A Ride on the Cosmic Slingshot

Wil and I, both, had been on an accelerated spiritual journey for more than two years, now, and shared an acute appreciation for the fact that our lives were undergoing a protracted period of deep, essential change. The year gone by had offered up an endless progression of psychological and spiritual shifts that had opened our eyes to the world in a way we had never imagined it before. While to the casual observer, our basic circumstances might have seemed relatively stable for two men diagnosed with HIV and AIDS, a tremendous reorientation in the way we viewed ourselves and the purpose of our lives was emerging from deep inside. We were discovering- sometimes painfully, but more often than not, joyfully- a reality in which our circumstances were nothing more than an elaborate projection of our habitual modes of thinking- a 3-dimensional hologram we could interact with through the mechanism of our beliefs. The new reality we had embraced, undergirded by a Gnostic view of the Universe and of ourselves, transcended the usual mentality of duality and blame. We were neither the victims of a deadly virus or of a punishing God but simply two individual interacting with ourselves. For better or for worse, our experiences were strictly of our own making. After months of hopelessness and gripping fear, the first rays of a new understanding had dawned into the fear darkened recesses of our AIDS saturated minds, and in that light clarity was beginning to emerge. In less than a year’s time since we had heard those awful words, “you have AIDS and you’re going to die,” our overwhelming fear of inevitable death at the hands of a killer virus had been replaced with a growing sense of excitement about what was possible in our lives. We had managed, somehow, to pierce the apparent horror of our diagnosis and find the reality of its larger purpose: AIDS was here to heal us, not to kill us. That, we had been doing to ourselves for years, with too much sex, drugs and rock and roll, and all of the other distractions the 80’s popular culture had to offer two guys from Manhattan with loads of disposable income. AIDS, it was turning out, wasn’t a punishment from God, after all, as the fundamentalists happily proclaimed, but simply a message from our inner being, spoken in the language of biology, telling us that there was more to our lives than we had ever imagined and that it was time to step out of the limiting box we had been living in for most of the last decade. As our process of personal transformation continued to unfold, we experienced significant turnover in the people closest to us, as those friends, unable to deal with the changes we were making in our lives, lost interest in keeping us company and drifted off to find more suitable playmates. Needless to say, we were sad to see them go. Even so, we knew their departure was an inevitable side effect of the healing process we had embarked upon; that it was inevitable that people who saw themselves as victims of this horrible plague would be threatened by the level of responsibility we were taking for our illness, and want to distance themselves from us. Practically overnight, we had shifted our focus away from the familiar pursuits of the party circuit, to a search for deeper meaning in our lives. Frequent all-nighters at the baths and our favorite disco, The Saint, suddenly lost their appeal. Our personal odyssey of self-discovery, fueled by an intense desire to live in the face of an incurable illness and the onset of its horrifying symptoms, consumed our time and dominated our every waking moment. It was difficult for many of the people who knew us, unaccustomed as they were to our new found interests and not sharing the urgency of our particular health challenge (not that they were aware of, anyway), to understand the radical transformation taking place in both our lives. Many of them chalked it up to fear, preferring to believe that we were acting out of desperation, just as Wil had originally perceived my actions when I had first seen the light, so to speak, and started sharing some of my new found metaphysical beliefs with him. Certainly, desperation may have been the catalyst that had started us down the path we were now firmly ensconced upon, but it was by no means the entire story. It was simply easier for some people to believe that we were crazy than to examine the shaky foundations of their own crumbling belief systems. In some people’s minds, no matter how heroic our will to live might be, our fate was irreversibly sealed by the finality of our diagnosis. We were doomed to die, no matter what; and in the end, all our brave actions and good intentions would count for nothing. When it came to AIDS, the entire energy of social consciousness was pitted against our recovery and the insidious drumbeat of negativity demanded that we simply accept our fate and die. Yet, miraculously, Wil and I had come to realize the insanity of buying into the mass hysteria. There was a cure for AIDS; we were sure of it. It might not be in the form of a pill, perhaps, but it was tangible all the same. Our challenge, as we saw it, was not to cure ourselves by finding a drug to rid ourselves of symptoms, but to transform ourselves from the inside out, using the experience of illness as a teacher and a guide. Healing lay in a transformation of consciousness, not in the suppression of unrelenting symptoms. When the lessons the disease had come to teach were finally learned, the teacher would no longer be needed. It was in the midst of these tumultuous times that I had what would be the first of many opportunities to share my ideas about self-healing and the details of my personal spiritual journey with other people facing the same challenge. The opportunity presented itself at one of the weekly meetings of the Power Seven, the small, rag-tag band of psychic explorers I belonged to, of which several of its members were HIV positive, like myself. Dana, the solitary girl in the group, showed up at one of our gathering with a flyer she had found on a telephone pole in the Village, advertising a potluck evening of metaphysics and channeling at a private loft on 24th St, just off Broadway and Fifth.