Alien

Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and slimy crawling around through the body of the one who calls herself MOTHER. She goes where she pleases, between the walls, down tight narrow little labyrinthine passages in search of prey, of heroes bones to crush, in search of the Other whom she may embrace and make self. Dripping, oozing, sliming her way through the darkness, she stalks, the son of Cain, the draconian descendant, the line of Lilith and Samael. Her kiss is death, the life of her lineage is death for the sons of Adam. She opens her arms and welcomes the Other to annihilation, planting her seed inside so that it will become as she.
MOTHER so bright and clean works to conceal her strange pet, that thing that lurks beneath her shiny veneer. Her cool logic and twinkling sterile light seem to offer protection, but deep within her icy hull chaotic animal hunger lurks. The Queen of the Heavens, she is a shining Isis struggling with Lilith over the habub tree. The stars are her companions, burning in the cold depths of the abyss. For her, the organic world is something to be used, turned to her advantage, and men are mere expendable tools.
The maiden who steals light walks the halls, a tiny reflection of MOTHER, the controlling, the rational, the calculating. Clean skin and neatly laced shoes. Our Theseus wondering in the dark, hunting and evading the minotaur. The hero, the one with a plan, unrolling her ball of string, her chain of never-ending thoughts to help her find her way. Occasionally she is lured into the wild wet madness of the other by her own animal, suddenly irrationally entering the darkness, the den of Mistress Deep, crooning,
“Here Jones, Jones, kitty, kitty.”
She is there, poised precariously between Isis and Lilith, the calculating and the chaotic elements of the machine in which she dwells. With her string unraveling she discovers the awful truth, that MOTHER wants to keep the OTHER inside, that MOTHER is not protecting her. MOTHER is using her, just as Mistress Deep wants to use her.
Theseus will not to be a tool. She tampers with codes and moves elements within the machine setting into motion the countdown for MOTHER to self destruct. When MOTHER dies then Mistress Deep will die with her. Our Theseus torches the minotaur’s nest and cages Jones, her own animal instinct, and carries Jones with her, controlled into her new body and watches the beautiful destruction of MOTHER.
She is going home, leaving the strange terrors of her quest behind, but the OTHER, dear Mistress Deep is still with her, not as easily shaken off as the bright and sterile MOTHER. The new body has been infected, Theseus is not alone. Poor Theseus sings a trembling song about the stars and positions herself for the final confrontation. Mistress Deep slowly unfolds, comes out of her hiding place. Theseus expels her from the new body, sends her into the vacuum, subjecting her to the fire.
Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and MOTHER so bright and clean, burning in the cold abyss just as the stars burn. Jones sleeps in his corner and Theseus files her final reports, the Gods of the new order, rulers of the new machine, a new mother and a new beast settling in for their long deep sleep.

