ELEVEN
MexQuake II:
Narrator:
I will provide you, horrible friend, with fragments that I think will interest you. This is the last of the Fr. Adam grimoire that I was able to retrieve. I will provide an abstract, but I hope a poetic abstract, of the rest of his development. After he discovered his connection with the goddess of death (you will enjoy this, I think) he revved his engines, so to speak, and took off. We’ve yet to determine who he really serves. But if we cannot convert him, or use him, I will kill him, my dear, dark Lord.
***
Adam:
… amidst this silent, boring solitude, a very clear intuition that Mexico (again!) was the next place and that hopefully would be the concluding punctuation to the Yemen Experiment. So I left Luxor.
I had to wait over-night for my flight near Cairo in a place called Heliopolis. At that time, I was reading books on Egyptian Mythology. One story of the creation of the world tells of Father God Ra, whose ancient place of worship was Heliopolis. Ra wills himself into existence out of the primordial waters. Then, finding himself alone and lonely, masturbates, taking the semen into his mouth and by spewing it out, produces the gods. (Interesting religious consciousness.) The rain rituals mentioned earlier had a related form, though not exactly.
(Also note: I read that the word “alchemy” derives from an ancient Egyptian word for black fertile soil. There is a connection from Spain in that: While I was in Barcelona earlier that summer, I was informed of a theory proposing that the famous, miraculous, black-faced Madonna of Monteserrat was that color because of ancient pagan beliefs connecting black fertile soil with worship of the Great Goddess. Also, it remains the venerable custom for newly weds in that district of Spain to go to Monteserrat for the first night of their honeymoon for the bride to offer flowers (and her virginity?) to the black-faced virgin. The Virgin is the patron of this journey. Also, the name of the goddess Kali, goddess of death, consort of Shiva, means “black” in Sanskrit and Romany. Gypsies brought Kali to Spain as their Patron Saint disguised as a Christian saint, according to a friend of mine who is a devotee of the Goddess and the great Mysteries.)
The Golden Light of Luxor was beautiful and characterized this summer’s journey. But balance in the world was horrific:
From the San Francisco Examiner September 25, 1988: “This year of disaster…
May floods in China cause million farmers to lose crops kills 100;
June Drought causes 10’s of billions of dollars damage in U.S. Midwest;
July 1st, floods in Bangladesh, cholera strikes New Delhi;
August typhoon in China effects 10.5 million people, Nepal- earthquake kills 900, floods in Sudan leave 2 million homeless (as I start out for upper Egypt!);
September floods inundate Bangladesh with 28 million victims;
September, the worst hurricane in history hits Mexico in the general area where I was supposed to conclude Yemen experiment. The preparation for this journey started in mid May with the mural crisis, and continued through the Geyserville episode in September, described below. (I will leave for Mexico soon enough, but first…)
I have tried to deny it to myself for the sake of my own sense of normalcy and sanity, finally I have to admit to an apparent interaction between the flow of these rituals and unusual meteorological, geological, political and/or social events.
I believe that we are now at a fulcrum moment in our vast history regarding our survival as a biosphere. I believe that the earth is moving to effect that survival by attempting to balance the abuses of technology; and that the shamanic capacity brings one more closely into the presence of that reality. Further, human personality has something catalytic to do with that process. Or, at least has the capacity to be catalytic. Though I am not sure about any of this, and I cannot judge in any conclusive way if the macrocosm of the earth has been affected by the ritual of shamanic pilgrimage, as was the microcosm of my body by the pilgrimage to eastern Turkey. But, there has been enough striking, even traumatic, “co-incidences” that it has warranted following through. I have the sense of facilitating, helping to birth this process rather than turning it around as earlier thought. In any case- Something significant happened. Two months later I left again for Mexico, hopefully to conclude this experiment.
The dominant symbols for the Luxor journey were light and water. The symbol for the Mexican Conclusion has been death.
Our hitchhiking went well for half the first day, but then we got stranded in the middle of the desert. We ended up walking all night. It was too cold to sleep. Some things my friend told me in that moonless dark night were like death but I cannot reveal the real nature of that sickness, or its sin. (9) It was the next day that the most disastrous earthquake in history to that date hit Soviet Armenia. It’s not the 50,000 dead that sadden me, we all have to die. But those left to suffer… Sweet Lord, give them solace and peace. That was just on the other side of the Russian-Turkish border from the place where I concluded the migraine experiment and began the Yemen Experiment, just a few miles away in that geologically volatile region.
I dance the dance with the dark lady– I dance a dance of time and eternity. I dance the dance of all things and not. I dance now– but weep for the suffering–tears… to the ocean…
We reached Juarez the next day, caught a bus to Chihuahua. Chihuahua was an ugly city, but there I had a beautiful, energizing dream.
Then, we moved on to the Sierra Tarahumara, the badlands of central Mexico where many of the Tarahumara Indians still live a pre-Columbian lifestyle. The mountains there are rugged and powerful. I stopped in a village called Creel. It was like arriving in a wild west town populated with Cowboys and Indians. And dust, blinding clouds of dust. Couldn’t see to the end of the block for the dust. That first night, I had a terrible dream. One night soon after, I made a ritual at the fireplace in my room. I used the incense from Luxor and Yemen and other things- prayers, intentions. As these offerings rose in the sacred smoke, out of my practice, into the world, snow began to fall in Creel. To snow in Creel, at 8000 feet, in December would not be unusual. But it also snowed in Chihuahua and El Paso. It seldom snows there? That cured the dust problem. Seemed to be quite a blessing for it to snow at that moment. Also, that night, the one who was to help me complete the ritual, a stranger, arrived in town.
Narrator: Here, pages seem to be lost. There was some mention of facing death in Copper Canyon, in the Sierra Taraumara of Mexico. Then, Adam meets a young man from Australia with whom he travels to Mazatlan and during some shared meditations has these visions… I think he is talking about the Grandmother Spider of Native American lore.
…She, to build her lair. She was vast. I couldn’t stretch across her abdomen.
Here, I completed a series of images/sensations that had been recurring in my mind and body over the past two months. This was of having sexual intercourse with the universe! It was the clearest non-physical, personally satisfying, sensation of perfect sexual intercourse.
Fecundating the goddess was the completion of that earlier intercourse. It was somehow related to re-vitalizing the Tree of Life, of sentience in the world. By that I don’t just mean reproduction, but enlightenment and completion. Her web was hung on the Great Tree. The last image from that scenario was of me wrapped up in her silken web, but escaping. In fact, I later make it to the tree itself and hide from her.
(The effects so far of the Yemen Experiment can be ascertained by looking up these readings in the I CHING: #12 “P’i” with 6 in the second place and nine in the 4th, 5th, and 6th place!!! Most interesting; then # 7 “Shih”, with its advice about the use of poison drugs and benevolence. Add to that a vision that came as I held the yarrow sticks to my forehead: a vast and drifting, watching presence broods upon the world. This is how I believe the Yemen Experiment worked out. We are well, at peace generally, but watchful and vigilant.)
The battle (of self) still rages. And I am ready now. A warrior of the heart (self), and the body (self), dependent on the world (self) and the Holy (Self) to fashion the battle. Personal and corporate suicide is a possibility. Hell is an option. But, so is Heaven.
Thus, Bishop, begins the Turn of Being. This is not the end, this is the beginning. WE MUST AWAKE UP. Thus, Bishop, I have dreamed dreams of Power. (Thus, I have turned in my sleep.)
________________
Within a month of these events, the U.S. had sent troops to Saudi Arabia to prepare for the war with Iraq. The communist party in Russia is soon to fall. But which is the most “evil empire”? Us? Them?
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us…”
But, Fr. Chris is back in jail. A “child” molester. (God, how the media loves this stuff…) As a result, someone recently congratulated me on being right about how badly his case was handled by church and culture. I suppose I was right. The usual institutional way of handling this sort of case not only has little of the Redemption in it, but its not even practical. Though at the time, I didn’t have any alternative that might seem obvious now.
…Bishop, I hope that you can now see that my actions have been the unavoidable result of my priestly vocation within the larger definition of the Church and its purpose; that your censure of me is a mistake that should be revoked, as I requested earlier.
Compared to greater tragedies in the world, this personal issue seems insignificant. What if, in issues great and small, we actually were like the visionary Christ, not dupes accommodating the hysteria of our over-stressed peers with bribes and cover (how much have you had to pay for these molestation cases?)–but rather, real sacrificial victims. What if we declared the whole damn system filthy and corrupt and refuse to take part in it like we do now. Die to investments, accounts and other spiritual slavery. Then, we might be worthy of sacrifice. We would be those whose loving sacrifice, forgiveness, vision and generosity, gives life to the world. Then perhaps the small would overpower the great before the ‘great’ progress us to the point of corporate suicide.
To see these issues clearly, to perceive the real spiritual content of these situations and to act salvifically is the path of the Spiritual Warrior. It is the presence of God, the Grace of the Spirit.
Bishop, you must now act. You must follow your conscience as your predecessor advised me years ago. But remember, in the Lord’s court you will be held accountable for every one of us: Me, Fr. Chris, the children, all of us.
Act, Bishop, but let the Spirit act in you.
Narrator: And the Bishop’s response in a private conversation with one of his priests was:
Bishop: Well, Fr. Pat, there it is. I think he over-estimates my influence. I think that he is at least suffering from some pretty complex delusions. I would put him in one of those programs we pay so much for, that are supposed to fix all the various kinds of psychotics a bishop has to work with in the Church. That’s where we sent Fr. Chris, when they found him guilty of molesting those kids. Bastard. I don’t believe in it myself. I think that it is a moral problem. He has to decide not to do it. But we have to do something for insurance reasons. It’s required. It costs big bucks, but… well, that’s the new world. Didn’t work for Fr. Chris. What? Yes, Yes. Tragic. Back in jail. He had a ‘relapse’ soon after he was released from that program. I don’t know…
The reason I called you in is that now that you have finished your ‘special’ studies, I want you to do something for us before you go to take over at the seminary. You see, Fr. Adam has got something that I think rightly belongs to us. Yes, something very important for us to stay afloat fiscally. $300,000,000,000.00!
***
Narrator:
I must interrupt here briefly to explain (clarify and remind) about what has happened. The bishop assigns Fr. Pat Mallin to investigate Fr. Adam on issues of doctrine, discipline, and dollars, the missing money. The Bishop belongs to an organization called Magnum Dei. It is an international, right wing, oddly traditional, but very successful and very rich, Catholic organization. Though successful and very influential in the Vatican, this organization is heretical to the spirit of the Church according to Fr. Adam. Fr. Adam has managed to obtain control of the famous 300 billion which is in several accounts in Switzerland that Magnum Dei believes belongs to their organization. Part of it, anyway. How did Fr. Adam obtain control of the money? That will be revealed later. Now it appears that he maybe obtained control dishonestly. There is a complex bank security system, that only Fr. Adam knows the whole of, to access the funds.
Fr. Pat sets out to find Fr. Adam, to bring him into line and recover the money. But Adam and Pat know each other from the seminary. And have a “special” relationship that nobody else knows about. Oh, Holy Mother Church! You will be amazed! And it is not just that we have influenced Fr. Pat. No, not influenced, perhaps influenced is not the word; owned, we own Fr. Pat. Or will before this is over with. You see, we first contacted him when he was doing his “special studies.” He is vulnerable in one area. Maybe more. But we only need this one.
For now let us return to Agnes’ development and her current affairs. That might display Fr. Pat’s weakness better than my trying to explain it.
SKY LIGHTS IV
I live
in a clean corner
beneath a river of sky
a giver of clouds and torrents
bringer of gentle whispers
in the evening breeze.
I can see you all umbered up,
Engorged with ochre
Lethargic and green gold– a great frog’s eye ripe with eggs in sacks of flem and cool streams
fragrant oxygen fumes and freshness/green grey shiny brown moss on treacherous flagstone flickering pond striders and every curious scarred turtle looking for a good time.
We could have whispered and giggled beneath those stubborn trees while brawny brothers and short but powerfully stacked dad carted rocks for our garden and patios. I was too young, but I was learning the ways of the weak. How light glints and scatters across the waters and the mud gleams as it rises to temples and pyramids.
You could have helped but some-body-else stepped in
On those bales of alfalfa and horse blankets with that underage banker…
TWELVE
Fr. Pat and Agnes
Narrator:
This chapter begins to expose certain ‘interactions’ between Fr. Pat and Agnes that reveal the deeper meaning and powers of Adam’s “way”. Religious, ecclesial questions discussed: seduction, spirit animals, Satanism, other religions, Obedience, Dogmas, Magnum Dei attitudes, parish attitudes, Adam’s attitudes such as; 21st century no longer accepts, so readily, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, authoritarian, xenophobic attitudes in religion. Some aspects of these involvements in religious history predate even stone-age value systems, even such taboos against incest, homosexuality or even bestiality. All in the brain structures. Study/practice leads one not only through the positive beauty of other traditions, but also the horrors that typify history.
-We discover a martial arts connection to the access codes for the 300 billion dollars.
-Fr. Pat goes to see Agnes on the East Coast. Ag is also somehow connected to access codes– the crystal tablets?
-Later Pat will dream lustily of Agnes, but not just dream? We see an item of his in her room. Did he leave it during their conversation or later…?
But first, Agnes remembers recent travel:
Bright stars are dimming. Largest, last to survive; black space becomes gray blue iron blue gray gray pink hazy with light at the horizon; the earth is red, dark vapor clouds divide the dome, cold shadows desert scrub, mesas just a few miles away, horses cows burros graze sleep along the road. occasionally a carcass. A busload of people traveling too fast southward, mostly sleeping, a few awake mostly sleeping; rocky soil and light, spiny scrubs and cool light.
Highest lake, legend of floating islands and a naked people on islands. We stayed along the shore marveled at the reed boats; the land seeming barren nurtured a mysterious civilization; ancient divisions, stone walls, mud walls houses same color as the earth; llamas, alpacas, red or blue yarn bobbing from ear tips cold cold wind and dust across altiplano to hills to mountains to the depths of La Paz… the peace. Arrequippa was nice with the volcano, then up the mountain, the sunset from the guard station top of the first hill and then the next hill higher, the dust from the car in front and the cold we slept at first I in heavy poncho Lucia and Harry beneath down sleeping bag then the altitude they both got sick from it. The moon was full, was full, I don’t think a plant grew in those hills of rocks and sand gravel beautiful cold shadow and light. There was a cafe at midnight lit by a fire in one corner of the room and the lamps in the kitchen beyond the other end dark people passing crowding in this only building for miles we sat at the table and didn’t understand Spanish except Lucia but she was too sick didn’t matter everybody ate the same thing. There was no bathroom here everyone just walked far enough into the dark no fear of getting lost cafe only light except the moon… After much urination, back into bus wait to get sick didn‘t on to Puno Lake Titicaca Out of cold bus to find warm hotel all closed 4 in the morning back into bus warmer than Puno. Met an Italian in Guatemala City. Kept meeting him throughout Central America until we teamed up in Bogota with him all the way to Lima hours on buses Ecuador Peru at night spanishfrenchitalianenglish silent had to wait a day for bus in small border town of Peru Harry Lucia went somewhere Luchano and I explored the town he taking photographs I making notes mostly dry town in first of huge Peruvian deserts. It had a river and a bridge through it we walked along river wall wide beaches on town side and grass and mud, women washing clothes themselves kids snapclick crossed bridge hiked along bank, I took off my clothes except white underwear went swimming around bridge pilings coming back I sank in the mud to my knees could lean horizontally backwards and not fall snapclick Luchano and I…almost breathed together for a moment– Did you think that…? Is it impossible not…? The girl that said “no” doesn’t exist anymore, she stopped breathing long ago during the summer suffocated in the smoke, fire within, sweet Alma breathe softly, for we live not…breathe softly for we live not loud or long ask for everything be prepared to get nothing Chris, Oh, where are you at times I felt that I was dying, but its not going to be that easy, Johnny, the stethoscope
Quiet
the river and quiet
we were, pretty pretentious.
Peruvian river quiet river pump feeding dry fields, children playing,
Quiete
sunset, hills, clouds, secondary color, light, momentary, very exciting fantastic! Quiet… be in the world not of… yes, holding, we’re holding, holding; hours of enforced bused boredom brought observation, brought thought and piecing, piecing, peace; quiet, cease, ceasing, desist problems old; begin, begin canyons wait, sycamores and cottonwoods. God Guidance, blessing, God…
God.
Fr. Pat opens the unlocked door of Ag’s room. He slips in quietly. Dusk cast shadows obscure his entrance. Ag remains lost in thought as she gazes out the window at a darkening college town. She hears a slight noise and turns,
Who are you? What are you doing in here? I’ll call the guard. What do you want?
No, don’t call out. Don’t call anyone. I just want to talk to you.
Why not just knock?
To talk to you about Fr. Adam and Chris.
Chris? What do you know about them? Who are you?
I’m Fr. Pat Mallin, I just want to talk. That’s all. It is important that we talk. …I’m trying to understand Fr. Adam. I have been sent by his bishop to find him and to question him about some of his activities and writings. So, I’ve tracked him across the world. And I now have reason to believe that you know where he is. I wanted to talk to you first because I thought that you might be able to help me understand before I have to take action that we all might regret. I have to report to his Bishop. He is ready to recommend to Rome that Fr. Adam be censured, condemned, excommunicated. Before I report to him I want to be sure that we have not misunderstood Adam’s intention. So, will you talk to me?
I don’t know– I don’t know that I can help you… You might be asking the wrong person. I don’t know that I understand his religious attitudes. But I know him and I trust him. He is a true Catholic. He believes in the Church. And God and Jesus Christ. He is a believer. If that is what you are worried about.
Well, yes, that is what we are worried about. Others would disagree with you. But what we want to know about in particular is more difficult to understand. He claims certain powers and is an expert in religion. So, we don’t want to make a mistake. I know that you are young to understand such things. You are also very intelligent. You went to one of the best colleges in the world and you had one of the best GPAs. So, at least you have the capacity to understand. Perhaps you can help me understand him. Then, I can help him.
Well, alright. If you want to help him…
Great. Thank you. Let’s start with shamanism and being Christian and altered states of consciousness in religious experience. And his connection with the theological work of Stephen Setewa. Do you know the connection that he sees in all this?
I really don’t. Maybe it is an integration of cultural, religious and artistic elements, sort of. Knowing Adam, maybe aesthetic values, exoteric and esoteric religious principles. I’m just repeating phrases that I’ve heard him talk about.
What about drugs? Doesn’t he do drugs?
What do you mean? What is all this bull shit? You don’t want to help him. You want me to help you catch him.
I do want to help him. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that he was into anything criminal. I’ve just heard that maybe he did drugs and I wanted to know if there was any connection to you or other young people; where he got such things. Is he an addict? Who hooked whom? That sort of thing.
