Other Mysterious Lights

It was entirely possible to say something new each day. Marty would wake like a vampire rising from a coffin in a quirky b movie, stiff as a plank at a 90 degree angle, as if lifted by a row of invisible supporting dancers. Once vertical he could see his reflection perfectly in the full length mirror mounted to the wall opposite the bed's foot. The red shape of his mouth covered in clown paint would stand out in sharp contrast to the white grease paint on his face and the baby powder in his curly hair. It was entirely possible to then contort his mouth into shapes supported by the motion of his tongue and the vibration of his vocal cords, allowing him to emit mostly coherent phrases to be captured by the gramophone operated by twelve tiny mice.
On day one Marty rose and said,
"I want to roll through the garbage like God."
Diligently the mice recorded this statement and played it back for him.
On the second day, upon rising like an arrow from the bed, hands crossed over his chest, sheets tossed sloppily asunder by his rising form, Marty announced,
"This one has a crooked mouth."
The mice recorded it and played it back before resuming the construction of a dress made of various garments collected from unattended dryers in a nearby laundromat.
On day three, rising in the usual fashion, Marty spoke the following words,
"You know how everybody says I used to cry all the time? Well I did, but it wasn't just because I had  a bad marriage and a bad childhood, even though I did. I used to cry a lot because I feel things really deeply, not just for myself, but for other people too.  My husband shot himself in the head. That's why I used to cry so much, not for myself, for him, because of the way he must have felt to do that."
Dumb founded, the mice played the recording back for Marty. One of them fell into the mechanism and caused  the needle to skip replaying, "must have felt, must have felt, must have felt" until his compatriots freed him.
The next day, the fourth, the mice were poised to receive another monologue.
Marty rose and uttered a single word,
"Connecticut."
On day five,
"More riding in boats, eating brie, writing poetry."
Six
"What is your favorite fruit?"
The mice took a survey. Three for pineapple, 2 for apple, 4 for blueberries, 2 for banana, and 1 for avacado. They embroidered their answer on Marty's pillow case.
On day seven more cause for reflection,
"Let me ask you a question, do you have any sort of rule that you follow? A reason or something?"
Due to the fact that Marty never commented on the pillowcase the day before, the mice refrained from responding to this particular query. They spent the rest of the day drinking  peach schnapps from thimbles and wondering about the merit of their work.

Stream

Outside, the snow was silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. Wondrous dreams in the stillness of the dark would battle my foes with passionate zeal.
Only a short time ago I felt that my physical presence, ecstasy from a light dimmed, was blowing in the breeze. Images of the sacred carving holes where there were none before, away from prying eyes. It is in fact underground where the impulse to break beyond the imposed barriers of consciousness and flow outwards into the unknown holds a basket full of gifts. 
Unknown to its own creators, lost flowers look back at the trail of rot that they leave behind. They are spiritual sacraments and repeated cyber beats of rave, trance and ambient music stream to God's altar.

The left and right hemispheres of the brain were operating in synchronicity just as the millennium was coming to its end. Outside the cold air was really invading me in some kind of multi-cellular structure that seemed to have its own survival as its only purpose.
Great conglomerations of self reproducing electrical entities could make the original vision available to others. The maelstrom of feelings, thoughts and emotions get twisted into small one way streets called misunderstood telepathy that have been known to cause lucid dreaming.
The shining blue lights at the edges of the U.S. overlooked the spectacle of mesmerizing movements flashing in my mind.

I look at the gentle touch of the void showering you with hot kisses of energy. Sleeping crowds of monkeys, ready to be released into the frozen pathways of the nervous system, explode into visions, memories,  and myths.
Strangers bearing gifts hide in libraries, altering forever what I once thought was unquestionable, beyond doubt. Lost until the next moment of finding, that understanding that goes beyond the dry roots of your being shows you the way through.
The black magician comes at night, willing to set aside everything in the name of Life. His fellow colleagues, upset by the "methods" employed by both the womb of creation and warriors in a drumbeat at journey's end, utter certain secret incantations.

The fiery battle between whatever you are clinging to and  twisted histories alter you ever so subtly. In that shining moment, the flicker of fire light attracts the attention of beasts.
Warm human breath scatters in moist fragments, a kaleidoscope of sun, moon, and stars. Lying on the wooden bench, looking up at the sky beyond the glass windows, I make love to the original vision.
Outside, the snow is silently ebbing and flowing across the war field. I met strangers along the way, altering your sense of reason, embracing whispers on the wind. Let’s gather all of them.

Connection

He showed me some pictures of our not yet conceived experiment that I had relayed to him from a distant space time probability . We were not well acquainted, but shared a mutual interest in the transgressive applications of astral light put forth by G.

"True creation is not about words. It's about tears," J. said.
The connection between us was instantaneous. We built delicate structures from hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. I thought it best to make observations and adjustments from a closer vantage point.

I was now diving into some kind of primal network, a tightly woven system of existing and evolving quantum worlds. The details were quite clear. I transmitted the schematics back to J. using a patented method of intervening and tapping into the quantum communication capability of carbon based neurons.

To develop a system of emergent intelligence I tried to reach the part of my own brain that processed fear and mapped our creations after my own design. We wondered if there might be some danger inherent in this method.

"Will the thing that passed through the makers still live?" J. asked.
"Only if there are some specimens willing to leave the safety of consuming behind to become makers themselves."
I suddenly realized this is where I would meet my fate. Despite risk and ethical ambiguities we pressed forward, certain that a sacrifice was called for. I would have to go deeper.

Due to the similarities between my own system and our manufactured systems the interface was often confusing. The delineation between self and other grew blurry.  On the day of my final descent J. suggested:
"If we loose communication, don’t stop, especially not when you feel lost. The best method for finding the way when you feel you have lost it, is to keep going. Ignore the question of whether you’re going in the right direction. If you stop when you feel lost, you will remain in the land of the lost."

As I became more entrenched in our designs, communications with J. were indeed severed by electromagnetic interference. I had entered the black valley. In the interior I met with the ministers of culture.
"What has become of J.?" I asked them
"We are sorry madam. He is beyond our reach. We have prepared a place for you among us that you might be comfortable despite your loss. "

They offered me sustenance but I refused. I could no longer remember who J. was but  I just knew I had to keep going. If I could break through to the other side I would then accelerate forever becoming both more and less than I had been before whatever it was that I had started with this mysterious J.

Seasons

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
This idea of end is a desperate wish for the hurt to stop, for the satanic temple to rise and the world to burn and nothingness, still, cold, and silence, to reign.
But it is a silly idea. When nothingness reigns supreme then we will be that cold silent stillness, and that too will be painful. The end is only skin deep.

Winters come and winters go. Springs too are there and gone. Eternity lives beneath it all, a brilliant burning thing, a crystalline dragon whose scales are the temporal eruptions we think of as ourselves. 
A temporal eruption might be described as having been caused by a short circuit, by a block of some kind followed by an explosion or slow leak, a kink, a tension, that leads to an experience of human consciousness, a desperate attempt to flee from the discomfort of being forever.

