Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (17 page)

I was gaining a new
perspective, yes, and growing more and more impatient for the
evening event. Time is always relative, I know, and you would think
that a few hours would seem a finger snap in contrast to Oak Grove
time, but I thought the day would never pass.

Along about five o'clock we bought another
change of clothes—evening casual—and found a quiet place for a
leisurely dinner. By coincidence, this was just up the street from
Oomville, and I met a man in there who knew the people over there.
Turns out that Hiawatha's name is really Gordon Campbell, that the
place had been his family home and he had grown up there, inherited
it when his father died some fifteen years back.

Interesting part is that
Campbell had lived there alone until a little over ten years ago
when he "brought the women in." My informant knew very little about
"the women" except that they seemed entirely reclusive and had
"started some kind of cult" immediately upon joining
Campbell.

"Strange goings-on over there sometimes,"
the man told me, shaking his head and terminating the conversation.
I considered myself fortunate to get that much out of him. Ojai is
an area of diverse cultures, and they all seem to try to
accommodate one another in a truly democratic way.

If this guy says that "something strange"
was happening in Ojai, then you just have to know that he was
referring to something very strange indeed.

None of that helped the early evening to
pass any quicker.

We camped in that restaurant until it was
simply too embarrassing to remain longer, then we took to the
streets again with still an hour and a half to go.

And I had to wonder—without television or
radio or movies or books or even newspapers—how the people of the
Oak Grove era coped with time on their hands.

I decided that maybe it was no problem at
all for them. Time is a left-brain problem. Maybe they were a
right-brain people.

Chapter Twenty-Three:
Ceremonial

Picture a secluded meadow with
sweet-smelling, luxurious grass, about two acres of it, surrounded
by ancient oaks and lit by burning torches. A raised grassy mound
is at the very center. It is about two feet higher than the
surrounding meadow, a perfect circle about twenty feet across. The
mound is strewn with cut flowers. One particular area with a
diameter of maybe three feet is blood red with a thick layer of
rose petals.

Oom-ray-key-too stands in
the rose-petal circle. She is facing the sacred mountain. She wears
a necklace of rose petals that almost, but not quite, reaches to
her breasts. The lustrous black hair is unbraided and falls to the
small of her back. It is adorned with oak leaves. Delicate
bracelets of woven flowers encircle both wrists and both ankles.
She is otherwise unadorned, the strikingly beautiful body
glistening in the torchlight and as still as a statue.

Twelve couples stand
inside a circle of fire at the edge of the mound—arranged boy-girl,
boy-girl, all the way around, a blazing torch behind each—facing
Oom in the center, and these people are all totally naked. Yours
truly is one of these; Alison is another. We, of course, are
beautiful in our nakedness. Matter of fact, everyone looks
beautiful. Maybe it is the torchlight. Or maybe it is the herbal
tea we were required to drink before the ceremony began.

At any rate, it is a
beautiful spectacle. I find myself barely breathing. Oom's eyes are
closed. Her hands are outstretched in supplication to the sacred
mountain. I wonder how she can stand so still for so long. I am
experiencing a touch of vertigo myself. I smile at Alison and she
smiles back. I wonder where Hiawatha is. A great-looking woman with
thunder thighs at the other side of the circle is looking me over.
I am wondering why she is looking at me like that when the thought
is interrupted by the distant howling of a coyote.

I don't know, maybe that
was Hiawatha providing sound effects because the sliver of new moon
has just edged into view, and I know that Oom cannot know that
because her eyes are closed until the coyote howls, then they flip
open and she has an immediate dead bead on the moon without even
having to redirect the focus. Her upraised arms undulate
gracefully, hands beckoning the moon like in a Hawaiian hula, and
she emits a low, keening cry that is a pretty fair imitation of
the coyote we just heard.

