BEFORE CHAPTER NINE OF PART I IS SINCERE RESEARCH WHILE LIVING A SPIRITUAL TRADITION. WHAT FOLLOWS SPECULATES, EXPERIMENTS AND EXTRAPOLATES FROM THE PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE.
It’s allegory, sorry- and there be monsters…
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Chapter One
In which:
-2nd Yemen; no, Egypt; no, Yemen; no…
-Luxor
-Golden Light
-The natural efficacy of disaster
-The I Ching speaks
-Mexico and Death (Alex and Doug)
-The Deer God and Salvation
-Fecundating the Great Spider in Mazatlan
-Nevada mists
The Golden Light of Luxor
I visited Upper Egypt on the way to Yemen. I stayed just south of Luxor in a little hotel on the river . It was like paradise to me. The river carried populations, no, continents of water lilies floating freely down its course, north. The farms on the other side are lush gardens fronting the utterly barren desert beyond. I visited the “land of the dead” on the other side. And stayed for a week on the side of the living. Again waiting, waiting. I had waited in Spain for six weeks and another in Cairo. All in not such patient preparation for what? I celebrated a Mass in my room overlooking the river at Luxor. Then I realized that I had been having, for several days, an experience of this other world, this world of wonderful, yellow, golden, light. Peace. A remarkable state of consciousness. Completion. Many times during this journey, I had imagined an elephant slowly lumbering along the shore of the sea. Slowly, it moved undistracted to its destination. Then I focused on the Nile. Water. The cradle for Western Civilization. The Nile. Egypt. This is exactly where I needed to be. The secret to life and the balance of life in this world is water. That will be the focus of the future battle.
This place, however, is the focus of this pilgrimage. And in it was a peace that surpasses anything for me. I completed the Mass. I knew I needed to journey no further in the Middle East. Not to Yemen, anyway. I could go to Yemen, but it would make no difference. The elephant had arrived in the realm of joyous, joyous, golden light. I stayed there until he disappeared entirely into the light, which took several days. I made a small medicine bundle and threw it into the river. For me this is a place of intense delight.
Amidst this silent, boring solitude, a very clear intuition that Mexico is the next place and that hopefully is to be the concluding punctuation to the Yemen Experiment.
I sent messages to Chris. Told him not to come to Yemen as planned. Yemen was not necessary. No point. This is the Place of the Yellow Light that he had seen in that earlier vision. He had intuited as much anyway and was on his way to Taiwan for further martial arts training. I left for home, mystified, satisfied.
I had to wait over-night near Cairo in a place called Heliopolis. At that time I was reading books on Egyptian Mythology. One story of the creation of the world tells of Ra, whose ancient place of worship was Heliopolis. Ra wills himself into existence out of the primordial waters, then finding himself alone and lonely, masturbates, takes the semen into his mouth and by spewing it out, produces the gods. (Armor, pg. 20) Organic religious consciousness this. The effective rain rituals mentioned earlier had a related form, though not exactly. That was heartening.
Besides the North Sea seal virus, this summer was one of remarkable disasters. Take Note:
From the San Francisco Examiner, September 25, 1988: “May floods in China cause million farmers to lose crops. Kills 100; June Drought causes tens of billions of dollars damage in U.S. Midwest; July 1st, floods in Bangladesh, cholera strikes New Delhi; August, typhoon in China affects 10.5 million people, Nepal earthquake kills 900, floods in Sudan leave 2 million homeless (as I start out for upper Egypt); September floods inundate Bangladesh with 28 million victims; September, the worst hurricane in history hits Mexico in the general area where I was supposed to conclude Yemen experiment. The energies for this journey started building in mid May with the mural crisis, and continued through the Geyserville episode in September, described below. This is the same period as this summer of disasters.
Once again, I do not believe the ritual to be causal. Relationship with God is not a one way street, it is co-relational. That is, I do not believe that the “rain-making” rituals caused the rain so much as they bring one into a “conversation” with the powers of the earth and the heavens. These “powers” are under assault from the unrestrained forces of commercial and military technology. I have simply tried to lend whatever personal or divine powers that might reside in an individual to the salvation of, the integrity of, sentient life. Further, though I have tried to deny it to myself for the sake of my own sense of normalcy and sanity, finally I have to admit to an apparent interaction between the flow of these rituals and unusual meteorological and geological events.