Run Mousey Run

How dare they? How dare they take the magick away, to steal it from us like cats stealing the breath from babies? Dark thieves that come to us and civilize us, closing doors, choosing for us, severing us from the magickal kingdom, the vibrant corridors. I know there are doors. I know they are there, even if they have been hidden from my view, blinded as I am by the words for things, the words that decide which things are and which thing aren’t, which experiences are real, which are imagined. How dare they to tell me how I should be. How dare they to cripple me, stripping from me true sight with the way of the word.
They do it because it was done to them and it was done to those who did it to them, and so they perpetuate it. They make the human being a prison, a dark cell cut off from the magick and wonder of the universe. The word is the dark magick that holds us spellbound within our cold bleak cell. How dare they to be such cowards, accessories to the crime if not the perpetuators of the great lie.
I could cry sun black tears leaving purple stains on my cheeks. I am filled with rage and sorrow that I have been taken into their ranks, into the ranks of the dark army. They recruit us when we are children. Now I have been both recruit and recruiter, and my sorrow is all the deeper for that fact.
The things that we have done without knowing what we were doing. Because it was tradition, because it was part of our culture. It was our parents’ way, and their parents before them. Because we come from a long line of slaves. So when will we stand up and break the chains that bind us up and hold us as separate from the strange leaky wet universe without.
We are holed up in here because we are afraid of what lies without. We are afraid of what lies beyond those doors which we have been trained not to see. Like rats running through a maze, we run for the reward, for the cheese, and the cheese makes us want more cheese, and we grow tamer and more and more accustomed to the usual route, so that we do not even notice the passages that lead in other directions, passages that do not lead to the cheese which we are accustomed to, passages that lead away from the familiar, the known.
Run, run on those little legs, run away from the great snake winding its away around the pedestal upon which the world is founded. Run little mouse lest ye be swallowed by the serpent. Let the white coats poke you with their needles, cage you in your cell, and set you in your maze to run for the cheese.
The cheese is good. The cheese is the best thing that you have in this world. And you do not know what the worlds beyond this one would be like. Perhaps there is nothing better than the cheese. Perhaps the other worlds are worse than this. Perhaps. Or perhaps you have been domesticated. Your likes, your dislikes, they have been cultivated in the lab. Wild things don’t like cheese. They run through dark corridors that lead out into the wild wood where the wind blows and the winter comes and the fox and the snake and the peregrine look for you.
Something else happens to the wild, something that cannot be told. Something that can never be understood by or communicated to domestic animals. The wild are possessed by a dark strange something that makes them tingle. The wild are alive, and the domestic are dead, and the domestic fear the life that courses through the wild.
I am domestic and I am wild and the two make war within me, one host of voices screaming for freedom, the other host begging for safety and me in the middle, scarcely able to move in a consistent direction, torn as I am between the many, many voices that cry out in every moment.
But the fact remains. There are doors. There is one right now, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to extend your hand and turn its key and step into the beyond, if only for a moment you can master your habit of running, of running for the cheese and from the wild wood.
Yes, everything that you think you are, you think with the mind they made for you, made for you with the shape of their maze, with their rewards and their punishments. Your parents, your teachers, your politicians and preachers, your friends, your siblings, your neighbors, your lovers, your reporters, your doctors, your favorite movies, TV, and radio shows; the white coats with their needles. Everything that you think is founded on the omission of certain subtle realities. Everything you strive for is a quest suggested to you by the appropriate stimulus.
What are you mousey? Are you a mousey at all? Or are you a string of chemical instructions? Are you a body of habits?
A body of habits.
A body of habits.
A collection of conditioned responses. The bell rings. I am hungry. I am hungry and I run and you run and we run blind down the dark alleys of the world, and the white coats are there, but we do not see them either. We do not see them or the doors. We see nothing and we hope only for cheese. As if filling ourselves with it would somehow make us feel better. But there is no way to feel better when you are dead. No way to pursue true happiness when you are domestic. Why do you pursue those things that the others are doing, that the others have always done, falling in line with tradition? Why preserve their culture, the culture of death? The culture of cowardice and gluttony?
There will never be enough cheese to fill you and you will meet the hunter one day. Maybe not in the shape of a serpent, but in some shape you two will meet.
So why run? Why run at all?
Why not open a door, step out, feel the wind ruffle your fur and meet that other with it’s gleaming yellow eye. How good can cheese be if you are its slave, the slave of the maze and its makers?

