jeff hogue/ bluelab art org

"Fortunately, Menninger’s was a rare place and had as much in common with a college as a hospital and I was allowed to walk to different buildings on their large and manicured grounds (under the supervision and guidance of techs and art and music therapists) study music, make paintings with professional quality materials, cast silver and use semiprecious stones like turquoise and to spend a lot of my extra time in a quiet and unencumbered environment. They say that in centuries gone by that troubled kids were sent to monasteries to grow up. In many ways Menninger’s was that sort of environment.

It was in the “community meetings” that I first experienced the miracle of true community. The doctors, nurses, activity therapists, psychologists, social workers, and technicians were from all over the world. To work at Menninger’s was considered an honor and these were people who came to work each day with real passion. Several of the staff displayed qualities that I have come to recognize as ecstatic, illumined, and even genius. I sat in rooms equally divided between some of the finest professionals in their fields and some of the most profoundly disturbed and tortured patients I’d ever encountered. Many of the young adults on our unit were childhood schizophrenics and had been in and out of institutions most of their lives. A few of us were fairly normal at first glance and some were quite gifted. So it was in these meetings of an hour or more with all of us sitting on chairs and couches and the floor filling a large meeting room that I witnessed so many things that have continued to have such a marked influence upon me.

I was for a time terrified of these meetings but I think I was so cut off from my own fear that initially I only recognized my desire to challenge and impress and taunt others. I had a huge ego and this was the first place I’d been where I felt that I was surrounded by worthy adversaries. These gatherings were largely unstructured. Anyone in the community was welcome to start the meetings and anyone—staff or patient was encouraged to speak up and to say what they felt about whatever the topic presented itself as. I gradually recognized that I was able to settle into this beautiful and subtle atmosphere of love, tolerance, and kindness that healed me deeply. There was something sublime about this unlikely mixture of human beings that opened me to a much deeper dimension of inter-personal possibility. The treators displayed such grace and poise and thoughtfulness even as they occasionally showed their own brokenness and weakness. Stereotypes and idiosyncrasies melted away revealing these amazingly vivid and tangible individual human beings. In the air one could often sense a palpable lightness and joy—even in the face of utter darkness.

Most of all when thinking of community, I remember the beloved section chief, Dr. Dean Collins. In the two years that I lived there as a long-term patient I never caught even a glimpse of disingenuity in that man. He was a tower of depth and awareness and fecundity. He was conversely accessibly squishy and Buddha like. He was soft-spoken but always rosy complected and potent. Occasionally there was chaos such as when once a fellow patient committed suicide on the unit. During the emergency community meeting the following day I noticed Dr. Collins sitting sage like and fully engaged, yet completely transcendent and compassionate. There were others times when I would be sitting alone in the cafeteria eating lunch or dinner and Dr. Collins would politely ask if he could join me. I never ever saw staff—especially doctors sitting with patients. He loved us as only a true saint could. My egotistical antics never seemed to faze him and I always felt warmly received by him in whatever the circumstances. It was his commitment to truth and his absolute integrity and clarity that sat the tone for the quality of our community. Years later in a video interview for a school project entitled, “The Return of the Soul”, he humbly disclosed to me that one of his proudest achievements had been his leadership in the development of the “team model” for the institution. He is one of the finest men I have ever known.

I eventually had what I have come to understand as several unitive experiences. Somehow, Grace blessed me with the willingness and capacity to release myself to this unknown and numinous presence I was coming to perceive. It was during this initial period of ecstatic consciousness that I first glimpsed some of the possibilities that I have come to call “triage.” The odyssey which began with a long and seemingly effortless drift into lost contemplative days and evenings was punctuated by an explosive light experience followed by 2 long and breathtaking weeks of ecstatic experience.

This was to become the defining period of my life. I felt that I was reborn and that suddenly my mind and perceptions were as clear as a child’s. The scales had fallen away and everything looked completely new. Sunlight flitted on the wind ruffled leaves of trees in the Kansas June in a way that seemed electric and rife with meaning. When I looked upon people around me, my heart was crushed by the weight of their pain and my compassion and love for them. I melted at the sheer innocence and fragility of human beings and with the sense of tragedy that seemed to counter their exquisite beauty. As I stood consciously in eternal awareness all was infused with unfathomable love. I knew as never before that all things of this physical world would ultimately pass away. Each moment was so filled with beauty and magic I had to return to my breath and to prayers to stay with it all. The edge of terror is the edge of ecstasy and the edge of death is the edge of creation and for a time I hovered there without effort. As though seeing a wall of thunderclouds overhead I looked up to see the eternal stream of mans intellectual and spiritual knowledge drift over me as I looked back to the dark horizon of the beginning of time. I sobbed with joy and anguish more than once.

One night I was dreaming that I was floating around in a whirlpool of light when suddenly I woke up next to my roommate Sam’s bed with my knees to the floor. He was sitting up looking at me pale with terror as he said, “Jeff, Jeff are you alright, are you alright? I don’t know if I was awake or dreaming but I looked up and saw you floating around in the air in this whirlpool of light!” I heard myself immediately say, “It’s the Holy Spirit.” I felt completely calm and composed and simply returned to my bed and to sleep.

One afternoon I looked up at the sky and it seemed a rare luminous blue like a sort of translucent turquoise or lapis. I was frozen for several moments in awe. This was the experience that led many years later to naming this organization’s predecessor “Blue Glass.” In searching for a name, I was reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and ran across the concept called, “Rigpa.” I won’t get into all the subtle meanings of this word, but the idea of it is symbolized by the “Sky of the True Mind” as opposed to the “clouds of human ignorance and confusion.”

I somehow knew that the walls of belief systems that I’d been blocked by had collapsed like those of Jericho. I stood in radical amazement before the whole drama of creation feeling like a child suddenly delivered into the sunlight from the dark and hopeless toil of a third world factory. Somehow I knew that I wanted to share this sense of liberation that I’d been blessed with.

In one vision, I saw a stage. It looked like the stage was perhaps 10 feet tall and on the front of it I saw a 3-leaf clover pattern formed out of light. The experience filled me with a tremendous sense of responsibility and it seemed that I was witnessing something outside the envelope of space and time fully developed and real. On the stage I saw a group of performers of which I was one. I felt completely overwhelmed with the experience and was left with a quaking sense of inadequacy in terms of the scale and magnitude of the spectacle in contrast to my own sense of brokenness and uncertainty. I felt I was being shown my future. I anguished as I seemed to stand in a vortex between different dimensions, at once joyous and elated and honored while simultaneously ripped apart by my overwhelming sense of the scale and mystery and shock of a whole new level of consciousness of which I’d never dreamed." from Memoirs of a Dervish