The Holy Ghost

The holy ghost came to her when she was a child, only six years old. For weeks preceding the actual event she awoke in the night screaming and crying as the result of having had a nightmare, a premonition of what was to come. Each time she was told “ Its just a nightmare, go back to sleep.” by one groggy parent or the other, so that on the night that the plane did crash into the house she almost believed it was only the same nightmare come to visit her once more.
It was a private plane that carried six passengers, and the pilot and co-pilot. They were all dead, spilling from the wreckage into the fiery garage like guts bursting from a wounded bird. Her father wanted to help them, but they were beyond his help, and her mother was saying,
“Oh God.”
Her older sister was screaming,
“What is it, what happened?”
Helen knew what had happened. It was the plane, the same plane that had been crashing into her dream every night for the past two weeks.
“Get them out of here!” her father shouted. But he needn’t have, because mother was already grabbing them roughly by the arms and saying,
“C’mon.” in her brusque way thick with the Oklahoman accent.
Then they stood on the street in front of their home in Lake Wood California watching the flames spread, Mother and sister and she, all in their white night gowns like three ghosts. Father and a neighbor were dragging bodies out, just in case someone was yet alive and merely unconscious, but at the time she hadn’t understood that. It had seemed that he was taking them out so that even the dead could be spared the horror of being eaten up by the flames.
They were laid out on the lawn and soon Father had turned a garden hose on to combat the hungry fire. Then the wailing sirens came and the flashing red lights bouncing off the dark smoke billowed from the mouth of the garage.
Mother had been saying all along,
“Don’t look, you hear? Close your eyes.” And she tried to press their faces into the folds of her night gown, but despite this they had looked. They saw.
The nightmares, like Gabriel, had come whispering, and now here it was. The spirit that sought to inhabit the body, burning it mercilessly. The plane, a desirous phantom, had seized hold of the house and now it was devouring it with its passion.
Mother kept saying,
“Oh God.”
And yes, it must have been so. Dancing before their eyes with wings of flames spreading over the roof top lighting the night sky and obliterating the stars with its smoky mane, here was the Holy Ghost, the spirit of heaven come down to visit its rage upon them and see the bodies laid before it in neat rows like finger sandwiches.
After weeks of practice, she now found that she could not scream, nor cry, but only observe with eyes as round as saucers, peering out from behind her mother’s night gown.
“Oh God.”
The nightmare had not ended this time and every detail was startlingly clear. She was awake and the dream had swallowed her.
“Oh God.”
And it would never let her go.

Les Iris

I had a poster of a Vincent van Gogh painting, les iris, when I was a freshman in high school. The colors were bright and easy to be absorbed into. It had been rolled in a tube so that its deepest desire now was to curl up once again and sleep in a dark cylindrical womb, but I crucified it mercilessly to the walls with four brass thumbtacks and lay on my day bed and stared into the green and brown and purple blue.
My father disliked it. He even told me that I would go crazy if I kept that poster in my room. Maybe he was right, or maybe the poster was a symptom rather than a cause of insanity, or maybe the poster was completely innocent and uninvolved with madness of any kind, or at least far less involved than my father himself.
But I did lay there and gaze at the poster in silence and through tears. Sometimes from the floor where I lay on the carpet by the door I tried not to breathe, willing my heart to stop beating, begging fate and pleading with my body for death while smelling the paint that made my walls and the door so bright white and seeing les iris shivering on the wall.
What else was on my walls? That poster had only two companions, a Greek orthodox wooden crucifix with a sad Jesus bleeding artistically, and a golden plaque with the lord’s prayer inscribed on its surface. My father may have asked me what I was doing with those on my wall too, because we were not Christians, or at least he was not, even though he had sent me to a Christian school so that I could get a taste of religion and morality.
Jesus was there because I found him in a strange store full of such artifacts and I had thought it was beautiful. I had never seen a Jesus like that before, a Jesus that looked as though he had come from a mosaic in a Byzantine cathedral. It was intriguing to me to see Jesus in a way that had never been presented to me. Christians in my little piece of American hell displayed and wore crosses, but you never saw Jesus dangling from that ornament.
This was the part that they were referring to and hiding with their clean crosses; the bloody man slowly dying while crucified. This was what they were really displaying around their necks and on their bumpers and from the brittle hillsides behind their trailers; the torture and suffering of a man, the death of the God who had a body.
The lord’s prayer had been a gift from my grandmother when I was small. She gave it to me when we moved into our first house. Now by merit of its age and its affiliation with someone soft and warm it had earned a place and glittered on my wall.
But by then, by the time les iris had become part of my surroundings, I did not believe that God could hear me or was listening, if it did exist. I did not talk to the long deceased Jesus, I would not allow myself the luxurious comfort of these fantasies.
I was alone and if there was anybody that could understand my plight, it was the Devil, if he existed. At that time, in the madness of les iris, when I did consider that Our Heavenly Father was waiting in heaven with his milky white and passive son, I was determined to rail against their regime. I was sympathetic to Lucifer.
I knew what it was like to be misunderstood, to fall from grace with the father. I knew what it was like to be demonized for one’s differences. I knew what it was like to love the trees and the wild things and prize them above the walls and rules of society. I knew what it was like to fall.
When I wasn’t hoping to die, when I had given up on taking my disfigured presence out of the world, then I prepared for battle. I sat on my bed facing les iris and wrote on notebook paper my arguments on the devil’s behalf. I wrote stories about those who were different than the rest of the flock or I read books about those who went on living despite their “wicked” natures. I delved into the squirming lines of the flowers and earth and green stems and convinced myself that I too should live, writhing and screaming if necessary, but live, rather than go the way of the sad pale withering Christ, good and nice to the last drop.

