Legends of School
“Donny, come here, come, come.” It was my classmate, and he was eagerly motioning me to follow him. This was very odd because he was Black and I was White, and this was third grade in East Texas in 1970, and, although Leon County School was officially desegregated, that didn’t mean the different races mixed socially, not by any means. It was like there were two different worlds sharing the world, only no one shared anything with the other race unless they had to. I tried to ignore him, but he was persistent, standing there under the awning near our classroom putting all his will into his hand pulling me towards him.
I regretted again that day, some two weeks before, when, bored to have no boys my age to play with because we lived so far from town, I finally gave in to my sinful desire to go and play with the Black boys who lived on the same dirt road as I, sinful because I knew my daddy would not like me to do that and might whip me for it. We lived on Old Durant Road four miles from the town of Jewett, a road littered with the houses and trailer houses of both poor Whites and Blacks. We were different my daddy often said. We were Dukes and White, and they were just a bunch of niggers. I believed him, never challenged his racism, but I always wanted to point out we lived on the same road as they and were poor too, but I never did. We lived in the woods almost a football field from the road, woods I roamed in, where I became a thinker, because I spent most of my playtime alone in those woods. My two step-sisters told on me too much to play with. That scrubby secondary forest, punctuated with tall old trees, was where I put my thinking cap on, as a habit I mean, kippah-like, although I already thought a lot, and so the solitude helped me to grow, was something I actually enjoyed sometimes, but it did get boring, like on that day.
Anyway, I knew the boys lived a mile or so further down the road, and so I rode Dolly, my Welch pony, to see them. I rode her bareback and with reins of rope, Indian style we called it then, as we couldn’t afford proper horse tack. Boy were they surprised. They lived in a cluster of houses on both sides of the road, and all the boys came out to play. They were a lot rougher than I was used to, and poor Dolly got the brunt of it, but it was wonderful. I spent almost the whole day there and regretted it after because I thought I’d done wrong. I never went back and, although the boys, like this one now, held my one-day friendship still in their eyes, I didn’t talk to them at school other than what you have to say when you live side by side, and I didn’t want the White boys to know I’d made friends with them. My daddy never found out, but it’s doubtful he’d have whipped me. Kids have this way of taking the prejudices of their adults as something they wear at all times and in all circumstances, and that if they don’t do the same, they’re in big trouble.
An image of that day has stood out in my mind and heart ever since, my heart also because I feel the sadness of it in my bones, and I’ve wanted so many times to tell that little White boy I was back them to just eat and enjoy it. The mothers made a feast for us, happy to have me there, and they went all out, cooking fried chicken with all the trimmings, mashed potatoes and gravy and greens with bacon bits and other tasty things. It’s pained me so many times to realize they must’ve sacrificed for that meal, and I just refused to eat it, but I wasn’t trying to be mean. It was so clear to me that here was line I mustn’t cross, to be loyal to my daddy I said in my mind, and looking at that nice meal I had to repeat that a few times. I’d play with them boys but not eat their food. You’d think the women would be put off, but they knew what was up. They sat me down—I think there were three of them —and, smiling with the patience of the ages, waved a drumstick under my nose until I couldn’t resist it, knowing as they did the hands of little boys when it came to being offered what they liked, and I grabbed that leg and ate it, but that was all I’d eat I thought to myself, the chicken, but I wanted to plow into the rest like who would’ve thought it. I didn’t though.
Returning to that little Black boy motioning me at school, I followed him to where he was leading me, a place near the end of the row of classrooms where we wouldn’t be easily seen by anybody. He stopped and put a crayon to his arm, a black one, and said, “Look, I’m not black.” And then he put a white one to mine and said, “And you ain’t White.” I stood there and agreed with him, never having looked at it like that before. He was being painfully earnest, like he was showing me something extremely important, a discovery of his that would change, if not everything, then at least things between us. For just a moment I felt his pain at being Black in a White only world, as much of all that a nine-year-old can grasp, but then I quickly walked off back to the playground, eager to get away from his pain and the dawning sense, which I wanted to nip in the bud, that I was a cause of it. I felt really uncomfortable as I was walking away, as these weren’t feelings that fit into my kid-self (more grown up they were ), and like a kid I just wanted to lose myself in play, which meant in those third grade recesses get back to bulldogging it on the merry-go-round (grab its sidebars with both hands when it was at full speed and let it fly you through the air), and I was king of the bulldogs.
