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- doh.wa.govFluoridation of Drinking Water
Talking Points: National Toxicology Program (NTP) Monograph and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ruling response by D0H DOH approved Holding Statements/Talking Points (PDF) Washington State does not require public water systems to add
Talking Points: National Toxicology Program (NTP) Monograph and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Ruling response by D0H DOH approved Holding Statements/Talking Points (PDF) Washington State does not require public water systems to add fluoride to drinking water. The decision to fluoridate drinking water is a local community decision. After a…
- californiathroughmylens.comShasta State Historic Park: A Ghost Town Near Redding - California Through My Lens
A small ghost town off Highway 299, Shasta State Park is a beautiful snapshot of California's history. Read my review and see pictures.
…rush of the mid 1800s. The town is now a state historic park, and it is literally on the highway that you would take to get to Whiskeytown Recreation Area. It is an easy stop; you just pull off to the side and park along the road. Because of this…
- utahstateparks.reserveamerica.comScofield State Park, UT
Scofield State Park is situated 7,600 feet above sea level in the Manti-LaSal Mountains of the Wasatch Plateau. The 2,800-acre lake offers excellent boating and year-round fishing. During winter months, the area serves as a base for snowmobile and cross-country skiing in the spectacular mountains s…
Campground Details - Scofield State Park, UT - Utah State Parks This website would like to remind you: Your browser (Chrome 68) is out of date. Update your browser for more security and the best experience on this site.× Your browser does not support JavaScript! Sign In or Sign Up …
- illuminati-news.comTestimony of Dr. Carol Rosin
All this chaos, genocide, ethnic cleansing and disaster has a genuine purpose. It is very carefully planned by a few men behind the scene, high up in the society, high above any power structure that the ordinary citizen knows about. It is a planned take-over to create a One World Government with those people on top, making the rest of us into their slaves in a Super Socialist State ...!
CR: My name is Carol Rosin. I am an educator who became the first woman corporate manager of an Aerospace Company, Fairchild Industries. I am a Space and Missile Defense Consultant and have consulted to a number of companies, organizations, and government departments, even the intelligence community. I was a…
- abfla.comAbsolutely Florida Guide to travel in the Sunshine State
The Sunshine State @ Your Fingertips! A huge website with thousands of listings, links, stories, pictures, maps and travel services for the best Florida vacation. Serving the online traveler since 1995.
> Comprehensive Florida Vacation Guide NEW! Florida Organic Farm Directory EAT HEALTHY! A guide to Florida's certified organic operations ATV RENTALS Largest selection of ATV Rentalsin Orlando and Central Florida. Book in minutes! In-Depth FEATURE STORIES THEME PARKS & FAMILY FUN - Busch Gardens - Universal Studios Florida - Islands of Adventure…
SponsoredScrapeCachePermanent snapshots of any URL. Replay it years later, even if the original is gone. Free tier, no card.- scribd.comHome of the Angels by Henry Kroll (Ebook) - Read free for 30 days
This book started when I received a copy of NASA''s video of the long wire tether experiment. NASA astronauts filmed the experiment from the space shuttle Columbia with a hand-held video camera that contained a wide spectrum chip enabling the camera to pick up high ultraviolet images that ordinarily would be invisible to the human eye. The long wire tether satellite contained a reel with a 12-mile-lorig cable and instruments to measure voltage in the upper atmosphere. The satellite measured a voltage ranging from 12 to 14 million volts. While the astronauts were filming the experiment from a distance of fifty miles a sudden surge of over three million volts burnt the cable in half. After NASA retrieved the satellite switches were thrown and a CO2 tank valve had been opened. After reviewing the tape for some time I realized that the camera was picking up round three-mile-diameter ships from a higher energy-state or dimension. (I hate to use the word dimension because people roll their eyes.) The huge dimensional ships seemed to be curious about the experiment and were swarming around the tether satellite like large jellyfish. They would lower their energy state and suddenly become visible to the wide-spectrum camera and glide slowly around the cable. It became obvious to me that I was observing spaceships created by intelligent beings with the capability of living in space forever. They had obviously worked out their political differences long ago and exist in a sort of mind-control society. They need us for emotional entertainment and coexist with us here on earth. Mind control societies feed on other people''s emotion because it is forbidden to them. The book is about the history of encounters with angels and the mindset needed to develop the technology to live in space.
