Travels (53 page)

I started complaining to the group about all this jargon. I felt that a group of people who are committed to spiritual growth shouldn’t create a specialized jargon. Jargon defined them as a group, it allowed them to feel smug and exclusive, and it got in the way of direct experience. Nobody paid attention to my point of view.

Soon after that, I began to feel that everyone was indifferent to me, that I was uncared for in my life by them, and by everyone else. I felt sad for almost two days.

And then I found that I no longer had any resentment toward anybody in the conference. They were all fine. I liked everybody fine. Even the jargon was okay with me.

I was making progress in every way but one. I had been sleeping in the desert most nights since the conference began, and I was never able to overcome an unreasoning fear of wild animals.

A few years earlier, I had definitively concluded I was not afraid of animals. But at Carolyn’s, every night I curled up in my sleeping bag, the thoughts began.

First scorpions. I worried about scorpions. I hadn’t seen any scorpions in the desert, but I knew they were out there. Then rattlesnakes. What
if a snake crawled into my bag? It was too cold for the snakes to be out yet, but that was all the more reason why a snake would crawl into my nice warm bag.

What would I do, exactly, if I had a snake in my bag? Where would it go? Would it curl up at the bottom of the bag, near my feet?

When I’d had enough rattlesnake fantasies, I’d hear the coyotes howl, and begin to worry about coyotes.

The coyotes will not bother me, I think.

Yeah? What do you imagine you look like, in this sleeping bag? A giant salami, that’s what you look like. A tasty sack of meat. Perfect for a coyote.

I don’t think the coyotes will bother me.

Yeah? They might. Especially if they’re rabid. You know rabid animals are unpredictable. They lose their fear of man. They’ll come right up to you. And just one bite …

I don’t think rabies is a problem here.

Yeah? If you got bitten, you’d have to have the shots; you know how you hate needles.

The shots are only shots.

They’ll still hurt. And, you know, the shots don’t always work. You could die anyway. And … what if you got bitten but didn’t notice?

I would notice.

Yeah? Vampire bats have razor-sharp teeth and bite between the toes and you never wake up while they are sucking your blood.

There are no vampire bats here. Can’t we go to sleep?

No. It’s not safe here.

My dialogue continued like this. Each night it took about half an hour to calm myself down so I could go to sleep. And it never got any easier on subsequent nights. The final night of the conference, I woke up at midnight and heard the coyotes eating the garbage at the house next door. Crunching bones. Crunch, crunch.

You’re next.

Come on, can’t we just sleep? Remember the elephant in Kenya? Remember how foolish you felt?

That was then. This is now.

Crunch, crunch.

Think how comfortable you’d be back in the house.…

I am not going back in the house.

A nice comfortable bed …

I am not going back in the house.

The only reason you won’t go back is you told everybody that you’re not afraid of animals. Actually, you are completely full of it. You have no idea who you really are. Face it: you’re terrified out here.

I am not going back in the house.

Okay. Have it your way. The coyotes will still be hungry when they finish that garbage.…

I am not going back in the house.

And I didn’t. But the struggle never ceased. The voices inside my head kept up the dialogue. And I thought, Haven’t I fought this battle already? Can’t I just go to sleep? The answer was, no.

And finally, in the middle of the night, I shouted out loud, “All right, damn it, I admit it,
I’m afraid of animals!
”

And you don’t really know who you are.…

“
And I don’t really know who I am!
”

With that, I fell sound asleep.

When I got home, I looked at people to see if I could still see auras. I could. It’s fun to do. When the dinner parties get boring, you just look at people’s auras.

But that didn’t seem to be the most important thing I had gotten from being at the conference. The most important thing seemed to be that, although I knew a lot more about myself than I ever had at any earlier time in my life, I still had to admit, the way I shouted in the desert, that I didn’t know who I was.

An Entity
 

In the spring of 1986 I was still working with Gary, the man who had taught me to channel. I continued to explore altered states with him.

I tried not to judge what was happening, but simply to accept everything as an experience. Past lives, guided meditation, astral travel: I just went along with it as an interesting time.

And I was in this general frame of mind—an interesting time, lots of doubts, and no idea what it all meant—when, at the end of one session, Gary said, “I experienced an entity around you during our work today.”

“A what?”

“An entity. A dark force.”

“An entity,” I repeated. I was very slow about all this. I didn’t get what he was saying.

“I believe it is interfering with our work,” Gary said.

“What is?”

“The entity. He’s attached to you. Do you have any sense of it?”

“No,” I said. I was starting to feel annoyed. I felt he was telling me there was something wrong with me. And it sounded bad, serious, an entity attached to me. “What is an entity, anyway?”

“Well, it could be a discarnate soul, a tramp soul.”

“A tramp soul.”

“Something you picked up earlier in your life, maybe at a time when
you were sick, or if you drank or took a lot of drugs at some time in your life. When you’re weak, these things can latch on to your field and go for a ride. And they can stay with you for years. Or it may be a thought form that you have created, I really don’t know. But it’s there.”

I understood clearly now.

“You’re saying I’m possessed.”

“Well. Only in a manner of speaking.”

That did it. I went crazy.

“What manner of speaking?” I was very upset. “You’re saying I have a demon or something inside me! You’re saying I need an exorcist!”

“Is that so bad?” Gary said calmly.

“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes! It’s terrible! What am I supposed to do about it?”

“I’m not sure,” Gary said. “I’ll have to ask some people.”

“Ask them what?”

“I know some people who have experience in these things.”

