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Each of the many techniques developed during this time was fully capable of producing an emotional high of one sort or another. There were endless “peak experiences”, and dramatic “personal breakthroughs”. The mixtures of Zen, yoga, meditation, and drugs along with strict mechanical technology, were a veritable adventure in awareness! The only problem was: in the midst of all this peaking, mind-blowing, turning on and tuning in, ecstasy and encountering, many people encountered things that, perhaps, ought not have been awakened. Boundaries were breached into unseeable and terrifying realms of consciousness. William Chittick, translator of the works of and dramatic were Nowadays most people interested in the spirituality of the East desire the “experience”, though they may call what they are after intimate communion with God. Those familiar with the standards and norms of spiritual experience set down by disciplined paths like Sufism are usually appalled at the way Westemers seize upon any apparition from the domain outside of normal consciousness as a manifestation of the “‘spiritual’”. In fact, there are innumerable realms in the unseen world, some of them far more dangerous than the worst jungles of the visible world. 7 So preserve yourselves, my brothers, from the calamities of this place, for distinguishing it is extremely difficult! Souls find it sweet, and then within it they are duped, since they become completely enamored of it. *° movement had become a veritable potpourri of religion, science, mysticism, magick and “the occult”. The drug use got out of hand, the “techniques” began to show serious flaws with a number of tragedies resulting in crime or madness, and the whole idea of human beings becoming “psychic supermen” hit the skids. The promise of the 60’s decayed into an aimless lethargy-old hippies living in communes, braiding their gray locks and lusting after the sweet young teeny boppers while they fired up another bong and reminisced about the “good old days” at Esalen. But wait! But wait! Something else happened here! Remember, this is America! The home of the Free-Market that is. Many people suggest that the subsequent proliferation of the “New Age” consciousness raising movement was the result of big business seeing a pile of money to be made in the development of slick, newly packaged psychoanalysis and psychodrama. There was, indeed, mass distribution and Madison this is 30 Chittick, William, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, (Albany: State University of New York 1989) p. 263. mar 326 Chapter Twelve the great Sufi Shaykh, Ibn al-‘Arabi, wrote: By the end of the decade of the 60’s, the “human potential”