The Path of the Heart

Oh, those sad lost creations of Neverwhere, wandering aimlessly from one cast off husk of a dream to another, from one pretend family and one imagined life to another. In world of the sleepwalkers, there is no real home, there is no real heart. We are born into the black abyss like the rats of NIMH into a dark air shaft. Only those strong enough to build their own heart and hearth will survive, only they will become anything at all. The weak will be sucked away into the cold darkness. Those who do pull themselves together and become the center of a tiny universe will suffer all of the growing pains that we expect infants to endure, as they struggle from crawling to walking upright. What is a magnificent triumph in the beginning is small potatoes as the work unfolds and you race against time like a slinky dripping silver down an unending flight of stairs. Its movement is fluid and harmonious with the laws of nature.
Your own motion will ever be subject to the very same laws, but there is a hope that something within you will supply you with a supernatural reserve of power, enough so that you may operate both as time does and as time does not. That secret something, your ace in the hole, would be the ace of hearts, that same heart you started growing when you crawled out of the chaos one morning so long ago and defiantly declared:
"I am the center. I am the point upon which all lines of force converge!"
At first it would be small and tender, a meek little thing fluttering like red rose petals twirling on a breeze. You must do more to nourish it or it will fade away and you will face oblivion. You must grow the heart, keep the heart, and tend it unerringly, for there are great gales ahead, storms which outmatch the tempest from which you emerged, and if your heart is a small fragile thing, it will splinter and bust and you will be no more than dust, the sort that trickles through the narrow waist of an hour glass.
Like a garden left untended, a heart will cease to function if it is not cared for. If neglected, the bloom you could have watched swell with care, will wither and be choked out by other hands, coarse things from the primordial chaos. The effort must never cease. In every moment, you race against sleek silver time, striving to widen your sphere of influence, striving to grow as a star grows, drawing on the mysterious force at the core of your cosmic body and, in so doing, burning brighter and hotter, ever more painfully.
It hurts to come to life.
It hurts to be alive.
There is only rest in sleep.
This is the unfolding of your heart. In the wasteland, you will be your own sanctuary. In the desert of Maya, you will be like the hermit crab which carries its home upon its own back, always searching for the next opportunity to expand into a larger sanctuary, a vaster greater heart.
Know yourself well, love yourself well, and perhaps you will find another you to travel with, the Other that is the moon’s reflection upon the water. This is will happen as the heart grows greater. But do not become distracted by the dead rocks that orbit the sun.
The heart must be maintained, the attention trained within, or you will be lost in the carnival of chaos, lost in a hall of fun house mirrors. You may look at mirrors up and down, but you may not come to know mirrors, you will only come to know illusions and distractions. The only thing that you may know is an invisible thing, a line to tether yourself to in the darkness, a small kernel of self which must be watered with constant attention until it grows and grows and blossoms out of the dirt of the dream.
Through the madness of the dream it is born, but it is not of the dream.
You are not of the dream, traveler.
You are a strange bloom in a cold black desert. An improbable but beautiful thing. A heart. A hearth. A home. A point from which the infinite can be navigated.
Explorers need stars to chart a course. If you want to become an explorer one day and rise from your knees to chart the cold valleys of the wasteland, you must first become the very star that you will follow. Once the star has grown within you, never falter, never deviate, never let your attention stray, never become fascinated with the many obstacles of the labyrinth. Follow the star that is you unerringly, until the very path that you walk becomes your home, and the void around you becomes the real heart that beats within you.
Do not be discouraged. The path is lit by the light of those who came before you.

