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psychedelicadventures.com
Sal
The
Ethereal Bean
We were very methodical. We prepared ourselves for a voyage into the
unknown and cocooned ourselves in Andy’s dorm room, which was adorned with
day-glow posters, Indian bedspreads, mandalas, and other Buddhist-related
images. We put two mattresses on the floor and an Indian fabric in the window to
insulate ourselves in absolute privacy and comfort. We had fruit and Fig Newtons
to eat.
We took it according to instructions from the pharmacopoeia in
the back of Naked Lunch. We were
familiar with Buddhism and psychedelia through the East
Village Other and the writings of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg and The
Autobiography of a Yogi, a lovely book by Paramahansa Satchinananda (CHECK
AUTHOR). It was a truly organic product we were dealing with, a dusty musty
little bag full of crumbs. The seeds were contained in little pods about the
size of acorns. There were eight pods, each containing four little seeds. At
around ten in the morning, Andy and I swallowed sixteen each.
(I think Hawaiian baby woodrose was still legal at the time. I later went
into a florist in New York City and asked for some, and the guy said, "Oh,
I know what you guys are doing" and demurred).
After an hour I began to feel light and giddy and my internal thought
processes were whirring as I became increasingly oblivious to the passage of
time. Jolts of energy ran through my upper body to my head. As each jolt
subsided, I went deeper inside my cranium. The room and all the tangible objects
in it appeared to be composed of the same matter, so I was making not the usual
distinction between a wall, a floor, a window, and a bed.
Andy was undergoing the same perceptual transformation. We took
occasional peeks out the window, and it seemed as if the whole world was made of
the same matter, which we could see was also energy, as everything was pulsing
and throbbing. When my eyes came to rest on one of the bedspreads, the wall
billowed as though filled with air, becoming carnival-mirror fat before
undulating down to size again. But we were too excited by the big ideas to focus
on the hallucinations, and just kept talking in a deliberate, pleasure-filled
way.
We started talking about how the stars and the planets and all the air in
between was made of the same stuff, that our guts and brains were made of the
same stuff, that our very thoughts were made of the same stuff, that all was
one. It wasn’t that the actual look of things had changed so much, but what we
were seeing was given new interpretation in our scintillated minds. You don’t
often consider that you’ve got nerves inside your head, but we were
experiencing a delicious bath on the inside of our skulls. It was the most
sensuous cranial event I’ve ever experienced.
We perceived all matter and life as part of a continuum that extended
from our minds to the most distant chunk of cosmic debris in the universe. The
only variation between different entities was the quality of energy it
possessed. There was a tangibility to thoughts and ideas and conversely, an
ethereality to the tangible.
I felt empathetic with all manner of things. The physical world had taken
on an anthropomorphic character. It was evident that the living and nonliving
world were made of the same building blocks. I felt fond of various objects in
the room. The terminology of endearment applied to things is rooted in that
impulse. A stool was much more than some object fashioned from a dead tree, but
a "dear little stool," a friendly thing. Viewing it with such
tenderness, I was also acknowledging the work of the craftsman who’d made it.
Kindness was the prevailing instinct we perceived in the manifestations of the
physical world that we so admired.
Evil didn't ever cross our minds, perhaps because we’d carefully
insulated ourselves from such thoughts. We’d heard about people's bad trips
and ensuing panics, but once aloft, we were never worried about it.
We were amazed by the stream of inspirations that the drug was releasing
from us. We’d had no idea that all of these cosmological twinges and
neurological twangs were in us. Andy observed that we were actually reinventing
the wheel in the sense that none of our revelations were new, but that the
amazing thing was our direct experience
of these truths. The entire universe
is, in fact, comprised of electrons, neutrons and protons, which are indeed
energy particles in constant motion. But instead of merely intellectualizing
these facts of relativist physics, our senses were now suffused with them.
Andy introduced the concept of reincarnation and we explored the notion
that people come back again and again, evolving over time. We spoke of those who
hadn’t moved so far up this path as “low-lifes.” (It was presumed that we
were pretty far along.) We had it figured out that when you died, you would pass
some undetermined period of time absent for a while, and then come back as a
whole new person. If you messed up, you’d have to go back and if you improved
your act you’d come back a step forward. (I wish I could believe all that
now.)
In our cosmology, there was no God who had a superconsciousness with a
motive, though we did also use the term “godhead” to describe the Ethereal
Being. “Godliness” was the possession of a high quality of energy rather
than being very handsome or powerful or whatever superlative you might ascribe a
deity from one of the big religions.
Every little thing in the universe was doing its bit in a crazy balance
that was humming along. A box in the corner of the room was as important as
anything else. Levels of “importance” according to a Western
materialist-utilitarian perspective, seemed to disintegrate.
Andy and I called the energy continuum the “Ethereal Being, “ though,
on reflection, it wasn’t so much of the ether, but a tangible feature of the
physical mechanics of the universe. As if to underscore that very physicality,
Howard would chime in with some pronouncement about the “Ethereal Bean.”
He’d grown increasingly excited by our conversations and definitely felt left
behind. Although Andy and I wanted to stay the evolutionary course and refrain
from acting on any pesky egotistical impulses, we could hardly resist giggling
smugly and said to Howard, “Yes, yes, of course, the ‘Ethereal
Bean’....”
Finally we tired and went off to sleep around midnight. For weeks
afterwards, the three of us had an excited dialogue about the experience. I
never did have another trip as revelatory or thrilling.
It went to our heads a little. We felt that we’d received a kind of
enlightenment that nobody else at the school had had, so that we were now the
elite spiritual corps. We became a bit self-satisfied and detached, which wasn't
good from a practical point of view. We were scruffy hippie types and when we
spoke of low-lifes, we were referring to anyone we didn’t like, such as jocks
or a math teacher with a smarmy, square worldview. Yet, one was still humble.
There was so much evolving that needed to be done. It wasn't really acceptable
to dump on others. That wasn’t going to help you get to the next plane.
We believed that yogis who could levitate were wielding the power that we
felt we’d unleashed while on the drug. (It never occurred to us ask ourselves,
if the guy can get off the ground, why can't he fly around like Superman?) I
pursued Buddhism for a while, but was turned back by the bizarre, fetishistic
rituals on behalf of lifeless corpses described in The
Tibetan Book of the Dead. How could a funeral march using human bones as
musical insturments be a path to enlightenment?
Andy, on the other hand, is still a practicing Buddhist, though he had
some rough years when his father, an M.D., put him in a mental institution to
cut him off from psychedelics. He’s since taken a graduate degree and become a
successful electrical engineer.
I think there’s a definite reality to the Ethereal Being,
but I don't know that it's one for which I've found any practical use in my
work. Suddenly feeling that all matter is one was a powerful feeling, but it
didn't enable me to solve, for instance, complex or even simple problems. If you
want to know how to do math, you have to study it the old-fashioned way. There
aren’t any shortcuts.
In painting, you may suddenly have a moment in which you see a way to
take the picture where it will knit together just right and manifest a higher
beauty. That overview is a kind of superconsciousness, but I've never heard of
the pill or the plant you can swallow to actually execute such visions.
Still, I always get a little rush on a beautiful June Saturday
morning, when I can literally feel the molecules of the plants dividing and the
flowers and vegetation coming out. l still experience a special
frisson on a warm spring day, when the splendors of the Ethereal Being are
throbbing all about. |
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