47 Possessed

I walked with Billy late one dark evening at the quarry. The metallic mysterious song of what sounded like a million locusts rose and fell in a sonic wave, stopped, silent for a second, then rising sang again; a thousand crickets clacking clicked; big bullfrogs burped and belched their croaking bass. All around us the warm, still, humid air was alive with the pulse and slow golden winking of lightning bugs and fireflies.

"Do you suppose?"

Billy held out his palm and in an instant one alighted there upon it.

"Oh!"

The tiny life resting at the center of his palm brightened to a yellow almost white, dimmed, and darkened; brightened, dimmed, and darkened; brightened, dimmed, and darkened in a slow, even pulse that reminded me of my breath in deep sleep; its illumination appeared to swell to a golden glow and pause, swollen, pregnant, precious, before it dimmed and darkened; and now it resembled a tiny golden slowly beating heart.

Light.

"What does this mean?" Billy asked.

Dark.

"What would it mean in a novel?" I wondered.

Life.

Billy smiled.

Death.

He looked like a saint.

On.

"It's sacred!"

Off.

The world had come to make sense to me.

I had been found by something.

I had been found.

I wasn't yet sure by what or what now I was supposed to do.

Once my awakening had begun I no longer distinguished hallucination from dream or nightmare from epiphany or vision. All my mental states had reduced themselves to one. I had expected possible telepathic input. I inferred as much from the sacred books and holy scriptures I began reading in order to figure out what was happening to me and how to manage and to control it. Now these songs, poems, stories, and records fueled my confidence. I read The Republic—I identified with the guardians educated by Socrates—and my friend John urged me to realize everything in mythic terms.

The idea had seized me.

Held me.

Though I shook and wrestled, enlightenment would not let me loose. Soon I was possessed. I read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the book of Mark, I reread Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. I finished the New Testament, the Gospel, re-examined King Lear and Hamlet and Henry the Fifth. History took me to Malthus, to Marx, to Lincoln, to Spengler. I read Heinrich Zimmer, Jung to understand the myths, the patterns, the archetypes, and then the Dictionary of Symbols by his interpreter Cirlot. I began to play with "sorcery," too, as I understood it from the books of Castaneda, and each night before I fell asleep as best I could I tried to set up dreaming according to the instructions of don Juan and Castaneda in A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power. I read the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, Huston Smith's anthology of the sutras of the Buddha, I studied the teachings of Christ and the epistles of Paul, I emulated the dialogues of Socrates, learned for the first time of the Mahavira, Vardhamana, founder of the Jains, and in general I investigated and I explored all avatars of the spirit, the writings of their students and disciples, the teachings of apostles and mystics.

Though an A student I had been, never had I been a student so dedicated. I dropped it all into the pot, into this cauldron of enlightenment, and I boiled it all down to its essence. It came out as selflessness, courage, nonviolence, openness, honesty, remorse, repentance, discipline, frugality, generosity, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, humility, and love, exactly what John and his teacher Stephen Gaskin had insisted all along.

I was hooked.