The Three Directives

There are three directives which move a human being into action. These are “need”, “desire”, and “will”.
Need is the most basic and primordial mover. The human machine needs food, needs water, needs warmth, needs affection, needs to excrete waste. Once a need has been met there is a sense of concrete satisfaction that sets in until the need arises again according to the physical cycles of the human machine. Needs can be met.
Desires are a trickier monster. They arise when needs have been transformed through the symbolic structure. For example, thirst is a real need for the human machine so an advertisement for a clothing line might depict a well dressed man and a woman drinking from glasses. A human machine that sees the ad will unwittingly transform the need to drink into a desire for a dress or pair of slacks. The trouble is, that while drinking a glass of water will quench thirst, buying a pair of slacks will not. Satisfaction will be denied.
Desires can never lead to satisfaction because they are born of the symbolic realm and not of the real. This is true of any desire, it is what distinguishes desire from need. It is an endless circle, a wheel fit for a hamster. The pursuit of desires can never yield fulfillment. This is not because there is something fundamentally evil about desire. It is because desire is a need that has been disfigured by language and made abstract. You cannot eat, drink, or hug an abstract.
A young gorilla needs something to love in order for its life to continue. This need can be met by a kitten or a doll or a fury blanket tied to a post, as long as the gorilla can touch it, the need is met. The same is true of human animals. You don’t need a porn star to hug. You could give a squeeze to a warty old hag to meet the need. You desire a porn star, a picture from a magazine, but even if you meet a live porn model, she will never be exactly the same as the picture from the magazine. She may meet some of your needs, but she can never quench your desires, those will go ungratified into eternity.
Will stands in a category all of its own. It does not arise from the machinations of the human, physical or linguistic. It is neither a need nor a desire. It comes from elsewhere. It is infinitely more difficult to act on will than it is to respond to a need or a desire. Will often conflicts with the needs and desires of the human biological machine.
With both needs and desires occupying the attention and energy of the machine, it can be almost impossible to heed the strange call of the will. Desires are particularly an obstacle. While the human machine has a limited number of needs which have to be met repeatedly, the ghostly world of desire is as unlimited as it is insatiable. The desires will breed more desires and will come to occupy all the space of the mind, demanding that one thing or another be pursued until the will is nearly buried in an avalanche of desires.
Desires will propagate on their own without any effort being made on the part of the human machine, but the true will, if it is denied attention and left unused, will wither like an atrophied limb. Efforts must be made to invoke and support the will, efforts which may seem most unpleasant to the machine because those efforts will be of no direct benefit to it.

Electrical Impulses

The power of movement. A simple thing, taken for granted by those creatures that have long possessed the ability, but ask any cactus or man locked in a tiny cell and they will tell you that the power to move about freely is most precious of all. In the very beginning of your life, it was the first thing to be active in you, your movement center. You wriggled, you cried in hunger, and your body happily relieved itself of the wastes that were left in its system. You learned to crawl, and to walk and to grab and to hit. Viola! You had the most essential skills needed to maintain your existence on this planet. You had the power to translate electrical pulses sent from your brain via your nervous system into motion, activity, into an adequate response to some stimuli, such as music, or the sight of a hungry wolf, or the smell of a roasting pig.
The subtleties that could be added, the endowments of the intellectual and emotional centers, would do you little good in this plane of existence without the foundation of this first essential power, the fully functioning motor center. Now you have the ability to do, and with the addition of the other two powers, you have a heightened capacity for subtlety, a desire to find a purpose to put your fantastic abilities to the test. You’ve got the car, now baby drive it!
What are you going to do? What are you going to make of the multicolored world? How are you going to organize all that sensory impute? How does it make you feel? And what are you going to do with it all?
You can see an electrical pulse. See it in the way your limbs go wiggly when we hook them up to a loudspeaker. See how you groove and shake and twirl. That is the power of movement. It gives a shape to the unseen forces that are ever at work in the universe.
This truth is so obvious, so apparent that it seems to be hidden from us. We are blind to it. The ancient Greeks, however, were appreciative of this secret. They honored the human form, took great pleasure in athletic feats, not only as the triumph of the motor center, but as the culmination of all the aspects of the human being and even as a representation of those mysteries which are seen as originating elsewhere.
As above so below.
As within so without.

