David Burns Manuscript¹

David Burns,
edited by Brent Potter

[CONTINUED]

Alan

  Alan was the only person I know who was not allowed to stay in Kingsley Hall; he was too crazy, and in the context of the existential philosophy of madness that means too violent. He was remembered for having lifted a massive safe in one of his manic rages and thrown it through a heavy double door. He was also remembered for ordering a jet airliner by telephone. So persuasive was his manner that he succeeded in making the order until he asked that a swimming pool be built into the fuselage. Then the hoax was apparent. He was also once arrested in a phone booth when his manner of making long distance credit card calls to various parts of the world convinced the operator that something was not as it should be.

I spent a day with Alan during the period of the break-up of Kingsley Hall. He had been kind and helpful to me during the difficult time before I moved to Archway and I had agreed to an interview he claimed to have arranged. He wanted me to meet with a representative of the Sunday Times; there was a curiosity about the last days of the Hall and the possibility of a short article in the Atticus column, then written by David Blundy. So Alan persuaded me to meet him in the offices of the Times on Fleet Street.

I arrived and made inquiries at the desk. Alan was actually in Blundy’s office; he came down and took me across the street to the Red Lion pub looking for Blundy. At last we spied him on the pavement, and inconspicuous figure with a slight limp. Robin swept us together and with a flourish announced: "Atticus, this is Kingsley Hall." The humor and the absurdity of the situation were immediately apparent. And I realized I had nothing to present in the way of news, neither propaganda nor an exposé. My feelings about the communities and the work of the Philadelphia Association were too mixed.

Danny

Danny was the second son of the second son of a Scottish landowner or gentleman farmer. His uncle and his father managed the land together, but his uncle was senior. Danny was seventeen; he had been a difficult child, apparently, and had spent some time in mental hospitals before coming to the community.

Danny was still difficult. He was intrusive and annoying, but really not abnormally so for his age. He would spill tea in the kitchen on purpose. He would invade the private room of our administrator and steal small items. He would poke dry sticks of spaghetti into the butter so that it was quite unusable. He would come to visit me and call me a ‘cabbage’.

But he was extremely creative in his way. The spaghetti and the butter are examples; I tried it myself. I found an immense sensuality in the resistance and slight pop as the stick went through the paper wrapper and in the smooth glide into the butter itself. In our back gardens Danny made a number of discoveries which he shared with me. Once he lured me to a pile of rocks where there was a large spider’s web. He had captured a fly and as he put it in the web he tricked me into moving my head very close indeed. I was horrified when an enormous spider appeared and made a sudden charge toward the trapped insect. I believe I let out a shriek and then Danny and I laughed together.

Another of his discoveries was unforgettable. He picked a dandelion and broke off the flower, leaving a translucent green tube. Then he captured an ant and gently induced it to make its way into this miniature tunnel. As I held the end of the dandelion stalk to my eye I could see the ant crawling vigorously upwards through a sunlit green pathway to freedom. Danny fed the ant into its tube again and again and in watching this found an exhilarating amusement.

But Danny burned the whiskers of the cat. He was not all gems and creativity. He told me of a castle where there was a child hidden away, a child with such a hideous defect of birth that he was forever locked in a room, never to be seen. This was the monster of Glencoe, an appalling ugliness. Danny told me this story several times, always in the same intense testing manner and I became convinced that he was speaking of himself. He was, in any case, unendurable to his family. Perhaps his uncle wanted to keep him from inheriting the land. So Danny became the family monster, hidden from the light of day. He had gone away to school, been hospitalized then sent to the community. He finally left us and went to a progressive hospital in Scotland. What became of him in the end I do not know.

Don

Don was from California and New Mexico, where his father had legally deeded a piece of land to God. After a brief early involvement with the Manson family in Los Angeles, Don had lived with his wife on the land that was God’s and had finally come alone but by prior arrangement to live in the community. I owe him a great deal.

During one period he was living in the same house as I; he was going through considerable difficulty and trying to work it out in a variety of ways. One entire night he spent sitting in the bathtub, having put a lot of shillings into the meter for the hot water. He believed that he could breath in the water through his pores. One day he set himself the goal of doing one thousand sit-ups and succeeded. Once he offered to clean the rooms of members of the community as a service, as an offering of himself, as an atonement. I was disappointed that he was discouraged in this by Leon, his therapist and also mine, who said that Don would never carry out the project. I though it was worth a try.

Once Don suggested that he and I walk north from Islington through suburban wastes of outer London until we reach the countryside, sleeping each night by the wayside. This seemed a bit extraverted to me. But Don was determined to give the idea a try and he was arrested twice on the outskirts of London for his unusual behavior on the streets.

Don was using a room on the ground floor of the same house where I had a room on the top floor. His plan was to sound-proof the room. For some reason he needed extreme quiet. At that time I was going through a difficult period of change, having strange and unpleasant experiences that I might have attributed to the fact that I had stopped drinking and that I could have explained away as a sort of delirium. But I received a few hints that my experience could not be so easily dismissed as that. I suspected from their behavior that some of the other residents of the community were having similar difficulties and that their inner lives were equally in turmoil. But I could not be sure as it was characteristic that they would act very strangely and say nothing about it at all.

