| MORPHING OUT OF ILLUSION |
Stevan Orescan
We returned to America, to our cool, rustic, house with the new oriental carpets in the Hollywood
Hills and to my practice as a hip head shrinker. Famous actors and rock musicians were our
neighbors and a silver Porsche convertible was in the garage. We shopped for groceries at the
gourmet market – you could pick out the fish you wanted for your dinner as it swam in the tank -
and drank espresso and ate fancy ice creams in the evening on the Sunset Strip while watching the
promenade of beautiful people, little gods and godlets that wanted to be in the movies. Everyone
wanted to be rich and famous. It was all very depressing.
What’s the matter, my significant other asked? You haven’t been yourself since we came back
from India.
I want to go back, I replied.
Maybe we can go back next year, she said.
I want to go back to live.
To live! What would we do? What about all this?
All what?
All this! Our house, the cars, the business, our stuff!
It’s just stuff, it has no intrinsic value, give it away.
Give it away?! Have you lost your mind?!
Timothy Leary said you have to lose your mind in order to find it.
I knew it! she said, it’s the drugs, and all those crazy people you work with at that clinic. You can’
t take LSD and smoke pot and expect to live like a normal person. You of all people should now
that!
What’s normal? I don’t know what that means anymore.
I want you to see a psychiatrist, please, she begged. Not one of those at that crazy clinic you
work at but somebody at UCLA.
So she made an appointment for us to see a real psychiatrist at UCLA the following week. She
had talked to him on the phone and explained to him what she thought was the problem, that I
wanted to give everything away that we had worked so hard for, and go and live in India, and that
she thought that the drugs had made me crazy because nobody in their right mind would want to do
such a thing. She told him that I was a therapist with a private practice and was affiliated with a
clinic and a lot of nutty psychologists that used psychedelic drugs to treat people.
He was a kindly man, quiet and thoughtful, a professor of psychiatry, a few years older than me
and we spent a good hour together. I explained to him that I was tired of the superficial and artificial
life that I was living and that it had no more meaning to me anymore, and that it was time for a
change to something more authentic, to a deeper and richer life experience, not more comfortable
or easy, because that was death to the spirit, that I wanted to go and live in India and read
philosophy and write books and ponder those important questions of life and death that we in
America did not have time for, and as far as I was concerned we could give it all away and go
together or if she didn’t want to change her life she could have it all and I would go off by myself.
And that was that. It all came out of me just as cool and easy as if I had been thinking about it all
my life.
Well Doc, what’s our diagnosis, am I crazy or not? I asked.
I don’t think you are any crazier than I am, he replied, after a moment’s hesitation. As a matter of
fact I would like to give everything away and go live in India myself.
We didn’t say much to each other on the drive back to our beautiful home but we both knew that
it was over for us. Just the details had to be ironed out. She knew that we were living a superficial
and meaningless life but was too trapped in the jaws of desire and illusion to be able to break
away. A lot of money was coming in and she just couldn’t let it go after so many years of growing
up with nothing. Life to her was a jungle, and in the middle of it a juicy piece of red meat, and she
wanted her share no matter what. And this from a Smith girl….
I returned to my work at the clinic but that too had changed. I could no longer think of my clients
in terms of the classic doctor patient--medical model, that they had the problems and I had the
answers, that I was the expert that could relieve them of their confusion, unhappiness or neurosis,
that I knew and they didn’t. What nonsense, how fraudulent, what a sham the whole profession of
psychology is, I thought. We’re all fools stumbling around trying to figure things out and no one
really knows, some of us manage to go to school for a few years, we hang degrees on the wall, sit
behind the desk and pretend. Its great theatre, you pretend to be sick and I’ll pretend to heal you.
If you pay me enough money you’ll get well soon, if you only pay a little bit it will take longer and if
you can’t afford to pay anything well, too bad, you’ll probably never get better.
In South India there is a temple that just specializes in the mentally ill. They have one treatment
for everyone. The head priest hangs the patient upside down by the feet and chants until the patient
is well. Needless to say cures are rapid with very few relapses.
The big desk and the framed degrees on the wall and the somber air of professionalism are
artificial barriers to authentic healing and this becomes obvious when psychedelic substances are
used in the healing process because the roles being played out by both therapist and client are
instantly dropped, and they stand naked before each other without the obscurations of ego and
attachment.