“People who have been to an exorcism?”

“One, yes. Let’s talk more tomorrow.”

“What are you telling me? Gary, listen, I have a job, I have to write, I have to be calm, you can’t just go around telling people they have entities attached to them and let’s talk tomorrow!” I was shouting now, really shouting.

“Look,” he said firmly. “I don’t like this, either. We’ll talk tomorrow. But I’m pretty sure you have an entity around you. Just don’t worry about it. It’s not the end of the world.”

It’s not the end of the world
.

I was very angry. I was distracted. Who wouldn’t be, to hear he had an entity bothering him? The next day I was still distracted. I couldn’t write. I was angry and upset. I called Gary.

“How do you feel?” he said.

“How do you think I feel?” I said. “Terrible.”

“Okay,” he said. “Come over at five o’clock, and we’ll have a session.”

“All right,” I said.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve asked somebody else to be there. A psychologist, if that’s all right.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sure it’s all right? She won’t come unless it’s all right with you.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

At five I went to Gary’s apartment. It was completely transformed. The drapes were drawn. There were lighted candles everywhere. On the couch was a row of pictures of holy people, from Jesus Christ to Muktananda. There were crystals scattered around on all the tables. In the center of the room, the massage table was covered in a white cloth.

Uh-oh
, I thought.
He’s really going to do it. He’s going to do an exorcism
.

I was introduced to a small, pretty woman with short hair named Beth. She was very calm, but there was still an underlying tension in the room. Gary seemed tense.

I was tense, too. I complained about how Gary had left me hanging with this idea of an entity, and how ridiculous I thought it all was, an entity. I mean, really, an entity.

They listened, and then Beth said in her calm way, “Well, what if it’s true?”

It threw me: she was agreeing with him.

“Do
you
think I have an entity?”

“I sense something around you,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. That did it.

“When you’re ready, why don’t you lie down on the table,” Gary said. I lay down on the table. Now I was pretty nervous. I kept getting these melodramatic images of Max von Sydow and Linda Blair.

But, on the other hand, a part of me was excited. An exorcism: well, let’s see what happens.

What happened was that Gary said, “I’m going to spend some time with Beth first, you just relax.”

I lay there on the table with my eyes closed and relaxed. I heard Gary helping Beth to lie on a couch across the room, and heard him inducing her into an altered state. He did that by talking to her, and by playing tapes of oscillating tones. It took a while; he was really getting her deep.

Finally I heard his voice very near my ear. “Ready?”

“Ready,” I said. By now I was really nervous. Some part of me was saying, This is crazy, an exorcism, you don’t know what will happen, you’re saying you’re possessed, a demon, this is crazy. But I was determined to go on.

“Okay,” Gary said, and he induced me pretty much the way he had induced Beth. Visualizing light, relaxing, visualizing moving my ego away from my center. Usually this induction took only a few minutes, but this time it seemed to go on a long while: he was getting me to go deep.

Finally Gary said, “Okay, now, Michael, I want you to visualize your body as entirely surrounded by light, so much light that anything dark will stand out against all the light.”

I visualized that.

“Okay, now, Michael, do you see anything dark around your body?” I tried to see. To my surprise, I saw a cartoon demon, a sort of Walt Disney evil spirit with wings that looked like the devil from
Fantasia
. I saw this devil right in front of me. I also saw a sort of large bug, like an ant, down near my feet. And I saw a little man about two feet high, with a hat, behind my left shoulder.

“Do you see anything?” Gary asked.

I felt ridiculous. The principal image was a cartoon devil, and I wasn’t going to open my mouth and report that I saw a Walt Disney devil.

“No,” I said.

Gary moved across the room. “Beth, do you have any information now?”

And I heard Beth’s voice, drowsy and trance-like, reply, “There are three entities around him. There is a large creature, an insect, and a little man.”

Oh my God
, I thought.

Because I hadn’t said anything. I was lying on a table with my eyes closed. Beth was lying on a couch across the room with her eyes closed. I had never met her before. There wasn’t any way for us to communicate now, yet she was seeing what I was seeing. How was that possible?

Gary came back to my ear. “Did you hear what Beth said?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any reaction?”

“Yes,” I said. I admitted she was right. I described the three dark entities. By now my left neck and shoulder were starting to cramp painfully. I remembered the first time I had felt that: it was in the summer of 1968, driving home from Florida to Massachusetts. I was in medical school, I had gone to Florida for a couple of weeks with my wife, to dive and to revise a book I planned to call
The Andromeda Strain
, if it ever got finished. The work had gone well, but, driving home in my blue Volvo, my left neck and shoulder had become excruciatingly painful. The pain had lasted about five months, and gradually faded. I’d considered it tension from typing, or from driving.

“Let’s talk to the little man,” Gary said.

I attempted to talk to the little man. He wouldn’t speak, but I sensed that he was an old and angry man beneath the sunhat, and I saw he had a fishing pole. I couldn’t really see him well because he was standing behind me, behind my shoulder.

Gary asked him some questions directly, but we didn’t really get very far with the little man. He was uncommunicative.

Gary asked Beth for suggestions.

“Talk to the creature in front,” she said.

“But the creature is a Walt Disney devil,” I said. “A cartoon devil.”

“That is how he is presenting himself to you,” she said. “That’s what he wants you to think he is.”

Gary said, “Can you talk to the creature?”

I tried. I saw him as bat-like, with glaring empty eyes. But I could talk to him, yes.

“Ask him how long he has been with you.”

A long time. Years
.

“Ask him where he came from.”