Journeys into the bright world

The week spun around and it was another misty Seattle Saturday. Howard and his daughter Valerie were off for the day and I was delighted to have the hours to catch up with my own eternal correspondence and immortal soul. By one o'clock in the afternoon both were in good shape. Lighting a stick of sandalwood incense I sat back in bed with pen, paper and a forty-milligram dose of ketamine.

By now I could gauge to within five milligrams how far a dose would take me, accounting for food recently consumed and my own state of mind. It had become possible to maintain the same continuity of consciousness at the forty-milligram level that had formerly stretched only to twenty-five. Yet I did not feel that I was acquiring tolerance for the substance. Rather, I was learning to deal with it better.

In determining the level reached much seemed to depend upon the order of business set forth by whatever intelligence was directing these trips. If I was simply playing my priestess role and monitoring someone else's journey then middling doses would not take me far from this world's squared-off realities. If, on the other hand, there was absolute privacy and the various departments of my life were reasonably well organized, the same dose would leave me gasping those oft-repeated words, "This is the deepest (or highest) I have ever been." In my mind this phrase had become the cry of the roots as they probed ever farther into the new element in which they were immersed. Whether these now flourishing roots of the psyche were actually extending deeper or higher seemed quite impossible to tell. Up or down-the distinction was as irrelevant as that between the stars over our heads and the stars under our feet. It was as hard to separate the above from the below as to discern the difference between a glimpse into the heart of the galaxy and a glimpse into the nebulae of atoms within the body.

Preparing to begin I set a poster-sized picture of the Indian superguru Sai Baba on a chair about three feet away and propped myself up so that it would remain in view. For some years I have been convinced that Sai Baba is the highest being alive on this planet today. In India millions worship him as an avatar of love and truth. But what exactly does the word avatar mean, I wondered, reaching for my Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. There I discovered that the word is derived from the Sanskrit ava meaning "down" and tarati meaning "he who passes across." Tarati is akin to the Latin trans. The word is defined as "the descent and incarnation of a deity in earthly form." In other words, an avatar is a transpersonal being who brings the lightning down from heaven and channels it through his own body in order to make it available for the use of mankind. Alice A. Bailey's A Treaties on Cosmic Fire states, "An avatar is a ray of perfected and effulgent glory, clothing itself in matter for the sake of service." Intellectually, the concept was clear enough, but what did I really know of avatars? Would the injection I was now giving myself help to clarify the issue?

As the medicine took effect the image of Sai Baba began to glow three-dimensionally. The enlarged photograph shows him clothed in his saffron robe, seated on a platform and looking down meditatively. It seemed now that he was brooding contemplatively over the whole earth and I felt the love that was emanating from his serene eyes. For him this was no unimaginably remote nirvana, no mere blanking out of the mind in order to transcend to cares of earth. Rather, he seemed to be stirring love into the world the way one might stir honey into a vat of foaming porridge. The whole brew was being sweetened with his tender concern. This love was synonomous with consciousness-they were one and the same. It also had a cohesive quality, as though he were holding the universe together through the inclusiveness of his engaged attention.