CONSCIOUSNESS AND NONORDINARY REALITY

     I have never been interested in being a magician like Gandalf or Harry Potter. I have never wanted to wave my magic wand, whatever that might be, say the magic word, and miraculously change reality. I have always been more like Carlos Castaneda's mentor, Don Juan.

     Don Juan may have started out as a sorcerer, but he came to realize that he would rather be a man of knowledge. After awhile, he just lost interest in magically making things happen and instead began to focus on exploring the totality and becoming a wise and whole being.

     Most of us live in ordinary reality, most of the time. We may leave it to dream, but we soon hurry back to the ordinary, usually forgetting the dream as soon as we are out of our beds and into our morning routines.

     The sorcerer, on the other hand, lives most of his or her life in nonordinary reality, a reality in which the "rules" are quite different. The sorcerer is interested in doing magic, in making things happen in nonordinary reality.

     The person of knowledge, however, lives in neither reality exclusively. He or she is fluid, able to move back and forth between them at will. The person of knowledge lives in the totality and is interested only in becoming more and more conscious of self and reality. He or she is in search of wisdom.



     I began my search for wisdom while still at the university, studying to be a clinical psychologist. I entered into Jungian Analysis then. Reading his books, I was inspired to begin my own search for wholeness. Like Jung, I worked with my dreams and did a lot of active imagination.

     Later, when I began using sacraments - by this I mean marijuana and LSD - I continued with this search for wisdom and wholeness of being. Soon after beginning my work with these spiritual substances, I realized that I had no elders. No one had already explored this new world. I was exploring a world without footprints.



     Looking for validation, I came across two contemporary authors, Stephen Gaskin and Carlos Castaneda. They were both my peers, yet I felt that I could learn from them.

     Stephen Gaskin, was a brilliant and charismatic sixties acid guru. He validated my feeling that truth was itself a holy path to wholeness of being, a path that I had already embarked upon. I had already seen that when I was on acid, I was always truthful. With that much energy, why lie or avoid the truth? I called this phenomenon acid honesty.

     Gaskin also helped me to see that attention was itself magical and could have effects upon reality. Once I was sitting under my favorite Juniper tree up at our camp at Dinky Creek in the High Sierras. I was watching this ant. As long as I was watching him, he stayed still, very aware of my scrutiny. When I closed my eyes but still visualized him, he was still there when I opened them. But when I closed my eyes and visualized my room in the city, he left. He wasn't anywhere near me when I opened my eyes that time. I tried this with several other ants, and flies too. They all felt my gaze. Attention affects higher level beings too. All life is sensitive to it. Human beings thrive under it. .

     Gaskin's psychedelic experiences, often with small groups of other trippers, also supported my own work with small groups, groups in which we used acid to explore consciousness and reality. Like Gaskin, our most important discoveries involved telepathy. In our groups, we were often in each other's heads, often sharing the same inner images.

     I remember once, when my wife at that time, Karen, and I were in one room and our housemates, Bobby and Abby, were in another. The two dogs were playing in our room and Bobby and Abby were watching them through our eyes, laughing at what the dogs were doing. Later that night, we decided that "the word is a turd," realizing that we were in perfect communication with one another without having to say a word.



     However, the writings of Carlos Castaneda were the most important and most singular influence upon me in those days. In fact, after I had read the first four or five of his books, I had a dream in which I was about to embark upon a journey. I was deciding what to take. I was told that I should take only Castaneda's books and my backpacking gear. This was all I would ever need.

     Before I had ever heard about Ki Aikido's one-point or the Japanese concept of Hara, Don Juan taught me, through teaching Carlos, about will, a mysterious power that emenates from our bellies. I remember once, in Berkeley, tripping with an old friend, Joe Shaker. He was standing too close to me physically, being too aggressive, so I used this mysterious force that emanated in my belly to push him back. When I did this, he staggered back a foot or so and yelled at me to stop what I was doing.

     Castaneda also helped me to see that the world out there is merely a description, a result of the internal dialogue that we all maintain constantly. By example, he showed various methods that we could use to stop our worlds, to stop our internal dialogues. The one that I really liked in those days was "listening to the sounds of the world." We would do this in our small groups, realizing that we were tuning our heads together by all of us listening to the same sounds at the same time.



     I found that acid always allowed me to enter into nonordinary reality. It always gave me enough energy to stop the world, to turn off my head. However, I soon realized that I could no longer do acid in the city. The vibes were too scattered as well as way too negative. Fortunately, I knew the perfect place, our camp in the High Sierras. Whenever I was there, and I was there a lot, I lived in nonordinary reality. I was becoming a sorcerer. My world became very interesting.

     Once, I was walking along one of the trails near our camp, and I noticed an interesting looking rock lying on the ground by my feet. I wanted to see it up close, but before I could bend down, I was already seeing it from less that a foot away. I saw it as if my eyes were down there. But they weren't. They were still in my head at the top of my body. I saw then that my vision wasn't tied to my eyes.

     Another time, I lost a contact lens at night, sitting around a campfire with some friends. We all got down on our hands and knees, turned on our flashlights, and looked for it. We didn't find it. After awhile, I went to bed. I was a bit bummed out. I was lying there, blaming myself for being careless, until an inner voice reminded me of a time when Don Juan couldn't find something he had put away somewhere. I felt better then. I stopped beating on myself.

