The Radicalization of the Human Heart

The Radicalization Of The Human Heart

Banaras, India Looking down onto the bathing ghats from my tower room overlooking the Ganges I am reminded of ants; how we humans are like ants, programmed for feeding and fornicating, working as robots for a specified number of days, fitting into a mechanized existence that has been engineered to function smoothly with few exceptions, and then dying off to be replaced by another duplicate. In every ant colony though there are always a few exceptions, always a few that run around the outskirts crazily ignoring the norms of good ant conduct and exploring the parameters of their existence in their own fashion.
In the human world of men and women those few crazies would be the philosophers, shamans, artists, poets and others that have voyaged deep into their interior, often with the assistance of plant guides or teachers. This is very common in India, a country of over a billion people that is not only agricultural but one that values the interior life over any other and plant guides of every kind abound in this land of continual seeking after knowledge and questing for release or enlightenment.
On every corner, in every bazaar or small market place there are shops selling herbal remedies and magic elixirs. Some of these plants are for indigestion, intestinal worms, skin problems, colic, cancer, some for inducing sleep while others wake up the organism to new perceptions and dimensions. This new awareness evokes new kinds of thinking that some power structures believe to be detrimental to their existence. Like a deadly virus that must be destroyed before it destroys everything it touches, many governments institute draconian laws to prevent their subjects from exploring and cultivating their interior life for fear that it would change the status quo and thus make those in power obsolete.
In India lip service is paid to those governments that institute such laws since aid is given or withheld according to arrests and amount of contraband confiscated but when you get down to the heart of the matter little is accomplished by this policy since practically everyone uses something to alter their consciousness. Meditation is of course that system that teaches us to be alive and awake to the present moment as do many of these plants when used as teachers or guides but the period of apprenticeship is much longer and requires a discipline that most people in the world do not have and especially those in the West whose time and energy is consumed by meeting the demands of their high standard of living which once committed to is difficult to abandon.
The West has always believed that the battle can only be won by the swift and the daring and that meek natures are losers, taking refuge in submission or flight. Indeed it has often been said that those who use certain substances are running away from reality and are looked down upon as weak or contemptible or mentally ill.
In the West the emphasis is on the material ends of life and religion is often thought of and practiced as a means of procuring not only worldly prosperity but a place in heaven as well. It is dynamic, ambitious and adventurous, imbued with courage and a social consciousness that knows no bounds. The Hindus and the Chinese on the other hand are of a quietist nature, more interested in making the best of a painful life full of hardship and poverty. “All is suffering,” as the Buddha said and the primary goal of the Hindu is to be released from the world of samsara, the wheel of life and death, and not return again to painful mundane existence. For them the qualities of contentment, patience and endurance are those to be cultivated rather than ambition and the robust energy needed to conquer the social, political and economic worlds of samsara. Adhering to this path, this mood of detachment has enabled them to endure thousands of years of both man made and natural disasters. “To be gentle is to be invincible,” as Lao Tzu said. The West races into combat in the name of freedom while the East allows itself to be subjected in the name of peace. It seems that the West is of the head, the intellect, while the East is of the heart, the intuition. Might there be a way to bring these two divergent paths together?



