Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00382_Field_Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 12KB | 24 lines

Yoga and the Psychedelic Mind
by Bob Simmons

HE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF NATURE LIVES IN THE MIRACULOUS - I CHING

   Consciousness as described by current psychology is composed of three levels of awareness.  Normal ego consciousness as experienced in everyday social functioning, unconsciousness or pre-consciousness, the container of drives, wishes, dreams, and super-consciousness, which encompasses peak experiences, revelation, God-head, etc.  Yet this description doesn't satisfy anyone who has taken acid, or tripped out on deep meditation.  It doesn't respond to anyone who has peered into the intercelestial macrocosm or looked deeply into the world of micro-photography, of plants, leaf patterns, mushrooms, cells and snow crystals.  It cannot qualitatively describe, express or map out in any way the evolutionary phantasmagoria I experience while tripping.  I define "trip" here as divine sexual union, religious ecstasy, peak experiences in painting, filmmaking, swimming, fasts, conscious expanding drugs, prayers and/or any technique which takes you into uncharted realms of consciousness.  Yoga and Hindu mythology on the other hand does.  They provide a framework, a topographical sketch of the labyrinths of consciousness, and have been doing so for the past three thousand years.
   I had my first hallucinogenic trip at Wally Ford's pad-palace in the heart of Medina in Tangier in 1963.  It was Ma'jun backed by a lot of hash, a two day fast, and three weeks in the desert.  It was pure.  I was squat up against the wall in a 8 x 8 square room, everyone was smoking, Wally was playing his flute in time to the raga on the tape recorder, the walls expanded and contracted, the people around me began to transform into swans, monstrous birds, reptiles and fish, and the pictures of my mind started flickering on the wall in uncontrolled projections.  I was frightened, elated, ecstatic, desperate.  I realized that I knew nothing.  I also felt a tremendous break-through, as if I were standing on the edge of a new continent, or peering for the first time into the vast reaches of some infinite and unknown being.
   When I got back to Europe I began reading and practicing Yoga, it came naturally.  Two months later I left for New York, the brain center of the world.  There it was, the living phallic light bulb, NYC, pulsating away as frantically as when I had left it four years ago.  A huge alien network, telegraphing dollar signs throughout the world, and, as always, people trapped in subways, people turning into billboards, mannequins dressed as people, cars jammed in the crack of walls, but something new was happening, a new spirit arising out of the dust.
   Ashrams were springing up out of nowhere, macrobiotic camps, communities, Bob Dylan's voice, and Millbrook, magnified in the black forest of my dreams.  Everyone a Guru, everyone a doctor.  I began discovering through meditation how to center while traveling, how to anchor while my mind transversed and floated through the hemispheres, the heavens and the hells of this universe; how to hold on by letting go.  It was a beginning.  After months of Hatha and Raja yoga practice I was able to experience not only the reaches, depth and power of my own BEING, but to tune into all the subtle astral planes of thought waves that had ever been projected within this universe and thereby have access to infinite knowledge, joy, beauty, horror and bliss.  By psychological standards this is megalomania, polymorphous perversion or schizophrenia.
'   To Yoga psychology it is quite simply a part of the process, in which extrasensory perception, astral projections, and clairvoyance are unfolding psychic experiences leading towards consciousness, unique powers not to get hung up on, or use for selfish ends.
   Or, see the universe as infinite waves of sound vibrations, some subtle, others more dense.  The most subtle being the potential (PARA), that which exists prior to manifestation.  Then the mental sound waves (PASYANTI), thought waves and visionary vibrations.  Finally the subtle sounds, wave lengths, radio, music growing more and more dense, becoming compacted quanta of energy and manifesting as solidified matter, material.  We are both, the most subtle transmitter and receiver in a gross carrying case, not different or indifferent from the rest of the universe, tuned in to the extent that we are connected, openly receiving and energetically transmitting.
   Yoga is based on the Hindu idea of the perfect state of being, living in accord with the infinite wisdom of the universe.  This wisdom is inherent in every molecule, rock, tree, leaf, flower, insect, animal and person.  Your inalienable right is the right to the realization of this God-given nature.  The word for "God" in Sanscrit is "SatChitAnanda," or Being-Knowledge and Bliss.  I think that is beautiful, that name for God.  It describes God in terms that really turn me on.  Then the triad that presides over this universe which is constantly involuting and evoluting towards this God-consciousness is Brahman (the Creator), Vishnu (the Preserver), and Shiva (the Destroyer), and the way to this knowledge which is yours, which is already there, is through the elimination of fear, or Maya (Illusion) which keeps you from it.  But Maya is tough, and hangs on.  This is Bardo breaking:
