It was 1982 becoming 1983. My old buddy was hosting a New Year’s Eve party and the LSD was flowing. Bill was a mystical artist and that year had been working in colored pencils, which when pressed hard and vigorously into the paper, produced vivid bright colors. Several of his recent pictures inspired by Golden Dawn Kabbalistic Magick were hung on the walls of his living room.
I had prepared a traditional Tibetan recipe, khabtse, deep-fried cookies served at Tibetan New Year’s celebrations. Since the cookies were both twisted and fried, they seemed the appropriate thing for this group of partygoers. 
There were about 10 of us just sitting around the room getting high and tripping and grooving. Most of us had been partners in Golden Dawn group workings. I was in an easy chair with my then-wife curled up in my lap. When we began to peak, I became conscious that all of us in the room had entered a group mind meld. I may have been the only one aware of it this clearly, I’m not sure. I discovered it as I was looking at a group of three of Bill’s pictures hanging on the wall.
On the right there was a figure done all in a variety of reds and scarlets. It was entirely made of dynamic swooping curved lines, and showed a fiery being rushing out of the picture at you, swinging a red whip ending in a large red knob. The immediate impression was of fierce, uncontrolled explosive demoniac energy.
On the left was a figure done all in blues and indigos. It was made entirely of of static rectangles and squares. It had a cold inhuman expression and it seemed to be motionless as it held up a hand as if to put a stop to all activity. It communicated intense repression and forbidding. I knew that the red and blue symbolized the basic yin/yang polarity of opposite energies that a magician works with.
Between them was the colorwheel design of the Rose Cross with 22 petals in 3 concentric rings corresponding to the Kabbalistic Paths and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The innermost ring had 3 petals: red on the left, blue on the right, and yellow at the top, symbolizing the elements of fire, water, and air respectively. The yellow air served to harmonize and balance the polarity of the red fire and blue water. In the very center of the mandala was the Cross with a Rose in its center.
The more I looked at the red and blue figures on either side, the more they messed up my mind. The energy kept seesawing wildly between the frenzied aggression of the red and the chilling repression of the blue. I felt most uncomfortable with both of them as there was no balance in the energy. Finally I had enough sense to focus on the yellow in the very center, on the Rosy Cross that was the gold of Tiph’ereth on the Tree of Life, the center and heart of it all that harmonized and balanced the opposites of Mercy and Severity. The Christ consciousness in which the universe was redeemed and made wholesome. Thank you, Jesus! that took care of everything, and all was well as long as I remained centered in that golden heart.
Then I noticed something funny. Every so often something would strike us as humorous and the whole group of friends in the room would begin to laugh at once and we shared in a few moments of jolly mirth before falling silent again. Based on this, I quietly thought of an experiment. I looked at the red picture. Everybody laughed. I looked at the blue picture. Everybody fell silent. I looked around the room. Anytime I looked at something red, everybody laughed and continued laughing for as long as I kept looking at the red. Whenever I looked at anything blue, they fell silent for as long as I kept looking at the blue. I kept moving the energy back and forth several times over and it worked consistently. Apparently I was able to do this so easily because I was the only one aware of how the dynamics worked. Once I had satisfied myself that we were all in a group mind meld, I quit experimenting because I didn’t want to be the puppet master of my friends’ minds, that would be unethical. But there was no mistaking that it was real. I reposed my consciousness to the golden heart of balance and we were all at peace.
At midnight we went in the back yard and shot off some fireworks and then went for a walk through the streets of old South St. Louis. I looked at the red bricks of those plain 19th-century buildings and saw moving pictures in every brick. It occurred to me that the bricks had recorded every event that had happened on the street since the buildings were constructed and the images were visible in the bricks. I mused aloud, “Imagine if these bricks could tell the stories of all they have witnessed here over the years…” Bill made a horrified face and said, “Oh, no, please!!!” We slept all through the morning and late in the afternoon just before sunset we went out and climbed Cahokia Mounds and communed with spirit of the ancient American Indian civilization that had built them. Happy New Year!
