It was the night of Thursday, December 10, 1992, and I was alone, downstairs at The Monroe Institute’s Nancy Penn Center. The Gateway course that we had just completed had been quite a roller-coaster, opening chambers within me that would take years to explore. I didn’t know how my life would shape up from there, but I knew that something decisive had happened.
I had plenty of mistakes yet to make, plenty of illusions yet to be baffled by, plenty of blunders and forgettings and stupidities to commit and suffer from. In no way could it be said that I now “had it all together,” as people used to say. But – if only for the moment – I was awake, and if I could wake up once, presumably I could wake up again.
This was only partly because of the psychic exploration encouraged and facilitated by the tape exercises. I had taken to that like a man dying of thirst who comes to an oasis. My liberation from the constrictions that had bound my past came partly from tape-assisted experiences, but more from interacting with the other participants, and with one in particular. I had always found it hard, dealing with people. Really, in ways I can scarcely remember at this distance, I was afraid of people. Gateway took that away. Long story, not one to go into here.
The point here is that on that Thursday night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, I was roaming around the darkened silent building in a state of quiet exultation, my senses and intuitions wide open, with no internal doubting-Thomas interfering., and three things happened.
The first thing: In the debrief room at Nancy Penn was a little goldfish bowl, complete with two pretty unimpressive fish. That night, roaming around, my attention was caught by the bowl and I sort of focused on the fish. (I don’t know how to describe what I did without making it seem special, which it was not.) I really, really concentrated on them – and both fish suddenly moved, in a jerky, startled-seeming way, as if they were people who had just heard a loud noise and realized there was somebody else there. (I know it sounds crazy, sounds like wild imagination.)
The second thing, I was in the exercise room, on the bottom floor, and I looked out the window and saw a fir tree, whipping back and forth in the wind. Following impulse, I went out the door and embraced the tree, like putting your face into a cat’s fur, and felt an emotional bond. But then, I have always loved trees. I was out there in my bare feet, standing in the snow, using what I have been taught about maintaining my body temperature, and the very cold seemed to reinforce my mood.
The third thing came next morning, looking up at the sky and seeing birds interacting with each other, making complicated recurring patterns as they soared.
A while later, I put my feelings into this little poem.
Focus 21
The fish were startled.
They saw me. Out of nowhere
a kindred consciousness appeared.
The fir tree, tossing and shaking
from the wind’s rough caressing hand,
called me. I went. The circling
fir arms said “joy.” The playful birds
making patterns said “joy.” The ice
engaged my feet and it said “joy.”
A long sad lifetime changes.
The view from here says “joy,” and says
that’s all it ever was.
When people have asked me about my Gateway, I sometimes tell them, it was the beginning of my life as a conscious individual. But I don’t find it very easy to say why, and certainly not how.