   Time out.  I turn on Sixth and Thirty-sixth:  Spade corners back to back.  Black night watched by the rook.  Transistor static ballooning my brain, televising nothing.  Oh young woman stuck between trucks I love you very much.  How much?  Very, very much.  I'm turned on.  Your redheaded breasts stir my heart.  What isn't consciousness?  Is communication so lost, caged on the imprint of Karmaic past.  Here on the loin street a pole is punched into the queen of groins.  I cannot say I love you.  You cannot accept it and so we pass, we pass, we pass.  I'm for a bowl of meditation.  That's where the real pain begins, these are only looks.  Comin', Pandora baby, open your golden box.  Floor tempest.  A sanitorium with no keys, no doors, walls or locks.  Liberal meditation come crown my thoughts.  O.K.  Who are you?  Rashomon swirling on the sheets of torture beach.  O.K., begin.  The trilogy of life faces the sea of death.  Battallions begin their march down the brain stem.  Spears of red sashes are helmeted in Tibetan black.  They bend the Kundalini sacrum.  Demons, demons, a million of them.  I start to sing.  "My mother is God, my father is God, my brothers my sister all are God.  God to the right, God to the left, God overhead and ahhhh"....you bastard!  The battle begins.  A black archer stretches my flesh and snaps the lining of my stomach.  I fire back but can't touch him.  Six thousand streets pour with phlegm, each helmet holds a face, is this masochism?  Where else can I go, can you go?  I rip off my shirt and start to sweat.  All those karmas.  Battling eunuchs cut off their legs and roll up their pants impaling catastrophes.  No love.  No love.  Not anywhere.  Three kabuki non-actors assume a karate stance grimace and prepare their fingers for the attack.  Slot machines and bubble gum.  I cannot do the concentration camps in this incarnation.  They're a session in themselves, besides I did them.  Aieeeeee...you bastard.  I'll never look away again.  He plunges his fingers into my liver, grins and splatters his face with blood.  I start to chant "Om ne mashevaya" but I can't find a battling mantra.  Find one quick, hold on artu, Aeiiiiiiiiieeee...ieee.e.e.
What?  Truth.  What is that?  Cosmic operas you haven't even sung.  He is looking at you.  He is rolling up his sleeve..He is hideous-formed and fast.  He is hissing at you.  Watch the ant army, phalanxed thoughts and his circling steps, My incisors are bleeding to death.  Go mad is better thought.  Go mad cop out on consciousness.  There no proof it even...Aeeeeiiiiiii..iii.  He leaps on my lungs.  No faith.  I appear in flash photos and grin.  Detestable ego, sly actor.  I don't even want to redeem this self.  The third one leaps onto my head throwing out all the books I had read.  You're not an enemy, friend.  Then he dumps everything I've ever written, every word I know down my throat.  Vegetable soup.  The army cheers as its being fed.  They pierce the pages with their spears and start their victory dance.  V for Victory.  Randolf Scott is being beaten to death by King of the Mohawks.  Forty-second street is beaten to death by naked girls.  Girls, girly shows, I hate this.  I'm copping out of this come down culture.  Its back to Greece baby, I hear you call.  I want to die there on the bed of your womb.  Sea ash, sea ash and Aaaiieeeeeeeee...a black archers stretchers my flesh, opens my wounds.
   Acid is and expanding catalyst, a searchlight, a bathysphere.  It's a long walk down Sixth Avenue from Central Park.  The infinity tunnel has a small shining opening at one end, and the closer you get the larger and more brilliant the light becomes.  It is light that dispels darkness.
   Isn't this what we experience when we group together, form circular mandalas and chant: Light?  Or in the Shakti state, isn't the perfect orgasm total being, total knowledge and total bliss?  Just go to the de Young and dig bronze Yab-Yums.  The potential of all men is within every man, you are Krishna, she is Radha, both are encompassed in LOVE and LIGHT.
   Yoga is circular, spiral; Western psychology is linear or perpendicular.  In Yoga there are seven planes of consciousness which correspond to the seven Chakras centers within our bodies.  These in turn have a direct relationship to the afferent and efferent nerve impulse centers within the cerebral spinal system.  Each chakra is a source of electrical energy, and radiation depending on its acuteness and conscious sensitivity.  The chakra can be awakened through concentration, through the chanting of Mantras and breathing technique (Pranayama).
   Energy can be drawn up through the spinal cord (SUSHUMNA) in much the same way that mercury rises through a glass thermometer.  Physiologically, the Kingdom of God is within.  As we open up (overcome fear) so are we able to increase the flow and circulation of light and electrical energy in our bodies.  This is being truly enlightened, truly independent, and self-reliant.
   I see Yoga as a guide to physical, spiritual, and material freedom; a vast counter-balance against the increasing constrictiveness of behaviouristic science which is gaining power in the control of acid as an experimental technique.  Doctors should be learning from us.
   It's not the past that's changing the future, but the present that alters both the future and the past.  If the circuit is broken, start it up.  Wilhelm Reich segmentized the body into seven different parts, not unlike the Yogic chakras.  Each segment could be opened up by a series of yoga-like exercises and massages, and his orgone energy is cosmic energy interpreted in biological terms.  Gurdjieff used Yoga as a de-hypnotizing technique, in order to free people from the limited stagnation of atrophied thought.  Huxley saw Yoga as an integral "way (TAO) of life" whose ultimate end is love, union and brotherhood.
   But more than that, I see Yoga as a positive and meaningful way of effecting social change; Ashrams replacing hospitals and sanitariums.  Where people can "drop out" of society meaningfully and constructively; religious workshop centers and reading rooms where consciousness can be explored; peace movements and passive-resistance movements not unlike Gandhi's SATYAGRAHA where means and end are not in conflict, but one.
   The climate is change, the danger an O.D.  We live in an amalgamated society, witnessing the end of the Piscean Era, and the Dawn of the Aquarian Age.  It's up to the young people, the new Aquarians, to manifest that change.  Love, service, beauty, Yoga seem to fit.  Meet with friends, find council, sing together, chant.

Copyright © 1995 Bob Simmons, A.K.A. Azul