Journeys into the bright world

The doctor shook his head. No, nothing like that has come to pass. "Well," I finished lamely, "Pisces rising should make you a natural spiritual healer. Your most important planet Neptune rules anesthesia, and being on the hidden side of the seventh house you would do well working in a partnership situation. The main thing to remember is that seeds sown at this time can bear good fruit."

Continuing to peruse the chart I noticed that the doctor's Geminian Sun was conjunct my Mercury and my Mercury conjunct his Sun-a double Sun-Mercury interchange. In addition my Mars, Uranus and Midheaven in Aries conjuncted his Saturn, while his Mars in Scorpio was in exact opposition to my Venus. "Not a bad comparison," I thought, turning the conversation to other matters.

To my regret, time did not allow me to regress this pleasant man during the workshop. However, he was a good sport about being passed over and before I left I suggested, without much conviction, that maybe at some later date we could schedule a private regression session.

A couple of days later the handsome doctor showed up at a party given by my friend Jan Allen in Seattle. As the guests departed he suggested that we take a walk. In my sedentary life it is always a relief to be able to snatch some exercise and we started briskly up the hill behind Jan's house.

The next hour brought two major surprises. The first was that Howard (also sometimes known by his middle name "Sunny") expressed a degree of regard for me that belied the briefness of our acquaintance. His kind words saddened me because he was obviously so nice and here was I on the verge of backtracking to Vancouver where Doug had lined up two final weeks of regression sessions. Immediately after I was scheduled to drive 1200 miles down the coast to Ojai, leave the car, and fly immediately across the country to Maine where I was already overdue in my promise to put the finishing touches on two books coauthored with Mark Douglas-The Astrological Tradition and Astrology and Time. There just wasn't time for romance.

The second surprise came when Howard and I started to discuss the curious coincidence that both of us were in the profession of putting people to sleep. In commenting on various means of inducing altered states of consciousness he asked if I had ever smoked pot. I replied that I had occasionally done so, but that the only chemically induced "high" that had proven entirely satisfactory involved the use of an obscure drug called ketamine. To my amazement Howard was well acquainted with ketamine which was, he said, a common and quite reliable anesthetic agent sold under the brand names of Ketalar and Ketaject. For the most part it was used to anesthetize children and animals. He himself had not made much use of the substance at the Public Health Hospital, but it was a legitimate surgical aid. Normally it was administered in knock-out doses in conjunction with potent narcotics and under circumstances that precluded any in-depth study of its psychological effects. Consequently, he had never heard of it being used for consciousness-raising purposes and doubted that many other physicians had either.

Here again was the end of a golden thread that seemed to lead nowhere. Nevertheless, I resolved to remember all the flattering things this charming man had said. Even if his personal concern for my welfare was nothing more than a friendly ego-massage the thought that someone like this could care would help sustain me during the miles and hours ahead.

My return trip to Vancouver, which lies one hundred and fifty miles north of Seattle, turned out to be a curious affair bringing some unexpectedly high and low sets of circumstances. The lows came about for a tangled variety of personal reasons, including the inexplicable happenstance that I became the target for a vicious onslaught by certain unknown persons who were willing to stoop to any means to discredit our work. My TV program was canceled by an impersonator claiming to be me, and a vulnerable young female journalist who had interviewed me for the local newspaper was sufficiently intimidated to withdraw the story. Repeated phone calls to my coworkers in Ojai conveyed scandalous lies, while psychic attacks were launched which even strong-minded Mac was hard-pressed to repel. The climax came when a phone call to Barbara Devlin in Ojai informed her that I had been critically injured in a car crash. Shortly after, a follow-up call conveyed the sad news that I was now dead. The callers were insistent that the word be passed on to my family. Considering the fragile health of my parents the shock could have had horrendous consequences and I was grateful that Barbie did not accede to this demand. Nevertheless, the word of my death went out and I was unavailable to explain that, in the words of Mark Twain, the rumor was "greatly exaggerated." 

"Why did they do it?" a friend later asked.