Travels (42 page)

Again I noticed that when energy work is done the air gets thick. It’s a very agreeable sensation, like sitting in a kitchen where bread is baking. Pleasant in that way.

And it turns out that energy findings are objective. Two people can scan a third, and they will agree on the findings: third chakra hot, fourth displaced, fifth cool, and so on. You can do your investigations separately, write down your findings separately, and then compare notes, if you want to. There isn’t any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.

You didn’t have to be in the mood to feel it, you didn’t have to be a meditating saint, you didn’t have to believe in it. You just had to calm down and then hold your hand out over somebody’s body. In fact, the body energy was so clearly genuine, so stable and straightforward, that the most common reaction of people in our group was “Why hasn’t anybody told us about this before?”

It was easy to feel the energy. Brugh said that you could see it as well. One day he called for the windows to be darkened, and we pulled out dark-blue cloths, set them on the ground, held our hands over the cloth, and squinted; we could see the energy. It was odd. I realized I had seen it as a child, but had dismissed it as some sort of optical illusion. You can see the energy most easily against a dark surface under low illumination. The level of illumination is critical, which seems to be why squinting helps.

The energy looks like streaks of yellow mist extending beyond your fingertips. The mist is strongest close to the fingertips, and dissipates farther out. It looks like yellow fuzz around your fingers.

You need to relax to see the energy, as you need to relax to feel it. If you are panicky, you may not get it right away. It’s subtle. But, then, as with so many perceptual things, once you see it you know what to look for. It’s much easier after that.

At first I still thought that I was seeing some kind of illusion. But other people can see your energy and talk about it, so it can’t be an illusion.

After I could see the energy, I was fooling around—cupping my hands together to make a ball of yellow energy between them, that sort of thing. Trying different things. I was sitting opposite another person, and I thought, I’ll try to send energy to him.

Immediately I saw the yellow mist shoot out in long streaks from my fingertips to the chest of the other person. And a third person nearby said, “Look—it’s going right into his chest!”

So in the end I had to accept the energy as real.

Brugh gave us tarot decks. I had a great resistance to these medieval fortunetelling cards. I couldn’t believe a physician, a scientifically trained person, would waste our time with such foolish superstition. But Brugh had already demonstrated the validity of body energy, so I decided to go along with him on the cards. He said, “Shuffle through the pack and pick out the card you like best and the card you like least.”

I liked the Three of Swords least, and the Magician best. My choices seemed straightforward. Some of the cards were clearly more attractive than others, and some were clearly unattractive. There was a range of personal choice, but it wasn’t limitless. You’d have to be a pretty strange person to choose Death, or the Hanged Man, as your favorite card. Or a pretty odd person to dislike the Lovers or the Ten of Cups. So I didn’t perceive much real choice.

Brugh said, “Now imagine that the card you like least is the card you like best. Say what is good in the card you like least, and what is bad in the card you like best.”

I found this reversal impossible to do.

The Three of Swords depicted a red heart pierced by three swords, against a background of storm clouds and gray rain. I couldn’t see anything in it but pain, suffering, and heartbreak. I couldn’t perceive it as a good card in any way.

People sitting next to me helped. Someone suggested there wasn’t any blood, so it was a clean cut. Someone else said it was a decisive card, cutting to the heart of the matter. The rain was cleansing. The three swords were balanced, each penetrating the center. The swords formed a stable tripod. The card had a finality to it, a sense of termination. The storm would pass. The card could be seen as intellect taking charge of emotion, which could be good.

And so on.

I thought I was beginning to get the hang of it. Now I looked at the Magician, my favorite card, and tried to see it as bad. The Magician showed a young man in a white robe standing before a variety of articles, confidently holding a wand high. He had an infinity sign like a halo over his head. I thought he was a powerful, good, white-robed person.

But I couldn’t see the card differently. I couldn’t see it as bad. Again, people had to help me. The Magician looked young and frivolous. He was a show-off, a trickster. He did not seem serious. He appeared self-involved and showy, insincere. His spotless white robe indicated he didn’t do any honest hard work; he just did magic. His wand was actually a candle being burned at both ends, proof of a dissolute life. His infinity sign meant he could never get down to business. All in all, the Magician was a hopeless case of form over substance, appearances over reality.

Hearing this, I wondered why I had ever seen the Magician as a positive card. It had so many evident negative features.

Brugh talked about the value of being able to see a card, or a life situation, from all sides. To see the good and the bad, and not to consider the thing itself as possessing either goodness or badness. He talked about how people became rigid when they assigned fixed values to things.

Then he suggested that the purpose of the tarot was to allow our unconscious free play as we inspected these ancient images. Since the cards themselves were neither good nor bad, how we saw them told us a great deal about the state of our unconscious minds. And in that lay their value.

This made a lot of sense to me, since I had already concluded that most of our actions were determined by our unconscious, not our conscious, minds. Now, by viewing the cards as a window into your unconscious, you were obliged to give them as much power as you gave the unconscious. If you thought your unconscious could see into the future—and certainly
some
people could see into the future—then the tarot cards could help your unconscious do that. If you thought the unconscious was primarily of psychological importance, then the tarot was a valuable tool for psychological insight.

Since the tarot worked by interacting with the unconscious, it also followed that it didn’t make any difference what layout you used, or whether you made your own layout. If you said, “The next card I draw will represent my feelings about the future,” then by definition the next card would, because the unconscious would interpret it that way.