I sneak a peek at Alison
at about this point, and what I see disturbs me. Her lips are
parted and her eyes look funny; her pelvis is thrust slightly
forward; she is looking at the moon, too, and summoning it the same
as Oom. I am thinking wait a minute, this was not in the
orientation, but then my attention is diverted by some sort of
phenomenon with the torches: every second one is fluttering, dying
out; I notice, too, that it is the torch behind each man that is
dying away; the women's torches not only remain lit but each one
seems to be brightening as well.

I become aware now that Oom also has thrust
her pelvis sharply forward. She undulates and gyrates; she is
screwing the moon standing up and both feet flat on the rose
petals; it is a beautiful, graceful movement, something like a hula
in slow-mo.

Alison is doing this.

All the women are doing this.

I am getting a fantastic
erection. I guess all the guys are, but I am not curious enough to
check that out; the ones directly across from me are definitely
ready for anything. I somehow get the feeling it's going to be a
dry run, though; the women are getting off on the man in the moon.
The idle thought crosses my mind that it would be a terrible time
to get raided; the Ventura County cops would get more than my
head.

I really do not have time
to appreciate the erotic charm of the moment because the torches
are doing things again. They are sputtering and sending off sparks
like Fourth of July sparklers. These are raining onto the women.
The guy across from me has a scared face; maybe I do, too, because
I am worried for Alison: she is bathed in these sparks to the
extent that I can barely see her, yet she is an arm's length away.
It does not seem to be bothering the women, though. They are like
in trance—an ecstatic trance.

I am looking at Oom and
wondering why she is not getting the sparkler treatment, but of
course she does not have a torch. But while I am staring at her
something seems to shoot up from the ground—it's like a flame
encased in steam, it shoots up right at her feet and engulfs her.
I think, oh, shit, she's bought it! But then the steam or fog or
whatever dissipates, the flame is gone, Oom is gone, and in her
place is the saintly lady—except that now this lady ain't no saint,
this
lady
is
sex
unleashed, she is four on the floor
and all the stops removed, and I am stunned to find myself moving
toward her, yet I am not really moving at all, I am standing still,
exactly where I was, but I
see
myself moving toward her, I see myself from
the
rear
, I am
still here but also I am there, and she is leaping upon me, her
legs girding my waist, arms about my neck. I am standing back here
watching all this, but I am also
feeling
all this, and it is freaking
me out, but I don't give a shit, I just stand and serve.

A tiny corner of sanity is
left to observer-me; I peer through it to see if Alison sees, but
she is still hung up on the moon.

I sink to my knees
while
over there
that other me sinks to his knees also and bears the
ex-saintly lady to the rose- petal ground on her back. Then all the
children begin to frolic—or their self-doubles do—doubles in
three-dimensional reality rushing together inside the circle while
their other selves maintain the integrity of the circle; all but
Alison. I shiver as her eyes turn to mine. The sparkle shower has
ended, and she seems okay except for little firebrandlike marks
circling her breasts and tummy. I shiver again and watch her double
run to join the other-me and Jane Doe Senior in the center ring,
and I
feel
her
invade our embrace.

I am hoping it is the
damned tea.

I just know damned well that it is not a wet
dream. I do not have that good an imagination, not even asleep.

If it is not the tea, and
not a dream, then I decide that we must have found that
favor
of which Oom spoke
earlier. If so, I guess I know how the Oak Grove People spent their
free time. They were not soul-walkers. They were soul-
fuckers.

Chapter Twenty-Four:
Dimensioned

Did any of that really happen? There was a
happening, all right, I was sure of that—but did it happen the way
I experienced it? Hell, I didn't know.

Just remember I warned you
a while back that we are subjects of the Kingdom of Nonsense. So
don't get bent out of shape with me for leading you a bit deeper
into it. I'm giving it to you just as I experienced it, as straight
as I know how to give it. And if you think about it for a moment,
you will realize that the experience at Ojai is of roughly the same
order as the experience at Malibu. Just a few more actors, that's
all, and gussied up a bit.

