the consequences of this blasphemy and this madness and this complete hallucination of power, and playing through the processes that we’ve been discussing, the power of that shadow and devote it in surrender and humility to the divinization process. There is no other way. It’s just the same in the individual growth divinization: it has to pass through the dark night, and for the dark night to be possible, the subtle ego has to expand to monstrous levels. Right?

Richard: Right, all of this resistance is not just an obstacle and impediment, is not just there to overcome. It also is part of the substance of the divine. It is literally one of the robes in which we must wrap ourselves in order to really get it, get it as solid, brave, accountable, real, able to stand up for itself against any version of demonic or Satanic denial, against any alien onslaught, however apocalyptic.

And even in its own demonic way, the new cult of the suicide bomber—the ritual of the suicide bomber—is an expression of the lost divine and a grasping at the pathway to the core. It’s also a direct attack on materialism. In a certain symbolic way, that’s why 9/11 so remarkably resembled the Tower Card in the Tarot, I mean down to the fine details. Talk about prophecy manifested!

Whatever else suicide attacks and jihad seem to be, because this all has a separate politics attached to it, one can’t help but see that in the simplest sense it’s a direct confrontation with materialism, with commoditism, with the actuarial and usurous reality of the West. In fact the Islamic worldview classically proposes a cleansing jihad, internally, not externally, as an inner struggle against darkness, not as a wrathful manifestation or vengeance against the innocent or incidental, but I can see how the oppressed translate it into holy war today. They are attacking the heart of a great materialist blasphemy.

Andrew: Absolutely. It was a lesson tragically lost though, wasn’t it, because nobody in this country has the courage to get up and say two things, which is firstly that there was some justice in what was done—not in the horrible way in which it was done—but the rage of the Islamic world against the pollution of the world by American capitalism or better by American media, by American vulgarity, has a terrible truth to it. And the second thing that nobody dared to get up and say is that we are supposed to be a Christian country and here we are bringing down destruction on those who have hurt us instead of pursuing mercy.

Richard: And those who haven’t hurt us. Well, that we’ve always done.

Andrew: Well yes. But one of the things that when you do read the works of the Islamist terrorists—and I’ve done a lot of it because I am very deeply moved by Islam, and very transformed by the great Islamic mystics, so I’ve been wrestling for years with Islam, and when I read many descriptions of the terrorist tracts of the culture that I live in, I recognize a great deal of truth in them: There is nothing whole about our culture, we are driven by greed; there’s a kind of free-floating, dark promiscuity which is attacking so much of what is sacred about love and emotion and passion, the whole of our culture is in the hands of a few corrupt business-people, I mean this is what they’re saying in their literature. There’s a reality about that that the Americans are not willing to face.

Richard: Yeah, not close to it.

It’s a bit of a non sequitur, but I’m reminded of something that John Friedlander, with whom I’ve been doing psychic work, said, and I quote very loosely, “Think of someone with whom you are in essential disagreement. Then imagine that that person is suddenly eliminated from the universe. What have you lost in your own development by their elimination?” He also pointed out that, in effect, the moment that person was eliminated, the universe would go about replacing them instantly. And if you eliminated all evil and opposition from the universe, it would return in less than the blink of an eye.

Watch Fox News some night, whether it’s Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity or Sarah Palin or whomever, and find what it is in yourself that you have to give up in order to demonize them, and then think what it would be like if they no longer existed, what you would lose, and then think how to take the act of demonization into yourself, as who you are, not who they are, which is a whole other thing. Demonization is a convenient way of avoiding confronting our own energy.

I’ve found this a curiously transformative exercise, one that always releases the strangest little curlicue of compassion for those people—sorrow that they suffer what they do, you know honestly, not just some sort of piety or arrogant piety but a fleeting quantum of communion with an actual sense of sadness. And that’s much more fulfilling and transformative than just staring at the talking heads and feeling anger and rage and thinking destructive thoughts and wishing all sorts of destructive things on them.

Andrew: Well, don’t you think someone like His Holiness, seeing the face of the terrorist who has just blown himself up or herself up, would feel the most acute compassion for somebody driven by heartbreak and frustration and humiliation to such an extreme and karma-darkening act?

Richard: For sure.

Andrew: You don’t just feel rage. It’s that somebody who’s done that must have done that from the most terrifying reasons of the soul and of the heart. And my own heart bleeds for these people. It’s not only that I don’t feel rage, I just feel more acute heartbreak when I see the face of a suicide bomber than for almost any other person—

Richard: Because there’s the sacred fire too.

Andrew: Yes! If only the New Age had the passion of the suicide bomber—

Richard: Right exactly. If they had the passion, the commitment, and the sincerity. In fact, just the sincerity would do it. That’s what’s missing in the New Age.

Andrew: And the capacity to give your whole life for a transformation you want, which is what’s going to be asked of us. While we sit here twiddling with our iPads and Facebooking and slacktivisim, this new trend that you just choose an idiotic cause and have 50,000 people wear red on their behinds … we indulge in this kind of monstrous, decadent play-acting for no reason and for no purpose—here are people who for all the wrong reasons and a few of the right ones are truly prepared to give up their whole lives in the name of a passion for a new world. God knows, I’m looking for people who have that passion and I hardly ever find them in the long, dreary malls of America.

Richard: Including the dojo malls and the holistic health malls.

Andrew: Oh yes, the whole malls. It’s all mall in America. The new age is one huge mall, all the publishers—except for of course North Atlantic [laughing]—one vast mall, the … it’s mall-mind, mall-heart, mall-soul, mall-mall-mall.

