For the first time, I felt fear.
I went down the hall to the bathroom, thinking furiously. What is this? I thought I was baseline last night; I'm sure I was. How could Shura have had no activity at all at thirty milligrams and I not only had a resounding plus-two, at just a little bit more, but it's lasting into the next day?
Is it possible that something in my psyche opened and got stuck open? I sat on the toilet, staring at the floor, trying to figure it out. I don't want to be here like this. What is it I'm locked into? There's a sense of some kind of intelligence; I can feel it, like a cold, observing Mind. It's everywhere, watching everything. It sees me. What feelings does it have about me?
Probe. No feelings. I can't pick up any kind of feelings. Just awareness. I don't want to be anywhere near it. I want to be back to my old self and my familiar old world.
There was one distinct difference from the day before: I had emotions this morning. Mostly despair. And anger.
After I'd dressed in my jeans and sweater, I made the coffee and scrambled some eggs, then sat at the table with Shura, picking at food I had no appetite for. I waited until he had finished reading the Chronicle before I told him, "I'm still on, honey."
He frowned, "What do you mean? You're still feeling something from yesterday?"
"I know I was baseline, last night. There was some residue, because I darted while I was going to sleep, but I was definitely down. This morning, I woke up and found myself right back on again. About a plus two, in fact."
Shura's eyes searched me, then he reached over and cradled my face in his hands, "I don't know what to say. Buns. This just doesn't make sense."
"I know it doesn't." "Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Nothing at all, honey. You don't have to stay home or anything. I'm okay by myself, believe me. If I feel weird or out of control or really worried, I'll phone you at work and tell you so, I promise."
The truth is, I am feeling weird and I certainly don't have an ounce of control over this, and the word "worried" doesn't even begin to describe it. But I've got to work it through myself.
Shura got up and began gathering his papers from the end of the bookcase.
"Are you sure you don't need me here with you? I can call in -"
"No, I mean it. I only told you because you had to know there's a continuation of the drug effect. I don't understand how, considering everything, but what else could it be?"
"Don't be silly! Of course you had to tell me! Don't ever withhold something like that, sweetie!
You would expect me to tell you, wouldn't you, if our positions were reversed?"
"Yes."
When Shura was dressed for the outside world (he worked with David, twice a week, in a research laboratory in San Francisco), I stood in the kitchen and looked at him, at the blue eyes shadowed by concern, and asked, "What if this state turned out to be permanent, honey?
I know that's not very likely, but what if it were?"
He looked into my eyes and took a deep breath, "Well, if it did turn out to be permanent, we'd find out how you can adapt to living at a plus-two. You would have no choice but to learn to adjust to it as your normal state. And you would, you know, just as I would if it happened to me."
I grinned weakly, "Yeah, I suppose that's exactly what I'd have to do."
That was a scared-child question. He's answering me as if I'm a grown-up, bless him.
" really don't think that's going to happen, Alice," he said, putting down his ancient briefcase and hugging me hard.
Jesus, I can't cry now! I've got to hold on until he's out the door. There's nothing he can do, and he'd just worry.
I squeezed him back and said, my voice as down-to-earth as I could manage, "I know it isn't, Luv. Just a wild thought. I'll be all right. You know I can take good care of myself. If I had any doubts at all, I wouldn't let you go to work - you should know by now I'm not the martyr type."
I sounded completely convincing to my own ears, and he kissed me, said he'd phone during the day, and turned to go. At the door, he hesitated, then muttered, "I don't understand all this. It doesn't make sense - or have I said that before?"
I said, "I already came to the same conclusion. It doesn't compute. But, in the meantime, I'm going to be pretty busy trying to work my way out of it."
I kissed him goodbye again, and watched his dusty little green car drive off.
As I turned to go back to the kitchen, I remembered an incident Shura had told me about, a long time ago. He had wakened one morning, having done no drug experiments for several days before, and found himself in a totally altered state of consciousness. He had set to work trying out various things to bring himself back to normal, including eating oranges for the sugar, which had no effect either. I recalled his telling me that, by the middle of the afternoon, the strange experience had apparently run its course, and when he woke up the next morning, he was okay. He'd never figured out the what or why of it, he'd said, and probably never would.
Perhaps this was my equivalent, I thought, and maybe it would be over with by the time he came home.
I started washing the few dishes in the sink, watching myself adjusting the temperature of the tap water, scrubbing forks, rinsing, as if I were a movie camera recording A Day in the Life Of.
In the bedroom, I observed myself pulling the fitted bottom sheet on the bed to smooth out the wrinkles, noting the efficiency with which I made the ordinary, familiar moves, and tried to remember the correct psychological term for this kind of detachment. The only word that came to mind was "discombobulation," which was certainly appropriate, but not what I was searching for. (Much later the word came back; it was, of course, "dissociation.") All the while, I kept a determined wall between myself and the Thing, to which I had decided to give the temporary name. White Mind - white, as in fog. And ice. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or later, but at least I had enough control over the situation - so far - to be able to decide when, and that would be after doing what had to be done in the house.