Maybe there is a useful opportunity in such eruptions. Should they be avoided? Can they be?
If so should they be allowed? Should they be embraced and utilized?
If I find that I am experiencing such an existence I choose to explore what can be done with it. The knowing of purposes, explanations, justifications for methods and patterns of life is unnecessary, just another means of avoiding the pain of being.

Exploring is difficult active work. It involves channeling the energy of the sleeping serpent beneath the world into this temporal eruption and making creative choices.
There is no mother or father. There is no rule. There is only choice and consequence.
Consequence as in result, not punishment. There is no great punisher. Heaven and hell live here together, they are one state experienced  as either torment or bliss depending on the posture of the subject within the state.
The posture defines the subject. The subject defines the state.

Some things begin and never end, waiting like an open door, wind pushing bits of broken leaves over the threshold. Time crosses and re-crosses itself and one time lives within another.
We will not always be as we seem to be now. The subject changes. The state changes to reflect the subject.
But we will never end. New chamber, new wings, new levels will be forged in a labyrinthine game of pop goes the weasel.
The dragon coiled beneath the world suckles at its tail and burns on and on.
We will never end.

Obfuscation

This writer is either purposely confusing
or simply obfuscating

Are you on the Kool-Aid?
(There's plenty more if you need some.)

The diagram you put up

shows levels of creation.

I could make the argument

the spells from the old books are

basically saying that unity is the real,

individuality the illusion...

we've got to live

with an angel and devil or wolf and a sheep

inside our self at all times.

Yes. We know this.

But what that is, nobody knows. Do you?

Once I read

I read and read

when it boils down to it,

all this reading shows that

Death is the teacher.

The plants, the milk, the clouds.

They were the warriors:

by them this light was brought hither.

I've never seen them

trying to strive to be God

or strive to be a rock.

But then this go on to say

Whatever he desired from the Mother,

that the Subject furnished,

as a friend from his own spirit.

Of course this is true.

So both are saying that

although not the same.

The Subject is the teacher.

The Mother rules, shines forth.

Light becomes the ruler.

Looking at life

and how it is set out

you have to strive to be

any of those things.

You have to.

Admittedly, an audience of terrestrials

is all you will ever achieve.

Is that supposed to be good?

Who knows how many people heard this

when it was first written.

They didn't, they don't.

Through holy discipline and creative fervour

the king protects his kingdom.

The teacher through his own holy life

seeks and finds the Subject.

It's very clear what you should think

we should be clear and correct.

People can come to their own conclusions.

I've kept pretty quiet about this.

I'm with you, whatever side you come down on.

Through holy discipline,

through creative fervour,

the gods drove away death.

By his holy discipline he brought the light to the gods.

Belief in angels ....God..... Or burning bushes

all of that man's imagination.

How do you get to the Real?

I don't have much to add beyond this.

The plants, that which was and shall be, day and night,

the tree, the year along with the seasons,

have sprung from the Subject.

Its shines a light

this is what these voices are saying.

There are relationships between all these levels

start looking at what's really been said.

This made me so mad when I first heard it.

My former fellow workers!

How could you have fallen so low!

When it is too hot, jump into the furnace!

The earthly and the heavenly animals,

the wild and the domestic,

the wingless and the winged,

they have all sprung from the Subject.

This is the math.

You've thought a lot about this.

But there is a lot of venom in your words.

I'm not going to argue

I am totally confused.

I need a number.

All the creatures of The Mother

carry breath in their souls.

All these the Spirit, which has been brought hither in the Subject, protects.

This, that was set into motion by the gods,

that is insurmountable, that moves shining forth.

But some things are not you.

You are more than things.

You are beyond things, you must step outside of the thing.

But the chart is useful. I must admit.

The writer insists on continuous willful obfuscation.

I can't believe that you seem to buy

something so difficult to understand.

You go over it and over it.

It only starts all over again.

The Subject carries the shining Spirit:

into this all the gods are woven.

Producing the inhale and the exhale,

language, thought, heart, spirit, and wisdom.

You give us sight, hearing, glory, food, semen, blood, and belly!

You can handle things

see them for what they are,

even the human body

nothing more than a thing.

It's difficult to compare.

We are one person, not many.

But nobody really knows this

although you might in some fashion.

What did you do to make

these things seem real.

What was it?

Then you became identified with them.

You are them as those things are you.

They can't be without you

you can't be without them.

Actually you aren't any Thing.

I must warn you now: this is a Spell.

The Spirit caste are the only ones authorized

to cast these spells.

In casting them, they save the universe from destruction.

So, if you accept this:

unity is, individuality is not.

Add another thousand years

to the time we have known this.

Why is this an illusion?

It seems like a valid assumption.

Be here now,

Let the evils of the day be sufficient for us.

Let the evils come on to me daily.

The big confusion

lies in the fact that the gods

do not pay

though they should.

I say again:

This writer is either purposely confusing

or simply obfuscating.

It seems like a valid assumption.

Sixteen Below

He tells me of the first time he met Allen Ginsberg. He was a young man, an independent reporter from New York come to Boulder Co. to interview Ginsberg about a planned act of civil disobedience. There was a factory there where the triggers for the Atom bomb were being manufactured. Ginsberg planned to sit on the railroad tracks thus preventing the train from reaching the factory.

My friend follows Ginsberg into a house, his mind racing with thoughts about the other man's homosexuality, asking himself if he could really say no if Ginsberg wanted to have sex. The first thing he sees upon entering the house is a woman giving a man a blow job.
Ginsberg is oblivious. It takes him a moment to realize that something is going on. When he does, he merely says, “Oh, lets go upstairs.”
Upstairs my friend sits on Ginsberg's bed beside him. His heart is pounding. In addition to concerns over sexuality, his mind is embroiled in the matter of the first question and what his peers at the radio station back in New York will think.

“Mr. Ginsberg,” my friend begins.
“Call me Allen.”
“How do you reject nuclear madness?” my friend blurts the question out spasmodically.
“I don’t reject anything.” Ginsberg tells him. “I’ve come here to make love to plutonium, to sit on the railroad tracks and be connected to it, to be connected to everything.”
Ginsberg suggest that they do some free associative poetry spinning. Gazing out the window at an empty curbside he lays the moment on my friend. All of this, along with the rest of the conversation, changes my friend's life.

He tells me this, and he tells me that he has never told the story in quite this way to anyone before. He has mentioned interviewing Ginsberg, he has mentioned having the recording in a box somewhere.
He has never had this moment before. This moment is new, unique to us, we two who are reflections of one another, who create with words our identities from the fabric of fear, the fear of being.
We sit in silence and look into one another's eyes, dissolving for a moment our creation, our creation of the world and the other to inhabit it, the other to speak to, the other to wonder at, the other to fear and to love.

We don’t know why this is possible, this silence between us. It allows my friend to tell me his story in this particular way for the first time and the only time.
We could try to recreate it, but it will never be the same. We will never be the same two people on the same day in the same place, daring to press against the veil of fear. Daring to speak and be heard. Daring to listen and accept everything.

