RADIANT IN THE PRIME & ULTIMATE LIGHT

Revision 2.3.0 March 23, 2011

RADIANT IN THE PRIME & ULTIMATE LIGHT A Personal Memoir by Stephen Hunt [1935 - ]

    At home one late afternoon in the early 1990's I routinely turned on a kitchen appliance's small utility light, and experienced the non-induced spiritual surprise of my life.  The incidental change in light level somehow triggered within me a radical peak experience arising from irrepressible emergent mysticism.  I was seized through and through by a tremendous divine White Light of ecstatic force.  I stood arrested in awe within a bright plasma – the prime and ultimate light.  The seed-light, as it were, of a low-watt bulb propagated instantaneously until the greatest radiance I have ever known filled my consciousness.  This happening was like a  shock-visual clip of the big bang -- super-expanding in the first nano-seconds of creation.   In no time the light grew more brilliant than a coiled ribbon of magnesium metal burning edge-on in pure oxygen.  I felt totally radiant in the energy's sphere, though my eyes did not hurt.  The peak phenomenon, essentially beyond words, was unprecedented in my life.   What was happening and what could have led up to the experience, I wondered at the time and later in an associative rather than chronological way.

    Often before I had spent my early evenings sitting alone beside a reading lamp that I veiled for the novelty and comfort.  When looking outside by day at nearby partially shadowed spaces,  I sometimes detected an intriguing soft-focus “graining” effect, precipitating and dancing in brownian movement in the atmosphere (or my retina...).   Some nights from my window I watched  distant but identifiable small round lights, to the south below the Chicago skyline.  Police car beacon blue, stoplight yellow, and a roving few of  red accompanied by trailing off sounds, these lights drew my attention because I could relate them to mandalas I had meditated on concerning my future.  

   From the same window sometimes I could metaphysically envision the mutability of all forms, even as I looked at material car traffic moving below along N. Broadway Street.   Some mornings when I awoke, the scene from my window seemed to present an appearance of composed artistic order – like a planned oil-painted panorama of building shapes fitting together in an over-all representational effect. By night, certain casual shapes of wall shadows, cast and slanted by moonlight, seemed suitable to be hung in MoMA – if only I could have rendered them masterfully in the right media.  Other times before sleep I flashed inwardly on detailed (but non-existent) landscapes that I had never consciously laid eyes on and could not place.  In one particular glimpse my inner eye beheld a quick rivulet of  liquid mercury coursing down from the sky and spreading until level everywhere on the land: surely a symbol of  changes descending upon the Earth.  Another image I saw was a diamond crystal pyramid that scattered down into individual component jewels when tapped on its apex, separating like a Droste apple.  Habitually, when I looked at anything natural, written or fabricated my eyes invariably sought out the highest values they could find. 

    In the 1990's I began feeling a need to be sequestered, even to go into hermetic hibernation, to protect my inner self and sensitivities.  I appreciated why it may normally be best that the occult stays hidden. For me the time was right to release common distractions I had chased with excitement, and to choose instead to become lost or entranced in what personally interested me.  I felt over-exposed to and overly answerable to others.  I bought ear plugs and noise suppressing gun muffler headgear to wear, I turned the phone off,  I postponed watching television until Masterpiece dramas and Nova nature programs aired.  Even so,  television as such assaulted my consciousness, and diminished my ability to hear the whisperings from my intuitive nature.  I became intentionally low-key and non-participatory over the Holidays.  I needed time to make an inner migration into sanctuary where I could sustain the long period of radical self-remaking following my early sobriety.  Though not prey to self-pity, when I felt especially sad and lonely I slept in my clothes for comfort.  I went to films; all my life I felt safe to feel my emotions as a gay man only while lulled and absorbed by screen entertainment in the dark of movie theaters.  Earlier in the 1980's my decision to live low-risk, more safely, and continuously celibate for the duration of the AIDS pandemic, had eroticized my view of men, while closing down my impulsive openness and enabling me to arrest my lust by trading it off for a just bearable feeling of being deprived.   Once, pausing alone on the stairs in Loyola Arms Hotel's skylighted stairwell, I suddenly realized I had been odd and unconventional all along and now again how very difficult it was for me to fit in or to be understood anywhere.

    In solitude and leisure,  creative ideas occurred to me not only about our curious human condition but also about the practical world.  Couldn't the tons of meteorite dust falling daily on Earth be manipulated scientifically to precipitate out quantities of atmospheric greenhouse gasses treated at source to condense on incoming dust particles, and thus be solidified and grounded  by gravity?    Couldn't spine-bound books be printed using an innovative computer program positioning the text on each page progressively closer or farther from the outer margin, so that any page appears centered and flat for readers' eyes no matter where the book lay open? Could it still be undiscovered that electricity subtly demonstrates a useful, characteristic 'signature' (neither amperage nor voltage) specific to whatever conducting metal or material it enters, transverses and leaves? – I suspected so.  Couldn't commercial honey bees be treated to eliminate the transfer of diseases at the point they are packaged live for transport? Couldn't a safer one-story California house be designed on a central plinth -- to have its roof  slide off into a sand bank and its walls fall outward harmlessly during an earthquake?  Couldn't retractable balloons, plying drug containers between earth's surface and the cold stratosphere, keep life-saving injectables suitably refrigerated against spoiling in vast rural Africa, as Bill Gates has said is vital?

    At the time of the intense White Light described above, I sank to my knees.  I was motionless.  I felt ineffably disoriented then at a pause, and fearful.  Was the Light coming to me from afar or from within me?  I prayed surpassingly that my body could endure the great Light and  survive through this experience.  My instincts told me I would either be extinguished or blessed by whatever was happening. I was transfused and enraptured to the point of surrender, but unsure.  My hands' empty cupped palms felt an unique sensation of growing lighter and warmer,  though not in any sense like being impaled with stigmata.  I hardly knew how to cope from moment to moment or what next move to make.  I felt I was outside of linear time in a vast space where I, despite my great anxiety to survive, was minuscule.  This White Light  anomaly was not leaving.  It felt too strong to control or escape.   I yearned simply for my own familiar little everyday inner experienced light of steady, vital magenta.  I wanted to be back experiencing nothing stranger than the landscape vistas my inner eye saw at night before sleeping.   At length I surrendered to the luminosity that possessed me from finger- to toe-tips – come what may.   

    Still I wondered,  giving in to the Light's total transformative sway, was I making my transition?   Was my living entity about to shut down and “me” dissolve into egoless non-being -- dispersing like a wisp in eternity?  I chanced thinking I might with luck live to remember being filled by this extraordinary Light.  I chanced thinking some churchman might someday interpret for me in his own terms that through intercession and grace, I had been brought to atonement.

    I overcame my fears and continued breathing.   Reorientation took form through my innate observant curiosity.  Objectivity was a viewpoint still serving me.  I began to realize, “This is It, enlightenment, first hand.  I am in a peak experience.  I am bathed in Light. The venerable White Light of past report must somehow have come upon me.”  Later, I began to accept that the state of being I had spontaneously entered could only be the epiphany-at-acme described by mystics, spiritual masters and other illuminati down through the ages of the Great Tradition – accessible to this day, truly. 

    Presently I felt buoyed up emotionally, in some new balance obtaining within the ambient ground-of-being. Now I sensed the Light present more on my right-hand side.  Nothing seemed disparate anymore.  Everything made exquisite sense and was wonderfully lucent and consonant down to the smallest right details.   I could now envision (envision!) what before had been just science to me: the energetic interaction of atoms with polarized components existing in a omnipresent medium that was like light but even more like a universal conductivity adjoined to or co-comprising dark matter.  I could feel the overall state of atoms in reciprocity attuning at zero point, a nanosecond and a light year somehow commensurate.  I had the sense of it.  I had the feel of it.

    The White Light, no momentary fluke, was at its most intense for forty-five minutes – then stayed with me for a good hour and more before trailing away into lessening euphoria.  I was a man stunned to his essence by this plasma-miasma of splendor.  I went from feeling enthralled by a power from afar, manifesting energy on a scale beyond my knowing, to a feeling that the Light was altogether beneficial and at one with me.  I was profoundly perfused, impressed, and grateful.   I moved, rapt and cherishing, among the growing house plants and favorite books in my quiet room three floors above the Loyola University lakeshore campus.  Here at the inner wall across from my south-facing window I saw where I meditated daily on my dhurrie style rug, and where I also rested during occasional short fasts.

    During one meditation I had gained the distinct impression and prompting that I was to “surround myself with electricity” -- perhaps indicating electronic media and cyberspace?  My walls were closely covered with many tear sheets and scrap printed images I was alive to.  Though filled with super-abundant Light, I felt not in the least overheated; instead I was comfortably warm.  On the sash of my window a keepsake crystal prism emanated a coursing rainbow of refracted colors.  It was a keepsake from my friend Leonard Johnston of the UC Berkeley French Department.  He had given it to me after our Baja California vacation in the late 1960's.  Near my meditation spot was an open shoebox containing my constantly growing collection of  found-art objects, many potent to me as symbols -- the most shiny ones, which ancient Greeks would have enjoyed, reflecting opalescent glints of bliss consciousness.