I didn't bother looking out the window because I already knew what I'd see.
Finally, after sitting for a few minutes with a cup of coffee, I unlocked the back door and went outside. It wasn't that the White Mind was located there; it was more a matter of my having chosen to do my battling of it out where there were trees and grass and sky, where I could move, walk, have space.
A few feet from the house, I paused and looked over the valley and, this time, I was not sensing the cold, dispassionate consciousness only in my immediate surroundings; I stood, arms folded in the instinctive body language of self-protection, next to a patch of bare ground where we had planted spring bulbs - hyacinths and daffodils - and knew that I was tuning in to a pure consciousness of unlimited intelligence and absolute clarity; there was a crystal awareness, everywhere, that watched everything, having neither liking nor disliking nor any other feelings for anything it saw. It observed love and hate and recorded, it observed atoms and elephants and recorded, it observed agony and orgasm and recorded. And it learned from everything; it learned all the time.
Suddenly, I was remembering Carlos Castenada's spokesman, Don Juan, describing what he called the Eagle - an immense, implacable, emotionless spiritual force which lived for only one thing: awareness. I had read about the Eagle with revulsion, a long time ago; I could still recall my resistance to the idea of such an entity existing on any level of reality. I went back into the house and found the passage in Castaneda's book, The Eagle's Gift: "The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle ... because it appears to the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle ... its height reaching to infinity.
"The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagle's beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle's food."
Shaken by a bur
st of intense anger, I returned the book to the shelf and went back outside.
I will not call it the Eagle. That's Castaneda's image, his world, his universe. I will not name this - whatever it is - after somebody else's lousy, godforsaken bird!
I was being pressed down upon by its presence.
Why am I so angry? It's more than anger; it's closer to fury. There's something about this Thing I'm tuned into which pushes all my buttons, and I've got to figure out why. Okay, it's because there's nothing more dreadful to me than impersonal intelligence, thought unattached to feeling. Why is it so terrible? Because it is inhuman - unhuman. What's bad about a mind being non-human? I'm not hostile to the idea of non-human beings living on other planets, and perhaps visiting earth, am I? Why not? Because I believe -1 prefer to believe - that non-humans would have feelings, that's why.
For the first time that day, I smiled. Why did I assume that aliens from other parts of the galaxy would inevitably have feelings of some kind?
Probably because the fact that they were visiting us would mean they were curious and wanted to find out, wouldn't it? Curiosity is most definitely a feeling, as well as an intellectual function.
Rocks aren't curious, rivers and trees aren't curious. Only the animal world has curiosity. So I figure that visiting non-humans would be feeling something we could understand: wanting to know. And if they can experience one emotion, they must have the capacity for others - or so the reasoning goes. And we can make contact, touch, communicate with feelings, even when we can't speak the other's language.
I looked up at the hazy November sky, and wondered if this crystal-cold awareness was the Mind of the Creator.
Whatever it is, I loathe it. I remembered another time, years before, when I had learned that God is everything that exists, good and bad, and that it experiences every emotion and sensation felt by every one of its parts.
Okay, this is not the Mind of God. On the other hand, what if the answer I got before was wrong, and this is the true nature of the consciousness that runs the cosmos? If it isn't, then why do I sense it to be universal; why has it taken over everywhere, so I can't tune in to anything else? And what am I supposed to do with it?
I flashed undiluted hatred at the Thing, the White Mind that watched and recorded, knowing that neither my hatred, nor the fact that I was deliberately communicating it, mattered in the least to it. It would continue to observe and register and learn without prejudice, bias or emotion.
I walked down the little path, brushing past the new grass which had sprung up with the first fall rains. The tawny yellow edges of California's summer-dried hills were starting to blur into long-forgotten green. I saw nothing of the growing things on either side of me as I walked the dirt trail, barely dry from the last rain; I was making a decision.
I refuse it. I will not accept it as the force that runs my universe. I will not assent to a spiritual intelligence that has no feelings, no caring.
I found myself outside the dear old scarred, dirty laboratory door. I put a hand out and touched one of the glass panes; they had been painted white on the inside long, long ago, to prevent the uninvited from seeing in.
Shura. Beautiful, incredible man of mine. How could we have actually managed to find each other? How is it that he has the heart and the patience to put up with me?
I turned around and began slowly walking back in the direction of the house, my head down, aware of nothing but the streams of thoughts flowing through me.
What happens to us when we die? Do we get absorbed by this clear, unfluctuating awareness, this inhuman, uncaring Recorder? Does all human experience mean only more material for a cosmic information-bank?
It didn't feel true. I was missing something.
How could an Overmind which has no feelings create living things which feel all the time?
Time had stopped moving. I sensed that I was on the edge of discovering something, at least a piece of the answer; I could feel it, just around a corner.