Bishop, I believe that we are now at a fulcrum moment in our vast history regarding our survival as a biosphere; and that the earth is moving to effect that survival by attempting to balance the abuses of technology; and that the shamanic capacity brings one more closely into the presence of that reality. Further, human personality has something catalytic to do with that process. Or, at least it has the capacity to be catalytic. Though I am not sure about any of this, and I cannot judge in any conclusive way that the macrocosm of the earth has been affected by the ritual of shamanic pilgrimage, as was the microcosm of my body by the Achekale pilgrimage. But, there has been enough striking, even traumatic, “co-incidences” that it has warranted following through. Somewhere in here, I have the sense of facilitating, helping to birth this process rather than turning it around as earlier thought.
Something significant happened.
I returned from Egypt, to the U.S., to Berkeley. There, I began doctoral studies in September. My mother, who lives nearby, and I took a drive north to Geyserville. The precarious mountain road from inland Geyserville to the coast was the spiritual conclusion to my first pilgrimage.(pg. 31) The geysers from which the ‘ville’ takes its name were further inland, I had thought, than the town in the hills to the east. I had suggested that locale as the destination of our drive. We found that there were no geysers there anymore, but there was one of the world’s largest natural reservoirs of subterranean steam, (ala eastern Turkey!). Mom and I stayed in those hills for perhaps three hours. As we returned south along highway 101, we looked back and saw smoke. We turned on the radio, it and the next day’s papers carried stories of five mysteriously spontaneous fires igniting in those hills just when we had been there. Even my mother, who is patient but generally incredulous about these things, was struck by the clear coincidence. Thus, I believe the Luxor chapter concluded.
The fires, and storms are connected sexually, Tantrically, to this. My mother has been central to a lot of the shamanistic imagery, (See conclusion of first Greek pilgrimage and Crazy Mountain dream, as well as Tibetan Buddhist theory.) as has been my father, (see Eastern Turkey dream). Both were unconsciously operative in the formation of my particular sexual bent, as parents always are. My sexual practice is abstemious as far as biological creatures are concerned, but the earth, the universe….. Who can really describe such things.
(Long Beach; center of so much of my ritual, art, and life for the past year, as well as in California coastal Indian creation myth and history, as well as being home of some of my family and most influential supporters at the time, was struck by an earthquake at that time of the Geyserville fires.)
Two months later I left for Mexico, hopefully to conclude this experiment.
The dominant symbol for the Luxor journey was light and water. The symbol for the Mexican Conclusion has been death.
One day, I opened Panikkar’s VEDIC EXPERIENCE for a “reading” about the approaching trip to Mexico. The reading I turned to was about Yama, the “god of death” in the Vedic pantheon. On my way to central eastern Mexico, I planned a stop in Zuni, New Mexico to observe their winter ” Shalaco” celebrations. When I called my friend there to make these arrangements, she was mourning for the murder of one of her students, the suicide of another, and the death of her father. When I arrived at the home of friends in S. California on my way to New Mexico, a former parishioner stopped by unexpectedly to say that she was dying of cancer. There were a couple of other cancer stories, including that of my former art teacher and early guide. The father of the close friend and artist who helped me paint the mural, died of cancer as did another friend of mine (The sister of my first art teacher in college.) There seemed to be at every turn a funeral cortege or cemetery. After Zuni, my friend and I hitchhiked from Albuquerque to El Paso. We started hitchhiking next to an old cemetery alongside the freeway on ramp.
Our hitchhiking went well for half the first day, but then we got stranded in the middle of the desert. We ended up walking all night. It was too cold to sleep. Some things my friend told me in that moonless dark night were like death. It was the next day that the most disastrous earthquake in history hit Soviet Armenia. It’s not the 50,000 dead that makes me sorry. We all have to die. But it’s those left to suffer. God give them solace and peace. That was just on the other side of the Russian-Turkish border from the place where I began the Yemen Experiment, just a few miles away in that geologically volatile region.
We reached Juarez the next day, caught a bus to Chihuahua. Chihuahua is an ugly city. But there, I had a beautiful, energizing dream. Then on to the Sierra Tarahumara, the badlands of central Mexico where many of the Tarahumara Indians still live a pre-Columbian lifestyle. The mountains there are rugged and powerful. I stopped in a village called Creel. It was like arriving in a wild west town populated with cowboys and Indians. And dust, blinding clouds of dust. Couldn’t see to the end of the block for the dust. That first night, I had a terrible dream. One night soon after, I did a ritual at my fireplace. I used the incense from Luxor and Yemen and other things; prayers, intentions. As these offerings rose in the sacred smoke, out of my practice, into the world, snow began to fall in Creel. To snow in Creel, at 8000 feet, in December is not unusual. But it also snowed in Chihuahua and El Paso. It seldom snows in El Paso.