You’ve got to be kidding. You really don’t know him at all, do you? (She pauses as if reconsidering something.) Do you always approach so directly…? (Agnes eyes him warmly, even a little seductively. Pat tries to ignore the atmosphere Agnes begins to create.) She continues:
Look, the success or failure of the… of Fr. Adam’s ‘experiment’, in the context of the volatile effect that contemporary culture has on the potential for such experience can only be understood as one explores techniques and traditions found in such categories as Shamanism, Tantra, and the eastern Christian Hesychasm. If you want to know or ‘understand’ Fr. Adam, you have to know those things.
Well, I don’t. So explain it to me. What experiment? (There is an unexpected assertiveness in Fr. Pat’s voice, as if he is quietly fighting for command. Ag has understood this and uses it.)
I bet you always find out what you want to know, don’t you.
What do you mean?
I bet you always get your man… or woman– as the case may be. (She laughs, then condescends pleasantly to explain.)
Well…
An underlying element of cohesion for the overall experiment is in the “energies”: Divine Energies (created and Uncreated) of the Hesychasm, Prana and Kundalini of Vedic lore, Tsa (Tibetan), Chi (Chinese), Qi (Korean), etc. This phenomenon is related to many religions, opens the door to a discussion about certain techniques for the “shift of consciousness” that seemed to Adam’s Catholic perspective, extraordinary. Yet, these are secure in the general human inheritance of serious religious practice.
You sound like you are delivering a paper. How do you know this?
Adam and I had a close relationship. Very close. I’ve read everything that he ever wrote. Several times. Listened to him very carefully. Do you want me to go on? Alright. His ‘experiment’ operates within the esthetic and comparative religious context on several levels: It refers to the frequency with which various forms of altered states of consciousness, even ‘sacred drunkenness’, is found in the history of religion. I personally witnessed this phenomena during shamanistic rituals among the Buddhist (and non-) people of the Helumbu and Khumbu regions of Nepal and the Christian (and non-) Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico. Examples can even be found among the ecstatic sects of Judaism…
Wait. Hold on. What does that mean? I’m not familiar with any of that. Slow down.
Didn’t you study religion?
My concentration was on Catholic theology.
Apparently that is not enough.
Just slow down. Do you mind if I record this? Just for my own use?
Why not? Such topics attract attention to more important but less titillating issues. It is so hard to get anybody’s attention these days. Everybody knows the problem– they think. They want a solution. Not more consciousness raising.
What problem?
Well… maybe later. Are you sure that you have the time for all this? Is there going to be a later, for us? I mean for our conversation? How much do you want to know?
Everything. Agnes, I want to know everything that you can tell me.
Well, if you are sure…
I’m very sure. Please continue.
For instance, the first miracle performed by Jesus Christ was to turn water into wine at a wedding for which there is no evidence that he did not participate fully in the celebration. (Though, it is usually assumed that he would not.) The connection here is to the agrarian (pagan and dionysian) experience in shamanistic and agricultural religion. This is contrasted with the apollonian, urban sobriety, which has dominated formal Christian practice since the early Fathers of the Church clarified what was and what was not appropriate Christian practice. In this, there is a suspicion that Christ not only understood the “Original” threat in such a move away from the “natural.” But he recommends a lifestyle more in the direction of our shamanistic origins or even a ‘yogic’ vision rather than the direction of historic, urban-based empires as that of Rome… and others. Temporal rule opposed to atemporal consciousness.
Is this what you wanted know, Fr. Pat?
Among other things. Go on.
I shall. Examples sensational for some, such as sacred inebriation, sacred hallucinogenic substances, such as peyote, or San Pedro cactus, are important members of a body of techniques that also includes prayer, meditation, music, dance, stories, poetry, icons, mandalas, rituals, psychedelics, ascetic practice and various other yogas. These have been and are still used to alter consciousness for the sake of achieving a multitude of spiritual, atemporal states, even absolute realization. Do you drink, Fr. Pat?
Sometimes.
Would you like something? I have…
Maybe later.
I’ll just open this vintage, to let it breath for awhile.
(Fr. Pat is uncomfortable with this advance by Agnes, his body tenses for a moment, his lean, athletic hips shift tightly, but he does not protest as Agnes opens a deep, dark, blood red wine and leaves it on the table.)
Wow. Well… ah, what is the connection between shamanism and Christ? So much of what you seem to think is this beautiful shamanistic experience, people in the west for hundreds of years have considered devil worship and evil.
Well, Fr. Pat, maybe some of it is! However, follow this if you will. Traditional scholarship connects Christ to the Old Testament prophetic tradition. But it is also undeniable that the Old Testament develops out of the more ancient mythic pool of the Middle East and further out of 40,000 years of universal, shamanistic and agricultural religious evolution. You can check scripture scholars like Noth for such references.
Yes, I read a little of Noth in the Seminary.
A little is not enough, is it?
Go on.
Adam does not suggest that Christ used or didn’t use such techniques, but does suggest his sympathy with the flow between the ordinary and the sacred found in such immediacy in archaic, agrarian society. That there is a natural ‘rhythm’ to life that we pervert in contemporary life. That perversion is the anti-Christ for Fr. Adam.
Well, maybe.
However, what happened after Christ is more important than Christ maybe, since we know so little about him and so much about what Christians have done, good and bad. “Nepsis” is an important concept in all this and in the development of Christianity as you know, no doubt.
Not really. What is “Nepsis?”
It refers, Father, to a state of spiritual attainment that is clear, awake, sober, and watchful for the advent of the Lord. It is liberation from the Passions. The ten virgins in scripture, half of whom had oil for their lamps and half that did not. Those who had the oil had prepared for the Lord’s coming. Those who did not, were not and were left out in the dark amidst the wailing and grinding of teeth!
That’s sobering.
Adam’s Master’s thesis focused on processes leading to this state of being “Awake” as did a major element in his Ph.D. comprehensives. It is also an important point of connection for understanding the relationship of Christianity to Buddhism, whose goal is to “wake up!”
So, Adam might say that a Christian example of techniques for altering consciousness to more atemporal realization would be 1700 very sober years of Christian monasticism.
Yes, exactly. As Fr. Adam would say further, some anthropologists postulate that the story of the Fall (Original Sin) in the Old Testament is really the poetic memory of a major transition from a hunter-gatherer people to the development of agriculture around the top of the Persian Gulf, a garden lush locale at the time. Thus, it results in development of civilization in Mesopotamia. Christ and Genesis perhaps call for a return from the empires of civilization to a less ambitious, less ego-driven mindset that allows for a personally closer relationship with God.
Never heard it explained like that. What were those tongue twisting words you mentioned? Cosmo– what …?
Cosmotheandric: Cosmos+Theos (God)+Andros (Humanity); Temporal and atemporal consciousness.
Dialogic Dialogue: Discussion is not enough, one must know the ‘other’s’ tradition and experience well enough to present it so that the ‘other’ could claim it.
Mutual Fecundity: Cultures and religions are the product of many mutual influences and are not derived from any single, ‘pure’ source.
I don’t understand what you mean by atemporal….
Well, Father, atemporal means non-temporal.
Yes, I know that, but why such heavy emphasis. You know I did not invent history. Its what we all have to deal with.
Well, Christ and a few others indicate that we have more to deal with than that.
Yes, of course. What do you think my life has been about? Why are you being so sarcastic? Just because I’m not so obsessed with Fr. Adam?
Aren’t you? What do you really want?
Just what I told you. Excuse me for losing my patience. I’m really interested in what you are telling me. What about the atemporal now?
Well, Adam believes that Christ meant that if you approach your life in a certain way you could experience the Parusia, the Kingdom of heaven, the Resurrection, all now, death is not significant anymore since the temporal and the atemporal are really of one fabric–singular being. Some of the more ancient cultures, such as the shamanistic, seem to be more in touch with this approach than our current mindset.
It seems to me that the Church has been saying something like that all along.
Well, then Adam is a true son of the Church. But the so called traditional Church has also been steeped in racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, authoritarian, xenophobic attitudes, typical of world cultures all over. Vatican II tried to change that.
Well, maybe Vatican II threw the baby out with the bath water.
Maybe Adam doesn’t think so. And maybe one of the greatest moments of that council was its openness to the revelation of God in other religions.
Some fear… Satanism, you know.
Some fear it in the Church’s activities as well, the inquisition for instance and the destruction of non-European cultures such as in Latin America, or the even more pathetic fundamentalist movements.
Well, anyway let’s go on. What is all this about martial arts? Why is a priest learning to kill people? We are supposed to promote peace.
You mean Tai Chi….?
Well, maybe the more violent forms.
Tai Chi properly applied is the most lethal.
Well exactly.
Such esoteric martial practice developed in China reflect not only a mixture of all the great spiritual traditions of the Far East; the physiologies, cosmologies of Asia and most of the world before Science, but as well a discipline that does not allow for slippery cover-ups characteristic of lethargic hearts and minds found in many solely passive religious traditions.
Feel strongly about this do you.
I don’t like sloppy attitudes.
Does Fr. Adam continue to practice?
He has the basic training. Chris is the advanced martial artist.
I still don’t see the connection.
Fr. Adam believes that we are in an important stage of transition in the battle for sentience in this world. The battle for life on this planet even.
Alright. I can see that. The fighter, the warrior, the medieval knight errant. But what is the connection with shamanism?
Different states of consciousness.
Continue.
You don’t learn how to get into these states easily. You get pummeled until you learn… You can’t mistake hope or desire for these abilities… There are tremendous powers that can be built up in martial arts. A lot of it is physical but a lot is pure psychic and spiritual energy. You can take the evil path, but it will drive you crazy or your body will degenerate. Your body will not be able to handle the energies that flow through you. So you must follow the God path. God will help you handle the energies. The founder of Aikido was a religious ‘fanatic.’ Shinto and meditation. Harmonize the Universe. Harmonize the other. Tremendously powerful. Lived to a ripe old age. (A sign of success in Martial Arts.)
But, altered states…?
Altered states of consciousness. Two attitudes. One, one alters consciousness to effect skill in fighting; or, two, one alters consciousness to explore the universe ontologically. How do you account for the variety? Perhaps some were even evil, certainly some were nasty fellows. Some were evil. Yang Cheng Fu’s older brother, Yang Shao Hou, was a real killer. Became a sour, bitter, old man.
You can go for altered states outside martial context. Maybe martial arts keep you ‘entertained’ while you mature enough to seek deeper things. At least, the discipline is there.
So you think that martial arts might be a spiritual path for someone who is more energetic, physically oriented.
Maybe. Depends on the person. ONE DOES THESE EXERCISES, LIKE WALKING IN A CIRCLE IN PA QUA, UNTIL THE POSTURES AND ENERGIES ARE SECOND NATURE. ONE IS USED TO MOVING IN THAT ALTERED STATE! THEN IN A FIGHT ONE MOVES INTO IT IMMEDIATELY. Eliade’s understanding of Shamanism sees this ability to shift consciousness as mastery of ecstasy and the primary ability of the shaman. I have begun to suspect that this ability is the fundamental and pivotal characteristic of a gestalt vision of human identity, integrated psyche, cosmos and deity. This vision has invaded every aspect of Fr. Adam’s perspective. His pilgrimage, his prayer–hell, even his bank account.
What do you mean?
Well, instead of numbers, or magnetic sequence like on a ATM card, there is an energy pattern produced by certain attitudes and different states of consciousness. Those can be detected by certain kinds of special photographic processes.
So… the code to the accounts is somehow contained in the martial arts form!?
(pause, silence)
You are slick, aren’t you. That’s all you wanted, isn’t it? After all our talk, you liar, all you wanted is the money!
No, no. Please… Our first interest is Adam as a person and Priest. But you must understand. We are not the only ones interested in Fr. Adam. There are others. And they are not interested in his personality… Or, his salvation.
[Narrator:
Suffice it to say that is how I got the clue that led to my disastrous attempt to access those huge investment accounts in Switzerland that Fr. Adam controls. But he is much more complicated than I anticipated. I thought him naïve. I guess I’m lucky to be alive. Pride goes before a fall, they say.]
The Seduction???
Ag dreams about Fr. Adam calling her to preparation.
More about Agnes and Pat, does she seduce him? You will see what she does…
And more about what Adam did to poor Fr. Pat.
***
SKYLIGHTS V
I live
beneath a river of dreams–
images and vast space
crowding between moments,
feelings that hold their claim in waking,
sight beyond the grasping heart
and more and more that can’t be held
by words
but only
in the stillness
and silence,
and roaring, crashing moan given by glacial Arctic ice flows.
I guess it doesn’t matter that you loved somebody else, (or a whole string of DNAs),
Though, though, though well, well, well… one of the last was a beautiful boy. Yes, I know he’s like your son… But I still wonder about love. Where are the boundaries? They’ve over lapped like the tap tap tap of that river pump on the frontier stream ‘tween Ecuador and Peru. Didn’t matter then, I still sunk down knee deep in the river’s bed until I made love to streams and clouds–jet trails across my stream of conversation and still enthuses a jungle burn.
For c o r n? With all its deities? I still worship… but now I think I prefer friendship.
THIRTEEN
Narrator:
I have to keep this straight—its harder and harder to concentrate on these topics. So, let me recap. The bishop is a secret member of that organization, Magnum Dei. You know that right wing, but very successful Catholic organization that has grown so influential in the Vatican. Maybe you don’t know. It is supposed to be secret. Its interest in Fr. Adam is of course, spiritual. They think that he has strayed off the path. So, they hope to bring him into line. Him and all his money!!
I’ve just recently found out how he got control of all that money. There was an elderly lady in Fr. Adam’s parish who was influenced by New Age spirituality and open to Fr. Adam’s “beyond the New Age” project. Adam and lady had become great friends. She reveals to him that she inherited the money from her son who used to belong to Magnum Dei before he was killed in the Viet Nam war. He was a very right-wing Catholic ala “Born on the 4th of July.” He’s Green Beret. He’s a CIA operative running a guns for drugs/drugs for money operation in the Golden Triangle of South East Asia. Magnum Dei “invests” some money with him because they need funds for their projects. He makes millions for them but it is in an investment account in Switzerland when he is killed, a great hero in the war. His mother inherits the access and turns it over to Fr. Adam eventually! This was all so secret, even the CIA couldn’t figure out what happened to the money for a long time. Those bankers have their ways. Magnum Dei wants the money. Others want it as well… The bishop decides that he must investigate Fr. Adam’s theology and other activities. The “others” hire me to investigate Fr. Adam… and how we can gain access to the money. But to tell the truth, Adam seems more adept at this then any of us, since we’ve had a hell of a time just locating him since he went to India last time. The rest of the information that I am presenting in this report is, as you see, spotty at best.
Stephen (have I mentioned him yet?) is a behind the scenes aid to Adam. Adam travels around the world. Meanwhile Stephen is still active in New Mexico and will send two young warriors to aid our hearty company in India. He senses that they are in trouble. I found that out by bribing an alcoholic Indian from Stephen’s pueblo. His treachery was discovered and he was publicly flogged! Old time religion down there on the reservation.
Stephen is working in a cave with some fellow witch doctors. It’s an odd set up. Not so long ago, I heard stories about witches who were hunted to such a cave and killed by fellow tribesmen. I don’t get it. Setewa can do as he likes, but these others were executed because somebody thought that they were evil. Each to his own witch, I guess. They said that a medicine man put some corn pollen on one of the witches who then turned into some kind of an ugly little creature, ran around the cave, then it turned back into a man and died. The others they tortured until they confessed their occult sins. Well, these are just stories, off the record. No reports filed with police. But not all is as it seems, it appears.
The Bishop’s organization has amazing influence. The Good Friday fast during Holy Week, a universal discipline for all Catholics, was waived for members of the Magnum Dei one year because the birthday of their founder fell on the same day and they wanted to celebrate. They got the fast lifted by the Vatican. That is the kind of influence they have. The birthday of their questionable founder is more important than the Passion of Jesus Christ. That seems odd to me. But, then, I’m not a Christian except when it is good business to be one. So, I don’t care. But it seems, ah… inconsistent.
SKYLIGHTS VI
I live beneath a flood of stars
knowing the daily round–
the morning prayers
and prayers to wash the dishes
again
and breakfast and serving it all and all and washing the clothes
and washing and prayers
for lunch, thanksgiving and praise the rite of it in the
afternoon chores that move us into night.
(We carry our boats and move beneath a river of night
a silent crew- marching, marching…
God knows where.)
All I see is those long stalks and feel the sticky sap that seeps and weeps when we picked their great blue bells—much more variegated in its person than the name can tell. Now it’s a knife of a thousand revelations that I was a lucky kid in our hiding place and willing to pay the wind for its bite and the long walk up those rocky hills to know its love,
Once I lay on its side writhing that migraine out, so that the old school bus driver got out on his way home and climbed up to take care of me, though I was a quarter mile off the road and up the side of our hill that dad built on—all gone now. More of what I learned to do as they were brawny and bold with those big flags of stone– More of light glinting across my ball the eye to my soul and sent now to save or kill.
FOURTEEN
THE RITUAL
Narrator:
In which:
-Castaneda is referenced.
-Stephen, Native American artist, scholar, smooth operator between worlds; spiritual, material, archetypal, atypal; buffalo-dancer, archaic shaman is described and introduced as the “ponens”, behind-the-scenes director, of this operation.
-A ritual, composed to find the way to a solution, is constructed.
-The place is sought and determined.
– Yemen.
Though all of these stories are fiction to some degree, this Part II, which includes “The Ritual,” is the most fictional. But, it foretells what must eventually happen or what possibly needs to happen, given the major operative powers moving in the world. What has happened already is something like this as well.
It was the summer solstice, Midsummer’s night. By agreement, they all met in the desert of southern Arizona in a place that Stephen Setewa, their ritual leader has chosen as appropriate to ignite the ritual. They claim to do this for the salvation of the earth, now supposedly in the final stages of its battle for survival. The evidence they offer of this is the one billion people who live on the brink of starvation, the twenty million plus who live in political and economic refugee camps, the desecration and destruction of the world’s resources at suicidal rates. Plus 5,000 acres per day destroyed of the Amazonian rain forest. Well, you know, these things happen. We haven’t depleted the earth. Not nearly. But for them the wonder of technology and science have not ended suffering, it has amplified the misery. The problem is really a spiritual one, according to them, one of identity. Who are we that we spend our resources like this? How do we spend our lives? Thus, they move spiritually; they think to address these issues at what they consider this most desperate hour, as they say, in their messages to one another. Things are not nearly so desperate as they will be. I wonder how they would feel if they knew that I knew almost everything they communicate and more. Oh, it is rich. I’ve even bugged their bedrooms!
