The secrets of the universe are

The secrets of the universe are hidden

in the details of our experience. -Pete

by Roger A. "Pete" Peterson

In the late seventies I worked part time delivering desserts to hotels and restaurants from South San Francisco to San Jose for a San Francisco bakery. Since I was also editing and publishing Coordinate Point, a magazine that explored the nature of consciousness and being, I often talked about dreams and psychic phenomena with the people I met in my travels. Catherine seemed as interested as any. She was a new friend and business customer from South San Francisco. During an animated discussion about dreams and intuitive experiences late in 1979, I asked her if she had ever participated in a Guided Imagery Exercise (GIE). She didn't know what it was so I described the process to her and shared one of my favorite experiences with her. When I finished, she asked me to conduct a Guided Imagery Exercise for her and some friends. I agreed, and we set up a time for the following week.

Here's the guided imagery experience I shared with Catherine. I call it Healing by Fire.

In guided imagery one person acts as the storyteller or guide while the other participants lie down, relax, and close their eyes. Once the participants are fully relaxed, usually through a series of relaxation exercises, the storyteller constructs an imaginary scene and offers suggestions to focus, guide, and stimulate the participants' creative abilities, just like thoughts and emotions stimulate our creative abilities in dreams. The results depend on each person’s ability to relax and get out of the way of his or her consciousness so it can flesh out the story line and allow the scene to take on a life of its own!

Healing by Fire

The first Guided Imagery Exercises I participated in involved the spirits of earth, fire, wind (air), and water. We met once a week and each week, for a month, we used one of these basic elements to build a story around. My favorite was the fire exercise.

After conducting a relaxation exercise, the storyteller describes a scene with trees, green grass, and wild flowers. He encourages us to enter the scene. Because I'm so relaxed and these scenic elements are so pleasant and non-threatening, I find it easy to fully enter into the scene. He encourages us to explore our surroundings, to tumble in the grass, smell the flowers, or float up into the trees if we want. After a while (several minutes), the storyteller tells us to "see" the pathway that winds through the trees. He instructs us to follow the path. We can walk, run, float, roll, tumble, or fly, whatever suits our fancy. I choose to float, and after some initial difficulty, do so quite successfully. As we approach an open field, we're told to see a fire burning off to one side of the path. Again, several suggestions are offered to stimulate our imagination. A roaring bonfire is one suggestion and a burning house another. Once we see our fire, we're instructed to enter it. I choose a burning house for my experience.

The house is a short distance off the path to my left. It's nearly burned to the ground but there's still some debris burning around the sides and in the middle of the house. My fear of being burned grows as I approach the flames, so I remind myself that I'm not in my physical body, that the flames can’t hurt me in my astral form. When I step into the flames they feel cool against my skin. Delighted and relieved by the cool, breezy feeling of the flames as they lap against my legs, I walk to the center of the house to be among the tallest flames. As I revel in these wonderful new sensations, a large column of flame rises up in front of me and huddles against my chest. As I look down at it, an arm-like extension of flame reaches out from the right side of its main body and penetrates the left side of my chest. Before I can react, I feel something like a hand wrap around my heart and begin to knead it gently and lovingly.

Somehow, in this alternate reality a doorway for healing has opened. For many years I sensed a growing hardness in my heart from entertaining too many thoughts and feelings of anger and disappointment directed at myself and the world for being imperfect. As the Fire Being, or Spirit, continues to knead my heart lovingly, strong feelings of love and compassion are released in me. With a sigh of relief, I completely relax into the experience.

The Storyteller speaks again and gently suggests we bring our fire experience to an end. As his suggestion slowly filters through my mind, the Flame Spirit withdraws its fiery hand from inside my chest. Growing an additional appendage from the left side of its body, it reaches up over my right shoulder and around the back of my neck to support itself. Then it leans back to look up into my face. With the fiery hand it had used to massage my heart, it reaches up and brushes the left side of my face with the back side of its hand, softly, like a mother expressing love and sadness before saying goodbye. After one final hug, it slowly lets go of me and sinks down into the flames still burning around my legs. With sadness, I turn to walk out of the burning house and back up the pathway. As I retrace my steps to the beginning of this journey and waking reality, I mentally relive my experience with the Fire Being and marvel at the magic and wonder of it all. It was a profound healing, maybe even life-saving, experience for me!