Ebook168 pages3 hoursEnglishHome of the Angels: Nasa's Tether ExperimentShow full titleBy Henry KrollRating: 0 out of 5 stars(0 ratings)Read free for daysRead previewSaveDownloadShareShare titleAbout this ebookThis book started when I received a copy of NASA''s video of the long wire tether experiment. NASA astronauts filmed the…
- whale.toMAFIA (STATE) MURDERS
[Democide. All paid for by our taxes. These are mostly individuals murdered, but includes larger groups in False flags. It is truly staggering the number of people murdered. Assassination is extreme mind control (e.g. 'Suicided': Kelly; 'Lone nuts': King, Kennedy, Lennon; Warnings: Webb, Schneider etc). Covert-Fascism/Authoritariaism kills its own people (who minds or actions they can't control) covertly, kills its own women and children for Gun Control, and attempted martial law (see: WACO 911 State Terrorism), and kills third worlders for their minerals (see: Rwanda Congo). Its psychology is Psychopathy (no conscience), and it is protected by Mind Control, preventing people from seeing the truth, which would destroy it overnight. Fear and anger, mostly, makes them believe Kissinger is a statesman, not a serial killer (see: Kissinger's wars). The psychopathic monopoly known as the medical mafia (the main pseudo-legit money making arm of the Junta) is the main cause of child injury and deaths on the planet, not forgetting it kills millions of adults with its monopoly medicine every year in the USA alone (whereas the suppressed Natural Healing methods would kill none)--it sure heads the list of the Serial Killers, along with War Inc or rather the wars of Big Oil. The main assassins are the 'Secret': CIA, MI5, MI6, NSA, Mossad, & Political, Police: FBI. Some of these are so obviously covert hits they fit the bill for Trauma programming.]
[Democide. All paid for by our taxes. These are mostly individuals murdered, but includes larger groups in False flags. It is truly staggering the number of people murdered. Assassination is extreme mind control (e.g. 'Suicided': Kelly; 'Lone nuts': King, Kennedy, Lennon; Warnings: Webb, Schneider etc). Covert-Fascism/Authoritariaism kills…
- whale.toThe Police State Road Map
Quotes In 1994 Clinton initiated the 'Agreed Framework' with North Korea, committing millions of dollars in aid for it's nuclear programme, allegedly for electricity generation. In 2000 Clinton authorized Donald Rumsfeld's company ABB to build two lightwater nuclear reactors in North Korea. In January 2003 Bush sought $3.5 million of taxpayers money for the nuclear programme.(20) The government claims that lightwater reactors cannot be used for nuclear weapons production. However the congressional North Korea Advisory Group concluded in 1999 that, If the 1994 Agreed Framework is implemented and two LWRs are eventually built and operated in North Korea, the reactors could produce close to 500 kilograms of plutonium in spent reactor fuel each year; enough for nearly 100 bombs annually if North Korea decides to break its obligations and reprocess the material.(21) Given that Kim Jong-Il is a brutal dictator who has starved millions of his own people to death, the American government are clearly building the best enemy money can buy in order to escalate the 'War on Terror'. There is no other logical explanation.
The Police State Road Map pdfQuotes In 1994 Clinton initiated the 'Agreed Framework' with North Korea, committing millions of dollars in aid for it's nuclear programme, allegedly for electricity generation. In 2000 Clinton authorized Donald Rumsfeld's company ABB to build two lightwater nuclear reactors in North Korea. In…
- trademarks.corporationwiki.comDudleytown Trademark of Dark Entry Forest, Incorporated Serial Number 78937753
This mark is dead with a status of Abandoned-Failure to Respond or Late Response. The last case file activity for this mark occured 18 years ago on Friday, February 29, 2008, according to the United State Patent & Trademark Office
…this mark occured 18 years ago on Friday, February 29, 2008, according to the United State Patent & Trademark Office Word Mark Dudleytown Status Dead 602 — Abandoned-Failure to Respond or Late Response Current Owner Dark Entry Forest, Incorporated of Cornwall Bridge, CT View all trademarks for Dark Entry Forest, Incorpora
- insightstate.com11 Ways To Decalcify Your Pineal Gland - Insight state
The pineal gland is shaped like a pine cone and is located near the center of the brain. Here are 11 ways to decalcify your pineal gland.
…August 12, 2025 How to decalcify the pineal gland? The pineal gland is a small, pea-shaped gland, that is located in the center of the brain, behind and above the pituitary gland. It weighs less than 0.2 grams. Unlike much of the rest of the brain, this gland…
SponsoredSuper Weapon NewsNews that will melt your face.- disneyprivacycenter.comYour US State Privacy Rights - The Walt Disney Privacy Center
This “Notice at Collection” provides certain disclosures about our collection, processing, sharing, selling, targeted advertising, and retention of certain states’ residents’ personal information, including in the past 12 months.