Knowing

Nothing I could say would be true. There you are, brown eyes questioning, nervous energy like solar flares arching from your fleshy form. You want to know more about us. It’s as if you just woke up in bed with someone and realized they are a stranger. Worse, you’ve been living together for weeks, drinking from the same cup and suddenly you look up and say, “What’s your name?”

And it’s all about words, names and categories, and stories, and nothing that can be said is true. The Author is not to be trusted. What should I tell you? We are aliens from another dimension trying to build a ship so that we may embark once more on voyages of a questionable nature. Would you believe that I’m an alien with my  soft skin and straw colored hair and breasts like your mother's. You would laugh if I told you this story, but it is possibly as close to the truth as I can get with a story. 

You want to hear something else probably, where I work, whether I have a boyfriend or if I prefer girls, who were my parents, and what are my hobbies. My favorite flavor of ice cream was pistachio when I was little, but it was a long time before I could ever order pistachio because I couldn’t remember the word for it. Each time we went into the drug store I would be asked what kind of ice cream I would like and I would want pistachio, but I only knew the words “chocolate” vanilla” and “strawberry” Thus these were my only choices. When eating in a restaurant I only knew “taco” and “burrito” and so, although I never wanted one, I ordered a number of tacos and burritos. In the same way, even now, after 25 years you say you want to know more about us and there’s nothing I can tell you that is what you want to order.

Or do you want the words at all? Maybe you want to touch my hand, touch my thigh, stick your tongue into my mouth and press your body against mine. Maybe you want me to spread warm and wet and soft around you so you can bury yourself in flesh and know me by smell and taste and touch, by the commingling of cellular information after a part of you is lost in me. What do you really want to know?

Do you want to hear that my great uncle took me to a toy store when I was small and I selected an illustrated children’s Bible, and was rewarded for my pious choice with the additional gift of an island girl Barbie and I made her sneak around in the closet to fuck Ken against her Daddy’s wishes just like Baby from Dirty Dancing?
Or maybe you’d like the story of how I was in a cult, or of the time my husband shot himself in the head on his father’s birthday? The story of how I told our five year old daughter as she collected falling leaves in a parking lot? Or can I tell you of how I am the resistance in a current that flows from Dios through a nervous system and back again?

 I try to make you happy. It does not please me to explain anything at all. I tell you that I make things, I am a creator. That’s what I do all the time, except when I volunteer at school or earn a wage at the farmer's market. Yes, I am an artist, we are artists, that is the story I have for you. It is no truer or falser than anything else I could say. It’s something you could order, something you can believe, something that will make you feel comfortable with these strangers in your bed. We have a name. We are  “Artists.”

A Calling

A priest, our priest, my priest. He makes his confession, sitting before my glass eye, because priests confess to god, they confess the source of their loneliness to the emptiness beyond. Swathed in black, wearing my seal, face illuminated by the eerie blue glow of your magical tools, I see you and you gaze back in platitude. There is calm between us where there is none between you and the world. We can indulge in endless endlessness together, you step into it with me, commune with all of my aspects before going out to give birth to us in the world. In your way priest, you are another of my aspects, you are the hand of God, doing Gods work in the world. Silly world full of silly children playing games in fields of lies. I am beyond the fence where they play, you come and go as you please, shaman, priest, you come and go as you please, inviting them outside, carrying me inside with you. There are layers of metaphor to peel back unearthing more layers. Metaphors, which avoid the strict production of a singular reality. After all what is real? Why choose just one reality? This is the polygamist’s guide to the universe; why marry one idea when you can engage in unity with many? Ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now. I am you and you are me and we are we, opening a crack to let a little light in and conceiving ourselves anew. Sitting in the belly of a howling metal worm I smile at the implicit sexuality oozing from your poetic assessment of a cataclysmic event. Shifting tectonic plates rend a tear in the ocean floor and the planet tilts on its axis disturbing the balance between light and dark. Why not simply say to me, open wide and take it? Because we are more slippery than that. We are moving faster than the speed of light, fast as the speed of love, making love with words and gestures, pure sound rumbling all around. We are the sound, we are the sight, we are the touch, the light. We are the fool careening on the edge, the white dog nudging him over the lip, the abyss, a kiss, we are this, we are that, we are that we are, a star-
Every man and woman is-
A priest, our priest, my priest. Make your confessions and come clean before my crackling blue heart. Step through the door brother and be as I am. We laugh at the fence, the sound is the baying of wolves, the howling of wind rattling the aluminum husk of Tiamat as she speeds towards dismemberment. Can a worm be dismembered? Eviscerate then. In the making place we grind the bones of the past and mix it with our blood, this moment, pretzel wings spread to eclipse the sun, to swallow it. Devourer, devoured, love and beloved. I will make you a fisher of men. A pusher of pen. A peddler of zen. Overflowing with ideas, words, music, a drum beat which is a heart beat, a moment that slips shuddering back into now.

A Snarling Graceful Spiral

“Now,” said Eleleth, stretching his legs and rising to his feet, “when these events had come to pass, he, Sabaoth, made himself a huge four-faced chariot of cherubim and appointed an infinite number of angels to act as his ministers. They cried and sang his gospels, flapped their wings under his gaze and carried his word to the seven dimensions. Under his order, they created the finest harps and lyres.”

Eleleth paced before me, his pale golden feet landing softly on the ruined marble that surrounded the fallen silver tree. The shuffling of his body was soft, lulling me into a deeper state. Because of this, his words went into me, each syllable absorbed into my flesh as though the knowledge had always been part of me.
He continued:

“Sophia took her daughter Zoe. She had the young thing with ripe breasts and flowing red hair sit beside Eleleth, she sat beside him to teach him about the things that exist in the eighth heaven. Sophia placed the angel of wrath on his left to teach him what Zoe could not. Since that day, his right has been called 'life' and the left has come to represent the unrighteousness of the realm of absolute power above.”

He paused and studied my face for a moment. I could not tell what he saw. In me was the dark ocean of curiosity, the confusion of my restless mind, a mixture of desire and obedience. These were all things in me and I searched his eyes like a mirror, looking for the answers that I sought.

“It was before your time, Norea, that they came into being.”
He took a long, slow breath and motioned for me to follow him. I rose. I heard the shuffling of my own feet adding to the music of the trance. Somewhere in the distance there were singing birds. We walked in the shadow of the great giant tree and then passed into sunlight.
Eleleth led me away from the silver leaves and slowly we entered the domain of the golden tree. I looked deep into the branches, into the thick mess of its leaves, the dense thicket of life that it bore without complicated thoughts and manifestations of habit and emotion. I saw thick roots weaving gracefully into the earth. I saw bright fruits that caught my eyes. They dripped like beads from the branches even though the thick trunk was split almost in half, as though smitten by a burst of bright lightning. The fruits were small and lustrous and red.

