Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I am not trying to minimize the misguidedness of mistaking an opiate stupor for a transcendental state, but it is undeniable that narcosis facilitates detachment, and Burroughs saw a rough equivalence between the cellular apathy of the stoned junky and the transcendental stillness of the meditator.
Curses are real, possession is real.
This struck him as a better model for human experience and psychology than the neurosis theories of Freud, in the end. He was busy with the world of imagination, of scenes and characters and voices and action. But he did pursue a lifelong quest for spiritual techniques by which to master his unruly thoughts and feelings, to gain a feeling of safety from oppression and assault from without, and from within. William Burroughs was an early and longstanding adjunct faculty member with the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded in 1974 by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. In 1975, at age 61, William was asked by Allen and Anne to come to Naropa and give some classes and readings.