…and retention of certain states’ residents’ personal information, including in the past 12 months. Categories of Personal Information The personal information we collect is described in the “Type of Information We Collect” section of our Privacy Policy, which specifically includes the following categories of personal information (as defined in applicable…
- tehrantimes.comIsrael is behind serial assassinations of Kennedy brothers: Laurent Guyenot
TEHRAN - Laurent Guyenot, who has co-authored a new documentary on Israel’s role in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, tells the Tehran Times that the “true American Deep State” is Israel, which had a crucial role in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers.
…all of America's power structures” TEHRAN - Laurent Guyenot, who has co-authored a new documentary on Israel’s role in the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy, tells the Tehran Times that the “true American Deep State” is Israel, which had a crucial role in the assassinations of…
- spointra.az.govArizona Procurement Portal | State Procurement Office
APP is the state's e-Procurement system. It's where suppliers and state employees meet to supply and procure goods and services to fulfill the individual missions of Arizona's State Agencies, Boards, or Commissions.
Arizona Procurement Portal APP is the state's e-Procurement system. It's where suppliers and state employees meet to supply and procure goods and services to fulfill the individual missions of Arizona's State Agencies, Boards, or Commissions. Arizona Procurement Portal Vision Provide end-to-end automation Reduce maverick…
- indymedia.org.ukUG#684 - The Supranational Deep State (Deep Politics and Middle East Oil) - UK Indymedia
Do you find yourself wondering what's really going on, having seen through some one set of lies, whether you are now faced with another, more carefully crafted set of untruths? Two contributors this week take a close look at the murky bu$ine$$ of Deep Politics. We begin with a new speaker, Charlotte Dennett, who suggests that underneath a lot of facades the Middle East oil (and its exploitation by foreign powers) lies at the heart of geopolitics - including both world wars. In our second hour, a compendious 2014 essay by Peter Dale Scott on "The State, the Deep State and the Wall Street Overworld". Scott reveals superficially separate incidents of political malfeasance such as the Safari Club, BCCI and Adnan Khashoggi are in fact all symptoms of a single political malaise that he terms a "Supranational Deep State".
Do you find yourself wondering what's really going on, having seen through some one set of lies, whether you are now faced with another, more carefully crafted set of untruths? Two contributors this week take a close look at the murky bu$ine$$ of Deep Politics. We begin with a…
- yadvashem.orgThe Conquest of Poland and the Beginnings of Jewish Persecution
On September 17, 1939, while the Poles were still attempting to stave off the German offensive, the Soviets invaded Poland and occupied the eastern part of the country, under the terms of an agreement concluded between the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and his German counterpart Ribbentrop. Within three weeks the Germans had defeated Poland and divided it into three regions: the western and northern provinces of the former Polish state, including the country’s second-largest city, Lodz, were annexed to the Reich; eastern districts were annexed to the Soviet Union and Lithuania; and an enclave in central Poland was converted into the Generalgouvernement – an area whose political future was undefined during the initial phase of the occupation
…conquest and division of Poland in 1939, Jews were subjected to humiliations and brutal violence, and were forced to wear the identifying Star of David. The policy of incarcerating the Jews in ghettos was outlined. On September 17, 1939, while the Poles were still attempting to stave off the German…
SponsoredLANAgentA personal AI assistant framework that can earn money providing services.- khazaria.comAn Introduction to the History of Khazaria
"The Khazar people were an unusual phenomenon for Medieval times. Surrounded by savage and nomadic tribes, they had all the advantages of the developed countries: structured government, vast and prosperous trading, and a permanent army. At the time, when great fanatism and deep ignorance contested their dominion over Western Europe, the Khazar state was famous for its justice and tolerance. People persecuted for their faiths flocked into Khazaria from everywhere. As a glistening star it shone brightly on the gloomy horizon of Europe, and faded away without leaving any traces of existence." - Vasilii V. Grigoriev, in his essay "O dvoystvennosti verkhovnoy vlasti u khazarov" (1835), reprinted in his 1876 compilation book Rossiya i Aziya on page 66
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF KHAZARIA by Kevin Alan Brook, Copyright © 1996-2022 Latest revision: December 2022. "Of all the astonishing experiences of the widely dispersed Jewish people none was more extraordinary than that concerning the Khazars." - Nathan Ausubel, in Pictorial History of the Jewish People (1953) "The…
- globalresearch.caTwenty-six Things About the Islamic State (Al Qaeda, ISIS-ISIL-Daesh) that the U.S. Government Does Not Want You to Know About - Global Research
The US led war against the Islamic State is a big lie. Going after ”Islamic terrorists” is used to justify a military agenda. The Islamic State is a creation of US intelligence. Washington’s “Counter-terrorism Agenda” in Iraq & Syria consists in Supporting the Terrorists.
