The last day. The morning was a walking tour that included the Roman Forum, and also a glorious basilica called St. John Lateran, where John Morton did a blessing and we gathered for a group photo. There was lunch in a cavern-like restaurant that featured a surprise—a thunderous and melodramatic opera performance that popped into the aisles between our tables as John was speaking, cracking everybody up. We rolled with the spirit of the occasion. John’s talk turned into a wild celebration, and when it was over John continued with his blessing.
Afternoon was a tour of the Coliseum. The crowds are still enormous, and you now have to show ID at admission because tickets were selling out and being scalped to others at outrageous prices. Our tour guide remembers when she was a little girl and the Coliseum was completely open, no lines, no tickets. She used to play hide-and-seek there with her friends.
Our guide had us act out the parts of gladiators, owners of the gladiator teams, and the emperor so we could get an understanding of how the whole socioeconomic process worked. There was no admission charge to events at the Coliseum. It was a huge project to enhance imperial power and mollify the masses, and the owners of gladiator teams were sponsored by the wealthy. It was a big patronized performance, just like what took place on a higher turn of the spiral in the later Christian world, in the building of churches and the patronizing of the arts.
Then we had some free time, and then a farewell dinner, which included thank-you’s for our tireless assisting team. John invited the three main organizers of the trip, Rosemary Swade, Sherie Wylie and Mark Lurie, to tell us about their part in creating this masterpiece of organization and inspiration.
There’s a novel by Ursula LeGuin called The Lathe of Heaven where a guy finds that what he dreams at night becomes reality when he wakes up in the morning. As I recall he gets angry at his sister and dreams that he killed her, and when he wakes up he’s in a reality where she never existed. He goes to a therapist because he thinks he’s going crazy, and the therapist realizes that he’s not crazy, and his dreams actually do alter reality. The therapist figures that if he can suggest a dream to this guy through hypnosis and modern medical technology, he has tremendous power to change the world for the better. The world does change, but each change brings unintended consequences, and the world just gets stranger and stranger.
On these trips it feels like we’re being put in an altered state of consciousness, very high up in Spirit, similar to a dream state but untouched by the personality, and it changes not just us but the whole planet. I could swear that the world we return to is not the same world that we left. Of course as a work-in-progress I’m not independent enough from my personality to be sure that it’s not clouding my perceptions. But for example I’m convinced that we returned to a different world after the Israel trip in 2023, just a few weeks before October 7. And then there was our Morocco trip right before the Arab Spring. And then there were J-R’s extensive Europe trips from around 2007 to 2013, followed by John’s Europe trips. In addition to the planetary work, often when I come back from one of these trips something is radically shaken up in my personal life.
During these trips it’s as though all my chakras below the eyebrows are turned off. I have minimal interest in food, sex, money, information, or emotional reactions to my environment. There’s just a living brightness in my head that won’t go away, and it overwhelms sensory experience. I’m not completely deaf to the external world, and my personality is the same, but the volume is turned down so much that it’s barely audible. When I stop doing photos and writing for a while I start floating upward, tethered just enough to keep me from disappearing into the sky like a balloon.
I know that a trip is drawing to a close because I start to pick up interest in my personal habits and desires. The Girlfriend starts looking tasty, and the food looks sexy. I start thinking about “my life” and how I can do this or that, or change this or that, or chase some sort of future satisfaction that seems exaggeratedly important to me in the moment.
This landing process started at our final dinner tonight, where I ate way too much and reinvigorated some of my cold symptoms. It was a multi-course meal with no info about what would be coming next, so we couldn’t pace ourselves through the feast. My fasting in Assisi seems like it was years ago. Who was that guy who had that much self-control and why can’t I control him? Well, anyway it’s the last night of the trip so I might as well…(fill in the blank). The End is near, and if it doesn’t come to me I’ll run to it.
It was like a procession of last meals, or last suppers, at our rooftop restaurant overlooking the Roman Forum. Our visit to Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan was cancelled before the Italy trip started, so it’s fitting that the last-ness of our last supper kept getting outlasted. It seemed to be never-ending, just like my process of leaving the physical world and re-entering, changed but still subject to the same cyclic temptations and tetherings which are woven into the larger cycle of our leaving the world, changing it, and returning changed ourselves.
You ask for a last supper and you get one—and not just one, but they keep coming until you can’t eat anymore. Either way you end up fasting eventually. It’s only the duration of the fasts that changes. J-R used to say “everyone is celibate between sexual intercourses,” although he used the four letter word.
The evening ends with thanking of our tour managers, Dmitri and Azhar, who were dedicated to taking care of us every step of the way. Around twenty of us are going on to Orvieto for a few days of post-trip trip so it’s not really over. And Turkey is coming up next year. And there’s the Royal Road retreat in December at Asilomar. I’d say I’ve given up trying to declare the End, but that’s just a different kind of end-declaration. All I can say is that I’m rolling with the ever-higher turns of the spiral. It’s a very strange world.
There’s a song from the 1960s that was a minor hit on the radio when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, called “Master Jack.” It held an odd fascination for me. I kept singing it over and over out loud or in my head, having no idea why, and it would move something inside me when I sang it. The fact that something could move me so much while I had no understanding of it made it even more meaningful/meaningless, mysterious and poignant. It felt like I was suddenly able to remember something that never really happened, or to see the ending of something that I didn’t know existed. The chorus went like this:
It’s a very strange world we live in, Master Jack.
And no hard feelings if I never come back.
It’s a very strange world we live in, Master Jack.
See you in Orvieto.