But Don had done a bit of writing, lucidly describing his sufferings, scrawled on the side of a cardboard box that was discarded and that I only noticed when I saw it full of books when I was helping someone else move out of the house. I sat down on the stairs and read the writing on the side of the box and knew what I had dimly suspected, that my experience was no delirium, that it was the same as Don’s and probably the same as that of others I had known. I knew then that I was free to join those such as Don who had gone through this agony of stretching; I was no longer compelled to forget.

Broadmoor

I was sitting in the kitchen when we had a visitor, a young man with a shy manner and sunglasses. He and I shared a cup of tea and went out into the garden. As we sat there talking he explained that he needed somewhere to live and that he was just discharged from Broadmoor, the notorious psychiatric prison or hospital for the criminally insane. He had stepped out into the street one day and shot someone in the legs with a shotgun. I asked him about this and he told me that the man was a complete stranger that he had no idea why he had done it.

I was amazed by the contrast between his gentle manner and his hisotry of violence. I noticed his sensitivity and vulnerability when he eventually removed his sunglasses and looked at me; it was as if he had taken a great risk and opened himself up to me by giving up this defense, his shield for his eyes.

I had to explain that I could not guarantee him a place in the community. There were others who had already asked for rooms and in any case he would have to get to know other residents than myself before he could move in. He was hurt at this apparent refusal of what he was asking for, although I had spoken with him in my usual friendly manner for visitors needing a space. I was surprised at his feeling for two reasons, because it was reasonable that he meet others before either he or we could make any decision and because his presentation of himself did not encourage immediate acceptance. But he told me that he felt he was being rejected. I examined my own feelings and felt that it was only fair to say that he was right. It was true that he was being rejected. It pained me to speak this way but it was for the best. Perhaps we even shook hands before he put on his sunglasses and quietly left the house, never to return.

Oliver

I found Oliver when I went upstairs looking for coffee, and I asked him whether I could have a cup. "I don’t know anything about coffee," he said; "I only know about tea." I did not understand what he meant and feeling slightly annoyed made myself a cup of coffee and went downstairs.

But he had something that he wanted to explain to me. And I wondered what he meant when he said that he knew about tea. Some days later when some of us were sitting around a freshly made pot of tea he came in and asked for a cup. Someone said "Surely," and he went quietly downstairs and forgot all about it.

Another time we were sitting around a fresh pot of tea and he came into the kitchen; with care and without a word he poured himself a cup and took it downstairs.

He had said that he knew about tea and I had been wondering what he meant. I had noticed his calmness and presence of mind and had sense a certain intentionality in his actions. What he knew was very simple and I was no longer confused. He knew that tea was there.

Kevin

Kevin and his mother came to visit us one evening and asked whether they or he could move into a room in one of our houses. I say "they or he" as it was a question, a confusion, an ambiguity which really preceded the issue of whether there was a room available. They or he? We did no know what was being asked. I have an image in my mind of Kevin, tall and hunched, with blond hair and downcast eyes and a hidden smile sitting on his mother’s lap; he was shy and remained silent while his mother did the talking for the two of them. That evening and for more than a year afterward during which he lived with us almost his only conversation was to answer a direct question with ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’.

Possibly due to the prevailing anti-parent philosophy, possibly due to Kevin’s own decision, he moved in by himself. He took a room in the house where I was living and he lived for a time very quietly. I was interested in him: he seemed gentle and deeply private, and somehow tolerant of others. And I was intrigued by his mysterious smile. He stayed in his room much of the day and moved about the house slowly and cautiously. To conceal his height and strength he shambled and slouched. He walked and sat with his shoulders bent and his head tucked into his chest. Thus also one could not usually see his face; he needed to keep to himself the humor in eyes and mouth.

I fell into the habit of visiting him. He was a good listener and I felt that he enjoyed the occasional visit from a friend. He was kind to me, offering me a chair and a cigarette and a space in which I could think quietly or talk as I chose. And always in his room that humor like a scent or spice. But one did not know what suffering he privately and uncomplainingly underwent. He was lonely and distressed, but he rarely betrayed such feelings in the beginning. During his first quiet months with us the only way he gave us any hint that he was suffering was by the fourth thing he said, in addition to ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘I don’t know’. And this was when he asked someone, late at night, "Do you have a sleeping pill?" Until he finally began to speak it was the longest phrase he had.

But Kevin would talk with his mother in private and must have had a command of language. Someone in the house would occasionally be surprised to overhear him speaking to her loudly and clearly in his room or on the telephone. Since I was a friend of his and since I had tried to help him in some ways I came to know his mother slightly, enough to understand the intensity of his relation with her and the apparent absence of his relation with others. One day she and I were sitting peacefully and privately in the kitchen of the house drinking tea. Perhaps because she valued my friendship with her son, perhaps because I was feeling happy and open that day she shared something with me that I will never forget. Our eyes happened to meet during a pause in the conversation and what I saw in her eyes, what she showed me, was a warm sunny day with a slight breeze passing gently and constantly through the long green grasses of an endless plain. An ecstasy of peace, a certainty of eternal bliss, a glimpse, perhaps, of the world she shared with Kevin, a view of a place that was not this planet.

Kevin was in a dilemma; he had been given birth yet he was unborn. He was a big fellow in his middle twenties, with a height and a strength he could barely conceal. Yet he was still inside his mother (unless she was inside him) living on that other world they shared. He was a giant fetus, a paradox, a grotesque impossibility. No wonder he had nothing much to say to anybody else.

