Hara (thanks for your last post!), Larrabee, all:
Here's a passage in the short story I'm still working on, about post-withdrawal states, and about the metaphysical implications of it all:
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Living at Flynn’s seemed at first to bring another kind of lift, too. It gave me a “family” outside the Bayard Hora network. On the strength of these new bonds, I completely severed all ties to Bayard Hora and Associates. Perhaps I never would be able to stand up to confrontation, but I simply could not take any more! I had dreamed one recent night of dozens of tentacles reaching, crawling, toward me. Each one appeared to be a separate entity, but then I saw that they all emanated from Bayard. I woke up just before a dozen or more of them wrapped themselves around my body.

The next day, going to the Museum of Modern Art instead of to the Bayard office, I continued to feel terrified and pursued. The second day, when I came home from my afternoon newspaper job, the phone began to ring for me. The person on the other end would say, “We’ve missed you at the office!” or “Why don’t you sign up forvolunteer staff this weekend?”…”This is Al”…”This is Violet”. I asked Flynn to intercept all calls and tell pursuers that I was not going to take any more calls from Bayard’s group, or have anything to do with it—ever. Flynn was willing and effective at this role, and I was able to I begin to decompress.

Once the direct infusions stopped and things began to settle down, I was stunned my mental state! Years earlier I’d taken several psychedelic trips. That was the only comparison I could find to my current state.

Yet I hadn’t done any drugs for more than fifteen years! What was going on? I was shocked, asking that question, to realize the current of intensity that had taken over my mind was karma! It was nothing but all the energy pumped into my system by months of artificially ramped-up human, emotional input—all the confrontations, all the demands, all the intrusions by phone, on the street, in courses, at the office. It was a flood of energy! Would it ever recede?

In a couple of weeks, it did begin to recede. Where did all that karma go? What did it mean that—I realized that it was true—I had entered into relationships with these hundreds of people who had criss-crossed my life because of Bayard. Would I have to work out relationships with them in future incarnations? Or was it Bayard himself who actually bore the karmic responsibility for having unleashed all these megatons of human energy? Where was he leading everyone? That was the ultimate question, as far as where his responsibility would bear him. Was it for the freeing, the betterment, of each person, as the courses advertised? Or was it mainly to create his own little empire of greed and power?

I did not have to answer that question, or any of them, really. What I had done would have whatever consequence it had. Karma was not as ephemeral as a drug; it was not something anyone could evade. I had only, whatever mistake I might have made, to go on from this day, living the best life I could. The rest would take care of itself.