Twenty-six Things About the Islamic State (Al Qaeda, ISIS-ISIL-Daesh) that the U.S. Government Does Not Want You to Know About By Prof Michel Chossudovsky Global Research, September 19, 2025 Global Research 18 November 2014 Region: Middle East & North Africa Theme: Terrorism, US NATO War Agenda In…
- illuminati-news.comIlluminati News: The Sovereign Military Order of Malta
All this chaos, genocide, ethnic cleansing and disaster we see in this world have a genuine purpose. It is all very carefully planned by a few ?invisible?, super-rich people behind the scenes, high above any power structure that the ordinary citizen knows about. They want to create a One World Government with themselves in charge, making the rest of us slaves in a Super Socialist State that would make former Soviet Union look like Paradise, in comparison...!
112606b Written by Updated: 07:20 pm UTC, 10/12/2025 ~ Illuminati News ~ Home Site Map Read First!!! News & Updates US Constitution The Illuminati Secret Societies New World Order Occultism Banking & Paper Money Politics Business Technology & Science Media Control UFOs & Aliens Mind Control Art & Mind Control Microchipping Drugs…
- boot-boyz.bizIngo Swann / Secrets of Power
Please allow 10 working days to process before shipping Lime Tote Bag - 20" x 15" x 5"100% Heavy Cotton Canvas Ingo Swann was a prominent American psychic research subject, parapsychologist, author and artist. Swann studied at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah, receiving a double bachelor’s degree in biology and art. Swann’s active participation in parapsychology research began in 1969 when he was 36 years old. During the next twenty years he worked only in controlled laboratory settings with scientific researchers. Although he lectured widely on the importance of psychic faculties and potentials, he has never publicly demonstrated his abilities. Because of his participation in hundreds of thousands of experimental trials, author Martin Ebon wrote of him as “parapsychology’s most tested guinea pig,” and Psychic News and other media often refer to him as “the scientific psychic.” During the 1950s and 1960s, because of psychic potentials partly evident in childhood, he became actively interested in occult and parapsychological literature and in a variety of novel mind-development programs which took positive approaches to the enhancement of ESP potentials. Swann early distinguished between psychic phenomenon and psychic mind-dynamic processes. He especially noticed that while parapsychology researched the existence of paranormal phenomena (such as ESP, telepathy, and psychokinesis), there was little interest in the mental processes involved in producing evidence of them. From this distinction he slowly developed unique theoretical approaches to process enhancement of psi perceptions, which was in keeping with ancient descriptions of Siddhis as found in various Eastern Yoga literature and Abraham Maslow’s developmental abilitism theories. In 1970 Swann experimented with Cleve Backster in attempting to influence plants by mental activity. In 1971 psychokinetic experiments involved successfully influencing temperature recorded in a controlled setting devised by parapsychologists Gertrude Schmeidler and Larry Lewis at City College, New York. This involved PK effects upon target thermistors (temperature measuring devices) in insulated thermos bottles at a distance of 25 feet from Swann. Swann was also the subject of experiments in out-of-body travel, or psychic perception at a distance. These took place during 1971 at the American Society for Psychical Research. They involved Swann sitting in a chair and attempting to project his consciousness into sealed boxes on a small platform several feet above his head, in which there was a target symbol completely shielded from view. Swann was monitored by electrodes that would have recorded any movement from the chair. Under these difficult laboratory conditions, Swann nevertheless scored significant successes in describing the targets. In one test he was actually able to state correctly that a light that should have illuminated the target was inoperative. There was no normal way of ascertaining this fact without opening the box. In 1972, at the American Society for Psychical Research, Swann began suggesting experimental protocols to test for the existence of mind-dynamic processes that would enhance ESP and he coined the term “remote viewing” to describe the experiments in which viewers would view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding. Remote viewing is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing" with the mind. One of the first most remarkable experiments involved a successful attempt to influence the stable magnetic field of a super-cooled Josephson junction inside a quark detector (a complex apparatus designed to detect subatomic particles). The apparatus was completely inaccessible, being encased in aluminum and copper containers and buried in five feet of concrete. When Swann mentally visualized the hidden target, significant variations were recorded in sine waves. This PK effect was reported at a conference on quantum physics and parapsychology. On April 27, 1973, in another extraordinary experiment, Swann “visited” the planet Jupiter in a joint “psychic probe” shared by fellow psychic Harold Sherman. Swann’s drawings made during the experiment showed a ‘ring’ of tiny asteroids around the planet which scientists at the time said did not exist. The existence of the ring was later scientifically confirmed in 1979. From the first experiments, Swann was increasingly considered a very unique test subject because, at the command of the experimenters, he could reproduce and sustain the desired effects over time at a significant rate of success. Throughout the history of parapsychology, other test subjects had been temporarily or spontaneously successful. But these subjects typically suffered from the well-known “decline effect” or “psi-missing effect” which statistically erased the successes, and thus permitted skeptics to believe that the successes were due to some outside factor other than claimed human psi abilities. Ingo was also a self-taught artist who worked mostly in oil paintings. His artworks express his passion for exploring the mysteries of the Universe and recapture his visions from leaving his body, remote viewing, and seeing auras. Starting in the late 1950s