Friday, June 1, 2012

Sex, Drugs, New Age Music: Enlightenment?

Julian Walker, ElephantJournal.com
Dead Can Dance perform "Yulunga" as New Age World music.

Sex, Drugs, New Age Music: My Search for Enlightenment in 90′s
Her face is frozen in a goofy smile. Eyes glazed over, body suddenly unmoving beneath me. My first thought is that maybe I am doing something wrong. I lift my head and look into her vacant eyes, “Are you trying to tell me something?”

Then I see it. A thin trickle of blood coming out of the side of her mouth.

“Oh my God. No, no!”

Her face registers nothing as I pull out of her, a gooey strand... as I look at her motionless body on the bed. My goddess, my Buddha-girl, my hot little green eyed, blonde gypsy princess.

More blood. Is she dying?

I am distraught. Run to the door yelling “Somebody help me, please, we need help!”

It must be her diabetes. Kristina is an insulin dependent diabetic. Five times a day she pricks her finger and drips a droplet of blood onto her handheld blood sugar meter. Before every meal she injects herself with insulin using her little disposable syringes, always trying to calculate the balance.

Thing is though, Kristina usually errs on the side of too much insulin and too little blood sugar. She does this intentionally, because while the symptoms of low blood sugar are obvious -- high blood sugar will go unnoticed until years of it create the kinds of irreparable damage that lead to blindness or amputation.

Being a dyed-in-the-wool bliss-chaser, Kristina also loves the initial altered state of having the kind of low blood sugar most of us never experience. She is usually convinced that it is a sign that all of her meditation, yoga, and psychedelic experimentation is bringing about a transformation in how she experiences reality. One of the first things LSD does to your brain? Reduces blood sugar levels. ...


Kristina cannot remember anything from the last two weeks. For the next two days I tell and retell the story of Goa, of the German Cafe and the sunset on acid, of the caves in Ajanta, the overnight bus from the Osho Ashram in Pune, my hiking boots being gone in the morning -- stolen by the nice Indian students who had sung pop songs with us into the black night as the bus snaked up the narrow and treacherously bumpy roads.

She asks the same questions every half hour or so, until eventually the amnesia subsides and all of her memory comes back.

We had been in Goa. Under that epic sky, protected by the multi-colored canopy stretched over that balcony draped over the cliff, looking down on the wide expanse of ocean. More


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