I was Donny Duke, a recent addition to that ‘been together since kindergarten’ ascending class of that one classroom per grade country school, and I was from Houston, the big city, and I was girl-crazy, girls in the class as crazy about me (Carla even dug up her dead cat to give me the skull, a prize for boy like me, a woods roamer), and walking to and fro under those tin awnings, my class going somewhere in single file, snaking this way and that, high school girls would come and run their fingers through my hair and fuss over me and say how cute I was and didn’t do that for any of the other boys. You would not believe what took that normalcy from me, religion believe it or not, but the spiral will fill that out later.
There was another reason I was making a hasty retreat from that boy’s pain, one deeper than a narrative of a lifetime can go without sounding like it’s gone off the deep end so far have we gone from the narrative of soul, a secret, awful reason steeped in my own unremembered murder at the hands of the KKK when my soul had donned the body of an African American man of the South in a former life, which was somewhere around the turn of the 19th century. It was a haunting really, and the memory hunted me in dream as a little kid, although in this moment it was a stirring awake enough to run from, dreams where I’d either be or be watching a Black boy growing up, and that day with the Black boys on Old Durant Road, playing among their smiling mommas and dilapidated old houses, was a sort of an unrecognized homecoming, why it felt so good but why also I really never went back: it really hit a nerve.
Getting back to the setting of this story, Safed, Israel, it’s occasion for being told, I don’t remember when I put on the kippah, before or after my night at Mosheheim’s, or if I had the dream of putting one on before, but I know I had it on after, when I attended a couple of classes at the Ascent Institute of Safed, where the crowd at Avraham’s was taking night classes. I wore a white kippah, which was for ceremonial purposes, not for everyday use, why probably I got pegged as a non-Jew so easily. I was and am a person that listens to synchronicities, and I found that kippah on the ground a day or so after the lucid dream about putting on a kippah, where I found it I don’t remember, but most likely in the cemetery where I was sleeping. Of course I put that one on. My whole time in Israel it was the only kippah I found. It appears the universe that put it on me didn’t want me to convert to Judaism, since it didn’t aid at all in that process, made sure I’d look like a Jew wannabe Jesus look alike and nothing more.
I went to Ascent in the late afternoon and asked if I could takes classes there, explaining I was a non-Jew but was thinking about conversion, and that I wanted to study Kabbalah. I was sent to talk to the director, or whatever he was called, who gave me permission. He told me, and it was literally the talk of town, that it was the time of the Revelation, not in the Christian sense of that word, but in the Jewish sense, when the Kabbalah would be disseminated throughout Judaism. Tradition has it that only when you turn 50 can you turn to it, after having learned the whole of the Law and having put it in practice for a lifetime more or less, so you won’t get sidetracked or go off the deep end obviously. In any event, their disseminating it to all Jews who wanted to learn it, regardless of age, was a breach of tradition, but they thought it was justified because they believed it was the time just before the end times and the time of Revelation. I left there with a small pamphlet I’d picked out to read among several, because the title caught my eye, which was something like The New World Order and the Coming of the Mashiach.
It spoke of the Mashiach as a political leader, not a miracle worker, and stressed that. He’d be the leader of the nations, and Jerusalem would be the capital of the world. That was basically the gist of it. I don’t remember much else of the pamphlet other than my thoughts while reading it, which that it seemed to me the writers of the pamphlet were trying to upstage the use of that phrase, new world order, by the former U.S. president George H. W. Bush. I didn’t know at the time it was or would become, with the advent of the Internet, a phrase linked to the conspiracy theory that claims Jews secretly rule the world and so forth. I didn’t buy into that theory then and don’t now (my awareness of the unlimited power Israel has to oppress the Palestinians and to influence especially the American government in its favor notwithstanding). I do, however, see that some sects or groups of religious Jews believe Jews should be the leaders of humanity and have prophecies that play that out, such as the pamphlet I read was doing. While it isn’t a whole lot different from the Christians or Muslims who desire the same, or, from a national perspective, the Chinese or Russians, and I can keep adding groups all day long, as it’s probably a desire among some in every human group on the planet, I think it’s quite prevalent among orthodox Jews in Israel.