These were my thoughts as the plane landed on the Big Island of Hawaii on my way to visit an old shaman friend that I had not seen for many years. Lowlands Everest, he was so called because he had lived for many years in the low lying tropical rain forests and jungles of South America, learning the ancient wisdom and medicinal preparations of the indigenous peoples. In his younger days he had climbed Mount Everest and rode with the nomadic tribesman of the Tibetan plateau learning their customs, their healing practices and remedies and now as a white haired old man he had retired to the Big Island to putter in his garden of exotic plants and offer his knowledge to those that took the time and trouble to seek him out.
As a psychotherapist and student of philosophy I had been interested since the early 1960s in the altered states of consciousness and subsequent transformation of personality and life focus that many of these plants produced. In my own experiments I had undergone such radical changes of lifestyle, perceptions and philosophy of life that my whole direction and model of reality did a complete about face and I had for all intents and purposes been “reborn.” This rebirth had prompted me to move to Asia where I could be in daily contact with those non-ordinary states of reality induced by a sacred or spiritual way of life. In Asia the spiritual is the ordinary for there is an ancient awareness that all of life is connected and there is something more than the world view of the western materialist who values only what he recognizes with the senses.
Science cannot satisfy the needs of the soul nor can dogma meet the needs of the intellect. Truth is opposed to dogma and tradition for both deny the mystic state, some even looking upon it as a psychopathic condition rather then a condition in which we are in contact with another dimension of eternal reality.
The Western Church looks upon the mystical experiences that have been induced by substances as false, of the devil, counterfeit, a questionable figment of the subjective mind. Then so would meditation, fasting, wearing a hair shirt as well as saying ten thousand hail Marys’ or chanting om mani padme hum a zillion times if we follow that line of reasoning. All of these are devices to flick the switch, and when the light is turned on we see clearly. Birth is coming out of the dark womb into light of day. Rebirth is coming out of the dark shadows of ignorance into light. Plato says that if we want a life of immortality then our lives must be centered on truth, goodness and beauty and our soul must be turned around if the light is going to shine upon it. And that can only happen with rebirth, with conversion, with a transformation of the heart and soul. A radical transformation and not just an extension or continuation of the same old self.
We strain for perfection like the flower strains toward the sunlight. The Upanisads say when the vision is attained all duality comes to an end. Then there is just God, love and light which is enlightenment. The Christians call it salvation, some call it moksha, I call it clarity. It can come by many means, it can come through grace… it is all grace anyway.
Lowlands, the Ancient One, met me at the small airport nestled in the shadow of the big volcano. He was dressed in old jeans and tee shirt and his long white hair fell all the way down his back. He drove an old beat-up pickup. His house was such a strange dwelling it would be difficult to describe but the interior was large and roomy with a picture window looking out onto the Pacific. Rare books on medicinal plants and remedies lined the walls and murtis, statues of various deities collected on his travels, filled the nooks and crannies. Rattles, drums and other shamanic paraphernalia were scattered about. A perfect place to flick the switch.
I drank a small cup of a vile tasting jungle concoction and laid on the floor. Why was I doing this? What was my intention? What did I want to explore? Waves of nausea pulsated through me, I retched, leaned over into the bowl threw up what seemed to be gallons of food and green bile. Looking into the bowl I saw nothing, empty, all my psychic garbage I had been holding onto for years. I laid back, clean, pure, refreshed, an electrical charge of incredible energy coursing through my cells, my body and brain. Soon wonderful visions appeared and I became aware of the antediluvian slime that I crawled out of millions of years ago. My hands had turned into amphibious claws and my body was covered with scales, and that was okay as I lay and pondered the deep things of life: love, God, relationships and death. Letting go was the message, loud and clear, let go of all emotional attachments, the rebellious ego, they are all excess baggage that blocks the light, clinging blocks the light, letting go lets it in. Illumination transforms everything; body, mind, heart and soul. Everybody’s birth right is to be clear and live in the light. And the shaman is the midwife, he assists us in our rebirth, guides us along the path so we don’t fall into the abyss, or if we do he’s there to help us climb out.
Low melodious chanting crept into my consciousness and the rattle of a gourd filled the night air and the heavy scent of jasmine wafted in from through the open window. The Ancient One and his assistant were leading me out of the primal ooz into another dimension and I followed the rhythms that took me over mountains and through jungles, roaring through the seasons, dropping me into bejeweled lakes that kaleidoscopically sparkled with the luminosity of pulsating diamonds, rubies and sapphires so brilliant in their multicolored illuminations I had to close my eyes for fear of being blinded, swimming with giant serpents and alligators with no fear for I too was strong and scaly and from the primeval depths and was one with them,
When I felt that I was losing my center the Ancient One was there with his hand on my head singing softly the songs of the spirits that have become his healing allies or chanting quietly into my ear, intention, intention, back to my intention, why was I here? To examine my body, to connect with my lungs on a cellular level, to swim in the black tar, the detritus of forty years of tobacco and marijuana smoke, let go, with crystal clear clarity I was being told to let go or death was soon to visit, let go, let go and move on. The women I had been with for fifteen years, a beautiful, tempestuous, self destructive woman filled with deceit, betrayal and violence. Let go and move on, it was over, you did your best, she was from another world, don’t hang on, the woman, the gold, the land, it had no meaning, no intrinsic value and all destined to disintegrate as all compounded things return to the stuff of the universe, atom, energy, to be reformed again, reshaped into new life. Rebirth.