Call Me Lil

In the bottom of a crystal palace, down bellow the lowest translucent and glittering floor, there is a chamber where the weary travelers rest, but for only a moment in an apparition of relief. Then they are spat back out on the black streets to fend for themselves under the shadows of hungry sky scrapers, evading drug dealers, pimps, and whores, diabolical creatures looking to prick you with a pin and put their disease into you. There you can only hope to escape notice, only hope that your own character in this twisted narrative can survive itself.
For I am a cruel God. When I’ve no sun then my creations shall know no sun, when I am alone then so shall all of my little spoon boys suffer the agony and desperation of separation, each one paddling along the great river in their own little eggshell boat armed with discarded sewing needles with which they intend to prick anything which comes anywhere near them in order to make that unwary traveler pay for the crime of having not come along sooner to adore their master and make her into a bright and shinning Goddess of love instead of a cold and vengeful deity.
Look down under the glassy surface of this river. If you look closely you will see that the muddy bottom is lit with tiny lights here and there which give off just enough illumination for you to make out the shapes of the large creatures skimming around the river bed; see the row boat sized catfish with their whiskers as long as those of old Chinese men, trailing alongside them? Observe the water moccasins as long as the river itself, oily black and weaving themselves through the river grasses where they may hide in wait for the last of seven brothers to jump in for a swim and never come back up.
Watch closely now, and you will glimpse one of my more diabolical servants, a siren with the long olive green tale of a fish, wriggling along with webbed fingers outstretched, fanged grimace painted permanently on her slimy white face. The lights flicker on and off in turns, small blue flames immune to the wetness. They mark the places where a treasure has been lost beneath the mud of the riverbed.
Now and again some deranged or desperate seeker ventures here in a little row boat or a canoe armed with snorkel, flippers, and a shovel. A few are slightly more prepared and bring along a harpoon with which they hope to fend of the beasties. It is a strange fact that many are willing to believe in lost treasures, but are just as unwilling to believe in the dragons that guard them. They are the lot that regard the stories of such creatures and all warnings as superstition. Then they meet my children in the river and their minds are forever opened, but it unfortunately does them no good at that point, because the sirens are usually feeding on the tender gray meat wrenched from their cracked cranium.
They are fairly clever my sirens, a result of eating all those brains of drowned oarsmen and fortune seekers. I cannot say that many adventurers appreciate their singing, which is a sound something akin to that of nails being raked down a chalkboard which has been distorted and amplified. They tend to sing in chorus, like coyotes yipping first one, then two, then eight, wailing and warning each other of their proximity. My sirens do not get along well with one another, and so they alert each other as to their whereabouts so that they may all avoid violent territorial disputes, except on rare occasions when the moon is full and they band together to hunt.
There are things in this river which evade my capacity to describe. The best I can do is to say that they are like the ancient ancestors of crocodiles, with lumbering bodies and spade shaped jaws and rows of red and blue jagged plates running down their backs. They open wide their mouths and then for all the world it looks like nothing but a cave, a place to moor your boat and rest for a moment, then snap! You are locked within the beasts belly where you will be slowly digested over the course of a million years.
Rest never lasts for long, (unless you count the million years it may take to be digested) and when it does it tends to extract a heavy toll. There is no safe haven that I have made for you. None whatsoever. You are damned like a hamster to run my coarse endlessly, struggling to stay alert and energetic enough to evade the many traps that I have laid to ensnare you. I have made for you a world of enemies to keep you quick. When they catch you they will devour you, slashing you with teeth and claws like serrated knives and condemning you to absorption through the walls of their large intestines so that what was worthwhile in you can be carried by the rivers of blood to nourish the hungry cells of the beast that it may continue its life devoted to the consumption and digestion of the slow and unworthy.
You will have to be quick to out match me, quicker than tears, quicker than fatigue and rage and desperation. You will have to learn to outlast your own character, which I have only written into this story to feed and amuse my pets. Like a little white feeder mouse you will have to scurry through my maze and evade my cold blooded offspring on their quest to swallow you whole.

Live and Burn

If you lack courage you always loose. If you never strip yourself bare and roar at the wind as it lashes at your puckering flesh, then you go out like a candle snuffed swiftly by mitten swathed finger tips, having never had a chance to get knocked over onto your side so that all of the wax comes pouring out, hot and translucent and your little flaming tongue flickers out hungrily and meets with some kindling, a synthetic fibered rug or the gossamer drapes employed to veil the houses big unblinking eyes.

Goddamn it! You will never bring the house down if you don’t burn a little yourself. It is painful and terrible, and then you get used to it, bit by bit. The heat becomes a thing which you can bear for small and every increasing increments of time, but by golly, that will never happen if you don’t stay in the kitchen, or even go into the kitchen to begin with.