I knew Kevin and his family well during his quiet period, so well that when I said I was leaving the community his mother exclaimed, "But you canna leave. You’re David Burns." I had not realized that Kevin or his mother or both had appreciated my presence or needed me until that moment. I was touched but it was time for me to move away. After so many years living in the communities I had learned and experienced there as much as I ever would and I could no longer bear the strain.

Some time later during a period when I was visiting the house or occasionally getting bits of news from people in the network Kevin began to change. He moved into my old room on the top floor with a view of the back garden and began to stretch himself out full size. He stretched in all directions: he became more of a man and more of a child. He began to follow the path of development that a number of those resident in the communities had followed and that had been thoroughly studied by Mary Barnes.

Kevin stopped wearing clothes and using the toilet or the bath. He would sit and shit in his room, on the floor or on the mattress, although he was provided with a potty and gently encouraged to use it. He quite stank up the house. He would sit or lie on his bed covered with a stained blanket and then descend the stairs with it draped around him in search of his chosen meal of Mars bars or muesli and milk. He became of course the focal point of concern of the household, of the community and of the larger network. People tried to keep him fed, making sure that he could find what he wanted to eat, and cleaned up after him again and again until it became necessary to put linoleum on the floor of his room so that cleaning was easier.

But he was a giant baby and very strong. As was not uncommon in the community he smashed up the kitchen several times, and one time when I was in his room he unexpectedly hurled a piece of furniture at me, missing me by a fraction of an inch. But he was more frightening than dangerous. I do not believe he ever hurt anybody, although he scared everybody. Once he was with his therapist, a woman, and suddenly raised his arm in a violent threatening gesture, saying with a formidable Scottish burr and in the finest Calvinist tradition of severity, "‘Tis the back of me hand ye’ll be getting me lass."

Yes! He had decided to speak. This was a great encouragement to the people who fed him and cleaned up after him and were sometimes frightened by him. I remember visiting the house and finding several people in the kitchen and Kevin on the stairs in his blanket. He was talking slowly with humor and a quiet intensity to the people around him and I was struck by his extraordinary charm. He still shambled when he walked; he needed to control the strength that could result in a severity that threatened others. But he had lifted up his face and let the brightness flow forth. He had a radiant smile and joy in his eyes as he stood on the stairs that day. It was a pleasure for me to see him there, transformed from friendly withdrawn passive fellow I had visited in his room the previous year.

The Dairy

We were renting short-life properties from a housing association. The local authority in Islington would decide a new housing project, modern blocks of apartment that would replace the decaying buildings in North London. During the period after families had left their homes and been re-housed and before demolition these old structures could not be disregarded; there was a housing shortage and associations were set up to look after this temporary housing and to provide living space. This was an unsatisfactory arrangement in many ways. During my time in the Archway Community we moved from one house to another again and again, from a house we had just repaired and painted and made our home to another which had just been abandoned by a family who had left behind perhaps a garden they had tended for many years. At one time we had a series of gardens in the back of our houses and of the empty houses on either side, about and acre of land with roses running wild, old outbuildings, blackberry bushes and grassy open space. For a while this was ours.

But then inevitably we would be forced to move and we would watch the demolition crews dismember, crushed and burned to the ground our homes and bulldozers destroyed our gardens. I remember the burning of four separate houses that we had made our home and had come to love. It gave me nightmares.

But there was one exception to this pattern. When we were told to leave one of our earliest home, one that I had live in myself, there were two who refused. They squatted the property, claiming legal possession of empty structure according to British law, paying no rent, while maintaining an informal relation with the community. Liz and Roger lived alone in the old semi-detached building with an old dairy on the ground floor, empty rooms, random painting and old memories above, and the leaky roof. The two of them lived separately and privately within this large space and at the same time lived together as a couple. Each was a dreamer and sometimes each dreamed alone. But sometimes they dreamed together. I know little of their lives during this time as they valued their privacy at the old dairy but I knew each of them very well as individuals. All that the community officially knew of these two was that a visit by our hard-worked administrator never produced any rent. They were certainly, however, glad of the attention he gave them and the continuing assurance that we still considered them part of our group. Some of us who knew them had an idea what were the experiences they endured, how they struggled.

Rodger made two remarks about life at the dairy; one was an obscure statement about dead bodies in the building. The other was more distinct. "There were dragons in the house," he said. "And they were really there." I believed him. I knew him well enough to know when he meant what he said. But I myself have never seen a dragon, only skeletons of dinosaurs.

Liz was a painter, a good one, a sensitive woman who carried on a private battle that many of us respected. I remember what she once said to me about self-hatred and self-loathing; I was surprised that someone of such integrity and compassion would be haunted by such devastating and damaging feelings. They were the enemies in her battle.

Liz and Rodger lived together yet separately in the old dairy. Their life was not an easy one; their private struggles and the love-hatred of their relationship did not make it so. I will never forget the day they visited my house when I was in the kitchen. The tension between them was hardly apparent until Liz took a chair and made what seemed a determined effort to batter Rodger to death with it; only the light fixture hanging in the way which took the force of the blow saved him from harm.

About Devon

My great-aunt who hanged herself just before the War was a painter of landscapes and portraits in pastel colors. The money from the sale of some of her work came into my hands enabling me to set up a small fund named after her. This money allowed some members of the Archway Experimental Community to travel to Devon and rent an old farmhouse on the edge of the moor near the sea.

