The orange barrel was coming on about half an hour after Tom, J.B. and I dropped. Things were getting shimmery around the room.
Sometime in 1972. I was living at the White House, a sort of commune, with friends Tom and J.B., along with a semi-rotating assortment of hangers-on, travelers both cosmic and mundane, would-be musicians, poets and occasional riff-raff.
Ex Catholics
All three of us were products of Catholic high schools. I had attended St. Pius X, a coeducational high school rather progressive for its time. Tom and J.B. had attended St. John’s Minor Seminary, an all-boys high school that prepared those with the priesthood vocation to go on to major seminary at Conception Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in northwest Missouri.
We all graduated in 1969 and headed for college. By 1972, Tom and J.B. had lost their vocation, if they actually had one – I never did – but kept the idea of spiritual search. For us and other men and women like us, it was only natural to delve into other forms of spirituality beyond the church, often with marijuana, hash, and LSD. But, I digress.
At the White House
The White House – because it was painted white – near 54th and Virginia in Kansas City, was one of those big, old 2-story houses with steep stairs leading up from the sidewalk, about 5 bedrooms, a roomy living room, dining room and kitchen, a messy basement, a neat staircase winding up to the second floor, and ghosts.
We were in Tom’s room, just off the bottom of the stairs. He and J.B. were sitting on the floor, I was lying on the bed, up on one elbow, occasionally chiming in but mostly listening, while we passed a joint around. Topics island-hopped from books we liked and didn’t like to favorite music – jazz, rock, classical, to art, to mysticism in all forms, to movies popular and obscure, culture, and the war. The damned war. Then to the Beatles and further on.
As we talked I grew drowsy and drifted off, but not to sleep. My heart was racing or slowing down – I could not tell. My breathing seemed to have stopped but I was not gasping for air.
Instead, I could feel and hear a rhythmic vibration within my chest, like a cat purring. I found I could use the vibration to circulate energy, a force like rushing water, within and without the area between my stomach and solar plexus. Maybe this was the breathless state yogis describe.
Tom and J.B. talked while I was now just listening, their voices receding farther, growing fainter, till I could no longer hear them. It occurred to me that maybe I was dying. How would I know? And even if I were, what could I do about it?
Soon the room was gone. I was in dark, starry space at the center of what felt like a flat, ever-expanding circle. My first impression was it was like an infinite pizza.
Although exciting, scary, and totally unfamiliar, it felt as natural as breathing. I could feel where the circle’s outer boundary met outer space. Expanding ever outward, I wondered if there was a limit beyond which the pizza would break apart. Maybe the pieces would fan out separately and I would die!
Dying didn’t bug me as much as knowing Tom and J.B. would have some tall explaining to do. What could they say? “Well, he went too far out and didn’t come back.” Clearly, that just wouldn’t do.
I was torn. I wanted to expand as far out as I could go, but hesitated. If the circle disintegrates, does that mean I’m gone, never to return? What if the circle holds and continues spreading out. Would I go on forever? Could I make the circle recede? I didn’t know if I was dying or not, but didn’t want to do anything irrevocable. Even as I worried about my friends, I was still expanding and spreading, flatter and thinner.
Eventually, the outer rim of the pizza did begin breaking into small individual particles, even as it remained a circle.
As the particles fanned out I could feel they were interconnected by a thin string or thread coming from my center, my solar plexus. At least, that was my impression of it. I couldn’t see the string as much as I could feel its tension. Although it felt like breathing, it worked by using the purring cat energy in the solar plexus to reel the circle out. Reversing the tension reeled it back in, like a fishing line. That’s my best stab at a description.
I reeled in and out a few times to get the hang of it. Expanding and contracting was surprisingly simple but I was still afraid to reel it all the way out, if there even was an “all the way.”
As I reeled out, the pizza expanded farther and flatter. When I reeled in, the pizza contracted. Each time I let it out a bit farther than before, but not so far it started to break up again. I was afraid if I went too far the string would break, scattering the bits of me like marbles in the cosmos.
Finally, what the hell. I reeled out farther and flatter even more than I dared, to what felt like the breaking point. I held it, held it for a few moments, holding my breath, taking it in, scanning the horizon, as it were. Then I reeled in all the way.
I was not flat anymore and things were more or less as they had been, as normal as they could be under the circumstances. I was back in the room. Tom’s and J.B.’s voices were no longer distant; they were talking nearby as if nothing had happened.
If I was indeed approaching death of some sort, this wasn’t the time. If I was on the verge of experiencing something else, it wasn’t the time for that, either. Although, on its own, this trip was very much something else.
I got a big jolt when I opened my eyes: I didn’t realize they had been closed all this time! I was lying exactly where I had been – how long was it? Minutes? Hours? Tom looked over, pointed his thumb at me, and said to J.B., “He’s back! ” They were laughing heartily as J.B. handed me a joint: “How was your trip?”
photo: Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared Light, Hubble Space Telescope