    What could have led up to my present tipping point into awakening and illumination?  Despite my Methodist mother's disapproval, from early adolescence I felt deeply and ecumenically curious about the metaphysical dimensions of  world religions and how they related at a practiced and demonstrating level.  During one high school year, the trouble-making gossipy wife of the local VA Hospital's chief did me damage and caused consternation by reporting on me to my mother -- for my being curious enough to have entered and looked around the local Catholic Church in my hometown, Butler, Pennsylvania.  I was judged susceptibly sensitive and to be watched.  My anxious parents (not surprisingly as they were both adult children of alcoholics and caught up in control issues) considered but did not send me away to military school. The etiology of divine inspiration fascinated me, as I felt such originating inspiration to be still purely possible in the present.  As a Protestant of course I was duly baptized before reaching the age of reason, but apart from on Sundays I was not conventionally devout nor did I feel “called” in the evangelical sense.   Secondary knowledge of others' religious sensibilities and experiences did not satisfy me.  I could not relate much to forms and rituals of Christian religion, because I could not summon up through them the originating transfigurations and fiery inspirations that led writer-fathers to pen the sacred books of the Bible and worship – though I intuited such states of mind had existed and still could be experienced.  I was on a quest.  I read an expanding selection of the works of acknowledged spiritual masters in the Great Tradition and byways.  Two tantalizing lines persisted in my mind: “You shall see when It is come / Illuminations are all one.” 

    During the 1990's my own mediumship potential was encouraged and I took form as a direct psychic giving readings in Chicago at First Temple of Universal Law, since May 2, 1965 located at 5030 N. Drake Avenue and the river. The founder's son Rev. Robert E. Martin occasionally spoke.  Over coffee and  pot luck fellowship dinners several classmates from Rev. Rose Spiros' Saturday class reiterated that they identified me as an old soul (which I at first imagined was like one's being some sort of a kindly generalist).  Sometimes when about to enter the Temple, I sensed the Maternal -- in fact my mother's face -- in the clouds above.  On my part, I was learning from the example of the older worshippers I mixed with how to age gracefully into active retirement, for when I reached that stage.  Having been raised during WW II, when most men were away  fighting, I related to women like my mother, grandmother and two aunts who had cared for me.  At church I explored the Temple library's collection, filling a separate room. Absorbed  church members happily called their study, healing, and service to others their “work” -- with an attitude that struck me as inspiriting and quite unlike my experience of nine-to-five clerking work and other drudgery done in corporate business offices for a livelihood.    At home I sought the trance state and spaced out during the magnificent moments when the sky's light changed mode and transitioned into dawn or sunset.  I was drawn too to stroll along Lake Michigan especially when Chicago weather patterns created vast pastel effects of light washing through the sky. As my vision expanded I enjoyed stronger intimations that spirit lay behind everything in the streaming omnipresence of change and regeneration.  

    I learned to command my metaphysical gifts reliably,  despite sometimes feeling depressed and experiencing underlying sloughs sans volition (not to mention hours sunk in idiocy because of old unresolved anger).  After much self-mortifying reluctance on my part and my development of an eye tic from stress (as I suffered through the inevitable 'imposture syndrome'), I accepted Rev. Rose's urgings to serve.  I overcame stage fright, and commenced giving well-received psychic readings for others on Sundays and  Tuesdays at the Temple. (Next to challenging my sense of family loyalty earlier and learning to stand apart from my birth family, the rite of differentiation into a direct psychic was my most difficult, excrutiating and  conflicted change to accomplish and accept.) Then, as a new intermediary and healer, I found it particularly surprising that very simple things I saw around me often provided the germ for  spiritual answers to the questions others tendered me.

    After some months in place as a Temple reader, I was approached by Marlene Berndt the 'Rock Lady' owner of the successful suburban J&M Psychic Fairs which enjoyed psychic Irene Hughes' favor and working presence.  Marlene Berndt found me both situation-wise and psychic.  Several times I accepted her standing offer and commuted to the various venues of her fairs in Chicagoland to work among the company.  However I was unknown to the public and had little draw at fairs, in contrast to my recognition at the Temple.  My having to sustain keening mental  energy to give but a few psychic readings intermittently booked during long hours of waiting in place at J&M  psychic fairs, disheartened me. While I was reaching out to venues, in April, 1994 I decided to explore another commercial niche.  I applied to the American Association of Professional Psychics, Inc. for membership.  An applicant being tested was required to do individual cold readings, arranged by appointment, over the phone.  These sample psychic readings required of me had to impress and convince three critical AAPP peers sitting in judgment out of state.  The Association's imperatives were to be professional, be psychic, and be accurate – altogether, convincingly and quickly.  Despite my anxiety over never having read at a distance for strangers, I was approved for membership on my direct psychic performances over the phone.  I then worked from home some seasons as a paid psychic partaking in popular culture and answerable to questioning callers from everywhere.  I was open to new experiential practice and answers came readily, but working this commercial way added little to my spiritual growth.  At length, I gave only very occasional readings on my own by request.  For a while I entertained the happy wish, unrealized, of setting up my own psychic practice, finding a location above a bookshop, decorating my professional space tastefully with the assistance of friends, and holding regular hours for the public.

    During this time of core life-changes more encompassing than just  midlife crisis changes, I was puzzled where to be and how to be. Each Chicago spring I felt more changed by the winter's passage. No fully mentoring person appeared with the time, education and experience to understand my underlying potential as well as conflicting complexities -- and to identify for me a whole picture the changes of mine manifesting throughout recovery. I was trying to resolve a most baffling Gordian knot while entangled within it! (Unbeknownst, I was my generation's alcoholic, within an extended alcohologenic family with a history.) Jungian Jack Miller said I evidenced personality “inflation”; members of 12-step programs advised me “Don't think you are special, don't be self-pitying, and don't experiment, -- just show up at meetings”;  my siblings considered me “devilish, very unhappy and sometimes not in your right mind”;  and I  realized that the balance of available consulting ministers operated from and espoused fairly exclusively their own church value systems and dogmas.         

    Staff member and Adlerian Dorothy Previn, on the Psychiatric Unit at St. Joseph Hospital, only very reluctantly tested me psychologically after my repeated requests as a co-worker alongside her within the treatment milieu. (Raising her sons by herself at home, perhaps she felt she had to maintain an undeviating patients-focus and energy efficiency at work, close under the eyes of the Director.)  Dorothy Previn tested me and found I had been able to claim available roles for myself as a middle child, but I had not developed into a successful adult. I pondered that objective finding of hers a long time, as well as my main mistakes in life so far as I could determine them. But how could I assume responsibility for my own life without more fully understanding who I was?  About this time, I read  the touching Dibs In Search of Self.  Few Chicagoans of my acquaintance had the time to hold sensitive, reciprocal conversations with me.  I felt I was not living in the right city, or country, or even the right century.  With my unconventional consciousness, gay sexual identity, and disengagement from getting ahead materially, I gathered I would always be a stranger anywhere.  

    I considered returning to live in Taos, New Mexico, visited several times in the past. I liked Carmel, California. I considered returning to Lake Chapala in Mexico where I wrote one summer.  I had always dreamed of speaking French as well as Edmund White and living in Paris, where I had sojourned.  Could I become situated sufficiently to flourish going back to the beloved student environs of Exeter, Devonshire as an ex-patriot this time -– perhaps to live as a scholar gypsy in a cottage in Jane Austen country?  I was especially keen to practice the contemplative way of life at New Camaldori Hermitage in Big Sur, California (later to be threatened by the wild fires of 2008). I became interested in South Africa from reading about Laurens van der Post, the formative intellectual and spiritual guru of Prince Charles.  I might find it compatible to be a non-governmental think tank resource person, or make a home and garden in Israel, or emigrate to Canada where I had visited on four occasions.  I day-dreamed of retiring to Santa Rosa, California to serve as a docent at Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, which I knew of from weekends spent in the Russian River area.  A traveler told me if  I visited  Pondicherry in South India,  I would stay and never leave its appeal.  I applied for a writer's residency at Ragdale in Lake Forest, Illinois to finish my manuscript of far eastern influenced poems, titled “A Few Gourds & Strawflowers”, to no avail.   I realized in more grounded moments that much incidental good happened for me when I gardened.  During the growing season I felt more nearly content, creative, respected, and able to integrate the spiritual side of my nature --- as well as well enough to pursue reading widely at night.  

     On the other hand, my mother's country, western Pennsylvania, held stark memories for me of my several suicide attempts there in 1952 over thwarted homosexual feelings for a slightly younger straight teenage neighbor boy, C.H.P.  At that time, I had a beginning spiritual sense, indistinct, that I was separated from the living breathing voices of kindred strangers who existed elsewhere and were my own kind. 

