22 Good Vibrations

        “We have met the enemy and he is us,” Pogo once uttered from deep in the Okefenokee Swamp. In contrast, many continue to hoist blame on others seeking the most self-righteous looking position on the soapbox to throw our hurtful words down on each other. 

        Several days ago, there was another mass shooting in our country. Many are speaking out as though they have some kind of answer, but the most crisp and clear statement was offered by a student at the Broward County high school, speaking on MSNBC. My reaction is that this young man proved what is becoming so obvious; in this culture of blame we become more ridiculous as we age, by collecting factions in our minds to harbor in contempt. Thank God for the young people. 

        Meanwhile our group of Dominican animals are standing by hoping that the human race will find itself through having the courage to shoulder the future. The two circles gathered within the cave which was now rich in warm sunlight. The light came through the curtain of water as it spilled over the falls in a rainbow of color.

        Mary, the white pelican crooned, “Let us wrap our minds and hearts around Consciousness without fear. You each have an animal in support right behind you.”

        “I would like to ask a question from the inner circle,” bleated BillyG. “Do you’ll believe that some humans believe that God is Mom Nature?” 

        “I have puzzled over that too”, buzzed Leda, the dragonfly. 

“I have slowly come to believe that humans have tried to turn lead into gold, without success,

        I might add”, blurted out Myrtle, the turtle. “by over-reaching with big brains rather than a steady heart.”

         Hooie, acting in support of Myrtle, whispered a tiny hoot, “tell them about steady heart”

        Myrtle said, “my heart is much steadier than my mind. My heart speaks to me even under my shell, but my brain gets anxious and begins guessing. My own heart is slower and is more in tune with weather and the stars. I love with my heart and not with my mind.”

        Bosco, the border collie, barked, “Wow I have been wondering about my master because he seems to be meditating when he has to make a decision. I wonder if he is trying to use his heart rather than his mind. I heard him as he blurted out that the Buddha says, “that the mind seeks what the heart already knows.”

       “And then to top that off,” Bosco goes on, “He repeats what the Dalai Lama said”. Rather than criticizing others, we should evaluate and criticize ourselves. Ask yourself, what am I doing about my anger, my attachment, my pride, my jealousy? These are the things we should check in our day to day lives.

        “I am feeling a good vibration,” Milvus, the black kite, squawked.

         “Then that means that our circle is complete and ready to go to work, but what do you mean by ‘good vibration’, Milvus,” crooned Mary, the facilitator.

         “There are no heroes, no savior, no caped crusader, and no devils to condemn. As Pogo has said, we have met the enemy and he is us. That is a huge pill to swallow.”  Milvus replied. “But I have come to trust our group and I feel the good vibration in my heart, not in my mind. I don’t expect any one of you to be my hero, but I feel the good vibration from your melded hearts.”

         Mira, the sloth, could not contain her feelings even though she was speaking from the outer circle, “My heart knows that I am speaking for Bosco, I apologize not being able to contain myself, but I feel the vibration in my heart as well."

        Buddy squeaked, “Now I have got it. Even if I don’t completely trust some of you I trust all of you because I feel the vibration too.”

        "Fantastic, that takes a load off me. I am comfortable with the group taking it." barked Jake, the basset hound.

         " What do you mean by it, Jake?" clucked King the kingfisher.

         "Well, I guess my consciousness is a tremendous burden. We are a pile of puppies and I belong again." 

         

       Suggested reading:  The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto

21 Interlude III

     In 1958, I launched into a one-year fellowship with National Institutes of Mental Health. This was a means of getting caught up on bills during medical school. My wife and I found the fun in making babies. By the completion of medical school and internship we had ‘funned’ our way into making six babies.

     But what was to be the subject of my research as a  National Institutes of Mental Health post-sophomore fellow?  In retrospect, I should have researched the insanity of blissful baby making. We were able to have six because they just cost of $50.00 bucks a pop and my wife was able to have a contraction or two, leave her work in the basement of Mississippi School of Medicine, take the elevator to the third floor and be quickly delivered by the Chairman of the Department of Obstetrics. What a bonanza!

    Meanwhile, I had to come up with a research subject which had nothing to do with baby-making. There is no deception headier than self-deception. Some reasonable readers may abandon me at this point because the digressions will get deep. Yogi Berra once said of his baseball team, ”We have deep depth.”

     Just like kicking a can in the middle of a dirt road, I stumbled on an article by an obscure scientist in Sweden suggesting that the copper bearing enzyme, ceruloplasmin in human blood, was connected with schizophrenia. So, I was able to distract from my own insanity toward that of hapless mental patients. There were several thousand folks with schizophrenia at Whitfield State Hospital but well out of the reach of our medical school faculty and no one had ever heard of ceruloplasmin. So, I felt safe. Whenever I passed someone in the hall, they would ask why I had dropped out of medical school, and I would tell them about my research on ceruloplasmin in schizophrenia. Their blank stare assured me that I was safe in deep research.

      Kicking the can further down the road, what in the hell was my research design going to be about? In a lark, I decided that I would study ceruloplasmin levels in  schizophrenic crisis, in the crisis of major depression and in the  experience of g-force by healthy naval pilots in the human centrifuge. This brings me to another Berraism,” The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.” As I look back, there were several self-serving self-deceptions in my suitcase. I was stealing away from the intensity of the schoolhouse( medical school), from the intensity of marriage, and from the reality of parenting itself.

     But the grandiosity did not end there. It appeared that the can got more interesting every time I kicked it.