When I arrive at Catherine’s house in South San Francisco she's home alone but expecting two friends. When they arrive it becomes clear neither one has ever heard of Guided Imagery. They ask me if its hypnotism, subliminal suggestion, or something more disempowering. To remove their fears, I explain that Guided Imagery simply combines storytelling with imaginative role-playing, something that often happens spontaneously when someone reads a story to us. The only difference between old-fashioned storytelling and Guided Imagery is that the listeners are meant to actively participate in the story. It’s about them! The hope is that something important and meaningful will come from the experience, as it did in mine. Guided Imagery is essentially a waking dream, one that the "dreamer" has conscious control over. I don’t know whether it was their skepticism or a lack of experience using their imaginations, but after the exercise only Catherine says she “thought” she could see something when I suggested they picture a scene of trees, grass, and flowers in their minds. The other two participants said all they could see was the black behind their eyelids. (I guess imaginations need to be exercised like muscles.)

Despite the poor results Catherine and her friends experienced, the longer I spent conducting the Guided Imagery Exercise with them, the more relaxed and intuitive I became, unknowingly setting the stage for what was to come. When I left Catherine's house for the drive north up highway 101 to my home in San Francisco, I felt very playful and alive. I could feel my body virtually tingling with spiritual energy.

The late night traffic on the five-lane Bayshore Freeway (Hwy. 101) was light, so I settled into the middle lane and drove at the speed limit, 55mph. Highway 101, between South San Francisco and San Francisco, is five lanes wide to accommodate the extra traffic generated by the presence of San Francisco International Airport and Candlestick (3 Com) Park. Less than a minute after I was settled into a comfortable groove (middle lane, 55mph), two rough looking guys on a Harley Davidson motorcycle slowly passed me on the right, in lane number 2. As I watched them move by, their “look” triggered a torrent of playful observations and judgments, like: Wow, these guys really look rough! I wonder how many years they’ve spent in places like San Quentin pounding out license plates with dirty acronyms? (a personal joke here because I often spend time turning the letters on license plates into sexually explicit statements to amuse myself as I drive) And look at those identical Mackinaw coats they’re wearing - they look brand new! I wonder which warehouse they stole them from? (Mackinaw coats are short winter coats, made of a thick, woolen, commonly plaid material. They were once popular in the northern and western United States, worn by many Indians and lumbermen)

As amusing as these thoughts are, I can’t help but notice their emphasis on slicing and dicing my two new road companions into pieces (categorizing and stereotyping them). In a moment’s glance, I have these two guys accused, judged, and hung. To salve a faint twinge of guilt, I remind myself that I'm only playing with surface issues, that deep down, I know we're all one and basically good. This makes the situation even more fun because, now, I think, as long as I don’t take my thoughts too seriously, I can be as playful and outrageous as I please. Not!

As soon as he passes my front bumper the motorcycle driver begins to turn into my lane without signaling. Observing this dangerous move, the passenger belatedly sticks his left arm out to apologize and signal the lane change. To add more fuel to the fire of my imagination, when the motorcycle driver sees his passenger’s arm signaling the turn, he reaches back with his left arm and pounds the friend's arm as hard as he can, until he puts it down. What was that all about, I wonder? Damn, are these guys really thieves? Did they really break into a warehouse and steal their Mackinaw coats? How many did they steal? Where were they hiding them? Who are they selling them to, and, jokingly, how much money are they going to make from the deal? After this wild flurry of questions my thoughts settle down, and once the driver of the motorcycle establishes a steady and safe distance between us, my thoughts turn in new directions, until I see the two men take the same freeway interchange I have to take to get home. Suddenly my full attention is back on them with growing irritation and concern.

As we approach the Fell Street Off-Ramp, the exit closest to my home, I find myself holding my breath and “willing” the pair on to the next exit, but to no avail. As fate, or magic, would have it, we are meant to continue our private little drama until it reaches some undisclosed and, hopefully, meaningful conclusion. So once again I watch as the motorcycle passenger signals their turn and the driver reaches back to pound on his arm, even more viciously than he did before. Why is this guy so goddamned contemptuous and angry, I wonder? And, why isn’t the red light at the foot of the off-ramp turning green for christ sake, there’s no traffic around? So here we are, at the foot of the Fell Street off-ramp, which splits into five lanes, waiting for the light to change. The two men on the motorcycle are in the middle lane, waiting to ride up Fell Street Hill, and I’m in the far right lane, waiting to turn right onto Laguna Street. The stop line angles back for the turn onto Laguna Street, so I’ve come to a stop several feet behind the motorcycle. Feeling safe from this vantage point, I carefully scrutinize my two new "friends" while waiting for the light to change, which seems to take forever! As I study them, I wonder, where'd the driver get the money to buy such a nice motorcycle? With his temper, I don’t see how he can hold a regular job. Also, I wonder, what circumstances brought these two guys together and what kind of relationship do they have? The passenger seems to be pretty well meaning.