    Sometimes I yearned to live in New York City again, this time to follow an envisioned new career as a professional psychic for successful actors and artists. I dreamed of having  my office at home in a Gramercy Park floor-through condo, my own nearby atelier for creating in Greenwich Village, and a spray-weathered summer place on Fire Island. Sometimes I wanted to be a naturalist on a journey of discovery.  Perhaps I should stay in Chicago after so many years, and commute to a job at Chicago Botanic Garden?  Though restless with wanderlust and nostalgia for so many places possessing genius loci for me, I wondered too if in fact my roving years were over. Was my destiny to stay put and explore inner space through meditation?  With these considerations in mind, I sometimes walked to the shore very early and sat beneath a tree in Hartigan Park near Crown Center -- to see the sun rising over Lake Michigan.  Before taking me to dinner at The Bakery restaurant years before, my father from the shore had pointed out the direction of my birthplace and how the lake's eastern horizon proved the curve of the Earth.  He sometimes quoted from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Future of Mankind, and questioned me, “How's your progress?”  Nonetheless, the feeling that I reside in Chicago by default and that the city is essentially incompatible with my nature, has never left me.  

    Once before in the past my father had spontaneously shown me a glimpse of his soul, when we visited my mother's hilltop grave in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.  He shared that he had only been able to let go of my late mother's image, and to bond with his second wife, when he experienced an inner image of  one favorite tree of his being replaced by another. He was on his knees as he spoke then, caring for the gravesite.  He said, “Let nothing you dismay”, and commented that in his inner eye he identified with a bracing triangle shape (Masonic?), which represented the strength to bear his life's unsettling changes. 

    I  recall experiencing the spiritual dimension in the mid-1980's once when I stood beside my college friend Mark A. Miller just before dusk in his hillside garden above Oakland, California.  At that moment, in words resonating J. Krishnamurti's writing style, Mark linked for me through his own spoken words the beauty of the surrounding hills, the Bay, and the sky we were beholding, to our rising consciousness and  expanding horizons of understanding as Berkeley students.  I was beginning to get a general sense of America, much as I had formed an overview and understanding of Dominican Republic when I had lived there some months with my lover Marino de Jesus Perez Minino in the capital. (In my self-image  and social awareness at Berkeley, I was benefiting from reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Also, I was earning high marks in UCB's first undergraduate course on homosexuality). The next summer I attended Harvard summer school to study Spanish and explore that campus, while remaining ever curious about expanding on the survey courses and interdisciplinary approaches I had studied at Berkeley.  I had a dream one night of a “word screen lattice” in the sky –  a verbal lattice of sorts but it only symbolized a far vaster reality existing around it and beyond.  I felt impelled to understand myself, my times, and the evolving human condition.

    Since that  dream I had re-read the books of  Aldous Huxley and his wife.  Spiritually I felt the Huxleys, though I had not met them, stood in loco parentis for me.  I remained inspired by their lives and interests through all my changes.  When I worked at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and lived nearby, I discovered and tacked up a poster, “APOTHEKER” on one wall of my tiny garden apartment on Grove Street.   The poster's figure and flora held for me a deep significance taking years to unfold; for it was not until the next century that I found and benefited from Mountain Rose Herbs' (www.mountainroseherbs.com) and Horizon Herbs' (www.horizonherbs.com) items for sale from their companies located near Eugene, where I had lived within sight of the University of Oregon campus as a child in 1944.   

    One dawn at Asilomar, California near the chapel by the sea I felt spiritual.  More often I felt a strong uplift and élan, a beautiful freedom, when hiking the footpaths ascending through the botanical garden areas of upper Strawberry Canyon  in Berkeley.  On my special high-perched bench in the garden, I ate my picnic lunch on the planted hillside and was imprinted with a sky-high magnificent natural spirit as I gazed out west towards the Farallon Islands.  I enjoyed similar  feelings when biking through San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to the ocean breakers, a ride during which everything I beheld on occasion seemed to be poetry about to become words.

    Another precursor of the White Light's manifestation was my finding Normandi Ellis' evocative translation Awakening Osiris (Phanes Press).  The work's images of an ancient land where people's faith was sustained and celebrated – images appearing in the included Egyptian invocations, declarations, exhortations and affirmations -- simply spoke directly to my soul as no other book's contents had before.  From first reading, Awakening Osiris evoked in me an inner magenta light pervading my emotions and thoughts whenever afterwards I closed my eyes to be entranced, spiritually encouraged and vitally empowered to emanate actions anew.  Lying on my bed reading the numinous book brought tears to my eyes.  I recognized that I had an underlying spiritual nature capable of being deeply touched across time, even while I was struggling to find and make my way in a mass society at war again and again during a materialistic epoch.  Awakening Osiris became my touchstone bedside book – its messages resonant at core and mysteriously inspiriting.  My tears sprung from my feeling and owning my spiritual dimension – and from remedially seeing how distracted, neglectful and under-serving I had been towards my soul without knowing it.

    More lightly in the early 1990's I explored a nearby Eckankar teaching center where out-of-body practices were taught.  I easily managed to experience hither-thither spacial dimensions, subjectively, and to sky-float while envisioning a silken tether from earth attached to my navel.  Of course I was but one of an aggregate of Chicagoans questing about at the time.  We chased enlightenment from place to likely place like a restless flock of hungry sparrows second-guessing where the next thistle seed and bits of suet would be flung.   We drove or took the 'L' and buses everywhere, curious to be where it was at,  to experience rebirthing breath-work, recovery program meetings, bookstore events, public appearances, indy art film show screenings and  more. I dipped into the old curiosity shop of Ric Addy's Shake Rattle & Read Book Box adjoining the circa 1927 Uptown Theatre. Taking a necessary break, I enrolled as an outpatient for a month in the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago's pain program where I learned how to manage my work-abused scoliotic spine, thinned in the past by malnutrition during third stage alcoholism, when I also lost seven teeth to neglect. Through meditation I found the strength to commute to the Institute and to work through its program's instructional content and exercises. Finding the bodily strength to do so was like my discovering earlier that I could adjust to demanding changes. Vital energy from the Source was eventually rising up through one's soma into my renewed and realigned consciousness – or, better, my body was responding as the servant of my spirit.  I grew kinder to myself; after all, I was but the identified alcoholic in an extended family with its dysfunctions.  Moreover, I gained confidence that my higher power step by step continuously accompanies me through my health challenges – and ongoing healing. 

    I met and socialized with Chicago editor Guy Spiro at the magazine offices of his growing print and online Monthly Aspectarian. Exposure to his work was an excellent counterbalance to the usual misconceived, carping denials of metaphysical matters in mainstream journalism outlets. His periodical was "dedicated to awakening consciousness, with the focus of our efforts being in the areas of personal growth, healthy and holistic living, spiritual transformation, and global awareness."  I was growing too.  Higher mathematics, no longer a field of rote study I had been taught unimaginatively, became more comprehensible to me as a beautiful notational sphere of complex but tinklingly interrelated geometric images.  I was especially fond of 4's and 7's, and happened upon them everywhere.  I recognized set points on graph paper, but also I had a persistent urge to deckle-edge the corners of book pages and stationery.  I became interested in the early recognition of childhood genius, and examined my own boyhood for traces.  Now in the 1990s I felt like a cocooned pupa reconstituting itself while awash in living caterpillar cell soup -- preparatory to breaking out to take wing as a whole new thing.   For several seasons I experienced recurrent dreams of being able to fly at will.   Listening by day, my musical ear instinctively sought out and identified with any heralding high notes and measures I heard played or sung.  My true inner self saw me as standing on a rising rock incline on Mt. Kilimanjaro just a few final steps below the Shirr peak.   I entertained reveries of traveling to Machu Picchu; and four possible ancient methods occurred to me for how, initially and at such a great height, the mountaintop redoubt's great puzzling stonework might have been engineered to rise there.

    To continue, when the initial two-hour period of the White Light mellowed and sufficiently attenuated to permit me,  I dressed and walked toward the lake to enjoy the fresh air and familiar sights along the circuit of my daily walk east and   back home.   (I recalled another time in the neighborhood, when I was struggling to find my way forward in early sobriety, I passed a much older man nicely dressed in a suit and approaching with sure steps from the other way.  He seemed to me a presentiment that I likewise would live on and be well in the next stages of my life -- as an elder.  Imitable habits he probably had developed like AA oldsters had, I felt, just might get me through early sobriety's seeming paranormality and onward into realizations of the big book's Promises.)  Before opening my door,  I wondered if any Loyola Arms Hotel tenants, especially Sophy Pransky the watchful old manager, would  confront me for perhaps looking as changed as I felt. What if I alarmed others by showing strong Light pouring from my eyes?  

    Encountering no one, outside I passed the mixed-border garden I had cobbled together and tended in front of the hotel.  Eventually the Loyola Arms was torn down and replaced with a dedicated parish garden on its site just east of St. Ignatius Church.  I sensed a great wheeling motion in the sky.  Too, I was more than usually aware of the surface intricacies and underlying forms of found objects.   I took my time walking along the lake and back home again, marveling at my peak experience – possibly the peak experience of a lifetime -- as it trailed off.  Before midnight the event folded into my awareness until I was able to sleep.  Years later when I moved away to Uptown I carried with me a keepsake vial of the hotel site's sandy soil with me.  I also carried with me by then the late Sophy Pransky's Holy Bible, Sacred Heart Edition of 1962, bound in red leather and showing a lifetime of her use by the time it came into my possession.

    I remained curious about what people, experiences, and influences had converged and compounded to precipitate my eventual  epiphany into White Light.  During the 1980's and 1990's in Chicago, earlier in the San Francisco Bay Area, and before that in New York City, an urge of divine discontent and unending search spurred me on despite everything -- to find my way to the mountain peak, to enlightenment and understanding.  