with his first still life painting and continuing through to his last work of art, Cosmic Intelligence, Ingo’s art periods mirror his own journey. From student to visionary, cosmic and later metaphysical artist, Ingo’s goal was to transcend the ordinary into an art form that conveyed an advancing frontier of experience. Most books and articles written after 1973 about parapsychology and psychic matters refer to Swann’s work in some way. Many analysts of science and parapsychology generally concede that his work and the high levels of official sponsorship it obtained gradually influenced positive reevaluations of the validity of psi in human experiencing. In July 1995 the CIA declassified, and approved for release, documents revealing its sponsorship in the 1970s of a program at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, to determine whether such phenomena as remote viewing "might have any utility for intelligence collection". Thus began disclosure to the public of a two-decade-plus involvement of the intelligence community in the investigation of so-called parapsychological or psi phenomena. One of the documents released was on project “SUN STREAK” which refined the process of teaching Coordinate Remote Viewing (CRV) to the degree that individuals possessing no known “natural psychic abilities” can be taught to remote view with extreme accuracy in a relatively short time period. The training program was divided into 6 stages with each stage increasing the scope and ability of the viewer. In the document it is said that the basic theory of how CRV works is very logical and is easily comprehended even by a “non-psychic”. It goes on to explain that somewhere in the unconscious mind there exists what they label “the Matrix” which knows no boundaries or limitations and contains all information about all things. The Matrix has within it “Patterns” - think of these as points within a 3D box and these Patterns each possess and radiate their own energy. This energy is emitted in the form of a signal or “signal line” which is particular to that specific pattern. This Pattern in the Matrix has other names such as “Thought Ball” or “Gestalt”. A Gestalt can be described as the Pattern and all of its associated patterns. “Cognitrons” are a pattern product existing in the unconscious mind, created by the interaction between neurons and synapses, after either a physical or emotional event. A practical explanation of training theory and how Cognitrons apply to learning could be accomplished using the example of an athlete. An athlete practices to reach a training objective, this objective could be skill related, like a wrestling move. The move is rehearsed time and time again until it is done correctly or until significant improvement is made and then training is ended to allow for the formulation of Cognitrons in the athletes memory. These Cognitrons will enable the athlete to accomplish the task spontaneously the next time the move is attempted, the same is true of psychic training. Clarification of this growing list of terms and definitions can be accomplished by walking through the process to this point. The monitor will read the viewer a set of encrypted coordinates e.g., 31° 42’E and 20° 16’N. In very basic terms, the viewer’s Autonomic Nervous System will respond to energy produced by the “Gestalt” or “Pattern”, and this response will manifest itself on the Idiogram. It is this registration on the Idiogram that indicates that the viewer is receiving the signal line of the Gestalt. The viewer will begin receiving impressions or perceptions of the target area (site) keyed to the specific issues he is concerned with e.g., structure, terrain, emotions etc. When Speaking of “the Matrix” or of “Gestalts” and the related “Patterns”, these terms are dealing with information which exists in energy form in the unconscious mind. The purpose of CRV training was to enable the viewer to extract the information from the unconscious and bring it into the conscious mind where it can be used for whatever intended purpose. All information and perceptions drawn from the unconscious must be processed through the “limen” thresholds or the conscious mind will not be able to receive it. This transfer or passage of information is accomplished through the use of “conduits” or “channels” which permit various types of sensory information to pass through. There are a number of inhibitors called “physical inclemencies”, which shut down a viewer's ability to pass information from the unconscious to the conscious or awareness. Each viewer has only a specific number of channels of conduit available in which to pass information thru the limen thresholds separating the levels of consciousness. If inordinate numbers of these channels are clogged with other functions e.g., survival (movement), sickness, fatigue, hunger etc., then the viewer's ability to pass information will be greatly impaired. In order for a viewer to be effective the greatest number of these channels possible must be made available - viewing when sick, hungry etc. was not recommended. What has been discussed here is theory, much cannot be explained, measured or quantified to the standards demanded by the scientific community. While analytical data may not be in abundance to support this theory, session reports and historical and experimental data exist to substantiate the fact that CRV is a reality. In Swann’s book Secrets of Power, he discusses the enormous amount of discovered data, information, and knowledge out there that is avoided, forbidden, made taboo, swept under carpets, or simply trashed. He says brain researchers say that we use only ten to fifteen percent of our brains and that it’s also quite possible that we use only ten to fifteen percent of discovered knowledge. One may ask what these two somewhat unexplainable discrepancies have to do with power. Well, he says it's entirely possible that we know only ten to fifteen percent about the nature of power, and that we utilize only ten to fifteen percent of our innate powers. He wonders why a species equipped to function at higher percentages of everything should remain confined to ten percept performance. In the intro to Secrets of Power II he says, “Most books about power only deal with the societal formula of the few having power over the enormously larger powerless masses, and which is mistaken as the so-called “natural order of power.” But it is not well