Stephen Setewa is well qualified in all this, if that is what is required here. He has three doctorates. Really. One in biology, another in philosophy, another in theology specialized in comparative religion, all from excellent European and American universities. He is a shaman. He is a community leader, recognized as a medicine man in the Kivas of his pueblo. His ‘familiar’ is a guardian of the world, a grandfather. Stephen is “wizard of the four winds.” He is not only brilliant but enormous, 6′ 6″, at an agile 300 pounds. Stephen began this ritual at noon; we joined him at dusk. The pattern is classic ritual. We enter a sacred space, alter consciousness with song, chants, fire rituals, myth, sacred plants, we identify with the gods, God. The desert is twilight silent. All are expectant. Even I anxiously anticipate the outcome of this evening’s entertainment. The drumming, the dances, the chanting build through the evening, a dream.
Stephen speaks:
We gather to announce a condition of extreme danger and to tell the genesis of danger. And to face it. We gather the extreme plants, herbs of magical intent to see the “person of danger.” Plants and stones, things of power, open the consciousness of creation itself. It is a story of the human heart and the heart of creation, of betrayal and salvation. If we betray ourselves, is God betrayed? Who saves? Thus we hope to inscribe the central issue with concern. Thus we hope to expose the root of our current danger. I am priest/prophet of ancient dispensation whose gift reveals the truth or “spirit” of a thing. I work the ritual of life and death. /I am… I, /life and death, fire and water, water and earth, /the plants and stones. / Christ is in me. /I, deified. /I heal, harmonize, seek balance for one and many. /I reveal God. /I die /to return. /Again, again until all is complete. /I am Christ. /She I am. /I weave the vision we share. /Bodisattwa, /I am dedicated to the salvation of all things. /I am he who conducts the ritual. /I am the child who first sees evil and cries. /I sit before the ancient searching fire; the primordial fire calls, calling I am devoured by that which I called. /I am thaumaturge. /I am wonder worker. /My presence is a witness to spiritual power and thus she works the wonder of God’s love for what God has made. / He I am, She I am. /Saint I am. /(M. Sabina I am)
Woman:
After the priest has identified the problem, then one must consult a sorcerer for the solution. Thus we sought a shaman who knows the sorcerer’s art, the way of power, the energies, divine and created.
(Carlos Castaneda’s, Eagles Gift. Pg.176ff. supplies the following abstract of Don Juan’s ‘schema for salvation.’ Compare these various systems. That will help you understand what has happened. In brief, “Being “ is a rapacious eagle devouring awareness. Only the impeccable warrior-shaman can/will follow the terrifying path to freedom, knowledge and individual immortality.
The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the Eagle, not because it is an eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to the seer as an immeasurable jet-black eagle, standing erect as an eagle stands, its height reaching to infinity.
As the seer gazes on the blackness that Eagle is, four blazes of light reveal what the Eagle is like. The first blaze, which is like a bolt of lightning, helps the seer make out the contours of the Eagle’s body. There are patches of whiteness that look like an eagle’s feathers and talons. A second blaze of lightning reveals the flapping, wind-creating blackness that looks like an eagle’s wings. With the third blaze of lightning the seer beholds a piercing, inhuman eye. And the fourth and last blaze discloses what the Eagle is doing.
Man:
It takes a gifted priest to identify the real nature of a danger. Most sensitive people of our generation sense the magnitude of our current tensions but few can identify the source of the pain. We search among the life ribbons undulating through the vast universe, through personality. We look to how they converge and knot, loosen and fly. Webs. Webs for entrapment. Webs for traveling.
The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all creatures that, alive on earth a moment before and now dead, have floated to the Eagles’ beak, like a ceaseless swarm of fireflies, to meet their owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these tiny flames, lays them flat, as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness is the Eagle’s food.
The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things reflects equally and at once all those living things. There is no way, therefore, for man to pray to the Eagle, to ask favors, to hope for grace. The human part of the Eagle is too insignificant to move the whole.
Stephen:
We counterpoint/integrate intellect with the “other world” to effect our end. The power of visions, dreams, and other powers latent within us are called upon not only to bring that sparkling clarity to the shifts of our own identity but to help us identify both problem and solution. We eat the sacred meal, drink God’s blood shed for us; blood, that touching the earth produced the sacred substance.
It is only from the Eagle’s actions that a seer can tell what it wants. The Eagle, although it is not moved by the circumstances of any living thing, has granted a gift to each of those beings. In its own way and right, any one of them, if it so desires, has the power to keep the flame of awareness, the power to disobey the summons to die and be consumed. Every living thing has been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom and to go through it. It is evident to the seer who sees the opening, and to the creatures that go through it, that the Eagle has granted that gift in order to perpetuate awareness.
For the purpose of guiding living things to that opening, the Eagle created the Nagual. The Nagual is a double being to whom the rule has been revealed. Whether it is in the form of a human being, an animal, a plant, or anything else that lives, the Nagual by virtue of its doubleness is drawn to seek the hidden passageway.
The Nagual comes in pairs, male and female. A double man and a double woman become the Nagual only after the rule has been told to each of them, and each of them has understood it and accepted it in full. Carlos Castaneda’s, Eagles Gift. Pg.176ff
As if in a film, the Kachina storms gather around the horizon, the moon is obscured. This is like a surrealist movie except that storms like this do occur in that place. Lightning explosion; roiling clouds; storm; Dragon clouds. Into the violently agonized undulations of the storm is introduced the shaman/Adam at a fire in some pre-historic context. He shamanizes and in his shamanic search contacts some evil (self? cosmic? eternal?) that destroys him. From this darkness, after an eon of eons, he returns. Conjures Adam and Eve.
Narrator: I have omitted the rest of the account of this ritual. The participants, under the influence of sacred substance, relived poetically the development of the problem to be resolved, and reached the following peak of insight. Truth is, I can’t tell you any more because, I don’t know! Except the little that’s left below. My informant is, shall we say, not dependable.
Fr. Adam:
The elements,
I conjure, to facilitate the future
Adam
Adam/Eve
The white light, original light floods through me. A web of energy is pulled from my bones then from the skeleton of the earth; is drawn through me. Then, I know
ARABIA–ARABIA–ARABIA FELIX—YEMEN
[Shiva, (blue neck) appears to me, the breath of Shiva blows against me, I become Shiva, perfect of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Kali, goddess of death/sex/birth dances for me, I am assumed into her body, death. But not death. Passage into her, into eternity. I am overwhelmed with my sense of care for the world. I begin to wake from the visions. Goddess of Death, Life cycles–I wake.]
My body hurts, feels crushed. I wake slowly. The others are the same. It is dawn. Stephen continues the ritual until noon for his own wizard reasons. We leave. I know where we must go. Arabia Felix. Yemen. The plain of Sanaa. I was there once before. Terrible. The ancient dragon there we must raise. The battle will engage on the plain of Sanaa.
SKYLIGHTS VII
Oh, Pluck the string,
Climate of my dreams,
sound your timbale,
that I may sing
of Elevations and river dreams
of all that is and all, all that seems.
I could still be had by love… there are bigger definitions—though not better, I suspect. Rather remember those wild flowers so few and far between–would that I could walk-on, once again, to walk out across an electric grid infini-
tes-
i-
mally small in its brane, eternally grand in its largess– Intimate kimono of embroidered grace, gold and midnight etched across the sky.
And you I still love but now still you’re sober in your corner room with a view (and its noise tolerated for past sins) and capable of memories even now…
So now the choirs still –sing
and rock and roll still guides your soul, inscribed your face
but there’s Something still
that will hold us dear
in its star-encrusted black,
and empty space.
FIFTEEN
YEMEN AND THE FLIGHT TO INDIA
Narrator:
The following story is from their own accounts, so I will tell it in the first person. It involves an unexpected visit to Luxor in Egypt, where omens of great benevolence are met. Then, they visit the Sinai desert and 3rd century Christian monastery of St. Catherine’s, the birthplace of the Hesychasm. This is the major spiritual school of eastern Christianity so influential for Fr. Adam. Next, they fly to Yemen where they confront terrible violence, are drugged, exposed to mystifingly Celtic and transsexual experiences with a very surprising result. They are advised to leave for India.
ADAM IS SPEAKING:
Getting to Yemen required flying first to Cairo to obtain a visa from the Yemeni consulate there. The airline sent our luggage to Paris and took a week to find it. It took that long to get our visas anyway. Once, while waiting for all this, we went horseback riding across the Sahara to a particularly ancient pyramid. We made friends with the family who owned the horses and stayed that night in their house. My window looked out directly into the face of the Sphinx several hundred yards away. The moon was full that night. We returned about three in the morning. I stayed at the window until sunrise, watching. However many times one sees these monuments they maintain a unique and powerful presence in my imagination.
Still our visas were not ready. So, we decided to a take side-trip.
Sinai. The drive was long and uninspiring. But the valley surrounding Moses’ Mountain is ignited with wonder. The White Fire was there. The shamanic presence was there. The surrounding mountains brood and nurture in a way nothing short of the maternal. The ancient monastery at the foot of the mountain is dedicated to St. Catherine and the Virgin—the process and the perfection. The whole area throughout history has been named for the moon Goddess, “Sin.” The “Wilderness of Sin” it’s called. The air at this altitude is cool, the breeze fresh and strong. The sense of the place is gentleness, care. Here, one does feel preparation. I was happy to be there and felt ready now for Yemen.
After Agnes threatened the Yemeni consulate with a complaint to the U.S. Embassy, they finally granted our visas. We completed our dusty stay in Egypt and flew to the capital of Yemen, Sanaa. Leaving the airport, I was invaded with a feeling of dread, of sickness, of regret, almost of despair. I couldn’t localize these emotions. It was simply my sense of the place; it’s the dragon. I couldn’t indulge such sensations though, since we had to locate someplace to stay and deal with all the rest that accompanies arrival in a new place. Actually, I like the people of Yemen that I met and enjoyed the mud brick skyscrapers for which Yemen is famous.
But my sense of the place is violence. There was a movie out in the U.S. not long ago called “Blue Velvet”(1986?). The sexual violence of that movie expressed something of the malicious violence I sensed when first in Yemen.
Soon after arriving, I began to have a series of spontaneous visions. These occurred unexpectedly and continued throughout our stay. They were of myself in a “great monk’s robe” with a staff of steel. I’m striking the ground over and over with the staff. It is some kind of shamanic action. There are leather strips hanging from the top of the staff. Sometimes I used these to help strike the ground with greater force. I seemed to be challenging something. I was completely intent on what I was doing. I was on the Plain of Sanaa. There was no city there. I was alone. Toward the end of our stay in Yemen, I, in the vision, was becoming exhausted. Then two Saint/bishops came to aid me. One was St. Augustine. The other was unidentified. They act to console and strengthen me.
We checked into a room at what was once a posh hotel, now decrepit. Then we all went for a walk in the marketplace. Chris and Agnes went off to look for antique Arab jewelry, and I went to find the incense shops. Yemen is the ancient, famous source of frankincense and I wanted to get some. I met, in this process, a young Italian man. He was an international salesman. He seemed friendly and helped me with these transactions. We hit it off pretty well. He spoke some English and Arabic. We had chai in a little teashop, then determined that we wanted to try out the variety of incense that we had just purchased, so we went back to the hotel. I had earlier set out some pictures of the Theotokos. We had brought some lit charcoals and proceeded to arrange all this on a table in the room. We put on the first incense. A wonderful, full, resin smell drifted through the room. It was late afternoon, warm but not oppressive. The young Italian burned some substance that he had brought with him. I don’t know what it was. Sticky sweetness filled my mind. The room was becoming dark. The furnishings vague. I became very tired. I was sad somehow. Somehow I could no longer quite grasp where I was. I lay down on the bed. He lay on top of me. I passed out of consciousness. I came to consciousness firmly in the embrace of a powerful man, not the Italian. We were naked. I resisted. But he simply overpowered me. He took me. I don’t mean sexually, but some other way. It seemed like my father, but wasn’t exactly. He took me. And I have never been the same after. I passed out.
No, not out of consciousness. I was laughing. Next it was Agnes. She was in the room. We embraced. Lay together. For hours. We were one… Dreams… She, a goddess, I, a God. I was a king. We are in a palace long ago somewhere on the Mediterranean. We are in a room with a window overlooking the sea. In one corner of the room. She and I kneel before a niche that contained her image in the form of the snake. It is a very positive, light-filled ambiance. But then through the window, one could see our harbor filling with enemy war galleys. Our palace is in a panic. We have only a small navy. They send out a small ship to test the strength of the enemy. It is overwhelmed. The enemy takes the harbor. The goddess disappears. The palace is taken. I am taken prisoner with a group of other men. The enemy warrior prods me in the back with a spear. We see distant mountains. Some in the group of prisoners are planning to escape there. I debate to join them.
That vision ends. I am with Agnes again. Our embrace is of divine duration. Then she was Chris. Such profound fraternity. Closer than brothers. Closer than family. Extensions of one another. Excursions into one another. We’re one, the same. Then it was Chris and Agnes. Then blinding white light seemed to explode from our loins. The pain in my body, first in the perineum, then all over was excruciating. The light, like liquid, enveloped our bodies, our being. Invaded everywhere, filled us, filled the room, exploded and disappeared as the real Chris rushed frantically into the room.
The Italian was gone. The room was clear of incense smoke. There was only the harsh glare of light from the neon in the hall. That filled the room with the ugly shadows of a cheap hotel room a long way from home. It was three in the morning.
Chris is desperate. He pulled me up. Tried to explain something, but had to stop, calm his breathing. Then he got it out. Agnes was gone!
Gone?! What do you mean?
Gone. Disappeared. Taken. Kidnapped.
What are you talking about. Don’t be crazy. What’s happening.
Chris explained: “We had been walking in the market looking at ethnic wares. A youngish Italian man befriended us. He knew the market well and showed us the best shops. Then he took us to a tearoom. It was very beautiful. Carved wooden walls, heavily embroidered curtains across the windows. Beautiful lush oriental carpets. We drank the usual Chai. It was drugged. Ag slowly faded out of my vision. I seemed to be in a forest, I was running naked. It was twilight. I was chasing deer. One in particular. A stag. It would sometimes stop, turn to look at me catching up, then bound ahead. It was like that all afternoon. It seemed to go on for days. There was nothing for me but the chase. Then I became the stag. And I laughed, as if I finally understood something very subtle but very important. I don’t know how to describe how a stag laughs. But I laughed inside that powerful body. And I ran. No longer pursued or pursuing but I ran for the exhilaration. Then it was twilight, I found myself standing over the stag. My spear killed it. I was bathed in its blood. I went to Agnes covered with blood. She was waiting for me. She was prepared to receive me. I came to her. It was more than love. It was like the copulation of two galaxies. White stars exploding. The earth created fecund all over again with all manner of living things. Our embrace seemed to last forever. I couldn’t stop. I seemed to be dying. Then, she was like a spider, withdrawing from me. She was still in human form but carried the energy of the spider. I was limp and dying on that web of oriental carpets in the room.
I came to consciousness. I could see Agnes struggling in the grip of two amazon-like women. The Italian man was with them, but he was dressed like a woman. Now he looked like a woman. They took her. I called out to her. She screamed to me. But I could hardly move. I tried to rise but fell back unconscious. When I finally came to, I ran back here to find you. I didn’t know what else to do. I was desperate. All my training to protect people, to defend, and I couldn’t even move
.…(Material lost here.)
We notified the authorities, went through endless paperwork and interrogations. Did not tell them about our visionary experiences. A search was mounted. After several excruciating days, nothing was turned up and we were invited to leave the country. We didn’t want to go, until I had this vision/dream. I saw myself and saw a vision that I had in the dream. A dream within a dream. I was once again the Great Robed Monk striking the ground with his steel staff. But this time he planted the staff in the ground on that plain of Sanaa, leathers trailing in the wind. The challenge is made. Whatever great being or ‘power’ dwelling there is roused. That is why we came to Yemen.
I board a plane. I fly to India. To a place in the north. The last scene of the dream is in a mountain place. A place of great power.
I wake from the dream slowly and know that to find Agnes we must go to India. I talk to Chris. We don’t have any other leads. We decide to follow the dream. We will go to India. I will speak to my Tibetan friends there. We will find these women who have taken our friend.
There was something else in the dream. Something that I only remembered later as we were on the train from Delhi to the mountains above Dehra Dun. Something that I did not tell Chris. (…Material lost here.) I knew that Agnes was pregnant by both of us. Twin warriors. Grandmother spider was there. It was in the dream. But I hadn’t remembered. That baby is what the women want. But why?
Narrator: We will leave our heroes there for a while and find out what is happening elsewhere. Why does birth always have to be surrounded by death? Holy Innocents. So much death and disaster as you shall see.
***
Changes
Red-leafed maples
have cried the death of this year’s green delivery.
Hills are
mottled gray
beneath the waiting
of a cloud-shaded day.
It’s as if something had changed or was about to change…
within the silence and the dying,
within the creation of fall and spring,
like a worship of holy things,
still in the singing of Godly things,
a rising,
a stepping-over,
beyond earth and Fall
to spring without the Fall
and that brothers sisters all is all…
and All.
SIXTEEN
ACCESS CODE
Narrator:
I discovered the access code to the 300 million dollars is tied to the energy pattern of Fr. Adam’s Tai Chi set, its particular sequence of moves and the number of repetitions of each move. I know that set very well. Well, I mean that I knew a similar set and adjusted it. It is a combination of Yang and Wu style. Thinking that I had cracked the code, I left surveillance of Adam and company for Switzerland when they were still in New Mexico.
I quickly discovered that my knowledge of the access code was only partial, I was nearly killed by my failure. The accounts are guarded by various lethal systems of protection that are meant to deter anyone who does not enter the access perfectly. Apparently.
I don’t know what saved me.
I returned to my investigation of Adam’s Way. First with a purloined correspondence to some of his former students and the Ag/Pat sequence trying to discover more about the access code and Adam’s way. These accounts of romantic encounters are my imaginary version of occasions that I know took place. It is my interest in their erotic lives that peppers these pages with such spice. Yet, this play of duality seems important to them. I wonder if that is important to the access code? It is my peculiar imagination that has created the details in order to display and understand the significance of these encounters. It seems to help me understand anyway.
I will rejoin the faithful company soon in Nepal or Tibet. Adam has this to say:
June 21, 1993
Dear Friends, (some former students)
We started a “working”, a spell (I.e., a word of power in old English, as in gospel) a prayer if you like, in the spring of 1992. It was almost a spontaneous happening. We did remarkable things, such as that Confirmation backpacking retreat and Camp Touchstone, I started running 5 miles several times a week, and my paintings flowed; Then there was that remarkable psychokinetic event… Anyway, the follow up was that everyone revealed themselves as themselves–and therefore we had a real chance to grow, messy as that can be. My efforts to keep it in bounds were thwarted by the new pastor who didn’t know what was going on, as well as certain unavoidable events, such as the accident with D…’s car during the Thanksgiving camping trip to Death Valley.
Actually, F… brought it to a close in spring, ‘92, with his violent reaction. But that was not unprovoked. And it was perhaps necessary. I needed help to keep it in bounds. My understanding of such things involving groups of people was mostly theoretical at the time. So, F…, perhaps you did the necessary thing, unintentionally. But that’s the pattern. We each perform according to our gifts, even when it is unconscious. And now we are returned to a more normal operation.