My office soon became a temple of transmutation much to the annoyance of some of my
colleagues. What are you doing? they would ask, you can’t turn this into some kind of hippie
temple; this is a place of business.
That’s the problem, I replied. It’s a business when it should be worship. It is the purchase of
friendship masquerading as science. We are like the moneychangers in the tabernacle and to
approach what we are doing as a business is obscene, especially since we are using these
sacramental substances for purposes of healing and transformation. We are trying to help people
change, to de-condition and wake up, not adjust to the status quo or sink deeper into the mud of
ignorance. And in the process of helping people wake up, helping them to expand their
consciousness, we ourselves will move into an expanded and awakened consciousness. This is
spiritual work that we are doing and needs to be taken out of the cold austere setting of the therapy
room. We need to wake up as well and stop pretending that we are God with all the answers.
With this new attitude of course money became a problem; how to fit it within the parameters of
right livelihood? The Bhagavata, one of the ancient Hindu scriptures, states that we only have a
claim to that which would satisfy our hunger. Anyone desiring more is like a thief deserving of
punishment. The professions of psychiatry and psychotherapy have rationalized their fees as being a
part of the treatment, that people won’t take the responsibility and do the hard work that therapy
requires unless they pay for it. No free lunch sort of thing. If they left it up to donation, the collection
plate, too many people won’t pay and thus they will be deprived of their handsome incomes and
the mortgages and car payments won’t get paid. A tough call for the profession, and a stumbling
block for those whose whole lives are committed to it.
As with money, so with sex. LSD is a powerful aphrodisiac and when client and therapist take it
together those artificial boundaries fade, conditioning dissolves, unacceptable behavior becomes
acceptable and societal norms and super egos release their hold on hormones and passions that
allows for total absorption in the other. Another touchy area for the professionals; you can’t have
the doctors fucking their patients and then charging money for the treatment.
So within the year I had discharged my clients, settled my accounts with all and sundry, signed
everything over to the woman who had been my partner for ten years and with my new backpack
and sleeping bag took to the road as a homeless pilgrim determined to live out the new life and
world view that had been offered me. I didn’t know where I was going or how I was going to get
there but my inner compass had pointed me to the East and I knew that all I had to do was trust
and put one foot in front of the other. This was the Age of Aquarius, a new world was in the
making and I felt blessed to be a part of it.
Hills and to my practice as a hip head shrinker. Famous actors and rock musicians were our
neighbors and a silver Porsche convertible was in the garage. We shopped for groceries at the
gourmet market – you could pick out the fish you wanted for your dinner as it swam in the tank -
and drank espresso and ate fancy ice creams in the evening on the Sunset Strip while watching the
promenade of beautiful people, little gods and godlets that wanted to be in the movies. Everyone
wanted to be rich and famous. It was all very depressing.
What’s the matter, my significant other asked? You haven’t been yourself since we came back
from India.
I want to go back, I replied.
Maybe we can go back next year, she said.
I want to go back to live.
To live! What would we do? What about all this?
All what?
All this! Our house, the cars, the business, our stuff!
It’s just stuff, it has no intrinsic value, give it away.
Give it away?! Have you lost your mind?!
Timothy Leary said you have to lose your mind in order to find it.
I knew it! she said, it’s the drugs, and all those crazy people you work with at that clinic. You can’
t take LSD and smoke pot and expect to live like a normal person. You of all people should now
that!
What’s normal? I don’t know what that means anymore.
I want you to see a psychiatrist, please, she begged. Not one of those at that crazy clinic you
work at but somebody at UCLA.
So she made an appointment for us to see a real psychiatrist at UCLA the following week. She
had talked to him on the phone and explained to him what she thought was the problem, that I
wanted to give everything away that we had worked so hard for, and go and live in India, and that
she thought that the drugs had made me crazy because nobody in their right mind would want to do
such a thing. She told him that I was a therapist with a private practice and was affiliated with a
clinic and a lot of nutty psychologists that used psychedelic drugs to treat people.
He was a kindly man, quiet and thoughtful, a professor of psychiatry, a few years older than me
and we spent a good hour together. I explained to him that I was tired of the superficial and artificial
life that I was living and that it had no more meaning to me anymore, and that it was time for a
change to something more authentic, to a deeper and richer life experience, not more comfortable
or easy, because that was death to the spirit, that I wanted to go and live in India and read
philosophy and write books and ponder those important questions of life and death that we in
America did not have time for, and as far as I was concerned we could give it all away and go
together or if she didn’t want to change her life she could have it all and I would go off by myself.