Suddenly, my mind and body are on full alert! Sheer panic or "inner" knowing takes control of my body and forces me to shift my eyes slightly forward of the driver's position and up at a Victorian house on the hill, a block or so beyond our position. As my eyes come to a rest on the Victorian, the motorcycle driver whips around and screams at me, “What are you looking at, Suckface?” Before the words finish leaving his mouth he realizes, with a look of shock, that I’m not looking at him but at something beyond him. He whips around to the front as fast as he had turned on me. With a look of innocence on my face, as if to say, are you talking to me?, and with the energy of his words still reverberating through my mind, I slowly bring my eyes back to rest on him. His emotional outburst was so graphic and powerful, the image of a man's face with the mouth area sucked in, in a lurid reference to male homosexuality, remains etched in my mind. When my eyes focus on him again, he’s staring straight ahead with a look of utter desperation on his face, a look that says, “Come on light, change - let me out of here!”

Still shaken from the violence of his outburst, I continue to study the driver, his passenger, and the motorcycle, until a strange movement at the top of the driver's head attracts my attention. Curious and somewhat apprehensive, I watch as another head begins to emerge through the top of his. This new head, bald and bodiless, is soon floating free in the air above the driver’s head. Mask-like and real at the same time, it slowly turns to face me, locking its hypnotic, shiny black eyes onto mine. With grinning arrogance and a look of hungry anticipation on its face, it starts to move toward me, sizing me up as it comes. As the gap closes between us, I suspect that this “thing” is a living manifestation, a psychic projection of quasi-matter, given birth by the sheer intensity of the driver’s thoughts and emotions. Somehow, I'm perceiving inner reality and outer reality simultaneously, and I can shift between the two at will.

As the bodiless head moves closer, it cunningly rises to a position above my head to stay beyond my reach, and begins to change before my eyes. I watch in amazement as it transforms into a circular stone wheel with two flat sides. The side facing me has lines cut into the surface to form eyes, ears, and a nose. Below the hint of a nose is a large gaping mouth hole that goes completely through the stone. As the stone face hovers over my head, I'm reminded of a primitive Sun God. The large eyes are closed and deep grooves radiate out from them like rays of the sun. I wonder, did my fear stop it, or did it stop on its own. Suspecting the latter, I wonder what will happen next. What kind of disturbed energy did the motorcycle driver unleash when he turned and yelled at me so violently? Suddenly, the face springs to life! The stony eyelids fly open while the very stone itself reverts back to its original human shape and flesh tone. The head's shiny black eyes once again lock onto mine, and with a look of maniacal glee, it swoops down, open-neck first, to force its way down over my head. Fearing it wants to possess me mind, body and soul, I quickly reach up to defend myself.

I force my thumbs up inside the opening of the mask's skin-like rubbery neck before it can completely slip down over my head and clamp my fingers down tightly on the flesh at both sides. This gives me control over the mask as it alternately struggles to force itself down over my head and free itself from my grasp. As we struggle, thoughts race through my mind about what will happen to me if this disturbed personality wins the battle. Considering this possibility strengthens my resolve to fight it off.

Sensing the growing strength of my rejection, the mask redoubles its efforts to alternately force its way down over my head and break free of my grasp. My arms are beginning to feel like dead weights but I refuse to let go. As the violent struggle continues, I see another me standing on some grass next to a wooden fence in the residential area of a large city. Nighttime lights illuminate the street as I hold the almost lifeless mask in my hands. Every once in a while it flutters weakly, letting me know it's still alive. In a fleeting moment of sympathy, before it completely dies, I release it, half expecting it to fall to the ground. Instead, it floats up into the air. Much to my disappointment, it quickly takes on new life and starts to move out over the darkened city with a look of renewed hope and determination. Using my inner senses, I follow the mask at a discreet distance as it combs the city streets and buildings looking for a new victim, one more willing than I. Invisible to him, I watch as he feels out potential victims. Finally he settles on a depressed looking young man sitting on a park bench. I'm amazed at how fast he subdues his new victim. The young man almost gratefully accepts the "Suckface" personality, as the mask easily slips down over his head. Using a kind of psychic shorthand to skip forward in time and space, I watch as a total biological and psychological transformation of the young man takes place. The human body that once belonged to him now belongs to "Suckface", the personality forged from the anger and contempt of the motorcycle driver, still impatiently sitting beside me at the foot of Fell Street Hill.