That’s what had happened in that Hawaiian temple of transmutation. My cells were washed clean by the invisible hand of the Divine through the medium of the bitter medicine and my internal physician who knew exactly where the sickness was. I could see the process in my mind’s eye as the mitochondria, those microscopic structures that provide energy to the cells, were being cleansed of a lifetime of buildup just as the terminals on a car battery need cleaning when they become corroded. With clean terminals better communication that controls and regulates electrical charges for optimum function results, both in the car and in the body-brain complex. The receptors react to substances produced in the body as well as substances taken into the body, selectively allowing them to enter or leave the cells. The cells have a favorable response to this South American jungle juice as the reactions that take place in the receptors have altered their responses in a positive manner.. Within the cell’s cytoplasm there are structures that use and transform energy in carrying out the cells functions. Also contained within the cell is the nucleus which contains the DNA or genetic material. In the 60s during the LSD paranoia the government claimed that its use destroyed chromosomes. This was never proven and the claims were eventually shelved. It now appears that the chromosomal configurations were either rearranged to their original configuration, before they were corrupted by millions of years of conditioning, or mutated up the evolutionary ladder. Whatever way one looks at it a radical change in the organism has taken place that allows for a process of de-conditioning and thus rebirth.
This bitter potion, this vine of the soul, has been given us so we may heal that which no other physician is capable of. All of the learned doctors, all of the remedies, the thousands upon thousands of expensive pharmaceuticals that the multi-national drug companies churn out, none of these can heal that deep existential sickness that we all suffer from, the emptiness we run away from, the fear of our loneliness and of our impending death, the anger and frustration of our slavery to a way of life that is not beautiful or true
But the visionary vine changes all that. Suddenly there is a serenity that has never before been experienced, a feeling of fullness, of completion, of a richness that embraces us and everything around us totally. Suddenly there is no more a me, it is us that recognizes and accepts the oneness of all life, the inter-connectedness with all that lives and that knowledge gives us a freedom that allows a new life to start consciously growing within.
All of us are suffering with dissatisfaction, anxiety and any of a number of other afflictive emotions that the Buddhists call delusions. The beginning of life is suffering as we fight out way out of the birth canal and continues throughout our lives until the very end that is marked with sickness, old age and finally death. All of this suffering is rooted in the mind so if there is to be healing it must start with the mind. To journey into the mind is what meditation is about, of identifying and ridding ourselves of negative states of mind and enhancing the positive states of mind. Delusions are states of mind that separate us from each other and the causative factor of conflicts in relationships and society, the them and us duality that creates division and dissension not only in our own community but in the world at large.
Mind is not something that one can hold. Mind is the unfolding of thought and as such is material since it comes from the brain, that blob of grey matter from whence comes our thoughts, memories, beliefs, behaviors and moods and coordinates the abilities of the senses. Our nervous system contains at least 100 billion nerve cells that run throughout the whole body like strings making connections with the brain. The jungle medicine, the vine of the soul, allows us to cut through all of those delusions or states of mind, the duality of subject and object that separates us not just from one another but from all of nature; trees, birds, the oceans, mountains, the environment, all of which is a part of us as well. How it does this extraordinary manoeuvre we’re still not certain but the fact remains that it does.
The next morning after our session the Ancient One drove us to the beach on the other side of the island. It was a day of total serenity devoid even of the desire for a morning cup of coffee. I sat on the beach for about four hours while the maestro went body surfing. I sat as still as a stone reflecting on the existence of the multiple worlds that I had visited and the reality of the spirit beings that had led me though those fantastic realms of consciousness. I was in a state of total completion and a sense of rapture pervaded my whole being, something that I had never experienced before. Looking at the sea I could feel the tides within me, rising and falling, inhalation, exhalation, the bellows of life and death, flowing in and out, the cosmic waves of creation.
How grateful I was for this experience to visit those hidden worlds of consciousness. With humble gratitude I thanked the Ancient One for his wisdom and his guidance and his allies and for those plant teachers that opened the hidden door and showed me the way into the parallel forest of my mind and nervous system.
As the time approached for me to return to the world the question in my mind was not so much my capability of maintaining my rapture, my sense of completion, for I knew that would probably fade over time, but the ability to integrate what I learned into my everyday life.
“There is nothing to integrate,” the Ancient One said, “A transformation has already taken place and it will remain.”
Rapture, euphoria are words that cover a multitude of mental and emotional states from alcohol and drug intoxication, the pain inducing practices of the masochist, to demonic possession and the divine raptures of Plotinus and innumerable Christian and Hindu mystics. What I experienced after the wild excitement and intensely ecstatic ride through the antediluvian swamps of my unconscious netherworld and after the symbolic purge of my past and lower life was more akin to that “peace that passeth undestanding,” that state of contemplative rapture reminiscent of the mystics of old. I did not pass beyond my self but passed into a state that was more myself, into a cool, clear sighted reality that infused my with light and understanding. When the intensity of the light dies out, which I knew it would eventually, I would once again stand alone before the altar of the mystery of my own life. But now I had been washed clean and given a fresh start, a necessary prerequisite for a complete and permanent penetration of the light into my consciousness.

