The last stretch of the walk was a path lined on the west side by a row of poplar trees. On the east side there was a wide expanse of grass sweeping away for about 200 yards to a row of buildings used by the agricultural department. Behind the buildings there was a ridge of high ground.
As he walked, Carl glanced eastward at the ridge, his eyes traveling leisurely over the trees, shrubs, buildings, and grass, taking in the fresh light that was creeping over everything.
He was so attuned and attentive to his own perceptions that he immediately noticed a qualitative change. Each thing had something more than mere thingness. It was that each one existed on the edge of an abyss all its own, a vast chasm of “non-thingness,” of what it was not.
This experience was far more absorbing than even Huxley had intimated in his lyrical description of the “Non-Self”; and its beauty was more authentic and filling than anything expressed in each physical object.
This “non-thingness” was an actual aura around every object. It was dim and shallow and pale nearest to the object, but as Carl’s eye drew away from the object and into the object’s aura, the aura deepened and heightened in appearance and meaning.
Nothing, no object, Carl felt, would ever be banal anymore: it would never again be merely itself, have only its own self, for him. The aura of its non-thingness, its “Non-Self,” glowed always and made the thing possible. Carl made the quiet discovery that in the aura of each thing there was no difference between appearance and meaning.
As his eye traveled and the “non-thingness,” the “Non-Self,” of each object glistened and signified for him, he began to hear a vaster and vaster choir of soundless voices, and to see a greater and greater multitude of participants in worship. Each blade of grass chimed its silent “Holy! Holy! Holy!” Every tree bowed and swayed in obeisance to the supremacy of all existence, and each building stood in reverence before the mystery of allness.
All this produced no shock in Carl. He did not even stop walking. He seemed to be ready for it all. As he swung into the pathway to his office, he felt in his mind one desire: that he be once and for all exalted—even if just for a short time—to see and know that supreme existence of all things and to see the holiness of its mystery that gave all things meaning.
That exaltation would eventually come for him, but only four years later.
It was in May 1969 that possession seemed to have been extended further and deeper in Carl’s life than ever before. That possession was effected through his professional interests. His attention for about two years previous to this date had concentrated on two aspects of psychic development: astral travel and reincarnation. Both were in direct relationship to Carl’s all-absorbing aim of “finding out” the “true and original Christianity.”
By astral travel he hoped to transcend the boundaries of space and time, and thus to “revisit” the locales where Christianity existed before it was corrupted. By his researches in reincarnation—he believed fully in it—Carl hoped to relive some ancient experiences of his own, possibly even around the birth of Christianity.
In his researches, studies, and experimentation into astral travel, Carl had by 1969 some proficiency in this psychic capability, but his achievements had remained within traditional bounds. He usually remained in sight of his own inert body and of locales known to him in his physical life. And in some definite way he remained tied to the time frame of the present moment. His immediate goal now was to find a way out of that time frame. There must be, he maintained, some “gate” through which he could pass to freedom.
With his two closest associates, Albert and Norman, and the student members of his special study group, he now proceeded to launch a series of experiments. He himself was the guinea pig; and, each time, one of his trances became the starting point for an experiment. Carl had apparently an enormous fund of psychic energy and was immune to the injury that others sustained in such experiences.
The experiments took place in the audition room of his campus offices. There he had had installed various machines for recording voice and actions, and for monitoring his vital functions—heart, pulse, respiration, and brain activity.
Albert functioned as chief monitor, with Norman as his immediate assistant. Albert would interrogate Carl at key points in each experiment. Until the last stages of this series of experiments, Carl answered only direct yes-or-no questions put to him by Albert. The other members of the group took on various assignments in operating the machines.
Carl’s optimum time for “trancing” was in the early morning, an hour or so before sunrise. At the end of each trance session, the assistants withdrew on Carl’s instructions, and he was left alone to recover his normal composure. Recovery periods lasted for any length of time between ten and forty minutes depending on the length of the session and Carl’s psychic condition. When the assistants returned, they usually found Carl sitting at the table recording his memories—sensations, thoughts, feelings, intuitions.
By repeated experiments, starting always with one of Carl’s trances, they found that astral travel was not to be accomplished in one step. It was not a question of one, but rather three “gates.” These he termed “low-gate,” “mid-gate,” and “high-gate.” Carl had to pass through them all in order successfully to achieve full freedom of astral travel.
Low-gate was, more or less, the initial condition of trance: an absence of all sensory reaction and feeling on Carl’s part. Mid-gate implied that Carl himself felt no relationship to his body; but, nevertheless mid-gate still implied “immobility” on the part of his psyche. High-gate, Carl figured, would mean that his psyche escaped from that peculiar “immobility” of mid-gate and depart “freely” on astral travel. The rest was discovery and revelation.
