Californicated, Santa Crucified

Santa Crucified

Sammy Davis, Jr. says: "All men are created bland." And I would add: "But they can, and usually do, get even blander." Case in point (never thought I'd see the day): Me. At the end of my second year in California, I watch with fascinated horror as I become nicer and nicer, more polite, more congenial, more well-adjusted.

I do my Tai-chi on the beach, write my haiku about inner tubes and the boardwalk and the crescent moon, glide over to my polarity therapy class, throw the bums a dime in my prime, cop a feel, catch the latest in New Wave fashions down at the thrift shop, pick up my free money from the ever-beneficient state, call my mother and rap about reincarnation, and fall asleep in the arms of my best friend's wife. Hey, this is easy, no hassles, no bummers. Hey, I'm in Santa Cruz, what year is it? Have a nice life. Dear Diary: Almost fell in love yesterday, and again today. Let's go down to Esalen tonight and get naked and take some drugs.

I can almost remember pre-California: Setting my hair on fire to scare and horrify my old girl friend, what was her name again, and one who said she'd get her father to kill me after I threw coffee at her, after she threw my Tarot books out the window, after I raised an eyebrow to some other witchy woman. That was a different life, filled with jealousy, suffering, terror, awe. Like the time brother Tom and I ran into that very white Baptist church in South Carolina, in the middle of the Sunday service, and shivered and howled and fell on the floor, screaming Jesus has come again to judge the quick and the dead, but he's black this time. Or when my friend Ellen got so demented and distracted over a story I wrote about her (pornographic, she said; erotic, I said) that she half-sliced off her little finger while cutting vegetables, and blamed me. We never spoke again.

Rock and roll was religion to me then; I dwelt in the power and glory of it all. There was Janis Joplin and me and a lesbian roadie crashing on the same filthy mattress in March, 1969; the cousin of George Harrison's ex-wife giving me hepatitis in '70; Johnny Winter punching me in the jaw in '71. I mean, I worshipped at the shrines. I was pure, I was holy, I was blasphemous and bad.

When I see those neat beards and bell bottoms marching in circles in front of pg&e on the Mall, I am calm and Buddha-cool. I do not snort, I do not judge, I do not compare. With supreme detachment, I remember gathering with the Black Panthers in downtown Durham, N.C. to throw Molotov cocktails at the cops; or making love with a real Marxist from Czechoslavakia; or — I don't know why, exactly — falling asleep in the outhouse one winter morning.

In March of 1977, on the day before I left North Carolina, my friend Richard said to me: "You ready to regress, boy? Do you realize that Californians are 10 years behind, not ahead, of the times? Why do you think they talk so obsessively about spirituality? They know nothing about it, they're innocents, that's why. Look how we tend to the spirit here. No full-page newspaper ads, no remedial gymnastics for the inner eye. It's all blended into the daily routine here. We don't have to call attention to it, we just do it. You just see how fast you lose touch with the moon and the cycle of the seasons out there. They're half-terrified of the earth, the land's too wild and unstable. They keep their distance — they have to. Why do you think they talk so obsessively about Mother Earth? Because they know nothing about her, they fear her."

Well? Two years later, Jerry Brown wants California to have space bubble communities orbiting the earth, before the U.S. government figures out how to do it. We'll have gay vegetarian rebirthed jocks in one bubble, and Taoist hermaphroditic scholars hermetically devoted to the study of Baba Ram Dass's sexuality in another bubble. "OFF THE PLANET!" will be the California state slogan by 1985. (Do I smell decadent anti-terrestrial sympathies, fear and loathing of the Great Mother, a bizarre exaltation of ignorance and abuse of the earth?)

And meanwhile, dear old Tim Leary wants not only his soul, but his body, his actual, physical, flesh and blood body, to live forever. Is this the next radical development in human evolution, or the supremely effete, deluded ideal of rapidly devolving patriarchal culture?

Psychic Centers

There is a new organic enchilada sauce on the market allegedly more pure than any enchilada sauce ever made. I found it in the Food Bin the other day. According to the label on the side of the plastic container, its ingredients include water, onions, garlic, soy sauce, spices, sea salt, and "unsprayed dry red chilis from the Mesilla Valley, one of the 7 psychic windows of the world." Is this a radical new evolutionary development in the history of food?