I returned to my home on the banks of the Ganges, to Banaras, the sacred city of the Hindus and repository of it’s five thousand year old culture and temple of Indian philosophic wisdom. Of its many systems of thought the one doctrine that runs through all of them, like a string though a necklace of beads, is the belief that the human soul is uncreated, deathless and absolutely real. Throughout it’s history this intangible mystery has haunted her thinkers in the never ceasing effort to understand and to put that understanding into practice. For them philosophy is sophistry if its function is not for the guidance of action and the ordering of life for when philosophy is alive and thriving it cannot be remote from the people and their deep concerns of birth and death and the constant suffering that continues thoughout. Philosophy, when carried to it’s logical conclusion, becomes religion when tested and tempered by the fires of life. Not dogma, or those creeds anxious to save the world, but the recognition of the one cosmic mind, the creative spirit whose dance was the dance of creation, whose dance sustains us and whose dance will eventually destroy us if the human heart is not radicalized by peace, love and light.

Shangrila-La Redux

Swayambutha Temple near Kathmandu

Kathmandu, the Royal Mountain Kingdom of Nepal, with emanations and vibrations of Shangri-La, the United Nations, ex-pat Americans and Europeans, the Nepalese Army and their beloved brother-foes, the Maoists.

Most of the time I only experience the Shangri-La part behind brick walls surrounded by a lush green garden of ferns, indigenous bushes and trees of every shape and size; elephant ear leaves of taro and banana, flowers of every imaginable color mingling with the brilliantly hued sarongs of the young women working in the garden. In the background can be heard the flapping of prayer flags, the low drone of chanting monks and the occasional piercing blast of a Tibetan long horn, the clanging of giant cymbals or the deep and melodious reverberations of a monastery gong. It’s almost like the James Hilton novel, Lost Horizon, that I read when I was twelve years old but then one only needs to step outside the walls to see that it’s a different world.

