CYCLE II Book Two 28-30

 

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

 

 

 

YEMEN AND THE FLIGHT TO INDIA

 

…imagination, reality, myth incarnates, PERHAPS to salvific effect

 

…involves an unexpected visit to Luxor in Egypt, where omens of great benevolence are met.  Then, we visit the Sinai desert and 3rd century Christian monastery of St. Catherine’s.  Next, we fly to Yemen where they confront terrible violence, are drugged, exposed to mystifingly Celtic and  sexual experiences with a very surprising result.  We  are advised to leave for India.

 

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 take a couple of side-trips.  The first was up the Nile to Luxor and Karnak.  As we started out, I realized that I had been traveling to this destination for a long time.  I had waking visions of an elephant, of a great elephant lumbering slowly but determinedly along the shore of the ocean.  I remembered that I had been having these visions all during our trip, but had paid no attention.  The elephant knew unquestionably its destination.  The destination had something to do with a wonderful golden light that I had first seen while doing some energy work with Chris several months previous.  Now the elephant seemed to be nearing the “place” of that Golden light.   Luxor.  The Hindu Elephant God, Ganesh, is the aid of pilgrims.  He is also the Vedic mundane-divine integration.  In Africa, the elephant can be the shaman’s ‘spirit guide animal’.

We arrived in Luxor and took a hotel just south of town.  Our windows led out to a balcony that looked across the Nile to oasis like farms on the other side and the vast barren desert beyond.  The Nile here is randomly embroidered with a negligee of floating plants: cities of lilies; no islands, populations, continents of lotus, moving as if carelessly choreographed; pushed and pulled, eddied and twirled by that ancient current.

We visited the usual sights: Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, the Karnak light show, the rest.  It was hot.  Very hot.  What would one expect for August in the Sahara?  There had been for such a long time a barren sense of waiting.   Long, tedious, often lonely waiting.  Now, the heat and more waiting.  It all seemed endless.  No great affair.  But somewhere inside it, I felt a great sense of arrival, completion of the preparation.  I saw the elephant/god enter the realm of golden light.  I identified completely with the god.  Wonderful, wonderful, joyous light.   I don’t know what this means for the journey, for Yemen.  Is it preparation?  Is it conclusion?  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I don’t know.  If it is conclusion, then I’m ready.  If that is what it is.  It is peace, absolute peace and meaning.  I made a medicine bundle and threw it in the river.  Then we left.

The 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 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 Stephanie 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, its 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 aggression I sensed when first in Sanaa.

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 straps 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 Stephanie 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 tea shop, 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 just 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.

Not out of consciousness.  I dreamed I was laughing.  Next it was Stephanie.  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 over-looking 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 Stephanie again.  Our embrace is of divine duration.  Then she was the man.  Such profound fraternity .  Closer than brothers.  Closer than family.  Extensions of one another. Excursions into one another.  Were one, the same.  Then it was Chris and Stephanie.  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… as someone 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.

The person who burst into the room was another guest.  He and Stevie had gone to visit the local market place looking for gifts.  I didn’t really know him at all.  But now he was desperate.  He pulled me up.  Tried to explain something, but had to stop, calm his breathing.  Then he got it out.  Stephanie was gone!

Gone?!  What do you mean?

Gone. Disappeared.  Taken.  Kidnapped.

What are you talking about?  Don’t be crazy.  What’s happening?

He explained:  “We had been walking in the market looking at ethnic wares.  We were approached by a youngish Italian man.  He knew the market well and showed us the best shops.  Then he took us to a tea room.  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.  Stephanie slowly faded out of my vision.”

 

Then I remembered.  It was from my own drugged experience.  Like a dream.  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, swift body.  And I ran.  No longer pursued or pursuing.  I ran for the exhilaration.  Then it was twilight, I found myself standing over the stag.  It was killed by my spear.  I was bathed in its blood.  I went to Stephanie 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 universes.  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 Stephanie 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.”

 

I notified the authorities, went through endless paperwork and interrogations.  Did not tell them about my visionary experiences.  A search was mounted.  After several excruciating days, nothing was turned up and I was invited to leave the country.  I 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 wake from the dream slowly and know that to find Stephanie we must go to India.  I don’t have any other lead.  I decide to follow the dream.  We will go to India. I will speak to my Tibetan friends there.  I will find these women who have taken my friend.

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.

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 before.  It came unexpectedly.  I knew that Stephanie 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?

 

Why does birth always have to be surrounded by death?  So much death and disaster as you shall see.

 

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

Mexquake II

 

But in India, I found nothing.  Nothing.  I was alone.  Too much alone. I spent a year there.  I sensed nothing, dreamed nothing, almost gave up even wanting to find my love.  Until,

 

Once again I felt that I should try Yemen. If nothing more, to recover my pride and to rouse the beast there once again.

I visited Upper Egypt on the way to Yemen.  I stayed just south of Luxor in a little hotel on the river .  It was like paradise to me.  The river carried islands, populations, no, continents of water lilies floating freely down its course, north.  The farms on the other side are lush gardens backing up against the utterly barren desert beyond.  I visited the “land of the dead” over there.  And stayed for a week on the side of the living.  I had waited in Spain for six weeks and another in Cairo.  Again waiting, waiting.   All in not such patient preparation for what?  I celebrated a Mass in my room over looking the river at Luxor.  Then, I realized that I had been having for days, an experience of the ‘other world,’ a world of wonderful yellow golden light.  Peace.  Completion.  Many times during this journey, I had imagined an elephant slowly lumbering  along the shore of the sea.   Slowly it moved undistracted to its destination.  [The elephant in Africa is the shaman’s beast.  It is Ganesh, patron of pilgrims in India.]   Then I focused on the Nile.  Water.  The cradle for Western Civilization.  The Nile.  Egypt and water.  This is exactly where I needed to be.