That cured the dust problem. Seemed to be quite a blessing. Also, that night the one who was to help me complete the ritual, a stranger, arrived in town.
I was invited to go with an anthropologist down into the deepest canyon in that region in Mexico. My friend from California and I consulted a pack of Tarot cards he had with him about going down into that canyon. We asked simply if I would survive the trip down into the canyon. Five consecutive readings said, “no”. We also asked if the Yemen Experiment would have its intended success. “No”. That affected me more than the death threat.
When one is into these adventures, normal rational caution is suspended at times, so I intended to go down into the canyon anyway if that was the completion of this “experiment,” successful or not. Also, my faith in the cards is half-hearted.
My friend had to return home at that point. After he left, I met the other young man, the stranger. This one was spiritually, psychically gifted and helped me complete the ritual. We had had a couple of conversations about spiritual things. On December 11, I went to Mass. That was the vigil of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. (Another dark-skinned apparition.) After Mass, I ran into this young man, Doug, again. He had been looking for me to go for a hike.
He wanted to go up to a statue of Christ on a mountain overlooking the valley. So we did. Though it was a light-hearted hike up to the statue, it felt like we were offering everything to Christ. Up there on a stone deck in front of the statue, I meditated and did Tai Chi. Then, it seemed appropriate to invite Doug to complete the ritual with me. He agreed. I went to my cabin, got the ritual things. Then we hiked to the other end of the valley through a beautiful rural Mexican cemetery (!), and a pine wood, to the base of a mesa of most extraordinary rock formations. There we gathered what was needed for a fire, and very shortly completed the ritual, but…
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After three days, the anthropologist had not returned to take me down into the canyon. Doug was anxious to be gone. So, I suggested that instead of the canyon (and possible death) that we go to Mazatlan(!) That was a place where I had kicked off the second pilgrimage 16 years ago. That pilgrimage was to South America during which I became more deeply fascinated with the question of God, the Church and the religious phenomenon in human personality. That pilgrimage preceded my entrance into the monastery.
(While we were still in Creel, in another of those spontaneous, evocative moments, Doug had his “helping spirit” named for him. The deer!) When we got to “Mazatlan” we stayed in the same hotel I had stayed in 16 years ago on the south (Mexican rather than the American tourist north) end of the beach. After a couple of days my feeling of the place was such that I felt urged to ask the manager what the name of the place, “Mazatlan”, means. I was told that it is the Indian dialect for “Place of the Deer”. There is a statue of a deer at the center of a ‘glorietta’ near the hotel.
By then, Doug and I had already begun a series of “meditations” that lasted about eight hours each, including meditation, energy exchanges, and guided imagery journey. There were more than four of these over three days. In the first of these, we sat face to face. The over-whelming sensation of that first section was anger and hatred. Take Note I believe it to be the hatred from the dragon. I say the dragon because it was without malice so it was not, I believe, diabolic in any ultimate sense. It was the dragon of being, the perhaps necessary violence of creativity. This was extenuated by the fact that we seem to have lost the battle of the ritual and the forces of technological consumerism seem to have taken the field in the human heart and are proceeding to consume the earth.
But, perhaps we win by losing. The theme of the journey has been death; from the reading in the Vedas to the prognosis of my own death in the canyon. But we avoided actual death. Was it rather a rite of passage for us?
After the first meditation, Doug and I proceeded to the usual energy exercises. These were of peace, healing, light with the usual good effects but very, very strong. When I was in the hate mode, I had a vision of struggling to fecundate the great Black Widow. Take Note– She, to build her web. She was vast. I couldn’t stretch across her abdomen. Here was completed a series of images/sensations that had been recurring in my mind and body over the past two months. This was of having sexual intercourse with the universe! It was the clearest non-physical, personally satisfying, sensation of perfect sexual intercourse.
This experience of fecundating the Spider Goddess was the completion of that earlier intercourse. It was somehow related to re-vitalizing the Tree of Life, of sentience, in the world. By that I don’t just mean reproduction but enlightenment and completion. Her web was hung on the Great Tree. The last image from that scenario was of me wrapped up in her silken web, but escaping. In fact, I later make it to the tree itself and hide from her.
Doug’s experience now dominates the rest of the vision journey, but I’ll leave that for him to tell. Doug and his helping spirit lured me away from the canyon that might have been my death. So in a sense saved me from being devoured by the spider after I performed the ancient office of her mate and priest. (The symbol transcends the sequence.) We parted soon after. The sense of the deer god remained strongly with us.