     My boss in this project was hosting the medical representative of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Berne Switzerland, Rudi Burge. I asked Mr. Burge if he knew of research on the similarity of the ravages of schizophrenia and the effect of LSD-25. I mentioned my project on ceruloplasmin. When his eyes glazed over, and I knew I had a wedge. Within two weeks a gross( 144  100 microgram vials) of lysergic acid diethylamide arrived from Switzerland to use as we saw fit. It was enough LSD-25 to drive Congress into insanity; but this was 1958. Since then they have found other means.

     Incidentally  in the 1950’s through the 1970’s , the Central Intelligence Agency, managed to get themselves into hot water by giving LSD-25 in a project called MK-ULTRA to a variety of subjects including mental patients, unwitting volunteers, prostitutes, government employees and line CIA agents. Some recipients sued successfully because of lingering psychotic symptoms. Many others probably wondered what happened.

    Meanwhile Dr. Bob Baringer( of St Augustine, Fl.)  and I launched our project on the changes in blood ceruloplasmin in acute stress on US naval pilots, patients with acute exacerbation of schizophrenia, recipients of electro-shock therapy (ECT), and finally on volunteers taking a single dose of LSD-25. When Dr Baringer agreed to join me I knew that I had found a truly supportive person. Both of us would enter our junior year of medical school in 1959. Perhaps it was because of our tenuous status as medical students we were very cautious about giving LSD to volunteers. But also, I had taken a dose of LSD and found the effects so profound and unpredictable that Bob, myself,  and Dr. Oscar Hubbard of the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Mississippi School of Medicine became the sole volunteers.

          These digressions, though remote, are crucial to following the issue at hand that the animals of Dominica faced in developing their group process. This involves a kind of communication between animals and humans alike that remains mysterious and controversial.

Suggested viewing:  Wormwood: a Netflix true story about a CIA employee who 
was an (unwitting?) recipient of LSD-25

20 Ambiguous Minds

     A friend, Bill, said to me, “Why did you change from speaking about Mom Nature to Mother Nature?”
     Now that I pause, ponder and reflex on the change, it is no small matter. I switched from comfy intimate ‘Mom’ to a more global commanding ‘Mother’ because Hummy seeks to influence the World in Disarray rather than stirring a small pot of stew. When Hummy flew over the airport in Dominica and saw the book cover ‘The World in Disarray ‘ his tiny bird-brain jumped to Trumponian visions of saving the whole human race, although he would deny that to himself later on. Are we all masters of self-deception; and see gold and grandeur in his little Lotto ticket?
     My ole professor told me, “I had 2 hours of reality once and it almost did me in.” So, is our reality close at hand; not global but local. Is truth within neighbors or a bridge too far as  in CNN? Is our strength built on each other or on distant mega mouths? Will Hummy look to BillyG and the others close at hand or to global kingpins far out of his short-winged reach and cross-examination?
     With ambiguous minds the animals began choosing their supportive counterpart to form the Double Circle in earnest.

                                                                 *******
“I have no earthly idea what we are doing or why we are doing this Double Circle thing,” moaned Mum, the nanny goat.
     Carefully Mary, the facilitator crooned, “We become ‘pairs’ of animals in the Double Circle and are supportive of each other. We must have each other’s back like fighter pilots. But to do this we have to put aside all the ambiguity about each other and all imagined or real incompatibilities we may have for the other.”

     Speaking out of turn from the outer circle, but with good cause, King, the kingfisher, sang out, “ I am a fairly solitary bird and don’t join others easily. Why should I be doing this  pairing routine?”

      Also, from the outer circle, Leda the dragonfly spoke out,” “This isn’t going to work for me either. After 300 million years of ancestors on this planet I am stuck in my ways.”

     BillyG bleated,  “Because of the Hurricane Maria we all got herded into this cave and after that things got real spooky.  It was a ‘good spooky’ in a manner of speaking. When Maria became the enemy, we found comfort in each other.”

     Hummy hummed in, “ Just before the storm hit I found that I was having a conversation with a billy-goat which was puzzling but BillyG  got my attention.”

     “Wow, that is spooky,” cawed Paula, the Sisserou parrot. “Being a wordsmith as some of us parrots are inclined to be; I can honestly say that the event of our group coming together is phantasmagorical[1]”

      “So, you think we are on some kind of drug,” rumbled Myrtle, the turtle. “I don’t do drugs. “

      The other animals chimed in, “ No drugs here and besides that is a human problem….”

     “Did you notice that when we came into the cave we all got doused with the curtain of water on the lip of the cave. I could not avoid it,” barked Jake the basset hound. “Maybe there is something in the water.”

     “That is a distinct possibility,” crooned the facilitator, “and I actually drank some of the waterfall. But we need to come to grips with the pairing issue.”

     “We are all of different species of animal except for Paula and I as well as BillyG and Mum,” squawked Shazam the Amazonian parrot. “I believe that Mom Nature is guiding us towards having humility and openness to accept an alter-ego or supportive animal because we all know that a big human problem is EGO. We all need to understand how the humans got so big-headed, smug and power hungry.”

     Milvus, the black kite,  squawked,  “ I don’t like ambiguity at all. The human problem is also too many complex words like ambiguity. I want to learn how to feel your presence with a gesture, a look or a touch.”  

     Buddy, the agouti, sweeked, “ Stroke my whiskers all. I must have drunk some of the waterfall because I believe again.”

suggested reading:  The Hidden Message in Water by Masaru Emoto

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[1] Used now to define a night out, normally substance fueled, that leads to lots of strange, weird, wonderful and damn right crazy things taking place around you as you try, and fail, to make sense of exactly what is going on.