    One deep hurt, I surmised, considerably shaped the direction of my natural spiritual capacity, curiosity, and drive for knowledge, discovery and fulfillment.  I suffered being imprinted with a strong emotional imperative during one agonizing trauma under surgery at age five.  This emotional imperative remained influential, though submerged,  in my subconscious for years.   In 1940 at an Army clinic in Louisiana, I was given only a few local skin anesthetic injections and made to watch my father assist at a sanguinary surgical operation on my right lower leg bone to excise a bone spur.  The procedure required a deep incision several inches in length and multiple stitches.  Under the knife, I suffered the excruciating fright of a trapped creature, jaws clenched, desperate to get free but coerced or overpowered into silence.  Ever afterwards, clenching my jaws has brought on a terrible semi-psychotic feeling of being undercut.  As a pre-rational child patient I desperately felt the only escape from my agony was to jump up into the strong light overhanging the operating table on which I was constrained.  Flight-to-light became my imperative! 

    Paradoxically, the physical ordeal visited on me so young may well have formed the matrix and route to the blessing decades later when I at last reached freedom in the ne plus ultra of the White Light.  Why the blessing took so long to manifest, until age fifty-five in my maturity, is not a question I may ask -- nor perhaps is it even the question.  The point may be not when the White Light occurred, but that it occurred. Perhaps like a photographic plate my consciousness needed only one late exposure to comprehend the overall profound picture. Perhaps I am not the waste of a good mystic but a late-maturing one.

     I gained understanding from a quote I found:  “What god wants god shall have, and so I say, make it easy on yourself.  The divine will asks only that things happen, that what it asks to exist comes to pass.  My desire, my little will gives it form.  If I struggle it comes anyway, malformed, a lesser power than it should be.  If I give myself to it, it passes through me and I nourish it as it nourishes me.  The difference is in the knowing of it.  If there is confusion, I have not allowed life, the will of god, to change me.  If I know it, I am changed by it.  Awakening Osiris (65/A Field of Flowers, p. 216)”

    In  Chicago I was greatly influenced by minister and author Dr. Carleton Whitehead (1913-2000) through services and coursework he led from 1969-1989 in the city – both before and after the First Church of Religious Science moved into Water Tower Place on Michigan Avenue.  My friend social worker Lucien Read first took me to hear Dr. Whitehead.  Lucien, commending the congregation to me, said,  “They are such free spirits.” After some months attending services and lectures, I dared give Dr. Whitehead a written creative critique of my considered impressions of Religious Science and the Center's activities as my gift of feed-back.  After reading my comments he looked me in the eyes and as my teacher affirmed my observations with, “You've got it.”  And so it was.  I was awakening.  We talked together in his office from time to time.  He took me to lunch at the Blackhawk Restaurant. I did not understand at first the recognition – and moral imperative to develop and use my spiritual potential to  the fullest – implied by his saying to me, “You've got it.” (But I well understood I could not be more open about my sexual identity and still become a respected leader in most churches.)   He gave me for my own keeping his predecessor the late Dr. Claudine Whitaker's annotated personal copy of founder Ernest Holme's The Science of Mind (Dodd, Mead & Co. 25th printing, 1957).  I thanked him and read it through.  I fashioned a book jacket of gold paper to protect its covers.  I began my years of reading day by day Creative Thought magazine from California.  

     Eva Goldblatt, too, listened to my feelings and thoughts.   As a Practioner she advised me at the Religious Science Center and during one-to-one counseling sessions at her gracious condo overlooking Lake Michigan.   I was impressed and moved when, at the close of our sessions together, instead of showing me out she sat with her eyes closed.  I learned that during these moments Eva was following through, upholding me in her thoughts, envisioning my life healing: its coming together and being in the present tense a true demonstration of my spiritual qualities.  I attended small soirees with a few other church members invited into her home.  The upper floor condominium with views giving onto Lake Michigan was the right setting for this attractive woman (resembling screen actress Natalie Wood) of many accomplishments and informed spirituality. We participated in group meditations and shared conversations together near a grand piano intermittently played softly in the living room.  Once Eva Goldblatt, after having travelled to be in the presence of a contemporary great spirit of whom she had a deep sense, spoke of her admiration for his life and work when she returned to us.  Her feelings seemed very like ones I formed after spending an evening in a private home near Stanford University in the company of Alan Watts following a public lecture he gave in the late 1960's.   

    My interest in Thomas Troward's published comments on intuition led me to discover and develop my gifts as an emerging psychic. (At thrift shops I kept finding half-burned candles that I came to believe symbolized so far unfulfilled prayers that my grandmother Bess Heazard Hunt, a sometime musical accompanist in Chicago, had upheld for my fulfillment.)  I found and attended Rev. Rose Spiros' Saturday developmental classes in spiritual healing and mediumship at First Temple of Universal Law on Drake Avenue in Chicago where she was Pastor.  Rev. Rose, with her ever-at-hand glass of pure water in a clear restaurant tumbler, was a warm, energetic and convincing teacher. Since much earlier times in the century, she had taken part in Chicago's spiritual life and prayer circles.  To help myself determine what kind of psychic I was, I visited the tables of long-experienced churchwomen and public readers elsewhere -- to see them in actual practice. I even visited those women reading cards for clients in a curious, long operating tearoom in an old elevator office building, west across the street from Marshall Fields department store in the Loop.   Gradually I found my gifts becoming centered and best expressed in the capacity of direct psychic sans accouterments, interpreting from immediate images appearing in my mind's eye when I was called upon to read for someone.

    One of my personal challenges was not only to practice a willing suspension of what I had previously been educated to believe were the literal-minded facts of life, but also not to turn totally into a selfless man for others, since I had to provide for myself.  Nonetheless my psychic skills unfolded opportunely and were empowered through Rev. Rose's faith, instruction and encouragement.  I joined the Temple. My mediumship potential found its right form and expression as I continued serving as  a well-liked direct psychic.  

    In the Loyola University environs I first met Dr. Jack Miller, a former Catholic priest who had returned in January, 1991 from study at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich.  He had lately founded his grief-healing and self-discovery Phoenix Project, which I participated in as one of the lay pioneers, with the fee kindly provided by Dr. Miller as I was impecunious.   The sequential group I joined committed itself to being in sacred time during our class's methodic weeks together and individual sessions with our founder/leader -- until our final celebration event, a graduation offering open to the public.  During this opportunity to heal my griefs and get current with my issues, I was impressed by the well-traveled Jack Miller's initial inspiration for a new project of his own design and then his successive working realizations of his life's dream. Jack was open about himself and in rapprochement with scores of people in many places.  He followed our lives encouragingly and stayed in touch with everyone long after our individual group's participation in the Phoenix Project.  It was at my Phoenix Project group's final celebration that I, Prostestant, rose to the considerable personal challenge of giving psychic readings in turn to a long line of people attending our graduation event, held on the premises of Loyola University, generally protective of its Catholic values.

    My former University of Exeter tutor was Richard. N. Parkinson, M.A., educated at Cambridge during F. R. Leavis' time and having done his national service in Egypt.  He corresponded with me before he traveled with his ecologist wife to teach a year in the American Midwest, away from the home they had built in Devonshire, his son Henry having gone to Australia.   I had not recovered my health sufficiently to meet the Parkinsons when they drove to the Midwest.   By letter, though, Richard Parkinson did steer me to a biography that enabled me to learn about (and to consider cautionary, all but too late) the later life and addiction of W. H. Auden.  The renewed contact with Richard even after so many years led me to explore for a while an interest of his, Christian Science.   Soon I reached out and was befriended by Chicagoan Earl Welther of that denomination.  I went to his church's services and gardened with him -- and I became increasingly aware that he had semi-secret designs to take over the local church's leadership.   We planted a red maple there in the front garden of Christian Science's 12th Church, 635 W. Grace Street, Chicago, Earl's home church. When I was invited to the Welther's apartment,  I noted that he and his wife with loving-kindness had posted little signs here and there and everywhere, enjoining all whose eyes alighted upon them to give one another Love.

    Crossing Loyola lakeshore campus with its many attractive looking students in the 1980's I occasionally ran into Gregory A. Sprague.   He was friendly, informative and seemed always rushing somewhere to accomplish tasks.  Once, just back from visiting New York City,  I saw Greg still wearing his S&M style black leather bar jacket.  He died of AIDS in February, 1987 -- long before Gerber/Hart Library moved to a larger W. Granville Avenue location south of the Loyola campus.  Reviewer Larry Bommer, whom I had met, was writing more and more accomplished pieces about Chicago theater – some short later reviews striking me as incisive as sonnets.  I read a few early Paul Varnell newspaper columns, as well as those of handsome young freelance writer Steven Friess, a prizewinner of ambition.  At 1260 W. Loyola Avenue, Allen Smalling lived across the street from my hotel digs. Gay and coupled, he led literary book-readings in his walk-up apartment, where he also held gay parties I attended (where his hand-raised fancy pet guinea pigs were part of the entertainment).  Privately I was journalling to understand myself better, but what I set down week by week to ruminate over provided me with no whole view at this point – nor did another writer's New Yorker short story at the time that, loosely veiled, in part described my supposed situation in my one-windowed room.