understood that this formula also requires social conditioning measures aimed at perpetuating the continuing depowerment of the powerless so that the powerful CAN have power over them. This in turn requires the societal suppression and secretizing of all knowledge about the superlative human powers known to exist in individuals of the human species, but which are socially forced into latency in most. It is broadly understood that power and secrecy go together, but the scope of the “web” of secrets surrounding the larger nature of human power(s) is surprising. As discussed in Volume I of SECRETS OF POWER, empowerment is difficult if the larger panorama of societal power and depowerment are not more fully understood. Any desire for more individual empowerment will soon encounter the question of WHAT to empower. There are many ways to consider this. One way is first to identify human power elements that are known to exist, but DO NOT receive societal nurturing, enhancement, training, scientific research, or philosophical interest. In-depth research will reveal at least five major categories of these power elements, one such category consisting of the aware powers innate in everyone of our species. The direct relationship between the spectrum of aware powers and increases of power is self-evident. The direct relationship between less or no awareness and less or no power is also self-evident. Most societal power structures do not encourage too much development of any aware and related powers, and, via societal programming of punishment, some structures force them into latency altogether. One basic reason is that too much awareness erodes the efficiency of walls of secrecy that support the elite of most power structures, whether large or small. Most are familiar with the awareness they have. But few are familiar with the awarenesses they don't have, but which anyway innately exist within their otherwise amazing information systems.” Secrets of Power I & II
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- psychedelic-library.orgThe Doors of Perception
IT WAS IN 1886 that the German pharmacologist, Louis Lewin, published the first systematic study of the cactus, to which his own name was subsequently given. Anhalonium lewinii was new to science. To primitive religion and the Indians of Mexico and the American Southwest it was a friend of immemorially long standing. Indeed, it was much more than a friend. In the words of one of the early Spanish visitors to the New World, "they eat a root which they call peyote, and which they venerate as though it were a deity." Why they should have venerated it as a deity became apparent when such eminent psychologists as Jaensch, Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell began their experiments with mescalin, the active principle of peyote. True, they stopped short at a point well this side of idolatry; but all concurred in assigning to mescalin a position among drugs of unique distinction. Administered in suitable doses, it changes the quality of consciousness more profoundly and yet is less toxic than any other substance in the pharmacologist's repertory. Mescalin research has been going on sporadically ever since the days of Lewin and Havelock Ellis. Chemists have not merely isolated the alkaloid; they have learned how to synthesize it, so that the supply no longer depends on the sparse and intermittent crop of a desert cactus. Alienists have dosed themselves with mescalin in the hope thereby of coming to a better, a first-hand, understanding of their patients' mental processes. Working unfortunately upon too few subjects within too narrow a range of circumstances, psychologists have observed and catalogued some of the drug's more striking effects. Neurologists and physiologists have found out something about the mechanism of its action upon the central nervous system. And at least one Professional philosopher has taken mescalin for the light it may throw on such ancient, unsolved riddles as the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness. There matters rested until, two or three years ago, a new and perhaps highly significant fact was observed.* Actually the fact had been staring everyone in the face for several decades; but nobody, as it happened, had noticed it until a Young English psychiatrist, at present working in Canada, was struck by the close similarity, in chemical composition, between mescalin and adrenalin. Further research revealed that lysergic acid, an extremely potent hallucinogen derived from ergot, has a structural biochemical relationship to the others. Then came the discovery that adrenochrome, which is a product of the decomposition of adrenalin, can produce many of the symptoms observed in mescalin intoxication. But adrenochrome probably occurs spontaneously in the human body. In other words, each one of us may be capable of manufacturing a chemical, minute doses of which are known to cause Profound changes in consciousness. Certain of these changes are similar to those which occur in that most characteristic plague of the twentieth century, schizophrenia. Is the mental disorder due to a chemical disorder? And is the chemical disorder due, in its turn, to psychological distresses affecting the adrenals? It would be rash and premature to affirm it. The most we can say is that some kind of a prima facie case has been made out. Meanwhile the clue is being systematically followed, the sleuths—biochemists , psychiatrists, psychologists—are on the trail. By a series of, for me, extremely fortunate circumstances I found myself, in the spring of 1953, squarely athwart that trail. One of the sleuths had come on business to California. In spite of seventy years of mescalin research, the psychological material at his disposal was still absurdly inadequate, and he was anxious to add to it. I was on the spot and willing, indeed eager, to be a guinea pig. Thus it came about that, one bright May morning, I swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results. We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience. To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. But what if these others belong to a different species and inhabit a radically alien universe? For example, how can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which, to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home? And how can a man at the extreme limits of ectomorphy and cerebrotonia