The other night I went to a gathering at the house of a U.S. Senator’s multi-talented, delightfully mad, hippie daughter, the night before to the palatial house of an old Dutch Burgher antique dealer and his harem of dusky, sloe-eyed beauties. The exchange rate is about seventy rupees to the dollar and ten dollars buys a huge amount of groceries or a big hunk of hash.

Sitting in front of a computer screen here on top of the world, looking out onto a beautiful garden and writing to people all over the world, what a wonderful way to spend one’s time. Sometimes I stroll down to the giant stupa and linger over a morning coffee in one of the many small cafes that encircle it. Monks and townspeople and funny, serious western types come to circumambulate this holy shrine, mumble in their beads and spin prayer wheels in the eternal quest for enlightenment, a more auspicious rebirth or a new Honda motorcycle. Not wishing for any of these I am happy to just sit and watch.

There is a small coterie of beggars that wait for me on my morning walks; two Indian sadhus, a one legged man and another young man that glides across the ground on twisted, malformed legs, all seeming to know when I am coming. No welfare or disability here, no crazy pay for the mad hatters, no kinder-gelt for the poor moms. These are the real holy men and women of this religious land of grand monasteries with priceless art treasures and golden domes; the beggars and scavengers, the cripples and whores, the goondas, the dregs of humanity that evoke thoughts and feelings of such great intensity that one cannot help but be transformed by them. These experiences are an everyday affair, an entheogenic voyage, a daily epiphany of insights and illuminations that the west does not offer its inhabitants, Oprah land not withstanding.

This is the home of the King of the World and the Mother of the Gods., two local residents that I see several times a week. The smile and wave hello, never asking but always receptive to a small donation. How can one not donate to such royalty? One’s beneficence may one day affect the king that rules this land at present, a ruler that few like but all are afraid of. When he dies his son is waiting in the wings, a chip off the old block, as they say.

The Maoists clamor for entrance to the palace gates. Outside the walls steely-eyed, camo-dressed gurkas with automatic weapons patrol the tree lined roads that surround the palace and give hard looks to all passersby, their finger always on the trigger. Blue uniformed policemen and riot squad guys with big shields and guns and sticks are everywhere in sight and concertina barbed wire and sand bag fortifications loom large in many neighborhoods. How nice not to be a person of importance.

There are many westerners here in various capacities; dharma scholars, antique and textile dealers, NGO workers, Social Security retirees, left-over hipsters and drug dealers. One can stay five months a year on a tourist visa for about a dollar and day or get any number of longer visas; research, business, retirement etc., for a price. (Visas are one of Nepal’s major industries). And India’s holy city of Banaras is only forty-five minutes away by plane when one grows weary of the guns, pollution and political situation.

In India the full repertoire of feint and maneuver, coercion and cajolery come into play, the caged despair of the hungry and unsatisfied. It is a good school for the teaching of patience, the ability to just be without anxiety. The false pride and moral standards of the west need to be relinquished if one is to survive. Survival demands that we stand alone, devoid of the baggage of conditioning and desire and be ready to die at any time, to shut off the brain and release the sorrow that binds us to the wheel of time. Camus has said that one is most awake on the way to the gallows. In Asia the hangman’s noose is everywhere and death is observed everyday or one is not paying attention. Living in Asia is both a deeper life experience and a deeper death experience. A good place to live, a good place to die.



Today on my morning walk to the giant stupa I saw a child? Man? Baby?

With a body weighing no more than fifteen pounds and a head larger than a basketball with two more protuberances the size of cut-in-half grapefruits growing out from it. The whole thing looked like it was ready to explode onto the circle of people staring at him. The mother, sitting on the ground, held him as if nursing while explaining in Nepali what his condition was and thanking the people as they donated a coin or small bill.

Though this poor being was sweating and obviously uncomfortable he looked amazingly alert and intelligent and as I looked into his eyes there was a flicker of recognition, some kind of connection that allowed the both of us to see deep into each other. At first I thought, how horrible, that such specimens of humanity should be eliminated at birth for the can only suffer untold anguish, humiliation and pain but the more I looked into his eyes the more I saw a soul, a brain and a mind that could very well be much more advanced than the puny one that we so arrogantly carry around.

