Howard himself later described the circumstances surrounding that gift as follows: "During the group regression session at Carol's workshop I visualized a talisman consisting of an opal and a diamond. Also, I saw Uranus as the highest planet in your chart. At that time I was unaware that this is exactly how Uranus was placed in your horoscope. Afterward, looking at your book I saw that the opal and diamond represented your sign and planet, Gemini and Saturn. It seemed to me that this was remarkably symbolic of your natal chart.
That is, those stones captured something about the essence of you.
"The very next day I was downtown and thinking about you. I knew that we would meet only briefly before you left the area and would not be together again for some time. The thought occured to me to buy you a token piece of jewelry to remember me by. I wandered into a jewelry store and saw the talisman exactly as I had visualized it during the regression session. It was a case of pure precognition."
The remainder of that fleeting interlude was an eternally memorable fantasia of champagne and flowers, music and laughter, and somehow underneath, the rising hope that this magic might be for real. The last thing I did before regretfully turning south once more was to keep my promise that we would have a hypersensing session together.
It was no great surprise to discover that Howard was an excellent subject, since strong-minded people are often best able to override the barriers of memory that compartmentalize the time-conditioned sequences of our many lives. However, I was numbstruck when the first life he recapitulated turned out to be one in which he was an orphan boy named Enid living in the Sherwood Forest area of England. After the loss of his parents Enid had joined a band of outlaws during the time of the legendary Robin Hood and henceforth lived as a fugitive.
What Howard had no way of knowing, since we hadn't discussed it at all, was that my Ojai friends Barbara Devlin, Robert Byron, Harmony Shaw and I had just been conducting extensive research into that very time and place. The four of us had become convinced that our soul group, which had periodically coalesced since pre-Atlantean days, had also been together then. Evidently we had all been outlaws who had rebelled against the abuses of power perpetrated by the tyrannous overlords of the not-so-merry old England.
Byron had been a reluctant renegade who would rather compose poetry than contend with the king's men. Barbie and Harmony (Ellen and Polly) were female camp followers. I was a childlike herb woman known as "Old Mary" who did her best to look after the motley crew of forest dwellers by making soups and concocting medicinal salves and potions, A chapter on this phase of our reincarnational saga is contained in Barbara Devlin's epochal book, / Am Mary Shelley (Condor 1977).
Now, as Howard recounted his version, I was witnessing the same scenes through another pair of eyes. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he (Enid) described the deaths of his oppressed parents and his own escape from the tyrants who were sucking the life blood of the hapless peasant farmers. After Enid cast in his lot with the outlaws he supported himself by fashioning knives and swords. Although he became a skilled craftsman he was excessively shy and had little to do with the women in the group, though he admired plump Polly from afar.
"What do you do when you get sick?" I asked.
"I go to the herb lady for a remedy."
"Do you know her name?"
"No, but I can see her. She looks exactly like you!"
Further questioning brought out the fact that he used to visit this herb woman on Saturdays. They didn't talk a great deal, but he seemed greatly touched by her kindness in making him pies.
Like most of his fellow outcasts Enid met ah early death. His downfall came shortly after Old Mary, who undeniably had been a troublemaker, was hauled off to a dungeon where, with great relief, her soul discarded that most inadequate body. Hearing the doleful news Enid lost his will to survive and began taking foolish risks, venturing into town disguised only by a hood which he drew over his head to shadow his face. On one of these excursions he was identified as a member of the robber band by his woodsman's shoes, hauled off to the town square, and executed with an arrow through the heart. Most of the others in the group were killed in subsequent skirmishes.
In the months following that regression session I could not help but think that probably those pies were the best investment Old Mary ever made.
A curious sidelight on this story is that virtually all the people associated with the unorthodox research projects sponsored by Ananta Foundation have lived one or more lives as renegades. Evidently the independence thereby cultivated was a necessary part of our training for the tasks we have elected to carry out, even though today we are all staunchly law-abiding citizens. It also seems notable that in his present life Howard has been an avid collector of knives and swords. Although not a specialist in surgery he is an expert with a scalpel as well as with the hypodermic needle. In Sherwood Forest he fashioned the weapons for the outlaw band. Now, as the spearhead of the ketamine research program, and one of the few who are legally permitted to give injections, he is still wielding a sharp pointed instrument for the sake of human liberation. In this respect, an astrologer would probably surmise that his soul selected a horoscope with Mars in Scorpio in the eighth house in order to carry on with a mode of operation which involves penetrating to the depths of things. This may involve physical cutting, or it may involve the psychological delving into and excising of problems which is a necessary part of the repetoire of a physician of souls.
Before Howard emerged from his meditative reverie we touched lightly upon a much earlier life as a Roman swordsman and charioteer. There was also a pathetically brief interlude about the time of World War I when he had been a young Armenian boy who was slaughtered by the Turks. Evidently it is necessary to be on both sides of the knife, just as to be on both sides of the law. It appeared that violence was not unusual in his soul's history. With all this training as a fighting man it was not surprising that when I recounted the story of my brush with the Canadian witches his first comment was, "If you had a doctor to protect you, this sort of incident might be less likely to occur."
Before leaving for Ojai I promised Howard that I would try to return sometime for a real visit. Meanwhile, I was scheduled to spend the remainder of August in Maine completing the two books with Mark Douglas, and the two weeks after that assisting Dr. Richard Willard, the president of Ananta Foundation, with his book on psychospiritual regeneration. Both these projects proceeded on schedule, but despite the unremitting effort involved, daily letters and mailgrams flew back and forth between Seattle and whatever part of the country I happened to be passing through.
Finally, we both determined that if our relationship was to be this intense we might as well become better acquainted. Coincidentally, Howard, who had been adrift since his divorce earlier that year, had received an offer to house-sit in a lovely home in a secluded area. At that point he sat down and wrote me a gracious invitation to attend a housewarming party for two in Seattle. Hence, on the eighteenth of September I was winging my way northward from California to "Sherwood Forest." It had been Howard's idea to bestow that name upon our temporary abode because of the manner in which the house nestled into a thickly wooded canyon with luxuriant green undergrowth and a bubbling stream.
The bliss of that pastoral idyll surpassed even my rosiest expectations and at the termination of our week in "Sherwood Forest" we celebrated our official engagement with a small party attended by Marwayne and Howard's best friend Heinz Mittelstadt. In retrospect it seems as though becoming engaged to someone with whom I had spent little more than a week was a daring step to take, though at the time it all seemed logical, sensible, and inevitable. Certainly our confidence in the Tightness of the decision was spurred by the fact that during my ten days in the Seattle area Howard and I took two spectacular mind trips together.