Frithjof Schuon: Essay (1907-1998)

Nature and function 
of the spiritual master



THERE is a Vedantic notion which, being fundamental, can serve as a key in the most diverse realms, and this is the ternary Sat , Chit, Ananda: Being,  Consciousness and Bliss. Here it will be applied to the spiritual master, not for any lack of other ways of approaching this subject, but because the Vedantic ternary provides in this connection a particularly appropriate means of access. The master, in fact, represents and transmits, firstly a reality of being (Sat), secondly a reality of intelligence or truth (Chit), and thirdly a reality of love, union, or happiness (Ananda). The element "being" which the master represents and transmits, and without which he would be as if deprived of reality and existence, is the religion to which he belongs and by which he is mandated, or the spiritual organization within the framework of this religion. The religion, or the esoteric cell which sums it up and offers us its essence, confers on man the "being" without which there is no concrete and efficacious way. The function of the founders of religion is a priori to give back to fallen man his primordial "being"; the first condition, then, of spirituality is to be virtually "reborn" and thus to realize the as it were ontological basis of the two constituent elements of the way, namely, discernment or doctrine on the one hand, and concentration or method on the other.

Representing a priori a "substance" or a "being," Sat, the spiritual master is a posteriori, and on this very basis, the vehicle of an "intellection" or of a"consciousness," Chit: by this is to be understood a providential doctrine which determines the flavour or style of every subsequent formulation. It is necessary to understand that this doctrine depends on a Revelation in the direct and plenary sense and that consequently its regular ramifications have a quality of absoluteness and infinitude which makes unnecessary any recourse to extraneous sources, although it is perfectly possible that formulations originating in such a source, to the extent that they are mentally compatible with the dogmatic or mythological system in question, may be extrinsically adopted by a given master and integrated into the perspective which he incarnates. Such was the case, notably, of the Neoplatonic concepts adopted by certain Sufis, or of Christianized Aristotelianism. It would be wrong to see syncretism in this, for the extraneous concepts are accepted only because they are assimilable, and they are only assimilable by reason of their inward concordance with the tradition in question, and because Truth is one. Another aspect of this question of intellectuality is infallibility: the master is in principle infallible with regard to the revealed doctrine which he represents, and which he even personifies by virtue of his "being" or "substance," of his Sat, so to say; but this infallibility, which is not unconnected with Grace, is conditioned by the equilibrium between knowledge and virtue, or between intellectuality and spirituality—one might even say, between intelligence and humility.

Thus, the spiritual master must realize the ternary "being," "discernment," "concentration." By "being" must be understood the "new substance” or "consecration," or "initiation"; by "discernment" is meant truth which distinguishes between the Real and the illusory, or between Atmā and Māyā; and by "concentration" must be understood the method which allows the "initiated" and "consecrated" contemplative to fix himself, at first mentally and later with the centre of his being, on the Real whose evidence we carry in ourselves. It is this fixation which, being a reality of union, and thus of "love" and of "bliss," corresponds analogically and operatively to the element Ananda in the Vedantic ternary. The importance in spirituality of what we have called the existential element results from the principle that it is impossible to approach the Absolute, or the Self, without the blessing and the aid of Heaven: "No man cometh to the Father but by Me" (Christianity), and "no one will meet Allāh who has not met his Envoy" (Islam); "whosoever gathereth not with Me, disperseth," and "without Me you can do nothing" (Christianity); "and you cannot wish unless Allāh wishes" (Islam). This conditio sine qua non, the pivots of which are first and foremost the elements of "consecration" and "orthodoxy"—related respectively to Sat and Chit—explains why a spirituality deprived of its bases can only end up as a psychological exploit without any relation to the development of our higher states.

The profane man being "inexistent" from the point of view at issue here, the master gives him "spiritual existence" by affiliation or consecration; next he gives him the doctrine—or "intelligence"—, and finally he gives him "life," that is to say, the spiritual means referring to the element "concentration." Now this means, which is an engagement "to the death"—for in order to "live" inwardly, one must "die" outwardly—is essentially a gift from the master and from Heaven, for otherwise it would be lacking in the indispensable Grace. Doubtless there have been very exceptional cases in which other modalities have come into play, but this was always on behalf of persons whose sanctity guaranteed their purity of intention, and protected the spiritual means from any profanation. In a word: we can only make use of a spiritual means on condition of a concrete and solemn engagement, recognizing thereby that Heaven disposes of us according to its good pleasure; and this engagement is irreversible—the way is one of no return.

Inasmuch as he is the guide of the personal way of the disciple—always within the general way laid down by divine authority through tradition—the spiritual master is as it were the continuation of the ego of the disciple. Every spiritual alchemy involves an anticipated death and consequently also certain losses of equilibrium, or periods of obscuration, in which the disciple is not fully master of himself; he is no longer completely of this world, nor yet completely of the other, and his experience seems to call in question all the existential categories of which, so to say, we are woven. In these "trials," and in the "temptations" which accompany them—for lower māyā, or the downward quality (tamas), takes advantage of the slightest fissure—the spiritual master plays the role of "motionless centre": to the temptation of giving rational form to irrational troubles he opposes objective, immutable and incorruptible truth. The same is true in the case of temptations of inverse character, when the disciple, submerged by some contemplative state which surpasses his usual capacity—and such a state may only be accidental and does not prove any realization—may think that to some degree he has become superhuman. In this case, lower māyā—or the devil, which here amounts to the same thing—will not fail to suggest to the disciple that he should declare himself master, or give way to some other pretention of this kind. The case is rather like that of a drunken man who no longer perceives the true proportions of things. The master, for his part, has realized "sober drunkenness", his human substance is adapted to his spiritual state, for mastership is precisely "keeping a cool head"—without any pretention, however—in the beatific experience. All that has been said shows clearly that faith is indispensable on the part of the disciple. Without faith there is no spiritual continuity, and thus no bridging of "hells," nor any possible victory over the ego.

In a certain sense, gnosis transcends and abolishes faith, but only when faith is understood as a quasi-moral acceptance of revealed truths, and not as a concrete presentiment of the Inexpressible. Certainly gnosis. is a "vision" and not a "thought," but it is so only in a certain regard, for it never abolishes in all respects the veil separating the earthly creature from Pure Being. Understood thus, faith—the shraddhā of the Hindu chelā—is a necessary element of all spiritual unfolding; of this order too is faith in the master, in so far as he incarnates the knowledge to be attained. Moreover the master, being a living man and not a logical demonstration, relates precisely to that element of non-fixation and illimitation which is everywhere present in the cosmos and which is indispensable for the subjective realization of the theoretical data. What has gone before clearly shows that spiritual mastership is a very special function and that it is consequently false to describe every teaching authority as a "spiritual master." The functions of "doctor" and "master" often coincide—but they may also not do so—in the same personage. The master does not necessarily write treatises, but he always possesses a sufficient doctrinal authority.

It is not the function of the spiritual master to reveal all his knowledge or all the graces which he has received. Here we are up against the whole problem of secrecy and asymmetry, or of inward illimitation and the laws of life. On the one hand, a plant has need of an invisible element—its root—and, on the other, it manifests the virtualities of the latter in a way which combines rigour with relaxation, or the determined with the indeterminate; a spiritual teaching does not set out to unveil totally, or to use up totally, the truth which inspires it, nor to give it the implacable and exhaustive form of a mathematical equation. One must not seek to introduce a quasi-absolute element of achievement—and thus of petrifaction and sterility—into the very expression of the truth. It is true that, strictly speaking, this is impossible, but it is nevertheless possible to confer on doctrinal teaching concerning the most intimate aspects of the spiritual life—but not in the case of generalities—a prolixity which is remote from the effective power of assimilation of the recipient. This is what, traditionally, is blamed as a disequilibrium between doctrine and method. In other words, theoretical teaching must not exhaust in advance the acts of awareness which it aims at awakening in the disciple. The latter needs light, but he also needs an element of obscurity which will act as a leaven on behalf of the light received, and which will help him to release the element of light which he carries in his own substance. 