ever put himself in the place of one at the limits of endomorphy and viscerotonia, or, except within certain circumscribed areas, share the feelings of one who stands at the limits of mesomorphy and somatotonia? To the unmitigated behaviorist such questions, I suppose, are meaningless. But for those who theoretically believe what in practice they know to be true—namely, that there is an inside to experience as well as an outside—the problems posed are real problems, all the more grave for being, some completely insoluble, some soluble only in exceptional circumstances and by methods not available to everyone. Thus, it seems virtually certain that I shall never know what it feels like to be Sir John Falstaff or Joe Louis. On the other hand, it had always seemed to me possible that, through hypnosis, for example, or auto-hypnosis, by means of systematic meditation, or else by taking the appropriate drug, I might so change my ordinary mode of consciousness as to be able to know, from the inside, what the visionary, the medium, even the mystic were talking about. From what I had read of the mescalin experience I was convinced in advance that the drug would admit me, at least for a few hours, into the kind of inner world described by Blake and AE. But what I had expected did not happen. I had expected to lie with my eyes shut, looking at visions of many-colored geometries, of animated architectures, rich with gems and fabulously lovely, of landscapes with heroic figures, of symbolic dramas trembling perpetually on the verge of the ultimate revelation. But I had not reckoned, it was evident, with the idiosyncrasies of my mental make-up, the facts of my temperament, training and habits. I am and, for as long as I can remember, I have always been a poor visualizer. Words, even the pregnant words of poets, do not evoke pictures in my mind. No hypnagogic visions greet me on the verge of sleep. When I recall something, the memory does not present itself to me as a vividly seen event or object. By an effort of the will, I can evoke a not very vivid image of what happened yesterday afternoon, of how the Lungarno used to look before the bridges were destroyed, of the Bayswater Road when the only buses were green and tiny and drawn by aged horses at three and a half miles an hour. But such images have little substance and absolutely no autonomous life of their own. They stand to real, perceived objects in the same relation as Homer's ghosts stood to the men of flesh and blood, who came to visit them in the shades. Only when I have a high temperature do my mental images come to independent life. To those in whom the faculty of visualization is strong my inner world must seem curiously drab, limited and uninteresting. This was the world—a poor thing but my own—which I expected to see transformed into something completely unlike itself. The change which actually took place in that world was in no sense revolutionary. Half an hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lights. A little later there were sumptuous red surfaces swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my eyes revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable. The other world to which mescalin admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact. What had happened to my subjective universe was relatively unimportant. I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. "Is it agreeable?" somebody asked. (During this Part of the experiment, all conversations were recorded on a dictating machine, and it has been possible for me to refresh my memory of what was said.) "Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit—wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy— except that Plate seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice. And with the prompt irrelevance of one of the Marx Brothers, the Master answers, "The hedge at the bottom of the garden." "And the man who realizes this truth," the novice dubiously inquires, '"what, may I ask, is he?" Groucho gives him a whack over the shoulders with his staff and answers, "A golden-haired lion." It had been, when I read it, only a vaguely pregnant piece of nonsense. Now it was all as clear as day, as evident as Euclid. Of course the Dharma-Body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I—or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace—cared to look at. The books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention. "What about spatial relationships?" the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning. And along with indifference to space there went an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse. From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights and diagonals—a pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair—how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes—or was it several centuries?—not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them—-or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair. Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born—the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality. The brain is provided with a number of enzyme systems which serve to co-ordinate its workings. Some of these enzymes regulate the supply of glucose to the brain cells. Mescalin inhibits the production of these enzymes and thus lowers the amount of glucose available to an organ that is in constant need of sugar. When mescalin reduces the brain's normal ration of sugar what happens? Too few cases have been observed, and therefore a comprehensive answer cannot yet be given. But what happens to the majority of the few who have taken mescalin under supervision can be summarized as follows. (1) The ability to remember and to "think straight" is little if at all reduced. (Listening to the recordings of my conversation under the influence of the drug, I cannot discover that I was then any stupider than I am at ordinary times.) (2) Visual impressions are greatly intensified and the eye recovers some of the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept. Interest in space is diminished and interest in time falls almost to zero. (3) Though the intellect remains unimpaired and though perception is enormously improved, the will suffers a profound change for the worse. The mescalin taker sees no reason for doing anything in particular and finds most of the causes for which, at ordinary times, he was