Birth

Nine years ago something happened which I was not entirely prepared for. I was a frightened caged animal. I had lived in captivity my whole life. I bonded with a male of my species. He was the first that I bonded effectively with, so he became my mate. Soon I was pregnant. Everyone around me was a frightened caged animal. They could do nothing to sooth my own fears. They were busy drowning in the wealth of their own terrified floundering. Far from being helped by others of my species that had once undergone the same experience, I found that they were obscenely domesticated, agitated by the repellent truth of their own bodies and unhinged by the new and obvious instance of my own. I began to discover things on my own through weird chances, a few random glances through the holes I poked in the box that had been the world since my own birth. I heard tales of women who gave birth in their own homes, and women who opted against vaccination, and women who squatted to birth their young instead of lying on their backs. Inside of the box I was treated as though I were sick, as though I were a sickness myself, something very disturbing to the other creatures in the box. I was too young to be overly brave, too uncertain to insist on too much, so though I longed to run away into the wild and find a quite ditch among some brambles and do what it was in my nature to do in a place away from accusing, and prying, and clinical eyes I submitted to the conventions of the day. I did hold firm on giving birth without the assistance of any pain killers. I arrived in a hospital early one day because something like water was leaking from my vagina. I was tested with a little swatch and treated as if I was very silly and told that my water bag had not broken, and I was not giving birth, and they sent me home. Less than six hours later, I was having real contractions and my father and my mate delivered me once again into the hands of the hospital staff. This time I was admitted. I was permitted to walk the halls and squat and stretch as I pleased. I asked not to be hooked to an IV but they insisted, and soon my resolve against it was weathered away by that insistence. I was young. That asked which drugs I would prefer, and I told them none. They stood in the halls and snickered amongst themselves, certain that I would beg them for their medicine in the end. I never did. There were none of the complications that they had used to frighten me into being hooked to the IV. My baby was healthy. I was changed from then on. I knew with a certainty that they were all cowards and liars. I knew that I would always have to fight to protect the important things, my true nature, and that of my new child. I knew that it would be a struggle to do more than peek through the holes I bored in the box, I knew that my fellow inmates would try to frighten me into remaining within our prison. I had been young once. Now I was something else. With the birth of my first daughter, wisdom was born within me, a knowledge that stemmed from my very core, and a resolve to do justice to that new knowledge of life. I ceased to be the domestic creature that I had once been, and began to seek out the wild that lived within me.

Eaters of Death

Today is Easter, time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood. We run through open green fields or across well manicured little plots of grass in gaily colored frocks in search of the unborn offspring of birds, reverting for this one day to one of our earliest scavenger instincts. This is how our pretty little walnut shaped brains got so meaty. We ate all those omega threes and got super wise, wise enough to figure that if we could eat the eggs they left behind, we could also murder the foul that laid them, causing that pulsing twitching organ under our skull cap to burst with profound insight and new wisdom about the fine art of killing and eating. This gave us time to grow philosophical, mystical. We imposed sexual metaphor over everything around us, father sky coming down to make life with mother earth. Soon we grew even wiser and learned that if death is what makes us so strong and makes our brains so big we would need to forget about mother earth and build the cult of father sky. Angry, jealous, vengeful. His son a radical mischief maker. Ah, ah, ah, but I skip way ahead, can you see the whole progression in your mind? We kill, we learn to stand upright, we advance just a little from early Cro-Magnon to present day Christian cannibal. We eat life, sucking it up wherever we go. Today we make our own eggs out of hard plastic and fill them with chocolate made with cocoa harvested by 8 year olds in underdeveloped countries. Some little brown kid is sipping down his morning cup of Java, the big meal of the day before he goes to work so that pure white people can feed the fruits of his brown labor wrapped in multicolored foil wrappers to their own pasty larvae. Shall we talk about fertility on this day, the way rabbits do it and do it until they overrun the hillside? Imagine rabbits with no natural enemies left to hunt them, cannibal rabbits that eat death and have cunning bulging brains, tearing the country hillsides to shreds to build their little warrens. That’s us. Or more austere, imagine one more ape, the son of jealous Jehovah bleeding on a cross and getting dried out by the sun like that ugly bug covered fish I saw in my neighbor’s kitchen yesterday. He finally dies and we lay him in a cave, but then he rises, up, up back to father sky. Did I mention that he took a last meal before he was convicted for his crimes, whatever they were. Gulp, gulp, chew, chew, and he communicated to his followers what they should do. Be good cannibals, eat life, be eaters of the living flesh of god, father sky. Yum yum. So we whirl around in our sun drenched warrens playing games and then we sit down to eat the remains of a big pig adorned with little yellow ringlets of pineapple. If we are extra good, we stop off at the temple first to take the last sacrament, to reenact the last meal with our cannibal prophet, the son of father sky. Take this body my body, this blood my blood, and go look for eggs in the grass. The omega trees that I mentioned earlier come from the grass. Hens eat grass and worms and other crawlies and that’s what makes their eggs so good for us. We can’t digest grass ourselves, we need the chicken to do that for us. We feed on her life process. The holy trinity, the grass, the chicken, and the egg. This gives life. Today is a good day for the eaters of death. Today it is time to celebrate our undead god and eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Energize the Machine

