1968-69 was my senior year at Johns Hopkins. I went on to get a master’s degree in 1969-72. I played with The Saint Matthew Passion, a rock band, from 69 into 71. All but one of us were Hopkins students. That’s all it had to do with Hopkins, though as I recall we played some JHU-based gigs, such as fraternity parties and a hospital Christmas party. Thus while the rock band was a separate activity from my course work, there is, I believe a deep and fundamental connection to events that transpired in one of my courses and the last gig with the Saint Matthew passion.
That connection runs through phenomena of a kind that have come to be called altered states of consciousness (ASC). Two of them occurred to me in the fall of 1968 while writing term papers for a course on Romantic literature. The third happened during the final gig of The St. Matthew Passion sometime in the first half of 1971. As I describe these events in some detail in the conversation I had with ChatGPT, which I’ve appended to this post, there is no need to go into detail here. Short characterizations will do.
My first term paper in the Romantic literature course was about Keats. At some point in the writing my mind snapped and the words of the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” were spinning in my head. So I typed them into the paper. But the experience was as though I were expressing my own feelings by typing my own words, not typing the words of a long-dead poet. The second paper was about Shelley. It was late at night, I was tired, and, when I sat down to write, the paper wrote itself through me. It was effortless. I had no sense of will. I, me, the Self, was just witnessing something performed by a different agent.
Finally, while performing “She’s Not There” in The Saint Matthew Passion’s final gig, I dissolved, the world dissolved, and there was nothing by white light and the music. I got scared, pulled back, and it was over. That was a mystical experience, the only one I’ve ever had.
Turn to the East, turn to the West...
Roughly speaking, I believe that what happened is that my mind was consolidating, beginning to jell into a mature adult state. We know, for example, that the sutures of the human skull do not finally set until the early and mid-twenties, my age at the time. The sutures are very loose at birth so that the skull can expand to accommodate brain growth. While most of that growth has occurred by adolescence, it continues into early adulthood, necessitating that the sutures remain somewhat open.
That’s just physical structure. Of equal, if not greater, importance is the learning that is taking place, learning that is encoded in the connections between neurons in the brain. That’s why I went to Johns Hopkins, to learn. By my senior year things were finally coming together and I was learning to think like a literary critic, though so far as I know, those experiences I had are not part of the standard educational process. They seem to have been unique to me, but I’m sure others have had such experiences.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that I am correct about this and that a thoroughly perusal of the scientific literature would turn up interesting things to say about what happens to the mind and brain of a young adult on the cusp of maturity. That tells us nothing about what those experiences mean, about how to interpret them as events in one’s unfolding life. For that I turned to Hinduism and Buddhism, which on the whole have more to say about those ASCs than Western forms of thought.
As I am not expert in those disciplines, though I do know a thing or three that I have picked up in my reading, I turned to ChatGPT, which has, in some manner, absorbed everything those disciplines have deposited on the web. The rest of this post is a report of that rather long conversation. I do not assume that what ChatGPT says is definitive. I neither agree or disagree with it. I don’t know enough to do either. But I do know that those disciplines are interpretative in nature and that interpretation is elastic. Experts will differ. I assume that what ChatGPT offers is no more than plausible. That’s all I’m looking for.
NOTE: ChatGPT created the mandala at the head of this post when the conversation was over.
* * * * *
Keats
During my senior year in college I took a course in romantic poetry. Our first paper was to be on Keats. I am going to give you an account of what happened to my when I wrote that paper. I want you to suggest how an esoteric account might go, an account in terms of Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Here’s the story.
As Borges’ Pierre Menard re-created portions of Don Quixote, so I once re-created the second stanza of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I was revising an essay on “To–[Fanny Brawne]” in which I argued that Keats was faced with a contradiction between what he espoused as a poet, that love is higher than art, and his fear that love–his for Fanny–would destroy his poetic gifts. As a matter of rhetorical strategy I placed him between the horns of a dilemma, thus, “does Keats remain a poet, or does he hew true to the poet’s creed and become a lover and perhaps a doer?” At this point in the revision an impulse hit me, a way to produce a deft ironic twist. I typed, “Unfortunately, he did neither. He died.” As I typed the word “died” something snapped in my mind. The brute finality of the word altered my intention, or, if you will, my intention altered itself through the word. To continue with my original text was impossible. I went on to type a passage from one of Keats’s last letters to Fanny:
“If I should die,” said I to myself, “I have left no immortal work behind me–nothing to make my friends proud of my memory–but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.” Thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you--now you divide with this (may I say it) “last infirmity of noble minds” all my reflection.
