Ralph Metzner
Initiation. To me, the word conjures up a gompa, a tiny monastery, set high in the snowy Himalayas, remote from the normal affairs of humankind. Trails of incense hang thick in the air across the room; candles light up dimly the chill dark space. Strange mudras are performed, eerie guttural chants are chanted. An icy wind blasts against the side of the building, threatening to blow into obscurity the sacred space being created. Meanwhile, a deeply wrinkled Tibetan deftly wields a dorje, cutting through the air with rhythmic movements. Slowly and deliberately, the initiate is introduced to a weird, archetypal figure. Half human, half animal, blue-black in colour, huge bulging eyes, and with a panoply of arms and legs. A necklace of dry bones adorns the torso. For the mass of humanity, it would be a vision from the most hellish of nightmares......
Initiation. 'The ceremony or formal procedure with which somebody is made a member of a sect or society' (New Penguin English Dictionary). Hmm.... not really. To initiate is to begin, especially to start something new. The dictionary definition is merely a narrow, formalised version of a function that is universal in scope. An initiation is an introduction, an invitation, to the hitherto unknown. Many indigenous people confer initiation upon their members as they pass from one phase of life into the next - from childhood into the world of adults, for example. Initiation manifests an opening, a doorway, a crack in the world, beyond which perception, and experience in general, will be forever changed.
Some people undergo some form of initiation from sacred plants and other entheogenic substances. 'Take a look at this. You never imagined the world worked like that.....' Through whatever means, and crucially, initiation shows a doorway, but that is all. It is up to the initiate, the student, to put in the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears, to properly actualise that initial insight.
Two events over recent years have performed vital initiatory functions in my life, though in both cases their full significance has become apparent only with time.
In April 2009 I attended a five-day course on 'Alchemical Divination'. Held in the mountains of Switzerland, it was run by Ralph Metzner, close friend and associate of Timothy Leary in the 1960s. I do not go along with quite everything that Ralph has to say, but as a researcher into consciousness for half a century he is probably peerless, and invites deep admiration. Following his LSD-assisted forays into multidimensional space and consciousness, he embarked upon a period of entheogen-free practice, before more recently studying and participating in the ways and rituals of indigenous peoples who include the use of psychoactive plants within a wider cultural and spiritual context.
This particular course focussed on the past, a singular and predictably cathartic challenge for me, having grown up spiritually within a Buddhist environment that concentrated on the present and the future, while relegating much interest in the past to the realms of morbidity or narcissism. The initiatory aspect of the course for me resided in its emphasis on energy: working with energies, and realising experience as different forms of energy. My previous Buddhist training and practice had majored conceptually on 'mind'. 'Look at the workings of the mind.' While sometimes helpful, 'mind' easily becomes too, well, mental. Identification with the conceptual, the personal, especially personal emotions. A tendency to become vague, colourless, vacuum-like. Additionally, for anybody raised in the western tradition, 'mind' inevitably gets entangled in the mind - body dichotomy/dualism, with all its attendant problems. To change the movie and see instead a continuous flow of energies has led me into a far more participatory relationship with my own psycho-physical organism, as well as the cosmos around me. On arriving home from the course, I immediately felt empowered to work with chakras and other energy systems, confident to be creative in ways that had previously been impossible. The shift in orientation, from 'mind' and 'the mind', those peculiar Buddhist preoccupations, to energy and consciousness, has facilitated the opening of many doorways.
With the snow still deep on the ground, I ventured forth from Highland Scotland once more, in February 2010, my destination Bath, south-west England. The event was the first ARC (Alternative Research Community) convention, organised and hosted with grace and humour by Karen Sawyer. I was enticed south primarily by the promise of listening to two speakers. Neil Kramer, with whose work I was starting to become familiar, was talking on 'Guerilla Psychonautics'. And Peter Taylor was presenting 'The Corporatisation of the Environmental Movement', a theme that was beginning to require urgent personal attention. While these two talks were the highlight, both stimulating significant changes in personal perception, the entire event acted as a kind of initiation into the present-day alternative community scene. Extremely heterogeneous, and incorporating many people who might disagree significantly with one another ('We present, you decide', the guiding motto of Red Ice Creations, could be equally applied to the whole alternative research thing), it is nevertheless united by the effort to find out what is really going on.
It soon began to dawn on me that there was an awful lot of interesting stuff going on out there, and I wanted to do my own bit, whatever that might involve. I had needed to cut all my formal ties to the Buddhist tradition in order to effect this entrance into the wider world; however subtly, I was always tethered to a post called Buddhism, which finally prevented me from entering into a more objective relationship with myself and the rest of the world.
These two initiations have informed a good deal of what has ended up on Pale Green Vortex, a project which (not coincidentally) I began soon after the ARC convention. They have profoundly influenced the direction of my life generally over recent times. Metzner Alchemical Divination, ARC: to the contributors and participants, I give hearty thanks.