And this place is the focus of this pilgrimage.  In it was a peace that surpasses anything that I had experienced.  “Go, in the peace of Christ… alleluia!  Thanks be to God… alleluia!”  I knew I needed to journey no further in the Middle East.  Not to Yemen, anyway.  I could go on  to Yemen but it would make no difference.  The elephant had arrived in the realm of joyous, joyous, golden light.  I stayed there until it had disappeared entirely into the light, which took several days.  I made a medicine bundle and threw it into the river.  For me this is a place of intense delight.

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 to the States 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.  By spewing it out, he produces the gods.   (Interesting religious consciousness.  Better really.  Not ashamed of innocent biological function.) 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 Montserrat 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 the 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 affects 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.

Though 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 social events.

I believe that we are now at a fulcrum moment in our vast history regarding our survival as a biosphere; and 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 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.  And I forgot that I ever knew a woman named Stephanie!

 

 

I returned from Egypt to the U.S. to Berkeley.  There I began doctoral studies in September.  My mother, who lives nearby, and I took a drive north to Geyserville.  The precarious mountain road from inland Geyserville to the coast was the spiritual conclusion to my first pilgrimage.  The geysers from which the ‘ville’ takes its name we thought were further inland than the town in the hills to the east.   I suggested that local as the destination of our drive.  We found that there were no geysers there, but there was one of the world’s largest natural reservoirs of subterranean steam, (ala eastern Turkey!).   Mom and I stayed in those hills for perhaps three hours. As we returned south along highway 101, we looked back and saw smoke.  We turned on the radio, it and the next day’s papers carried stories of five mysteriously spontaneous fires igniting in those hills just when we had been there.  Even my mother, who is patient but generally incredulous about these things, as impressed by the clear coincidence.  Thus I believe the Luxor chapter concluded.

The fires, and storms are connected sexually, Tantrically, to the ritual.  My mother has been central to a lot of the shamanistic imagery, as has been my father.  Both were operative in the formation of personality; consciously unintentionally, operative in the formation of my particular sexual bent, as parents always are.  My sexual practice is abstentious as far as biological creatures are concerned, but the earth, the universe…   Who can really describe such things.

 

[Long Beach: Center of so much of my ritual, (the previous “earthquake ritual,” for instance) art, and life, for the past year; as well as California coastal Indian creation myth and history; as well as being home of some of my family and most influential supporters: was struck by an earthquake at that time of the Geyserville fires.]

 

 

Two months later I left 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.

(1) One day, I opened Panikkar’s Vedic Experience for a “reading” about the approaching trip to Mexico.  The reading I turned to was about Yama, god of death, in the Vedic pantheon.   On my way to central eastern Mexico, I planned a stop in Zuni, New Mexico to observe their winter Shalaco celebrations.  When I called my friend there to make these arrangements,  (2) she was mourning for the murder of one of her students, the suicide of another, (3) and the death of her father.  When I arrived at the home of friends in S. California on my way to N. Mexico, a (4) former parishioner stopped by unexpectedly to tell us that she was dying of cancer.  (5) There were a couple of other cancer stories, including that of my former art teacher and early guide.  (6) The father of the close friend and artist who helped me paint the mural, died of cancer as did another friend of mine.  (7) The sister of my first art teacher in college.)   (8) There seemed to be at every turn a funeral cortege or cemetery.  After Zuni, my friend and I hitchhiked from Albuquerque to El Paso.  We started hitchhiking.  Next to the freeway on ramp was a cemetery, partially covered by the interstate.

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.  It was the next day that that most disastrous earthquake in history hit  Soviet Armenia.  It’s not the 50,000 dead that sadden me, we all have to die.  But those left to suffer…  God 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—rather than it being us who project our perceptions onto nature, it is nature who has formed our perceptions by its projections into our minds and bodies.

We reached Juarez the next day, caught a bus to Chihuahua.  Chihuahua is 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 did a ritual at my fireplace.  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 is not 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.

I was invited to go with an anthropologist down into the deepest canyon in that region in Mexico.  My friend from California and I consulted a pack of Tarot cards he brought with him.  We consulted them, asking simply if I would survive the trip down into the canyon.  Five consecutive readings said, “no.”  We also asked if the Yemen Experiment would have its intended success.  “No”.  That affected me more than the death threat.

When one is into these adventures, normal rational caution is suspended at times, so I intended to go down into the canyon anyway if that was to be the completion of this “experiment” not withstanding any threat of death.   Also, my faith in our ability to read the cards correctly was half-hearted.  But still, five times…

My friend who had traveled with me from California decided to return home at that point.  After he left, I met the other young man, the stranger.  This one was spiritually, psychically gifted  and was to help me complete the ritual.  We had had a couple of conversations about spiritual things first.  On September 11, I went to Mass.  That was the vigil of the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. ( Another dark-skinned apparition.)  After Mass, I ran into this young man, Doug.  He had been looking for me to go for a hike.

He wanted to go up to a statue of Christ on a mountain overlooking  the valley.  So we did.  Though it was a light-hearted hike up to the statue, it felt like we were offering everything to Christ.  Up there on a stone  deck in front of the statue, I meditated  and did Tai Chi.  Then, it seemed appropriate to invite Doug to complete the ritual with me.  He agreed.  I went  to my cabin, got the ritual things.  Then we hiked to the other end of the valley through a beautiful rural Mexican cemetery and a pine wood to the base of a mesa of most extraordinary rocks.  There we gathered what was needed for a fire, and very shortly tried to complete the ritual, so shortly though, that it was more like a comma than a period.  There seemed to be more to come for the ritual to complete itself!

The anthropologist never returned to take me down into the canyon, I waited three days.  Doug was anxious to be gone.  So, I suggested that instead of the canyon (and possible death) that we go to Mazatlan.   That was a place where I had kicked off the third pilgrimage 16 years before.  That journey was to South America during which I became deeply fascinated with the question of God, the Church and the religious phenomenon in human personality.  It just preceded my entrance into the monastery.