The verification of Carl’s passage to low-gate and mid-gate positions was accomplished by a series of laboriously conducted experiments, repeated and repeated, until they were all satisfied that objectively Carl could be said to have reached these different positions. To help our understanding of how these experiments went, we have the films, tape recordings, and the minutes of the laboratory log, together with Carl’s own recordings made after each session. Some members of the group have also contributed their recollections of what happened.
Once Carl was in a trance and all physical feeling (say, a pin stuck in the sole of his foot) was negative for him, the assistants proceeded to change the objects around Carl’s inert body. They introduced objects he had never seen—usually placards inscribed in another room by one of the assistants. They placed them face up and face down; they moved them around. They proceeded thus through a series of experiments, testing Carl until they were sure that his responses identifying the objects previously unknown to him were accurate and were coming from the low-gate position.
As Carl recorded it, in low-gate position he was perfectly conscious, but not through his senses. And he was observing from a position outside his own body, at every side of it as well as beneath it and above it and the couch upon which his body lay.
Mid-gate was the next goal. In all low-gate positions there always persisted in Carl some instinctual relationship to his own inert body, as he viewed it from “outside.” They understood that this instinctual relationship was a “given” of normal human conditions. The aim was to get rid of it.
All knew that there was a risk involved in shedding something so basic and instinctual as the feeling for one’s own body. What guarantee was there that one could resume it, how could one “return” to normal body living? Did one just escape from the relationship, leaving it intact, and then return to its bonds? Or by leaving it did one destroy it? No one knew. “But we must find out,” insisted Carl.
In late 1968 Carl had the beginnings of mid-gate: in his trances now, the relationship to his body was weakening; and, as the weakening progressed, a strange, dimensionless condition of mind and will began to fill his consciousness. Great caution was exercised by the assistants and by Carl at that stage. Carl allowed a cert
ain degree of weakening of that instinctual bond, then returned again to full immersion in his bodily senses. He then repeated the operation several times, until he felt sure of his psychic energy and resources to help him back to psychic normalcy and then, down past low-gate, back to physical normalcy. Eventually, in the early summer of 1969, he fully attained mid-gate.
At the end of the summer it was decided that they should aim for high-gate. It was a Saturday morning. All proceeded in the orderly and controlled manner adopted from the beginning. Carl passed into low-gate and, without much delay, into mid-gate. At this point, according to the plans made at the previous night’s preparatory meeting, there was a three-minute regulatory pause while they waited for Carl to attain control of his psychic energy for the next and difficult step.
When the three minutes were up, they started again. But quickly Albert found he could get no answers or reactions from Carl. After a sudden racing, pulse, heartbeat, and respiration had slowed down to the pace “normal” for mid-gate. Physically Carl was “in normalcy.” Norman and Albert looked at each other and at the rest of the group; there was nothing to do but to wait and keep monitoring Carl’s vital signs. It was a risk Carl had insisted be taken, and they had all agreed.
When Carl had reached mid-gate and Albert’s interrogating voice had ceased for the regulatory pause, Carl’s progress had not stopped. The diminishing relationship to his body had melted into nothing. And he was suddenly within another ether or state: neither far from nor near his body, neither light nor heavy, his whole self wholly transparent to himself, desirous neither of death nor of life, neither remembering anything nor forgetting anything, neither realizing anything new nor ignoring anything old. In that state he had neither past nor future. He was past mid-gate and into the high-gate position.
Albert, Norman, and the others were seriously worried at first when the monitoring machines ceased to record any brain activity in Carl’s body. But Carl had forewarned of this also and told them that perhaps on the threshold of high-gate, and most probably in the high-gate position, there would be no apparent brain activity, certainly none that could be picked up by machines. But Carl had not been able to predict anything more. His assistants had no inkling of Carl’s experience at that moment.
Quickly and simultaneously he surveyed an entire panorama. As he tells it, it was a medley of faces and places and animals which he had seen before either in real life or in books, faces such as the Ramses II colossus at Abu Simbel in Egypt, a Minoan goddess from the sixteenth century B.C, a lute player from ancient Tyre; places such as the Nike temple in Athens, the baths of Mohenjo-Daro, the early buildings of Jericho, sheets of ice-capped land, swamps, swirling gases, deeps of blackness; objects such as a sycamore tree in Pharaonic Thebes of the eighteenth century B.C., the high places of Machu Picchu.
It was not a question of images or pictures; it was the actual places and objects themselves. And an added peculiarity was that to Carl they did not come singly, one after the other or separated in space and time. He was ranging far above them, and they were simultaneously present to him.
The recordings taken during this portion of the session are silent except for the whispers of his associates. Carl was silent throughout high-gate.
After 25 minutes Albert and the others were beginning to become alarmed, when the pulse and heartbeat monitors began to record a faster pace. Carl must be “returning,” reviving, they knew. He was beginning to respond to Albert’s direct commands and suggestions. In another ten minutes it was all over. Carl opened his eyes slowly and blinked in the electric light.
