What’s up?
For that matter, what’s down?
The directions are confusing. We are on our way to heaven because it is all uphill. No one gets to heaven by heading in that direction, but only by backing out of Hell. One must go past one’s personal demons in order to be on the right road, yet to the outsider looking upon us, we look absolutely nuts. Like we had lost our minds.
Re member Ulysses. He had to hear the sirens call. But being wise, or perhaps, it’s only by being clever, he had himself tied to the mast, and all the other sailers had their ears plugged up, so that they would not succumb to the Siren’s call.
The question is, or becomes, did I have a mast? Did I have something in my self that is strong enough to withstand the madness? Do I have something in my self that will protect me from crashing against the waves? It is easy to fool oneself and get too close to the drain. Too close to the black hole and its inexorable pull. What is on the other side of the event horizon? When I was 15 I asked myself that question. Did I have something strong enough in myself to protect me against myself? I pondered this question for a very long time, and frankly, I didn’t know if I could trust myself because the answer was that I didn’t know. The next question that came to me was “was I going to take the plunge anyway?” The answer came back, loud and clear – Yes, I was going to take a plunge into the maelstrom. I didn’t know if I would come out on the other side.
Those were my mental hospital years. I spent time in state mental institutions. One in New York, named Creedmoor, and the other in New Jersey called Greystone State. I was in Greystone at the same time that Woody Guthrie was there and Bob Dylan visited him. Bob didn’t visit me and I doubt he knew that I was there at all. I was nothing but a straight jacket dude teen. My parents wouldn’t sign for electroshock therapy but they were dupped into signing me up for chemical shock therapy. I believe it was insulin shock and it went like this: they gave you some drugs that put you to sleep and when you began to wake up they gave you more so that you slept for more than a week. I can’t remember dreams from that time, but I knew that I was being drugged. After a while, the drug stopped working and you would begin to wake up in an hour or so after being given it.
When the tolerance built up to the degree that it hardly put you to sleep at all, they switched to something that aggravated your waking state, some kind of upper some kind of speed, and they would put you in a rubber room. Literally a rubber room with padded walls and ceiling and floor. You would bash against the cushions for several days while the drug worked its way out of your system. There was a little opening in the door every 15 minutes or so to make sure you were still alive. When that stopped working, and you settled down into a kind of lethargy, they would let you out. I can remember walking into the wall, dumbfounded. My friend, Albert Anderson, who later joined the Wailers visited me, and after sitting next to me, he burst out in tears. I asked him what was wrong and he said “they’ve killed you, Richie, they’ve killed you!”
When I pressed him on what he meant by that he said that he couldn’t find me when he looked in my eyes, that I had been brainwashed to the degree that I was no longer in the room, or anywhere else for that matter. I assured him that I would come back given a little bit of time. And slowly but surely I did come back to myself. In the meantime I sat across from the room where they gave electroshock therapy and I would see people come out of their room completely vacant with nobody home. The bodies would walk right into the walls If they could walk at all. Every once in a while, alarms went off, and they would rush a crash cart into the room because for whatever reason they had a literally caused the heart to stop. And this they said was a therapy. They nullified the person altogether. That was a success, according to the bigwig doctors. Then they would often release the person into the care of their family, a family who really didn’t know what to do with the person; who wept when they saw what had become of their child. I have heard that Lou Reed was given 15 sessions of this Electroshock therapy. I can really see how that would be true. Lou always had a vacant side to him…
Anyway, that’s what happened to me. I spent three months in each of those places in the ward. They called the flight deck and where they would assess you and your ability to function in the outer world. If they deemed you sane enough, they let you go. But if they thought you were going to be trouble, they put you in another ward. Where you never got out.
And every time they let me go, I went back to the self-medicating adventures that were at the core of my being. I would get close enough to hear the sirens. Their call was very luxurious and beckoning and many who heard their song never got out of it. They got flushed down the drain. And that’s what it was like — being flushed down the drain quicker and quicker as you spin around the drug that was your drug of choice. It took me many years to get completely free of it and I’m not sure I am ever going to be completely free because the drugs became food for inner bodies of another nature. Certainly a body of bliss, of suffering, and a body of conscience and a body containing many other factors. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, seeing time travel, and other things that are known in yoga as siddhis, Special powers as the result of doing yoga.
There are, many kinds of yoga. Not just the pretzel gyrations that serve as hatha yoga But untold yogas. I will write more about these various yogas as time permits. Right now I’ve got to go practice doing nothing. Doing nothing is very hard work.