    Gerber/Hart Library was once located in a buzz-to-enter basement across from Gay Horizons organization offices on N. Sheffield Avenue.  Under the latter's auspices my blind lover Terry Gorman and I  ran our gay books recording and distributing program called Lambda Resource Center for the Blind.  At Gerber/Hart I first made a point of introducing myself to young Rex Wockner, the gay journalist.   Intent on pursuing facts in the stacks, he took with testiness my interruption of his very eye-on-target work.   But he managed a few words back and split.   Later, Rex went west to become a successful San Diego-based newsman, after having considered residing in Washington, D.C.  Eventually he matured into a popular, even key,  American marvel of journalistic experience, accuracy and  constancy -- freelancing his news stories and columns to gay media in our hemisphere and all over the world.  After he went west to 'Sandy Eggo' (as he quipped) I bicycled by his old apartment building on Marshfield Street in Chicago to see where he had lived and to imagine his life.  Rex had a brother who was into ecology; Rex liked bear type men.  Years before fearless Brit Bear Grylls climbed into heroic popularity through his adventure survival series on television, part of Rex's appeal for me was his own enthusiastic travels abroad – reporting with personal laptop computer and documenting camera.   

    I myself became interested in journalism – perhaps, I thought, to try my hand as an inference reader secondarily circulating apt published materials. I serendipitously found a key, model description of a past American journalist whose popular regular columns were simply a re-worked compilation of his selected news items of the day.  For starters, I liked writing headlines and witty one-liners.  I noted that Rex had studied at Meinrad and Mundelein before Drake University in Des Moines (along with Chicago publisher Tracy Baim).  He wrote somewhere that he broke off celibacy because his undergraduate classmates did – (thus precluding, one supposes, overly-pressurized epiphanies.)   I found the example of Rex Wockner's professional work and travels filled out my picture of the queer fourth estate's array in the world, and its work.  I commenced recycling news by sending out credited clippings representing my modestly forwarded jots and tittles of participation. 

    Tiptoeing into media-land, from the start I felt at a disadvantage. Still, I had and did read widely and I possessed a knack for finding apt articles and sending them out selectively, on composite sheets of newsclips I hoped I had tellingly juxtaposed -- before the Internet changed journalism. Simply put ideas out there, I decided, and let the right readers in Gaia serendipitously find them through six degrees of separation, and so add more buzz to the rising calls for equality rights.  Eventually this action tack brought me the friendship of Washington communications executive Robert Witeck, who early understood my glbt activism style and encouraged me greatly. By contrast when interacting with Rex, I felt like an older, out of practice student retread trying to learn from a younger, inveterately competitive professional, too busy to give me ample tips and in any case out of state and sometimes the country.  Nonetheless Rex Wockner, with his roots in downstate Illinois, engaged my interest.   Further, it occurred to me that advancements in gay rights issues would be well served over time if I gave my enthusiastic support to such talented, energetic, and reactive thought-leaders as he.  I might even avoid the known perils of extended news work: cynicism and burn-out.

    Eventually the law of attraction, serendipity, and the six degrees of separation notion were to bring me into a long-term relationship with leading Ukrainian glbt activist Andriy Maymulakhin (Maymulakhin Andriy Yuriyovich, born October 26, 1969) -- a founder in 2000 of the national  Nash Mir/Our World Gay & Lesbian Center (www.gay.org.ua) which later moved its headquarters from Lugansk to Kiev.   Since my high school days in Butler,  Pennsylvania – with its heavily Slavic-populated Lyndora district – I had taken an interest in my classmates of direct Eastern European descent. Also, at that time my father studied Russian the better to understand those of his Russian-American medical patients who spoke English as a second language. 

    I met the warm, well-favored author and lgbt activist Chris Glaser when he visited and spoke at Unity Church of Chicago on W. Thome Avenue.   (I was impressed anew by our celestial Creator who gives life and form to intelligent and handsome human beings like Chris Glaser from generation to generation for millennia).  I thrived in Unity's enlivening services led  by Mike and Sara Matoin, in its mindfully stocked bookstore (later to have shelf space to the documentary “Why We Fight), and in the three acres of  improved gardens surrounding the sanctuary on the stylish former country club property.  I knew Sara from Unity's earlier days at Ambassador West Hotel, where she once generously gave me self-improvement tapes that I needed but could not afford.    Significantly, Sara said in my hearing, “You can't create if you are depressed.”    Her words impressed on me that some keys to the kingdom are biochemical, and my underlying challenge was to find ways out of my sloughs of  depressed volition so I could express the magnificence of spirit.  Sometimes I felt like an overburdened recruit on The Long March.

    I attended most Sunday services as well as Saturday artists' support meetings at Unity Church.  I knew former New Yorker Ed Townley, whose ministry followed Sara Matoin's, from meetings at a Newtown club.  Sometimes I deeply missed living in New York (while still resenting those in Manhattan who had taught me to drink).  A Unity church member gave me my first IBM computer. At age sixty I was shocked to discover that after fifty-four years of reading I was now computer-illiterate. I needed to master the steep learning curve of personal computer and cyberspace skills. Sometimes I returned to visit Good Shepherd Parish Metropolitan Community Church on Wellington in my former Lincoln Park neighborhood.  I had liked attending services at MCC especially during the pastorate of Rev. F. Jay Deacon.  Rev. Troy Perry, a big, rushing man, flew in from California on one occasion -- and into the pulpit to exhort us heartily.  Years earlier in 1953 as a pre-college teenager I had worked a summer at Chicago's Laird Community House when Miss Corbett ran it. That summer I lived in the men's dormitory of McCormick Theological Seminary at Fullerton & Lincoln Avenue, quite near MetroHelp/National Runaway Switchboard where years later I was office manager under Dave Palmer, whose successful $100,000 grant proposal to Washington passed through my Selectric typewriter.  When I returned to Chicago permanently in the early 1970s, churches again figured in my life.  I worked at United Methodist Lake Bluff Homes for Children headquarters in the Loop's Temple Building as intake coordinator and secretary to the well-known African-American social work figure Bertha Swindell.

    As it happened later, for several weeks I enjoyed a temporary assignment performing office work at Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies before the sparkling glassy new building was constructed on South Michigan Avenue. From working on the locked psychiatric ward at St. Joseph Hospital several years, I already knew of the influence of the somewhat linked Adler School of Professional Psychology, under the same roof as the Institute.  During lunch hours I explored the Museum of Judaica on the ground floor.   It was Sukkus holiday time, and I received an inclusive spiritual blessing while celebrating with friendly Spertus staff over bowls of ripe autumn apples.  This was deja vu for me, recalling a formative student summer I spent with office staff transcribing home studies for Jewish Child Care Association, then on Madison Avenue in New York City.   There I had been warmly socialized, so far as my own nervousness over being gay allowed me to be, and I became a yiddishe neshuma for life.   Later I enjoyed the invaluable  publishing industry mentoring of Miss Dorothy Sharif, a lawyer's daughter from New Jersey and my superior while working in New American Library's Rights & Permissions Department on Madison Avenue.  Years later I thought up the concept of  pre-reviewing new books in provincial cities (like Broadway plays are tested and refined before final production) and book publishers took up the practice, deeming the promotional form “Advance Praise”.

    When our paths crossed in Chicago's Boystown around 1980, I had coffee with the accessible, out-and-about, ever-chronicling street columnist Jon-Henri Damski wearing his trade-mark baseball cap.  He commented to me -- pointedly, and especially -- that it was always easier to destroy than create. Hung over, I had come to at home one morning having bled through my pillow from a unfelt lesion suffered during a blackout the night before. Another ill morning I found I had been sleeping rough under the Cubs Stadium, as I had once done in an open field in Saugatuck, Michigan.  I thought at the time that one could not blame the tiny yeast cell for man's appropriating its defensive fluid to distill into the ready escape of high proof spirits.  (The nadir of my hereditary and denied disease of compulsive abusive imbibing, along with my cross-addiction to mood aids, was not to occur until 1982 -- during a very low bottom indeed.)  Jon-Henri and I twirled around together one evening on the big dance floor at the after-hours disco Charlie's Chicago.  Another time he showed me upstairs to his old hotel home snuggery, with his alcoved typewriter accessible within one wall of the single furnished room.  He was involved with his sidekick, the quirky twink Omega Michael, whose popping, far-out art work decorated the south wall.  I could never come to terms with Jon-Henri's puzzling, popular journo writing, because I could neither identify nor fathom where he was coming from. Perhaps he enjoyed being unique.  He was off my map, but certainly more inspired than just any journeyman hack scribbler.  Jon-Henri had taught college in the East, and at Truman College, Chicago.  He recommended I read Huston Smith, the religious studies scholar,  and I am grateful to Jon-Henri that I did.   