prepared to act and suffer, profoundly uninteresting. He can't be bothered with them, for the good reason that he has better things to think about. (4) These better things may be experienced (as I experienced them) "out there," or "in here," or in both worlds, the inner and the outer, simultaneously or successively. That they are better seems to be self-evident to all mescalin takers who come to the drug with a sound liver and an untroubled mind. These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event. In the final stage of egolessness there is an "obscure knowledge" that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to "perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe." In this context, how significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! For certain animals it is biologically very important to be able to distinguish certain hues. But beyond the limits of their utilitarian spectrum, most creatures are completely color blind. Bees, for example, spend most of their time "deflowering the fresh virgins of the spring"; but, as Von Frisch has shown, they can recognize only a very few colors. Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. To judge by the adjectives which Homer puts into their mouths, the heroes of the Trojan War hardly excelled the bees in their capacity to distinguish colors. In this respect, at least, mankind's advance has been prodigious. Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary. Unlike Locke, it evidently feels that colors are more important, better worth attending to, than masses, positions and dimensions. Like mescalin takers, many mystics perceive supernaturally brilliant colors, not only with the inward eye, but even in the objective world around them. Similar reports are made by psychics and sensitives. There are certain mediums to whom the mescalin taker's brief revelation is a matter, during long periods, of daily and hourly experience. From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts—four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth—the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts. A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair"—that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for. It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art—some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts. This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers—what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel—how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture. Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational—the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric—the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation—inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand—of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fête galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality. But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli—and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television. "This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, how things really are." And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find the question constantly repeated, "What about human relations?" How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? "One ought to be able," I said, "to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important." One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me "e world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshipped notions. At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by Cézanne—the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he is?" The question was not addressed to Cézanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were? "It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency bow window at Brighten—his head thrown back as though to aim some stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually said, I have forgotten; but what his whole manner, air and posture fairly shouted was, "I'm as good as those damned mountains." And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine. Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cézanne makes no difference. For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large by-passing the brain valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye. For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have added,' 'These are the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god. "The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer." Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted-with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always a painter of still life. Cézanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples, tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than to the Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but in the abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the very limit—but always with the proviso that they refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never giggle, never display self-consciousness, never say their prayers or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously at other women's babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work. In the act of doing any of these things they would doubtless become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake's phrase, the doors of Vermeer's perception were only partially cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in all its heavenly beauty—could see and, in some small measure, render it—in a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives. But there have been others, for example, Vermeer's French contemporaries, the Le Nain brothers. They set out, I suppose, to be genre painters; but what they actually produced was a series of human still lives, in which their cleansed perception of the infinite significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by subtle enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened clarity, an obsessive distinctness of form, within an austere, almost monochromatic tonality. In our own day we have had Vuillard, the painter, at his best, of unforgettably splendid pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of the Absolute blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker's family in a suburban garden, taking tea.
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