I knew the Enemy was observing my sequence of thoughts and questions, feeding itself with what was going on inside me, along with everything else going on everywhere else.
I can't live with this Thinking Machine. I will not accept it as the final truth of the nature of God. I do not accept!
I stopped next to an oak sapling and looked up at the clouds which were beginning to gather overhead.
Anger swept over me again, and it was edged with hate.
Do you hear me, you damned monstrous son-of-a-bitch? I say NO to you! I DENY YOU!
I realized that tears had been flowing down my cheeks for some time; I just hadn't noticed before. They would have to be ignored; I was too busy right now. I had just informed what might well be the Creator that I wasn't going to play in its lousy sandbox.
Now what?
Why am I feeling no fear? Because this is too important for me to waste time being afraid.
Besides, what is there left to be afraid of? The worst possible thing which any cosmic Mind could do to a little human one has already been done: it has revealed its own nature, and in doing so, it has managed to effectively strip my world of all meaning, all purpose. I'd rather confront an eight-armed demon with razor fangs! You can battle with a demon, you can embrace a demon; what the hell can you do with a fucking spiritual computer?
I folded my fingers around a handful of cedar bush, needing the touch of something friendly.
I have to solve a rather serious question, and soon. The question is: if I refuse to live in a universe run by this - this Thing, and if I have no intention of committing suicide, then what kind of universe will I consent to live in? And how do I go about creating it?
An interesting observation drifted quietly in.
If lean experience the White Mind and reject it, that means I have a choice, because I have made that choice. And I obviously have the right to say no, because I have just said it.
I sat down on a grassy slope next to the brown path, and rocked myself back and forth to help the thinking.
If the essential core of all life in the universe, including the human, is in truth this Mind that only thinks and learns and does not feel, then my alternative is a universe run by a consciousness that feels. A Mind that is capable of love. Does that mean it has to be capable of hate? We've had that one already in good old Jehovah. No. Yes. You can'thave just the goodhalf; it's all or nothing,my friend. If my acceptable God-mind loves, it also hates. If it feels any emotion, it feels all emotions. Jesus. Start again.
One of the cats had discovered me. I knew she wouldn't leave, so I would either have to put her in my lap and try to ignore the passionate clawing which would accompany the purrs, or get up and go inside. For the moment, I decided to turn my lap over to the cat, because I wanted to keep searching for some kind of answer here, outside, under the sky.
I kept working, trying to find out what it would take to create another universe and another God - one I could assent to - and what the rules would have to be. I already knew that there had to be positive and negative, male and female, Yin and Yang. For there to be life, there had to be death. I understood that much. There had to be pain as a sign of imbalance, of something needing to be fixed. If there was connection with another living being, one would experience loss when that other was taken away;
if you open yourself to love, you open also to sorrow.
I shook my head sharply to clear it, wiping off tears with a furiously impatient hand. The sound of purring continued, and I resumed my rocking.
All those thousands and thousands ofyears of human beings trying to survive, everywhere on the planet, scrambling to get food and build shelters, finding a bit of joy in loving and working and singing together, and all of them desperate to discover what the meaning of existence is -
all the suffering and pain, all the beauty - trying to understand because they've been created with the kind of mind that is compelled to try to understand. It's been built into us, that urge to figure it out.
&
nbsp; Images paraded through me: abandoned old people dying alone in dirty rooms, children crying because their parents hurt them, young soldiers losing arms and legs and their manhood; eons of pain and anguish, fear and loss of hope.
My God and all the little gods! Is all of it just food for some sort of horrendous Watcher-Recorder-Computer?
I cried for a while, real crying, for all the innocent, injured, rejected, helpless people and other living things, all over the world. There was a racking pain in my chest, and I remembered having been in this place of sorrow before, one evening, years ago, after taking one of Shura's compounds. I remembered calling it the Sorrow Place, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, finally realizing that it was a bottomless pit and asking Shura what I should do with it.
He had answered, "Step out. Now that you've learned what it is, decide you've been there long enough, and simply step out. Get back to the world of life and love and humor, which exists right alongside it, and is just as valid."
I had asked how he would get himself out, if this were happening to him, and he'd said, "When I get stuck in a difficult place, I go to the lab and wash glassware, until the difficulty resolves itself, or transforms into something else. Sooner or later, it always does. But, since washing glassware's not your thing, why don't you sit down at your typewriter and put it on paper? You could make it one of your great reports to Dante and Ginger!"
I did exactly that until, very gradually, I began to glimpse images of the Smiling Buddha and then, many small children playing on a field of grass, and I found myself coming out of that place of pain and sorrow.
It was time to step out again, I thought. If I could. That still left me with my number-one problem, though. Since I will not assent to this White Mind being the ruling intelligence of my universe, I'm going to have to construct a God-Mind. I can accept.
I sat on the grass, rocking, absently stroking the cat.
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