Travels by Michael Crichton
Suddenly I heard a booming voice. It seemed to be inside my head, vibrating the bones of my skull, and also inside the room, like a great loudspeaker. The voice was full and resonant and echoing like the voice of God.
The voice said, “Jill St. John!”
I snapped my eyes open. I was sure everybody else in the room must have heard it, too. But the others were all sitting in the lotus position, peaceful, not moving.
Nobody had heard the voice but me.
What could the voice mean? I had met Jill St. John once but I didn’t know her, and hearing her name didn’t suggest anything in particular to me. It wasn’t as if the voice had said, “Go west, young man!” or “Write your congressman!” or something that you could do anything about.
So I thought, Boy, I heard a voice, but now I can’t tell anybody, because it said this mundane thing, it said “Jill St. John!” But I was so excited to have heard a voice at all, I told people anyway.
“You know, I heard a voice today.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was big and booming and seemed to fill the universe.”
“That’s great. What did it say?”
“Uh, it’s personal.”
I wanted a vision, too. I mean, why not have the whole thing of a desert retreat, voices and visions? I was greedy for spiritual experiences. I wanted more.
But no vision came to me. I sat out in the desert and observed a lot of heat-convection waves and mirages, but no vision.
One day, at lunch, we were talking about the fact that, whenever we did energy work, Brugh always insisted that we begin by imagining a protective cocoon or shield around ourselves, to protect us from any harmful aspects of the work. I wondered if this ritual shielding was really important.
Eileen, a woman from Alaska who had done a lot of energy work, said, “Sure, it’s important.”
“It is?”
“Sure. All that stuff is important. It’s just like fluffing your aura.”
“What do you mean, fluffing your aura?”
“Haven’t you ever fluffed your aura?” Eileen said, surprised.
“No.”
“But you know how it’s done.…”
“I can’t begin to imagine.”
“Well, you know, you get all the accumulated stuff out of the aura that shouldn’t be there, and once it’s clean you sort of fluff it up, you know, make it fluffy and nice.”
“Oh.” I thought this was about as ridiculous as anything could be. I imagined beauty parlors of the future—get your hair and nails done and an aura fluff all for one price. New Age maintenance!
Eileen had to be pulling my leg.
“Here, stand up, I’ll do it for you.”
“Do I need it?”
She eyed me critically. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt.”
Just what they always say in beauty parlors!
I stood up in the middle of the cafeteria, and Eileen formed her fingers into claws and raked her hands down my body, about a foot away from my skin. Just as if she were combing invisible fur. At the end of each combing motion, she’d quickly shake her hands clean and comb again. Finally she held her hands palms upward, and made little pushing motions, exactly as if I were covered in cotton wool and she wanted to fluff it up. I watched, fascinated. But already I could feel a difference. It was almost like taking a bath. I felt cleaned up, spruced up … fluffed up.
The other people watched and tried to suppress giggles. At the end they said, “Well, Michael, how does it feel to have your aura fluffed?”
“I hate to tell you,” I said, “but I notice a difference.”
“You don’t!”
“I do,” I said.
“Of course you do,” Eileen said. “Somebody fluffs your aura, of course you’ll feel it.”
So then all the people in the cafeteria began fluffing their auras. And eventually we stopped making any kind of jokes about body energy.
Midway through the conference, Brugh announced we would have two days of fasting and silence. I had never fasted before, and I was looking forward to the experience. Also, I wanted to stay out in the desert for a while, and I knew if there were meals I would come back for them. I just would.
So two days of fasting and silence sounded liberating to me. And it was: I slept in the desert and stayed out there, and drew pictures. I had a fine time, but I made some surprising discoveries.
The first was that I talked to myself in the desert. I walked along with a constant stream of grunts and curses as I stubbed my toe or scrambled over a rock. No wonder people thought I was angry! Just listen to me swear and groan! I had been entirely unaware that I was doing it. In fact, I found it difficult to stop, and to walk through the desert in silence.
On the second night of fasting, I woke up in the desert in the middle of the night. I looked up at the sky and I saw that all the stars of the Milky Way had been rearranged like skywriting into a single giant word, followed by an exclamation point, that filled the bowl of the sky:
“HI!”
I was finally seeing a vision.
I was excited. I thought, This is great. This means that the universe is looking down at me and saying, HI! It means I am integrated with the universe and All Is One. Fabulous.
I waited for the vision to go away, but it didn’t. I looked down at my sleeping bag, then looked back. The sky still said “HI!” I was very pleased with myself. A really nice, stable vision.
Then I thought, The sky only looks like this because of the way I am sleeping. If I were turned around, it wouldn’t say that at all. It would say, ¡IH, with an upside-down exclamation point, as in Spanish. That ¡IH seemed to convey indifference, like EH? Who cares? So maybe I was really seeing a vision of cosmic indifference.
With that, I went back to sleep.
The next morning, I left my camp and went off to sketch in the desert. After a few hours, I headed back to camp. I couldn’t find the camp. The desert had become absolutely unfamiliar to me. And then I realized I couldn’t find the institute, either. I was lost.