While we were still in Creel,  in another of those spontaneous, evocative moments,  Doug had his “helping spirit” named for him.  The deer!   When we got to “Mazatlan” we stayed in the same hotel I stayed in on the south (Mexican) end of the beach 16 years previous.  After a couple of days, my curiosity about the place was such that I felt urged to ask the manager what the name of the place, “Mazatlan,” means.  I was told that it is the Indian dialect for “Place of the Deer.”

By then Doug and I had already begun a series of “exchanges”  that lasted about three hours each, including meditation, energy exchanges, and guided imagery journey.  There were four of these over three days.  In the first of these we sat face-to-face.   The over-whelming sensation of that first section was anger and hatred. I believe it to be the hatred from the dragon.  I say the dragon because it was without malice so it was not, I believe, diabolic in any ultimate sense.   It was the dragon of Being or perhaps Nature, the necessary violence of creativity.  This was extenuated by the fact that we seem to have lost against the forces of technological consumerism.  These forces seem to have taken the field of battle in the human heart and are proceeding to consume the earth.

But, perhaps we win by losing.  The theme of the journey has been death; from the reading about Yama in Panikkar to the prognosis of my own death in the canyon.  We avoided physical death, but was it a rite of passage for us?

After the first meditation, Doug and I proceeded to the usual energy exercises.  These were for peace, healing, light and the usual good effects, but very, very strong.  When I was in the hate mode, I had a vision of struggling to fecundate the great black widow. She, to build her web.  She was vast.  I couldn’t stretch across her abdomen.  Here was 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 nonphysical, personally satisfying, sensation of perfect sexual intercourse.

Fecundating the Spider 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.

Doug’s experience dominates the rest of the vision journey, but I’ll leave that for him to tell.  Doug and his helping spirit, symbol of the male sun god and the peyote vision cult, lured me away from the canyon that might have been my death.  So in a sense saved me from being devoured by the spider after I performed the ancient office of her mate and priest.  (The symbol transcends the sequence.)  We parted soon after, the sense of the deer god strongly with us as my plane left the fog bound coast of Mexico.

Right after arriving home I got a card from my friend in Zuni.  She had left the reservation, to take up a different job.  While driving out, a deer ran in front of her jeep and was killed.  She felt badly, and was angered about the three thousand dollars of damage to the car, but related that the Zunis told her that deer were sacred animals who choose the hunter by whom they will allow themselves to be sacrificed.  She had been so instrumental to my studies on Native American Shamanism.

 

 

(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 places!!!  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.)

 

---

 

TWENTY-NINE

 

 

 

 

Indian Mandala, New Mexico, Brilliant Passages: Conclusion

Cast the Spell, Come the Storm

 

To explain, from a different tact, how this story evolves spiritually, I will describe it, within the structure of a recent journey to India, to classic Kundalini awakening. This same explanation will relate briefly the events of the Indian adventure, so pivotal to our progress.  I was in India to complete some research for this Ph.D. program in Berkeley. This following comparison with Kundalini and Tibetan equivalents is a potent depiction of possible Christian realization, if a Christ really is at the heart of all Being and Existence as I believe.

This resolution reduces several stories and whole religious and cultural traditions to a few phrases but now I seem to be rushing towards the end, no longer patient with making this kind of record or perhaps not much longer capable of it.  Following the sequence in the Shrichakra mandala described in Tucci’s book on the Mandala (Appendix plate III). I interpret as follows:

 

1. The earth chakra, Muladhara, at the perineum and Svadhisthana at the base of the genital organs is represented by my experience with the chthonic creatures the black widow (and the vast, terrible black (snake?) that arose in my inner world, as I and my spirit guides watched, for days, its arising!) just before my departure for India last summer.   In the midst of financial and emotional despair, the Widow appeared and pumped me full of extraordinary energies as the ‘black snake creature’ arose from primordial ooze to first terrorize, then carry me through the galaxy.  In actuality, I went to India against all expectation and financial ability.

 

2. An experience in Hawaii, on my way to India concluded with, among other things, (a.) an uncomfortably, brightly active, but also pleasing energy flowing around the Manipura (naval) chakra.  (b.) “We will be with you there” was the  clearly stated ‘communication from those volatile islands’, that came to me while I was involved in some other ordinary occupation.  Who is “we”…?  (c.)  AIDS connection: Articles in Hawaii papers about growing infection in the world…  Reports about similar  mysterious new diseases…  And tragic need for population stabilization, reduction…

 

 

3. An experience in Agra, India that was so disturbing was an unrequited affair of the heart; the Anahata chakra in the heart. It was similar to Yemen experiment.  Personally earthshaking.

 

4. News about the calendar coincidence of the earthquake at home in San Francisco and  my own disturbance in Agra similar to the frustrating Yemen ritual, came to me from the  ‘throat’ chakra, (the voice of a holy woman, Agnes, who runs the leper colony, my friend in Derha Dun), the Visuddha, (the Word).

 

 

5. Violent headaches in Dharamsala (the top of my head felt like it was coming off as I was taken to the hospital…) indicate possibly, activity in the Sahasrara or Crown Chakra being opened, at the top of the head. (The Yamataka (remover of obstacles) Initiation was being given in the Dalai Lama’s Monastery at this time.)

 

6. Visions from my stay in Dharamsala of the dragon-“man” who came to me comatose; and my striking him with my staff through his forehead as I try to heal him, is the opening of the Ajna chakra, or the “third eye.”

 

 

7. Powerful energy flows from the earth through the marrow of my skeleton preceding the terrible headaches and the visionary energy experience, at the conclusion of the India trip, of my connection with the skeletal structure of the psychic earth makes the tantric, microcosmic-macrocosmic leap. Thus, the purpose of the Shrichakra mandala is to some degree effected with the resulting sense of somehow coming of age, of elevated integration, peace and normalcy, of having died, of giving up my powers, being reborn to be empowered in preparation for…

 

 

This seems to be a fairly clear Kundalini/mandala experience spread over several months  and thousands of miles.  Kundalini power or enlightenment experiences are not as uncommon as one might think.  They happen spontaneously or can be induced by difficult yogic techniques.  (See White, Kundalini.)