The water drained from the moor and the pastures on its borders, from marsh into rivulets into two streams that flowed through two valleys they had created. Between these streams, overlooking them, just below a finger of high dry grazing land that extended out from the moor stood a solid two-story farmhouse, three hundred years old that a friend had discovered and lived in for the winter season a few years before. The house stood isolated on a small space between the moor and the pasture lands that ran along the two valleys; it could only with difficulty be reached by road: either one parked on the moor and walked or else drove up and down steep hills, fording the river between them.

But we loved the house in spite of its remoteness. We were a hundred yards from the moor with its miles of bloom and heather and the vision of the low mountains all around. We were suspended over the river which we could always hear singing below us; we had the peace, the quiet and the solitude of the deserted wilderness and the lushness and the beauty of a marshy delta land.

We took the house for two weeks, renting it from the strange anchorite lady who lived in the remodeled barn behind it. She was eighty years old, originally from London and lived entirely to herself, being very shy. She was the subject of gossip as she did not mingle with the local people. It was sometimes reported that she had been seen walking at night in the depths of the moor although she never went into the moor, not even during the day.

We took several trips out to the house in Devon. One summer a large group of us, therapists, their clients, students, spent the month of June in the area, some of us in the old farmhouse, some of us in other houses and cottages. This was one of the passionate attempts at a movement toward living in the countryside; for many years people in the network had been trying to set up centers outside of London. This summer it was Leon, my therapist who took the initiative and planned for that month to be living and meeting with people in the area we had discovered. So North Devon was invaded by a number of us.

I remember mainly the long solitary walks I took up into the moor, purple and brown and green, meeting a cow, a sheep, a wild pony, followed for a moment by a skylark seeming to sing from heaven. I walked very far over heather to the top of a ridge or along one of the two rivers to its source. I walked until I was very sweaty and then I bathed naked in a rock pool between two waterfalls. I practiced my asanas or sat and tried to meditate. And I gloried in the space and the solitude and the sunshine. I was on top of the world; I could see the mountains and the sea and the clouds.

But there was another of Leon’s patients whose husband had rented space in a nearby farmhouse for a family of four, the parents and two children. The mother had previously visited the communities and she had been in therapy with Leon for some time. I had met her once or twice, or rather seen her: she seemed remote, emotionally isolated. Of course these were times when she was in a group and perhaps felt uncomfortable. I do not know what she was like in intimate surroundings except from hearsay. The times I did see her was hovering over the doorway or standing next to the fireplace examining the stonework intently and almost with horror.

In London she had been given continual attention by members of the network who had gone out to the house in the suburbs where she lived with her family. She had tried several times to throw herself out the window and needed protection as an alternative to be locked up. Leon had hoped that a holiday in the sun and space of Devon would do her good and it did, for a time. For she eventually crawled out a window in the middle of the night, siphoned some gasoline out of the car, poured it over herself, and set herself alight like a Vietnamese monk. She suffered very severe burns and was taken to the hospital where she lived for several months without skin. One of those who went to visit her during her last days reported that she seemed to glow in colors, transparently, so far had she transcended the flesh, so close was she to death.

This was the death that touched me most closely during my years in the London communities. Contrary to the expectations of many that the experiment of Kingsley Hall would be unsuccessful and would lead to suicides and pregnancies no one died there; and that a pregnancy could be a comparable misfortune I do not understand. The woman who burned herself alive had not lived in the same household with me but I had met her and her dramatic and horrifying death disturbed our experience of the country and destroyed the local people’s confidence in us. For a long time afterwards the community had a very bad reputation in this part of Devon. This was partly because some of us had been seen dancing naked in the moonlight outside a rented cottage near the village; at least this was the reason given in later years that people from the network were not wanted in the area. But I believed that this death was the major factor. Several years later a local farmer was discussing it with one of us and he was weeping and weeping.

John

After his experience John began using the term metanoia. That was the first time I heard it myself. I knew he had been through a personal transformation; he had spent time in the common space with the continuous attention of members of the network. He had of course been close to speechless during this time of change so I knew there was meaning in the comments he made afterward.

He spoke indirectly, making reference to something Francis Huxley had said during a seminar. Metanoia is the step beyond paranoia; it is not a conspiracy against a conspiracy. John said the two experiences were not really opposites; in a sense they were the same or subtly different from each other. One commonly hears people called paranoid. John spoke of people being metanoid. The term caught my fancy. It drew attention to itself, provided curiosity. It had an interesting sound, like metallic, or like android, or like metaphysic. Metanoid man, something new.

My impression from John’s words was that he had become aware of a possible movement from paranoia to metanoia. He had come to the community as a student. He had not been a mental patient and had not been diagnosed schizophrenic. He had not acted particularly strangely during his time with us before he moved into the common space. He was unusual but not really out of the ordinary.

Then he had moved into the center: he had moved into his emotional center and he had moved into the space in the common room and accepted the attention and the care of guardians who sat with him day and night. He had taken off his clothes. He had shaved his head. He had listened into himself. He had become silent and private, undergoing the inner journey as had the others. Here was a demonstration of the usefulness of the institution we had developed. It was more than a response to a noisy violent demand for attention from a severely disturbed person. It was a tool.