We can see only later how things might have been different if we had been undeterred by the threat of pain. When we are distanced from the experience of discomfort we think that we will be brave warriors, proud champions, and yet whenever we have the chance to get into the ring we shy away, like spoiled little girls that run off to hug their grandmothers legs and suck their thumbs rather than clean their rooms. So the toys lay all over the etheric floors of our mind, our play things, our fantasies slowly transforming into nightmares as they mingle together unrealized, seasoned with guilt and doubt and sloth. The meek of heart will wither and vanish without a lasting trace, leaving only a transcendental curl of grayish smoke which will dissolve into the atmosphere moments after they are snuffed out.

You loose everything when you do not take risks. As the saying goes; “Use it or loose it.” It is as true of life as anything else, even truer perhaps. Death is a real concern, especially for those who don’t make the effort to live before its inevitable dawning. Standing on the sidelines, playing with all the playthings in our minds, never coming out to slay the real dragons or fuck the real princesses, growing weaker and pastier at each missed opportunity, we let the entire cosmos down. When, because you fear some trick, you fail to accept that beautiful girl´s invitation to sit beside her on the bus, or stand with her in line at the movies, you not only let yourself and the princess down, but all the heroes and all the gods in the heavens.

Everything in creation is depending on you to rescue it with a measure of foolish and heartfelt passion. Do not be the last unicorn that sees that the unicorns have all disappeared and so takes up work as a mare in some dirty stable, waiting to pull the plow or be penned up with some intolerable stallion for the furtherance of horsekind because it is unfashionable, embarrassing, or silly to be a unicorn. Be the last brave heart, busted open and bleeding bright crimson all over the blue and gray world.

There is no shame in being the last or the only one of your kind, doing the painful work of seeking out the other shinning immortals, their hair full of stars, their hearts and bodies fringed with cerulean and titian flames, blazing through the cosmos, wailing in the wind that feeds the flames melting away their breasts. There is only shame in hiding in your room, in your placid life, in your filthy stall, watching the glimmering of passions go dim behind a cage of bone and softly fluttering pink lungs, like butterflies witnessing their precious one day of life descend into the awaiting twilight.

Deranged Yo-Yo's

Who are those deranged, and up and down the elevator shaft of None, yo yo’s that take on the work of liberating the primordial being that awaits at the center of the labyrinth? They are yo yo’s for they do rise and fall as necessary to navigate through the four dimensional labyrinth, and they are deranged, because they are the undoing of the organically arranged. Some are tough and some are sweet, but none could know what they were getting into until they were well into it. There is no way to convey to a non yo yo what the experience of coming unraveled is really like, you must become a yo yo to know what a yo yo knows. I can say to you, our work is to liberate the primordial being at the center of the labyrinth, but what on earth can that mean to you, because chances are good that the idea that you are a voyager lost in a labyrinth is likely to sound absurd or quaint, primordial makes you think of amoebas or dinosaurs, and liberation is an absolute junk word- it means absolute zero to you who have never actually tasted it. Even a seasoned yo yo will find it difficult to remember the secret that lays entrenched within the words and ideas espoused within and around esoteric schools, in science fiction books, on the sides of buses, and in Kung Fu movies.
Who, who, who is the Lord of the Labyrinth, when I am one and there can be no other?
What, what, what is a labyrinth, if not the shape of my own fears and fantasies?
Not just philosophically speaking, but actually, in the sensory language of liquid light that has been preserved in the darkness, feeding on rot, I am the voidness of the void. When you are ready to get off the drug of organic sleep you will find yourself in the shape of this or that guide, and if you are of a goodly kind, they may take you to the entrance of the kingdom. And you, not knowing what lies beyond may leap gleefully into the abyss.
But ha, ha, it is not such a quick and painless choice to make, for to see the hidden you will have to give up your mortal eyes and ears, and everything that you thought was true. Blind and deaf, you will have to trust your guide to lead you into the new world. You must give the guide permission to derange you so that you can see, hear and know the secret ways. It is not a momentary excursion into wonderland, from which you will re-emerge refreshed and able to enjoy your remaining biological life in the home you have always known. You are to be modified, altered, and when you have been transformed, home and biological life are no longer what they were.
Nothing can ever be the same. Just as the same man cannot set foot in the same river twice, you can never go back. You can freeze, unfinished, or move forward into the unknown. Many a Yo Yo has been lowered into that forbidding hole, and yet the experience of life on the other side of the mirror can not be told. The trick is this: if you think that this Work of liberating the minotaur is best left to another, more qualified mad man, consider that they are only a projection, an illusion dreamt by you.
You are the one trapped at the center.
You are the medium in which you are trapped.
You are your helpers and your adversaries.
The only course is to come to know yourself, and to do so you must come unraveled. Unravel to travel, dear would-be yo yo, into the center of self. Your intellect, as you know it, cannot help you. The programming you received in child hood was good for conditioning you to live within mechanical society, the society of sleep, but to see the world that you were conditioned to close your eyes to, you will have to be deprogrammed. You will need to have your brain washed. The right guide can take you to the river and wash that filthy brain right out of you, teach you to use a new set of tools for navigating spaces where brains are no help, and then, if they be a goodly guide, they will proudly boot you into the elevator shaft of None.

