Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (10 page)

I ended up with a room full of equipment that would have been prohibitively expensive if I’d had to buy it. Things like ten-turn helipots, precision resistors, and power supplies that would provide precisely the voltage you dialed in with no spikes or fluctuations.

While at Berkeley, I had heard stories of people who could control their heart rate with their mind. They could speed it up or slow it down by thinking about it. People in India could put themselves into a state of hibernation. It sort of made sense to me. I knew that frogs were capable of burrowing into a hole and shutting things down for the dry summer months. I thought, I’m an animal—I could probably do something like that if I practiced it long enough. I decided to use my newly liberated electronic equipment to learn how to control some physiological parameter. I decided on the electrical conductivity of my skin.

The flow of electricity through a circuit is directly proportional to the voltage and indirectly proportional to the resistance. I put one electrode on each wrist and attached them to 9 volts. The resistance in my skin would range from about 14,000 ohms up to about 100,000. It would sometimes go higher or lower, but I was not able to control it at first. The salty fluids of my body were easy for electricity to flow through. The difficult part was my skin. I figured that the resistance between the two electrodes was mainly the resistance of my skin times two.

I decided to learn how to control the resistance of my skin. By just fooling around, I discovered that if I wanted my resistance to go higher, I had to think about something really boring or meditative. If I closed my eyes and thought about floating on a dark featureless lake, my skin resistance would go up. The voltage meter reading occasionally went as high as 180,000 ohms. But if I looked at a picture of a naked woman in
Playboy
, whoosh, the reading dropped below 10,000.

It was fun. To make it more of a pleasure to watch, I added an oscilloscope. I built it from something called a Heathkit. I bought a voltage-controlled oscillator at Radio Shack and put it in a circuit that contained my skin resistance. I could plot the variable frequency I obtained from the voltage across my skin against the 60-cycle frequency coming out of the electrical socket in the house and get some pretty interesting patterns on the oscilloscope. They looked like science fiction stuff and they were responsive to my thoughts. Bizarre. Wild tumbling shapes like the kind that happen just before the lab blows up. The technical term is “Lissajous patterns.” If I really concentrated, I could adjust my skin conductivity so precisely that I could make the tumbling patterns on the
screen stand still. That took a lot of practice, but it was definitely impressive.

Nobody else was impressed, however. It was hard to explain to a nursing student why it was amazing that I could cause a tumbling Lissajous pattern to stand still on the screen.

I realized I could do a lot of things with this. I could control a voltage with my mind. I decided to make a system that would allow me to turn a lightbulb on and off across the street in my neighbor’s house. Technomagic. I hoped this would be impressive to a nursing student.

There were radio-controlled cars available in the hobby stores that had little FM transmitters in them that could send a signal across the street. If I used that transmitter to send a signal generated by my skin conductivity to a receiver connected to a set of transistors and a device that could drive a 120-volt lamp, I could turn that lamp on and off from across the street. I set it up with a circuit that would toggle the lamp any time my skin resistance changed rapidly because it was easier to drop it fast by looking at a nude picture of a woman than it was to raise it by not looking at one. It worked the first time.

People came by to see me do my telepathy. They knew I wasn’t psychic, so they decided I must be an electronic genius. I decided not to argue.

The nursing students were impressed.

I
N
1978 I was working at the University of California–San Francisco on endorphins, which had recently been discovered in humans amid a good deal of excitement, because their natural existence in our body explained why opiates, like morphine, which had been found only in plants heretofore, could exert such profound effects on people.

It was about midnight when Harry showed up at my lab. I had been trying since early morning to purify an endorphin that wasn’t very stable. Sometimes things you are purifying that seem to be unstable suddenly stop disappearing at some point in the purification. That means you have separated them from something else that has been actively destroying them. You hope this might occur, and you work rapidly for a long time trying to arrive at that point. I had got there around eleven thirty. I had my endorphin in the freezer and I was shutting things down. I was proud of myself because I had introduced a really clever step in the purification that had worked extremely well. It had to do with the fact that tetrahydrofuran is completely miscible with water until you add salt. I was eager to tell someone about it who would understand. Cynthia, my wife, would have believed me when I told her I
had done something clever that day, but Harry’s arrival was a special joy. He would understand exactly and he would think it was cool. I hadn’t seen him for months.

We met in Berkeley in the late 1960s. We were both chemists. It was still ambiguous then as to how the synthesis of LSD was going to be tolerated in California. The law wasn’t ambiguous. It was flat out illegal as of 1966 to synthesize LSD and a serious crime to even have it. But it seemed ridiculous that our legislature, which surely must have had important things to do with our limited tax dollars, would get itself involved in regulating LSD while scholars and popular magazines like
Time
and
Life
were still debating the pros and cons of this new phenomenon. A number of well-informed and respected psychologists were enthusiastic about the possible uses of LSD in psychotherapy, and various social and religious leaders saw LSD as a way out of World War III. But there was a lot of ignorance in Sacramento, California, about it, and wherever there is ignorance, you can always find arrogance. In Sacramento, arrogance was almost thick enough to rust the bumper off a truck.

We didn’t believe they could possibly be serious. It was insane that the people who knew the least about something would be able to ban it. We figured the law would not be enforced. We were wrong on that one.

Harry and I both had a love of organic synthesis. The process of taking readily available things and turning them into precious substances is a little like cooking or magic. Harry had a love for larger-scale quantities than I did, so he was understandably secretive about his whereabouts after he left Berkeley. He left in the middle of the night after the campus
cops had made an uninvited, and some say rude, visit to his lab.