I had an encounter with a young orthodox man on the streets of Jerusalem, the new part, not far from the central bus station, a month or so after leaving Safed, who gave me a very revealing picture of what it looks like to Jews (who believe it) to have the Jewish people as the leader of the humanity. He came walking up from the opposite direction and was putting leather bands on people’s arms, on anyone’s arm who let him, and it was a kind of complicated procedure with the knot he had to tie. He wasn’t wearing the Hasidic getup but was wearing the black clothes of the orthodox, with the 40’s style man’s hat. He appeared to be in his mid-20’s, and he looked determined. He was tall and rather slender, and when he bent over it was as though paper was being folded in half, was not a fluid flow. He had a handsome face but one not open and smiling. Watching him put the band on a man’s arm in front of me, I asked him what he was doing. He explained, telling me it was called tefillin, and that on it, or folded in it rather, was a verse from the Torah. It seems to me he gave me a rough translation of it, and I knew it from my Bible days (I’ve since learned there are four verses). I asked him to put one on me too. I no longer wore a kippah, was wearing my colorful hippie clothes. He looked me up and down a moment and asked if I were Jewish. I said no. He said no band then.
Therein ensued a conversation wherein he gave me that revealing picture. He likened humanity to a body and said that Jews were the head of the body. I asked then what people were the anus. He didn’t see my point. I went on the say that his idea was religious racism, although bigotry is the word normally used to describe his religion’s superior attitude. We’d need to see it as racism to change it, give it the charge it needs to see it. I explained that, inherent in that view, was Jewish superiority over everyone else. He denied that it was racism of any kind, laughed at the idea. He said humanity had to have a head, and Jews were it. What would humanity be without a head? I couldn’t make him see that the image was only that, an image for illustration, and that you couldn’t make it fit reality. Who would be the arms then, the hands, the feet and so forth, returning to the anus so he might see now what I meant. He didn’t, and he didn’t put a band on my arm. What struck me though, was how sure he was, dead certain. I realized I was talking to a brick wall, one that had been built by bricks of indoctrination that had been put carefully in place over the entire course of his young life, from birth onwards. It’s the idea of the chosen people pictured how it would look in practice: the head would look down on the rest of the body and order it around.
While I was with Lars camping on the Mount of Olives with our small Jerusalem Peace Group, some days after finishing the hunger strike, we heard a story about a Catholic priest that had been publicly asking the question: what’s the difference between the chosen people and the master race? The story goes that he got quickly transferred out of the country. Maybe that’s a folk story that’s been floating around Jerusalem for years, or maybe it’s a true story, but it’s a good question nonetheless and one that needs asking. Of course the ideas of the chosen people and master race are not the same ideas either in theory or in practice. There are big differences between the Jewish belief and the Nazi one, but the thing to ask is if there are similarities, and, if you’re honest in your assessment, whoever you are, you’d have to admit there are. It’s the same with the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with the Apartheid of South Africa. It’s not the same thing, but you can draw a comparison between them, and that’s what needs to be admitted.
The world cannot, neither the Palestinians being oppressed nor the people wanting it to stop, expect either the Jews who are doing the oppressing or the ones unequivocally supporting Israel despite it to admit to that Apartheid-like oppression unless humanity admits that the Jewish people not only has a right to exist (as my muse has said in poetry) but also that we need them and always have, at least in this latest stage of being human, because they have something to do with who we are, with our becoming the modern ego us, but that’s a story filled out on the spiral later on.
But that pamphlet about the new world order and the questions it brought up were not the main things on my mind. At that moment in Safed, I wanted to attend Ascent to explore the possibility of becoming a Jew myself and to see what the Kabbalah was about. Constantly being discriminated against because I wasn’t Jewish just baffled me, as it was wholly unexpected and didn’t fit into my picture of how I thought Jews treated non-Jews, ones who weren’t trying to kill them or wanted them dead at any rate. Somehow I expected the best from them, which I know now you can’t expect from anyone, myself included.
