Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience – 7  

Allen Ginsberg on Visionary Experience continues from here

Student:  Allen?

AG:  Yeah.

Student:  Isn’t there a conscious cultivation of these experiences (visionary experiences) now?  That’s why everybody raised their hand just now.  Everybody has those things, but not everybody knows them.

AG:  “Many seek and never see/anyone can tell them why.” [Editorial note – Allen is here, (as he has earlier), referencing his poem, “The eye altering alters all”]  Well, my theory then was that everybody knew all along and, in a sense, everybody was in a permanent state of heightened consciousness, or that there were several consciousnesses going on at once, which you can say is true.  When you recall yourself, when you do enter a state of remembrance, you realize that you remembered all along.  That is one of the tearful and great beautiful things about it.  You realize that you’ve known all along.  I imagine on the deathbed or drowning there’s that awareness. “Ah, all along I’ve been aware of this, it’s just that I didn’t pay attention to what I knew most deeply and basically.”  “Yes, yes/, that’s what/ I wanted,/ I always wanted,/ I always wanted./  To be/ in the body/ where I was born.” [Editorial note – Allen, is, of course, referencing his own poem, “Song”, here,  tho’ note the slight variant – “to be/in the body” -“to return/to the body’]

AG: What did you say, exactly?

Student:  Allen, you said you were surprised when so many people raised their hand, but now there’s a conscious cultivation of these in our culture.

AG:  So there’s an acknowledgement in our culture of this area of experience as being real.  At the time, 1948, that that happened to me it was not anything that people discussed and it wasn’t part of the background noise of the culture.  It’s an extraordinary difference between the consciousness of consciousness of the ‘Seventies and the consciousness of consciousness of the ‘Forties.  There was very little examination of the nature of consciousness or the suchness of consciousness or varieties of consciousness or alterations of mind.  You didn’t have the terminology like “alternative modes of consciousness” or “modalities of consciousness.”  You didn’t have that.  You didn’t have a terminology to discuss it.  All you had was mystical terminology like “I saw light.”  So I rushed into the Columbia College office of Lionel Trilling or Mark Van Doren saying, “I just saw the light.”  The only one that asked me what I meant was Mark Van Doren.  The others thought I was just a nut; typical college kid who’d freaked out finally.  I got out and (tried to) get a job and instead freaked out.  “I saw the light.  How am I gonna get a job if I’m a saint?  Saints don’t work!”