Instead of "obscurity" one might say "generative disequilibrium," of which the koans of Zen Buddhism doubtless provide the best example. Verbal demonstrations are certainly indispensable, but the symbol with its power of direct, total and unlimited suggestiveness, and its double function of unveiling (re-vealing) and of veiling, keeps all its rights in the subsequent order of contemplative realization. Mention must also be made of teaching by sign or gesture. Where the spoken word is insufficient, the master makes a "gash" in the soul of the disciple, he marks it with the red-hot iron of the pure symbol. This sign—which may well coincide with a humiliation—is meant to release in the disciple the necessary awareness and, at the same time, to actualize the corresponding virtue. The essential is not to fall into either extreme: we must neither despise words, which are venerable when they are what they ought to be—otherwise man would not possess the gift of language—nor imagine that we can do everything with them; here, as always, wisdom consists in putting everything in its proper place. God instructs the collectivity a priori by the revealed Word, but he instructs the individual a posteriori by destiny. This principle is reflected in a particular way in every spiritual method.

Another point which must be made here is the following: granted that the human world is made of abuses, one must not lose sight of the fact that exoterism has a natural right to certain excesses, if one may so express it, which means that it is impossible for exoterism to do justice to every nuance without compromising its very existence. The disordered subjectivism of a personal mysticism is usually more false and more harmful than the contrary excess, because pharisaism at least safeguards the keys, and for that very reason never goes quite so far as to kill the spirit. Nevertheless, as there is no rule without exception—in view of a certain aspect of All-Possibility—one must mention the cases, extremely rare in comparison with their opposites, of Kabîr, Guru Nanak, and Jakob Boehme. These cases of intrinsic orthodoxy without a traditional framework are explained only by very special circumstances, and possible only—as far as Boehme is concerned—as a result of a certain shrinkage in Catholicism from the time of the Renaissance, and—as far as the Indians are concerned—as a result of the juxtaposition, both painful and mystical, of Hinduism and Islam. In fact, exceptions of this kind are due either to contact between two powerful, ponderous, even tyrannical religions—whether rightly or wrongly so is not the question here —or, as in the case of Boehme, to a sort of stifling of sapiential esoterism within the framework of a traditional civilization which had accidentally and very recently given rise to a vacuum such as Protestantism.


In the present day however there are no longer anywhere in the world powerful and fervent religions dangerously bordering on one another and so giving rise to what may be called "explosions" of bhaktic esoterism, and nowhere does there still exist a powerful religious civilization which is artificially stifling its sapiential esoterism or gnosis, and though there are yet other factors—more personal and more subtle—which occur in the cases cited, they need not be taken into account here. At all events, the present-day world does not and cannot present the circumstances making possible legitimate spiritual exceptions such as those mentioned.[10] In a world where the formal framework of the sacred everywhere becomes more and more whittled away, spirituality is more than ever linked to this framework, which is like a last witness to the truth. Spirituality has need, in fact, of a formal or psychological atmosphere of which the modern world is the very negation.

A question not unconnected with the foregoing—since we are talking here of exceptions—is the following: can the function of the spiritual master extend beyond the frontiers of a given religion? This cannot be ruled out categorically, but it is nevertheless a very precarious possibility in view of the high degree of spirituality which it demands on the part of the master, and also in view of the possible difficulty, for him, of assessing facts situated in a traditional world other than his own. Furthermore, in a case such as this, he would act as the vehicle of an "extraneous" barakah, and it is precisely this which presupposes a spirituality having effectively transcended the world of forms. It is necessary to stress "effectively," because universalist verbiage is one thing, and realization of the Essence is another. Moreover, in a case of this kind, there must be a sufficient reason of force majeure. Such reasons do exist accidentally, as is shown, for example, by the relations between the young Ibrahim ibn Adham and the monk Symeon, a master of gnosis, and also by a passage in "The Russian Pilgrim" which allows that in the absence of a starets the seeker may receive instruction "even from a Saracen," with the help of Heaven. Such an encounter is only conceivable if the two parties are in full conformity with their respective tradition, for the Christian must be really Christian and the Moslem really Moslem, however paradoxical this may seem in view of the spiritual communion that has to be established between them;[11] but if their understanding must be more than a philosophical abstraction, it must nevertheless include the points of departure, which extrinsically and provisionally are separative. This is not because they are separative and exclusive, but because, by their intrinsic veracity, they guarantee a true intuition of unity.

This seeming paradox is comparable to that of our relation with the Infinite. This relation cannot be unitive without first having been separative, or rather, without being separative in its basis and in our individual consciousness, for there is both an order of succession and a parallelism. The most accomplished gnostic, or the perfect Jnani, "prostrates himself at the feet of Govinda," which implies a separation. From a more contingent point of view, the station of unity means that the sage has transcended the level of forms, and thus also that of doctrinal formulations—which nevertheless are sacred and always remain valid in their proper dimension—but this station is independent of the question of knowing whether or not the master is informed about a given religion other than his own. The state of union implies, in this particular connection, not a de facto attitude, but a capacity in principle.[12] That is to say that the spiritual master must manifest, taking into account the nature of the difference of levels, both the particularism of form and the unity of spirit. He must conform to holy separation at the base, so as to be able to realize holy union at the summit.[13] One only attains to the latter by perceiving in advance the element of unity in the revealed form itself, and by loving this form for the quality which it receives from the Supraformal. For every sacred form is Shûnyamûrti, "Manifestation of the Void."

*          *          *

As the very term "spiritual master" often gives rise to disproportionate and offensive-sounding assimilations, it would be useful to say a few words on the question of hierarchical differences. The misunderstandings concerned, be they serious or slight, are at bottom of the same order as the common error which, analogically speaking, would assimilate the circle to the sphere, on the pretext that both figures are round—a typical error, to be found in the most diverse domains, but above all in history and psychology. In the first place, either we apply the term "spiritual master" to the founders of religion —in which case the term can no longer be applied to the sages who succeed them and who are not prophets in the proper sense of the word —or else it is the sages whom we call "masters"—in which case it would be improper to use the term "spiritual master" in the case of beings such as the founders of religion, or the Avatāras of Vishnu,[14]because this would be a tautology casting a slur on their supereminent dignity and equating them with their representatives. It might indeed be asked whether the term "master is appropriate for the greatest of the latter—Christ's Apostles, for example—for the very same reason, mutatis mutandis, since their greatness is proved by the fact that they alone were the direct disciples of the "Word made flesh" and that they participate instrumentally in the Revelation.[15] This distinction is entirely legitimate in this connection, but there are also reasons which allow one to disregard it, as we shall see later.