The first class I attended, one late afternoon, was an introductory one in the main lobby, where there was a long table at the head of which sat the teacher, a man in orthodox clothes. On the sides near him we students sat, only two women and I, both of them married and wearing the hair net married women wore. We watched a short film on a television monitor about Hasidic Judaism, one full of enthusiasm like it was just the coolest thing, and then he talked about what it meant to be Hasidic, which was, as he explained it, to be on fire for God, and where, for example, you were by the Law required to put your cut fingernails and toenails into the trash, the Hasidic would burn them so to go that one step further in obeying God’s laws, and they would do that with everything. It gave me no desire to convert let me tell you, and I began to suspect that the teaching and study of the Kabbalah had been taken over by the orthodoxy, and I couldn’t see how the two could mix without the latter becoming so watered down it became only an outer observance and inner moral attitude and not the unbound and unpredictable opening of the inner consciousness whereby mystical experiences steeped you in knowledge of God. I didn’t know at the time that the Hasidic movement had been centered on Kabbalistic teaching since it began, or, to put it differently, that the orthodoxy had taken it over long before. It’s that way with any mystical tradition really; it’s too dangerous to the doctrines and practices of any religion to not be controlled by the orthodoxy of that religion, or banned altogether as it is in many cases. Mystical experience, which means both metaphysical and spiritual experience, has this habit of taking off habits and changing a religion.
The second class was my last. It was in the evening, and several Americans from Avraham’s were there, including he, people I knew and talked to on a daily basis, at least for the past two weeks or so, people I considered my friends, as much as you can in that amount of time, which, when you’re traveling, when time is or seems more compressed, is quite some time. It was a regular-type classroom, with student desks, the teacher’s, and a blackboard. The teacher looked like a regular collage professor, wasn’t dressed in the black of the orthodox or in the heavy getup of the ultra. I remember he was writing on the board the Hebrew word for charity and explaining that, according to the Law, whatever fell onto the ground in a farmer’s field could be gathered by the poorer Jews and was to be left for them, but they couldn’t take anything off the crop themselves, as that would be stealing. I think I must’ve asked a question, but I don’t actually remember why he suddenly centered his attention on me.
“Are you Jewish?!” It was a typical ‘who, me?’ moment as I tried to evade his pointed stare.
I just looked at him a moment, feeling like a Jew in Nazi occupied Europe being spotted in a crowd or whatnot. I’ve probably just offended a million people, because the consequences were so lopsided. Here I’d only be thrown out of class, while there I’d be sent to a concentration camp and probably killed, but I’m showing you the spirit of the thing, hatred, and you don’t know how interconnected we really are, or I doubt you do, connected in our very deeps, how we are not divided in groups or even as ego individuals as it appears on the surface, and how it’s these small ‘you are not in my group get out’ that add up to the big ones where you are killed for being in the wrong group. After some hesitation, I finally said, “I, I uh, no, but I got permission to take this class from the director, and I’m thinking about converting.…” I’ve always said too much in a pinch.
“I don’t believe this.” The transformation that he then quickly underwent was something to behold. “This is impossible. I can’t teach this class with you in it. Leave!”
“I’ll just sit here and not ask any questions.” I looked around at my friends for some support, but, like as happened before but with different Jews, they looked away or looked down, looked anywhere but at what was happening, although I think I caught a whiff in the room of a couple being happy about it, the ones who had wanted to tell me that same thing but couldn’t do it because of social constraints.
“You have no idea. Your very presence will disrupt the class. You don’t have the background, don’t know anything about the Jewish tradition, what these people have been learning their whole lives. You, you know nothing of it!” He was silent a second and declared, “I will not teach this class until you leave! Is that understood? He said the last part to the class, and now what was happening was being looked at, but not from my side. I decided to go, but what really got me was his hatred, and I didn’t’ t want to just leave without addressing it. He wasn’t just annoyed I was there. He was seething with anger, shaking with it. I really wanted to ask him why he hated me, and did he hate all non-Jews, or, for that matter, what had all that tradition taught him if, at the drop of a hat, he would just lose it and throw a fit, but I said nothing and just left, the room’s silence a thunder helping to throw me out.
I’d imagine the reader would be split 50/50 on this. Don’t people have the right to the privacy of their group? There’s a humanity involved. Maybe in matters of security privacy is needed if the secrets being told save lives, and even then a humanity witness would not be out of line if they know to keep the secrets that really do save lives, and they are there for humanity and not just the group telling the secrets, but things like a humanity witness in human groups won’t appear until we are quite a bit more mature as a humanity. I’m not talking about surveillance devices, electronic spying, but of living breathing human beings, and not ones necessarily appointed for that purpose but people, like myself in this instance, an outsider, that, as part of the mind-boggling all things connected movement of world process, just showed up. When you let them in it’s a process of soul. It could be too that a group needs their privacy if they’re teaching or telling things too deep, things that could harm the uninitiated, but that wasn’t the case here. The case here was the racist and exclusive attitude, which had superiority as its basis, that the uninitiated would harm the group just by being there.