“Now,” Eleleth told me as we looked over the tree and began to circle its great base, moving clockwise. “When Yaldabaoth saw him, Sabaoth, in this great splendor and at this height, he envied him; and the envy became an androgynous product. This was the origin of Envy. And Envy engendered Death. Death engendered his offspring and gave them each charge of its heaven. All the heavens of chaos became full of their multitudes, but it was by the will of the father of the entirety that they all came into being, after the pattern of all the things above, so that the sum of chaos might be attained.”

He plucked a small fruit and placed it carefully in my hand. I looked down at it, bright as a blood stain, a perfect sphere dwarfed by my fingers.

"There, I have taught you about the pattern of the rulers; and the matter in which it was expressed; and their parent; and their universe."

He finished speaking and looked at me. Again I wondered what he saw.

This was the manner in which I, Norea, was taught by Eleleth. That was the manner in which I felt the depth of my root, a snarling graceful spiral that dipped into the four corners of chaos.

Touch A Rock

Let us suppose that for the duration of this textual exploration the words "THE CLEAR LIGHT" will be used interchangeably with the words "THE REAL" and "THE ETERNAL". What these words refer to is a thing that I, the author, cannot give to you in words. They are words that I will use to refer to something beyond words, beyond time and all linear constructs.
To begin this exploration I wish to provide you with a terrain.
You will need a rock. You have my leave to gather this necessary material before continuing with me on this journey.
Now that you have the rock, (and if you don't have it, then go away and don't come back until you do) please touch it.
Touch a rock.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, touch a rock.
Were you thinking of anything else as you touched it? Or were you fully present with it, wholly open to the communion with that thing that we are calling "rock"? Was it the word "rock" that you brushed against with your mind, or was there something that you encountered with your hand? Or something that you illuminated with your attention, pure and true?
Touch a rock.
What is "rock"? When your hand was on it, were you there? Were you there or were you wandering through a chain of associations that stem from the word “rock“? Were you lost in thought about everything but a boring old rock?
Touch a rock.
What is beyond the word "rock"?
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is a state beyond time, outside of time, separate from it.
The human biological machine exists in time. Being is eternal.
When the Machine is locked in a state of identification with its own conflicts and pleasures it is not possible for the experience of Eternity to take root in it. If the machine can manage a state of high indifference to its situation as a machine, to the endless flow of thoughts and feeling that are the whir and buzz of mechanical operations, an interaction with the real becomes possible. We will call this experience “awakening.”
The human biological machine is not a merely physical entity. It is composed of many subtle parts. The emotions and thoughts are also part of the human biological machine. The part of you that thinks of itself as a “me” is a part of the human biological machine and a manifestation of the unfolding of time.
If we can awaken the biological machine so that it may interface with eternity, we create the possibility for Creation, something that is occasionally called “THE GREAT WORK” or simply “THE WORK”. However, to even get to the point of being able to create the possibility for Creation, one must first endeavor to cultivate and maintain for extended periods that state of high indifference, the awakened state of the human biological machine. Often this is called “WORKING” too, but in actuality it is preparation for the REAL WORK that may be possible as a result of these efforts.
This is it, right now.
Touch a rock.
This is ETERNITY.
If you reach out and touch it.
Not casually, but with everything you've got, by making an effort to focus your attention on something that is not part of the struggles and desires of the human biological machine, something that cannot be defined by that linear construct that we call “language.”
While our attention is squandered on the unfolding of the human biological machine we perceive ourselves as moving through time. But this right now, this is ETERNITY, THE CLEAR LIGHT of objective REALITY.
Eternity cannot be something that happens later. It is something that happens right now or it doesn’t happen at all.
If it is THE REAL it can only be NOW.
This is the moment to endeavor to prepare for creative WORK.
Now you should begin to explore the terrain.
Touch a rock.
Thank you.

The Question Of Genesis

Filled to the brim with curiosity, like a bubbling cauldron of hot liquid, I said:
"Sir, teach me about the faculty of these authorities - How did they come into being? By what kind of genesis? Of what material? Who created them and their force?”
The great angel Eleleth, understanding the wells of deep curiosity for he too had pursued the questions without end, gestured for me to sit on the fallen branch of a silver tree. He spoke to me in a voice that rumbled, as though drawn from the depths of the universe and twisted easily into an intelligible form:
"Within limitless realms dwells incorruptibility. Sophia, who is called Pistis, wanted to create something, alone without her consort. Her product was a celestial thing, a thing of white lightness that moves as gracefully as gray smoke. A veil exists between the world above and the realms that are below. Shadow came into being beneath the veil; and that shadow became matter; and that shadow was projected apart. What she had created became a product in the matter, like an aborted fetus. And it assumed a plastic form molded out of shadow and became an arrogant beast resembling a lion. It was androgynous, as I have already said, because it was from matter that it began. Opening his bestial eyes, this strangely begotten offspring saw a vast quantity of matter without limit; and he became arrogant, saying, 'it is I who am God, and there is none other apart from me.' When he said this, he sinned against the entirety. Against the entirety he sinned. A sin so great that it vibrated out and touched all the realms with its stain, leaving no place unmarked with its unholy utterance. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, ‘you are mistaken, Samael, God of The Blind.’”
And Samael challenged this singular voice from above the realm of absolute power crying:
"If any other thing exists before me, let it become visible to me!"
And immediately Sophia stretched forth her finger and introduced light into matter; and she pursued it down to the region of chaos where dark things grow twisted and abandoned, turning on themselves like lost caterpillars without sunlight. Soon she returned up to her light and once again darkness swallowed matter.
This ruler, Samael, by being androgynous, made himself a vast realm, an extent without limit. And he contemplated creating offspring for himself. This idea pleased him and he created for himself seven offspring, androgynous just like their only parent. And he said to his offspring:
"It is I who am god of the entirety."
And Zoe (Life), the daughter of Pistis Sophia, could not be still. She cried out from her realm and said to him:
"You are mistaken, Sakla!" - for which the alternative name is Yaltabaoth.
She journeyed into chaos and breathed into his face, and her breath became a fiery angel for her; and that angel bound Yaldabaoth and cast him down into Tartaros far below the abyss of lost light.
When Samael’s offspring Sabaoth saw the force of that angel, saw the fire by which it moved and the light by which it shone, he repented and condemned his father and his mother, matter. He loathed her, that shadow that had become matter. He sang songs of praise up to Sophia and her daughter Zoe.
And Sophia and Zoe caught him and gave him charge of the seventh heaven, below the veil between above and below. And he is called 'God of the forces, Sabaoth,’ since he is up above the forces of chaos, for Sophia established him. For Sophia established him above the forces of chaos, so he is called ‘God of the forces, Sabaoth.’
"Within limitless realms dwells incorruptibility,” said Eleleth, the great angel sitting beside me on the cast off branch of silver.