And that was that. It all came out of me just as cool and easy as if I had been thinking about it all
my life.
Well Doc, what’s our diagnosis, am I crazy or not? I asked.
I don’t think you are any crazier than I am, he replied, after a moment’s hesitation. As a matter of
fact I would like to give everything away and go live in India myself.
We didn’t say much to each other on the drive back to our beautiful home but we both knew that
it was over for us. Just the details had to be ironed out. She knew that we were living a superficial
and meaningless life but was too trapped in the jaws of desire and illusion to be able to break
away. A lot of money was coming in and she just couldn’t let it go after so many years of growing
up with nothing. Life to her was a jungle, and in the middle of it a juicy piece of red meat, and she
wanted her share no matter what. And this from a Smith girl….
I returned to my work at the clinic but that too had changed. I could no longer think of my clients
in terms of the classic doctor patient--medical model, that they had the problems and I had the
answers, that I was the expert that could relieve them of their confusion, unhappiness or neurosis,
that I knew and they didn’t. What nonsense, how fraudulent, what a sham the whole profession of
psychology is, I thought. We’re all fools stumbling around trying to figure things out and no one
really knows, some of us manage to go to school for a few years, we hang degrees on the wall, sit
behind the desk and pretend. Its great theatre, you pretend to be sick and I’ll pretend to heal you.
If you pay me enough money you’ll get well soon, if you only pay a little bit it will take longer and if
you can’t afford to pay anything well, too bad, you’ll probably never get better.
In South India there is a temple that just specializes in the mentally ill. They have one treatment
for everyone. The head priest hangs the patient upside down by the feet and chants until the patient
is well. Needless to say cures are rapid with very few relapses.
The big desk and the framed degrees on the wall and the somber air of professionalism are
artificial barriers to authentic healing and this becomes obvious when psychedelic substances are
used in the healing process because the roles being played out by both therapist and client are
instantly dropped, and they stand naked before each other without the obscurations of ego and
attachment.
My office soon became a temple of transmutation much to the annoyance of some of my
colleagues. What are you doing? they would ask, you can’t turn this into some kind of hippie
temple; this is a place of business.
That’s the problem, I replied. It’s a business when it should be worship. It is the purchase of
friendship masquerading as science. We are like the moneychangers in the tabernacle and to
approach what we are doing as a business is obscene, especially since we are using these
sacramental substances for purposes of healing and transformation. We are trying to help people
change, to de-condition and wake up, not adjust to the status quo or sink deeper into the mud of
ignorance. And in the process of helping people wake up, helping them to expand their
consciousness, we ourselves will move into an expanded and awakened consciousness. This is
spiritual work that we are doing and needs to be taken out of the cold austere setting of the therapy
room. We need to wake up as well and stop pretending that we are God with all the answers.
With this new attitude of course money became a problem; how to fit it within the parameters of
right livelihood? The Bhagavata, one of the ancient Hindu scriptures, states that we only have a
claim to that which would satisfy our hunger. Anyone desiring more is like a thief deserving of
punishment. The professions of psychiatry and psychotherapy have rationalized their fees as being a
part of the treatment, that people won’t take the responsibility and do the hard work that therapy
requires unless they pay for it. No free lunch sort of thing. If they left it up to donation, the collection
plate, too many people won’t pay and thus they will be deprived of their handsome incomes and
the mortgages and car payments won’t get paid. A tough call for the profession, and a stumbling
block for those whose whole lives are committed to it.
As with money, so with sex. LSD is a powerful aphrodisiac and when client and therapist take it
together those artificial boundaries fade, conditioning dissolves, unacceptable behavior becomes
acceptable and societal norms and super egos release their hold on hormones and passions that
allows for total absorption in the other. Another touchy area for the professionals; you can’t have
the doctors fucking their patients and then charging money for the treatment.
So within the year I had discharged my clients, settled my accounts with all and sundry, signed
everything over to the woman who had been my partner for ten years and with my new backpack
and sleeping bag took to the road as a homeless pilgrim determined to live out the new life and
world view that had been offered me. I didn’t know where I was going or how I was going to get
there but my inner compass had pointed me to the East and I knew that all I had to do was trust
and put one foot in front of the other. This was the Age of Aquarius, a new world was in the
making and I felt blessed to be a part of it.
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