The year, spring ‘91 to spring ‘92, was a year in which great energies were released in our group, truths revealed, people healed in remarkable ways including me, in spite of our egos. Most was sub-conscious intention. If we put resentment and indifference aside for a moment and follow the pattern, it is the classic pattern (working) of the thaumaturge, the wonder worker(ing)– a prayer.
F…, you thought that my gathering together of a company of followers had failed. But this, as described above, is the deeper intention. If it is what I believe it to be, this is a display of a larger “power.” God’s power working through us. It is more important than merely putting together a tribal ‘gang’, or ‘posse’, as good as that might be in the short term, as much security and comfort that such might provide. Though, many of those in the original group, including a few Asians are still in contact with me and we share a continuing adventure in the Spirit.
You might even say that our purpose was to run a youth program, not all this esoteric stuff. But, the deeper meaning of reality, life and religion are what should to be revealed in any Church program. And to do it as well as one is gifted to do it. That was and remains my intention.
Did I do it on purpose? Well, I willed the larger thing, how it worked out, it did on its own. So, make of it what you like. When our current endeavors are accomplished and their significance has passed, this will remain. This is one of the ways that the universe works. How Grace works. The semantics may be new, the pattern is old.
The thing that kills these efforts at a more holistic experience of ‘church’ is always egotism; deluded attitudes about how things have to be done. Yes, I think it’s egotism mostly, and the need to be in control, especially when that is veiled behind a style that is very ‘cool‘ or ‘hip.’
There is no other way to teach such understanding of the ontological flow of time and experience but to show by doing. I believe that it is true and essential. And somewhere along the way, each of you had expressed the desire to know. So, there it is.
Sincerely,
Fr. Adam
Narrator: What is it about this that strikes me? There is something here. Something that means something. I feel so close to it. But what is it? I was not killed in Switzerland as it was clear that I should have been. What saved me? Somehow this is all related. But, I don’t get it. What is the code?!!
***
Big Sur
The Eagle wings gently into spreading night.
Black cormorant screams its hunting whistle
above afternoon cliffs.
Wave and wave
white-capped swells flood the sea.
Light sails the wind-carried waves.
Having fasted and have prayed,
I am ready for the feast–
fresh and clean.
The eagle,
the Old Man are with me now, Abbas Mundi–
Servant of God,
feeds me on the Spirit,
shows me the glory of creation
nearness of God.
This is heaven,
the presence of God–
but we cannot see.
He helps me to see,
shows me the liveliness of everything.
He is the Old Man standing in a dark portal.
I am brother to Christ
forgive my transgressions
Eagle
Golden Eagle
the Eagle rests.
SEVENTEEN
INDIA
Narrator:
This most amazing chapter in which:
-More disasters occur.
-India
-Tibetans
-Kasmir
-Women (Shivalilas)
-A battle
-Escape
-The Other World
-The poison, vision
-A Mass is celebrated.
-The Great Tree is struck.
-A baby is born.
-A walk along a beach.
-Some confusion about worlds,
deer and virgins.
Believe it, if you will–
***
INDIA
(Stephen is still about his ritual in New Mexico. He is solemn, knowing the stakes)
As the jet flew out of Sanaa, we looked back. The city was encircled by a writhing cloud, smoky black and red before the rising sun. The dragon breathed and whispered an eternal presence. We could only look in awe! This whole experience is an on-going, epiphany for me. Yemen was a dark epiphany, though. Around this time my family ranch in California burned. My father had a heart attack and died. My brother left his wife. My mother was left without house or husband or daughter(-in-law). My bishop died. All this, I found out when I called home from Cairo. I was devastated. I could hardly get up from the phone. I could fill a great Black Hole with those dangerous, dark feelings. I felt so exposed, violated. So vulnerable. Repress, then sublimate. We must keep going.
We had changed planes in Cairo and arrived many hours later in Delhi. It was miserably hot. We went directly to our destination in the foothills of the Himalayas.
After a late night arrival, a young, Tibetan monk awakened me early the next morning. He was from the monastery where I was to look for my contacts in India. He actually came to the ashram where we spent the night for other reasons than to see me. But he became a guide and a friend who helped our search greatly, considering it his karma evidenced by our chance meeting. He took me directly to the head lama of his monastery. This lama turned out to be more helpful than the friends I was looking for but I won’t waste time now with that story. This lama knew of a group of such women as Chris described. He said that they were called “Shivalilas” and suspected that they wanted Agnes for ritual purposes and that then they would use her for prostitution or sell her off to the tribes in the mountains. Not so uncommon out there. If she should survive the rituals. This group of women was centered in Kashmir near Ladak. He thought that we should go there to find Agnes. Rather than return to Delhi and take the plane. We decide to go by bus directly to Jammu, then on to Kashmir. Should be an easy bus ride of a few hundred miles.
The trip was horrible. It was viciously hot, just before the monsoon; completely over-crowded on the buses, the trip much longer than I had dreamed. However, after forty hours of hungry discomfort, we arrived in the delight that is Kashmir. We stayed for a couple of days on a houseboat on one of those most beautiful of all lakes, to reconnoiter before we took off to the mountains. We were anxious to follow our leads. The attraction of those mountains remains irresistible to me and we knew the Shivalilas were up there somewhere.
While we were in the capital of Kasmir, Shrinagar, a most remarkable thing happened. We met two of Chris’ friends in a restaurant, Quebecois hockey players that Chris met during his preparations back home. They were here giving hockey demonstrations for rich Anglo-Indian hockey fans at this high mountain, world class spa. They were happy to find Chris, so that they could spar and play with someone they considered a “sifu.” Seemed pretty violent to me, but they enjoyed it and nobody ever seemed to get permanently damaged. These two had just finished their demonstrations and were up for an adventure so they elected to come with us. This may seem improbable, perhaps too much a coincidence. I feel that they were sent by the ‘Powers” Chris had encountered in his preparation journey and shamanic activity around the northern reaches of the Great Lakes in Canada. My sense is also that these two hockey jocks were sent by the crystal powers of Thunder Bay to aid us in what we are about to face. Maybe Stephen Setewa arranged it somehow.
Also, Chris’ friend, John, from Northern California joined us. Chris had called him from Cairo. He had been waiting for our call. He was ready. So, he came immediately. He had been to Stephen in the desert already. He had been healed by those free-lance medicine men there, the “Bone-pressers”, and had been initiated by Stephen. It was like the arrival of fresh troops. We were getting pretty worn out. When John was a teenager, he was thought to be promiscuous. But he is past that now. Even with that there has always been something pure about him that sexual confusions could not confuse. We were grateful to Stephen for sending him now. I felt somewhat more secure, backed up by two black belts and two professional ice hockey jocks.
We hired a guide, named Rashid, through some contacts given us by our Tibetan friends. Rashid had heard of these women but did not know exactly where they were. He knew the local rumors about them. So, we started out early the next morning traveling by car, horse, and finally by foot. We reached the base camp of our little expedition by evening. This was a gracefully sloping meadow above a glacial river and beneath a convergence of snow-capped and green craggy mountains. It was cold. There were groups of shepherds and other nomads camped there as well. Rashid questioned them about this Tantric order of women. He received vague information as to their location.
It was magnificent country. Our camp was near the base of a glacier. A storm was building as night fell, but the night passed quietly. Rashid and I rose early the next morning before the others. We hiked up to the Glacier. He waited as I continued up closer. I stopped at one point, this being the furthermost point from home of the whole pilgrimage, and made a pile of quartz rocks, as is the local custom, but in the form of a cross, as is my custom. I prayed to God for a good resolution of what we had started.
About that time, I felt, a strong familiar presence. It was clear and strong. Stephen! Then, he disappeared. Rashid later said that when I was up there he felt a gale force and very cold wind rush up the canyon. So cold, so strong that he had to take refuge in a shepherd’s stone hut. We were only a few hundred open yards apart. I had felt no wind.
We descended the mountain. Rejoined the company. Broke the night’s fast. Broke camp. Walked for half a day through those mountains. We stopped for a rest in a little village isolated on the far side of a perilous mountain that could be reached only by the rugged path we had just taken. We sat on the wooden plank floor of a tiny teashop with other clients. The tea was thick and salty, like blood. I mused that this would be an easy village to defend from intruders. It was so precariously placed on the craggy rocks amidst the knarled trees of this near tree-line elevation. The shop was run by a village woman. She and Rashid were discussing something, then it became argument. Best that I could make out was that it was a religious discussion. Rashid was a devout Moslem as were most in Kashmir. But he and this woman were having some kind of “dharma” conflict. But it seemed to me to be a conflict between good and evil. It got to be a little terrifying. She was like a vulture. Rashid finally broke it off and we went to another part of the village. But we had attracted a lot of interest. Many women were gathering in the area now. For the first time I realized, as did the others, that there were no men in this place other than us. We had stumbled into the center of the Shivalilas! But now it was too late.
At first, I tried to communicate with them peacefully. No response. Then I demanded to know where Agnes was. That was pretty funny. Nobody laughed. More and more of the women were gathering. A lot of them seemed to be American or Europeans gone native as well as there being Indian women among them. I began to feel like a furless, thin-skinned bear trying to steal honey from a hive of African killer bees. As we were sneaking around a corner arguing about leaving there, I glanced down the street to our right and saw Ag walking towards us. We ran up to her. She didn’t see us. She was in some kind of trance. Very disoriented. Several women came running up to her. We confronted them and they retreated. After a few minutes, they returned with a cadre of women warriors. We ran for the horses. I had Agnes. Chris, John and the two hockey players used their various arts to hold back the women. But there were so many women. Shadows swooping like birds of prey, they caught our friends from behind, from every direction, hacked at them. The numbers were overwhelming.
Some of the women started to flee. But the leaders whipped them back into the battle. There were now archers up on the roofs of some of the buildings, but they couldn’t use their weapons because of confusion and close violence below. John went down beneath a surprise onslaught from behind, rolled, was up and behind the opponent. Struck on the neck from behind again, I could see him roll as he gave way before the force of the blow. I could see the blood from his ears and eyes. But he twisted and turned immediately to pull his opponent down past him with the gravity of her own force. His way of fighting seemed to perplex the direct violence of the enemy. Martin was even more confusing to them. He walked in quick tight circles. Circles of death. His training in Pau Qua was evident. He seemed to draw the enemy into the vortex of his circle. Each step was deadly. Confrontation with him in this mode would send his opponent flying 10 or 15 feet. He continued in his circle, cutting across it, by half, turning, slicing through the mob of assailants. One by one the enemy fell in rapid succession. But Jacques was nearly overcome. He looked frantic and (self)-disgusted as he seemed to be overwhelmed by seven massive women. They were screaming and laughing over him as I saw them rip his shirt. He writhes, struggles, kicks. But they have him. They reached inside his pants. He is perhaps unconscious as they ripped off all his clothes. The blood, the blood!
Chris still had his elbow knife, which he used freely. I saw one woman’s severed head fly up then, thud to the ground. The sound when it hit the ground is still unforgettable; I will always remember the horror of that sound. Martin was surrounded. He struck furiously, trying to take as many of his opponents as possible. He slipped one blow, blocked, twisted a second aside, but another hit hard enough to jar his joints and leave him stunned. Savage joy lit the face of his assailant. Agnes, Rashid and I were across the clearing now. The archers saw us and started to aim in our direction. I saw Chris go down roaring just as we turned to run out of range of the arrows. We could see in the distance, women arriving with guns. Strangely, I thought them to be biological weapons. Seemed to be over-kill to me since we were so few in number.
Rashid got to the horses. We had to run for it or be captured ourselves. We got away. Chris and the others fought to the last. But what happened to them? When we last saw them, they were surrounded and going down. We were able to slip away in the confusion. I see them being engulfed by those masses of the darkly feminine.
We escaped. One way or another we got back to Shrinagar. It seemed a little too easy.
The ride back across the lake in a “shikara” was absolute contrast to the earlier battle for our lives. We crossed the lake just as sunset sent dark gold rays of light through shaded silver-pink billowing clouds nearly static behind a silhouetted mosque on the far side of the lake. The boat ride took us through lotus ponds. The air was perfect. The water was perfect, liquid silver and golden. We go to the houseboat. We wait there. We nurse Agnes. I don’t understand what’s happened to her. She is now very pregnant, as lumberous as any woman heavy with child is. But it’s only been a few days. I think. Is it weeks? I’m very confused now. Frantic about the loss of our friends. Agnes is still so distant, though she has begun to talk a little to us. She won’t speak about her experience, or how she got to India. She talked a little about “Shee” or “Sid” somebody and the “other world”. She became incoherent when she did. Our friends who had been lost defending us… I felt sure that they had sacrificed their lives. Four dead, not to speak of my father and bishop, not to speak of the horrific ‘natural’ disasters. It all seems related. But we weren’t totally sure about the four up on the mountain. Perhaps they got away. What we were sure about was that we could not stay here. Too easily found. It was all such a mess. What did this all have to do with Yemen? Where was Stephen? Fleeting images is all I get of him. Everybody seems dead or deviant somehow. Agnes’ current condition is nothing less then weird. Even by our standards. Maybe it was all a mistake. It is certainly seems a disaster at this point.
We don’t want to leave India because we don’t know yet about our friends for sure. We don’t want to stick around because the women will be looking for us. Agnes reminded me of an ashram up the Ganges in the mountains where westerners don’t go because it is only for Hindu yogins making pilgrimage to the source of the sacred River. We could hide there if we could get there. I tell Rashid. Easier than I thought. We can fly to Reshikesh in a private plane owned by a friend of his. It turned out to be a open cockpit bi-plane. I won’t take the time to tell you what delight that freezing cold terror of a flight over the mountains was like.
We left Shrinagar next morning before sunrise. Arrive in Reshikesh. Then, walk several kilometers up the Ganges; Ag heavy with child! There is a good trail on the east side of the river. But Agnes is not well. We stop around dusk. We hadn’t got to the ashram yet. We found a cave down from the trail near the river. It had been occupied at one time because it had a strong bamboo gate across the entrance. We determine to spend the night there. I suspect that this had once been the dwelling of some yogi.
The cave was just big enough for the two of us. Ag sat propped up against a wall. I lay with my head near her leg. She put her hand on my forehead. It was a very comforting gesture. I had been very tense and exhausted. Now I relaxed. I felt myself slipping into an altered state of consciousness. I continued to be aware of the cave but was also having a strong visionary experience. I realize that in order to accomplish our mission we must take on the persona of the archetype, the deity. It would not be enough to be able to visualize ourselves as the deity as ancient tantric practice suggests, but to become the intention of that visualization. Then all things are possible. In this vision I was seated in meditation in an interior landscape. I was seated in a circle of white light. This was a familiar image for me but this time I did not conjure it. It built itself. The circle became a tower carrying me up with it in a hammock of light until I disappeared. Yet the tower was still capped. It seemed to require my assent for it to complete itself. I knew that this was in reference to the next step of this ritual. I knew this was an essential request involving the salvation of my soul and analogously the ‘soul of the world’. I hesitated, then, gave assent. At that point, the tower rushed upward to some eternal point of resolution. I came fully back to the cave with a controlled high energy, I could feel the energies rise in my body, especially in the form of heat radiating from my hands.
It was then that I was taken up with the memory of an experience hitchhiking across France. I was near a place called Belloch. The spirit provided a special place for me to spend the night. I had sensed that place was there several miles before and looked for it. It was a wonderful ruin of an old farmhouse with an ancient cherry tree full of ripe fruit for dinner. I decided to stay in the animal shed next to the remaining walls of the house out of the wind and sheltered from the rain.
During the night there was more rain and it became very cold. I am sensitive to the cold anyway, so it probably wasn’t all that cold, but as I sat in meditation my legs would get terribly cold. I became very uncomfortable after a long seated meditation. I did not have enough strength for practicing very much “Big Vase” breathing to keep me warm. After trying, I fell asleep and dreamed an intense dream of which I only remember the last scene outside the farmhouse. I was with someone in the dream. In it, I was very excited and challenged by something in the night. I levitated from my meditation position and flew to attack a huge, dead looking, burnt out tree. It was the Great Old Man who guided me in this. I sensed him first standing in the area where I had made an offering of almond cakes the night before, to the place, the holiness of the place. There was an excellence about it that I sensed strongly. The offering was also for the little animals that live there, but in the night something came for the offerings. I was terrified. The Guardian was the one in the dream.
During the “Big Vase” I did do, I felt an unusually strong surge of energy and became dizzy. I felt almost invisible, hollow, empty. All that was happening that night at Belloch happened mostly while I was intensely uncomfortable and regretting the practice of any asceticism. I wished I had never started it and that I would never do it again. I sensed two levels; the uncomfortable physical plane and the “other world” (Celtic: ‘Sidh’ (shee), the realm of super-normal power; Sanskrit ‘siddhi’, occult, super normal, yogic or sometimes “Pentecostal” powers. That’s what Agnes had been talking about.
She was now somehow very strong, the Guide, the Guardian. I couldn’t comprehend. In Belloch it was the Great Old Man. I sensed his presence first during the waking meditation–not when asleep. He also was in the dream that followed as teacher standing behind me as I levitated and attacked the great burnt out tree. I felt delirious with power. But had I missed the point? It wasn’t that I had to attack the tree but he was just showing it to me. It was the Tree of Life, the symbol of all sentience. It was nearly burnt out. This is the symbolic heart of the problem. Take Note. I felt desolated by this.
Here, the heart of sentience where the physical and spiritual are one is the place of the shaman. It is in this inner realm that the energies express themselves as visions and voices, ecstatic experience of gods, goddesses, God.
Now I am conscious that the walls of the cave are becoming transparent (as with the wall of the ark in my black scorpion experience described earlier). There I can see the same tree but huge and vibrant. It looked like a nuclear explosion of reds, yellows, incredible blues, then finally screened by arabesques of black. As we watch, the darkness, which at times seems the whitest white, consumes everything else. (Finally I understood that our task is to rekindle the life in this Tree of Sentience. It is the allegoric energy center of human genius, indeed all sentience? This expresses itself in a confluence with political, social, economic, geological and meteorological events in the world. To be honest, I am not so clear about this.)
In this, Agnes is spider-like, standing over me. I cannot stop the visions. We are in the cave still. I move restlessly. I groggily notice a little spider in the back of the cave. It is black and seems to be spinning erratically. But then I notice that it is repeating this same pattern over and over. I watch, become mesmerized in my fatigue and by what Ag is doing. The wall of the cave, once more rock, becomes more and more gray until it is an opalescent mist instead of dirt and rock. Then we can see into the other world of distant mountains and mists. To the left is a dark forest. In the center is a meadow with a stream, distant forest and more distant mountains, soaring eagles. A great old she bear is ambling across the meadow with a couple of cubs. In front of the dark forest is a great male ape sitting, watching on a hill, also the black colt from that early dream was there but now is a great black stallion, there was also the deer, the great stag with antlers trailing energy ribbons of rainbow colors. And the snake. To the right is the white opalescent mist. There is no cave now, we are in the other world. The spider weaves, the scorpion dances, becomes the form of an old woman. Naked, terrible. Sagging breasts, but strong in power, a great crone. Is it Agnes? She turns and is the bride, Botticelli lovely. Then unmistakably, becomes the Virgin /Blessed Mother. Divine image. She beckons us to follow. The spider wraps me tight in a cocoon of web, injects me with her venom. This injection made me so sick, but instead of harming, catalyzed vision.