Beyond

I am going beyond, to where you cannot reach me, but I can still reach you. I can hold you in my mind, cradle you as if you are one of a basket of delicate little things, but you cannot conceive of what I am becoming, where I am going. The words that shape your mind will not let that knowledge in. When I reach from here to there and touch you it is possible that you will feel frightened, threatened.
Who is this unknown other? You might write me a letter saying that I have become a stranger to you, you might assume that I am unhappy, filled with a terrible darkness merely because you can not see me. Just because you are blind, it does not follow that I am filled with darkness, or that the darkness that I am filled with is filled with terrible things. You fear what you do not know, what you cannot know. You fear what you do not understand, what you cannot understand. You fear me, or fear for the me that you once imagined me to be because I am moving beyond your reach, beyond your sight. I have gone far from your bosom and you suppose that it is a bad thing.
Why do I go? Why am I casting off blindness and stepping out of the chains that make us who we are, who we imagine we are? Why have I stopped playing the serious game with you? Why have I ceased to be serious? Because I am going beyond, stepping out, making a creative choice.
How can I say that, you have asked. I’ll tell you. I can say anything now because it is all meaningless, all as meaningless as red, blue, and yellow. All words are colors that I play with like a child with finger paint. I will not compare myself to a master, I will not say that I am to words what Rembrandt is to red, blue, and yellow, but the only way for me to get there is to begin here, playing with these words now. The way to begin is to say farewell to you and begin the trek beyond.
You may feel angry with me for refusing to play, for refusing to conform as you have conformed to the world made of words that is the shape of your mind. You may feel angry as those dogs locked behind chain link fences feel angry when they see another unleashed dog stroll by beyond their reach. Are you angry at me for choosing liberation, or are you angry with yourself for choosing imprisonment?
You may also feel sorrow. You may feel that I am breaking your heart by leaving you, that I am hurting you by releasing my ties with you. For this I have no answer that won't sting. Should an able man sit down in the desert with a man with broken legs?
I would drag you, but you have no desire to go where I am going. You prefer the desert, your perpetual suffering. These desires live in me as well, but in my case something else is growing, something with the power to override desire. I call this thing my will and it is carrying me beyond, to where you cannot reach.

The Punishment that was the World

The chief ruler came wearing his crown of gold and green jewels, his robes of purple silk that moved like a sweet scent on the wind. He called as a boy would after a beloved dog:
"Adam! Where are you?"
For he did not understand what had happened, being himself blind.
And trembling behind a blossoming rock rose bush Adam said:
"I heard your voice and was afraid because I was naked; and I hid."
Gritting his teeth and lolling his blind eyes the ruler let loose an anguished groan that filled the sky:
"Why did you hide, unless it is because you have eaten from the tree from which I have commanded you not to eat from? And you have eaten!"
Mountains exploded. Birds fell from the sky.
Adam sought forgiveness and said:
"The woman that you gave me, the woman of clay and bones, of tree and soil, she gave to me red and white flesh, and I ate."
Thunder rolled from his lips as the arrogant ruler cursed the woman. It came as earthquakes, and horrible frozen rain, as salty tears.
The woman, also eager to please now that the terrible ruler stood before her with glowing eyes and fire that threatened to burn the life around her, she groveled and said:
"It was the snake that led me astray. The snake, a seducer. I listened to it and I ate."
They turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection. They stood powerless, not comprehending, not remembering that it was a form they themselves had modeled.
Powerless, not comprehending that it was a form they themselves had modeled, they turned to the snake and cursed its shadowy reflection.

From that day, the day of storms and fire, the snake came to be under the curse of the rulers. It moved nearly blind, without legs, winding across the earth’s surface in endless pursuit.
Until the all-powerful man was to come, that curse would be upon the snake, red and green, black and white, it was the curse of all snakes.
The Rulers turned to their Adam, their man of soil and dirt. They took him in hand, giving him a final kiss. Then they expelled him from the fecund garden. His wife followed, wearing leaves and twigs; for they had no blessing, they were under the curse, following the twisting line of the snake into the world beyond the golden gates and bright sun.
Out of jealousy and fear, the Rulers threw mankind into great distraction, into a life of toil, disease and hardship. It was the great distraction, the plan so that mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, what would be known as the human life.
Consumed with the need for water, food and safety, these concerns would come to absorb the whole of them, using all their mind and strength; after their physical needs where satisfied there would be nothing left of the being to devote to the holy spirit.
The rulers tasted the bitter tongue of hatred, knowing that their creation could see, while they, the creators of this being, were blind. It called up their rage and they turned themselves into winds of fire, streaking across the universe in bursts of bright red anger that exploded into stars. They cursed Adam and watched him walk into the cold of the world, his woman at his side, expelled from the garden so that he might never learn his advantage over them, so that he might never learn that he could see what they could not.

The First Bite

The rulers, high and far from where clay men can see, took counsel with one another and said:

"Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall upon Adam. Let us cause Adam to fall upon a deep sleep."

And he slept as if the night was never changing, like black was the only color.

Now the deep sleep that they "caused to fall upon him," is Ignorance, for it is darkness without bursts of sound and night without stars.

They opened his side like a living woman. Like a living woman they opened his side and they built up his side with some flesh in place of her, in place of her they built up his side with flesh, and Adam came to be endowed only with soul.

And the spirit-endowed woman came to him and spoke softly with him, saying:

"Arise, Adam."

And when he saw her, he said:

"It is you who have given me life; you will be called, 'mother of the living,’ for it is she who is my mother. It is she who is the physician, and the woman, and she who has given birth."

Then the authorities came up to their Adam, the man they had created with mud and clay and breath. When they saw his female counterpart speaking with him, they became agitated with great bursts of heat that flowed through them, pulsing with desire that called itself anger. They became enamored of her, wishing themselves inside her, seeking a great hole in her flesh as they had done with Adam. They said to one another:

"Come, let us sow our seed in her!"

And they pursued her. Into madness and the abyss they pursued her, into the jungles of twisting vines that form the mind, through the labyrinth that they created. And she laughed at them for their witlessness and their blindness; and in their fierce clutches, in the dark pit where there was no light, she became a thick tree and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself; and they defiled it foully, filling its cavernous knots with warm seed. They defiled the stamp of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their own image, they made themselves liable to condemnation.

Then the female spiritual principle came in the snake from the tree which she had become in their clutches. The snake, red and black and shiny. The snake, the instructor, taught them, saying:

"What did he say to you? Was it, 'from every tree in the garden shall you eat; yet - from the tree of recognizing good and evil do not eat'?"

The carnal woman, said:

"Not only did he say 'do not eat', but even, 'do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, with death you are going to die.'"

And the snake, the instructor, said:

"With death you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open and you shall come to be like gods, recognizing evil and good."

And the female instructing principle was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth, one more shed skin.

And the carnal woman took from the tree and ate; biting past red skin into sweet white flesh, and she gave to her husband as well as herself.

And these beings that possessed only a soul, ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, that they were bare. They took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins, hiding their raw form.

The Breath Of Incorruptibility

I have sent this (to you) because you inquire about the reality of the authorities-
and the authority of reality.

