Crossing the Threshold

In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…the trumpet shall sound… and we will be changed. – Corinthians 1:52

At school  there was a ‘work-study’ arrangement for scholarship kids which provided a series of jobs, like calling alumni to ask for money, checking ID’s for students entering one of the many libraries, and, at the end of the school year, working on the dorm clean-up crews. For minimum wage the crew worked under implacable dictates of exacting spotlessness. We carried toothbrushes, steel-wool, scrub brushes and rags – the tooth brushes were for the finishing touches around faucets and drains. The Harvard dorms, known as ‘Houses’, were things of beauty and of extremely well made solid assembly. You never saw such heavily constructed mosaic bathroom floors, and substantial grey stone showers, with invincible steel fixtures of mighty water pressure. The suites themselves were generous, wood-floored, and furnished simply with copious hardwood chairs and oak desks. If you were assigned a top floor room you could sit in the niche of a dormer window and look out endlessly at the action on the streets of Cambridge.  I really loved every single one of those college residences I lived in. Not being particularly domestically inclined, dorm living suited my nature – I love a communal meal that i dont have to prepare or to clean up, and to spend time contemplating and discussing phenomena. The dining halls hummed with bright conversations and were a verbal person’s outright utopia.

In late May at the end of my junior year a friend let me bunk at his off campus digs while I completed the two week dorm cleaning stint. Walking back at the end of a shift, I looked like a bum, wearing throw-away old clothes covered in detritus from a day’s worth of slimy tasks. It made me smile to get the hairy eyeball from passersby who sniffed at me trudging along with a haul of messed up cleaning tools and bits of loot, like cool posters, electric kettles and the like, left by students. 

One day in the midst of scrubbing out the corner of a floor layered with unknown sticky substances, I started thinking about how small the monetary reward was relative to the energy I was expending. This rumination was mostly the result of the courses I had been taking with  R L Trivers, who revolutionized evolutionary biology by quantifying the genetic cost-benefit calculous underlying human behavior. So to keep myself amused, and from the depths of early childhood conditioning, I dredged up the idea of offering this boring scullery business to the “Higher Power,” otherwise known as God. Mind you, the existence of God wasn’t much of a consideration in those days, at least for me, but i remember an unmistakable lightness and cheer suddenly permeating the day’s labor. That night i came home super tired and fell asleep soon and deeply. 

Precisely at dawn i sat bolt upright in the bed and looked out the window, awakened by a sound like a trumpet blast, so loud that i instantly knew the whole world could hear it. And I knew: This is the end of the world

It is strange that such a blaring sound wasn’t painfully bursting my eardrums, but as i later learned it is like the blazing light of the ‘sahasrar’, the spiritual center in the crown of the head. That sight, ‘brighter than a thousand suns’, doesn’t hurt your inner eye, and unlike other burning, blinding lights, your gaze isnt repelled, but is irresistibly entrained by its ravishing beams. 

I am hearing the sound, and i know the entire earth is hearing it too. There is something about it that is infinite – a pulsing sonic ground of everything. The sound is textural, pervasive, a resonant mobius strip with no beginning and no end. It is deconstructing me, i am dissolving.  Just then, a vehicle comes swirling out of the sky – shaped like a flying saucer – with red, green and white lights rotating around it. Two figures are at the helm of this sky-ship, and it swirls right at me, terribly close, finally entering my third eye in the center of my forehead.

 The next thing i know, i am sitting up again, wide awake, to a typical morning. 

Three weeks later my uncle Henry takes me on a drive to the Catskills in Upstate New York, in order, as he said, “to meet a saint.” Statements like “to meet a saint” were the sort of anomaly i pegged with a placeholder in my mind. I vaguely recalled that in Catholicism to be a saint you had to be dead to begin with and then a bunch of miracles had to be ascribed to your intervention. Mostly you had to have suffered hideously, or better yet, been martyred appallingly. So who was this person they were calling ‘saint’? Didn’t matter – i was psyched for a crisp summer day in the country.

Ever since the morning of the trumpet blast i’d been unable to shake the remembrance of the sound. I was either hearing it spontaneously or playing it back to myself, trying to understand it. There was nothing to compare it to. It was something i could tune into at will, as it seemed to be constantly droning in my core. It could be a hum, or quadrillions of tiny bells or at times immense unceasing choral singing, depending on my focus or the quality of attention.

In the car going up I spoke to Henry and his friend, Arnold, who was driving,  describing my recent spate of unsettling so-called non-ordinary experiences – (my boyfriend called them “fits.”) These things were often prefaced by an episode of sleep paralysis – a term i learned when i went for an EEG at the campus health services. The latest  one was like this: The body stiffens, immobilized, then i find myself standing at the window of my mother’s apartment over looking the Hudson. I am not dreaming, but really there. It is the dead of night, and i hear the rumbling sound of rolling thunder, as in the movies when a kettle drum accompanies ominous events. The ground is quaking under my feet. Suddenly over the Hudson an enormous, roaring sun starts rising – spanning the entire horizon! Every hair stands on end – this is impossible – but it is real  – the whole world must see the gigantic sun rising in the west. Shock permeates my body in waves from head to toe. 

Then i am awake again, in my bed, at school. 

We arrived at the entrance of a worn out Catskill resort. Above the lintel was a curious sign, almost startling: “See God in Each Other.” 

Evidently, we were right on schedule to meet the saint. The place smelled enticingly of aromatic incense and exotic food. Just before stepping into the auditorium  we came to a set-up for selling fruit – seems you were supposed to offer something – so for 25 cents, I bought an orange and got on line for the brief introduction. People obscured my view of the end of the line but I saw that when you got there, the thing to do was kneel down in front of the chair where the saint guy was seated, and so I did, dropping the orange into a basket. Arnold was next to me and started saying “This girl has had many visions…” i whipped my head around, flabbergasted that he would come out with such a thing, then turned quickly back to be face to face with the man in the chair. I didnt understand what I was looking at. Instead of a face, was a variegated kaleidoscope – as many different faces as there are facets on the surface of a diamond, and they moved in rhythm. His body was undulating. I looked away unable comprehend what i was seeing. When i looked back, laughing out of confusion, he laughed simultaneously, mirroring me precisely.

He was hitting me, gently, with a wand of fragrant peacock feathers. The feel of them was substantial, and they landed six times with a subtle “thump” as if magnetized by my body.

Then we all went to sit in the audience and wait for the evening’s discourse to begin.  

I couldn’t really follow what the guy was saying. He spoke though a translator and at some point began talking about something, some kind of vibration, he called “OM,” specifically,  about the power of meditation on OM. He paused, pointed to me in this crowd of several hundred and said “That is what you are doing now” – matter of factly explaining the incessant inner audio going on in my head. I made a show of looking cluelessly around me when he pointed, pretending i had no idea of what he was on about. But he held my gaze and within myself i asked “are you talking to me?” He slowly nodded, yes. 

I looked away, spooked

 After the lecture, I went to relax in one of the guest rooms before the drive home, and lit up a prohibited cigarette. Then, dozing off, i dreamt about being in the hall again, only now I could see that many of the people in the audience had cancerous growths in various parts of their bodies. The Saint reached into one of the tumors and extracted a cigarette, handing it to me with the words “go ahead and smoke.” 

Later, i met Henry in the lobby for the drive home. Crossing the threshold, i caught sight of the logo beneath the motto “See God in Each Other”: It was an enormous sun, rising, over a river.