I am never lost. My inner sense of geography is good. Yet here I was, alone in the desert, and unable to find my camp or the institute. It took a while for me to realize that with the high mountains at my left shoulder, the institute had to be on my right. I climbed the hills to the right, and saw the institute.
Then where was my camp? I spent another hour looking for my camp. When I finally found it, I saw from my footprints that I had walked all around it for an hour, but hadn’t seen it.
Perhaps the fasting was affecting me more than I realized.
Toward the evening, I began to feel filled with tremendous energy. It was almost overwhelming, this tingling, rushing sense of energy. I was restless. I drew pictures in my book and made notes long into the night. Finally, around midnight, I got into bed and lay there for a while, wide awake. I thought, This is ridiculous, I’ll never get to sleep. So I got up again and drew for several more hours.
What I recorded while in the grip of this energy seemed terrifically silly. I was preoccupied with cacti, and I recorded all kinds of giddy foolishness in my notebook. I wrote poetry from the viewpoint of a cactus. I wrote cactus philosophy. I also drew designer cactus fashions, a history of cactus religion, Cactus Comics, the Sayings of Chairman Cactus. All profusely illustrated. Page after page of silly stuff. Long into the night.
The next day, I mentioned to somebody that I had experienced all this energy. He questioned me closely about it. Then he said, “I think that was Kundalini energy.”
I knew about Kundalini energy. It was a serious, powerful energy occasionally experienced by Yogic adepts, after years of preparatory meditation.
“No, no,” I said. “It wasn’t the Kundalini energy.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I spent all my time drawing Cactus Comics.”
People were having a great variety of psychological experiences during the conference. You’d run into people in the desert, or on the p
A few people were always the same. One guy was always mad. I began to avoid him, taking another route if I saw him coming down the path, because he was always the same. He was stuck. It wasn’t interesting to be around him.
One night Brugh played some music I hated. Hated. I thought it was stupid music. I was enraged that I had to listen to it. This music was ridiculous and banal. This music was beneath me. I was steaming when the music was over. I was in a fury.
I complained loudly about the music. I wasn’t the only one who thought it was stupid. Other heads in the group were nodding as I spoke. I was right. Idiotic music.
Brugh pointed out to me that the music was simply there, a sequence of sounds, and I had the choice of finding something interesting about it or being annoyed about it, but that I should know I had a choice.
And the group conversation moved on to other areas.
But I was still mad. Brugh hadn’t dealt with my objections. He hadn’t really responded to my feelings at all, he’d just mentioned them and moved on. Leaving me behind. I couldn’t get out of my rage. I was stuck. At the break, when everyone went for coffee, I went off by myself and cried. I was having a tantrum, like a child.
I remained angry for a couple of days. During this time, I complained to everybody who would listen. I was convinced of the rightness of my rage. They all seemed to be sympathetic.
And then I noticed that people were avoiding me. They would see me on the path and take another route. I thought, No kidding. They’re avoiding me. I’ve become a bore.
So then I had to deal with some ideas I had about being special and unique, ideas about status and education and “the right things.” And finally I could drop my anger and be in a good mood again. And people stopped avoiding me.
But you never knew when the emotional storms would strike. Some people found they were terrified of the desert, and couldn’t set foot in it. Some people couldn’t be alone. Some people couldn’t talk in front of the whole group. Some people couldn’t stand their roommates. Some people couldn’t stop thinking about the outside world, and the news they weren’t hearing. Some people couldn’t be part of a group—they had to be leaders. Some people cried during the two days of fasting. Some people couldn’t handle two days of silence. Some people always needed to sit next to Brugh.
It was ultimately reassuring, to see all the different things that snagged people. It made you less harsh with yourself. We were all in this together. What difference did it make that I cried because I didn’t like the music, and someone else cried because he couldn’t eat during the fast? Neither thing was better or worse. These were all just examples of getting stuck, making yourself miserable by your opinions and beliefs.
As if protecting your opinions was more important than having a fresh experience and rolling with the punches.
Brugh continued his energy work. He had developed a series of exercises to teach us to feel the chakras, to identify the different ways that energy could feel, to give energy to other people, and to receive it ourselves. This turned out to be quite easy to do.
If you stand beside a person who lies on his back, and move the palm of your hand slowly down the midline of his body about a foot above the skin, you will feel some distinct warm spots. These are the chakras. Sometimes the chakras don’t feel warm, but tingly and breezy instead—as if the body had little fans that blew breezes up against your hand.
You need to be relaxed to feel the chakras, but it isn’t a special or spiritual kind of relaxation. It isn’t a difficult state to hit. You just need to calm down for a few seconds before you begin. It requires about as much calming as you would need to thread a needle.
