The Stoned Apocalypse Read Online Free PDF

form his own school. He claimed that the New York school had been overly Ouspenskyite in its orientation, and he called for a return to pure Gurdjieff. Old G. had hardly been dead a score of years, and already high-level factions were forming, complete with defections and purges.
    I walked into one of F.’s groups carrying a copy of Search before I knew what the score was with them. One of the people came up to me and said, “Reading Ouspensky, eh?” And suddenly I felt like I had carried a copy of Trotsky into a roomful of Stalinists. My reflexes went into overdrive and I immediately dug the scene. “I find him . . . interesting,” I said. He nodded. “Yes, he says some valuable things. But one mustn’t be misled by him.” It reminded me of my days in the Party. The same guarded tones, the same innuendoes, the same air of complex intrigue.
    Almost two years later, on a chill night in the desert outside of Tucson, with some fine Southwest grass coursing through my brain, I woke up simply to the fact of existence. And at that moment, Mrs. R. ceased being an influence and became simply one of the many people I had known in my life. I was returned to myself, and I knew that, paradoxically, I had found the place Gurdjieff talks about, without being a Gurdjieffite. Of course, I fall in and out of enlightenment, as I fall in and out of all the states which compose the human condition. After all, cosmic consciousness is just a part, and is no more or less real than a fart.
    For a long time, before coming to myself, I was haunted by the visions I had while under her influence. The fact that almost every human being I meet is actually asleep, dead to himself or herself, walking in a world of illusion, created a loneliness that was almost crushing. And from time to time I still suffer night horrors, haunted by that insight into existential aloneness. I find that having a woman nearby, some cold beer in the refrigerator, and a copy of Ecclesiastes by the bed, however, go a long way to counteract the influence of Turkish fairy tales.
    Shortly after dropping acid, I dropped out. I left the girlie book publishers. And I began to get even more restless. My journey to find myself started to take on a geographic bent, and in the classic manner of every American who seeks to know himself, I began to look west, toward the fabled land of California.
    But before the final resolve to leave, one more event was to fill my paranoia quotient to the brim. With the wounds from my encounter with Mrs. R. still bleeding, one sunny afternoon, I walked into the Hotel Martinique, and into the arms of the Scientologists.

2
    I have never had any luck with organizations. I began life between the Mafia and the Catholic Church, in the enclave of East Harlem in upper Manhattan. The neighborhood had the ambience of feudal Italy; it composed a fief with clearly marked boundaries. It was bounded by the East River on one side, a large park on another, with Park Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street marking the divisions between it and the stretches of black Harlem to the northwest. Just about everyone over thirty had been born in Italy, and I remember asking my mother at what age I would begin talking Italian, since it seemed that all the young people spoke English while the older ones reverted to the more ancient tongue. To say that we were sheltered is to miss the depth of isolation from twentieth-century America that blessed and blighted us. I didn’t meet a non-Catholic socially until I was seventeen; and at the age of fifteen, when one of the neighborhood girls dated a Protestant from the YMCA which stood in benign neglect at the fringes of the kingdom, we all swarmed around her after she returned, asking her what Protestants were like, how they looked, what they said. For all practical purposes, for the first decade and a half of my life, my picture of Protestants was a vicious lampoon of Martin Luther and legions of godless heretics. Jews were