John, and the two Quebecois, Jacques and Martin, are with the great spider now. She is huge, spinning a vast web from one of the massive limbs of the Tree. John moves, radiant with golden light and takes her from beneath. She is a great, beautiful, darkly sensuous woman. He struggles to fecundate her. She resists. She continues to spin her web. She consents. The clear sense of it is that John is having sex with the universe. Take note. The burnt out tree becomes radiant, young, arbol splendor; green, golden, silver essence of life. They are Adam and Eve/The tree and the snake.
(Shamanistic, Animist religions, once considered primitive, now are seen to form the matter out of which the Christ weaves a vision of God, matter and spirit inseparable.)
While she is thus distracted, I escape from the cocoon. Reach the tree. I climb down. I find Jacques and Martin have followed me down. They start digging in the dark rich soil beneath the Tree; digging at the root of the tree. They dig with their hands. I have a vision of what is in the roots and earth beneath the Tree. It is a brood of infant dragons. Take note. They are in larval stage. They are transmuting into the powers of creation, nuclear energies. I warn the Quebecois. They keep digging in spite of the danger. Then they find something. It is soiled with the rich black earth beneath the Tree. It looks like some type of crystal. It is a crystal human skull. It is beautiful. Beautiful. Not at all grotesque. It is wonderfully carved with abstract angles to describe its human form. The most striking thing about this skull was not just its form, but inside glowed something red, deep, ripe fruit red. Something so tantalizing that one’s hunger was raised and sated by only looking at it. Take note. It was wonderful. Then the tree exploded in nuclear holocaust. It produces a thousand, thousand dancers all colors that become covered with a swirling screen of black. The dancers are birth and death, disease and suffering. Then, silence and the tree is once again a burnt-out ruin. The silence overwhelms everything, silence, and the mist…. I understand. Finally, I understand.
The Fall from the Garden of Eden depicts poetically an anthropological reality, a human shift from the relatively natural innocence of more primitive “hunters and gatherers” to the technological development of agricultural methods and other civilized crafts. We are at the other end of spectrum of human history. If the Fall, in Genesis, describes the human urge to power (The snake said to Adam and Eve “you can be gods yourselves if…”) The urge to be in control of environment, of good and evil–morals, genetics, of life itself; if the Fall described the human urge to reject, or rather to claim the efficacy of the divine, then we are at the other end of the spectrum of human history. Since now, with the advent of science, we have the power not only to improve the world materially but also to destroy it. The warning in Genesis is for human genius. The answer is the identity of the resurrected human nature, the human being, the resurrected Christ, the Body of Christ, the Church. Or, from a different vocabulary, the fundamental Mahayana Buddhist teaching, “emptiness of inherent existence”; immaculate empty and fecund Void, the Blessed Virgin.
That is an option to self-destruction. The mythical ground for this is represented by the Tree of life, burnt out genius, gift gone mad. As the nuclear scientist Oppenheimer said, “We have known sin”. Our task is to re-vivify the tree, but with balance, proportion, rhythm in the configuration of the Tao—rational and intuitive mind reframed, reconnected, re-configured in the Spirit. We base our speculation on the mystical notion of the body of reality, the relatedness of all things and the Tantric perception of the relationship between the micro-cosmos of the body and the macrocosm of the universe, the Body of Christ, the dynamic mysterious ‘stillness’ of ultimate relationship. What we do in our individual life effects the general absolute life. The direction of Being itself can be altered, so to speak, by how we are. Take note.
That is what we endeavor to do. At the focal moment we will celebrate a Eucharist dedicated to the Blessed Lady to facilitate our survival, to balance the masculine left brain, the scientifically, commercially successful mentality dominant in the world today. Thus, the sentient community adept at salvation addresses crucified nature.
The world situation, as this “other-world” scenario develops, is such that a reactionary government holds the White House. Troops are staged in Central America. Israel is on the verge of war. The threat to world peace is stressed to the point of breaking the fragile bonds of human society, of natural systems. AIDS is rampant with the numbers of infected heterosexuals as well as homosexuals in the millions in USA alone. It is worse elsewhere. There is a new sterilizing bacteria attacking fertile women and another disease like AIDS that kills in a matter of weeks.* (…the waters carry the potential of life and the balance of death.) The sentient earth is moving to protect itself from being eaten alive by the dominant commercial technocracies of the world, the shortsighted politicking and aggression of capitalist democracies, dying communist imperialism, the exploding populations of the Third World.
We seek to facilitate the process; earthquakes and tornadoes, storms, volcanic eruption; oil supply is sucked into the inner holocaust. That is, there are fires in the Middle Eastern oil fields. Oil fields are burning… World populations are cut traumatically. Fresh water shortages are universal.
This liturgy enacts a salvific step forward in human consciousness, the evolution of the world. We save what can be saved. After all “we” created the problem. We do it… I am, only, who… warrior of the heart… to focus universal unconscious. I perform my task in the larger intention. I am the larger intention. I am who am…
The Goddess is in me now
The God is in me now
Horror of death, the wonder of life, the pain of being… alive
God -young, hero, -old father, gods, goddess, all … to the other, nameless power–Divine Energy. Grace.
Death is balanced as the human mind is balanced.
I dance with Kali.
I am in the other world somehow, yet still in this one. The women, the Shivalilas are priests. They have called us here. It had to happen this way. This is where we all join again. Chris is here with John and the hockey players. An altar is surrounded by the religious of the world, are the altar—of sacrifice—making sacred: Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Shamans, Great Robe Monks; all the others, light mystics and people of good will–even secular humanists are represented. The women guide me through the crowd, they vest me in the vestments proper to celebrate this liturgy. The Grail… Agnes screams in the agony of birth. In the chalice, I watch the reflection of the crucified God-Man. It seems to shoot down through the cup’s sacred content, through the cosmos, through eternity, into a deep vortex, it strikes the primal gesture of creation and the holy rood becomes itself rooted in the heart of the Great Tree. A newborn baby cries its first gasp of inarticulate speech. There is a terrible rumbling in the tree, in creation—like Stravinski’s, Rite of Spring– as the tree begins to regenerate with an explosion of life. There is the delighted gurgle of the newborn baby’s laughter echoing through all of existence, as the old ruin begins to sprout anew. The chants of great jubilation from the ‘Powers’ of the world. Brilliant, sparkling rainbow, clear light, it is the heart of creation, the ineffable, the One. It is the personal and transpersonal light at once. It is the same for all, Catholics, Moslems, Buddhists, priest, shaman, lama, warrior. This composition fulfills everything. It is too much for biology to contain. My eyes tear/fully/still when this memory fills my heart.
Then the scene shifts back to the dark dusty cave where Agnes and I have died from the exertion of this vision, this ritual. But, before I die, I see a final hope:
I. Old Man of America–
First, He Dreamed:
He was in a desert land– cool twilight was delicate and careful of his love. He moves on a rocky plain in this land–light sets the rose and yellow and brown soil, (secretly), dancing.
The dream progresses as the desert plain turns into a reservoir. There are many people swimming in the middle of the lake. It is clear that what was once below the surface is now above, forming a new, watery plain through which playful figures fight and splash. Then, Old Man is called upon by the local community to use his shamanistic, magical powers to oppose the evil that is coming to take its victim. The evil seeks to destroy someone–a guest in the community– a musician– who is soon to perform!
The community leaders, oddly, put the musician in a bank vault to keep him safe, but ask the shaman to guard him against occult destruction. He sets about constructing a ritual to do so.
The scene of the dream shifts: Then, as he walks down a street in West Los Angeles, he is attracted by a prostitute. The prostitute is very aroused, excited by the prospect of such a client. He wakes highly aroused…
II. The Young Man of Asia–
There were short periods for the two of them in which a trans-temporal consciousness was maintained for days at a time. This was aided, I believe, by certain traditional agrarian, Far East Asian influences; that is, by drinking large amounts of strong alcohol. This was re-enforced by strong post-modern alienation and the immigrant status of this young Asian American. This creates a mystical, if not respectable, atmosphere that uniquely reinforces the shamanistic character of their following encounter.
Between Youngman and Oldman, those moments became trans-temporal and preferable to anything else for brief durations. Given their basically well-intended dispositions, it was the alienation that freed them for these moments, not just the mind-altering substance they imbibed. Though Youngman might have been freer than most in his generation, since he had been through a liberating boot camp of the heart in his up-bring. After his third stepmother left his emotionally distant and underdeveloped father, she took up with an Asian gangster half her age. In a jealous rage once (and forever) the gangster stalked her to a restaurant, shot her to death, then worked the same favor on himself. Leaving behind a bloody mess amidst the delicate, Asian dishes for someone else to clean up…
Youngman did above average in high school. He got high as often as possible. He wore baggy pants very low and was described by a counselor in his Catholic Church youth group as “a punk, but a nice punk.” He got into college. He was an un-inhibited teenager, unusually tolerant; had had several girl friends by his 19th year and is wise beyond his years about the human heart– Hummm…
III. Oldman/Youngman
YM rejected the Church and priests as a waste of energy, boring and unconnected with his current interests. As such, YM shared in the power of the secular fashions that are the spirit of our age. But, YM had befriended this priest/shaman–for lack of a better title, the Oldman. OM had met Ym and become friends at Church.
(Re: priests. Priests mediate eternity for the world. They are an archetype in the structure of the universe, or at least human consciousness. But when the two worlds get so terribly out of whack as they are now, then an older, deeper religious capacity must be accessed. That is the figure of the shaman. The shaman mediates between matter and eternity as does a priest, but as a sorcerer also has the ability to reach into the caldron of psychic chaos to draw out the salvific tools necessary for healing and survival in particular situations.)
The two are now traveling in Asia together. The young man is translating for the old one. They were together “24/7” in YM’s diction, for a month. Nights they drank. Both veteran drinkers, not yet addicts, if you’re worried. Sometimes, they drank during the day. This was because the doses of hallucinogens that they brought with them had run out. (Shamans use hallucinogens to explore the mythic realms of the psyche. That’s the only reason he could imagine for using them.) This was a month of mind-altering substances. It was soon to be followed by a long period of abstinence for OM, had he survived.
Once, after visiting a Buddhist monastery, they got on a bus going to a coastal city, but instead the bus took them to another part of the country entirely, to a city particular only for two reasons that they noticed: One, was a rebellion against tyranny which had begun there in the 1980’s; and two, this city was located in a valley powerful with the feminine energies. The night that they spent there was woven and knotted with blessings, initiations for the young one into the many layered mysteries of the Goddess and the Body. (Sexuality–actual or latent, is a sometimes a symbol in these writings, for one’s fascination or obsession with self. Or, delving into self, through self, to find the way… Sometimes of innocence… Sorry if you are only into straight or gay modalities, there are other options. If you studied anthropology or something like that, maybe you know…) In any case, the local climate responded with a freak tempest. The shaman employed creatively wrought methods based in antiquity. He is the sort of fellow that mothers and wives guard their husbands and children against. In reality, if they understood his activity, maybe they would welcome it as a salvific gift, rather than fearing it as something its not.
The young man was particularly qualified for this project. He, while rooted in the Confucian virtues of his origin, agreed with his education in California that rejects so many of the taboos of the past. For instance, patriotism and other group values like loyalty are appreciated but moderated by a knowledge of history. Sexuality is regarded more as a biological function in an emotional and sometimes cultural complex rather than a moral issue itself. So, Youngman’s generation is pretty free to explore. Sometimes, without sufficient parameters. YM is smart though…
The priest’s situation is different. He has already explored Being and being young in the 60’s and an art student as well, he explored widely. He is supposed to know how the biological spiritual function appropriate to body and eternity works. Morality for both is about guarding the integrity of the individual. But for the priest, the health of the larger, corporate body is a central concern as well. And this priest knows; and this shaman acts. He uses his pastoral commitments or desires, pure or prurient, and strange psychic connections to the natural world and the Spirit to work his transformations, in self and the other (self), in the two, temporal and non-temporal worlds. His duty is to the truth of things. If truth lies in tantric practice of breaking taboos purposefully and working sometimes with sexual energies along with all the rest (heart and brain, etc.) then tantra is what he must do. Or, if truth lies in shamanistic practice of esoteric healing, and using hallucinogens to explore and find the lost, heal the wounded, etc., then that is where the duty of the priest lies. That was his vow. And the Lord said, I am the Way, the Truth, etc… The priest’s superiors can only judge this if they move out of their own suburban morality and really try to understand how the Spirit might be motivating OM. To assume that truth of spirit only operates within the function of one institution (Rome, Geneva, Varanasi, etc.) is blasphemy. To be respectable in such a fundamentalist mainstream, is blasphemy. To be respectable within this venue is to acquiesce to the very system that is destroying the world. Or so it seems to OM at this time. But, to just ‘react’ is immature and self-indulgent. To react artfully is the intention of this priest. He uses what is available to him. What is provided by the moment and his craft.
Well, who knows, a modern jury might call the relationship of the priest with this young man, abuse, seduction. But which of which? Even though there was no physical contact. NONE IS NECESSARY. It’s the trans-sexual, polar shift that reveals and generates the necessary energies. And the YM is definitely of age and heterosexual. But a shaman is everything he needs to be at the moment. There are no improper bonds. Here, only choices hold them together.
If you can’t quite placeYM and OM in any attractive convention of religious or social practice (even though you don’t know exactly what it is they do, what they do, reserve judgment a little longer. There’s more to come…)What about the two million Asians killed in the Viet Nam complex of wars. We built a wall for our war dead. Who will build a wall for the 500,000 Iraqis dead from the Gulf Storm. Million plus Iraqi children starved by the sanctions. How will we honor our 300 casualties. “Tie a yellow ribbon, tie a yellow ribbon…” Talk about nasty.
Who causes all of this? Some bloodthirsty deity? Some god? Some God, Christian.! Well, YM and OM are about something else entirely. They can call a storm, (Indra like). No, not “call” a storm. The weather comes to meet them.
So, they dreamed (of finding another way). So, they wandered, having lost the way. Errant, they seek the holy land of delight and power–power to save the world. At least, save the musician in the safe…. hummm.
IV. To Seek the Emperor’s Palace; a Priest Was Killed.
The day started benignly enough– pick up tickets at travel agent. Visit the Emperor’s palace of that ancient country like any other tourist. But, the pollution downtown was terrible, there was an argument at the travel agent’s. The young one was disorientated. In great discomfort. The shaman determined that they were pursued by negative energies, a hostile dragon– Sa Tan, the “test.” They needed to take refuge underground, in the mother, in the earth. So, they went into one of the many below ground restaurants and drinking establishments in this old town. Began to eat and drink. Good. YM is recovering. Then, OM became young! Before the eyes of YM. Voice softens to power and authority. A strange thing. A wonderful thing. Old Man moves in the cleansing, regenerating waters of Our Lady’s refreshing delight. YM is amazed.
They stay below ground until dark. Depart. Too soon? Chances teeter anyway. They venture forth to continue the maze. Stepping off the curb, Old Man, middle-aged now, twists his ankle badly, touching a new jeep parked there, setting off one of the few car alarms in Asia. A minor accident but telling… of the minor circumstances that contribute to destroy a life. They continue to wander, limping, through the night. (They “saunter” to find the Holy Land, Saint Terre, sans terre themselves.) The young man calls for directions to the restaurant/bar of a friend in a district of ill repute. They are lost. OM absentmindedly begins to chant hymns and spells.
Remember us,
Oh Lord
when you come, when you come
into your kingdom (imagine this in Byzantine harmonics)
into your kingdom
Lord
see what I see
oh Lord see what I see
do not forget it, Lord
do not forget what I see
and save us. Move us…
If we fall lord/brother–the whole thing falls, doesn’t it. Heaven and earth, the world. You have tied yourself to us, to the tree of life. If we extinguish sentience, if all reality is one, then… Is God extinguished as well? Oh my God–
The one who finally takes us to the restaurant is the son of YM’s cousin. (Who YM had called for directions) and brother to YM!! His brother! A great shock to YM, since before tonight, he did not know that he had a brother. Youngman thus begins to excavate his life– another 1st. Setting a great stride, lord… New brother drops them at the restaurant. They drink with cousin’s young friends. YM/OM ‘put that bunch to bed.’ They, soon after, start drinking with new brother, who has rejoined them at another bar. Old Man dozes for about 20 minutes. He wakes to an argument with Young Man. “You are weak, old man.” “You are arrogant and deluded, young man.” And so on, and on, until they almost separate in anger. But newfound brother and another friend try to keep them together. Their friendship is legendary. They continue to argue, until Old Man throws glass of intense native alcohol in the face of Young Man. Shock of alcohol in his eyes, stings YM out of argument and he seeks to restore friendship with OM by offering to feed him from his plate with his chopsticks. Old Man still rumbling, accepts. “These are long-ass chopsticks in this place”, remarks YM. “Better to reach across the table,” OM smiles.
They reach home in time to greet the housekeeper as she leaves for 5:00 a.m. service at Buddhist temple. That day, another priest, long time friend and tantric partner of Old Man; fellow warrior for sentience of the world, is killed in U.S.A. Mysterious Accident. But he is a warrior, he knew the price of their battle… Om, Shanti, Shanti, Om… At this time 200,000 people are viciously butchered in central Africa. A cyclone hits poor Bangladesh again. Another friend/tantric warrior dreams that OM comes to him and warns of impending evil which friend meets and faces. Repulsive evil. Friend does rituals, discovers OM’s vehicle stored at this friend’s house is vandalized. Better car than us, thinks Old Man.
In the spirit of his age–skaters one and all–YM is attracted to old evils– but is too inherently good and smart to be mastered by them. (We hope.) Such evil is a semantic overlay as youth seeks truth beneath the hypocrisies of necessity and propriety. Young Man is no longer a ‘punk.’ Though, not yet a student. Old man is no longer able to fit into the usual model of a Catholic priest. Nor is he satisfied with the claims of counter-culture activities. But he is still a priest–He preached brilliantly last Sunday. Parish people wanted tapes of it. But he can’t stay in that vocabulary all week long–52/12.
The peace of Christ, peace of heaven. Silence of the Buddha. Where else then?