 

 

As my tantric studies have concluded in India, my shamanistic studies also an element of my Ph.D. comprehensives in religion and art, conclude with a stay at the American Indian reservation pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico.

In Zuni, it is the dances and some of the masks and some other art forms in the context of the larger Indian religion that take one to that ‘other’ place of ‘nothingness’ that is ‘everything.’  The old, sacred masks, when worn, confer on the wearer divinity itself. (Shalaco)  The impersonator becomes the impersonated.   In one case, the God is sacrificed for the good of all.  The dances, in which the masks are worn, are danced to effect all that is good.  (In that desert land rain becomes the metaphor for what is beneficent.)

These art forms help create a beneficial relationship with nature especially, there in that special ‘place,’ that I feel to be of great power.  That is why I went there.  There is an old Church there, a 16th century Catholic mission, in which murals of the Kachinas are being painted.  That ancient building is the integration and amplification of ancient spiritual power.  I celebrated Mass there several times, talked to the artist, and visited that side of pueblo often.

 

Visions at Zuni:

 

3/10/90

The Shrichacra mandala pattern of Kundalini realization identified as the pattern of the Indian mandala pilgrimage!!!  (as described above)

 

3/12/90

Sky mating earth ritual–sense of sinking into the local water- table: connubial bliss with the water goddess.   Rains follow.

Meet the war god Twins from Pueblo myths.  Merge with them

 

3/10/90–3/23/90

Battle with Steel Staff from Yemen.  Weather Working: Water, Earth, Air, other Elementals.  The Yemen staff is retired. ???

 

4/3/90

Yesterday the ritual of creating a battle mandala (‘medicine’ shield) continued at grotto where the Dragon-man from India was cured.  But then the steel staff from Yemen, in a spontaneous arising vision, heated to melting point and the lower half fell away through the earth to the sky below!!

Now all is open sky above, sky below.  Puncture through earth plane.  I am still holding.  Holding.  I still have the glass sharp sword.  (Monk becomes warrior.)  If worse comes to worse, there are still the direct energies.  I must disappear to survive.

 

Staff is replaced by large earth-red shield.  I am now solely warrior.  I am naked, clothed in light and dark behind shield with large glass sharp steel sword in my right hand surrounded by auras of protective mandalas.

 

 

 

THE FIGURE OF THE WARRIOR IS NOW COMPLETE,

and soon to launch the salvific ‘first strike’…

 

 

 

MANDALAS AND POISON

 

The human body and the body of creation engage to produce the mandala’s intention, which is justification of personality, of world, God.  The aesthetic experience of the mandalic configuration is fairly elitist, since few would go to the trouble to conjure it.  So in evaluating art objects, as related to this story, perhaps we could look at the painted, 3-D, or sand mandalas as psycho-active substances, from the art world rather than the plant world, meant to: 1.] aid one’s journey of transformed consciousness; to catalyze growth and holiness as “fetish” power objects; 2.]  provide,  in a ritual context, for the divine encounter with “self” and “Self”;  3.]  be a “personality” to engage us in the “Grand Affair” of absolute realization.

This story is meant to function like that.   Conceptually, the Mandala, like the Crucifix or the Sacraments for pre-Reformation Christians, represents the distilled codification of a vast “wisdom” gleaned from eons of cultural and esoteric redaction, to produce substances (art objects), and processes (rituals, religions), symbols if you like,  that engage the divine  to the greatest degree  possible.  Why?  For Love.  For the union of all things open and luminous.  For complete realization, resolution of the divine mundane conflict.  For survival.

In my own inner conflict, my personal ‘dysfunction’ (poison), and the world’s conflict, microcosmic/macrocosmic dysfunction  the battle seems necessary, as this play of dualities that produces the world is necessary(?).  The Fall, the “necessary Sin (poison) of Adam”: Necessary as the Aryans violently invading and conquering, (poison), northern India to produce the Vedas and thus Buddhist and Hindu culture.  Necessary as the conflict, (poison), between Christ and Jewish/Greek/Roman culture, culture in general, that produced the Mediating Church.  Necessary as the conflict between the natural world and technological aptitude to perhaps realize the destiny of divinely mundane Christos; that Omega point to which spirit and matter evolve, or better, resolve (?)…

Well, at this point no one can say what that is.  Exactly.  No one knows what the Glorified Body is, or the Mystery of Union with God, or Nirvana for that matter.  But the “way” is clear…

 

 

Something of importance happened in New Mexico in this regard.  I circumambulated–drove around the Trinity Nuclear Test site near White Sands, New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was detonated.  Nuclear power is the central symbol for the great technological leap forward characteristic of our age and our “problem”.  Poison

 

My friend Fr. Chris is back in jail on further molestation charges.  Poison.  He was arrested in New Mexico when I first arrived there for the Zuni research.  In this story, aberrant sex is the result and connection of this spell to aberrant cultural and technological use of human capacities, creative powers.  It triggers the great release of creative energy so that we may turn it to sacrifice and healing.

 

I traveled around New Mexico with a friend who had come to drive me home to California.   We visit El Santuario del Chimayo.  A holy place.  Then we visit Los Alamos nuclear research center, which is run by the University of California.  Very uncomfortable place.  Evil?  Then we make an unplanned return to Chimayo.  Holy.  (?) Nurturing place.  Healing place.  Then we were to go to Crown Point in the middle of the Navajo reservation, where I was to celebrate the Sunday Masses.   Go through Los Alamos again to get there by the shortest route.  Get lost in Los Alamos.  It’s night.  Drive around and around, trying to find the right road through Los Alamos to Crown Point.  Psychically I am spinning a web.  A trap is set?  Some sort of psychic/spiritual device to control this power represented by Los Alamos?  Then we find the road out.