So I accepted the tarot, and dutifully worked with the cards, but I never really liked them. Tarot cards always felt to me like somebody else’s dream.

* * *

Next Brugh introduced the
I Ching
, a Chinese method of divination in which you toss three coins six times, do a calculation, then look up the answer in a text.

The procedure seemed mathematical and needlessly complicated. And when you got to the text, it was often not helpful: “Someone does indeed increase him; even ten tortoises cannot oppose.” Or “The well must be repaired before drawing water.” It was hard to make sense of that!

Yet, despite these drawbacks, I was attracted to the
I Ching
. At first I thought I liked the
I Ching
because the mathematical aspects appealed to me more than other kinds of divination. Later I thought it was because I was verbally oriented and the
I Ching
’s interpretation was textual. Later I thought that I simply enjoyed reading the book, browsing through it. Eventually I decided that all these things were true.

Of course, the basic mechanism of the
I Ching
had to be the same as the mechanism of the tarot—to provide an ambiguous stimulus to the unconscious mind. The text answers of the
I Ching
are as ambiguous as the visual images of the tarot.

In fact, the traditional scientific complaint about the
I Ching
—that the line readings “could mean anything”—started to make sense to me. Of course the line readings could mean anything! That was exactly what was desired: a neutral Rorschach for the unconscious to interpret. If the line readings were unambiguous, then there would be no unconscious involvement. The interpretation would be entirely conscious. And then there really
would
be a credibility problem: how could a twenty-five-hundred-year-old Chinese book tell you the answer to your modern, Western question? The very idea is absurd.

Because, of course, the book can’t tell you the answer. The book doesn’t have that power. You do. You can answer your own question. You already know the answer, if you can just gain access to it. And in the end your unconscious mind does answer your own question, and that is why many people, including Carl Jung and the Chinese scholar John Blofeld, have been struck by the specific, personal quality of the answer that is provided.

The purpose of the
I Ching
, or the tarot, then, is to help you get access to yourself, by providing ambiguity for you to interpret. And this quality of ambiguity is shared with nearly all other forms of divination—cast artifacts, or entrails, or weather formations, or events, such as the flight of birds, that one could choose either to see as “omens” or to ignore.

The very thing that makes these divination techniques seem so unscientific is what makes it possible for them to work.

Toward the end of the second week, I began to think of leaving. I wasn’t the only one. Several of us talked about what we would do when we finally went home.

Personally, I longed for a Big Mac. As soon as this conference was over, I was driving down the road and buying a big, disgusting, unhealthy, unspiritual hamburger.

I couldn’t wait.

On the final day of the conference, I visited the cactus to say goodbye. The cactus was just sitting there. It wouldn’t speak to me. I said I appreciated what it had shown me and I had enjoyed spending time with it, which wasn’t exactly true because I had felt frustrated a lot of the time, but I thought it was more or less true. The cactus made no reply.

Then I realized that from its position in the garden the cactus could never see the sun set. The cactus had been years in that position and had been deprived of seeing sunsets. I burst into tears.

The cactus said, “It’s been good having you here with me.”

Then I
really
cried.

On the drive home, I couldn’t find a McDonald’s anywhere. Finally I passed a Marie Callender’s. I went inside and ordered a chili burger and french fries and a Coke and a piece of pie. But when the food came, it seemed rich and heavy. I didn’t finish it. It wasn’t what I wanted, after all.

Back home, I was shocked to see how beautiful my house was. I lived on the beach at Malibu, but I had long ago stopped looking at the view, and complained about the traffic instead. Now I was astonished that I lived in such a breathtakingly beautiful place.

At the office, I turned on my word processor, and the letters on the screen flashed on and off, like a neon sign. At first I thought the computer was broken. Then I realized I was seeing the screen refresh itself. That happens all the time, but normally we’re not aware of it, as we’re not aware that light bulbs blink on and off sixty times each second. I looked at the screen and thought, This is a remarkable perception, but I don’t know if I can work with a screen that blinks like this.

Later I learned this perception was a commonly reported consequence of meditation. In a few days it faded away.

For a while, after I returned home, I felt wonderfully alive. But then the emotional high of the two weeks faded. It all just drifted away, the way any vacation decays from consciousness. I felt discouraged. I hadn’t really made any real progress, any substantial gains. The energy work was real, the meditations were real, but what good was it if you couldn’t maintain the high and apply it to your daily life? What had it all amounted to in the end? Just another illusion. Summer camp for adults. A lot of New Age mumbo-jumbo.

Meanwhile, I had practical matters to occupy me. A relationship of two years came to an end. My work was not satisfying. I needed to move my office. My secretary was begging to be fired; I fired her.

It wasn’t until much later that I looked back and saw that, within eight months of returning from the desert, I had changed my relationships, my residence, my work, my diet, my habits, my interests, my exercise, my goals—in fact, just about everything in my life that could be changed. These changes were so sweeping that I couldn’t see what was happening while I was in the midst of them.

And there was another change, too. I’ve become very fond of cacti, and I always have some around, wherever I live.

Jamaica
 

In 1982 I ended my two-year relationship with Terry, a securities lawyer who worked for the SEC in New York and Los Angeles. But after a few months of separation, we drifted back together in a vague and tentative way, and since Christmas was coming up, we decided to take a trip to Jamaica together, with some other friends.