They wander. History is done. It is finished when they began to wander… sainte terrers, their friendship is legendary. When they began to wander, time ends, Old/Young…
Young Man dreams: “gangsters push Old Man off tall building, 3 stories. Breaks his neck on the concrete below. Young Man goes in search for him. In a helicopter YM searches for OM, but where he struck ground has become a forest. Young Man dreams of beautiful, intense, erotic stimulation. Old Man dreams: Driving in high mountains with young woman, doesn’t make (just another) turn in the road along high cliff. Drives straight off. Says prayer of contrition calmly, softly as they fall, softly to the sea.
Young Man and Old Man part, leaving the Emperor’s Palace for a time. Perhaps, they will re-connect as Om makes abstemious preparations for the pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash, the god mountain in Tibet. Young Man begins his education for a life of Business Administration and psychology. What do we do with our young men? Our boys? Train them for war? And what of the musician? Yes– what about the Muse-ician?
The scene shifts back to the dusty cave, to the suffering of the world—building, building to nuclear proportions, to an explosion of white. White. Then white fades to mist, misty, sunny beach. Agnes, Adam, Chris are walking along the beach, arm in arm. There is a little child playing in the sand. John and the Quebecois, Jacques and Martin, are horsing around in the distance. There are other people scattered along the beach. We don’t know where this is. Mazatlan?
Stephen is talking. His image is superimposed over the scene. He is completing his ritual in New Mexico. He is alone, but next to him is a faint red glow from beneath a cloth. As he moves, he inadvertently pulls the cloth aside to reveal the crystal skull, delicious red inside.
“Are Adam, Chris, Agnes and the others dead? Are they in this world or the other world? Was their experience only personal, deluded hallucinations? Or did it have impact on the world? Did it facilitate our survival as we hoped? Our salvation? Did they discover who we really are? Their effort was total.
Who are we that we think we can effect change in the direction of Being? Who are we?”
Then Stephen starts to laugh. It’s hard to tell if it is friendly laugh or not. He just laughs, thunder rolls, lightening flashes. The dragons, a great writhing cloud mass of tangled delight, laugh with thunder, parent and newborn beast dissipate into sunrise cloud. The Virgin appears, resplendent in first morning light. Then her image becomes the face and rainbow antlers of the Stag, the divine quest.
***
Night Prayer
Silver slipped
down the branch
lit night leaves
almost bright
carried dark shadows through
endless silence
Luminous gray
ruled the land
raised shadows,
laid patterns light
across field and trees,
across endless bramble
of this life’s night.
Owls, courting
loot
loot the countryside of mice
perch in pine tree outside my window
discuss the price of meat these days.
All
all speak of endless endless intent
for the endless, endless
end
EIGHTEEN
Narrator:
In order to recover from arduous experiences, Adam takes Chris and Agnes through a remarkable experience of temporal translocation to explore spiritual friendship ala St. Aelred of Rievaulx. (Aren’t Adam and Agnes dead? Or, is death really just transformation? Who are these people?) Oddly, they lock into a consciousness, under Adam’s guidance, from the European Middle Ages in Abbot Aelred’s 12th century monastery. Fr. Adam seems to have the ability to shift in and out of different time periods as needed. As well, he shifts in and out of different personae. Further, he can do the same for others. One’s concept of time and personification are the issues here. Sometimes it is hard for me to tell if this really is an paranormal event, or some metaphor for a more natural exposure to other times and persons through the usual vehicles of study and travel. I say this since what follows is close to what St. Aelred wrote 700 years ago. Adam may well have been exposed to it in his theological studies. But I don’t think Agnes or Chris have been. Well, any of them might have run across it in the monastery, since this theology of spiritual friendship was developed there. Adam is able to plant this scenario in their imaginations verbatim, it seems. A religious psychodrama.
Or, maybe certain shamanistic personalities are just given to such paranormal feats. Like that Santeria priest we met last year. He was a very European Cuban citizen. Very Catholic up bringing. Until Ochun, the Goddess of Mercy in an African pantheon, saved him from death when he had slipped into a 40-day coma. Medical doctors had given him up. Ochun advised his mother how to care for him. Later when he recovered, he learned the way of Santeria and really has the power. We witnessed it ourselves. He even was able to begin to defuse some of my … my problems. He read our souls and gave us what we wanted, answered our questions, without our even having to ask, verbally. He had, no doubt, some superficial exposure to this African based Santeria as a child growing up in Cuba. Though, probably it was considered in a negative light by his European Catholic family. He is a natural shaman. He just locked into Santeria because it was the shamanistic mode that was available to him. Why else would an African goddess have power in the Americas?
Excuse me, I digress. I get fascinated by these things. The participants in this conversation on friendship are Chris, Agnes and Adam rather than the original cast from the famous 14th Century treatise on Friendship and Union with God. This, apparently is a spin off from the power of the earlier trance states of ‘the ritua’l, Yemen and India chapters in Part II.
Once again, I am under such severe time and space constraints. Most of this chapter can be found elsewhere, or is lost, or is on the INDEX (of forbidden books.) But for the essential movement of Adam’s intention, try this:
Adam:
What we are about to deal with is, I believe, the spiritual touchstone of the over-all movement in our work. It is here that integrative, balancing forces in our story find their grounding in a traditional, though little known teaching, as we continue to grapple with destructive forces. It is a great, healing, teaching moment on both a normal and a highly spiritual level. Spiritual community, friendship (with each other and God), and love as the agents of that great, ineffable, universal, lightful Union that justifies everything.
Perhaps you are still confounded by some of the dark, gothic elements in our work. A shaman must deal with, be able to defuse even, such evil or negative energies. It’s part of the training. To do that one must ‘see’ and understand the whole picture; the creative operation of both light and dark. In individual lives… in history and out of it! Then, one might progress beyond/in/to the “light that casts no shadow.” I thought pedophilia and the rest were poignant contemporary issues that exemplified something about dark powers operative in our culture. But don’t let that be a red herring. Keep your sights set on heavenly treasure while you deal with the worldly processes. “The two will become one.” The important thing is to do the right thing at the right moment. Like in art, put just the right mark in just the right place.
For now, let me take you on a vision journey in order to open the world a little more for you. But in a peaceful, loving way, this time. ‘Listen to the precepts of this teaching, incline the ear of your heart…’ close your eyes and imagine a great stone monastery in northern England. It is the High Middle Ages…
When the transformation had taken place Chris is questioning Adam:
Chris:
How many persons leading a worldly existence and acting as partners in some form of vice, are united by a similar pact and find the body of even that sort of friendship to be more pleasant and sweet than all the delights of this world! I hope that you will not find it burdensome to isolate, as it were, from the company of so many types of friendship that one which we think should be called “spiritual” to distinguish it from… Well, you know. More carnal intimacy… For by contrasting them you would make spiritual friendship better known to us and consequently more desirable, and thus more actively rouse and fire us to its acquisition.
Adam:
Falsely do they claim the illustrious name of friends among whom there exists a harmony of vices; since he who does not love, is not a friend, but he who loves iniquity does not love his fellow-man. “…for he that loves iniquity” does not love, but “hates his own soul.” Truly, he who does not love his own soul will not be able to love the soul of another. ….Yet, since such great joy is experienced in friendship which either lust defiles, avarice dishonors, or luxury pollutes, we may infer how much sweetness that friendship possesses which, in proportion as it is nobler, is the more secure; purer, it is the more pleasing; freer, it is the more happy. Let us allow that, because of some similarity in feelings, friendships, provided, however, they are judiciously distinguished from that friendship which is spiritual and therefore true. Hence let one kind of friendship be called carnal, another worldly, and another spiritual. The carnal springs from mutual harmony in vice; the worldly is enkindled by the hope of gain; and the spiritual is cemented by similarity of life, morals, and pursuits among the just. …”he that abides in friendship, abides in God, and God in him.”
Agnes:
I have been listening to the two of you now and must admit that what you call friendship is attractive, perhaps the most attractive thing in the world. Perhaps even more attractive than marriage. But I am a practical person. I should like to have you tell me what practical advantages it procures for those who cultivate it. For though, it is a matter of such moment, as you seem to have thoroughly proved by means of unassailable arguments, yet it is only when its purpose and benefit are understood that it will be sought after with genuine ardor.
Adam:
I do not presume that I can explain it in a manner befitting the dignity of so signal a good, since in human affairs nothing more sacred is striven for, nothing more useful is sought after, nothing more difficult is discovered, nothing more sweet experienced and nothing more profitable possessed. For friendship bears fruit in this life and in the next.
It manifests all the virtues by its own charms; it assails vices by its own virtue; it tempers adversity and moderates prosperity. As a result, scarcely any happiness whatever can exist among mankind without friendship, and a man is to be compared to a beast if he has no one to rejoice with in adversity, no one to whom to unburden his mind if any annoyance crosses his path or with whom to share some unusually sublime or illuminating inspiration. “Woe to him that is alone, for when he falls, he has none to lift him up. He is entirely alone who is without a friend.”
But what happiness, what security, what joy to have someone to whom you dare to speak on terms of equality as to another self; one to whom you need have no fear to confess your failings; one to whom you can unblushingly make known what progress you have made in the spiritual life; one to whom you can entrust all the secrets of your heart and before whom you can place all your plans! What, therefore, is more pleasant than so to unite to oneself the spirit of another and of two to form one, that no boasting is thereafter to be feared, no suspicion to be dreaded, no correction of one by the other to cause pain, no praise on the part of one to bring a charge of adulation from the other. “A friend says the Wise Man is the medicine of life.” Excellent, indeed, is that saying. For medicine is not more powerful or more efficacious for our wounds in all our temporal needs than the possession of a friend who meets every misfortune joyfully, so that, as the Apostle says, “shoulder to shoulder, they bear one another’s burdens.” Even more– each one carries his own injuries even more lightly than that of his friend. Friendship, therefore heightens the joys of prosperity and mitigates the sorrows of adversity by dividing and sharing them. Hence, the best medicine in life is a friend. Even the philosophers took pleasure in the thought: Not even water, neither the sun, nor fire do we use in more instances than a friend. In every action, in every pursuit, in certainty, in doubt, in every event and fortune of whatever sort, in private and in public, in every deliberation, at home and abroad, everywhere friendship is found to be appreciated, a friend is a necessity, a friend’s service a thing of utility. “Wherefore, friends”, says Tullius, “though absent are present, though poor are rich, though weak are strong, and what seems stranger still–though dead are alive.” And so it is that with the rich prize of friendship as their glory, that exiles regard it as their native land, the poor as their wealth, the sick as their medicine, the dead as their life, the healthy as their harm, the weak as their strength and strong as their prize so great …
And a thing even more excellent than all these considerations, friendship is a stage bordering upon the perfection which consists in the love and knowledge of God, so that man from being a friend of his fellow man becomes the friend of God, according to the words of the savior in the gospel: “I will not now call you servants, but my friends.”
…And so, in this friendship of ours which we have introduced by way of example, if you see ought worthy of imitation, profit by it to advance your own perfection.
Thus ascending from the holy love with which he embrace a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. With the dispelling of all anxiety by reason of which we now fear and are solicitous for one another, with the removal of all adversity which it now behooves us to bear for one another and above all with the destruction of the sting of death together with death itself, whose pangs now often trouble us and force us to grieve for one another, with salvation secured, we shall rejoice in the eternal possession of Supreme Perfection; and this friendship, to which here we admit but few, will be outpoured upon all…
Narrator:
Maybe there is something to it. Isn’t that what we really want in our lives. To be loved. Maybe there is a way… to love. To be free. Chris and Agnes are profoundly moved by this experience. They are still radically mystified by the overall experience. Fr. Adam claims that this kind of friendship is a necessary balance in counterpoint to the esoteric strain of all the rest. But I think that they are altered. Permanently altered by it. I wonder if I’ve lost Chris. He was a double agent for a while, you know. Maybe I can still claim him. We’ve been working on him for so long. Oh, forget it. It’s too complicated to think about now. I’ve got my job to do. Let’s get on with it.
After the above vision journey is complete, (of which I have presented here only part), Adam slips into a deep, restful trance/sleep to recover from the strain. He is just waking (days later?) from this state when he confronts Fr. Pat on the TIBETAN PLATEAU!
***
STEWARD’S POINT
Light sails the wind-carried waves–
big swells and whitecaps.
My eyes rest on the largess of now…
Luminous salt, liquid sea,
Turquoise sea–
white foam and light;
Fresh, clean, rushing waves
Fresh and clean as the rush of heaven.
NINETEEN
Confrontation between Frs. Pat and Adam
(and the Narrator) on the
Tibetan Plateau.
(Having discovered that his knowledge of the access code is incomplete, the Narrator returned to the hunt for Fr. Adam with subliminal fury. Now, he is seeking direct confrontation. He has once again suppressed his fury to tell this story with what seems to him rational, if aggressive determination. Fury, however, is the term that more accurately describes his inner state. He is becoming conscious of his identification with ultimate evil. He is one of many high-functioning psychotics operative in the construct of culture. You’d never know…)
Narrator:
In order to facilitate the flow of this story, while still trying to clarify a few last points for myself, and bowing before the constraints of time (that son-of-a-bitch is going to get away if I don’t get going!), I am skipping over much of the material from what I had planned in this presentation for you. Oh, don’t worry, dread master, I am aware of your need for entertainment in these little reports. Everything must be fun these days. I will include all the material that we have gathered into an appendix that you might read at your leisure. I myself feel a certain anxiety that if I don’t move soon, I will never escape from… I mean, I will never discover access to Fr. Adam’s accounts. We will never have Mrs. Shanti’s inheritance. It will be hidden away, fragmented knowledge scattered here and there, memories of it relegated to the dusty parlors of the occult, secreted in the complex economies of the future. (Maybe that’s what you want? I really don’t know anymore!)
Fr. Pat has discovered Adam’s location at that ashram high in the Himalayas where Adam is recovering from the trance states involved in Part II of this history. Pat has discovered, read and reported to his superiors) several of Adam’s writings including the “grimoire” entitled, Mexican Earthquake. Pat does not know that Adam has been quite open with the Bishop about all these developments. Which is how we know. Material known from long ago as that which contributes to the corruption of youth especially fascinated Pat. You will enjoy that, I’m sure. But for now, no more fooling around. Let’s get to the heart of the issue–
Fr. Pat is self-consciously fierce but subdued and self-contained in his righteous task; yet, confused by the very conflict in himself that Adam represents. Fr. Adam knows that Pat is shamanistically gifted, but violently repressed. Both were in the seminary together. Both gifted. Adam developed his gift. Pat repressed his. Pursuing Adam is breaking through his training from the institutional Church. What an amazing experiment that institution has been. It took earlier notions about institutions (The Roman Empire, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.) and turned them into these great religious bureaucracies that by their own estimation preserved the exalted theologies developed up through the Middle Ages. When you think about it, what an impossible thing was accomplished for a few centuries. Most people really believed that they should be chaste. What an ideal! To convince masses of people to try to give up sex… Great institutions dedicated to abstinence and service. And God. Now, what a switch, few are sensitive enough to sense the spiritual ambiance at all.
Hell, I’m getting as spaced as they are. God, I find it harder and harder to concentrate. Have to now. So close to success. Gratification, that’s what people are into now. Oh, I admit it. I’m one of the worst: A child of our materialistic times. But at least I know now what we’ve lost.
Anyway, Adam maintains the “inner-radiance” from which the perennial philosophies of the past derive: As well, his more contemporary philosophies of action. His series of ‘light to black to light’ painting/sculptures reveal the alchemy of the “light that casts no shadow.” Adam, hopes that he is “changing the direction of Being.” A little pretentious. But he believes that he is helping the biosphere survive by helping its psyche survive. He discerns that Nature is almost past its power, “a woman lying face down in the mud with several knives in her back.” “A woman weeping on the edge of a bed of violence.” Who is to help? The occult? The hirophant of Tarot, as one “reading” will indicate? Ha! Priest craft! Adam and Pat have met before. Well, I’ll be… can you believe that! I don’t care. I’ve got my own reasons for this quest and that order is about to be filled. He fooled me once, but not again.
People do some pretty strange things with their lives, don’t you think?
The dialog between Frs. Adam and Pat should have the simplicity of daytime soaps, but it gets technical. They are specialists after all. There is terrific tension between the two. All that priestcraft. But shamancraft as well. Agnes is anxious about this confrontation. Chris is as well. But won’t admit it. Adam is used to the tension.
This is an Age of Action, according to Adam. However much he prefers the more contemplative ages. Goodness, Truth and Beauty are the inept deities of the past. World War One killed them, finally. They, the perennial philosophies, did not save the world from the horrors of the 20th century. Did not really represent the naturally diverse cultural emotion anyway. They became too heady. Too classical. Too separated from the cultures that spawned them. Therefore, they are deposed. Or, maybe their altruisms were just not strong enough in the face of human greed!
Fr. Adam initiates Pat through Chris and Agnes. Reminds him who he is. Takes him through a trans-sexual realization. That modern definition of ‘deviant’ sexuality is too hard, too narrow for the more plastic potentials in human personality. According to Adam. “Not as in agrarian fertility cults, either. But in the freedom of a Paleolithic identity, engaged from 20th century understanding, built on religious and scientific cultural evolution… etc.” Then, the spirit animal strikes and Pat is converted… seemingly.
By the way I found out that their names are pseudonyms. Religious names taken to effect the meaning of their ritual, their artful craft. Agnes means the “Lamb of God,” Adam is the “Man” in the sense of the “Human” (originally, bi-sexual Adam and Eve in one), Chris is, well…. the Son of Man, etc.
[Narrator has been pursuing Adam for so long, that he is being altered by the quest and is mysteriously, psychically sharing in this exchange between Adam and Pat, but from a distance. At times, their personalities seem to merge for a while. Distance makes no difference. Their minds and hearts are melding into a single conscious development within the ethos of the quest. Also, as Pat and Adam encounter one another, the power of their conflict, you’ll see, is having a devastating effect on the progress of the Narrator’s forces.]
…searing, excruciating beauty of the Church. Sacrament of the world! Its understanding of mankind, the world. Its gift of God. It’s enough. Its wisdom. Its balance. Light resplendent in the concrete world. The Church. God and world married…. Evil is just off the mark. That’s why you, Adam, come off so well. What you do seems beautiful to some, but in the long run… What have you got against the Church, anyway? She cared for you. She took you in, educated you…
Pat, you have misjudged darkness.
You don’t actually believe I’ll accept that, do you, Adam?
Adam stopped in the act of putting his hand on the door that lead to the steps out of the ashram and to the trail into wilderness.
It’s simple, Pat. The Church has not saved the world after two thousand years. It’s had its chance. Religion has had its chance. Either we change our approach radically, or … Even those who are truly caring, courageous people who live their lives for others, those magnificent people whose efforts justify the whole human race, even their sacrifice and love turn against their efforts. Nuns and nurses handing out modern medicine in Central Africa. Anti-biotics result in dangerous population explosions. We are at a moment of necessity…
How can you blame the Church for that?
I don’t blame anybody. What has happened, has happened. Now, I act.
Your irreverence only becomes more apparent in your current state of drunken delusion.