In comparing a Benedictine master—of the fifteenth century, for example—with St. Benedict, and then comparing the latter with St. John, we obtain a sufficiently clear picture of the principal degrees, not of spiritual mastership in itself, but of its manifestation in breadth, for it is important not to confuse an almost cosmic function with inward knowledge. Certainly the most eminent saint or sage, by his traditional position, is always in possession of the "greater" or the "whole," but the less eminent does not necessarily represent a "lesser" as far as his inward reality is concerned, although, even on this level, there may be relations of "dimension" or "breadth" to be taken into account in favour of the most glorious figures on the traditional "iconostasis." This factor is of especial importance when the figure concerned incarnates a non-supreme mode of spirituality—for example, the cases of Rāmānuja and Confucius, the latter, incidentally, being greater than the former—so that one might be tempted to place these eminent figures below a jnānî of lesser dimensions. This would be an optical illusion, especially in the case of the Chinese Revealer, whose inward reality necessarily immensely—transcended the role which was assigned to him by Providence.

Be that as it may, it should not be too difficult to understand or to feel that, from the point of view of cosmic breadth, theurgic power, and the capacity to save, even a Shankara is not the equal of Krishna, and that from an analogous point of view, no later master can be the equal of Shankara; no roshi can replace Bodhidharma, any more than the latter can be equated with the Buddha. Nevertheless, in comparison with the worldly and the profane, and with regard to them, every true master is altogether close, not only to the great instructors of "apostolic" rank, but even to the founding Avatāra, and this is a compensatory truth which lets us better appreciate the cult of the master in India and elsewhere.[16] The cosmic breadth of the Avatāra and of his direct prolongations obviously presupposes spiritual perfection, but inversely, this perfection does not imply the cosmic rank of the very greatest, whence the inegalities already referred to.

Doubtless it is not always possible, or, for that matter, necessary, to avoid every ambiguity, for example to settle the question as to whether there is a real difference between the "apostolic" degree—for example, that of a Nāgārjuna—and certain later, but particularly eminent manifestations, such as Padma Sambhava in Tibet and Kôbo Daishi in Japan, who are so to say, central reverberations of the Spiritual Sun in a new world.[17] On the other hand, it is always possible and even necessary in the other cases to take account of the evidence of the facts and of traditional opinion, out of respect for the irreplaceable majesty of the divine manifestations.[18]

But these considerations must not cause us to lose sight of the compensatory truth just mentioned, namely, that every spiritual master is mysteriously assimilated, by his knowledge and his function and by the graces attaching to them, to his prototypes and—both through them and independently of them—to the primordial Prototype, the founding Avatāra. On the level of this synthesis, it could even be added that there is but one sole Master, and that the various human supports are like emanations from him, comparable to the rays of the sun which communicate one self-same light and are nothing apart from it.

Mikhail Naimy : ميخائيل نعيمةميخائيل نعيمة The book of mirdad (1948)

On Creative Silence, Speech is at best an honest lie

Chapter 12

Naronda: When the three days were spent the Seven, as if by some irresistible command, gathered themselves together and made for the Aerie.  The master greeted us as one fully expecting our coming.   

MIRDAD: Once more I welcome you my fledglings, to your nest. Speak out your thoughts  and wishes to Mirdad.

Micayon: Our only thought and wish is to be near Mirdad so we can feel and hear his truth, perchance we shall become as shadow-less as he.  His silence, howbeit, awes us all. Have we offended  him in any way?    

MIRDAD: Not to exile you from myself have I kept silent for three days; rather to draw  you Silence, the same can never be offended, nor offend.   

Micayon: Is to be silent better than to speak?   

MIRDAD: Speech is at best an honest lie.  While silence is at worst a naked verity.    Abimar: shall we conclude that even Mirdad’s words, though honest, are but lies?    MIRDAD: Aye, even Mirdad’s words are but lies to all whose I is not the same as Mirdad ‘s .  till all your thoughts  be quarried from one quarry, and all desires drawn of the selfsame well, your words though honest , shall be lies. 

When your I and mine are one, even as mine and God’s are one, We would dispense with words and perfectly commune in truthful Silence. 

Because your I and mine are not the same, I am constrained to wage on you a war of words that I may vanquish you with your own weapons and lead you to my quarry and my well. 

And only then shall you be able to go forth into the world and vanquish and subdue it even as I shall vanquish and subdue you.  And only then shall you be fit to lead the world unto the silence of the Consciousness Supreme, unto the quarry of the Word, unto the well of Holy Understanding. Not till you be so vanquished by Mirdad shall you become in truth impregnable and mighty conquerors.  Nor shall the world wash off the ignominy of its continuous defeat save when defeated by you. 

So grid yourselves for battle.  Furbish your shields and breastplates, and whet your swords and spear.  Let Silence bet the drum and bear the standard too. 


Bennoon: What manner of Silence is this that should be at once the drummer and the standard-bearer?    MIRDAD: The silence I would usher you into is that interminable expanse wherein nonbeings passes into being, and being into non-being.  It is that awesome void where every sound is born and hushed and every form is shaped and crushed; where every self is writ and unwrit; where nothing is but IT. 

Except you cross that void and that expanse in silent contemplation, you shall not know how real is your being, how unreal the non-being.  Nor shall you know how fast your reality is bound up with all Reality. 

It is that Silence I would have you roam , that you may shed your old tight skin and move about unfettered, unrestrained. 

It is there I would have you drive your cares and fears, your passions and desires, your envies and your lusts that you may see them vanish one by one  and thus relieve your ears of their incessant cries, and spare your sides the pain  of their sharp spurs. 

It is there I would have you fling the bows and arrows of this world wherewith you hope to hunt contentment and joy, yet hunt in truth nothing but restlessness and sorrow. 

It is there I would have you crawl out of the dark and stifling shall of self into the light and fee air of The Self. 

This Silence I commend unto you and not a mere respite for your speech worn tongues. The fruitful silence of the Earth do I commend unto you, and not the fearful silence of the felon and knave. 

The patient silence of the setting hen do I commend unto you, not the impatient crackling of her laying sister. The one sets on for one and twenty days and waits in silent confidence upon the Mystic Hand to bring about the miracle beneath her downy breast and wings.  The other darts out of her coop and madly crackles on announcing her deliverance of an egg. 

Beware of cackling virtue, my companions.  As you muzzle your shame, so muzzle your honor too.  For a cackling honor is worse than a silent dishonor; and clamorous virtue is worse than dumb iniquity. 

Refrain from speaking much.  Out of a thousand words uttered there may be one, and one only, that need in truth be uttered.  The rest but cloud the mind, and stuff the ear, and irk the tongue, and blind the ear as well. 

How hard, Oh, how hard it is to write the word that need in truth be written! 

Bennoon: What of prayer, Master Mirdad? In praying we are made to say too many words and ask for far too many things.  Yet seldom are we granted any of the things we ask for.

The book of Mirdad  

                                            THE STRANGE STORY OF A MONASTERY 
                                              WHICH WAS ONCE CALLED THE ARK
                                                                Published date: 1948

Alan Watts: Psychedelics and Religious Experience (1968)

Opposition to Pyschedelic Drugs

Resistance to allowing use of psychedelic drugs originates in both religious and secular values. The difficulty in describing psychedelic experiences in traditional religious terms suggests one ground of opposition. The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the universe. We have no appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will not accept the idea that man's inmost self can be identical with the Godhead, even though Christians may insist that this was true in the unique instance of Jesus Christ. Jews and Christians think of God in political and monarchical terms, as the supreme governor of the universe, the ultimate boss. Obviously, it is both socially unacceptable and logically preposterous for a particular individual to claim that he, in person, is the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the world-to be accorded suitable recognition and honor.