I went to the office the next day to complain. I talked to a different man than the director, or the person I thought was that I spoke to the first time. This one was impudent but not so much so you couldn’t talk to him. He wore orthodox clothes, not Hasidic, and I think they didn’t dress as the Hasidic Jews they were because they didn’t want to scare prospective converts off. The whole place was a front to convert Jews to Hasidism more than anything else. He told me that the teacher was in his right not to teach the class with me in it, and, to sum it up, that I was no longer allowed to take classes there. I tried to talk about the hatred and anger, but to no avail. Finally, I did what I always did when being devalued. I bragged. God save me.
This meeting with him has played over and over in my mind since then, since it was here I began to realize I was only bragging when talking about my spiritual and metaphysical experiences (but realizing is not the same as stopping), my over the top outer ones too for that matter, like being a Green Beret on a tactical nuclear mission for example, not bragging every time, but most times, and that, usually, the person or people I was bragging to would not appreciate my experiences and were not ready to even hear them, as was the case here at Ascent. What is the case here? You not ready?
We were sitting at a small table in the large lobby near the entrance, in front of one of the windows, he with his back to it and me looking out it from time to time. I’d never just listed my experiences like I did with him, but the topic of our conversation had gotten to the Kabbalah, and I was expressing my thoughts on what I thought their thought was in regards to it, which wasn’t to either teach or encourage mystical experience other than surface phenomenon such as slight ecstasies, the seeing of visions, auras, the future, and the curing of sickness, and other things that had to do more with magic than spirituality. I figured, however, that he’d be interested in deeper things, and I figured correctly, only he wasn’t about to show that. As I went through my list I could see him try to hide his peaked curiosity and interest, which is how a little boy looks driving a motorbike on the roadways here in India, so serious and matter of fact, so to look like he’s not driving illegally most likely without his parents’ permission, when you know in reality he’s jumping up and down inside with excitement.
I don’t remember either the order or the exact manner I listed the experiences, not anywhere near as neat as I do here for you, but this is the basic gist of the list. I asked him did he want to hear about driving my truck and going several meters over my head and being for a moment who I am beyond all the lives I’ve had, my Godself, or did he want to hear about driving that same truck a year later and not only my thoughts stopping but my breathing and heartbeat, and down the road I drove still, in a sort of suspended animation, or about the time I found myself inside my grandfather’s body as he died of a heart attack two weeks before he did in the way and in the place I experienced it beforehand, or about the inner journey I took to someplace deep inside me, which was all the way through dream to what was beyond it, an ocean or realm of Spirit, or about the time in university I conjured a demon? I didn’t include the divine experience because I was on acid, and so I didn’t think he’d think it was real, and I only included the biggest experiences, the ones I knew that would impress him the most.
He wanted to hear about the demon, and I remember I thought at the time that showed me how mundane he was, unspiritual, since a God lover just wants to hear about God, any and every idea of God, to see how it stacks up to theirs, to see if they might be missing some possible way to get closer to God. I was surprised at his choice, and he knew it. A look passed between us that put the conversation on a different footing, a look where he no longer held the look of holier-than-thou, a footing where he no longer held the higher ground.
He got a very abbreviated version of the story of conjuring the demon, which happened soon after I returned to Houston to study the History of Science, returning there from Seattle, where I’d been washing dishes so to try and forget about thinking deeply, if you remember. The detailed story I put on the web some years back with the title, “Breaking Silence, Careful to Stay an Apparition”, but maybe I was too detailed, or too careful, because only a handful have heard that silence broke. It’s the silence in regards to being molested by the Hostile Powers, whom my muse has described in poetry at the end of the last chapter.