Next, an all white room swims into focus. "Suckface" is standing in the middle of the room naked, except for a small loincloth and wide, studded leather belts. One belt is wrapped around his waist while the other one, attached at the right side of his waist, runs up his chest and down over his left shoulder, attaching to the waist belt in the back, like a bandoleer. Holding a leather Cat-O-Nine-Tail whip in his right hand, he uses it to both sexually stimulate and punish the naked, submissive man crawling on the floor in front of him. A quick flashback shows Suckface picking him up on the street earlier with the promise of food, wine, and wild, uninhibited sex. Watching this scene from a point in the air between the two men, I know the man on the floor will get his night of wild, uninhibited sex, but he's also going to get something he doesn't suspect. At the end of this long night of sexual abandon and sadistic abuse, he'll be killed and, like others before him, his body parts will be dismembered, wrapped in plastic, and hidden throughout the city for the police to find.

The contempt and loathing Suckface feels for himself and the other homosexual men he meets has grown in proportion to his homosexual activity and the public’s condemnation of it. Unable to resolve these two strongly opposing forces, he has become self-destructive. While outwardly seething with contempt for those who condemn him and his behavior, unconsciously he accepts their condemnation as the condemnation of his father, the motorcycle driver. Unconsciously, he looks for ways to appease this energy. Ironically, he chooses to destroy those who give him the most love and pleasure in life, his male sexual partners. In this way he's able to express his contempt for society and punish himself at the same time. Deep down he knows that playing this gruesome game of cat-and-mouse with the police will eventually lead to his own destruction but, outwardly, he denies the possibility.

I watch from an invisible point in the air as Suckface moves through the city streets, hiding the bloody body parts of his latest victim. He's offering up a sacrifice to the limitation and fear that condemns his behavior, "one more dead "queer" for those who hate queers", he thinks. Unable to resist the urge to pay the ultimate price, he taunts the detective in charge of investigating his murder victims through a series of cryptic letters. He laughs at the detective for not being able to find him and put a stop to the reign of terror he's inflicting on the city's homosexual community. Knowing the police are closing in on him in this alternate reality, I return to the present and renew my grip on the struggling mask.

With these terrible thoughts fresh in my mind, I decide my course of action. The Suckface personality, forged from the negative thoughts and emotions of the motorcycle driver, will not gain its freedom today! Enough anger and contempt is loose within the world already. As my resolve solidifies, I return my attention to the mask. Staring down at me the look on its face changes; where once it wore a look of arrogance and superiority, now it wears a look of fear and exaustion. Strengthening my grip on the mask, I project my astral or energy body through the car window, like Plastic Man in the comic books, and try to jamb it down over to the motorcycle driver's head, more than ten feet away. Although my move catches him off guard, he reacts quickly and forces me all the way back into my car. Again and again, we drive one another’s energy bodies back and forth in a pitched battle, neither one of us willing to accept final possession of the mask.

As the motorcycle driver and I grimly fight on, both strongly rejecting the personality and intent of the mask, a look of apprehension and fear grows on its face. Finally, with a look of total shock and dismay, it gives up, letting the glow of life that once strongly animated its features, drain from its being. Surprisingly, I feel a touch of sadness. The motorcycle driver and I are now battling over a limp, lifeless rubber mask. Still determined not to keep it, I reach over and attempt to stuff it into the right hand pocket of his Mackinaw coat. Unwilling to accept responsibility for it, he rejects my attempt and angrily pushes my hand back with the mask still in it.

Finally, the traffic light turns green and we both have to shift our attention back to the outside world long enough to get our vehicles moving. As the motorcycle driver and his passenger head up Fell Street Hill, I turn right onto Laguna Street. I still don't want to keep the dead mask so I reach back again to stuff it into his coat pocket but to no avail. He still refuses to accept it. After several more fruitless attempts, I arrive home two blocks away to park my car, clean up, and go to bed.

Lying in bed beside my sleeping wife, I find myself unable, or unwilling, to let the Suckface incident go unresolved. Doggedly, I start rerunning the image of the motorcycle driver heading up Fell St. Hill. In each sequence, I put the mask back into his pocket but in each case it comes floating back to me like a loving pet to its master. Just before sleep can claim me, I start an internal dialogue with the motorcycle driver. I admit to him that as we drove north from South San Francisco together, I was amazed and amused by his look and behavior. I apologize for making fun of him and, in an attempt at humor, I add that it did look strange to see you beat your buddy’s arm so violently just for signaling turns. He kind of laughs and I volunteer that I had no right to pick on him. With this admission a sense of brotherhood and understanding blossoms between us and I use this moment to remind him that when he did turn around to yell at me, I wasn’t looking at him, and that alone should be reason enough for him to take responsibility for disposing of the mask. With this appeal to his sense of fair play, he reaches down and opens his coat pocket, giving me permission to place the dead mask inside, which I do. My final view of him is his back as he drives up Fell St. Hill to disappear over the top, taking the mask with him and out of my life forever. With this delightful image still in my mind, I role over onto my left side and fall fast asleep, in peace.