Such an imperial and kingly concept of the ultimate reality, however, is neither necessary nor universal. The Hindus and the Chinese have no difficulty in conceiving of an identity of the self and the Godhead. For most Asians, other than Muslims, the Godhead moves and manifests the world in much the same way that a centipede manipulates a hundred legs-spontaneously, without deliberation or calculation. In other words, they conceive the universe by analogy with an organism as distinct from a mechanism. They do not see it as an artifact or construct under the conscious direction of some supreme technician, engineer, or architect.

If, however, in the context of Christian or Jewish tradition, an individual declares himself to be one with God, he must be dubbed blasphemous (subversive) or insane. Such a mystical experience is a clear threat to traditional religious concepts. The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a monarchical image of God, and monarchs, who rule by force, fear nothing more than insubordination. The Church has therefore always been highly suspicious of mystics, because they seem to be insubordinate and to claim equality or, worse, identity with God. For this reason, John Scotus Erigena and Meister Eckhart were condemned as heretics. This was also why the Quakers faced opposition for their doctrine of the Inward Light, and for their refusal to remove hats in church and in court. A few occasional mystics may be all right so long as they watch their language, like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, who maintained, shall we say, a metaphysical distance of respect between themselves and their heavenly King. Nothing, however, could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven-and such alarm would be shared equally by Catholics, Jews, and fundamentalist Protestants.

The monarchical image of God, with its implicit distaste for religious insubordination, has a more pervasive impact than many Christians might admit. The thrones of kings have walls immediately behind them, and all who present themselves at court must prostrate themselves or kneel, because this is an awkward position from which to make a sudden attack. It has perhaps never occurred to Christians that when they design a church on the model of a royal court (basilica) and prescribe church ritual, they are implying that God, like a human monarch, is afraid. This is also implied by flattery in prayers:

O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold....7

The Western man who claims consciousness of oneness with God or the universe thus clashes with his society's concept of religion. In most Asian cultures, however, such a man will be congratulated as having penetrated the true secret of life. He has arrived, by chance or by some such discipline as Yoga or Zen meditation, at a state of consciousness in which he experiences directly and vividly what our own scientists know to be true in theory. For the ecologist, the biologist, and the physicist know (but seldom feel) that every organism constitutes a single field of behavior, or process, with its environment. There is no way of separating what any given organism is doing from what its environment is doing, for which reason ecologists speak not of organisms in environments but of organism-environments. Thus the words "I" and "self" should properly mean what the whole universe is doing at this particular "here-and-now" called John Doe.

The kingly concept of God makes identity of self and God, or self and universe, inconceivable in Western religious terms. The difference between Eastern and Western concepts of man and his universe, however, extends beyond strictly religious concepts. The Western scientist may rationally perceive the idea of organism-environment, but he does not ordinarily feel this to be true. By cultural and social conditioning, he has been hypnotized into experiencing himself as an ego-as an isolated center of consciousness and will inside a bag of skin, confronting an external and alien world. We say, "I came into this world." But we did nothing of the kind. We came out of it in just the same way that fruit comes out of trees. Our galaxy, our cosmos, "peoples" in the same way that an apple tree "apples."

Such a vision of the universe clashes with the idea of a monarchical God, with the concept of the separate ego, and even with the secular, atheist/agnostic mentality, which derives its common sense from the mythology of nineteenth-century scientist. According to this view, the universe is a mindless mechanism and man a sort of accidental microorganism infesting a minute globular rock that revolves about an unimportant star on the outer fringe of one of the minor galaxies. This "put-down" theory of man is extremely common among such quasi scientists as sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, most of whom are still thinking of the world in terms of Newtonian mechanics, and have never really caught up with the ideas of Einstein and Bohr, Oppenheimer and Schrodinger. Thus to the ordinary institutional-type psychiatrist, any patient who gives the least hint of mystical or religious experience is automatically diagnosed as deranged. From the standpoint of the mechanistic religion, he is a heretic and is given electroshock therapy as an up-to-date form of thumbscrew and rack. And, incidentally, it is just this kind of quasi scientist who, as consultant to government and law-enforcement agencies, dictates official policies on the use of psychedelic chemicals.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature. The result is that we are eroding and destroying our environment, spreading Los Angelization instead of civilization. This is the major threat overhanging Western, technological culture, and no amount of reasoning or doom-preaching seems to help. We simply do not respond to the prophetic and moralizing techniques of conversion upon which Jews and Christians have always relied. But people have an obscure sense of what is good for them-call it "unconscious self-healing," "survival instinct," "positive growth potential," or what you will. Among the educated young there is therefore a startling and unprecedented interest in the transformation of human consciousness. All over the Western world publishers are selling millions of books dealing with Yoga, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and the chemical mysticism of psychedelic drugs, and I have come to believe that the whole "hip" subculture, however misguided in some of its manifestations, is the earnest and responsible effort of young people to correct the self-destroying course of industrial civilization.

The content of the mystical experience is thus inconsistent with both the religious and secular concepts of traditional Western thought. Moreover, mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises. Moreover, their sense of the relativity of good and evil arouses the suspicion that they lack both conscience and respect for law. Use of psychedelics in the United States by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important segment of the population is indifferent to society's traditional rewards and sanctions.

In theory, the existence within our secular society of a group that does not accept conventional values is consistent with our political vision. But one of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The Republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust. Metaphysically, the American Revolution was a rejection of the dogma of Original Sin, which is the notion that because you cannot trust yourself or other people, there must be some Superior Authority to keep us all in order. The dogma was rejected because, if it is true that we cannot trust ourselves and others, it follows that we cannot trust the Superior Authority which we ourselves conceive and obey, and that the very idea of our own untrustworthiness is unreliable!

Citizens of the United States believe, or are supposed to believe, that a republic is the best form of government. Yet vast confusion arises from trying to be republican in politics and monarchist in religion. How can a republic be the best form of government if the universe, heaven, and hell are a monarchy? Thus, despite the theory of government by consent, based upon mutual trust, the peoples of the United States retain, from the authoritarian backgrounds of their religions or national origins, an utterly naive faith in law as some sort of supernatural and paternalistic power. "There ought to be a law against it!" Our law-enforcement officers are therefore confused, hindered, and bewildered—not to mention corrupted—by being asked to enforce sumptuary laws, often of ecclesiastical origin, that vast numbers of people have no intention of obeying and that, in any case, are immensely difficult or simply impossible to enforce—for example, the barring of anything so undetectable as LSD-25 from international and interstate commerce.

Finally, there are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs. First, use of these drugs may be dangerous. However, every worth-while exploration is dangerous—climbing mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical specimens in jungles. But if you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not really healthy for monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for Jesus to get himself crucified, but these are risks taken in the course of spiritual adventures. Today the adventurous young are taking risks in exploring the psyche, testing their mettle at the task just as, in times past, they have tested it—more violently—in hunting, dueling, hot-rod racing, and playing football. What they need is not prohibitions and policemen, but the most intelligent encouragement and advice that can be found.

Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad and very sane. But beyond these occasional lost and insane episodes, there are the experiences of the world as a system of total harmony and glory, and the discipline of relating these to the order of logic and language must somehow explain how what William Blake called that "energy which is eternal delight" can consist with the misery and suffering of everyday life.