Even though I was no longer an atheist before the conjuring event, I hadn’t become interested in knowing God or in spirituality, wanted only knowledge and returned to college for that, as I mentioned earlier. I as yet had no idea where to put or what to do with what I’d seen in that divine experience. Returning to Houston after that experience, it took some three months to settle down enough to begin classes at the university, and because I had a dual focus, inner exploration and university study, I had to find a full time job that would support me but wouldn’t rob me of any thinking time or shake me up out of myself and my inner focus. That’s why I kept the job as a doorman, valet and concierge I’ve mentioned earlier, at Four Leaf Towers near downtown Houston. They preferred college students and allowed us to study at work, and it was a calm, quiet environment conducive to an inner focus. I should mention that, other than with my mom and high school best friend Randy, I didn’t socialize with anyone (no net then). My life was concentrated on gaining knowledge, not of the material world but of the unseen, to a degree that all else took second place, because I’d seen it exists and knew there was knowledge to gain. And so begin those three exceptional years or so of mystical experience I’ve referred to.
I don’t think you ever write a university thesis on really what exactly interests you the most. Other than having a small brush with a tactical nuclear device in the army and becoming interested in atomic science, I don’t know why I decided to write a Master’s thesis on the origin of atomic theory in Greek science when what interested me more was how we came to be different from other animals in the first place and how we become the ego-organized human beings that we are, ego transcription, mainly because I wanted to know where our sexual preference comes from, but that’s a story for later on. I wanted to show that their atomic theory came more from intuition than empirical observation, perhaps wholly so. I suspected the early Greek scientists were mystics, and that they did as much if not more inner exploration than outer observation. That tactical nuclear weapon mission in SF had made a deep impression on me, and I basically wanted to know why, being so much more civilized than other animals, we were at the same time hell-bent it seemed in destroying the whole human world, and much if not most of the natural world, with nuclear bombs. The Cold War was still going on remember, as this was 1989. Also, I didn’t want to come from the standpoint of religion but of science, what I still held as the most reliable means to investigate reality, if it would but admit the results of inner exploration and modify its method for that. If it would but admit it was wrong. Fat chance.
As it turned out, I didn’t get past the initial idea stage of the thesis, didn’t even complete the undergrad History of Science class I’d enrolled in at the request of the professor who’d oversee my studies, who also taught the class. What happened was this: I’d begun to wonder if, like Socrates from his daemon, some early Greek scientists got ‘help’ from non-material entities in their investigations. The divine experience had opened the door in me to such possibilities. My question concerning them took the form of a more general question concerning us: are such beings involved in human life now? My life was arranged to answer such a question, and so when the writings of Carlos Castaneda gave me the knowledge and a drawing of M.C. Escher suddenly the how-to, I used them.
I remember sitting on my sofa in my small, rundown apartment on Old Galveston Road near Pasadena, Texas, looking at an Escher drawing on my wall, the one where he’s looking at his reflection in a small glass crystal ball, and then looking at my own glass ball of the same size on my coffee table, which I’d rubbed my blood, spit, and semen on in the weeks before in order to ‘program’ it to me, things I just did on the spur of the moment looking at the thing, having heard you have to program crystals. It was a Christmas gift from my mom, made in India, and I do think those things add to the whole thing. Anyway, I snatched it off the table and got it to how he had it in his drawing looking at himself in it sitting there on my sofa looking at myself in it. Putting the two and two together had not occurred to me before, believe it or not.
I didn’t just look, but looked with that knowing Castaneda talks about in The Fire From Within (or maybe it was The Eagle’s Gift?). You have to look into a reflective surface so to call up what he calls an ally, his name for the disembodied beings that help him with his exploration of dream and magic in his books. It’s hard to know what I mean; it’s not believing you’ll see one but knowing you will with a certainty, the same kind of certainty you use in lucid dream to supersede the laws of matter. It certainly helped that I’d just smoked some skunk my sister had given me that’d been grown on Spyrock Mountain.
With that certainty, I was not surprised when clouds began to form in the crystal ball, but I was very excited. After a few seconds they took animal shapes, each with the same silvery, mirror color, a donkey, monkey, and then the shape of my surprise: looking at me with his pure red eyes was Chevy, the dog-dragon, the imaginary playmate from my early childhood. He was standing in the reflection as if behind me and had one furry paw over my shoulder, like he was posing for a family portrait, the fur on his body standing straight up like it’d been electrocuted, which really added to the atmosphere of hysteria let me tell you. That devil wore the same shit eating grin he wore the last time I’d seen him, when he’d shut the storm cellar door down on me after having tricked me into the Void, that cellar door how my four-year-old mind represented the entrance to the Nothing, or nonexistence, or bottom-most hell, or whatever you want to call the sum total of all our fears. We were looking eye to eye the demon and me.