Under the attention of those who gathered John experienced a change. To be paranoid means that one feels hostile or malicious feelings directed at one. It means that one feels translucent or even entirely transparent to the gaze of others. It means that one feels at the center of attention even of those who are not physically present. One feels totally exposed, though totally vulnerable. But it is a different matter to be in a room with a group who are gathered with the expressed purpose of letting one be at the center and to accept their mindfulness. No longer is one imagining that one is the subject of others’ thought: those others are actually physically present. The trembling and insecurity of one’s consciousness need not be so intense. One need not fear the unknown other; they are real others present and one can feel for them.

John found that he need not fear them, that he could trust them, that he could use them for his own purposes of growth. Perhaps it was here that he learned that if there is a conspiracy of the group it is a conspiracy for the individual. Perhaps it was here that he learned that if people were laughing at him it was a laughter in which he could join.

John remained a student but applied his happy new awareness to the way he went about it. He remained in London studying Japanese with intention of translating ancient Zen manuscripts.

Ellen

Ellen killed the cat because God told her to. This was how she put it. She had been in the back yard with two cats, the white one and the black-and-white one. She killed the latter with a kitchen knife, stabbing it several times. The white cat walked up to her as she was standing there with the bloody knife in her hand and escaped death by its apparent willingness to die.

God told Ellen to kill the black-and-white cat and to spare the white cat. This was her experience. Of course this did not make me feel better when I was shown the dead body of the animal I had so much loved. I could neither understand nor forgive. I was aware that she was tortured. I knew that she found life exceedingly difficult; and I was familiar with her occasional bizarre behavior. She had more than once taken off her clothes in the house and strolled out toward the local shops before she was taken to a "place of safety", as the legal phrase had it, by the police. But it was common for a member of the community to be found naked on the streets; it was not common for one of us to murder a cat.

Several months later, while I was preparing a meal, I found a large evil-looking bug inside a head of cauliflower. I was so disgusted that I decided to break my usual rule of not harming even the lowliest of creatures and killed this bug. It was a mistake. I well knew that I was in a tricky, sensitive, vulnerable state in which I needed to be mindful but I had not realized the importance of my rule of non-violence. So I went out into the garden with the intention of squashing it, only to discover that a lust for murder had overtaken me. I decided to let the bug live: but I would not be let off the hook so easily. When I put the insect gently on the ground and looked up I saw a rabbit. I knew that the violence I had released within myself was out of control. If I did not kill the bug I would have to kill the rabbit, I felt, as if a divine voice were giving the command. So I killed the bug.

But I was not Isaac being reprieved of the need to sacrifice Jacob by sacrificing a goat. When I killed the bug and looked up I saw the cat…Here was a ruthless progression of violence, an ecstasy of death, a mindlessness of murder. I was shaken and wished to my depths that I had not killed that one unimportant insect. And I was so grateful that I had not been compelled to destroy a rabbit, a cat or a man before I learned to avoid the terrible frenzy of death.

I valued this experience of the power and amorality of the divine, the superhuman. I was fascinated and in awe; I had been helpless in the hands of a power greater than myself. I understood and forgave Ellen who had been commanded to kill one cat and to spare the other. I respected her for she might have been living further into the depths when she sacrificed a cat than when I merely squashed a bug.

Ellen used to accuse me of stealing her eggs. She used to insist that I owed her a pound note. None of this was true. I was bewildered then by what she was saying; now I think I understand her somewhat better. She was trying to ensure, to guarantee, to create a relationship with me by putting something between us, an egg, a pound note: it did not matter what. One time this became more explicit but I still did not figure out what was going on. She had insisted that she owed me a pound; perhaps I had given her one on a previous occasion when she insisted I owed one to her. Ellen knocked on my door, came in and gave me the money, a small paper rectangle ornately designed but with unfathomable significance. I said thank you and she left the room. But I was somehow dissatisfied, tense; I would not allow her to put something between us that bound us together in a mystifying way. What I thought was that she did not owe me the pound and that therefore I could not accept it.

There was a small hallway on the landing to which led the doors my room and to Ellen’s room on the top floor of the house. We met in that space, each of us in confusion, and I tried to return the piece of paper she had just given me. But it was impossible. When she accepted it back it was then necessary for her to feel that she once again owed it to me. So we were back at the beginning. I wish I had understood her better and had been better able to accept the existence of this object which belonged, it appeared, to both and to neither of us but could not be claimed one or given to the other. What were we to do with it?

I do not remember what happened to that particular printed document. But there was always something holding us together. I tend to say that she was responsible for creating these situations but perhaps I am being unfair. She was genuinely confused: I cannot blame her for my confusion. It was exasperating, however, to be continually drawn into these states of mind and feeling toward her by the ridiculous demands and accusations.

Ellen had a well-earned reputation for bizarre behavior and violence. She might walk into the kitchen and suddenly urinate on the floor. She might explode into a rage or burst into tears. She was prone to believe that God was telling her to do things or that gods and devils were using her for a battleground. We experienced this battle perhaps at second hand but we felt its effects. One day she might pick up a knife and hold it and scream: it was sometimes necessary to hide all the knives in the house or at least to get them out of the kitchen. She walked into my room one day holding a large bread knife but I was not in a playful mood. I got up from my chair, went over to her and took the weapon out of her limp hand; it was surprisingly easy. But she frightened people and she seemed terribly disturbed and unhappy. And she was in some danger of being arrested if she went outside or if the neighbors should find her noise intolerable and call the police.