The undoubted mystical and religious intent of most users of the psychedelics, even if some of these substances should be proved injurious to physical health, requires that their free and responsible use be exempt from legal restraint in any republic that maintains a constitutional separation of church and state. To the extent that mystical experience conforms with the tradition of genuine religious involvement, and to the extent that psychedelics induce that experience, users are entitled to some constitutional protection. Also, to the extent that research in the psychology of religion can utilize such drugs, students of the human mind must be free to use them. Under present laws, I, as an experienced student of the psychology of religion, can no longer pursue research in the field. This is a barbarous restriction of spiritual and intellectual freedom, suggesting that the legal system of the United States is, after all, in tacit alliance with the monarchical theory of the universe, and will, therefore, prohibit and persecute religious ideas and practices based on an organic and unitary vision of the universe.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters (1904)

Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden

August 12, 1904

    

I want to talk to you again for a little while, dear Mr. Kappus, although there is almost nothing I can say that will help you, and I can hardly find one useful word. You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.

     It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate; and later on, when it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to other people), we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being. And that is necessary. It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time had a wrong idea about the sun's motion, they are even now wrong about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still, dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

     How could it not be difficult for us?

     And to speak of solitude again, it becomes clearer and clearer that fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization. It will, of course, make us dizzy; for all points that our eyes used to rest on are taken away from us, there is no longer anything near us, and everything far away is infinitely far. A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses. That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called it apparitions, the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous in security that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

     So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like some one who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

     Don't observe yourself too closely. Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame (that is: morally) at your past, which naturally has a share in everything that now meets you. But whatever errors, wishes, and yearnings of your boyhood are operating in you now are not what you remember and condemn. The extraordinary circumstances of a solitary and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, surrendered to so many influences and at the same time so cut off from all real connection with life that, where a vice enters it, one may not simply call it a vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a quite definite necessity of that life and could have been absorbed by it without any trouble. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the "great thing" that you think you have achieved, although you are right about your feeling; the great thing is that there was already something there which you could replace that deception with, something true and real. Without this even your victory would have been just a moral reaction of no great significance; but in fact it has be come a part of your life. Your life, dear Mr. Kappus, which I think of with so many good wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing"? I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but that is also why it will not cease to grow.

     And if there is one more thing that I must say to you, it is this: Don't think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.

                                                                            
                                                                                  Yours,

                                                                 
                                                                                 Rainer Maria Rilke 

Sylvia Plath: Short story (1958)

Johnny Panic
and the Bible of Dreams

EVERY DAY FROM nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can’t be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellevues alone.

       Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

       When people ask me where I work, I tell them I’m Assistant to the Secretary in one of the Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics Building of the City Hospital. This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to asking me more than what I do, and what I do is mainly type up records. On my own hook though, and completely under cover, I am pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors on their ears. In the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary to none other than Johnny Panic himself.

       Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone. A lover of dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake, the Maker of them all.

       There isn’t a dream I’ve typed up in our record books that I don’t know by heart. There isn’t a dream I haven’t copied out at home into Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams.

       This is my real calling.

SOME NIGHTS I take the elevator up to the roof of my apartment building. Some nights, about three A.M. Over the trees at the far side of the park the United Fund torch flare flattens and recovers under some witchy invisible push and here and there in the hunks of stone and brick I see a light. Most of all, though, I feel the city sleeping. Sleeping from the river on the west to the ocean on the east, like some rootless island rockabying itself on nothing at all.

       I can be tight and nervy as the top string on a violin, and yet by the time the sky begins to blue I’m ready for sleep. It’s the thought of all those dreamers and what they’re dreaming wears me down till I sleep the sleep of fever. Monday to Friday what do I do but type up those same dreams. Sure, I don’t touch a fraction of them the city over, but page by page, dream by dream, my Intake books fatten and weigh down the bookshelves of the cabinet in the narrow passage running parallel to the main hall, off which passage the doors to all the doctors’ little interviewing cubicles open.

       I’ve got a funny habit of identifying the people who come in by their dreams. As far as I’m concerned, the dreams single them out more than any Christian name. This one guy, for example, who works for a ball-bearing company in town, dreams every night how he’s lying on his back with a grain of sand on his chest. Bit by bit this grain of sand grows bigger and bigger till it’s big as a fair-sized house and he can’t draw breath. Another fellow I know of has had a certain dream ever since they gave him ether and cut out his tonsils and adenoids when he was a kid. In this dream he’s caught in the rollers of a cotton mill, fighting for his life. Oh he’s not alone, although he thinks he is. A lot of people these days dream they’re being run over or eaten by machines. They’re the cagey ones who won’t go on the subway or the elevators. Coming back from my lunch hour in the hospital cafeteria I often pass them, puffing up the unswept stone stairs to our office on the fourth floor. I wonder, now and then, what dreams people had before ball bearings and cotton mills were invented.

       I’ve a dream of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.

       In this dream there’s a great half-transparent lake stretching away in every direction, too big for me to see the shores of it, if there are any shores, and I’m hanging over it, looking down from the glass belly of some helicopter. At the bottom of the lake—so deep I can only guess at the dark masses moving and heaving—are the real dragons. The ones that were around before men started living in caves and cooking meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the alphabet. Enormous isn’t the word for them; they’ve got more wrinkles than Johnny Panic himself. Dream about these long enough and your feet and hands shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun shrinks to the size of an orange, only chillier, and you’ve been living in Roxbury since the last ice age. No place for you but a room padded soft as the first room you knew of, where you can dream and float, float and dream, till at last you actually are back among those great originals and there’s no point in any dreams at all.

       It’s into this lake people’s minds run at night, brooks and gutter trickles to one borderless common reservoir. It bears no resemblance to those pure sparkling-blue sources of drinking water the suburbs guard more jealously than the Hope diamond in the middle of pine woods and barbed fences.

       It’s the sewage farm of the ages, transparence aside.

       Now the water in this lake naturally stinks and smokes from what dreams have been left sogging around in it over the centuries. When you think how much room one night of dream props would take up for one person in one city, and that city a mere pinprick on a map of the world, and when you start multiplying this space by the population of the world, and that space by the number of nights there have been since the apes took to chipping axes out of stone and losing their hair, you have some idea what I mean. I’m not the mathematical type: my head starts splitting when I get only as far as the number of dreams going on during one night in the State of Massachusetts.

       By this time, I already see the surface of the lake swarming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am. I see whole storehouses of hardware: knives, paper cutters, pistons and cogs and nutcrackers; the shiny fronts of cars looming up, glass-eyed and evil-toothed. Then there’s the spider-man and the webfooted man from Mars, and the simple, lugubrious vision of a human face turning aside forever, in spite of rings and vows, to the last lover of all.

       One of the most frequent shapes in this backwash is so commonplace it seems silly to mention it. It’s a grain of dirt. The water is thick with these grains. They seep in among everything else and revolve under some queer power of their own, opaque, ubiquitous. Call the water what you will. Lake Nightmare, Bog of Madness, it’s here the sleeping people lie and toss together among the props of their worst dreams, one great brotherhood, though each of them, waking, thinks himself singular, utterly apart.

       This is my dream. You won’t find it written up in any casebook. Now the routine in our office is very different from the routine in Skin Clinic, for example, or in Tumor. The other clinics have strong similarities to each other; none are like ours. In our clinic, treatment doesn’t get prescribed. It is invisible. It goes right on in those little cubicles, each with its desk, its two chairs, its window arid its door with the opaque glass rectangle set in the wood. There is a certain spiritual purity about this kind of doctoring. I can’t help feeling the special privilege of my position as Assistant Secretary in the Adult Psychiatric Clinic. My sense of pride is borne out by the rude invasions of other clinics into our cubicles on certain days of the week for lack of space elsewhere: our building is a very old one, and the facilities have not expanded with the expanding needs of the time. On these days of overlap the contrast between us and the other clinics is marked.