Most people discover that one hand is more sensitive to energy than the other. And most people find, after a while, they can’t feel anything in their hand any more. They need to snap their wrist a few times, as you would to shake off water droplets; then sensitivity returns. And since metal interrupts the energy, you don’t want your subject wearing a big metal belt buckle over the second chakra, or a metal pendant lying right over the heart chakra. (In fact, it’s odd how we have designed jewelry to cover our chakras: crowns, tiaras, chokers, necklaces, pendants, and belt buckles are all located at chakra positions.)
Again I noticed that when energy work is done the air gets thick. It’s a very agreeable sensation, like sitting in a kitchen where bread is baking. Pleasant in that way.
And it turns out that energy findings are objective. Two people can scan a third, and they will agree on the findings: third chakra hot, fourth displaced, fifth cool, and so on. You can do your investigations separately, write down your findings separately, and then compare notes, if you want to. There isn’t any delusion. It is absolutely clear that this body energy is a genuine phenomenon of some kind.
You didn’t have to be in the mood to feel it, you didn’t have to be a meditating saint, you didn’t have to believe in it. You just had to calm down and then hold your hand out over somebody’s body. In fact, the body energy was so clearly genuine, so stable and straightforward, that the most common reaction of people in our group was “Why hasn’t anybody told us about this before?”
It was easy to feel the energy. Brugh said that you could see it as well. One day he called for the windows to be darkened, and we pulled out dark-blue cloths, set them on the ground, held our hands over the cloth, and squinted; we could see the energy. It was odd. I realized I had seen it as a child, but had dismissed it as some sort of optical illusion. You can see the energy most easily against a dark surface under low illumination. The level of illumination is critical, which seems to be why squinting helps.
The energy looks like streaks of yellow mist extending beyond your fingertips. The mist is strongest close to the fingertips, and dissipates farther out. It looks like yellow fuzz around your fingers.
You need to relax to see the energy, as you need to relax to feel it. If you are panicky, you may not get it right away. It’s subtle. But, then, as with so many perceptual things, once you see it you know what to look for. It’s much easier after that.
At first I still thought that I was seeing some kind of illusion. But other people can see your energy and talk about it, so it can’t be an illusion.
After I could see the energy, I was fooling around—cupping my hands together to make a ball of yellow energy between them, that sort of thing. Trying different things. I was sitting opposite another person, and I thought, I’ll try to send energy to him.
Immediately I saw the yellow mist shoot out in long streaks from my fingertips to the chest of the other person. And a third person nearby said, “Look—it’s going right into his chest!”
So in the end I had to accept the energy as real.
Brugh gave us tarot decks. I had a great resistance to these medieval fortunetelling cards. I couldn’t believe a physician, a scientifically trained person, would waste our time with such foolish superstition. But Brugh had already demonstrated the validity of body energy, so I decided to go along with him on the cards. He said, “Shuffle through the pack and pick out the card you like best and the card you like least.”
I liked the Three of Swords least, and the Magician best. My choices seemed straightforward. Some of the cards were clearly more attractive than others, and some were clearly unattractive. There was a range of personal choice, but it wasn’t limitless. You’d have to be a pretty strange person to choose Death, or the Hanged Man, as your favorite card. Or a pretty odd person to dislike the Lovers or the Ten of Cups. So I didn’t perceive much real choice.
Brugh said, “Now imagine that the card you like least is the card you like best. Say what is good in the card you like least, and what is bad in the card you like best.”
I found this reversal impossible to do.
The Three of Swords depicted a red heart pierced by three swords, against a background of storm clouds
People sitting next to me helped. Someone suggested there wasn’t any blood, so it was a clean cut. Someone else said it was a decisive card, cutting to the heart of the matter. The rain was cleansing. The three swords were balanced, each penetrating the center. The swords formed a stable tripod. The card had a finality to it, a sense of termination. The storm would pass. The card could be seen as intellect taking charge of emotion, which could be good.
And so on.
I thought I was beginning to get the hang of it. Now I looked at the Magician, my favorite card, and tried to see it as bad. The Magician showed a young man in a white robe standing before a variety of articles, confidently holding a wand high. He had an infinity sign like a halo over his head. I thought he was a powerful, good, white-robed person.
But I couldn’t see the card differently. I couldn’t see it as bad. Again, people had to help me. The Magician looked young and frivolous. He was a show-off, a trickster. He did not seem serious. He appeared self-involved and showy, insincere. His spotless white robe indicated he didn’t do any honest hard work; he just did magic. His wand was actually a candle being burned at both ends, proof of a dissolute life. His infinity sign meant he could never get down to business. All in all, the Magician was a hopeless case of form over substance, appearances over reality.
Hearing this, I wondered why I had ever seen the Magician as a positive card. It had so many evident negative features.
Brugh talked about the value of being able to see a card, or a life situation, from all sides. To see the good and the bad, and not to consider the thing itself as possessing either goodness or badness. He talked about how people became rigid when they assigned fixed values to things.
Then he suggested that the purpose of the tarot was to allow our unconscious free play as we inspected these ancient images. Since the cards themselves were neither good nor bad, how we saw them told us a great deal about the state of our unconscious minds. And in that lay their value.