Afterthoughts

The “Suckface” Incident highlights two important issues: human sexual expression and the power of thoughts and emotions.

When the motorcycle driver turned and yelled “What are you looking at Suckface?” he unleashed a powerful Thought Form into the world, one with clear intent and the ability to actualize itself. If I had not seen it coming and persisted in stopping it, would it be alive in the world today dominating my thoughts and emotions, or someone else’s? Also, do we have Inner Selves that fight in the background to protect us from the effects of negative or unwelcome energy forms like the Suckface entity?

In a heightened state of awareness I was able to access and translate the mental and emotional turmoil created by my volatile encounter with the motorcycle driver into meaningful images and action. As you might imagine, mental and emotional turmoil is little more than a storm of thoughts and feelings so intense and moving so fast, we can’t make sense of them through normal means. By switching to my Inner Senses, or becoming my Inner Self, I was able match speed with the energy of these thoughts and feelings, to observe and interact with them in a way that made sense. In effect, I had one foot in Inner Reality and one foot in outer reality. This enabled me to interact with and control the flow of energy within each reality and between the two. It’s not something I can do all the time because surviving in waking reality requires a great deal of energy, which leaves us little time to spare for meditation and other activities that might help us understand and learn how to use our ability to shift into higher states of consciousness outside of dreams.

Now, why was this guy so angry with me? Could he sense my playful but critical thoughts about him as he passed me and we drove toward San Francisco together, or was he this angry, self-conscious, and anti-social all the time to everyone? This brings up another important question because people send mean messages to each other all the time in this value judgment world with thoughts, words, and gestures.

This experience clearly demonstrates how thoughts and emotions can affect us. What we need to remember is how often we use them to affect others this way. When the motorcycle driver expressed low self esteem in his look and behavior and I happily reflected that back to him, he reacted by projecting onto me the most vile image he could think of, a male “Suckface”. What happens when we get angry and yell at our children or one another? Every thought is a living energy form, or suggestion, that will attempts to actualize itself. Children are more impressionable or vulnerable than adults because their imaginations are more active.

Why would a man, happily married to the same woman for over thirty five years with two grown children, a grandson and a granddaughter, want to admit to the world that he had a sexual relationship with another guy in high school? That's like giving someone a rock to bash you over the head with, isn't it? The answer is simple: it is time to put an end to the pain and suffering associated with being different in this world. It's time to face our fears and move through them. It is the only way we can find our way back to love!

Also, this account gives us an example of just how powerful we are. In a heightened emotional/intuitive state I was able to see what most of time, I (we) do not. I could see the power of our thoughts and emotions manifested in quasi-physical form.

In my mind I watch as the Suckface personality transform and dominate the life of the individual it possesses, imprinting the new mind and body with its own brand of psychological and biological characteristics. And what will happen, I wonder, when this personality’s insatiable need for male sex encounters the strong public condemnation of homosexuality? Will he be able to resolve the conflict effectively or will the projected guilt become internalized, resulting in self-hatred and, ultimately, in self-destructive behavior? Will this hate-filled personality retaliate by becoming the King of Suck? As soon as this thought forms, other thoughts show him maniacally giving head to any man who will let him, in public or not, and reveling in the humiliation and shock that registers on the faces of those who perceive it as outrageous antisocial behavior. More to come...

Before making a final decision on how I will deal with the mask, I ask myself, “Why am I involved in this situation? What attracted this experience to me?” My first thought in regard to this question is that just being in San Francisco makes you a target for homophobic attacks. Then I recall a sexual relationship I had with an older male student during my freshman year in high school in 1956. At the time it seemed like that was the only sexual outlet that was safe and available to me. My girlfriend would wiggle in my lap and let me touch her breasts through her clothing but she refused to have sex with me. Was I caught up in this drama out of guilt over this old homosexual relationship? No, I think, guilt is not the answer here because I came to terms with the “rightness” or “wrongness” of my behavior years ago in a nightmare that kept recurring until I squarely faced my feelings of guilt and dealt with them. In that moment, when I decided to stop cowering before the powerful voice of public opinion, I took my life back. In that moment, I admitted to myself that I had enjoyed that experience while it lasted and that I felt no natural guilt about it, only the unnatural guilt that accompanies the threat of punishment and even destruction in a world of limited self-awareness and value judgments. In that moment, I knew I could not allow the more limited, fearful perception of reality to prevail over the larger, more loving one that was emerging from deep within my soul.

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