Celebrate beautiful liturgies in Crown Point.  Wonderful people there.

Finally we are ready to leave New Mexico.  All the people who had helped me get to and from New Mexico faced many unusual obstacles.  For example, my friend’s transmission and starter blew out on his car two weeks before he came; his driver’s license was suddenly in danger of suspension, so he had to delay coming for three days; he sprained his ankle; developed a terrible cough; infected sinus; and was troubled with high blood pressure while in New Mexico.  Needless to say, I felt relieved as we finally headed for home.

But I also felt under assault psychically.  I drove the first ten hours until we were out of the danger zone.  It concluded like this.

 

Visions:

I am the warrior.  I am crouching, sheathed in skin-like armor of silver light, behind the great mandala-shield which is on my left arm.  It is being blasted with a constant assault of tremendous energy from the left.  On the right, I am repulsing small shots of energy with the lower blade of my sword.  As we travel across Arizona, I feel increasingly challenged.  Rather than be overcome, I curl into a ball, lay on my side in a shallow hole in the earth and cover the hole with the earth shield.  I’m just “not there” when the light-blasting angel of death passes over.

 

As we arrived at my friends’ house in Southern California house, it started to rain heavily, a rare tropical rain storm, a deep blessing.

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 begins the Turn of Being.   This is not the end, this is the beginning.  WE MUST WAKE UP.  Thus, I have dreamed dreams of Power. Thus, I have turned in my sleep.

 

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.

We “compassionately” abandoned Chris. Did all the “right”, seemingly compassionate, legal things. And destroyed him in the process.  Left him on is own in Albuquerque, isolated in shame and compulsion. Materially taken care of, but out of the way! After all that psychological therapy, was he healed or even restrained?

Thus we are all abandoned.

 

 

“Stephen is at the same location in the same Southwest desert as before, with the crystal skull reliquary at his side.

Stephen with great, steel, glass-sharp, sword across the altar, the “mesa,” in front.

Stephen with medicine shield, the battle shield mandala of 8 directions.  Baqua, Axis Mundi.

(I am in the center of the great mandala shield, now three dimensional and all around me, a galaxy, the universe.)

 

The great staff from Yemen rests at his side.

 

Stephen, Artificer

Dances the dance of swords

sends the webs of

binding

 

[Having spun the web around the sacred trees of Los Alamos

I now play the webs of the Spell.]  And

binds the insane Destruction

And binds the Criminal, injects the poison

to heal.

Dances the Dance of Swords and entreats the God of War.

Is the God of War.

 

Stephen Artificer

 

(silence)

 

 

 

 

 

spins the webs of healing.

Artificer

tends the fire of creation;

 

 

 

the 5 creatures and 12 directions,

dragons of water and fire, earth, air and ether,

tends the weapons,

warrior

guards the People

Spreads the Spell of Being

treading twilight,

Artificer watches for dawn,

 

 

 

________________

 

Within the month of these events above, 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”, finally?

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us…”

 

(The battle for the sentience of Being continues…)

 

_________________

 

 

…we walk along the misty beach, children playing in the distance…

 

Adam, Man of clay, of the earth, straining for realization, liberation.

Chris, the priest=the active, mediating purpose of human identity=

Christ=the Great Symbol of God=Shaman, yogi, minister, monk, Chris.  Kind Chris, Warrior Chris–Buddi(y) to…  The Anointed One.

Stephan the Crown(Gk.)=Sanctuary, Magic Circle, Mandala, Meeting Place w/The Other World as the Non Temporal Other meets Matter and Consciousness (Time) of human perception.

Agnes  Lamb (of God)

 

Art is everything that comes after the timeless moment of consciousness.  Everything subsequent to consciousness–which does not seem to be touched by time–is a reflection about the timeless moment of consciousness stretched out in linear, temporal thought.  It is literature.  It is science.  Art.

 

 

The scene shifts to the suffering of the world, building… building to nuclear proportions, to an explosion of white light.  White, Black of a star lit night.  Then white fades to mist, misty, sunny beach.   Stevie and Chris are walking along the beach arm in arm.  There is a little child playing in the sand.  The others are horsing around in the distance.   More people are scattered along the beach.  We don’t know where this is.

 

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 Chris, Stephanie and the others dead?  Is the baby dead?  Are they in this world or the other world?  Was their experience only personal?  Merely deluded hallucinations?  Or did it have impact on the world?  Did it facilitate our survival as we hoped?   Our salvation?   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, 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Re:  Salvation outside the Church:

The Church understands itself to be the place where the incarnation takes place.  And here is a reference to the shift in its ultimate sense.  Just as the Church, since Origen and St. Cyprian in the middle of the third century formulated that famous statement:  extra ecclesiam nulla salus [outside the church there is no salvation] we are exposed to a tautological emphasis:  Wherever salvation happens, there is the church.  Ecclesia is understood as locus salutis.  This is the cosmic and soteriological understanding in the primordial Katholike:  the church which exists throughout the universe, space, time, and eternity.  (Panikkar,  Bellarmine Lecture, 1991.  “A Christophany for our times”, p. 1.)  We are talking here not just of the organizational level of church in the Vatican or the hierarchy, or even the World Council of Churches, etc. but of the real body of salvation that is the animation and life of existence.

 

PAST LIFE:

During my first assignment as a priest, I went to a psychologist/hypnotherapist for treatment of migraines.  He was not able to help me with headaches, but we had this interesting experience.  We first talked generally about my condition.  Then, about my comparative studies and like experiences that he had had while a graduate student at a major university.  Then, we talked about past life regression.  I felt such experience to be so subjective as to be impossible to judge as anything but an interesting psychic, probably purely psychological, phenomenon.  However, since this therapist was versed in the hypnotheraputic techniques associated with this experience, I was interested to try what was called a “past life regression.”