    Novelist Richard W. Peck came to town from New York City for a book signing, staying, as of course he must to burnish his image, with suitably chic friends on the North Shore.  We got caught up on personal news in a long local phone call, Richard wittily chatting in his rapid, bantering, ever self-appreciative manner.  By contrast, when I was eventually overtaken by personal ambition myself, the irresistible thrust to achieve seemed to me a side issue I hardly recognized in my life, though I eventually became listed in Who's Who in the Midwest, and later in Who's Who in the World.  “Oh,” I thought, “ have I become  thrall of the  tyrannical goddess Fortuna that one chases to self-exhaustions for glittering prizes?” If I were not thrusting forward with all the strength of a Bertrand Russell's “twenty locomotives,” nonetheless I experienced a like sense of motion.  Annie Proulx was to win the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction in 1993.  I meet her at a Miracle Mile hotel lobby around prize-giving time. She joked, “Well, we are not ninth graders any more at Black Mountain High School in North Carolina!” We had a rushed walk to the lakeshore and back before she had to leave for O'Hare Airport.  As in the past, her attitude towards me bespoke that she thought me naïve about people, whose shadow sides she knew were always up to no good. Another time I saw her when she read and signed books at Borders Bookstore at 830 N. Michigan Avenue.  I wondered why Annie had  convinced herself she was obliged to do wearisome book tours, when her forte was composing quality fiction.

    Several articulate students who took classes at the Jung Center in Evanston shared with me some of what they were learning, and I visited the Jung Center out of curiosity.   Too, members of the Temple on Drake Avenue told me about their summertime visits to Lily Dale Spiritual Community in upstate New York and to Camp Chesterfield Spiritual Center, Indiana. The huge domed Baha'i Temple of pierced stone on Chicago's North Shore attracted me.  I bicycled there to meditate and to explore its sanctuary,  the exhibitions downstairs, and the symmetrically laid out flower gardens.   

    On one of many day trips to Chicago Botanical Garden, I experienced a distinct mystical feeling.  An image came that prompted me to caress plants with the shadow of my hand and then reveal the sun to them in passing, as if I were a master gardener.  On the Fruit & Vegetable Isle another time I came upon a happy mother standing unselfconsciously in the sunlight; on impulse she was  lilting out a song of joy for her two smiling pre-school children.  I meditated within sight of the central fountain's great column of living water rising in a single thrust from the northeastern lake.   I returned often to Chicago Botanic Garden.  To me it became a Monaco size enclave almost like a separate country, as I familiarized myself with its greenhouses' micro-climates, special plantings, islands, library, and exhibitions.  The presence of too many intrusive service roads, however, must have stemmed from an initial overall error in the Garden's plan – as was allowing in  distracting noise from the highways bordering on two sides, and from airplanes in flight too close overhead.  

    One noon I, like a haiku figure, ate my lunch undisturbed on a bench being gleaned for wood fibers by an absorbed bald-faced hornet.   And once a box turtle routed by an earlier rainstorm appeared at my feet as I sat daydreaming about nearby Ragdale artists' cloister, full-up with my betters. I met my brother and sister and their families for a picnic at the Garden. But there was but one gay me, and so many of them in our extended family following a quite different narrative.  Their unrelieved parental preoccupations jangled my soft-focus feelings for nature, we did not jibe much any more, and I never repeated gathering at my magical Garden with them.  AA was indeed turning out to be truly “a program of change” for me – and them.  Talking with one another, some of my family members voiced a kind concern for one another's welfare – a tender manner I had long had to smother in my expediency to survive. But since my earliest childhood in the South, trees, shrubs and flowers seemed indescribably evocative and special to me.  It was enough for me to look at a new green plant to sense its characteristics and remember its condition and location. Either of my forefingers determined soil's water content at a touch. Through many troubled years I kept houseplants and cobbled together little temporary gardens where I could.  Green-leaning to begin with, in time I became a credible urban guerrilla gardener.

    I  also enjoyed bicycling along the city's lakeshore, and west to North Park Village Nature Center with its pond, sugar maples and working, demonstration honey bee hives.  I felt a profound almost incredulous sorrow that the Earth's climate was imperiled, that living things I had liked all my life were threatened or disappearing forever.  I remembered and wondered about a certain hilltop garden with its strolling gay befrienders that I had frequented in Ulm, Germany in the 1950's as an infantry soldier before the coming of acid rain. 

    I went several times with friends to services at Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. In Chicago, we also went to hear a noted priest-healer visiting from Ireland.   I explored a suburban Cicero church where the psychically sensitive minister answered billets submitted by members and visitors attending his service.  Earlier that Sunday morning I had been open-stitching a glove at home, and the completely unprompted minister saw for me psychically a green inch-worm with open-stitching movements.  I explored a Sunday service at Moody Church – for the choir music.  Friends and acquaintances in my milieu always were sharing with me:  news of upcoming events,  affirmations by Louise L. Hay, Cabbala insights, self-improvement and music tapes, new books published by Bear and Company and The Theosophical Society in Wheaton. and more.  A friend introduced me to the Men's Movement and took me to an animal-animus men's gathering in Evanston where I began learning  about Robert Bly, his poetry, and activities.  (I was already a longtime subscriber to James White Review.)   Although Joseph Campbell had died in 1986 his work was still being read, watched on television and  talked about.  (Krista Tippett's 'Speaking of Faith' (later named 'On Being') radio interviews over WBEZ-FM Chicago were years in the future in the new century.)  I met a very beautiful, erotic-neurotic member of MENSA at a 12-Step program meeting. She invited me to attend a MENSA social gathering at an O'Hare hotel with her and I did, for I had long been interested in MENSA, its members,  and their activities.

    Rev. William B. Glenesk, a close Presbyterian friend from Toronto, continued our decades-long friendship and exchange of correspondence.  We had first met at his arts-friendly Spencer Memorial Church, Brooklyn Heights, NYC, before he became known for officiating at the 1969 wedding of entertainer Tiny Tim on television's The Tonight Show.  In the 1980s I airmailed him a copy of The Christian Century from Chicago, and from London he wrote a piece the publication printed. I saved most of his correspondence to me over the years, with an eye towards depositing it with Gerber/Hart Library, Chicago. Though letter-writing generally diminished as a form of expression, ours continued for years and in future may prove interesting as two men's exchange in the twentieth century.  By contrast, in the new century I was to correspond totally by email with a new friend, Graham Underhill, Melbourne, Victoria based international correspondent. 

     I especially enjoyed Kitaro's music during this period and listened to it often. Also, I liked music in a minor key, music that changed key, and music played with the French horn, my favorite. I first heard Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate over late-night FM radio.  My spirit was especially uplifted by this music from Hearts of Space Records in San Francisco (1986 Gandarva).  I searched for and bought the cassette, tellingly described as a Magnificat and Exaltate for digital orchestra, choral voices and special electronic images – finding its mystical roots in Western sacred tradition, and its themes in the timeless archetypes of the transformative journey.  It touched my soul. 

     I accompanied my friend Charles Gill to Irene Hughes'  Michigan Avenue office suite and classroom for an appointment of his to have a reading from this Mid-American psychic of note.  For a while I attended a long-standing weekday evening healing and worship service on campus at Loyola University.   A Loyola departmental secretary I knew, Mrs. Connie Steinke, kindly steered me to the service after I happened to find a guide to spiritual growth on a campus sidewalk, and took the book as a sign to work further on overcoming my spiritual crisis.  At one such campus service I made the acquaintance of the Classical Studies Department's John Makowski, who had mounted the lectern and contributed compellingly.  I realized soon enough,  after I later spoke with John and visited his office and walk-up apartment near Edgewater  Library,  that I could become too fascinated and absorbed for my own good by this charismatic and impassioned teacher of many attractions.   In addition to his presence and accomplishments, John had a most interesting family history stemming from WWII-era Eastern Europe.  Nonetheless, shortly after the outset of the friendship I reluctantly but necessarily withdrew to concentrate on my own development.  

    In these years Sherwin's Health Foods was open in two Chicago locations.  The hearty Sherwin himself  waited on me and steered me to special items somewhat ameliorating my mood disorder.  I found a commercial blend of twenty free form amino acids that diminished my depressions as did my avoiding the, for my constitution, dysphoric co-factors in coffee – by not drinking it. Instead, I moderately used caffeine in halved tablet form, to good mood effect. The benefits of taking caffeine separately from coffee took me thirty years to discover -- along the explorative path of self-caring for my odd constitution.  I patronized Dr. Michels Herbs on N. Western Avenue as well.  For years I raised a series of kombucha mushrooms for their tonic tea -- each fleshy fungi disk resembling a quivering, living placenta.  I learned to fast and dropped below obesity level by thirty-five pounds, excess weight I had supposed could be a  hedge if needed against the risk of wasting away should I ever contract AIDS.   Howard Cohen's Booksellers Row bookstores were open in two, then three locations.  I visited one or another store weekly, bringing books in for sale and taking others out -- perhaps excessively, but it was the feverishly acquisitive 1980s. I read incessantly to satisfy my mind's university of interests and to stay above the undertow of  daily depression. 