The eyes of a demon are the damndest things, holding awful knowledge you really don’t want to know, knowledge you gain in the Biblical sense of to know, being fucked, but it’s not consensual intercourse; it’s like you’re being raped, ravaged. And it wasn’t just any demon. The hell of the whole thing was that it was the imaginary playmate I knew I had but didn’t remember how it looked exactly, until now, when I saw it wasn’t imaginary but very real, what it wanted me to see. It was looking into those calamitous eyes that I realized, among many things in that terrifying moment, that Castaneda did not have the reader’s best interests at heart, had the worst intentions in fact, and I had been snared in his intricate, tantalizing web of lies lighting every truth. He says two very contrary things to do, several pages apart, if you find yourself looking into the eyes of an ‘ally’: if you keep looking in its eyes you’ll bring it out into your outer reality; if you look away it’ll kill you. What is a Faust to do?
I tore the thing from in front of my face and held it at arm’s length, stood up like a jack-in-the-box, shaking like a leaf, and ran to the window to fling the thing as far as I could from me, then thought better of it, since I realized it was now an object of power, something those books also explained, went back to the sofa and plopped down into it in that state of terror that visits a man when he’s come face to face with something really and truly to be afraid of, something from the jaws of hell, a devil. Fortunately, terror of the unknown and I were very acquainted, as you have seen, and it didn’t unseat me, just scared the shit out of me. Hastily I put the crystal ball back on its stand and sat there trying to calm myself down. I had to be at work within the hour.
In our talk we miss somethin’: God simply is. And that’s a whole other business, like the mountaintop. The mountaintop came into my arms so easily. I did not know what it said. I ignored its wisdom. I looked on the floor and found God. This was a world away. God became the center of my attention in long slow leaps. It’s where I put my feet today, and I’m not crying. I don’t think so, I don’t think I will be here tomorrow. Do you have another one? Of course. I will guide tomorrow all levers to enlightenment. My body will be here but my mind will not, not the mind you know, not the one called Donny. We’re picking it up now, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but here I am in the room with you. Field with me. Let’s bring this to enlightenment, the village in our room, the city we sit at. It’s what’s going to take tomorrow in human consciousness, in long slow years, as the years open up. We gather it today. And here we are. You ever seen it? And this book will show it to you in the course of its pages. So it’s here before me in my mind’s eye, completing the world. Do you hear it? We’ve listed it, put it where aim bothers you. How would you grasp life? You’re reaching for enlightenment. But know this: it’s not the end of the world. Supermind comes down in your ascension, and you fulfill the world with your consciousness. You become That who you are, and we are here for that. Great the days play towards that end: a new Jerusalem, in the symbol paradise of man’s mind Heaven on earth you see. And there we are. Let’s talk about the soul. We did. The Supermind is where your soul sits above time, and there it is inside you a piece of itself evolving in its ways. It’s what we are becoming if you want to know the truth, our soul self. That meets enlightenment. That gets ascended in the supramental transformation, an enlightened being soul. That ascends with soul force. Ace ascension, it’s a hard part, the ascension of the soul into everyday life from the depths within. Where the soul meets life, it’s not an automatic process. Can you grasp your soul? Can you bring it on? Touch it and it will come. Be ever present with it. Soul involvement to open your life to an involvement with God. This is ascension. Really come ascension. It probably goes to me right now provide you the milk. Deal with it. Deal with it plainly. You have the news. The burning of Jerusalem, I’m just really well on the water. Someone with an advanced degree has just barked at you, read you the riot act. No I haven’t done that. Enter your community someone who reach people with ears. I’m listenin’ to my world. I write it down for you a world need. You’ll just lock me up if I get unprotected. You hate prophets and seers. You will just get rid of us to get out of that word. I think I saw it a short film and ah notion you ride in your head: my path lays straight the ways of the Lord. Read my path that way. No need to divorce. We’re not gettin’ a divorce. I’m right here at book. That cannot be; that can’t happen: and the God who was in the book dies, and we’ll never hear it. Just look at me please. You’re gonna have to sooner or later. Now that’s the stuff build us a better world. Let’s get this show on the road.
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The Unknown in Perspective 