By then, I was already used to hypnosis.  So, I followed his lead.  The first image that came to mind was not a past life, but very much this life– when I was five years old:  I had arrived home from school at our California ranch.  I discovered that my mother was not home when I got there, which meant that I was alone on the ranch.  I was afraid.  I gazed up into the hills to the east.  And began to cry for the loneliness of what I saw up there.  My mother walked in at that point, which meant that I had not really been alone at all.  She asked sympathetically why I was crying.  I told her that I had seen a wolf, which amused her.  There had not been wolves in that part of California for 50 years.  I had not seen a wolf.  But to this day I believe that I did glimpse something terrible.

Next, the therapist took me on a vision journey back through a long tunnel to a place of mist and fog.  The mist blew away.  I was in a pre-historic age.  Perhaps somewhere in south central Asia or north west India.  I was a shaman or yogi in a forest far away from the nearest village.  I was sitting before a fire at twilight conjuring the ‘powers of being’ somehow.  Then, something came for me.  It was terrible.  Too powerful.  It devoured me.

The next scene placed me in a Renaissance Roman Place.  I was an ecclesial prelate.  Perhaps a Cardinal!?  I was dressed in the full satin robes appropriate to my office.  I was moving swiftly across marble floors.  We were dealing with the same evil as above but more successfully, given thousands of years of religious development and the Advent of the Christ.

That concluded my “past life regressions.”  Genetic memory?  Waking dreams?  St. Paul’s “one life” lived out in various temporal modes?  Perhaps, it was the fundamental religious issue deeply etched in my sub-conscious.  How is this feral beast to be met?  Simple goodness?  Heroic self-sacrifice?  I’ve done what I can, as you see…

 

 

So, Bishop, what do you think?  Have I not walked the path of the pilgrim–sincerely?  And like a shaman/prophet of old, –human “history” for thousands of years– have I not gone into the other world to steal fire from heaven for the sake of the people?–or at least tried to  –like a priest, for the union of worlds, for the reconciliation of all things, for healing?   Have I not submitted to the strict disciplines of contemporary academic and religious masters?  I am mystified and challenged by the horrific element that I came across in Yemen and other places.  I have taken this as far as I can without further conversation with you.  I need to hear (Lt. root: ob audire) what you have to say to help determine the will of God in this, the rhythm and breath of the Spirit in this– in order to be truly obedient (Lt. root: ob audire) as I intend.   So, Bishop, Over-seer of the Sacrament, Guardian of Souls–

 

…what do you think?  Can Stevie ever face the baby’s death alone?  Was the shock needed to send her into the other world or to bring her back?  To do what, after all?

 

 

 

 

 

(CAST THE SPELL, COME THE STORM)

 

After setting down

from 19 hours in the air

from Bangkok

from Nepal

to San Francisco

to sleep the first hours of jet lag away

Awake to

“Lasher” of a storm

wind rips

hip, lip

sucking

trunk thigh lift

strip leaves lift

and lift the air

sway and

swim

swarm like hair

underwater stay

rooted lay

self up

on

upon the shelf

let the wind blow

clean through

work its pleasure

lash the ground

sweet bright breath

clear and sound

clean

lift the dust and rave

raise sprint high

the spirit my soul

not last

my storm gusting through yours

Transparent

permeable to your full breath

whip the air

papers high ( the stack

piled neatly, filed

in their sullen society

then solely membered in the clear clean sky (that morning)

between earth and sky mating a clean sky morning high

snow storm of papers

whipped up instead of down

“hope you have a copy buddy…”

 

good

blow the wind

luck

connubial bliss with the wind

sin… no, no

eucharistic feast maybe

at least its a good try

earth and sky

moves

replies, flies

light

the doubt

 

break the heart crushing broken centuries, eons dry lake dry

for all sakes

sate the drought

light not doubt

ignite the storm

then sweetly kiss our lips

together with a gentle fall

light drops on an iridescent day

a battle fraught with love

and fought from trench foxholes

freshly dug

grave

s

(Hide my lady, the front is coming.)

 

points of passage in

this sweetest honeycomb

of mornings and misses in

this labyrinth of meaning and misses

 

Until the rain (sane director, ringmaster, crew)

rain too full many body laid out forms

some not lost yet

not yet

sheath the sword

Dear my sweet Lord forgive my fears

dear my Lord…

come the storm.

 

red berries high branch

high piled snow

whitest crystalline

chaos transformed

 

to taste of sweet salvific satisfaction

sung

in high rhythm lilting

in high heavenly choirs

in rhythm with our

groaning evolution

 

from start

to finish

to ravish the ‘lie’

to reason and lavish dream

(for ‘I’ start to see too

clear, too

clean)

So, finish the dream

for ‘I’ cannot (upon the shelf)

So, rip the wind

earth river

ocean stream

weather and spirit

maker of storms and climate of our dream.

 

---

 

THIRTY

 

 

Stephanie:

That was all so long ago.  I eventually went back to India to work with Agnes.  A real saint.  I gave up magic.  I gave up sorcery.   Put it all away.   The two of us women worked together for years.  When Agnes died, I took over.  Thus, I have labored here for the last twenty years, among these lepers.

But I often think of those strange experiences long ago and how we were saved in the end.  Remarkable things would happen when Chris and I got together…

 

Chris had gained control of $300,000,000,000 worth of investment accounts.  Others want it: the CIA, a reactionary organization in the Catholic Church, Magnum Dei, and other, even more insidious agents.   Chris had obtained these financial resources from a devoted follower, Mrs. Shanti.  (Chris always could attract people, especially people with money.) She inherited these accounts from her Green Beret son, who was secretly a C.I.A. operative killed as he worked a drugs/guns/money triangle in Southeast Asia.  He was also a member of Magnum Dei who had invested some of their funds in his Asian operation.  It took years, after his death, for these various forces to find where Mrs. Shanti’s son had hidden the money.