    Through several groups I knew Paul Samuelson, a visual artist, gallery owner, and Far East traveler.  I looked up to him, a vital, cultivated man.  He invited me to his home, a Manhattan-style double-condo off N. Marine Drive, when he had open house, showed his art work, and entertained.  I never fully outgrew my need, developed during my New York decade, to be befriended by older mentors.   I joined other New Age adventurers for one memorable past life regression session during which  I tranced into my erstwhile 18th Century identity as minister, apparently, of a straitened chapel with a stony grave yard in central Devon.  I dipped into the I Ching for answers. I sampled sessions of breath work in Unity's social hall until I experienced rebirthing for myself.  Learning to meditate was a long process that I eventually mastered on my own.  I took an interest in Tarot cards and their history. I explored Cabbala. As mentioned before, in an OBE group, I easily embarked skyward to experience floating between earth and moon by a silken terrestrial tether attached to my navel.  I yearned to evolve in serenity and live my daily life along a course glimpsed as possible during sacred moments.  Learning and practicing yoga in a Mr. Hunt's small neighborhood group, I painfully worked through my body's rigidities and adhesions brought on by years of working sick, hunched over by day in subservient office work and hunched over by night on bars stools. In the 1950's my being discharged from the U.S. Army, after thirteen months' duty, with an Undesirable Discharge for being gay subsequently led to my ever-present, never outgrown fear of being ostracized or dismissed outright by any of my later employers who might find out. (Even during my basic Infantry training at Ft. Carson, Colorado, while sitting on the barracks steps one night I perceived the moon pulling me towards suicide because I was different.) In civilian life I often felt like a beetle trapped in a matchbox being shaken .  When my self-esteem healed enough, I vowed I would never again force myself to waste my time and talent upon incompatible, soul-destroying jobs – though I was not work-shy.  

    My wealthy younger friend John Feldman squired me about Chicago in the early 1990's and thus enabled me to maintain the fiction of still being part of Chicago's upwardly mobile gay scene.  However, progressing in successful recovery at last, I was determined to avoid a casual sex lifestyle and drinking situations as certainly too risky.  Only very slowly did I recognize and accept that through ill health I had dropped economically from the middle-class into grinding financial insecurity.  As I was partly awakening and regaining self-control, though, bursts of freed energy radically expanded all my interests and appetite temptations -- even while I was dealing with bodily tics and glitches of my autonomic system along with self-defeating mental resistances.  A new acquaintance Jason Serinus, a California performance whistler and author, sent me a cassette of his music and his new lotus-embossed book Psycho-immunity & the Healing Process.  Jason also was first to excite me about the ongoing international activities of the Prophets Conference (www.greatmystery.org).  Later he sent me a little unexpected and welcome money encouraging my news clipping service, as did Boyd McDonald from New York City,  French Wall, Ed. (The Guide) and Rev. Jay Deacon from Boston, and Randy Shultz from San  Francisco.  William Glenesk sometimes tucked a welcome five pound note into his personal letters to me.  

    During my recovery and radical reformation, I pondered optional future roles for myself.  I asked myself what of my past was fortuitous and what was sickness-skewed, even pitiable for being memories laid down in depressed states? Clearly I was more a reader and comprehender than a writer. I was increasingly aware of the craft of writing's masochistic side, as the poetaster and would-be novelist I seemed to be. Paradoxically I avoided closely learning in detail the very forms of literary expression! Without knowing what, I felt something more overarching, more spiritual existed that I needed to pursue and reach.  I experienced  my seemingly self-defeating ambivalence about writing even when poet Clara Lundie Crawford, in private lessons given to me, Annie Proulx and a few other ninth graders in Black Mountain, North Carolina, outpoured her attention and encouragement upon me.  All  these early years I remained ignorant that psychics and mystics existed.

    I read much, often wholly absorbed in the activity.  During the early 1990s, my eyes took on a new mode of motion.  Their movements became neither jumpy, nor fleet as in speed-reading, but gliding.   It was very pleasant feeling my open eyes gliding swiftly and tirelessly, caressing to and fro the undersides of their lids.  Not having needed glasses until my 50's, I could still see unaided the wisp of vapor from a cup of tea across the length of a room. I bought a new dictionary.  I personally became most aware of the strong emotional and behavioral link between our deep-time mammalian antecedents' skill at habitual grooming, and modern man's ability to focus acutely, through like skills, on reading for a considerable attention span.  (Nikola Tesla had grown fascinated by women's earrings, I obsessed about barbering. I became fascinated by men's features and grooming.)  I made a point of reading under whole light, because I had developed a practical interest in the range of commercially manufactured light sources, from plant lights to tanning lamps.  My pupils, butterscotch-rufous in color, dilated when I looked at what I liked.

    It came to pass that an older woman and well-read church member who served as a healer and psychic at the Temple on Drake Avenue most fortunately referred me to Evelyn Underhill's classic work Mysticism. I comprehended at once from the table of contents that this book was key for me.  It was nothing less than the author's masterly study of the nature and development of Man's spiritual consciousness.  Many fine mornings I then dedicated to bicycling with Mysticism and my lunch to Elliot Park on the lakeshore in Evanston.  In splendid isolation at a picnic table, day by day and chapter by chapter, for an entire month I carefully read Mysticism from cover to cover, pondering, underlining, margin-inscribing, and absorbing its wisdom.  Within Mysticism's pages I found conclusive matches for many of my own feelings, experiences, and growing understanding of who I had been while growing up and who I was becoming in maturity.  (Many years later, in the new century I found Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism to guide my development further and to answer many questions that had arisen in the meantime.  I was inspired by Chapter 7 as especially exhortative.  I read Margaret Cropper's Life of Evelyn Underhill, and took heart picturing her life's journey and achievements. I read Essential Writings, containing Emilie Griffin's important Introduction.)

    When I took a respite from studying for a turn in the park and looked south, I recalled the sandy spot where I had celebrated my eighteenth birthday down the shore on Montrose Beach, north of St. Joseph's Hospital where I was much later to work on the psychiatric ward and become quite patient-centered in attitude during caring shift work on the nursing team.   I recalled a time earlier still, playing in 1939 as a kindergartner in the courtyard of south-side International House on the Midway when my father was a medical intern at Chicago Lying-In Hospital.  From Elliot Park, to my north I could see Northwestern University, where Aldous Huxley taught for six years.

     I could understand a dark night of the soul, having endured depression for decades while never being certain that accepting counseling and prescription drug treatments based on the American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic & Statistical Manual would not dumb down my creativity and overly conform my spirit. More than as a fated existential condition, I experienced depression as an affective slough: my absence of willingness and shut-down of emotions.  I felt like I was waiting for dawn under house arrest. I was late in accepting I must protect my core nature, my privacy to meditate and practice inner migration, and my leisure to develop spiritually.  Still, I had eventually found a sanctuary of sorts and a particular setting in all the world, for the time being of recovery, at the decrepit Loyola Arms Hotel.   I considered the odds of my having reached even my present coalescing situation as one chance in five million.  The odds of developing my potential to full self-realization I judged to be even higher, in this dollar-driven city where harried workers rushed between two or more jobs, and the fierce subway cacophony could destroy one's subtle inner promptings.  Yet, somehow I had managed to discard  old ideas and life-threatening habits necessary for me to release.  

    Also, I had accelerated my personal energy enough to achieve emotional escape velocity. I succeeded in thrusting myself free from my conventional family and overwhelming,  careening, physician father whose latter-day psychiatric records diagnosing and chronicling his manic depression I eventually requested and read (but certainly not alongside Mysticism in Elliot Park...).  Growing up, I had felt like a Phoenix fledgling in the midst of a mob of loud starlings.  Later, having come out,  I felt like a man without a country.  Nonetheless, somehow I survived with my essential nature principally intact despite the assaultive and intrusive impact of American mass society, money-driven and ad-saturated, surrounding and confusing me.  Perhaps it is true, as Robert says in Paris To The Moon, “. . . it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves – though only after the crisis is over.  Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone.   Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you.” (A Handful of Cherries chapter, p. 293).

    Lena Biernacka was very much in my life for over eight years. Non-anonymous by choice, she was an open,  articulate and reactive recovery maven well-known about town in Chicago 12-step circles. A Polish-American citizen from the Bug River banks and Warsaw, she took a keen interest in spiritual matters and languages – and, surprising to me, little or none in WW II history.  She possessed a huge unabridged English dictionary such as Joseph Conrad might have perused – or held in mind.  We attended many meetings, where sometimes she and sometime I gave lead talks as dry, clean, smoke-free alcoholics with lengthening sobriety.  I shared in AA meetings about meditating in 1982 in my back porch container garden on Wolcott Street: praying as a last resort to have my disease lifted from me. On June 23 it was lifted: I had the actual feeling of a convectional vapor moving out of me and off me up into the sky to dissipate. 

    For a while Lena lived in her own space at the Loyola Arms Hotel.  So I had a supportive sponsor practicing sobriety as my exemplar under the same roof.  Lena  commented on the necessary dailiness of living: the routines and chores required. She had, however, no answer for the paradox that though my sobriety continued unbroken so did my depression, which others saw and bluntly commented upon. She did inquire severely of me, however, “What kind of God do you have?” My first sponsor, the cultivated John Townsend, an urbane travel agent, had died earlier.   Neither sponsor made the writing of one's Fourth Step easier during the first years following my June 23, 1982 anniversary date of sobriety. I much distracted myself antiquing with a companionable new friend, Wally Leck. I spoke once with Annie Proulx on the phone, and corresponded briefly with her in 1983 when she was improving her Cider Mill house in Vermont, doing public relations work for a hospital within commuting distance, and no longer owner of the newspaper Behind The Times (Bradford). I felt her energy and achievements overwhelmed me and I left off after the exchange of a few letters. 