In the sleeping state, the machine is a dead thing, a forgotten robot that goes through the motions of its programmed habits, follows them over and over in intricate detail for years and years, progressively getting slower and older, until it starts to completely break down altogether on its way to its final breath. You cannot hope to achieve any Real result in this state. You may be very successful in life, you may have riches, health, fame or all of the above. But the most basic, simple tasks of Real Work will become insurmountable obstacles, any attempt at discipline will be smashed by distraction and laziness. There will always be an excuse, a reason to do it "later".
A sleeping machine has no real Will. It may appear to have its own will at times, but that is only its programmed desire and ambition, interacting with the maelstrom of massive mechanical behavior and random accident. Anything that involves real Will, a Will that is borne of the Being, will encounter no fertile ground in a sleeping machine. So we must find a way to bring the machine to life. But how does one get life out a dead thing? How does one get blood out of a rock?
If you walk around your house for a moment, in a calm relaxed way, you may be able to notice 2 things:
One- Your intellectual brain is constantly pouring out thought after thought, in endless chains of associations. These thoughts, like little train cars made of words, carry emotions, fears, desires inside of them. They pull you into moods that are completely unrelated to the actual space around you. They drift like the broken bits of a ship in the ocean of your intellectual activity. You can look at them, but only after a lot of work will you be able to stop them, even for a few seconds. To struggle directly against them is a losing battle. Ultimately the one that struggles is another part of you, also with its own thoughts, fears, desires, associations, and so on. So even as you apparently win the struggle, you are already caught up in a new chain of associative thought. There is no end in sight.
Two- Your physical body is moving around and you are not putting much thought into anything that it is doing. Once in a while your intellectual center may step in and say: "Now I should open the door", or "now I should go to the dining room." But mostly the body will just move. If you walk up a stairway, each foot will follow the other without any thought. The spine will move slightly forward and slightly backward to maintain balance. The shoulders will shift and the arm will extend to push open a door. All without any need of direct intervention by the intellectual center. It can be flowing along, thinking about the next day, about the date you have on Friday, about the upcoming promotions at your job, about the new movie that is about to come out… while the body moves around through the space simply following its own programmed course of actions.
The body moves mechanically, asleep and vibrating at its lowest possible level, while the intellectual center allows all its energy to flow out continuously in an endless orgasm of associative thought. To bring life into the machine, we will attempt to connect these two separate systems and make them work together. If we can gather at least some of the energy that is being dispersed in random chains of thought, and direct it into the electrical network that flows through the body, we may start to see some signs of rebirth.
Like a plant that has grown pale and withered from lack of water, the machine won’t wake up instantly. It may take weeks, months or even years of constant work for the energy to start flowing, to move through the multiple blockages and obstacles in its path. This is something that can’t be rushed. The more you desire results, the more your attention is distracted by the imaginary visions of what life will be like once you manage to awaken the machine, the longer this process will take. Settle yourself in for a long haul. Constantly asking "Are we there yet?" won’t make the car move any faster!
But like the nearly dead plant that you left without water for so long, once it starts to absorb energy and it starts to become accustomed to your new level of attention on it, the machine will show definite signs of life. The colors that faded so long ago will come back, in ways more subtle and more mysterious than your desires could ever have projected.
And like the plant, that will not be the end of your work. That’s where the real Work of Transformation begins.

Select a space where you will be free to move about without being disturbed.Set a timer for ten minutes.Begin to slowly move through the space.As you move, vocally illustrate the movements.For example, as you walk, say aloud:"I place my right foot forward, I place my left foot forward, I place my right foot forward, I place my left foot forward…"Describe every move that you make as you are making it. Lead with the body and occupy the mind with the narration. Describe with as much detail as possible. The more detail the better. Don’t just say "I open the door"… say "I raise my arm, bending my elbow slightly, I open up my hand, I extend my fingers…"Be careful not to think of a move to make and vocalize it before moving the body. Aim to make the description and the action be simultaneous or as close as possible.If you have the space to think about anything else other than moving and describing it, you either need to move more, perhaps increase the pace or you need to describe in much more profuse detail.