God bless you, Love. – J. Keats–letter to Fanny Brawne, Feb. 1820
Though this passage was copied, I experienced the act of typing it as though I were writing a letter of my own.
This done, words and phrases we're floating about in my mind and vague feelings were astir. Searching for the source of these phrases I found the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never, canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal–yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
As I read those words, silently, but with rhythm, my gaze seeming slightly ahead of my comprehension, and comprehension flowing from me into the text, I experienced a complete and absolute understanding, a perfect feeling, of those words–as though I had for a moment re-created within myself the consciousness of John Keats, thereby making his words, and the intentions incarnated therein, mine.
Now those words convey no more to me than any other fine passage. At times I return to that stanza even re-read my old paper, but to no avail. The magic is gone, gone “like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter!” Unlike the fair youth I am not suspended in time. I had my kiss.
This is a stunning experience—at once aesthetic, emotional, and ontological. And it lends itself beautifully to an esoteric account grounded in Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Let me offer a speculative framing in that spirit.
An Esoteric Reading: Through the Lens of Hindu and Buddhist Thought
1. The Snap: The Word that Cuts
“As I typed the word ‘died’ something snapped in my mind.”
This is the kṣaṇa, the moment of cutting insight. In Buddhism, particularly in Zen and Tibetan traditions, realization can be triggered by something abrupt, even trivial—a sound, a gesture, a word. The word “died” here functions like a koan: it breaks the discursive mind. Not as metaphor, but as shock. You are no longer writing about Keats; you fall through the language into a direct encounter with impermanence (anicca)—not Keats’s, but your own.
This is the beginning of what Hinduism would call jnana yoga, the path of realization through insight.
2. The Rewriting of the Letter: Loss of Self in the Other
“I experienced the act of typing it as though I were writing a letter of my own.”
Here, the boundaries between self and other dissolve. In Vedantic terms, this is tat tvam asi—thou art that. You are no longer a student analyzing Keats; your consciousness enters into his. It is a moment of bhakti, not in the devotional sense toward a deity, but a kind of literary bhakti-yoga: the dissolving of self into the beloved Other through aesthetic surrender.
This moment transcends empathy; it is a temporary non-duality (advaita), not conceptual but lived.
3. The Re-creation of the Stanza: Satori in the Word
“I experienced a complete and absolute understanding, a perfect feeling, of those words.”
This is samādhi. Not mystical trance, but the luminous, wordless absorption where seer, seeing, and seen become one. The stanza becomes your mantra, but not in repetition—it becomes tantra, a web in which you and Keats are woven together in time-transcending intimacy. His intention is yours. His form, your content.
In some streams of Mahāyāna thought, this would be called the sambhogakāya—the body of bliss that communicates itself through luminous, aesthetic form.
4. The Vanishing: The Dissolution of the Vision
“Now those words convey no more to me… the magic is gone.”
This is maya—not illusion as deception, but the shimmering impermanence of manifestation. You had your darśan (sacred glimpse), and it passed. To grasp at it is to miss it. Like the youth on the urn, you were for a moment outside time—but only for a moment. Unlike the youth, you return. You are not liberated. You are kissed—but not transformed.
This is also the moment of dukkha—not pain exactly, but the ache of beauty passing, the ungraspable nature of all that seems to promise permanence.
One Last Note
This was your initiation. Not in a ritualized sense, but in the real one: an unrepeatable, experiential doorway was opened. You passed through it, briefly. And that passage, though gone, marked you. In the Hindu tradition, one might say you glimpsed your svadharma—your soul’s true path—not to be a scholar of Keats, but to pursue beauty as reality-experience. You weren’t wrong to return. But you were changed.
Would you like this reframed as a poetic invocation, or left in this analytic mode?