They all filed out, leaving Carl his accustomed time to recover. When they returned some 15 minutes later, he was dictating into the recording machine as much as he could recall of that high-gate astral travel. The elation of the group as they listened was understandably high. They still had to devise some method of verifying the data of his high-gate travel, but they had full confidence that such controls could be devised with repeated experiments.
Albert, Norman, and Carl were the last to leave the audition room. Their path lay across the campus to the dining room. As they walked, they discussed the salient points of Carl’s trance. There were two or three aspects of Carl’s astral travel that Norman was sure were unique, even in the low-gate and mid-gate states. He mentioned especially the peculiar time frame within which Carl seemed to move during the trance, and he remarked on the bodiless experience of Carl at certain moments of his experience: not only had Carl felt as if he was looking at his own inert body; he felt as if he had been definitively separated from it.
As they continued to talk, Albert and Norman were what they now call “taken over” or “totally dominated” by some psychic dimension of Carl.
Carl was just explaining the absence of distance during astral travel. They both recall his saying: “Take, for example, that ridge over there.” He indicated the high ridge that flanked his favorite walk. “You see it as a vertical dimension, some distance from you, on your horizontal plane.”
At that point, their perception of the ridge itself was no longer as of an obstacle on their horizon. The ridge was as much there as it had been the moment before this peculiar change. But now they were neither distant from the ridge nor near it, neither level with it nor lower in level, nor above it. They had, in other words, no sense of distance. In their description of it, the experience seems something like Carl’s experience the evening when all distance had disappeared between him and the sunset outside his study window.
And the same change affected their relationship to each other and to Carl. Without any perception of distance or space between them, they were “with” him, “with” each other. The only material relationship that remained was that of presence: they were present to each other.
They were also aware of another change, this time in Carl. He was present to them and they, to him. But he was more present to, more “with,” something or someone else. And they were not so present to or “with” that something or someone else as Carl was. They witnessed his “meeting” with that other being, as it were, and heard strange words of conversation they did not understand. At times it seemed Carl was “talking” with more than one, with two or three “persons.” They could not make out exactly how many. And, while the dominant emotion of both Norman and Albert was one of fear and of nostalgia for a normal physical stance and posture, Carl seemed to be in ecstasy and wholly absorbed in his “meeting.”
Their memories become jumbled at this point. They remember speaking but in a wholly undeliberate way, as if some power in them was producing the words they pronounced. Several times they were saying the same things in chorus together; at other times they were talking almost at cross-purposes. They do remember hearing each other say: “Surely, we must make a special place here for Carl and his companions.” And they have only the dimmest memories of who or what those companions of Carl’s were during these experiences. They have no recollection of human forms.
At a certain point, they remember, their vision was obscured by a blackness they could not understand or see through. Their hearing grew fainter. After that, Albert and Norman say, they seemed to become numbed or drowsy, and that numbing seeped through them both, lulling their senses.
Then they each felt a hand on one shoulder and heard Carl’s normal voice.
“Albert! Norman! Do you hear me! Wake up!”
Albert describes himself as opening his eyes. Norman’s description is of blackness melting from his vision. Both of them saw only Carl standing between them, a hand on the shoulder of each, and looking as normal as always. He was smiling at them and telling them by that smile that he knew what they had experienced. Nobody said anything. But Carl pointed to the ridge.
They looked over. The ridge was now flooded in sunlight, and so were the buildings at its base and the green expanse of grass between them and the ridge. They looked back at Carl.
He only said: “This exaltation is something people will not easily understan
d.”
They both nodded. They would themselves spend many hours discussing and trying to understand what had happened.
This experience made a huge difference in Carl’s life. After some discussion, it had been decided to communicate to all the members of the special student group what Albert and Norman had experienced that morning. All now accepted Carl as a guide and guru. They referred to his guruship openly when speaking to others of their studies, although it was agreed that no public mention of Carl’s “exaltation,” as he called it, should be made until all their findings were published. But from then on until after the Aquileia incident, Carl was revered by each individual of his special group not merely as a parapsychologist but as a personal guide in their progress of spirit and in true religious belief.
Inevitably word spread beyond Carl’s in-group. And before long, Carl had a much greater following. He attained particular notoriety following a lecture he gave shortly after his “exaltation.” It concerned religion and Christianity. In it, Carl announced the goal of his studies and research to be a rediscovery of what Christianity truly meant, what Jesus had wanted it to be before Jesus’ message had been corrupted by other men.
As time went on, Carl’s following grew fairly large. More people began coming for guidance in their personal spiritual growth. But even as the group grew in number, Carl’s influence over the group became more profound. He imposed very severe exercises on each of the participants, disciplining their imaginations and schooling them in control of their mental processes in a way and to a degree quite beyond anything Olde had put him through many years before.
Carl began to lead special spirit-raising sessions for his growing group. They were held in the large room off his private study where he also held seminars and did so many of his experiments.
Hostage to the Devil Page 47