Chris discovered that not only does he have all this money to deal with, but certain arduous travel experiences and the study of mysterious Asian religions have awakened in him unusual powers.  Such powers that can effect the weather, destroy his enemies or even cause earthquakes.  He struggles to reconcile this with orthodox religion as he knew it before.  He fears that his powers are Satanic, since the darkness of their exercise results in much destruction.

Chris’s main nemesis, whose name is Adam, tries to ferret out Chris’s secrets in order to gain control to the treasure.  Adam, otherwise charming, helped once upon a time to develop the Vietnam War in order to gain enormous profit for his clients in supply and munitions sales.  He operates along the edge of true evil.  Though he feels lured by Chris’s way, he is a dark alter-ego to Chris’s search for wholeness, holiness, health, and survival.

Chris is also opposed by the Bishop, a member of that sinister, confused, but very influential organization, Magnum Dei.  Some members of the death squads in El Salvador were members of Magnum Dei.  The Bishop investigates Chris and sends an inquisitorial priest, Fr. Patrick Mallin, to bring Chris and his money into line.  Fr. Pat, however, is quietly independent with his own agenda.  He is nearly converted to Chris’s cause through the sometimes sensual efforts of Chris’s assistant—ME–and a “special” relationship with Adam himself that some mistake as sexual.

 

No, Chris.  Please.  Move away from me.  Don’t touch me.

Even as he resists, Pat’s arms writhe snake-like about Chris in response to Chris 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.)

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…  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.

 

Chris nearly succeeds in his task to convert Fr. Pat to his Way.  But finally, he renounces compulsion and offers Pat freedom of choice to do what is right.

In the meantime, Adam, thinking that he has discovered the access codes to the money abandons his pursuit of Chris and proceeds to the security control room in a secret Swiss bank.  He is nearly killed by the bank’s security system because his code was incomplete.  He recovers and returns to the chase on the Tibetan Plateau just as Chris is confronting Fr. Patrick.

Chris is in confrontation with the elements of creation, powerful forces in the Church, as well as that insidious agent of secular power, Adam.  Chris is plagued by conscience, doubt, and terror.   Yet, in pursuit of his holy intentions, he seems to be protected by the very powers that plague him.  He entices Pat with strange power beyond imagining, the force of which simultaneously destroys most of Adam’s hired assassins and rips open a vast chasm thousands of feet deep between Chris and Adam’s confused forces.  Adam has just begun to suspect the process of conversion that pursuing Adam has begun in his heart.  He recommits himself to obtain access to Mrs. Shanti’s inheritance, (“peace beyond understanding,” according to T.S. Eliot, something that neither Adam, nor the modern heart, is quite ready to substitute for the money).  Adam fails this time, but is open to a sequel.

Chris’s quest has climaxed when in a waking dream trance he sets certain forces in motion meant for the salvation and survival of the world.  Chris and Stephanie climax when they discover very traditional but little known teachings about the sweet delights of a spiritual friendship as potent as their formerly physical relationship.

 

…21th Century no longer accepts, so readily, racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, authoritarian, xenophobic attitudes in religion.   But 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, in the central nervous system, in the body itself.  Study/practice leads one not only through the positive beauty of other traditions but also into the horror that typifies history.

 

 

Stephanie muses widely, then remembers this following encounter with one of Chris’s pursuers:

 

 

Fr. Pat opens the unlocked door of Steph’s room.  He slips in quietly.  Dusk cast shadows obscure his entrance.  Steph 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 Chris.

Chris?  What do you know about them?  Who are you?

I’m Fr. Pat, I just want to talk.  That’s all.  It is important that we talk.  …I’m trying to understand Chris.  I have been sent by my 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 the Bishop.  He is ready to recommend to Rome that Chris be censured, condemned and excommunicated.  Perhaps more…  Before I report to the Bishop 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 comparative 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 might have the capacity to understand.  Perhaps you can help me understand him.  Then I can help him.

How do you know so much about me?

I have to be thorough, or people get hurt.

If you want to help him…  Maybe…

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 Sete…, you know, the Indian in New Mexico.  Do you know the connection that he sees in all this?

I really don’t.  Maybe it is an integration of various cultural, religious and artistic elements, sort of, knowing Chris, 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 to 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.  (She pauses as if reconsidering something.)  Do you always approach so directly…?

(Stephanie eyes him warmly, even a little seductively.  Pat tries to ignore the atmosphere Stephanie begins to create.)  She continues:

Look, the success or failure of Chris’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’ Chris, you have to know those things.

What experience, what do you mean by “volatile effect…” etc.?

Altered state of consciousness.  I thought you would know about such things.  Since, you are so thorough.

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.  Steph 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. 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 phenomena is related to many religions, opens the door to a discussion about certain techniques for the “shift of consciousness” that seemed 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?

Chris 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 aesthetic 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.  I do my homework very thoroughly.

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?  Everybody knows the problem.  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.  Stephanie, 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, Nepsis, that has dominated official 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 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 to 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 includes prayer, meditation, music, dance, stories, poetry, icons, mandalas, rituals, other psychedelics, ascetic practice and various other yogas which 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 put a bottle of wine in the fridge, to chill.

(Fr. Pat is uncomfortable with this advance by Stephanie. His body tenses for a moment.  His lean, athletic hips shift tightly.  But does not protest as Stephanie places a bottle of deep, dark, blood red wine on its side in the refrigerator.)

Perhaps you know that Chris has critiqued his own approach according to the norms of aesthetical theory, especially as that is applied to icons, mandalas, and Abstract Expressionism and traditional theology.  It’s all available.  Well, the formal critical work is.  There are lots of things that he never published.

Last time I talked to him, he was trying to clarify how his work fits into the larger scheme of human knowledge by representing the cosmologies, beliefs (gods, God, or science), spiritual experience (from kenosis to sunyatta) and psychic experiences (psychokinesis to rainmaking) that are the self-identification of people(s) in dramatized rituals.  The whole of this is developed and critiqued according to Stephen Setewa’s categories, such as…

You sure this is what you want?