Lindy: So how are we going to galvanize people?

Andrew: How the hell do you think? What do you think? What do you think? What do you fear in your guts when you ask that question.

Ed: Can’t happen. It’s too late.

Lindy: Ed says it’s too late and it can’t happen.

Andrew: Don’t feel that because that would be a betrayal of your deepest spirit. How you galvanize people is by three things: First of all, you connect them with the divine consciousness within them. Secondly, you give them the disciplines that really sustain that consciousness, and, thirdly, you help them follow their heartbreak and follow something they can really do in the real world to help the real agony of the real exploding real crisis. If you really see that the world is dying—and that means that not only your psyche is going to be destroyed but that the world that you love is dying, that if you have children your children are going to inherit desolation; if you really see that, if you really allow yourself to feel it, if you really stop intellectualizing about it, but start feeling it and feeling it from the divine within you, then you will be driven, you will be driven to find something that you must do just to stay human.

Richard: That is sacred activism.

Andrew: Yes. I know I’m being dramatic because it’s so important that you don’t go to that place where there is nothing to be done, because that’s exactly what—from that place nothing can be done, and this tremendous crisis will be totally wasted, and we won’t have a chance to repeat it. Richard, before we end, there is one question I wanted to ask you: what do you fear the most for the world?

Richard: Well, I think that the answer is both obvious and not obvious. I fear that the oil will not stop coming out of the hole in the sea and that that hole stands for a larger hole that has been opened into a darkness that doesn’t have light or hope behind it, and that it will fill the oceans and choke our life—and I mean that both metaphorically and actually—because the hole in the Gulf is not only the corporate vacuum of greed, the breach into the underworld of our apostasy and the demons who feed off our cruelty and lack of modesty or mercy, but it becomes a symbol for nuclear proliferation, for the trafficking of children and young women, for Africans who are machete-ing off people’s hands and legs to strike fear into them and make them controllable, for the religious fanatics spewing toxins into the psychic oceans, the Crusaders, Armies of God, Israeli Settlers, Iranian mullahs, Jihadists, and so on. I fear having those forces get in control of the world and then even worse, convince people that they’re in charge forever and they’re running things from now on and have excoriated and abolished the divine. Get in line if you want to be saved, if you want your place in the suburban cornucopia or the bomb shelter. It would be like an invasion of the worst form imaginable of alien Grays. Convincing people that they have to yield to the satanic force of this sort of tar-black toxic darkness. That seems to me the most terrifying thing because once it gets into the soul—but you know, I’d like to think that the soul is immune.

Andrew: Oh no.

Richard: I think that once it gets into the soul, a whole new level of danger is entered upon—like when in the Inquisition they tried to force evil into that Cathars’ souls. That was probably one of the most horrendous things that the Church imagined and enacted—to take innocent people and try to corrupt and taint their souls. So I think that that’s the most frightening thing—that it will get inside of you.

Andrew: Exactly.

Richard: And I know something of what that feels like and I think you know that, too.

Andrew: Yes. Yes I do. I think that I fear exactly the same thing that you do. I fear that there are two visions of oneness fighting for the future. One is that transcendent immanent unity that could birth us into a new humanity. And the other is its exact demonic opposite: a oneness that is a terrifying collusion, potentially, between the mass corporations, the military industrial complex, an enslaved and depraved media, and mind-altering, body-altering experimentation, and a one-world government run by corrupt lobbyists. And that is now a distinct possibility. Imagine what Hitler would have done with the hydrogen bomb, a massive media system, a corrupt corporation network, and you can imagine what some financially supported blond thirty-five-year-old selected by the hidden Plutocrats could accomplish at this moment.

Richard: Yeah well that’s why I think that in the end we have to get almost silly and goofy and say, ‘Okay, all those entities and people and angels who are out there on all the other levels—now’s the time you can rush in to help us. But you don’t even have to tell us you’re there; just support us a little from within and we’ll get it done. We’ll bring us all home.’ We need to be a bit hyperbolic and amused.

Andrew: Well I think—don’t you think there’s a tragic dignity in being able to see as much as we can see?

Richard: I do. There is a tragic dignity in this whole situation, and you know in a funny way, our plight goes all the way back to the Stone Age, which is only a second away in cosmic time. Our plight and our opportunity. I was thinking recent of how brilliant the entire shamanic tradition is and how it arose as almost precisely the same training and practice, with variations, in every area of the Earth across millennia like separate stars coming out in the same night sky. Shamanism is the unitary pleroma of the Stone Age. Our whole civilization is born from it, yet that civilization is but a faint replica of the fiery nexus that birthed the original shamanic cultures of the old times. So the war, the basic ideological war now is between shamanism and science. Not that they don’t have moments of collaboration and overlap, but those are the two opposing competing forces.

Andrew: Right, and when you found your whole vision on that shamanic basis and then expand it through all the mystical revelations of transcendence, you get a vision of evolutionary mysticism that can embrace all those different levels of awakening.

Richard: Right and if you convert it into sorcery, and then apply it to metallurgy, you get the present show.

Andrew: Yes, on that happy note.

Lindy: Thank you so much, Andrew, for joining us.

Andrew: No, this is a great pleasure—it always is. Thank you all who have been listening; don’t go away too depressed, because there is a lot that can be done if you’re prepared to die. … And I don’t mean die unto death.

Richard: No, he meant die unto transformation.

Andrew: I was being a jihadist. Inner jihad.

Richard: Okay, thanks again, Andrew.

Andrew: God bless you, Richard.