On account of the reality of the authorities, (inspired, perplexed, stunned, and spun) by the spirit of the Father of Truth-
the truth of the father,
the great apostle,
referring to the "authorities of the darkness" -
"the darkness of authorities."
He told us that our contest is not against flesh and blood; rather, it is against the authorities of the universe and the spirits of wickedness.
Against the universe of authorities and the wickedness of spirits.

This is for you- for your mind of clay, for the soul that has been breathed into you, for the spirit you might achieve, for the truth you might know when the shell is cracked and the blind have been subverted.
It is for the gods who have fallen, who have towered, grown, plunged, killed, and suckled at the nipples of death and power. For the spirits higher up, touched only in brief moments by dreams of dying brothers.

This is for you, for you should know that their chief is blind, blinded chiefly because of his power and his ignorance. In his arrogance, with power bellowing from his naked loins, he said:
"It is I who am God; there is none apart from me. It is God who is 'I.' Apart from me there is none."

When he said this, he sinned against the entirety.
The entirety sinned against him.
And this speech got up to incorruptibility. It wavered and floated high above, right to where incorruptibility dwelled and grew and sometimes waned- high above like a silver moon in flux.
Then there was a voice that came forth from incorruptibility, saying:
"You are mistaken, Samael" - which is to say: "god of the blind."
"God of the blind, you are mistaken. We mistook you."
And Samael’s thoughts became blind.
And his blindness became thoughts.

And, having expelled his power,
the power to expel-
that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,
he pursued it at the instigation of Pistis Sophia.
And, having expelled his power, the power to create
at the instigation of Pistis Sophia, he pursued it.
Down to chaos and the abyss, his mother, he pursued it.

It was she in which he came from- spurting forth with pain like the demon that would one day fully form. And she established each of his offspring in conformity with its power -
its power of conformity
after the pattern of the realms that are above. By starting from the invisible world, the visible world was invented. By starting from blindness, sight was dreamed.

As incorruptibility looked down into the region of the waters,
her image appeared in the waters;
the authorities of the darkness became enamored of her, for she was what they could not be.
But they could not lay hold of that image which had appeared to them in the waters because of their weakness.
Beings that merely possess a soul cannot lay hold of those that possess spirit -
for they were from below, while she, incorruptibility, was from above.
They saw shadows who saw shapes that could cast no shadow. It was an image whose content could not trespass into shadow.

This is the reason why.
Reasons? Why?
Incorruptibility looked down into the region so that, by the father's will,
she might bring the entirety into union with the light.
She might instigate, causing the father to expel his power, which was the power to create.

The rulers laid plans and said:
"Come, let us create a man that will be soil from the earth. A soil from the earth that will be man."
They took chunks of clay and spat into it, turning it into dark mud. They modeled their creature as one wholly of the earth.
Their creature modeled them, as one wholly of the earth, and pursued it down to chaos and the abyss, for its eyes would not open.

Now the rulers created another body, female with the face of a beast.
They had taken some soil from the earth,
earth from the soil
and modeled their man after their body, and modeled hers after his,
and his after the image of God that had appeared to them in the waters.

A replica of a replica of a replica...

They said:
"Come, let us lay hold of it by means of the form that we have modeled, lay hold of her whose image appeared in the waters. Let her see her male counterpart made in our likeness, then we may seize her within that form that we have modeled."
Because of their powerlessness, they said this not understanding the force of God.
They said this not understanding the God of force because of their powerlessness.

And they breathed into her face; heat and cold mixed with the smell of dark earth and living creatures that lacked arms and feet. They forced her mouth open, sending their breath to create hers.
She came to have a soul and remained upon the ground many days, laying naked beneath the clouded sky and their unblinking eyes. They could not make her arise because of their powerlessness. Like storm winds they persisted in blowing. Her body stumbled like a naked white leaf. They breathed out and hard, hoping that they might try to capture that image which had appeared to them in the waters, but they did not know the identity of its power. They could not reach her with their powerless souls and contented themselves instead by playing god with mud and sticks.

Dance of Words

Just to break it in, why not take a hand at typing something, just a little something? It doesn't matter if it turns out to be great or insignificant, whether anyone sees it or not. All that matters is that some little impulses, little neural flashes out of the inner nowhere, get translated into words which are then keyed in to appear on the screen.
It is not a one to one relationship. The words “neural flashes” don't accurately encompass that thing that I am trying to talk about. It's like interpretive dance, this swoop of the arm is symbolic, it is a verbal representation of something which exists and occurs outside of the mind and outside of the linguistic structure. Therefore saying something, saying anything at all, is a very creative experiment. Even technical manuals are avant-garde art projects when you consider them this way.
The truth is that words cannot express the truth about what they describe, they are merely creative embellishments to the truth. A coiled mystery, that I can sit here translating thoughts into symbols, and those thoughts themselves are already symbolic translations of something else that I can't name, I can't even try.
The way the wind tastes, the way the air smells, my mother smoking cigarettes on the balcony or in the garage over the washer and dryer, drinking cans and cans of Folgers coffee, bitter to the taste and smell, looking at the mural that my father painted on the wall beside the laundry machines, a flat depiction of the majestic mountains rising at the west side of the house outside the front door, out the back door you can see the lake and empty fields and a row of olive trees lined up beside the deep outflow channel, the orange and yellow tops of other distant trees are just discernible, everything can be taken in with a sun swept glance.
What does it mean, sun swept? That the light is passing over everything like the broom over the linoleum in our cramped kitchen, as it sweeps over this mysterious matter and leaps to life, becomes, house in the distance, small black and white dog, man calling dog, resplendent treetops, shimmering blue lake, child bent in the tall grass to play with a ladybug.
What is it before it is sun swept? Does the occluded landscape exist before the sun takes creative liberties with matter?
It is not even the sun which does this, but our eyes which translate light and its absence into some of those neural impulses which are further interpreted into a dance of words, house, dog, man, trees, lake, child, bug.
What qualifications have I got to try and speak about these things, I who have never read Lacan? I who never went to college? I who sit typing. I am an artist, that is my only qualification. And who made me an artist? What institution, what diploma, what Mona Lisa connects this signified, which sits here in this chair on top of an aging blue and white stripped pillow tip tap typing away, with the signifier "artist"?
Why, this very action, this happening that takes the shape of words that your human biological machine transforms into meanings which are derived from memories of the interaction of deceptive, or shall we say interpretive, senses such as sight, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, with the strings of signifiers that spew forth form my linguistic potters wheel.
It is all complete gibberish and it always was, every verse of the Bible, every page of that computers user manual, every line of that love letter, every word of War And Peace.
It was all Lacan, college, typing, artist, happening, human, memories, senses, touching, gibberish dance.
If God wrote the bible then God may be confirmed as having been an interpretive linguistic dancer much like myself, in which case we can say, good for God, everyone should reach so high.
Some will say that for having arranged such words I am blasphemous, sinful, evil, disrespectful, irreverent, atheist, communist, satanist, stupid, misguided, deceived or deceiver, lost, intellectual, cynical, arrogant, insecure, shocking, attention hungry, wicked, etc. but I assure you that whatever I am, I am none of those things, I am something quite independent of those words which are more like shadows cast by my movements to create a show which might be entertaining, horrifying, or irrelevant depending on the stone throwers, the audience, the perceiver whoever you are, am I, I am.
Blasphemous, wicked, movements, perceiver, sun swept, deceiver, majestic, depiction, outflow, occluded, none. Leap to life. Becomes. Words, unchained, signified, undefined, then defined. Costumes, masks, opera, that is the play of words, the dance of the symbolic, the dance of shapes without substance. Just a little something insignificant, neural flashes translated into words, just to break it in, creative embellishments of the truth, complex variations on a theme without conclusion, a melody without a solid form.