The problem for me, at the
time, lay not in
accepting
the reality of the experience but in attempting
to understand it, reality or not—and to understand it in terms that
would help unravel the perplexing mysteries of this case. Among the
first things to fall under my intellectual purview had to do with
the mild disorientation effects I'd experienced earlier, they were
present, also, during and immediately following the experience in
the sacred grove. Something about that was definitely strange, as
though my edge on awareness was slightly tipped or skewed. I have
never tried mind-altering drugs so cannot directly compare the
effects, but I would guess that they are somewhat similar.
Something was definitely altered with regard to perceptual
awareness. Possibly the "tea" was a factor in this—but please note
that I had experienced virtually the same effects before ever being
introduced to the tea. Maybe the tea helped set it up, amplified
it somehow.

Do you remember the
earlier discussion on quantum physics? I quoted Planck, one of our
most revered physicists and a father of modern field theory,
regarding the "simultaneous existence" of the same particle
everywhere within the influence of a guiding field system. Planck
was speaking of atomic structures—but then, that is all the hell we
are—and he is saying that mass, charge, and the entire field of
force accompanying the particle
exists
simultaneously
throughout the space
occupied by a particular system. A "field of force," or force
field, is
that which moves and
does
; it is the active agent; and Planck
is then saying that the active agent is
everywhere present
in the given
system of action.

This could be a little
hard to grasp with our linear, cause-effect thinking apparatus—but
if you picture a single orange in a large basket, then try to
imagine the orange existing
everywhere
within the interior of
that basket at the same time, you get an idea of what Dr. Planck is
trying to tell us about the nature of nature
. He is saying that the solid, physical reality perceived by
our senses in the space-time world is an illusion produced by our
senses
. Dr. Rhine—a parapsychologist, not
a physicist—told us precisely the same thing. The physical reality
does not exist,
except as a convenience to
our sense perceptions
as we attempt to
orient our own peculiar form of consciousness—and therefore
existence, itself—
to that dimension of
the universe in which we express that existence.

What does all of that mean
to me as I grapple with my experience in the sacred grove, an
experience in which I was both here and there at the one time,
engaged in one activity
there
while simultaneously engaged in quite a different
activity
here,
though all the while conscious of and fully experiencing
both activities at once?

It means, I choose to think, that maybe
briefly I expanded beyond the confines of my ordinary sense
perceptions; I was given a larger view.

Try to follow this imaginary dialogue with
someone like Dr. Planck:

"Is the orange in the basket?"

"Yes."

"Is it resting at the bottom of the
basket?"

"Yes and no."

"Then is it hovering at the top of the
basket?"

"It is, yes, if that is where you happen to
be looking for it."

"But it is actually
resting on the bottom?"

"If that is where you are looking, yes."

"Wait a minute! I did not put it there. You
put it there. So where did you put it?"

"I merely placed it in the basket."

"Where in the basket?"

"Everywhere in the basket, dummy. Wherever
you want it to be, simply look for it there, and there it will
be."

Does this sound a bit like
one of the old Abbott and Costello routines? Never mind what it
might sound like—this is the reality revealed to us by quantum
physics. Einstein saw the entire, magnificent universe as a field
of activity in which processes produce "continuous functions in
space— and he did not mean "outer space" per se, but space itself
as a continuum within space-time. All the atoms of the universe,
including yours and mine, are participants in these "processes"; we
are embedded in the process, you and I, and it is embedded in us.
In other words, it is
all a single
fabric,
but it is a fabric woven not of
cloth but of
fields of
energy
. Einstein died still trying to
hypothesize mathematically the direct inter- relationships of all
these fields, big and little, which produce you and me and the
universe. Others are carrying on the work, called unified field
theory. Perhaps one day soon another Einstein will come up with
something as simple yet as powerful as E=mc
²
, but having to do with the consciousness
equation.