Journeys into the bright world

I have never failed to feel cleaner, healthier, and more relaxed after a samadhi session. However, as one busy day followed another it was very hard to keep the memories of the bright world fresh in mind. It still seemed as though my spiritual roots were too nonporous to make the connections with that realm where there are no separating surfaces. The situation reminded me of the plight of the two tropical plants on my window sill that I was trying to propagate. While in sunny Ojai I had snapped them from their stems and put them in water. Now, plunged in alien soil the stalks were striving to put forth a new substructure. Often I would brood over those poor plantlets, so rudely severed from their mother bush, wondering if they would ever be able to recreate the fibrous network required to sponge up the nourishment they needed.

Fortunately for these languishing sprigs of greenery Howard took it into his head that he was going to become a plant doctor. Each morning he would place his outstretched hands authoritatively over the drooping petals and command, "Heal, heal!" Amazingly enough the pair of them did perk up, even while a sibling plant in the livingroom turned brown and shed its leaves.

During this period I had a series of dreams that clearly mirrored my concern with piecing together our various realities. In one dream I was trying to give a lecture but was unable to start because the audience was spread out in four or five different rooms. In a second I was worrying about my clothing. The top and bottom halves of my wardrobe wouldn't coordinate, even though plenty of both were hanging in my closet. In still another dream I was struggling with a desk constructed in such a way that the lower drawer was locked when the upper drawer opened, and vice versa.

What my mind seemed to be telling me was that fulfillment can never lie in getting from here to there, but rather depends on bringing the here and the there into a conscious unity. Reaching up to the High Self can be no more or less important than helping that overshadowing Presence to grow down and take root in the personal self. The impulse which makes a flower grow is surely as sacred as the impulse to cast it upon the altar where it soon must die. If, therefore, samadhi therapy is to succeed it must be presented not as an invasion of the exigencies of daily existence but rather as a way of integrating formerly disparate modes of being.

It is easy to find God in that which is high, noble and manifestly divine. But if the world is to be saved we must also seek His presence in that which we deem to be low, base and beyond the pale. Increasingly it seemed to me that the ketamine trips were enabling me to look down as well as up, to see the glory of the creation of each atom of matter and to appreciate the designs into which these particles are drawn. What bliss I achieved was not the gift of the inmost source that we have termed the cosmatrix. There the multidimensional wheel spins on, the movie screen shines whitely, the sound reverberates monotonously and the substance of which existence is woven just is, devoid of emotional content or even of what I would normally think of as "spirituality." This undifferentiated state cannot be truly joyous because there is no one there to exult in it, nothing to praise, to appreciate, or even to love. For that kind of veneration we need a separate observer.

That is to say, my profoundest pleasure was experienced not in the deepest state but rather during the journey back from that condition. My desire was not to become more detached from the physical world but rather was for a closer union of the archetype with its image. I wanted to see the pallor of planet Earth interfused with the vitalizing color-music of the bright world, and to feel how the same flowers that germinate in pain blossom in joy in a realm where ecstasy, understanding, sympathy and devotion shine like facets of a single jewel.