Soon after arriving home, I got a card from my friend in Zuni. She had left the reservation to take up a different job. While driving out, a deer ran in front of her jeep and was killed. She felt badly, and was angered about the three thousand dollars of damage to the car, but related that the Zunis told her the deer were sacred animals who often choose the hunter whom they will allow to sacrifice them.
The Yemen Experiment continues along a slow, drawn out conclusion. I returned from Mexico at Christmas. In the New Year, I had a strong urge to go to Nevada to a certain place that I knew to be a power place, a place of white light. I rented a car and drove out there. It was all quite spontaneous. The Nevada desert, so dusty the first time we went there just before the first Yemen trip, was now covered with snow. Beautiful. When I arrived at Pyramid Lake, it was just getting dark. The lake was covered with a negligee of mist and fog moving in and out of vision. It was more than beautiful, it was powerful as well. The dragon roared its silent presence.( 6th Dragon) It was too dark to find the place I was looking for. So, I parked the car and waited for morning. When morning came, I was greeted by grey-white vistas of snow three or four feet deep. I explored the back roads looking for the place.
Then I found it. A Golden Eagle was perched on top of it. I stayed there for a while without approaching closer. Then, I drove around the lake. That took all day in the snow. I returned to the place at dusk. The eagle was there again. It flew off as I approached its rock. I made a ritual there. I burned some incense from Yemen and some herbs. I prayed. I felt something of the good energies of the place. Very clearly, these energies were the underlying goodness of things, the wellness of all things. Especially in this place, words fail to describe given that there is no reference or comparison. I returned home. This will be a place of great paranormal exercise. See Addendum
Afterwards I reflected that my visits to that good place, one near the beginning, one near the end, were like bookends to the climactic Yemen Experiment. Beauty seems a predominant aspect of these conclusions.*
*(About the effects of the Yemen Experiment: hold in your mind this description of the above mentioned Nevada adventure and dream, add to that these readings from the I Ching: #12 “P’i” with 6 in the second place and nine in the 4th, 5th, and 6th place!!! Most interesting; then # 7 “Shih”, with its advice about the use of poison, drugs and benevolence. Add to that a vision that came as I held the yarrow sticks to my forehead at the end of the session: a vast, drifting, watching presence broods upon the world. This is how I believe the Yemen Experiment worked out. We are well, at peace generally, but watchful and vigilant.)
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121 [67] Desert/Sea I
Oil on Canvas 5.’ x 4′ 1987
There are a number of art works in this collection that seem more clearly than others to be the product of some specific religious ‘preparation’ or ‘practice.’ For instance, I painted “Theotokos” (#36) immediately after spending nine months with Catholic monks (Trappists) in their monastery in Utah. I know that this painting carries/expresses something of the ‘energy’ of that powerful and ascetical experience. The same is true of these less clearly ‘representational’ “Desert/Sea” paintings; #’s 67, 68, 69. Though, these pieces are more a response to ‘wilderness’ experiences; either the sea or the desert or the mountains. The pilgrimage stories, documentary or fiction, of NEPSIS II also are expressions of such preparation/practice/exercise.
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122 [68] Desert/Sea II
Oil on Canvas 4′ x 4′ 1987
There are a number of art works in this collection that seem more clearly than others to be the product of some specific religious ‘preparation’ or ‘practice.’ For instance, I painted “Theotokos” (#36) immediately after spending nine months with Catholic monks (Trappists) in their monastery in Utah. I know that this painting carries/expresses something of the ‘energy’ of that powerful and ascetical experience. The same is true of these less clearly ‘representational’ “Desert/Sea” paintings; #’s 67, 68, 69. Though, these pieces are more a response to ‘wilderness’ experiences; either the sea or the desert or the mountains. The pilgrimage stories, documentary or fiction, of NEPSIS II also are expressions of such preparation/practice/exercise. Here are the minor contradictions from earlier times that can be handled by traditional religion and science or yogas.
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123 [69] Desert/Sea III
Oil on Canvas 5.5′ x 4′ 1987
There are a number of art works in this collection that seem more clearly than others to be the product of some specific religious ‘preparation’ or ‘practice.’ For instance, I painted “Theotokos” (#36) immediately after spending nine months with Catholic monks (Trappists) in their monastery in Utah. I know that this painting carries/expresses something of the ‘energy’ of that powerful and ascetical experience. The same is true of these less clearly ‘representational’ “Desert/Sea” paintings; #’s 67, 68, 69. Though, these pieces are more a response to ‘wilderness’ experiences; either the sea or the desert or the mountains. The pilgrimage stories, documentary or fiction, of NEPSIS II also are expressions of such preparation/practice/exercise.
Here is a violent intrusion into the gardens of paradise–a contradiction of great magnitude