Drunk? Who’s drunk?
You. Isn’t that how you obtain your mystical experiences?
No.
You wrote “Mexican Earthquake” and about the Seoul episode didn’t you?
How did you… you went through my things. What else do you know? No, never mind… You people are drunk on power and self-righteousness. You think that you can do anything as long as it serves your cause. In reality, you are in radical denial of your real nature and therefore of the Christ. You are sexually repressed without the Grace of sublimation. You have denied the actual gifts that the spirit has placed in your personality and you are desperately afraid of who you are. You prefer the order of your institutions to the inspiration of the Spirit and therefore you miss any opportunity for Grace. You replace real experience with intellectualized formulas of holiness. You replace the real journey of spiritual realization, self-realization, God realization, with watered down accommodations to Capitalism. Yours is an order of bankers and bureaucrats. You’ve taken over the Vatican and you’ve corrupted everything, even the official Church examination of sainthood in order to have your Magnum Dei founder declared a saint. Which he wasn’t. Worse than that, you betray friendship.
What are you talking about? I’m not a member of Magnum Dei, if that is what you mean. The Bishop is, I’m not.
You work for them.
I work for the Church.
They think that they are the Church.
That’s an evasion, Adam. Pat remarks coolly.
You betray friendship and other real, … what’s the evasion?
All of that. By the way, I think that we were/are more acquaintances rather than friends.
You lie! All of what?
You are jealous of me. I succeeded in the Church and you are a renegade, an outcast.
Succeeded…?
You claim all these bizarre experiences to be authentic, to be of the Holy. You have tried to recreate the Church in your own image. I prefer the Tradition. That’s all.
I don’t claim to be especially holy. I am an explorer of the realms of the psyche. I don’t have anything against the Tradition, either. But we live in a different age. Dialogue with other religions; Buddhism, Islam, the rest, has changed everything. Capitalist technocracy has changed everything. You want it all to be the same as the Middle Ages with the Church once again in charge. You’re right, it was magnificent. But it was also xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist and…
Who in the world wasn’t! The Church lost the issue when it lost northern Europe to Protestantism and the Enlightenment. But Adam, your little diatribe is all a cover for what is really eating you.
What do you mean? Clerical ambition of some kind? You think I want that?
Maybe not, but what happened when we were in the Seminary is what is eating you. You remember quite well. What no one else was supposed to ever know.
I think that you are misinterpreting my affections, dear Pat.
No, I think not. Aren’t all these delusionary palaces of yours, all these theories really just a denial that you are remarkably unsuccessful in love? That you really wanted a relationship with me and maybe others and it never worked? Be honest, Adam. I just didn’t want to continue a physical relationship with you. First, I prefer women and second, I really want to be celibate. For God. For the Church. For the People of God.
Well, Pat. That rather takes my breath away.
I don’t doubt it…
You will be surprised to know that, yes, I do believe that you want to be celibate, as I do, and for the very same reasons that you mention.
Do you?
Yes, but how we practice that, how we pursue it, is different. You repress. I work through. I do definitely intend to get to the ideal, but in a more healthy and creative way. Shamanism…
Come on Adam! Stop with all this– shamanism. You are a homosexual or at least a bi-sexual and you refuse to accept your own dysfunction. Why can’t you just accept. You’ve never been able to form a mature relationship with any woman but your mother. All your shamanism was just a psychological escape from the wreckage of that very modern battle between your mother and father that you once told me about, what you project as universal conflagration. All that fighting when you were a kid.
God, Pat, (Adam hesitates, for a moment unsure of himself) that is rather passé psychology. Even if it were true, so what? The important word that should follow all that is “and”… (he sinks his consciousness into the Tan Tien, the navel chakra. The place of amoral battle in Tai Chi; problem resolving, and magical transformation. Pat has scored a hit. Adam now for a moment is suspicious of his own motivation. But from years of practice he reaches for inner resources to engage and continue the battle.)
Pat, you are wrong. Human personality, and even sexuality, is more plastic than you admit. Homosexuality has become such an issue because our culture is desperately unbalanced by the domineering, aggressive male ethos required by a commercial society. My parents were products of their culture and its values. But they had healthy, beautiful insights as well. The larger corporate personality subconsciously seeks balance. Certain genetic pools, perhaps, are gifted to respond.
Adam, give me a break and stick to the point. I’ve worked hard to overcome my sexual drives. I’ve really tried hard to come to terms with my own sexual hang-ups. Everybody has them. Just be honest about it, don’t you see. Or do you fear the stereotype so much– weird men with furtive glances, haunting public bathrooms.
No, Pat. Don’t you see. It wasn’t just affection and a kind of physical bonding that we exchanged when we were young. It was an awakening of deeper parts of who we are. It didn’t really have anything to do with our sexual orientation. It had to do with… well, don’t you remember how dismayed we were after the first time? How shocked? We didn’t even talk for weeks. But we continued. Then, how at one point, I ‘saw’ into you. Saw your real vocation. I saw what took you months, or was it years, in therapy with that psychiatrist of yours. That’s when you really panicked. And broke it off.
Long pause.
I was pretty confused. I thought that you were evil. That you had fooled… everybody. …I still believe that. I don’t think that you should have been ordained… Yet, there is something that seems so attractive– true to what you say– no, you have committed heresy, you have led others astray, you will be ex-communicated.
Pat, please. No, not please. You will listen to me. (Adam now speaks with a voice almost not his own. Low and sensual. Yet a pure force somehow. For Adam and those like him, all things are a vehicle. Even things that for others would be sin, for him in certain special circumstances, must be allowed. The Mississippi has flooded as never before. Its headwaters were a place of pilgrimage for Adam. Nepal also is flooded this year. So is Adam’s soul flooded– with destiny.) You loved me Pat. You love me still. The woman. The man. The man. The woman. We will move together. We will dance Hera’s glory. Kali’s joy. You are called.
No, Adam. Please. Move away from me. Don’t touch me.
(Even as he resists, Pat’s arms writhe snake-like about Adam in response to Adam’s advance. But this is not a physical joining. Sexuality is only a guise of deeper unions. This is a union of persons. In this embrace, the “two are made one”, their energies merge. What is necessary is the shift of consciousness that reveals ‘original’ energies. The following is the sense of their exchange. But the experience was really a series of sensations, radical states of consciousness rapidly accessed and passed through, indescribable ontological shifts.)
Hetero- and Homo-sexuality. One is the mutation of the other– a regrafting of the feminine energies onto the masculine which itself is a genetic deviation from the original feminine! Or a simple working of “X” and “Y” chromosomes? The cultural result of men behaving like men-wo-men. Were-persons who attempt (?) to work out a mythic intuition about origin and transformation. Transformation to what? Origin of what? Original unity? That other category of human perception. Nirvanic Unknown, the Hidden God, human identity. The trouble is that people stop short. Are impeded, (are indifferent!), but mostly stop themselves. They settle for marriage or for homosexuality, for example. There has developed in our times an “incapacity” to deal with our in-depth potential for total transformation. The cultural support system, (religion at the center of culture), that encouraged the development of that transformative attribute are gone. People now are usually only pushed in that direction by personal tragedy.
Some say that the man/woman relationship is the most natural– but if we talk about the most natural biologically, some say the female is the most natural since a male is only a female with an extra chromosome.
People stop… get scared, lost, get indifferent, never even consider an option, give into desire and affection, (nothing wrong with it per se…); give into obsessions, the drive to procreate.
But what else is there for most people…
I would use nature as the model. Then, as I said, the feminine is the most primal biological reality–
(Therefore, God is a woman!)
But, how is that an improvement on the past. One could as easily say that women are missing something essential and need men. The atomic model might be more basic—Or, one might see God as a society of persons, individuals in commune. Some attracted, some repelled by each other– the Trinity (Hindu and Christian) unity and diversity.
… God is not beneath a love affair according to many sacred texts. And certainly capable…
But what is the problem?!
That all was 2500 years ago, at least– and nothing since. (Well, the Christian theology had developed a lot, as has Tantra and Islam… But, most of that was perfected by the 1200s AD. Then, there is science, of course…
We are in gridlock.
Were-animal [wolves etc.] are a popularization of mythic attempts at transformation; Shape-shifting, going beyond perception… wer-persons, homosexuals, shamans, saints, artists– spiritual means; science– physical means. Transformation… Absolute realization… God. The kingdom is at hand… We can’t separate eternity from history and remain sane. God and the world are one.
(That wouldn’t be very popular because most heterosexuals will resist. They will prefer marriage or significant others, whatever… as the local solution to the human predicament. The great loneliness. Suffering. Death. Homosexuals, for similar reasons will want to stay as they are.)
All are still prone to divisive orders of being.
Transformation, once again must be the purpose of culture– but we must switch vehicles from matriarchal, patriarchal or democratic models. To what… ???
While this is going on between Adam and Pat, forces beyond description are attacking the Narrator’s company. He hides behind some huge rocks, watching as his men are killed by avalanches and gale force winds. Adam and Pat are undisturbed by any of this as they re-engage their conversation:
Some shamans, yogis, prophets and saints move beyond all that, at least when in “other” states of consciousness, ecstasy, etc. Temporal life and eternal life. We are permeated in every particle of our being with the radiance of eternity.
But in order to seek this transformation (salvation or enlightenment if you prefer), we have to have a biosphere in which to work all this out, a body. Since the environment is so threatened we must seek/use the lesser of evils to promote survival.
So, must cut the world’s population by 2/3, preferably by birth control. But maybe there is no time… If we don’t, the degradation of civilization and environment, war and disease (natural and manmade!) will. Or, death to all! (Or, perhaps the pressure of all this population and progress will push us into a new approach all its own…)
Protect environment at all costs. Save as much natural landscape in the world as possible. Promote bio-diversity.
Protect and promote humane culture, traditional or modern.
Anything less than this is against God, religion, humanity and the world.
(Still Pat and Adam move together to some ontic rhythm only they, still entranced, can hear. Their touch is arousing in a way to which no pornography could ever aspire, more satisfying even to watch than any previous union. Avalanche of ice roars, gravity drawn, crushing the side of a near-by mountain. Wind blows strong enough to level the few trees around these frugal stone buildings, crashes through this high valley, through their beings, Pat and Chris, now one. Pat is finally claimed. In ways that he won’t even remember as he wakes.
Most of the Narrator’s crew of assassins are killed by the avalanches and other “natural” violence. Several are blown off a cliff by the fierce wind. They are killed by their own evil intentions. These climatic and geologic shifts, minor movements in the world system, disrupt entirely the Narrator’s progress. The Narrator himself hides behind some large, deeply rooted rocks. A great, impossibly deep, chasm, miles long, opens with a screaming roar between Adam and the Narrator’s party, what’s left of them.)
Finally, after long silence, as if nothing much had happened–But what do you do with it, Adam? How do you use all this money? What do you need with 300, 000, 000, 000 dollars?
Money? (Adam momentarily surprised by Pat’s complete repression of the experience.)
Oh, yes, that. To tell the truth I don’t really have much use for money. I use it for practical things, environmental projects, educating children, leper colonies, that sort of thing… Render onto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
You live like a king.
No. Not really. I don’t own anything except what I need for my projects. I live as I need to live to do what I do.
What do you do?
You don’t remember, do you?
Remember what? Don’t evade the issue. What is it that you really do with all your free time and money?
Mostly I attend to the psyche of the world. To the gods, and lesser spiritual beings. I rally them for our mutual survival.
Then you actually believe what you wrote in Mexican Earthquake! You caused all that death and suffering.
Yes, (you’ll remember when it’s time…)
Well, not exactly caused. The relationship is not causal– it is a relationship, a thing in itself, between the powers of creation and the shamanic capacity in human nature…
My God… You are insane.
What do you mean?
If you actually did those things, purposefully, then you are a vicious criminal. If you did not do those things and you only think that you did, you are pathetically deluded.
I didn’t do anything. I did not intend anything other than what most well meaning people intend. What I believe, I just said. (We said!) How that must come about, I cannot say. I don’t have much faith in the usual humanist, fixer programs for solving the world’s problem. The world is a personality that needs more than materialist band-aids to heal its wound. So, I tried a different approach.
(Pat has obviously blocked out the experience that he just shared with Adam. Adam humors him. This all represents events that have taken so much longer to accomplish.)
People think that they understand the world. Not yet. For instance, the information that you get in school is that the Middle Ages was really the Dark Ages, ignorant, cruel and repressive. Off by two hundred years. The medieval was very sophisticated. Very well organized. Enlightened in many respects.
Maybe we are not so far apart after all.
By the way, I have a theory you might like–about the celibacy that was imposed on the priests of the Church in the 1100’s at the Second Lateren Council in Rome. Still current last I looked. As you know, by now, in Tantric sexual practice the yogi redirects the “energies” in the body from the Earth chakra near the perineum, up the central nervous channel to the crown, or celestial chakra at the top of the head, opening all the intermittent chakras and culminating in full enlightenment by uniting the heaven and earth of the body’s microcosm. This is accomplished through certain sexual yogas performed with a partner or if you are a monk, in your imagination. Celibacy falls into the general category of such yogic practice. As you have learned as well, such practice generate energies that can be used for other intentions than enlightenment. Magic for instance. It is very dangerous, but it can be done. Maybe the celibate priesthood from the 1100’s to the 1600’s in Europe thus re-directed the energies of generations of men and women, creating a psychic atmosphere in Europe that spawned the dark magic of our great scientific revolution, enlightenment, reformation, democracy, etc. EUPHEMISMS THAT NOW THREATEN THE VERY EXISTENCE OF LIFE ON THIS PLANET…
Adam, really! If what you say about celibacy is true, why didn’t Tibetan monasticism and celibacy produce this effect. Celibacy is for service, and is witness to the coming Kingdom of God.
In part, that is true. But before that, it was and remains, a yogic discipline. About Tibetan celibacy, I don’t know, maybe because the idea of evolution is inherent in Christianity and not so much in Indian religions like Buddhism… Ah well, just a speculation. But if these theories about Tantra and the Sacramental nature of existence are true, then such possibilities must also be considered. But these are monkish, scholastic considerations… I am only a pilgrim.
You are not “only a pilgrim.” You are a threat in the eyes of many people. And I agree. You are a false monk and a false priest.
Pat, I tried a different approach. But things happened that I did not expect. Maybe that is our gift. That is our age now: Karma yoga. Action. So, I have acted and prayed for the Holy Spirit to complete this action.
Adam, the Church is the agent for the salvation of the world. Christ sacrificed himself so that we would not have to. Priests and Nuns and Christians sublimate their own wills and desires for the sake of the Church’s mission. We only need to identify with Our Lord’s sacrifice and celebrate it. The world develops as it will and we maintain its contact with God. That is the ongoing, priestly mission of the Church, to mediate between God and the world, in service to all.
(…much missing dialogue.)
Ah Pat, we used have some great talks in the seminary, when we were all into philosophy and theology. Didn’t we?
Do you remember that lady in your first parish who collected all of her husband’s hair from the barber when he got haircuts. They must have had a room full at home. Pretty colorful. Parishes are the best and the worse, like religion.
Yes, oh my God. We were so young. I really liked the seminary. It was great wasn’t it. Do you remember fat old Chung. You used to call him Chunk. He looked like a panda bear. He’s done well in the Church…
His family was Charismatic. Had all that alleluia lingo. And he was a trained technician. So, he wrote technically perfect papers. …all that Confucian background. He’ll be a perfect Church bureaucrat. You should like him.
Listen, Adam. I am not just some functionary, filling out a hollow role of false piety in an internationally based, religious conglomerate. The Church institutions are the sacramental, mediatory, agents of God’s grace in the world. I am working for fulfillment of the Kingdom of God, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and in his Church. Organization of some kind is necessary, isn’t it? But people never like the restrictions. Boundaries are unavoidable.
Pat, I visited a place in Nevada last spring. It was a park that preserved a group of prehistoric petroglyphs, you know, rock carvings from early native Americans. It was in a pass through a rocky range of hills. This pass was used by migrating herds of deer and other animals and was an important locus for hunting, religion and magic. Some of the glyphs were fertility symbols. It struck me that fertility, success, survival and bloody killing have been inextricably meshed in human consciousness, or sub-consciousness, from the beginning. The sacrifice. One could see how our attitudes could develop about sacrifice from that to Christ. Christ is for Christians, the fulfillment of the scriptures. Right? I believe that to be so–from these glyphs through such holy documents as the Vedas, right on to the New Testament. The figure of Christ in the gospel is a representation that weds the historical to the mythic, atemporal to temporal consciousness in such a way that reveals the secret of heaven–who we are! Right now, here. The kingdom is at hand. That is the value of the Gospel. Our lives are permeated by the eternal. Religious culture misses the mark at times; all its repressive mentalities, leads to the massacres as well as progress, hard to tell what really has been called up, all the “horror of history.
But the Church is true, Adam, the mystical body, whatever the horror of history or the depravations of individuals, in or out of the Church. New scientific world or Old World traditions. Science is not really opposed to the Church, politics aside. It is possible for us all to live together.
What makes you significant, Pat? According to science, the astronauts, the theory of evolution, you are a spec in the Universe. Next to nothing. But according to religion, quantity is not important. You share the Mystical Body of Christ (the Sangha). Quality is important. Eternity is all around us. It is not something that goes after life here or before. We are permeated with this quality of being.
The diabolical part of the theory of evolution is not that it denies Creationism, which is a childish misunderstanding of poetic truths in the bible stories anyway. The diabolic part of the theory of evolution is that the definition of a person is reduced to being this self-conscious spec of dust in the universe, an accident with certain limited powers of self-determination, just enough power for self-destruction. That is an insult to humanity, the history of thought, the power and character of the Spirit.
What is at stake in our times is not whether countries have problems, or I have a headache, or we blow up the planet… there is, after all, still the rest of the universe, from the scientific point of view. The stakes here are of a different magnitude altogether. While remaining a theist, I accept the deepest atheistic concern, putting it in a very crude way, God or the divine has no self-guarantee. Oh, he has power but he has made himself vulnerable to creation, to us… for love… for the ultimate things. Our destiny is tied to his. His to ours. The destiny of the world. God sacrificed himself to make us out of his own nothingness. The destiny of the universe is tied to us– (remember size in this sense is not necessarily important to God). He has tied his life to ours. For the sake of wholeness, for life, for love. If we abuse, or now extinguish ourselves, our ecosystem (our body) perhaps we also extinguish God—everything we know about ourselves. The direction consciousness goes—with it also God, wholeness, fulfillment.
Do not mistake me. I am not denying history or even science. There is a historical, scientific dimension. But this is not the whole of reality. What concerns me is that we ignore or deny all the rest of reality. We deny the eminent character of eternity. Thus, we deny ourselves, our whole self. It is the ultimate schizophrenic split. It is the diabolic (tearing apart).
The Church? The Church is wherever or however (in the whole universe) that salvation happens.
(Record of this part of the conversation has been lost.)