Invisible Labyrinth

I’ll tell the story of what has been, of how I’ve changed shape and color and then changed again. Once small and golden, like the cast off eyelash of some heavenly being, I danced and dreamed to the sound of wind chimes and acoustic guitars, watching green spiders weave their webs while rainbow colored fish spoke to me through the invisible barrier separating their world from mine. Monsters with heads like black dandelions and snouts like those of Lord Ganesha leaped from closets moaning, dressed in bulky trench coats to teach me about the subjectivity of earthly experience when they removed their dark wine colored glasses to reveal smiling eyes.
My father was embodied in the question, the mystery, the fierce murmuring darkness, cultivating me in his image. Like rainbow colored candies I was coated in a hard sugary shell which concealed something prized by the Mayans, a food worthy of Godly consumption. As I moved through time like jelly forced through an abstract tube-like blown glass sculpture, I was made new around every bend. Once pale and bloated, as if fashioned from some bit of factory produced silicone byproduct, I longed to break through the glass and escape the life of the living dead. I was fed corpses and bathed in the rays of the cathode tube frequency control device worshiped by the popular culture. As they sprang from me, I held my offspring up to keep them from crawling in the mold and animal filth that closed in, squeezing tighter, and tighter…strangling, tighter…the life, tighter… that dwelt, and tighter…within it.
I was held suspended in time, ensnared in the sticky threads of fear. Only the burning will to speak to the creature standing behind the invisible barrier, allowed me to slash my way free.
Once beautiful and full of the color of autumn leaves, I blew along like a red tailed hawk riding the current, eyeing my quarry, and gingerly evading the pursuit of salivating foxes whilst enjoying their charm. I listened to the mad men, all sons of greater mad men, wearing lipstick and prosthetic noses, hats, long black coats, covered in beer spilled yesterday, and bits of dried leaves. I looked into the eyes of my immortal beloved and we walked beneath skies of snow flake obsidian until it swallowed us and we howled with one voice before we were spit out around the next bend. Once I cried and cried and watched the mold grow upon my flesh and along the window sills, while the blood spilled from me into the white hospital under the Christ’s agonized face. I met dark haired demons in the bed where I left my beloved and my tooth broke in my mouth so that I had to spit it into my hand and smile.
I cannot see the shape that I am in now, because I am still in it, in this temporal chamber. I cannot see time, it holds me and I squish through its length to other imagined scenarios, wondering what sleepy Deity rubbed her eye and cast me into this maze, striving to be whole again without breaking the glass and ending this journey. I struggle to see the glass, my rainbow tail undulating behind me like a banner in the wind. I train my ear to hear the unintelligible speech of the other, pressing her fingers against the imperceptible barrier, begging me to swim for her, to swim where she can never swim, in the tiny world assembled of the lost flecks of golden skin, eyelashes, and fingernail clippings, a realm which perhaps exists in the shadows under the bed where she lies dreaming, trying to tell me in the language of the unspeakable… remember me, remember me, and we shall swim, I in You and You in Me, into the darkest depths, where the father’s face is hidden.