I wouldn't bet on it. At least not until the makers of the enchilada sauce or some reliable trance medium provides better documentation for this claim. Most everyone I've ever talked to agrees that there are no more and no less than 7 "psychic windows" on this planet, just as there are exactly 7 chakras in the human body. But according to my own informal survey, 54 geographical locations, as of Sept. 1, 1979, have already laid claim to the title, including Santa Cruz. The Mesilla Valley is number 55.

As I understand it, a psychic window is a supercharged place in the body of the planet where the veil between this dimension and the next is parted. Strange and miraculous things happen there. Planes and ships disappear into thin air. The skies are cluttered with fantastic colors and images. Animals talk. Clairvoyance and telekinesis are commonplace. People are obsessed with the occult. ufos come and go freely.

The most celebrated of these places - which also go by the titles "energy vortex," "planetary chakra," "spiritual center," and "circle of light," - is of course the Bermuda Triangle. In more esoteric circles the popular sentiment remains with the hidden magical city of Shamballa (where the Buddha will supposedly be celebrating his birthday on the Full Moon), which some observers have located in the Himalayas, others in the Gobi Desert.

I don't think I've ever lived in a place that hasn't been identified as a psychic window, and that includes 16 different cities and towns. Which means either that my very presence bestows some sort of divine grace, or else that some of these places are faking.

During my stay in North Carolina, I lived in two cities, only eight miles apart, that each claimed to be the center of a psychic window whose boundaries most definitely did not extend as far as the rival city. It always seems unlikely to me that the earth would squeeze two separate chakras into an area only 50 square miles wide. But when I lived in Durham I believed in the divinity of Durham, and when in Chapel Hill, the divinity of Chapel Hill. It gave me a kind of civic pride not much different than the chauvinistic glow other people drew from the success of the local universities' football and basketball teams.

Of those 55 places I know to have been called psychic windows (and there are probably more) I have visited 41, so I feel eminently qualified to offer a list of 7 locations in the United States most likely to be psychic windows. These are just the possibilities; I doubt that we actually have more than 2, since the 7 must be distributed pretty evenly over the face of the earth:

1) The Bermuda Triangle. The odds-on favorite of the people; the darling of the National Enquirer and pop-occult crowds. (This should not, however, be held against it.)

2) The Cleveland-to-Columbus Corridor. This section of Ohio is visited more frequently by ufos than any other place in the world. It is also the origin of several of the most notorious punk rock bands.

3) Fairfield, Iowa. The Transcendental Meditation organization has made this its "levitation headquarters." Advanced meditators are brought here to be taught the power of flight.

4) Forestburg, S.D. It's often mentioned, by subjects progressed through hypnosis to their future lives, as a great center of North American civilization from the 22nd to 26th centuries.

5) Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C. My own sentimental favorite.

6) Los Angeles. Who can possibly deny that the entire world is being created in the image of L.A.?

7) Santa Cruz. The evidence is impressive. The Dalai Lama himself has said that the new spiritual center of the world will be between San Francisco and Monterey. According to the U.S. Geodetic Survey, this area has a strangely low amount of electro-magnetic activity — thunderstorms are abnormally rare. Several psychics on the east coast who have no special stake in glorifying Santa Cruz have made references to this area as an "energy vortex."

In June, 1968, several years before I had ever even heard of Santa Cruz, I dreamed of a tall, yellow-eyed, winged man who told me, "Go to the holy place, Santa Cruz." Recently, while researching this article, I discovered that the native Ohlone Indians, who regarded this land as holy, had legends of a giant bird man who appeared periodically and foretold the future.

I have only one reason to question the evidence. And that is that there seems to be almost too much spiritual activity in Santa Cruz. Sometimes the proliferation of spiritual schools, movements, and organizations is so excessive that I'm sure someone must be playing a joke on all of us. But then a cosmic comic sense might be the one and only essential symptom of life in a psychic window.

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