If mind is the unfolding of thought and thought is the result or output of the brain’s activity then this huge brain throbbing inside the skull of this person could be a developing mutation struggling to find and keep its place in the hierarchy of primates that presently occupy the planet. Is this possible I ask? Or could this be another form from another planet who has floated down on a thread of DNA to eventually occupy this land that we humans are destroying with our greed and aggression?

Twenty years ago I saw another such person in a small village in the north of Thailand, a huge pumpkin head in a tiny, withered body, lying in a baby carriage as the mother solicited contributions. They looked similar, could have been twins or members of the same mutated species that have evolved into this extreme deviation to teach us about mind and intelligence and slowly replace us as we become extinct due to AIDS, TB, greenhouse gases, drugs and war. And if they have come down, say from Alpha Centauri, there must be more. And if these huge brains and withered bodies were to return to their place of becoming would they refer to us as huge bodies with withered brains that they observed on their travels?

Or are these just isolated examples of encephalitis, “water on the brain,” a condition more prevalent in Asia due to heat, dirt, diet and strange tropical diseases, and one that has not been swept under the carpet or warehoused in special institutions as we do in the west. What if two members of this group were to have children? Would their offspring have the same characteristics, the same brain size and intelligence, the same underdeveloped bodies and withered appendages?

Those are relative terms of course; underdeveloped in relation to what? Withered in relation to what? To say that they are underdeveloped and withered is stating an absolute—that which does not stand in relation to anything else and that prevails all the time and everywhere—which is not the case with homo sapiens. We are as varied as the snowflakes, all beautifully shaped and singularly unique and equal in our humanity. And if the world is God made manifest then those two specimens of humanity, and all the others of their form and substance, are just other versions like all of us and with as much right to live as all of us, if they so choose.

But what if they are not specimens of humanity? What if they were not human? Could they be angels? What is an angel? A spiritual being not of the corporeal world of time and space? An immaterial substance? A disembodied spirit? An article of faith? A winged doer of good deeds? A bringer of light and wisdom?

There is not much in the annals of Hinduism or Buddhism regarding angels and there is no theological, philosophical or scientific proof that angels exist in any of the major religions of the world. But there is no proof that they do not exist and the two beings that I saw, both times in a Buddhist setting and in areas of holy shrines, indeed carried with them a radiant, celestial presence once one overcame the shock of their forms.

Angels exist as an article of faith in the revealed religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and there are angelic intimations in some Buddhist circles that manifest in divine forms such as mother goddesses or heavenly helpers. Generally these beings have beautiful configurations, ethereal, sometimes with wings signifying other worldliness, as if from heaven or even the nether reaches of the underworld of darkness and shadows, as in the angel of death. But never distorted or misshapen, never frightening in appearance , weak or physically helpless; these characteristics belong to the world of evil, bad karma, hell, suffering, punishment, all that we are afraid of and try to avoid during our life.

However, since there are handsome forms of evil as well, one could presume that grotesque angels also exist. Osama and Sadddam are handsome men and Hitler would not have been considered ugly or funny looking had it not been for his moustache and haircut. Mother Theresa, considered by many a living angel when alive and a saint since dead, had much inner beauty but little of the outer.

Does an angel bring happiness? Wisdom? Comfort? The ever smiling drug dealer on Freak Street does that, the whores and madams of the brothels do that, aid and attendance, an anodyne for a tired body with a soul in anguish as it awaits the angel of death, handsome in his black robes and deep black eyes, bloodless white face ready to sweep us up into his robes and carry us off to places unimagined by mortal man.

Death. Om Mani Padme Hum, Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus. Everyone here in the Buddhist community where I am is getting ready for death and hoping they won’t have to come back again.. How about you out there …..are you ready?