It was because of the problems Ellen posed that we developed a practice that served us well for a long time, that created an atmosphere, a feeling in the community that was very important in drawing us together. It became necessary at a certain point to give Ellen twenty-four hour attention and we discovered that we had the resources to do so. Ellen was the first, and this way of dealing with people in crisis proved useful later with others in differing situations. At the beginning our response to her continuing tension and threat of violence was informal: she demanded attention. If there was no one with her she would scream, pick up a knife, or else drop her clothes in her room and wander out the door and down the street, letting the world marvel at her beautiful breasts until, inevitably, she was taken by the police.

So Ellen received the attention she required. He room was on the top floor but during this time she would usually be found in the common room with a group of us gathered around her drawn by her intensity and the need to protect her. Eventually we put up a list for all the hours of the day, so that people from the community or the larger network could put down their names and promise to spend some time with her. This formality was a guarantee that there would be at least one person with Ellen at all hours of the day and night. Usually there were more; in fact the common room where she was protected became the emotional center of the house and the community. Our endeavor to attend to her gave focus and meaning to our living.

She was a strong, passionate woman; she was struggling through her private inner battle in a very physical outward way. She would hit and kick and curse and weep, fighting, apparently, to escape from confinement. But there were no locks, not even closed doors caring her from the world outside her common room. Only a wall of flesh. She was held, embraced, sat on. She was listened to and talked to. She would try to break loose and be wrestled to the floor, biting and kicking. But she was the center of attention and if she was ambivalent about the restraint imposed on her then she felt on balance happier to be restrained than to be ignored.

This was shown one day when a police officer visited the house. He was in the kitchen speaking with someone while Ellen sat unclothed in the next room with her circle of attendant friends around her. We could not imagine what he would think or do if he were to enter and see this unusual scene; we could not expect that he would understand what was going on. So we were concerned that Ellen would struggle and scream or even call out to be rescued. She had not openly indicated that she valued the form our caring took and had appeared to resist her confinement. But she was unusually quiet while the policeman was in the house; we could therefore assure that she appreciated the attention we were giving her.

One evening I experienced something of what she might have been feeling. A nun who was resident at the community arranged an informal but fully ceremonial mass to be given in the room where we were gathered about Ellen, who had a Catholic background. I was very drunk and getting drunker; I believe I drank a full bottle of whiskey that evening. But I sat quietly and attentively during the mass and took communion as I believe did Ellen who remained stark naked during the proceedings. After the priest left I found myself very upset and began to make violent gestures and to declaim loudly. But I was in a special place, in the common room where the energy and mindfulness of the community were focused, not only on Ellen but on whoever needed love and attention. And I was with two special people who were ostensibly there to take care of her but were willing to share themselves with whoever was present. Ellen had thus let us create a central space where any one of us could demand attention just as she could.

So as I began to bring my distress out into the open these two people were with me. And what they did was extraordinary. They did not of course try to persuade me to take my clothes off as Ellen had done but one of them suggested that I remove my watch and then my glasses and somehow this calmed me down. There was a humor in his asking me to do this: he did not try to take away the whiskey as might be the usual reaction to someone who was very drunk but instead allowed me to give up the glasses and the watch which I was very willing to do. In some unexpected way this amused me and calmed me down; my incipient violence was dissipated.

Eventually the person in the common room asking for or demanding help and receiving it became a sort of institution. In addition to community many members there were therapists in training, seminar students and others in the network who would rally to the news that someone was in distress, going through changes, freaking out. The person who was being helped provided a vital service to the group by giving us a central focus. Sometimes it seemed that we took turns freaking out, regressing, coming out of the closet and that the health and happiness of the community required that one of us accept this role. This was not a scapegoating; this was perhaps a scapegoating in reverse. No one suffered through the process, although sometimes I felt sorry for the person in the center who had to endure the patronizing ignorance and the foolishness of some of the helpers. I was amused by some of those who had come in order to care for someone severely regressed and who began partially to regress themselves, becoming childish as opposed to childlike, talking baby talk and acting silly, discarding their usual serious and sophisticated social manner.

But some of us had a consciousness of the warmth and intentionality that was generated by the gathering. Some of us made an effort to allow this institution to grow and develop, whether by taking the role of helper or helped. It was not always possible to distinguish these; one who came to observe and learn might find himself benefited by his experience; and the best helped was one who had gone through a time of being in the center changing, growing, flowering and bearing fruit.

Carl

A number of residents seemed to go through a similar experience in its outward form and I learned that they shared to some degree an inner experience. I came to know Carl best of those who found their way to the center through the tension, violence and turmoil they expressed and the terrible pain and fear they felt. Carl told me his story.

During the time when it was possible to put oneself at the actual physical and emotional center of the community by utilizing the institution originally formed to answer Ellen’s needs, Carl went through his inner change without moving into the common room and calling on the total resources of the network. He was content with the knowledge that he could do this if he wished and he was aware that the ambiance of the household where he lived allowed him to go through changes in private as well as in public.

Sitting in his room Carl began to feel that he had become transparent, that the barrier between his self and the outside world had faded. He felt that his thoughts were being perceived by others and he heard voices responding to what he was thinking as though he were speaking aloud in a dialogue with another. But this other was the whole outside world; the voice of children and the cries of animals would appear to be answering his thoughts as if he were giving a lecture and getting a reaction, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes critical. Carl felt he was the center of the universe, that he was the focus of loving energy. But it was necessary to accept this peculiar state of consciousness, to affirm it, to move into this other and alien dimension without reservation. He found it unbearable to exist on the borderlands of this unexplored territory; if he could no longer ignore this space into which he felt drawn then it was better to move into it by an act of will then to feel condemned to an unwanted and undesirable experience. This was the difference between heaven and hell.