       On Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance, we have lumbar punctures in one of our offices in the morning. If the practical nurse chances to leave the door of the cubicle open, as she usually does, I can glimpse the end of the white cot and the dirty yellow-soled bare feet of the patient sticking out from under the sheet. In spite of my distaste at this sight, I can’t keep my eyes away from the bare feet, and I find myself glancing back from my typing every few minutes to see if they are still there, if they have changed their position at all. You can understand what a distraction this is in the middle of my work. I often have to reread what I have typed several times, under the pretense of careful proofreading, in order to memorize the dreams I have copied down from the doctor’s voice over the audiograph.

       Nerve Clinic next door, which tends to the grosser, more unimaginative end of our business, also disturbs us in the mornings. We use their offices for therapy in the afternoon, as they are only a morning clinic, but to have their people crying, or singing, or chattering loudly in Italian or Chinese, as they often do, without break for four hours at a stretch every morning, is distracting to say the least.

       In spite of such interruptions by other clinics, my own work is advancing at a great rate. By now I am far beyond copying only what comes after the patient’s saying: “I have this dream, Doctor.” I am at the point of recreating dreams that are not even written down at all. Dreams that shadow themselves forth in the vaguest way, but are themselves hid, like a statue under red velvet before the grand unveiling.

       To illustrate. This woman came in with her tongue swollen and stuck out so far she had to leave a party she was giving for twenty friends of her French-Canadian mother-in-law and be rushed to our Emergency Ward. She thought she didn’t want her tongue to stick out and, to tell the truth, it was an exceedingly embarrassing affair for her but she hated that French-Canadian mother-in-law worse than pigs, and her tongue was true to her opinion, even if the rest of her wasn’t. Now she didn’t lay claim to any dreams. I have only the bare facts above to begin with, yet behind them I detect the bulge and promise of a dream.

       So I set myself to uprooting this dream from its comfortable purchase under her tongue.

       Whatever the dream I unearth, by work, taxing work, and even by a kind of prayer, I am sure to find a thumbprint in the corner, a malicious detail to the right of center, a bodiless midair Cheshire cat grin, which shows the whole work to be gotten up by the genius of Johnny Panic, and him alone. He’s sly, he’s subtle, he’s sudden as thunder, but he gives himself away only too often. He simply can’t resist melodrama. Melodrama of the oldest, most obvious variety.

       I remember one guy, a stocky fellow in a nail-studded black leather jacket, running straight in to us from a boxing match at Mechanics Hall, Johnny Panic hot at his heels. This guy, good Catholic though he was, young and upright and all, had one mean fear of death. He was actually scared blue he’d go to hell. He was a pieceworker at a fluorescent light plant. I remember this detail because I thought it funny he should work there, him being so afraid of the dark as it turned out. Johnny Panic injects a poetic element in this business you don’t often find elsewhere. And for that he has my eternal gratitude.

       I also remember quite clearly the scenario of the dream I had worked out for this guy: a gothic interior in some monastery cellar, going on and on as far as you could see, one of those endless perspectives between two mirrors, and the pillars and walls were made of nothing but human skulls and bones, and in every niche there was a body laid out, and it was the Hall of Time, with the bodies in the foreground still warm, discoloring and starting to rot in the middle distance, and the bones emerging, clean as a whistle, in a kind of white futuristic glow at the end of the line. As I recall, I had the whole scene lighted, for the sake of accuracy, not with candles, but with the ice-bright fluorescence that makes skin look green and all the pink and red flushes dead black-purple.

       You ask, how do I know this was the dream of the guy in the black leather jacket. I don’t know. I only believe this was his dream, and I work at belief with more energy and tears and entreaties than I work at recreating the dream itself.

       My office, of course, has its limitations. The lady with her tongue stuck out, the guy from Mechanics Hall—these are our wildest ones. The people who have really gone floating down toward the bottom of that boggy lake come in only once, and are then referred to a place more permanent than our office which receives the public from nine to five, five days a week only. Even those people who are barely able to walk about the streets and keep working, who aren’t yet halfway down in the lake, get sent to the Out-Patient Department at another hospital specializing in severer cases. Or they may stay a month or so in our own Observation Ward in the central hospital which I’ve never seen.

       I’ve seen the secretary of that ward, though. Something about her merely smoking and drinking her coffee in the cafeteria at the ten o’clock break put me off so I never went to sit next to her again. She has a funny name I don’t ever quite remember correctly, something really odd, like Miss Milleravage. One of those names that seem more like a pun mixing up Milltown and Ravage than anything in the city phone directory. But not so odd a name, after all, if you’ve ever read through the phone directory, with its Hyman Diddlebockers and Sasparilla Greenleafs. I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren’t called Smith.

       Anyhow, this Miss Milleravage is a large woman, not fat, but all sturdy muscle and tall on top of it. She wears a gray suit over her hard bulk that reminds me vaguely of some kind of uniform, without the details of cut having anything strikingly military about them. Her face, hefty as a bullock’s, is covered with a remarkable number of tiny maculae, as if she’d been lying under water for some time and little algae had latched on to her skin, smutching it over with tobacco-browns and greens. These moles are noticeable mainly because the skin around them is so pallid. I sometimes wonder if Miss Milleravage has ever seen the wholesome light of day. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if she’d been brought up from the cradle with the sole benefit of artificial lighting.

       Byrna, the secretary in Alcoholic Clinic just across the hall from us, introduced me to Miss Milleravage with the gambit that I’d “been in England too.”

       Miss Milleravage, it turned out, had spent the best years of her life in London hospitals.

       “Had a friend,” she boomed in her queer, doggish basso, not favoring me with a direct look, “a nurse at Bart’s. Tried to get in touch with her after the war, but the head of the nurses had changed, everybody’d changed, nobody’d heard of her. She must’ve gone down with the old head nurse, rubbish and all, in the bombings.” She followed this with a large grin.

       Now I’ve seen medical students cutting up cadavers, four stiffs to a classroom, about as recognizably human as Moby Dick, and the students playing catch with the dead men’s livers. I’ve heard guys joke about sewing a woman up wrong after a delivery at the charity ward of the Lying-In. But I wouldn’t want to see what Miss Milleravage would write off as the biggest laugh of all time. No thanks and then some. You could scratch her eyes with a pin and swear you’d struck solid quartz.

       My boss has a sense of humor too, only it’s gentle. Generous as Santa on Christmas Eve.

       I work for a middle-aged lady named Miss Taylor who is the Head Secretary of the clinic and has been since the clinic started thirty-three years ago—the year of my birth, oddly enough. Miss Taylor knows every doctor, every patient, every outmoded appointment slip, referral slip and billing procedure the hospital has ever used or thought of using. She plans to stick with the clinic until she’s farmed out in the green pastures of Social Security checks. A woman more dedicated to her work I never saw. She’s the same way about statistics as I am about dreams: if the building caught fire she would throw every last one of those books of statistics to the firemen below at the serious risk of her own skin.

       I get along extremely well with Miss Taylor. The one thing I never let her catch me doing is reading the old record books. I have actually very little time for this. Our office is busier than the stock exchange with the staff of twenty-five doctors in and out, medical students in training, patients, patients’ relatives, and visiting officials from other clinics referring patients to us, so even when I’m covering the office alone, during Miss Taylor’s coffee break and lunch hour, I seldom get to dash down more than a note or two.