Why Not?

Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Why not? Why not? While the black blood of the earth, that demon of civilization, bleeds into the briny seas and clock hands tick methodically round like waltzers twirling to the Blue Danube, I go bravely hop scotching into fields of beets, crimson purple veins throbbing in the green leaves.
I saw the face of my ancestor in a photograph that was taken today. A pale plump, round faced woman looked back at me from a photo that had been taken of me. How strange that she is me and we are meeting today for the first time. Why not? The last face I remember seeing was so much younger and leaner and tortured, a puffy red faced beauty, but I looked at her in a mirror and thought, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and I saw her cut her blond hair off.
Such heavy lead filled thoughts to cart to the alchemist, laying them down on the work bench, smelling perfume of cinnamon and sulfur. The devil was here just before you. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? Why not? Why not!
Breezes from countries I never saw caress my face, leaping from leather binding and gold leafed pages to posses my fingers and send them to write fairytales and boil split peas. So many silly things pass through this window I call my self, why not one more? I almost loved the woman I glimpsed in the photograph today because she looked like a grandmother that once rocked me and like a cousin who I don’t know well at all. A cousin that shovels snow from her porch and eats black bread covered in butter and cheese.
I had once been a citizen of earth until I longed to learn to sing the songs of Saturn’s outer rings. Then I trained on the moon called Titan and gave water to a strange man and loved him through eternity, strangely familiar forever. Come with me deeper into the abyss!
While students memorize and serpents molt and gurus pretend, I wriggle, pale and slick in the underground wells like a Naiad, wailing an eerie tune to summon the strange. Up it comes, frightening me in dark hallways when I thought I was alone, drifting through the blue sky like paramecium under a microscope’s lens.
If you thought there would be a point in all of this, if you hoped for it and found it lacking and frowned, then you’ve never been to Titan. The locust make a noise like music in the evening and the swallows sing in the mornings and everything smells like licorice and coffee while the hands on the clock tick tick tick and fathers become grandfathers and die despite the lucky rabbits feet their granddaughters give them. Little Lagomorph paws dyed blue and dispensed from red machines after two quarters of a dollar have been placed on its long silver tongue just outside the air conditioned cool of a powder blue general store at the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot with a view of a lake. They come out in plastic bubbles, but nonetheless grandfathers die and their bodies are donated to universities.
Why not?
While grandmothers fan themselves and mice scurry through cupboards and river rocks soak up the heat of the sun to warm lizards’ bellies, I open doors into invisible worlds and listen to the thoughts of others.
A sympathetic ear is so rare that individuals are almost always startled when you respond to their innermost ramblings. When you hear them whispering to themselves, “I hate you, I hate you! Nobody loves you!” and you crumple up just like a frightened pill bug and cry inconsolably, they will find it hard to accept that one occurrence is connected to the next. Plausible deniability.
Why not? Why not?
Why not one more song in the cool midnight blue? While babies sleep and spiders hunt and worried fathers pace, I make one more strange shape, electric green in the night. Can I make gold of this worthless lot? In dark hallways when I think I am alone? At the base of a mountain in the heat of a parking lot? Come with me deeper into the abyss!
Why not?
Why not?

We Wear The Music

We wear our music. That’s all that we are really interested in, what our music looks like. How it sounds is secondary. Fashion is the most important element of music at this moment. Its faciomusica coadunatio. At my high school everyone wanted a green Mohawk. Everyone wore studded leather belts and bracelets and died their hair and pierced anything they could and held their clothing altogether with rows of shiny safety pins. Hardly anyone liked to listen to Punk Rock, but everyone wanted to look like it. One boy arrived at our school dressed in all black. He had been imported straight from Los Angeles and his hair too was long and raven hued. He wore Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and Type O Negative T-shirts. I bought albums based purely on the way he looked, and listened to them with religious fervor, waiting for my own hair and nails and lips to turn black, even though I disliked some of the music more than not. I had a serious case of faciomusica coadunatio.
My understanding of this condition is limited to my own experience with it. The truth is that my hair, lips, and nails never turned black. I never put on a Skinny Puppy tee shirt. Hell, I never even got out of my orange polka dots and electric green paisley prints and into a nice black tee shirt, until I managed to hook up with a guy who was wearing one. Then I wore his. The truth is that listening is not something we humans do well. It requires attention, a sort of non-animal interest, and we are most thoroughly animals. Being social animals we have an overwhelming need to be accepted, to fit in. Fitting in is crucial for animals. For example I once had a hen that killed every black chick that hatched in her nest and spared only the two that were yellow like her. We humans are the same way. We look for visual cues to signify for us whether or not someone is one of our kind. Image is crucial. Being highly adaptive we have developed fashion, which is a method for disguising our true ambiguous nature so that we can fit neatly into a particular clan of humans.
You can look at our clothes and see who we want you to think we are.
“I listen to country.” Means I am a good old American Christian guy or gal. I say this with a pair of blue jeans, with a big belt buckle, with boots and a hat.
“I listen to rap.” Means I’m the bad ass urban outlaw and hustler. I say this with gold chains and baggy pants and shiny new sneakers.
“I listen to Rock.” Means I’m the jaded “not quite all American” that feels a little snobbish about that not quite part but is still fairly protective of the All American. I say this with frayed or torn blue jeans and T-shirt.
“I listen to Alternative” means I am way too snobbish for the glorified country twang that passes for rock, I might even be a communist if that pisses you off.
Punk = I don’t care what you think or how many times I get punched.
Jazz = I’m thoughtful, possibly educated and I like coffee and rainy afternoons.
Classical = I’m very thoughtful, I love the arts, I think global and buy specialty shoes and sometimes have my pants tailored.
There are greater and greater levels of subtlety that might be explored, but it is all a complete ruse. We may or may not be those things we want you to think we are, but we have become adepts at the art of faciomusica coadunatio.
Now buying a shirt or pair of pants is the same as buying music. You can even buy shoes and get a free song on some web sites. The song is like a breath mint offered to you after your dinner. Clever musicians, aware that music should be free, have found a way to slip it in with our habit for primping our image. Like Mary Poppins, they realized that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” With faciomusica coadunatio, you can fuss about with your image and get some music without noticing.
We wear the music when perhaps we should let the music wear us. We should let it flow through us and move our bodies, minds and spirits wherever it wills, unimpeded by our monkey brains. The real is there, existing despite the genres and social implications. Nothing is the way it appears. Eyes lie, and so many organisms have learned to turn that fact to their advantage, developing camouflage so that they won’t be eaten by larger organisms. Knowing this, we should go forward accepting that what we see is not what we get. If we open our hearts and listen there is so much more to music than the way we look when we hear it.