During the day with other people Carl needed to maintain his normal persona; he wanted to act sane. For he knew that from an external point of view he was withdrawn, estranged, deluded. During the day he lived out strange intense fantasies that were more real and important for him than the reality we agree to share. One day he was in the garden waiting for his therapist. Carl felt that a wise old man from China had decided many years ago to be reborn as himself and to live his life with all its ignorance and follow. He felt that this ancient had wanted to come back as Carl, that there was a humor and a meaning to his life, that the old man had known who Carl was and why he must live. And Carl felt that he was remembering his identity with this old Chinaman and that he was on the edge of understanding the purpose his life must have if someone so wise would be happy to choose it. Carl also was convinced that the two other people in the garden with him had also been reborn in this way, that they had made an agreement to die and to return at this moment and to remember who they were and why.

And this was where Carl had to be careful; this was where delusion and folly set in. He found himself believing that the ten-month old child in the next garden was God. Then who was his therapist who was on his way? His therapist was Jesus Christ. His therapist would die, would be crucified. And this was where Carl’s basic common sense made all the difference. This was where the nights he had spent sorting through his strange ideas and senseless but overwhelming convictions gave him strength and understanding. For in the midst of these extraordinary experiences he knew that he was deluded, mistaken in fact; but most important he knew that there was a core of significant truth in what he was living through and that there was life-enhancing value in the midst of his delirium. So he did his best not to overreact to this outpouring of fantasies and not to stifle them.

His therapist arrived but was not, of course, able to share his inner experience. In fact, Carl told me, he felt that the therapist was dragging him deeper into the experience, was communicating to him by blinks and nods. Carl felt that he had a tragic choice facing him. Everyone in the world except him had decided to take on animal form while retaining human consciousness. This was an eminently sensible decision as they would have beauty and resilience and freedom from the oppressions of human culture. They would be clothed in their natural fur, would be unmechanical and would communicate non-verbally. But Carl was being told that he must join the others in taking on fur and feathers or else remain the lone naked human, an eccentricity, an outcast, and outsider.

This was a great adventure, a great challenge for Carl; he knew it was really a fantasy but he was fascinated by the truth of this inner experience. Here was a seeming evolution in reverse, back to the animal, yet a movement forward at the same time. A shedding of the obscure violence of our civilization. But Carl was unwilling; he must remain a human being in human form. It seemed a tragic situation that it was not possible for him to join the others. The tragedy situation that it was not possible for him to join the others. The tragedy of an Adam without an Eve.

Carl had had moments of revelation earlier in his life and had been sustained over the years by their memory. He had had glimpses of peace and glory. But now he found that he could inhabit these spaces he had passed through. Especially during the nights when he could let go his defenses and drop his everyday persona he was swimming in a sea of meaning and breathing an air that was more than a mixture of gases.

Carl kept rabbits in the back of the garden of the house. They were brother and sister, one called Silver, the other called Gold, after the colors of their fur. He became very close to them during his time of hardship; their necessary daily feeding and care was an important duty. And they were his faithful silent companions. One evening he stood by their cage with the open door and in their presence he let himself feel his grief. He felt that he and the rabbits were flooding the world with a purity and power of feeling. He felt barriers give way; he felt them open. In the silence and stillness of the evening he stood without moving, without sobbing or weeping although he breathed with the deepness of strong emotion. The distraction and disturbance of noisy tears did not interfere with the intensity of his feeling. Grief filled his consciousness. His mind was washed clear and beautiful by a flow of inner tears.

Being at the center could be a glorious exalted feeling but it could also be horrible. One afternoon Carl came downstairs in a cheerful mood wanting to touch everyone he saw, feeling sociable and affectionate. He went into the kitchen and sat on a stool in the middle of the room; suddenly he was stuck. He had abruptly lost his freedom to move. He had lost the strength to get up. So he sat. At last he had the freedom to stay where he was on the chair: from one point of view an infinite freedom. His happiness was muted not but was able to accept the state he was in. He still felt exalted; he had not lost consciousness of the great meaning he could dredge up during the night.

Eventually he as unstuck from the chair and was able to stand, but feeling some anxiety. As he moved into the common room where there were people gathered the horror struck, his anxiety mounted. And his consciousness twisted and warped until the power and meaning he knew so well became evil and terrifying. And then at the perfect moment an airplane began its long slow shattering droning down the musical scale as it descended overhead toward a landing. But Carl felt that the airplane was thinking his control and that he was willing it to crash. As the rumbling decreased in pitch his horror grew and his obsessive belief became more overwhelming. Carl was lost in a dread delusion, convinced that he was willing the destruction of airplanes if not all over the globe then within a radius of many miles. He imagined air traffic controllers and pilots desperately trying to understand this mysterious series of disasters. The cause of it all, he believed for quite a while, was his own evil power of rage. Carl recovered from this experience but he was shaken. He had been living in a world of controlled delusion with some success. He had allowed himself to be irrational without losing himself. This time the strength of his unfelt rage had been such that he had totally succumbed to an experience of terror.

At night Carl would retire to his room and stop his attempt at controlling his behavior and his experience. When it was quite late and he was alone he would smoke some hash that had been given to him by his therapist. This allowed him to slip into the inner world, the other dimension; the intoxication gave him an explanation for the alien experience; smoking the hash was a symbolic act which allowed him to affirm a movement into himself. He finally understood, he told me, what it meant to call a drug a sacrament.