    Over time going to and from meetings, I collected a three-inch roll of public transportation transfer  tickets, each one being proof of my willingness to attend recovery meetings and to restore myself without lapsing into self-pity.   For exercise I often bicycled miles to meetings and on errands.  I freed myself from smoking cigarettes by substituting a red pepper seed on the tip of my tongue each time I craved to light up.   Lena followed me to the Temple on Drake Avenue, where she pressed the leadership to adopt A Course in Miracles.  Though Lena regularly gave me tough love and affection, in myself I felt I had no bosom confidante with the comprehension, experience and gay élan that I needed to understand myself and to break into full being. 

    To minimize interruptions in my life I cared and charred for myself at home without anyone's direct help.  I was journaling, but my writing entries continued to seem a partial and incremental activity, for only the whole view of things would satisfy me.  Lena taught me a healthier diet, and she continued calming me away from chasing common excitements. However, I never outgrew my insuperable susceptibility for grace-through-vision. I continued looking about to find and appreciate male glamour, strength and good bodily form.  I over-idealized new faces perhaps because I was late in refining self-recognition of my own given image. AA, being a program of change, Lena and I visited Montreal with other Chicagoans in July, 1985 for the international AA 50th Anniversary celebration.  There, out walking alone, I experienced an uplifting spiritual moment standing before a plaque commemorating Canada's discovery.   In the shape of an open bronze book in Parc Mont-Royal overlooking Montreal and beyond, the plaque faced south with the United States in the distance. At that moment standing there I had a transcendental glimpse that seemed to be a  whole panoramic scene  of my country laid out beyond the international border.  (I also sensed that I carried the burden of feeling I had to be the measure of all things, without knowing why that burden should befall me.)

    After the ineffable White Light in Chicago irradiated (or imploded) me into deeper self-understanding and renewal, I became more aware of my life's path and more tolerant of others along the way.  I could appreciate the meaning of the once puzzling phrase, “where one is coming from.”  To me the phrase now meant the standpoint and viewpoint a living person fashioned and held in our planetary- cosmic setting. Two hours of enlightenment brought me the most complete experience of my life.  A true feeling of compassion for others returned, after long suspension, into my emotions.  I felt a spiritual sense that the Great Tradition is paramount, cumulative and ongoing.  Hope arose in me as I gradually became dependably premised in positive energy, steadier and healthier -- grateful to be able to care, act and cherish.  My sense of humor returned, especially when my healthy but over-sexed inner impulses surged.  I felt I was more often in a Beta waves mood.  I began to accept my mortality and believe that dying is less a problem for me than a problem of others foisting their fears and superficialities upon me.  The ego's strong self-preservation instinct seemed to  me only a function of the passing condition of being alive. My inner critic abated and I found after years of feeling blocked that I could more readily compose writing. With a newly solved facility, words seemed to slip into my field of vision from the right hand side of  paper or screen -- in a half-conscious way I wondered I had not hit upon before when I was a left-handed person expecting inspiration from the left direction.  Yet some driving divine discontent caused me to ruminate over whether or not I shall ever again experience the White Light in my lifetime.  

    I wonder why my experience of enlightenment was so late in coming – withheld until age fifty-six.  It seems a humbling  paradox that I have come later rather than sooner to the  conviction that I am potentially a mystic.  Am I to be but the waste of a good mystic? What choice has anyone to try his best, if he was born covered in the mantel of mysticism, no matter when he realizes it?  For good and all, was I a church member, a contemplative, a psychic, a mystic, or perhaps, with late-arriving resolve I am fated to be the patron of younger generation neo-mystics I shall surely recognize and know how to help?  Nonetheless, the Light radiated a direct and lasting awareness in me that a powerful sustaining spiritual dimension informs my entity, and indeed pervades everything in my view.  Learning to trust and tap into spirit, I became empowered for constructive activities.  Keeping access open to the divine, and especially while acting as a psychic interface for others  enlisting me to see and read for them, was not without its cost in exhaustion, however. This said,  in quiet times I can experience equipoise, peace of mind, and the priceless state of inner integrity and outer synergy known to the ancient Egyptians as ma-at.  

     By contrast, in former years I  suffered confusion and I despaired of finding out how and where I could fit into the world.  I was never economically motivated beyond basic survival; I carried no credit cards.   But neither was I lacking a work ethic and a desire to achieve – perhaps to win succes d'estime. Depressed, I got through academic and job failures, broken relationships, self-neglect, and grinding daily chores while working sick with chronic back pain and nauseous hangovers seemingly beyond remedy.  Perhaps my years of cooking meals on a hot plate and eating alone led to a borderline anemia that wilted me into asceticism, despite nearby St. Ignatius church's distribution of food from their basement public pantry.  Though I had worked many years, I dropped below the poverty line and into Chicago and the state's patchy safety net.  The national SSI program would not cover my disease, as recovery provisions would have done in Sweden, for instance.  

    Reaching my milestones in recovery, I saw many not flexible enough to cope slipping back into denial and active alcoholism, the lonely disease. Much later, Lena wrote me from Oregon that church acquaintances there had persuaded her to begin drinking again – wine. Surprisingly when I got sober I found I was HIV-negative, and I have self-disciplined myself to live at the lowest risk, in celebacy.  The examples of my lover Jerry Gregory's death from AIDS, and that of my last fond intimate Tom Koch (with his nearby bungalow and garden) led me to chose celibacy along with sobriety in 1982.  So radical a change in my lifestyle brought psychosomatic symptoms of aphasia and avoidance of touching or being touched -- except eventually by pets. I began reading out loud to myself to encourage retention of my power of speech. Yet through all my wracking emotional disruptions, soul-killing employment mismatches, housing crises and other degradations brought on by inexorable dependencies long practiced and denied before recovery -- some genuine core of innocent willingness to renew and fulfill myself survived.  All along, I had a feeling I was a late-bloomer and above all I wanted to retain and improve a clear mind to perceive intimations from spirit.

    To me depression was like a deep cold current over which the balmy Gulf Stream of belief circulated uncertainly.  For slow submarine days I drifted sunk in the current below, subject to my mood disorder, all the while aware of what was potentially possible during the times I felt well. Every week for years when I sharpened my kitchen knife I realized the importance of decisively cutting through my confusion.  I waited through many winters only to find I experienced next to no uplift of vernal renewal in springtime, and I learned to go on “as if”. Self-monitoring my moods was like watching a fishing float bobbing down while I willed it upward. I often felt inured to everything, as if I had developed the frustration tolerance of a zombie. When I managed to be in the flow above depression, I lived in claritas, hope and possibility as long as I could make it last.  I knew both toppling chaos and fine order in myself and surroundings, and I was not at peace living the paradox.

    I pondered going to London to take metaphysical courses at the venerable Spiritualist Association of Great Britain on Belgrave Square.  After my White Light experience I felt, “Now I have seen I have the capacity to ascend to spiritual fulfillment as a mystic, to be at one with the source and to serve the living with my best. Why else have I been affirmed for my potential, and vouchsafed a peak episode of enlightenment within the very ne plus ultra?”  Eventually much later, it occurred to me that broadcast journalist and author Krista Tippett (http://being.publicradio.org/) might be someone with answers and directions for me from contemporaries.

    I listened over and again to Novus Magnificat.  The music invariably brought wonderfully ascending, wider and wider panoramic views to my mind's eye.  Though still questioning my life situation long after the White Light, I progressed slowly over the years and improved in stages -- in a patient Carl Rogerian long-term wending way. Eventually, to my surprise, I found myself even rising to the highest level of self-integration and service described by Carl Rogers, the seventh. The realization grew more acceptable to me that my spiritual vocation might simply be for the most part what it already was: being an aware volunteer urban gardener living longer and longer within a medium-sized group milieu in a world city -- where I read in the evenings.  When, years later in the new century, with clear libermancy I was psychically led straight to a shelved copy of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life by Gregg Levoy  (www.gregglevoy.com) for re-sale at 'Brown Elephant' thrift shop on North Clark Street, I read it from cover to cover with amazed attention and growing understanding deeply felt. Most questions about my life's past and path then seemed masterfully clarified and answered from a knowing depth that satisfied my soul and touched me with humility, gratitude and tears. 

     When my lifespan comes to full circle, perhaps I shall be blessed with the release I would wish – to die serenely by myself, held by no one's hands, asleep in my own space in the midst of a natural dream.  Perhaps beautiful wavering bands of aurora borealis will brighten into a steady White Light above me, having returned to my birthplace on the Huron River.  For I would like to have gone back by then to Ann Arbor, the place in Michigan I first saw and felt the sun's light.  It is the university city where I wandered as a twelve-year old boy into the Arboretum at the foot of Harvard Place -- and up to the paths surrounding a fragrant peony garden planted on a broad hilltop -- beneath the Pleiades circling Alcyone with its torque attenuating even unto me. Through some latter-day peony flower petals may my scattered dust shine radiant once more in the sun's portion of the prime and ultimate Light.

    - from notes made before  & after the White Light event of December 2, 1991, Chicago.  Revision 2.3.0  March 23, 2011