The next time I saw him he was wearing a fake beard and talking about the fact that the
federales
were using voice printing technology to trace phone calls. I thought he was overestimating the cleverness of our national constabulary, whose skills, in my eyes, did not yet include Gerald Ford’s famous ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. But I humored him. I made a few phone calls for him and picked up a package for him that had been hidden in his hasty retreat, and he rewarded me with a wonderful vehicle. It was my first old VW bus.

All that was long ago. When Harry came to my lab in San Francisco, without his beard, the timing was perfect. He saved me from the N-Judah streetcar, and BART, and Cynthia having to pick me up at the Fruitvale station in Oakland. We shot across the bridge in his new Toyota pickup, and by 1:00
A.M.
, we were sitting at my kitchen table with a couple of cold Becks.

Cynthia was asleep. Harry smoked a joint. I never smoked unless it was a weekend because I was older and marijuana made me too groggy the next day. Thirty doesn’t seem old now, but it did then. Harry sipped his beer and then looked up at me differently, as though from across the aisle of some Buddhist bookstore, and said, “I want to show you something.” I knew I was in for something good.

His eyes were wide, and he looked straight into mine. “Keep your eyes on mine and try not to blink.”

I stared straight ahead. His face was calm, but his eyes were alive and intense. “If my face starts to change,” he said, “don’t react. Just keep looking into my eyes.”

His face did change. It was still Harry, but varieties of Harry I had not seen. Different faces appeared out of the familiar flesh, which now wasn’t so familiar. Some of them were humans I didn’t know, some were not human at all. They were animal. They were all Harry in some way I couldn’t explain. I was seeing things in him that were him but not a part of the life we had shared. It was a little scary, but Harry was somehow underneath it smiling that confident smile.

I trusted him more than almost anybody else I knew. He had experiences I wanted to share, and he didn’t need anything from me that I was not willing to give. We had always had a nice balance that way. He had told me something a long time ago, when we were going into some business venture together, that made me always feel at ease around him. He said that for any human interaction to work both parties must believe they are getting the better deal.

It was hard not to blink, but I was totally enthralled and willing to concentrate in order to keep the images from going away. The kitchen started to take on a reddish hue, and the walls came in at the top and bottom like a barrel. It was a perception similar to one I had had after taking mescaline. I suspect it is a malfunction of the optical processing circuitry, which compensates for the fact that the images on your retina are really on a curved surface. Why I was experiencing a malfunction just then was not clear, but I was so distracted by an overwhelming sense of my own reality and my absolute permanence that I didn’t pay much attention to the way things looked. I was aware that whatever I might wish or attempt—I could never not exist. I could not die. Rocks were fragile and could pass away, but not me. Nothing of me would ever go away.

Harry nodded. He understood what I was feeling.

“That’s what I wanted to show you,” he said. I was crying and so was he.

“I can read your mind, Harry,” I said. “I’m only allowed into the front room—the reception area. But I’m in there.”

“I’m in yours, too,” he replied.

I got up from the table and broke the whole thing off for a moment. I knew for certain that all we had to do to re-enter that state of mind was to stare again into each other’s eyes. I returned with a bunch of index cards and two pens.

“Write the next word you are going to say, Harry.”

We were being scientists. We both wrote down a word and then showed each other our cards. It was the same word. Just a word, nothing cosmic, but it was the same, and we knew it would be. We did it again and again, and we knew every time it would be the same. We were watching something—always present but usually dormant—from a privileged position that we had created by putting ourselves together in some way. It was absolutely normal and yet it wasn’t.

That night I recognized that whatever I had been experiencing and referring to as my life was only one aspect of something that was really me. That “me” was what people who were religious meant when they said “soul.” It was nothing like the ghostly things I had imagined before whenever I thought about souls. Kary Banks Mullis was a ghostly thing compared to Kary. Kary was forever.

I remembered the slogan of the Bay Area Society for Life Extension. They were a bunch of crazies who were planning to immerse their freshly dead bodies in liquid nitrogen in order to be revived sometime in the future. The slogan had always seemed illogical to me. This morning it seemed absurd. “We
want immortality and we want it now!” They hadn’t the slightest clue about “immortality” or “now” or “we” or “want” or “it.” I’m not sure about “and.”

But I didn’t know much about “and” myself until I met Nancy Cosgrove.

Harry and I did things like that on several other occasions. We were both impressed by what we had experienced, but neither of us was the type to fixate on things. Something I have noticed about other-worldly aspects to my life is that they don’t tend to change a lot of what you had been doing already. They add something to what you might call the depth but not the direction.

T
WO WEEKS BEFORE
Christmas in 1978 I met Katherine O’Keefe in the flesh and began the final chapter of one of the most bizarre experiences that I’ve ever had. The story began in Kansas in 1974. One day, before doing my laundry, I decided to inhale some nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. I had a cylinder of it at home and liked to inhale it once in a while. I would breathe in a few breaths, and my mind would sail off briefly into something primeval and human-less. This time the effect would be very different, because the night before I had taken a powerful antihistamine with Cynthia Gibson. We were just getting to know each other—she would later become my third wife and the mother of our two boys—and she had been bitten by a mosquito at a backyard party I was having. She was allergic to mosquitoes and needed to take the antihistamine immediately, which would put her to sleep. She encouraged me to stay with the festivities, which were getting wild in a 1970s kind of way, but I tore myself away and joined her inside in an antihistamine reverie.

The next morning Cynthia went home to work on a paper for nursing school. I put the little plastic tube in my mouth and opened the valve on the tank. In my previous experience with
nitrous I would have had plenty of time to react, turn off the tank, and then settle down for a couple minutes of bliss. The aftereffects of the powerful antihistamine of the night before changed everything. I was immediately out cold and dead to the world.