     Then the voice went on to tell me that the lens was stuck on the inside of my wool shirt. The weird thing, looking at it from the here and now, is that I didn't even look for it then. Instead I smoked a goodnight joint and, after watching the stars for awhile, went peacefully to sleep. I did look for the lens the next morning though, first thing, and it was there, just as my inner voice had said it would be.

     From these experiences I came to realize that reality is not at all as it is popularly conceived to be. Our vision is not limited to the geometry of ordinary reality. And there is someone inside each of us that cares for us, that sees what we could have never seen with our eyes. Someone inside me saw the contact lens fall. Someone inside me saw it slip inside my shirt. Not with my eyes though. I hadn't even been aware that it had fallen out at first. And, after first telling me it was all right to lose something, this caring someone, my inner teacher, told me where the lens had hidden itself.



     Several years later, I began traveling, wandering the back roads of America. While camping for a time at a natural hot springs in Southern New Mexico, I read about Hara and about Kundalini yoga. I remember driving away from the springs later in my hippie van. On a long deserted stretch of road, I began focusing my awareness, all that wasn't needed to drive, on my chakras. I began at my base and would raise my energy up, through each chakra, and then back down to the base again. I later learned that this was the Taoist "secret of the golden flower," this circulating of energy from the base to the crown and then back again. For the Taoist, this creates the inner "diamond body," a center of consciousness that exists in the totality and will survive the body's death.

     I became interested in the chakras, and, to this day, they are an important part of my daily meditation. I have attempted to understand the functions of each chakra as well as how they interact with one another. In my meditations, I have come to see that the lower three chakras, the base, the sexual, and the solar chakras, have an interesting correspondence with the three upper ones, the throat, the third eye, and the crown chakras. I have also come to see that the heart, the middle chakra, is the natural bridge between the three lower and the three upper chakras, between Body and Spirit.

     For example, the base chakra is at a bodily opening, the anus, and the throat chakra is at one too, the other end of the same intestinal tract actually. Both function best when relaxed. Both are ends of our most basic physiological structure. Their interaction is obvious, especially after you've changed thousands of diapers.

     Similarly, the sexual chakra corresponds to and interacts with the third eye chakra. The third eye is a higher level manifestation of the same energy that drives sex. The third eye is the seat of our imagination. When we dream, we men usually become hard. Perhaps women experience something similar if less noticeable. This is why the third eye is important in so many mystical teachings, especially those referring to sex magic. This is why people use the sexual energy in conjunction with their third eye to affect reality. Both these chakras channel energy, sexual and magical. Using them together - the power of the sexual and the creative aspect of the imagination - can powerfully affect reality.

     Finally, the solar and the crown chakras both have the same function - to connect to the world outside our bodies. The solar chakra is at or near our belly button. It connects us to the outer world. It does so, by what Don Juan calls will. The crown chakra, at the top of our heads, connects us to the world of Spirit. The Hopi have said that they followed their crown chakras to their present homes in the Southwest.

     The crown chakra is easily the most blissful of the chakras. I must have left my body through this chakra when I was a dying, little boy. It certainly was blissful floating towards that white light.

     These days, I can turn off my head whenever I want. I can stop my world whenever I want. And my head still works when I turn it back on again, and the world is still there. When I do stop my world, it gets interesting, sometimes almost too interesting, especially if I am enhancing my consciousness with psychedelics.

     Once, I was alone at our camp at Dinky. I was high up in the rocks above Dinky Creek. I was sitting under one of my favorite Juniper trees. Sitting there, I listened to the sounds of the world, and my world stopped. All of a sudden, reality as I know it disappeared completely. I saw only a grey chaos. Maybe Don Juan's ally was stalking me. I didn't know. I know only that I had driven over a thousand miles to get there and that I had come for the incredible beauty of the place. Knowing this, I brought the beauty back.

     Sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if I had gone on into that grey emptiness. I'm open to being there again, but the next time I'd rather not have it be at Dinky.



     These days, I'm mostly interested in exploring consciousness and reality. I'm happy with my head. I remember dreaming once, long ago in Berkeley, of exploring the Old City. I understood this to mean exploring the underlying and usually invisible layers of reality. Most folks stay on reality's surface, most of the time. There are those of us, though, who want to know, who are willing to explore all of reality.

     I have lived in ordinary reality. I grew up in it. I went to school in it. I did well. I enlisted in the Air Force. I was an officer. I flew on SAC bombers. I've also been a carpenter, a computer programmer, a teacher, and a healer. I've done all that ordinary world shit.

     I have also lived in nonordinary reality. I have left my body. I have listened to others talk and been able to get behind their words to their inner thoughts and true feelings. I have connected to my inner teacher, to my god consciousness. I have met the right people, magically it seems, at just the right moment. This has happened so many times! I have seen how consciousness can affect reality.

     These days, I live in both realities. There are times for me to be in ordinary reality. There are also times for me to be in nonordinary reality. My life flows when I honor the conditions of the time and act accordingly. By following this flow, I am able to respond impeccably. I become centered and live the life that Spirit intended for me while I am in this body. I receive Spirit's blessings and bounty.

     By Eugene Marks