       This kind of catch-as-catch-can is nerve-racking, to say the least. A lot of the best dreamers are in the old books, the dreamers that come in to us only once or twice for evaluation before they’re sent elsewhere. For copying out these dreams I need time, a lot of time. My circumstances are hardly ideal for the unhurried pursuit of my art. There is, of course, a certain derring-do in working under such hazards, but I long for the rich leisure of the true connoisseur who indulges his nostrils above the brandy snifter for an hour before his tongue reaches out for the first taste.

       I find myself all too often lately imagining what a relief it would be to bring a briefcase into work, big enough to hold one of those thick, blue, cloth-bound record books full of dreams. At Miss Taylor’s lunch time, in the lull before the doctors and students crowd in to take their afternoon patients, I could simply slip one of the books, dated ten or fifteen years back, into my briefcase, and leave the briefcase under my desk till five o’clock struck. Of course, odd-looking bundles are inspected by the doorman of the Clinics Building and the hospital has its own staff of police to check up on the multiple varieties of thievery that go on, but for heaven’s sake, I’m not thinking of making off with typewriters or heroin. I’d only borrow the book overnight and slip it back on the shelf first thing the next day before anybody else came in. Still, being caught taking a book out of the hospital would probably mean losing my job and all my source material with it.

       This idea of mulling over a record book in the privacy and comfort of my own apartment, even if I have to stay up night after night for this purpose, attracts me so much I become more and more impatient with my usual method of snatching minutes to look up dreams in Miss Taylor’s half-hours out of the office.

       The trouble is, I can never tell exactly when Miss Taylor will come back to the office. She is so conscientious about her job she’d be likely to cut her half hour at lunch short and her twenty minutes at coffee shorter, if it weren’t for her lame left leg. The distinct sound of this lame leg in the corridor warns me of her approach in time for me to whip the record book I’m reading into my drawer out of sight and pretend to be putting down the final flourishes on a phone message or some such alibi. The only catch, as far as my nerves are concerned, is that Amputee Clinic is around the corner from us in the opposite direction from Nerve Clinic and I’ve gotten really jumpy due to a lot of false alarms where I’ve mistaken some pegleg’s hitching step for the step of Miss Taylor herself returning early to the office.

ON THE BLACKEST days, when I’ve scarcely time to squeeze one dream out of the old books and my copywork is nothing but weepy college sophomores who can’t get a lead in Camino Real, I feel Johnny Panic turn his back, stony as Everest, higher than Orion, and the motto of the great Bible of Dreams, “Perfect fear casteth out all else,” is ash and lemon water on my lips. I’m a wormy hermit in a country of prize pigs so corn-happy they can’t see the slaughterhouse at the end of the track. I’m Jeremiah vision-bitten in the Land of Cockaigne.

       What’s worse: day by day I see these psyche-doctors studying to win Johnny Panic’s converts from him by hook, crook, and talk, talk, talk. Those deep-eyed, bush-bearded dream collectors who preceded me in history, and their contemporary inheritors with their white jackets and knotty-pine-paneled offices and leather couches, practiced and still practice their dream-gathering for worldly ends: health and money, money and health. To be a true member of Johnny Panic’s congregation one must forget the dreamer and remember the dream: the dreamer is merely a flimsy vehicle for the great Dream Maker himself. This they will not do. Johnny Panic is gold in the bowels, and they try to root him out by spiritual stomach pumps.

       Take what happened to Harry Bilbo. Mr. Bilbo came into our office with the hand of Johnny Panic heavy as a lead coffin on his shoulder. He had an interesting notion about the filth in this world. I figured him for a prominent part in Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams, Third Book of Fear, Chapter Nine on Dirt, Disease and General Decay. A friend of Harry’s blew a trumpet in the Boy Scout band when they were kids. Harry Bilbo’d also blown on this friend’s trumpet. Years later the friend got cancer and died. Then, one day not so long ago, a cancer doctor came into Harry’s house, sat down in a chair, passed the top of the morning with Harry’s mother and, on leaving, shook her hand and opened the door for himself. Suddenly Harry Bilbo wouldn’t blow trumpets or sit down on chairs or shake hands if all the cardinals of Rome took to blessing him twenty-four hours around the clock for fear of catching cancer. His mother had to go turning the TV knobs and water faucets on and off and opening doors for him. Pretty soon Harry stopped going to work because of the spit and dog turds in the street. First that stuff gets on your shoes and then when you take your shoes off it gets on your hands and then at dinner it’s a quick trip into your mouth and not a hundred Hail Marys can keep you from the chain reaction.

       The last straw was, Harry quit weight lifting at the public gym when he saw this cripple exercising with the dumbbells. You can never tell what germs cripples carry behind their ears and under their fingernails. Day and night Harry Bilbo lived in holy worship of Johnny Panic, devout as any priest among censers and sacraments. He had a beauty all his own.

       Well, these white-coated tinkerers managed, the lot of them, to talk Harry into turning on the TV himself, and the water faucets, and to opening closet doors, front doors, bar doors. Before they were through with him, he was sitting down on movie-house chairs, and benches all over the Public Garden, and weight lifting every day of the week at the gym in spite of the fact another cripple took to using the rowing machine. At the end of his treatment he came in to shake hands with the Clinic Director. In Harry Bilbo’s own words, he was “a changed man.” The pure Panic-light had left his face. He went out of the office doomed to the crass fate these doctors call health and happiness.

       About the time of Harry Bilbo’s cure a new idea starts nudging at the bottom of my brain. I find it hard to ignore as those bare feet sticking out of the lumbar puncture room. If I don’t want to risk carrying a record book out of the hospital in case I get discovered and fired and have to end my research forever, I can really speed up work by staying in the Clinics Building overnight. I am nowhere near exhausting the clinic’s resources and the piddling amount of cases I am able to read in Miss Taylor’s brief absences during the day are nothing to what I could get through in a few nights of steady copying. I need to accelerate my work if only to counteract those doctors.

       Before I know it, I am putting on my coat at five and saying goodnight to Miss Taylor, who usually stays a few minutes overtime to clear up the day’s statistics, and sneaking around the corner into the ladies room. It is empty. I slip into the patients’ john, lock the door from the inside, and wait. For all I know, one of the clinic cleaning ladies may try to knock the door down, thinking some patient’s passed out on the seat. My fingers are crossed. About twenty minutes later the door of the lavatory opens and someone limps over the threshold like a chicken favoring a bad leg. It is Miss Taylor, I can tell by the resigned sigh as she meets the jaundiced eye of the lavatory mirror. I hear the click-cluck of various touch-up equipment on the bowl, water sloshing, the scritch of a comb in frizzed hair, and then the door is closing with a slow-hinged wheeze behind her.

       I am lucky. When I come out of the ladies room at six o’clock the corridor lights are off and the fourth-floor hall is as empty as church on Monday. I have my own key to our office; I come in first every morning, so that’s no trouble. The typewriters are folded back into the desks, the locks are on the dial phones, all’s right with the world.

       Outside the window the last of the winter light is fading. Yet I do not forget myself and turn on the overhead bulb. I don’t want to be spotted by any hawk-eyed doctor or janitor in the hospital buildings across the little courtyard. The cabinet with the record books is in the windowless passage opening onto the doctors’ cubicles, which have windows overlooking the courtyard. I make sure the doors to all the cubicles are shut. Then I switch on the passage light, a sallow twenty-five-watt affair blackening at the top. Better than an altarful of candles to me at this point, though. I didn’t think to bring a sandwich. There is an apple in my desk drawer left over from lunch, so I reserve that for whatever pangs I may feel about one o’clock in the morning, and get out my pocket notebook. At home every evening it is my habit to tear out the notebook pages I’ve written on at the office during the day and pile them up to be copied in my manuscript. In this way I cover my tracks so no one idly picking up my notebook at the office could ever guess the type or scope of my work.

