Journeys into the bright world

The distance traveled on twenty-five milligrams impressed me in quite a different way the following evening. Howard had been called back to the hospital for his third emergency of the weekend and I decided to watch the showing of Anna Karenina on television while awaiting his return. Strangely enough we had never tried viewing television under the influence of ketamine. Accordingly, I took a dose of twenty-five-milligrams and lay back to watch the show.

The resulting experience was enchanting. First my eyesight seemed to improve. All the colors deepened, faces glowed and I became conscious of how enormously well the entire production had been executed. (In actuality it was a superb rendition of a book I had read twice from cover to cover many years before.) I remained entirely within the here-now world, but my delight was the same as that which I used to feel as a child when going to the movies was a supreme treat. Somehow I had forgotten how it was to be completely thrilled by a theatrical presentation. It occurred to me that I could be criticized for using ketamine for so frivolous a diversion. But why not? It seemed like an innocent pleasure, one probably less deleterious than downing a couple of martinis. Indeed when bedtime came I was relaxed, happy and ready for a long soothing sleep.

In telling Howard about this experience I suggested that we might try a low dose together the next time there was a particularly good TV show. Two nights later he arrived home from work while I was out of the house. Taking twenty-five milligrams he lay back to watch the news. Unhappily, by the time I had returned he had become so locked into all the dire, doleful and distressing happenings that were occurring around the globe that he remained depressed for the remainder of the evening. Reactions of this nature have made it clear that there is no such thing as a ketamine experience per se. Rather, it is the combination of the drug plus the setting plus innate predisposition that produces a given result.

On the whole I still feel that ketamine should be used as a sacrament and not just for "kicks" or to enhance a movie show. Children should not play with matches and adults should not tamper with the fires of the body unless they have some idea of what they are doing. We mention this experience because it was part of our experimentations, and not to encourage others to do the same.

As the new week began it occurred to me that I had only a few more days before making another twelve-hundred-mile run down the coast to take care of various important pieces of business in Ojai. On the way back I would be meeting Howard in San Francisco for his anesthesia research conference. In addition a heavy schedule of hypersentience and karmic astrology programs were coming up. Charts would have to be drawn and new material assembled. It would be at least a month before there would be the time and energy for any new in-depth explorations of the ever more intriguing kingdom of ketamine. It was at this point that the impulse came to end our narrative and submit the material to Para Research.

Normally, my inclination would have been to allow far more time for the production of a book. After all, Mark Douglas and I had labored for nine years over our magnum opus The Astrological Tradition and its companion piece Astrology and Time, and they were just coming into print. What would people say to our giving birth to this strange brainchild in such an impulsive flush of enthusiasm only a few months after our marriage? Considering the issue, however, I realized that we were not yet in a position to engineer an opaque data-stuffed tome. That could come later when we had the proper backing. Rather, our immediate goal was to fashion a translucent objet d'art, blown into form on a single molten breath of inspiration.

We knew that we had made only the barest beginning and that we would not rest content until the job was done right. Psychic faculties were starting to open up which we were constrained to inhibit. There was no way we could develop a greater degree of sensitivity and still give due attention to all the other demands on our time. However, it would not be possible to dispense with these nonessentials until we had a book to use for priming the pump of a continuing research program to which we could be entirely devoted.

All at once we began to appreciate some of the advantages which might accrue from restricting the core of our personal narrative to the experiences which transpired between November 1977 and February 1978 - four months in all. These reasons can be listed as follows.

1) The imposition of a cut-off point would obviate the temptation to go back and try to say everything better. Of course improvements could be made, but only at the cost of the veracity derived from recording each "journey" when and as it occurred.