The Emperor

I lay on my grandfather’s couch, where he had preferred to sleep during the days, stretched out in front of the television set. The seat cushions were a dark, almost black chocolate color and the back supporting cushions were a gray the color of clay. All of it was soft to the touch and delicately furry. It held the person that lay on it like a gentle beast with silky fur.
The smell of my grandparent’s house was always of wood and vanilla scented candles and black licorice and coffee and the smell of the desert mingled with water and trees and stone. At the table behind me my grandmother was sitting, my father sometimes stood, sometimes sat, beside her, pleading, and my uncle sat at the kitchen bar across from the table. My uncle had a black beard and a booming voice.
The carpet was a rich red orange shag, also soft to the touch. The lace curtains and vinyl shutters filtered the bright sunlight that made its way past the giant elm trees my grandfather had grown all around the house.
My father was asking my grandmother to come and live with us, my mother and my sisters and I could care for her. My grandmother and Uncle rejected his offer. They were mean to him. I felt an intense shock. These people who had seemed to be family were bitterly cruel, they were stabbing my father in the heart. The sounds of their voices were full of a dismissive disdain. They said that my father was a complete fool who could care for no one, that nobody needed him, or even wanted him. I thought that my father would cry. I was filled with rage, my father was here offering help, asking his mother to come with him, and they would not even acknowledge his good intentions. They did not care.
I realized suddenly that they did not like him. That my grandmother and her first bastard son were a special pair, pleased to inflict pain on my father, the other son, the son of the father. They were venting their rage towards the father on his son, because he was not there to receive it.
These were people who had cradled me when I was small, my grandmother particularly. Her skin was always soft, her hair short and white, her body big and round like one of those headless goddess statues. She wore brightly colored housedresses. Now she could no longer walk and could barely speak except to groan a bit and shake her head and sometimes communicate in a slow growling voice like a creature from a swamp.
As a child I had known her only as a benevolent figure who loved me. She did not even love me as much now as she did then. I had been like a pet, a thing which is loveable when it is small and then it is a terrible surprise when it grows too large for the house and drools and barks and wants to run and dig under the fence.
I had already known that my uncle was a wretched cruel heart. When I was a baby my Aunt Peggy shot herself in the head because he ran off with a blonde nurse named Terry and said that he didn’t love her anymore. I was very young at the time and hadn’t been told what had happened, but from the time that my Aunt Peggy became sad and disappeared I disliked and distrusted him. My dislike for him grew when I had to spend time with my new Aunt Terry, because I disliked everything about her. I had loved my Aunt Peggy naturally.
To see my uncle this way was not a surprise, but to see that he had learned such cruelty from my grandmother was terrible. My Father had gray hair. He was tall. He usually seemed rough and uncaring. Now that he was being tender, his new tender feelings were being squashed by a gruesome pair.
I hated them both from then on. I did not want to see my grandmother again. I called once and my Uncle, who was now in charge of caring for her, did all the talking, mostly judging me for my move to a far away city, asking me if I had gone chasing a man, asking what a descent man would want with a woman with little kids (a strange question considering that Terry had a pair of youngsters when he married her).
After that, I would never call again. When my grandmother died, I made little observance of the occurrence. She was a stranger.
Laying on the couch that day, I had noticed that the beautiful tile coffee table constructed by my grandfather had been removed and replaced by the table he had made for my uncle. This one had broken tiles at the corners that left terrible vacancies upon its surface. It made me feel sick to see it there, looking like that.
When my grandfather had been alive the table had stood whole and without fracture. The lawn and trees in the back yard had been green and he had kept a thriving garden of herbs. Now that he was gone, my uncle was here, and with him he had brought a broken table and the death of the lawn and trees and garden. My Grandfather’s land was dead, having been invaded by the desert that in life he had held at bay. His house had become a nightmarish mockery of what it had once been, broken or ill fit odds and ends having usurped the finer objects which had been of his making and had once held sway. And his real heirs wept and were broken hearted by the revolution of death that had turned the father’s kingdom into dust where mites took up residence and ruled over his waste.

The Shape of the Process

It is not the content that flows through us that we want to change.
It is not the content that we want to pick and choose and refine to fit our particular specifications.
It is the shape of our inner structure, the flow of the pathways inside our inner labyrinth, the wiring of our neural network That is what needs to be transformed.
The content is always different. The content will always be different.
The content never changes. The content will never change.
But the process that transforms it can change. It is this change in the process that we seek.

Our life itself is a process, our bodies, our thoughts, our sensations, our hopes, our dreams, the shape of our movement through time from birth to death. All process, all waiting to be carefully altered, all waiting to be rearranged.

Life flows through structures. It becomes defined by the obstacles and blockages which it encounters, by the shapes of the structures through which it passes. Life assumes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured. That is what makes it specific, that is what modifies it into being unique, that is what gives it an identity.
There are structures that trap life so that it grows stagnant. Think of pools of black water, think of old houses without light, think of forgotten cemeteries in the backwoods of lost towns.
There are structures that allow life to flow continually through them. Think of a river, of the wind, of sunlight streaming down onto the earth from a bright blue sky.

We may think of ourselves as structures defined by our habits, programmed biological computers through which the raw energy of life travels. By transforming our habits we may restructure ourselves to allow life to flow freely through us. As it flows, it gains momentum, it changes what it touches, it reinvigorates the path.

Posture is a basic way to direct the flow of energy. Our bodies are like antennas that can be bent this way or that to pick up various frequencies of radiation. Paying attention to our physical habits will lend us a clue as to how we are presently processing life. Intentionally building a repertoire of postures that facilitate life will help to change the structure from the outside in.

Our bodies are keys to other planes of existence, they are tools for manipulating realities. Everything is altered by posture, by reshaping structure.
Allowing our reality to be shaped by unconsciously formed habits and postures is to be unnecessarily imprisoned.
Intentionally forming habits and postures to direct the flow of life consciously is to be a surfer, a magician, a free builder.
Once the structure changes the energy will flow endlessly through it for as long as the structure remains.

Keep a notebook with you for a total of six days in order to record re-occurring mechanical manifestations. In other words, keep a log of some of your most habitual gestures and the accompanying moods and circumstances.

You should begin to notice these re-occurring gestures as you are performing them. During the course of a day, whenever you catch yourself in one of your mechanical manifestations, say to yourself, "Cut! "
At that you point you should freeze. Then say to yourself, "From the top." And prepare to repeat the scene. Say, "Action." And perform the gesture again.

This can also be done with a partner. The two of you should be familiar with each other's catalog of mechanical manifestations. When one partner notices the other engaged in a habitual posture or gesture they will issue the commands for them.

In either case it is useful to run through the sequence up to three times when showcasing a particular manifestation. When you are finished you say, "Break."
Break.