       I begin systematically by opening the oldest book on the bottom shelf. The once-blue cover is no-color now, the pages are thumbed and blurry carbons, but I’m humming from foot to topknot: this dream book was spanking new the day I was born. When I really get organized I’ll have hot soup in a thermos for the dead-of-winter nights, turkey pies and chocolate eclairs. I’ll bring hair curlers and four changes of blouse to work in my biggest handbag on Monday mornings so no one will notice me going downhill in looks and start suspecting unhappy love affairs or pink affiliations or my working on dream books in the clinic four nights a week.

       Eleven hours later. I am down to apple core and seeds and in the month of May, 1931, with a private nurse who has just opened a laundry bag in her patient’s closet and found five severed heads in it, including her mother’s.

       A chill air touches the nape of my neck. From where I am sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the cabinet, the record book heavy on my lap, I notice out of the corner of my eye that the door of the cubicle beside me is letting in a little crack of blue light. Not only along the floor, but up the side of the door too. This is odd since I made sure from the first that all the doors were shut tight. The crack of blue light is widening and my eyes are fastened to two motionless shoes in the doorway, toes pointing toward me.

       They are brown leather shoes of a foreign make, with thick elevator soles. Above the shoes are black silk socks through which shows a pallor of flesh. I get as far as the gray pinstriped trouser cuffs.

       “Tch, tch,” chides an infinitely gentle voice from the cloudy regions above my head. “Such an uncomfortable position! Your legs must be asleep by now. Let me help you up. The sun will be rising shortly.”

       Two hands slip under my arms from behind and I am raised, wobbly as an unset custard, to my feet, which I cannot feel because my legs are, in fact, asleep. The record book slumps to the floor, pages splayed.

       “Stand still a minute.” The Clinic Director’s voice fans the lobe of my right ear. “Then the circulation will revive.”

       The blood in my not-there legs starts pinging under a million sewing-machine needles and a vision of the Clinic Director acid-etches itself on my brain. I don’t even need to look around: fat pot-belly buttoned into his gray pinstriped waistcoat, woodchuck teeth yellow and buck, every-color eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses quick as minnows.

       I clutch my notebook. The last floating timber of the Titanic.

       What does he know, what does he know?

       Everything.

       “I know where there is a nice hot bowl of chicken noodle soup.” His voice rustles, dust under the bed, mice in straw. His hand welds onto my left upper arm in fatherly love. The record book of all the dreams going on in the city of my birth at my first yawp in this world’s air he nudges under the bookcase with a polished toe.

       We meet nobody in the dawn-dark hall. Nobody on the chill stone stair down to the basement corridors where Billy the Record Room Boy cracked his head skipping steps one night on a rush errand.

       I begin to double-quickstep so he won’t think it’s me he’s hustling. “You can’t fire me,” I say calmly. “I quit.”

       The Clinic Director’s laugh wheezes up from his accordion-pleated bottom gut. “We mustn’t lose you so soon.” His whisper snakes off down the whitewashed basement passages, echoing among the elbow pipes, the wheelchairs and stretchers beached for the night along the steam-stained walls. “Why, we need you more than you know.”

       We wind and double and my legs keep time with his until we come, somewhere in those barren rat tunnels, to an all-night elevator run by a one-armed Negro. We get on, and the door grinds shut like the door on a cattle car, and we go up and up. It is a freight elevator, crude and clanky, a far cry from the plush passenger lifts I am used to in the Clinics Building.

       We get off at an indeterminate floor. The Clinic Director leads me down a bare corridor lit at intervals by socketed bulbs in little wire cages on the ceiling. Locked doors set with screened windows line the hall on either hand. I plan to part company with the Clinic Director at the first red Exit sign, but on our journey there are none. I am in alien territory, coat on the hanger in the office, handbag and money in my top desk drawer, notebook in my hand, and only Johnny Panic to warm me against the ice age outside.

       Ahead a light gathers, brightens. The Clinic Director, puffing slightly at the walk, brisk and long, to which he is obviously unaccustomed, propels me around a bend and into a square, brilliantly lit room.

       “Here she is.”

       “The little witch!”

       Miss Milleravage hoists her tonnage up from behind the steel desk facing the door.

       The walls and the ceiling of the room are riveted metal battleship plates. There are no windows.

       From small, barred cells lining the sides and back of the room I see Johnny Panic’s top priests staring out at me, arms swaddled behind their backs in the white Ward nightshirts, eyes redder than coals and hungry-hot.

       They welcome me with queer croaks and grunts, as if their tongues were locked in their jaws. They have no doubt heard of my work by way of Johnny Panic’s grapevine and want to know how his apostles thrive in the world.

       I lift my hands to reassure them, holding up my notebook, my voice loud as Johnny Panic’s organ with all stops out.

       “Peace! I bring to you . . .”

       The Book.

       “None of that old stuff, sweetie.” Miss Milleravage is dancing out at me from behind her desk like a trick elephant.

       The Clinic Director closes the door to the room.

       The minute Miss Milleravage moves I notice what her hulk has been hiding from view behind the desk—a white cot high as a man’s waist with a single sheet stretched over the mattress, spotless and drumskin tight. At the head of the cot is a table on which sits a metal box covered with dials and gauges.

       The box seems to be eyeing me, copperhead-ugly, from its coil of electric wires, the latest model in Johnny-Panic-Killers.

       I get ready to dodge to one side. When Miss Milleravage grabs, her fat hand comes away with a fist full of nothing. She starts for me again, her smile heavy as dogdays in August.

       “None of that. None of that. I’ll have that little black book.”

       Fast as I run around the high white cot, Miss Milleravage is so fast you’d think she wore rollerskates. She grabs and gets. Against her great bulk I beat my fists, and against her whopping milkless breasts, until her hands on my wrists are iron hoops and her breath hushabyes me with a love-stink fouler than Undertaker’s Basement.

       “My baby, my own baby’s come back to me . . .”

       “She,” says the Clinic Director, sad and stern, “has been making time with Johnny Panic again.”

       “Naughty naughty.”

THE WHITE COT is ready. With a terrible gentleness Miss Milleravage takes the watch from my wrist, the rings from my fingers, the hairpins from my hair. She begins to undress me. When I am bare, I am anointed on the temples and robed in sheets virginal as the first snow.

       Then, from the four corners of the room and from the door behind me come five false priests in white surgical gowns and masks whose one lifework is to unseat Johnny Panic from his own throne. They extend me full-length on my back on the cot. The crown of wire is placed on my head, the wafer of forgetfulness on my tongue. The masked priests move to their posts and take hold: one of my left leg, one of my right, one of my right arm, one of my left. One behind my head at the metal box where I can’t see.

       From their cramped niches along the wall, the votaries raise their voices in protest. They begin the devotional chant:

The only thing to love is Fear itself.

Love of Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

The only thing to love is Fear itself.

May Fear and Fear and Fear be everywhere.

       There is no time for Miss Milleravage or the Clinic Director or the priests to muzzle them.

       The signal is given.

       The machine betrays them.

       At the moment when I think I am most lost the face of Johnny Panic appears in a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead. I am shaken like a leaf in the teeth of glory. His beard is lightning. Lightning is in his eye. His Word charges and illumines the universe.

       The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.

       His love is the twenty-story leap, the rope at the throat, the knife at the heart.

       He forgets not his own.