First he began to feel afraid, terrified as he accepted his place at the center of the world, at the focal point of consciousness. But once he had passed through this barrier of fear he entered a space of terrible pain that was not physical or mental but pure emotion. Then he was at the center at the place where all feeling is born. He began to let his imagination run at the place where all feeling is born. He began to let his imagination run free, reaching out into mythopoetic reality. He experienced consciousness not as something that he had but as something that had him. Consciousness was like a sea in which he was floating, a great calm buoyant salt sea in which he was warm and safe. He was free to imagine, to hallucinate, to be deluded. He examined with care what was going on in his head for he knew that there was a pearl of great price to be found; there was knowledge; there were values. He worked on his consciousness; he taught himself how to swim; and he learned how to play.

Carl felt that he was not alone, that he was sharing consciousness with others who were old and wise and kind. He felt he was being led along a pathway toward a goal. These others were the ten just men who hold together the world; they were the wise men from the east of the theosophists. He almost felt their physical presence.

Then came the change. From the heights of the exaltation he had experienced he was abruptly dropped into hell. Later he thought of it as a bad case of the dry-cleaners. But that was much later when he could laugh about it and think about it objectively. At the time it was hell on earth. He had lived through similar changed of mood before; he had been in a state of grace and had there lost it; he had lived on memories of a glimpse of heaven. This time, however he had been living in heaven, breathing its rarified air, hearing its music and to fall into the depths of unmeaning that was almost unbearable. Life did not seem worth living. He did not think of suicide because he had more than fugitive memories to sustain him. He knew now that it was possible to live in that place he had only glimpsed previously. He had been able to inhabit a land of ecstasy and intense feeling where effort had value, where question of the meaning of life became irrelevant. This was a land to be explored, an adventure that held joys and terror and happiness.

But he had been cast out. Perhaps he was only living in the everyday world once more but it seemed worse than he had remembered it. It seemed a place of filth and degradation and trivia. A place of confusion and obsession. He did no think of himself as Jesus; he never had. But he remembered that Jesus too had explored the inferno, had descended to the depths and then returned. There was a literary precedent for Carl’s experience. He was in good company.

If he had been "schizophrenic" before and had been able to learn from it and glory in it, then he was "obsessive-compulsive neurotic" now. Even if there was no transcendence, no lightness, no divine bliss nor divine terror in this new state then at least Carl determined that he would be able to lean something of value during this period. This hope alone kept him going. For he had to endure such unpleasant feelings that he had never imagined were possible. Shame, self-disgust, self-hatred, feelings of personal uncleanness polluted the seas that had once supported him with such buoyancy.

He felt he was swimming in shit and he wanted to get out. But there was nowhere to go. His own body was the very pollution he could not bear; try though he might to wash himself he could not wash away the filth that he found his physical self to be. He became obsessive in keeping himself clean, bathing every day, washing his clothes and bedding, but was unsuccessful in clearing his mind of the thoughts that drove him to wash. Earlier he had enjoyed the discipline and the ritual of bathing before his morning practice of hatha yoga exercises but now there was no pleasure in it. His mind was filled with self-disgust and horror. Carl told me that he tried desperately to clean his body and his surrounding until he found the task impossible. He was like Hercules at the Augean stables. He vacuumed his carpet. Then he shampooed it. Then he shampooed it again carefully and laboriously. But this was not enough. Finally he got a new carpet only to discover that the whole process of cleaning it must start anew. After the wonders he had experienced the triviality and horror and meaninglessness of these preoccupations were humbling indeed. He could not understand what was happening to his mind. He was filled with dread.

But he survived and he told me that although he still did not understand why it had been necessary he had learned some invaluable lessons from the experience. He had come to understand the suffering a person could undergo, the terrible conditions under which a person could continue to survive. He began to learn to forgive. This came about because he had realized that he could never know what someone else might be going through. He knew a depth of suffering that he had not known before. More important, he told me, he began to learn to forgive himself.

Emily

One afternoon I was walking down the stairs from my top floor room when I noticed the open door and the visitor sitting in the room used by Edward, our "administrator". As I passed my attention was drawn by this figure of a girl sitting motionless and Edward invited me to meet her, explaining that he had to do something. He left us alone together and I could not help being impressed by her extraordinary stillness. I decided not to intrude on whatever she was doing so I sat on the floor and watched her. I gradually became aware of the atmosphere of serenity and warmth that surrounded her. I felt as I breathed the stillness of the air we shared. As I entered this calm space I noticed that her eyes were open and that she was staring fixedly at a spent match on the floor. I did not speak to her; I sat for those few minutes, then I rose and left her side when Edward returned to the room. He explained that she had traveled alone from Canada, having managed the mechanics of arranging the plane flight and getting from the airport to the house in spite of her apparent catatonia. She was presumably willing and able to talk well enough to relate to airport personnel and immigration officials.

She had read Laing and decided to come to London seeking therapy and a place to live in a community. So she visited the house, spoke with Edward, met some of the residents including myself and formed her decision. I never saw her again. I believe she found a home and a therapist in another part of the extended network of therapeutic associations in London. But I was deeply impressed by meeting her, by her determination and by the strength of her personality that communicated itself without her making any sound not making any movement except to breathe.

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