The Stoned Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF Page A

dances performed at the Gurdjieff Foundation in France. The work performed there exhibited the highest level of intelligence I have ever seen, a profound reverence for the mystery of existence coupled with an uncompromising understanding of that portion of the universe which can be known. But once again, the people who attended all looked as though they had pokers rammed up their asses. The film showed at one of the East Side movie houses and was attended by most of the Gurdjieffites in the Western Hemisphere. The movement puts some stress on wealth, for a person must have enough means to move about to wherever he needs to be at any given time. I felt as though I were at a convention of psychic closet queens. The head of the Work was there from France, a superbly manicured woman wearing a sable jacket. She was fawned over as though she were royalty. And I saw that above all else the Work is an excuse to form another clique, a group of people among whom complicity was the chief virtue. They had all agreed to play life according to a similar set of rules, and within that matrix, were more or less successful.
    Of course, the esoteric aspect of the Work is the crystallization of a spiritual body, one which will continue, at a different level of consciousness, after the death of the physical body. The goal is immortality within the limits of the solar system, with immortality being understood in a special sense. Yet, despite all the hush-hush high-level work on awareness, there was for me the suspicion that the only thing Gurdjieff was saying was to wake up and enjoy life, its total joy and terror, its mystery and its revelations.
    The entire affair concluded shortly thereafter, when I took LSD for the first time. The experience of the drug cannot be communicated through words. I went through the usual cycles, flavored by my own conditioning. My guide was freaked out on The Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time, and she kept reading me snatches from that hoary comic book. Oddly enough, Gurdjieff’s system is derived from the same sources as the Tibetan, and in fact, he learned much of his scene from the Tibetans while he was smuggling guns past the British into Asia. Among other things that night, I reenacted the tragicomedy of Abbott and Costello, and then sailed off into a full-blown Jesus trip, complete with glory, agony, death, and resurrection. Finally, I rose from the dead, resplendent in golden rays, and floated off into the heavens.
    But at the height of my victory, with all the earth at my feet, I looked down and saw dumpy old Mrs. R. walking down the street. With a voice like trumpets I shouted, “Mrs. R. Look at me, I’m Jesus Christ.” Without so much as looking up, she muttered. “You’re Marco Vassi, and you’re still a fool.” At that moment, I may have become the first person to blush on the astral plane.
    The next day I was down from the drug, and called her. “I took acid yesterday,” I said, “and I want to tell you that I am ashamed of the way I behaved.” She paused a long time and then said, “Oh, I suppose you’ll have to do the whole drug thing now. Call me when you’re finished with that foolishness.”
    I never saw or spoke to her again. Her phone number mysteriously disappeared from all my records one day. She stayed in my consciousness as a living force for some time. There was little I did during that time which she didn’t actively super-ego. Her influence reached into my deepest core, and I had hardly got to know the woman!
    Some time later I ran across several renegade Gurdjieff groups on the West Coast. John Klaxon led some two hundred people in bizarre psychic orgies each week. And a number of people who had read Gurdjieff but not come into contact with any teachers were using his ideas to put together their own syntheses of mind control. The most interesting person was Mr. F., however. His wife and he had both been members of the Foundation, and she stayed on while he broke away to