…So, if we really are the Church of Christ, the Body, the Sangha, maybe the institution of the Body should sacrifice itself. That might be what we are supposed to do. If we really want to follow the Lord. Perhaps that will save the world. Since God had no primal “stuff” from which to create, he had to use himself. By sacrifice, the world is made and maintains itself in existence; by sacrifice, the entire cosmos returns to its source. Sacrifice is by its nature a human/divine act, an act in which God and man have to work together in order that the world be maintained; it is a cosmic act, for the subsistence of the world depends upon it. God alone cannot perform the sacrifice, he requires human cooperation; man alone is impotent to sacrifice, let alone to make the sacrifice acceptable, he requires divine help, divine grace.
Man, you are on a roll!
Thanks.
Adam, Christ did not commit suicide. The scriptures are not so much psychodrama. God is not subject to our self-destructive whim.
No? If not, if that is not what we’re supposed to do, maybe there are no ‘supposed to do’s’…
Adam, they will cut you off. Take away your priesthood. Please…
Pat, my religion goes back to the beginning of humanity. The Church herself teaches that we are ordained by the Holy Spirit and ontologically changed in the depths of our being. That cannot be taken away. Abel and Melquisedek are my forebears in Christ. What can the Bishop do to me? They don’t burn us at the stake anymore. So, what will they do? Maybe they will change. If not, well, Christianity has seeded the world. Now, perhaps, it must die to itself in order for Christ to live in the world. Perhaps, it is time for the Bishop to die!
Adam, please… don’t do this. You don’t really intend to kill him. Adam…
I don’t intend to harm anybody.
Yea, but when you move, things happen. Look at the landscape. You know, I think I saw some people skulking around the side of that mountain earlier. What’s happened to them since we talked? I don’t remember this canyon…
I don’t know. I don’t intend to hurt anybody. I don’t intend anything.
Adam, come with me. Let’s go home. I’ll talk to them, get them to leave you alone.
No, Pat, never mind. It’s too late…
Whatever the case, I’m on pilgrimage now and should get going; Human creativity, intercourse–with the divine. Winter comes early here, around Mt. Kailash. And soon I will meet our friend. The one so determined to find the code. He wants to kill me. Maybe he will want absolution. Do you think? To be free… finally after all that… from that burden he carries. The absolution of heaven… Mediated through that which opens mind and heart to the sweet breath of freedom; actions that conjure… the Sacrament, the wind of Shiva! Lord Christ, the sacred bridge, sacramental vision and authority: Resurrection, Ascension, Parusia, all at once, the art of it. Sweet freedom. Come if you like– or go your own way. All the best, in any case…
Adam walks off across the plateau. Pat hesitates for a few moments then follows. He is still divided. He feels a sparkling sensation somewhere between his navel and his genitals. He wants the access code to the money. He is so close. He already knew that it was more than just the martial arts set. He feels the sparkling sensation almost like a prelude to sexual arousal, a coiled snake shifting its coils of light and energy. He ignores it. Somehow he is still honestly drawn to Adam’s way. Agnes smiles somewhere in his visionary mind. Chris stands behind her with the shadow of antlers, a great stag’s antlers behind his head.
Adam is not concerned that the Narrator has part of the code from the Tai Chi set. Since, it requires a second Krilian pattern. Ag’s or someone like her. But doing what esoteric technique? Adam’s Krilian pattern is like the Narrator’s! They must finally meet. Conversion. Convertio mores. And more. That’s the ticket. The Narrator was not killed when he attempted the entrance code in Switzerland because he is beginning to evidence the energies typical of someone undergoing a real conversion of heart… self…
Fr. Adam’s thoughts trail off in the thin mountain air as he and Pat hit the trail for the sacred precincts of Mt. Kailash, the destination of Hindu, Buddhist and now, Christian pilgrims.
The Narrator is standing on the other side of the Chasm with what’s left of his guards and servants, having just missed Fr. Adam once again. Beneath the above-the-tree line clarity of breathless, ice crusted peaks, he stands on a very high, grassless hill, surrounded by hills partially, fairly recently, denuded of their forests. He surveys the approaching evening mist that laces the eroded canyon walls.
Narrator: (a bit delirious, altered, from the exertion of surviving in these mountains perhaps.)
…it is only now that I begin to realize that I even want to be forgiven. What? How could it be possible? But we are so close now. What have we accomplished? 40,000 years of spiritual development set aside. From animal consciousness to Christ, the Buddha. Set aside for power, for progress, for conquest… not much left to conquer. Now, it is comfort and security we sell. Quite a distraction, no? What remarkable profit. Even Adam could not know the enormity of it, the people I have harmed and killed– families, generations. For thousands of years… (he is nearly one now with his dread master). What my little operation has done to whole environments, whole people; cultures crushed, humiliated. What am I saying? My eyes close… there is no redemption. Too great… It is too terrible… Necessary? Too horrible to comprehend, …to be forgiven? No, no, no…. I cannot forgive myself…
I must find Adam. I WILL have access…
(Can I not be forgiven…)
Come on, let’s get going. Damn you, damn you Adam, I must have the code! I must….
____________________
And I wake, Dantesque, with only vague memories of a wonderful and terrible dream. Adam has used the Narrator to manipulate world events!!! Draws their energy. Evil is so stupidly selfish and compulsive. Who are these people… I wake. I’ll pull their fangs, pull the poison. Draw their energies. What?! What am I talking about… As I wake… leaves fall, magenta red. Pat denies affiliation with Magnum Dei, retains connection to Church. Fall comes early up here.
No, I am at camp in the coastal mountains north of San Francisco with the teenagers and young adults from my parish. It is Camp Gualala, in the hills between the hot springs of Geyserville and Pt. Steward on the Pacific ocean. It was while hitchhiking along this road, 23 years ago, that I first had an inkling of becoming a priest. That was in the late sixties. The land ‘spoke’ to me. My companion called me the bishop! An Overseer. I was amused–
For the last five years I have spent midsummer’s night doing youth retreats. It is in this parochial ministry, in my studies, that I have been made well. The sickness, the poison, gave me power, perhaps, for a while? What next? I will help these children to grow to meet their destiny. (This is where I was assigned, after all. I didn’t ask for it! None of it.) OR…
What can be done is being done. Rest assured of that.
“Time to wake up. Come on, get up. Get cleaned up. Get ready for– breakfast!”
“Good morning Billy.
“Good morning Father.”
“How did you sleep? Any dreams?”
“Oh yea, awesome, totally! Awesome”
Laughter. Like distant, muted thunder. Stephen starts to laugh. He is still on his reservation. It’s hard to tell if it is friendly laughter or not. He just laughs, thunder rolls, lightning flashes. The dragons, a great writhing cloud mass of tangled delight, laugh with thunder, parent and newborn beast dissipate into sunrise cloud. The Virgin appears, resplendent in first morning light. Then, her image becomes the face and rainbow antlers of the Stag, the divine quest.
Here’s how it really works. Christmas earthquake, 9.0, and the tsuanmi, 2004.
Simon visited Adam one holiday recently. To celebrate, they drank… after three days they fought. Out in the mesquite forests of SE Arizona. Upset OM upset YM when he informed him that he was not a spiritual master as yet. And OM punished YM slightly for his arrogance. Gave him sharp pains in the back. And tested him. He looked within and drew out the charred lining of his soul. Then he put it back. OM needed to see what was there. Then OM filled the deep vase with a similar charred black ‘substance’ from the farthest reaches of the physical universe. Then on the third day of drinking poison, OM taunted YM, teased and taunted him with his pain in the back. YM blew up. Said terrible things, and the tectonic plates of south asia slipped… What happened makes all the difference.
SO EASY TO SET OFF WHAT IS ALREADY READY TO GO… CONCLUDE THE TIBETAN PLATEAU:
OM and Ym attempted a reconciliation, but the same sort of discord arose along with what the weather station described as freak storms, plunging temperatures, snow, hail, tornados across the country. Check the 3rd and 4th weeks of April 2005.
…that’s the end of it. Sad Old Man is satisfied that the spell is cast as he knew it must be, though he never planned it so. Resolved the intention to turn back the 6th Extinction and then cast it into the caldron of the earth charkas. Into a mandalic Black Hole… The Tan Tien and the Goddess. Young Simon is no master, but he’s a hell of a gifted student. Very advanced, if he survives.
But all those deaths, the cancer, heart attacks, the suicide of that young native American man–and the unexplained fires and other high coincidence of destruction. Magic has some dark agents indeed. Pure mysticism is better. Intend nothing. Allow the Holy Spirit to guide the flow…
Also see paintings 141-149, www.nepsis.com/gallery.
MORAINE (THE METHOD)
Fogs and mist
gray and white
black and mist
dragons that devour
these massive cliffs
hima
laya
mountains
fountains beneath
glacier dredged
hill high piles
of rocky debris
seems solid
slips beneath your feet
shifts by seasons
lift and fall
by the mile
by the summer’s heat
and winter’s fall
Mist and heat
f
a
l
ling
Seems to shift
“still–
the mountain”
(loved) eaten by the mist.
TWENTY
MALE DREAM:
After traveling for a week with a friend in northern California, I had a surprising dream. In the dream, on a grassy hill there is a pavilion tent. I approach. Through the tent flap, a young man, lying naked on a bed, legs dangling over the bedside, seems to be waiting for me. The situation is spread with attraction and danger. The young man lay on some softly lit, rich fabric covering the bed. A boy/man. I approach more closely– I nurse suckle the (energetic) milk from him as I spread further his muscular, but no longer hairless, legs.
The scene of the dream shifts to a large procession. A group of aristocratic women in medieval or renaissance garb move from behind the tent toward a river below and distant mountains. A thunderstorm is building and threatening above and behind the mountains.
The scene shifts again to the river’s side where I am trying to pull by rope, a heavy log, up, over the bottom branches of a large oak tree.
A vast flood charges, dark and thundering down the river valley. Both the tree and I disappear in the powerful waters. There is a sense that the waters are destiny and great peace…
The important and surprising point of this dream is that when I awoke, I was flooded with an energy of enormous delight. Energy. For hours after I woke, sensations of ebullient joy flowed through me. Not just joy but energy. Flowing, endless energy. For weeks after, if I told the story or even remembered the dream, I would again be suffused in delight. What enabled me to evoke these levels of light-filled delight? The erotic elements in the dream? Not exactly. I believe that the dream indicated a shift between masculine and feminine poles in my psyche that engaged states of consciousness flooded with amorphous, transsexual (transcendent of opposites) delight.
Such states of consciousness might be the foundation of culture as well, since such dualistic (pluralistic) states and their resolution/transcendence are, I believe, the underlying content and construct of human perception. Homoerotic love, since it is able to evoke feelings in individuals as powerful as the heterosexual drive to procreate, the biological urge to propagate in any species, indicates a capacity to redirect major elements of human personality. The homoerotic emotion indicates a condition free of otherwise inexorable biological logic. The feminine, the earth, and the storm, are evoked here, I suspect.
The homoerotic emotion is a catalytic strain laced through the psychic structure of human kind, perhaps the whole biological universe. It is a dangerous and invaluable alternative, the experience of which is fraught with endless social problems. If it were not very potent, why would people react so strongly to what really seems to be, otherwise, a minor issue. Only a few topics generate the level of vitriolic bigotry that this topic manages to arouse. The prohibitions against it in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are vague in that they probably are reactions against flagrant practices in erotic religious cults of surrounding cultures–the negative reaction thus being as much xenophobic as homophobic. After all David loved Jonathan “more than women.” Jesus Christ, who supersedes all previous God/World agreements, for Christians, said little about sex at all–but forgave the one caught in sin by sinners–much less about the homoerotic emotion–
…except perhaps secretly to St. John.
What I am treating here is the homo erotic emotion, not Gay culture. That is something else for a different discussion. Here we merely discuss an important, powerful element in human perception.
The problem might be in the deeper construct of culture. Many cultures in the past 5000 years, since the development of civilizations and empires, have been so characterized by masculine domination and willful progress, as to be trapped in their own pathology of willful aggression. It is a situation increasingly, violently, out of balance. As the corporate, universal order of the world subconsciously tries to balance itself, individuals respond in the most remarkable ways. Perhaps Gay culture is such a response. I believe the more universal, homoerotic emotion certainly is.
SPECULATION: The dualistic powers that govern the biosphere are called upon to save it. These opposite elements are but an expression of the inexpressible Godhead. Poisons become elixirs, in the right circumstances, with certain personalities. Sexuality and violence are closely related reactions that inherently seek the Eden of union, balance and radiant beauty in all things–sometimes they just react. …the natural world is reeling from traumatic blows being struck against it by militant profiteering and commercial technology. Profit and security are the motives now that dominate the dominant value structures in the world: Security in a world increasingly insecure. Profit in a world increasingly bereft of natural resources, as vast populations, dazed by suffering, mourn their own fruitful increase.
Is there a way to respond to this sad demise of the natural world, our deep spiritual relationship with it? Is there a way beyond the rational sanctity of humanist virtue and religion that has so far failed to save us from the raging human heart?
Stephanie:
Well, he is my man. And I will defend him to the end of the world. Even as above: Chris at his opinionated, full-of-himself, youthful, articulate best! Admittedly, at first, I was repulsed by his explorations. We had both gone off to different colleges. He on the west coast. Myself on the east. We wrote a lot of letters, since we couldn’t afford big phone bills. But my opinion about such topics was changing.
Let me provide some background, since this is such a hotly contested issue. This is what helped me understand what was going on with Chris. So, I didn’t cut him off entirely. And this information is important for later on.
The following gets a little academic. Proceed at your own risk! The value of such persons capable of the homoerotic response is well displayed in the William’s book. [Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh, (Boston, Beacon Press) 1992, p. 17.] According to the anthropology in some of this research, the homoerotic capacity in an individual is an ability gifted by the divine Spirit to reflect its own nature that contains the image or ideal of all things, masculine, feminine, light, dark. This individual is protected by spirit familiars. Those who harm this one, suffer. The Flesh and the Spirit, clearly indicates well founded, alternative attitudes in many cultures that reveal the Judeo-Christian bias regarding this topic and therefore a strong bias in the West generally. Let me explain:
A model of the homoerotic sentiment can be found in the relationship between Herakles and his young friend, Hylas. Herakles (Hercules) was a ‘Goddess priest’ who often wore the robes of the priestess to perform her rites. This transsexual theme figures largely in the history of the self-identification and god-identification found in many world religions. The suggestion in our story is merely that certain of such sexual elements are catalytic in the esoteric action of this story. The sexual issues here evoke connections to Tantric practice and cosmological themes as well–i.e., all is essentially pure, created good. Sexuality is a means of divine realization and enlightenment. In magical practice it is used to re-channel power. The sacrament of sexuality is not only the modern sacrament of self-fulfillment in relationships, but it is, from antiquity, the metaphor of divine/mundane union–best practiced by ones with, at least, the celibate’s dedication. This is true for both heterosexuality and homosexuality.
In many Shamanistic traditions, the tradition of the [old] Navaho for instance, homosexuality is viewed as a metaphoric gift, emulating the bisexual Godhead. (Bisexual because everything in the world comes from God, including the two sexes.) In the realm of the psyche, the androgen, –a person who is sexually balanced, maintaining both poles of sexual orientation–is the gatekeeper between worlds–between this world and the world of the Spirit. This was/is an ability to be prized. Not everybody can do it. It might be a gift necessary or at least valuable to culture and cosmos. It should be noted that not all Shamanistic people hold this view. And many contemporary Native Americans are influenced by the dominant culture in this.
In any case, this more tolerant view seems to be a better appreciation of talents available to human access. It is a poignant fact that this tolerance among Native Americans, that might be considered progressive today, was one of the major excuses Europeans used for exterminating or enslaving the indigenous peoples and cultures of the New World.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p.124 or throughout Graves’ book. Graves’ analysis of the priest/poet/hero figure, such as Herakles, in mythology in relationship with the Goddess is invaluable here. The two are inseparable and perennial in human perception. This topical reference starts with the sacrificial priesthood of the Great Goddess from around the Mediterranean. In this construct, the hero/sacred king/priest/son/consort–Herakles (Gk., “Glory of Hera”) is adulated for a time, then sacrificed to become divine. His initiates would often eat his flesh and blood in communion with their deity. This function of the mediatory priesthood, hieros or hierophant, extends to the priesthood of Jesus Christ in the order of Melquizedek.
The broad range of priestly identity developing from agricultural sacrificial/resurrection religions, performs the essential priestly function of mediating between mundane and divine being. This is the case, if the mediation is expressed in charitable service or by performing rites of bloody or non-bloody sacrifice. There have been many modes of such mediation:
Beginning with the cultural and individual phenomenon of Shamanism, rooted in the early Stone Age, we can see a complex of particular insight and practice… [characterized by] a group of radical techniques: Transsexual trauma, terror, torture, alcoholic inebriation, use of sacred (psychedelic) substances, humiliation and sickness. All are “ingested” in combination with mythological belief patterns and perhaps used in combination with more moderate practices such as meditation, pilgrimage, and other traditional practices. The danger is initiation of psychological unbalance or even death. Some young Eskimo shaman novices, when forced into a transsexual experience, commit suicide, others adjust. (Eliade, Shamanism, p. 258) The positive effect perhaps, with certain individuals, is to disorient one enough, or to separate one enough from one’s personal or cultural context to discover access to fundamental elements from the sub-strata of consciousness, the instinctual “stuff” of personality; i.e. Knowledge, Powers, and Transcendence arise. Jung might refer to this as “figures” or “powers” that arise even spontaneously from the Unconscious. (Jung’s Introduction and Commentary, Secret of the Golden Flower, p.120.)
One can discover the use of such techniques simply by reading Castaneda, or by more laboriously doing comparative religious study and experience. A male might be exposed to the archetypal feminine and thus display in one’s life [transsexual] behavior that loosens the vice-like grip of “ordinary” consciousness. This might allow for other extraordinary archetypal experiences. For another example: Through experience of extreme alcoholic inebriation’s, one does not just come to understand perceptive faculties that are not apparent when one is “in control” but one experiences these faculties in such a way that integrates and empowers one both in the extraordinary world of the psyche and the ordinary world of “daytime” consciousness.
This is not to claim that simply getting drunk or getting high or having unusual sex will do this for you, but in certain circumstances with certain individuals, unusual phenomena pertinent to this story–and Chris’s condition– sometimes occur.
(I would give you a similar presentation on heteroerotic tantric practices, but maybe you already know about that. I’m a little rushed. Perhaps you will simply take my word that these practices are the natural product of the encounter between this world and God, leading to extraordinary powers and experiences, even onto enlightenment and salvation itself.)
End Mental Note!
petunias
are a working class plant; like
pansies, adequate to decorate
gas stations and 7-11’s
but now as sun light shifts surely behind
their purple,
no magenta, no
vermilion purple
offering, its enough
to make one
almost
believe
in
LOVE