Well, I don’t know those terms.  Tell me more about Stephen Seteotewah.

 

Stephen Se-te-wah.  Besides being a famous medicine dancer in his Southwest Native American tribe, and a dedicated Catholic, he has an academic expertise in Theology, the History of Religion and the Philosophy of Science.  He holds doctorates in Chemistry, Theology, and Philosophy.  He has taught at Cambridge, Harvard and the University of California among others and has published more than thirty books and three hundred major articles.

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 have considered devil worship and evil.

Well, Father, 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 Sem.

A little is not enough, is it?

Go on.

Chris 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 the contemporary lifestyle.  That perversion is the anti-Christ for Chris.

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.   The ten virgins in scripture, half of whom had oil for their lamps and half who 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 and wailing and grinding of teeth!

That’s sobering.

Chris’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, Chris 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 Chris 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.  Cosmothean..,  what …?

Never mind that for now. 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.  It’s 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 obsessed with your Chris?

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, Chris 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 Chris 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 Chris 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 the New World, or the even more pathetic fundamentalist movements.

Well, anyway let’s go on.  What is all this about martial arts.  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, allright, exactly.

Such esoteric martial practice as developed in China reflects 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 more pacific religious traditions!

Feel strongly about this, do you?

I don’t like sloppy attitudes.

Does Chris continue to practice?

Chris is an advanced martial artist.

I still don’t see the connection.

Chris 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.  Lot of it is physical but a lot is 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, 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.  Yang Cheng Fu’s older brother, Yang Shao Hou, was a real killer.  Became a sour, bitter, old man.  But then that was their profession.  Its danger.

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 Chris’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 clever, aren’t you!  That’s all you wanted, isn’t it?  After all our talk, you liar, all you wanted is the money!

No.  Please understand.  Our first interest is Chris as a person.  But you must understand.  We are not the only one’s interested in Chris.  There are others.  And they are not interested in his personality…

______________________________________________

Adam:

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 Chris controls.  But he is much more complicated than I anticipated.  I thought him naive, I guess I’m lucky to be alive.  Pride goeth before a fall, they say.  …and the Seduction???

 

Stephen laughs from his desert reservation…

 

Mother and I wander through the family graveyard, pleasant with wild California poppies, golden,  and purple lupine…

 

Chris and Stephanie walk along a warm, misty beach–children play along the shore…

 

Agnes, gem like- like clear water-  sits on the verandah in her wheel chair, one-legged Agnes.   Amidst the lepers.  Distant, muted clatter from their little houses as they finish perhaps their evening meal.  Having fought off the final schizophrenic split, of personalities and lives, she sits one, whole.  A life of integrity and service.  She refuses to have telephones and faxes in her place.  Too easy.  Destroy communication.  Writing and talking is better.  So old now.  The good fight won.  She remembers everything as she gazes over her evening garden.  No need for television or radio.  She sees all she has seen… and more.  Art and knowledge, science and literature, myth and history, all leads/returns to simple, ordinary, atemporal consciousness–All in one great clear light,

 

as evening’s dark conceals slowly

the garden’s final range of earthly sights

in this night’s tired air

in this night’s

clear

and final light.

 

 

NARRATOR’S LAST NOTE TO HIS…

 

 

Dear Dread Master ,

 

(What Lucifer Did)1

 

I wanted to add just a final note in my report… As you know there are two spiritual paths: The empty path, devoid of phenomena, empty of projection—no judgement, no experience—simple bliss (after years of religious practices, usually).

 

And then, there is the symbolic way—communication, community, communion–experience, decision, relationships. I chose the latter (cataphatic rather than apophatic ) way because it’s easier to communicate about some thing than it is about no thing . It’s really the same in the end. And I know that you do, dread lord, enjoy your little entertainments, your soaps , so to speak. Well, so do I– The human predicament, the other “irresistible imperative”, ‘down to the fourth generation’, and more, so much more… Yes, yes, I know that I’ve been a little repetitious, but certain episodes, issues, definitions were hard to inculcate. I thought they would bear, indeed needed deeper penetration, …deeper observation and expression.

 

Well, in any case, we seem to have taken the field, don’t you think—this is the intention, your intention, that we serve, isn’t it?

 

There was in response to this note from our narrator

 

a deep lowing,

 

a booming, groaning

 

NO!

 

It is clearly regret given

 

voice

 

…and despair, reverberating across the universe

 

No, no, no… this is not what I meant at all. I am/Light borne–

 

no,

 

Then silence again.

 

Nothing, nothing was

 

nothing, nothing was, no thing… God or creature.

 

How long? Who can tell, when there is no rising, or setting, nor turning about another…

 

Until,

 

like a pin prick, a tiny sound passing by,

 

from the waters…

 

Poppies, golden poppies, purple lupine and golden poppies between the gravel and the graves

 

and along the freeways ,

 

Not so blissfully self absorbed as the deadly ’habits of the heart’—just a gently swaying, –full breath of ocean — and open poppies along the great snaking curves of an open country onramp

 

“Lisping,

 

Whispering

 

Lisping whispering dialogs

 

of trees and grass…”

 

Swaying, purple, pollinating breeze before the whispers

 

past

 

The golden gentle breeze

 

Refreshing breath

 

Of a blue throated

 

dancing Lord.

 

 

 

_______________________________

1 The Master tells this Moslem story about Lucifer and God: The Devil is talking to God: “I worship You alone. From the beginning, only You. Now you want us to bow down, to bend our backs before this human, this pathetic creature stretched out in time and space, full of bile and feces, who cannot love you as we do, fully, all at once, in the singular moment of your eternal glory. I will not do it. You, like a doting grandfather who pours all his favor on his last grandchild, his last creation… No! We will not! We remain loyal to you. Obedient to you alone– by being disobedient!