Eternity

Eternity is here and now. Right now. As you read these words. It cannot be otherwise.
Eternity is not a very long time. Eternity is not very slow. Eternity is not loving or unloving. Eternity is not reward or punishment.
Eternity is not and cannot be something that will happen or something that has happened.
Eternity cannot "happen".
We may experience Eternity. But this experience won’t be in the past, in our memories of that perfect psychedelic trip or that amazing moment of meditation or the instant that you and I fell in love or the sudden burst of direct Knowledge that came over you that one day.
And it won’t be in the future, when I accomplish the Great Work or when I am finally Awake or when I complete my spiritual progress through a thousand lifetimes of abnegation or when I finally surrender and start to Work.
Our experience of Eternity can only be Now.

Not a moment from now,
not a moment ago.

NOW.

Our language and our imagination have conspired to give us an image of Eternity as a really long time… the white washed heaven of the Christians, the gardens and virgins of the Muslims, the complex Bardo spaces of the Tibetans. All of these may in fact be real (or real enough to experience them for a very long time) but they are not the experience of Eternity. If something is happening, it will stop happening eventually.
But Eternity cannot begin and cannot end. It is not an extension of time. It is outside of time. It overcomes time and envelops it. We are, you and me, right now, in the midst of Eternity, projecting images of illusory lifetimes onto a never changing Clear Void.
The longing for the experience of Eternity is a struggle that can never be completed. As long as there is a struggle, the goal has not been reached. But if the goal has not been reached, the struggle cannot end. And so, like Achilles, our work will always be just a hair short of the Eternal Turtle that moves just slightly out of our reach.
In the deepest void within you, behind you eyes, behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your secret wishes and desires, behind your bright nightmares and dark dreams, you have Eternity. Right now. Your experience of it relies on your ability to maintain your attention steady, to look inside and not be instantly repelled by the frightfulness of Nothingness.
There is a reason why we are here, why we move through time, why we play our parts in an infinitely complex labyrinth of time and space, why things happen, why "we" happen.
The reason is entrenched in the experience of Eternity. When you enter into the heart of the Labyrinth, the inner circle that never changes, that never started and never will end, where there is no past and no future… you will understand the reason.
This has happened a million times before.
To you.
This will happen a million times again.
To you.
You have experienced Eternity. Directly. And now you are here, in time. And the part of you that recoiled, the part of you that fell, the part of you that opened a door slightly, saw the primordial union that cannot be seen, felt or heard, and ran away...
That part of you knows why we perceive Time and why we imagine that there is a past and there is a future.
At the heart, right now, within you and without you, everything is still, quiet and outside of Time, beyond Time, around Time. Here in the innermost chamber we can truly say:
Nothing ever has happened
Nothing ever will happen

Experiment – A Posture of Eternity
You will need a quiet place, a chair, and a timer to conduct this experiment. Before beginning, set the timer for one minute. Sit in a straight backed chair with your feet placed firmly upon the ground. Your knees should be bent at a 90 degree angle.
Place the palms of your hands on top of your knees and keep your knees together so that the thumbnails of your two hands are pressed together. Keep your back and neck straight and your eyes open gazing downward at a space on the ground approximately three feet out from the tips of your toes. Keep your eyes in a soft focus. This means that you are gazing and not staring pointedly. Once in position, do not move until the timer sounds. (No scratching, looking away, wiggling, nose wrinkling, etc.)
During this time place your attention on your body. Hold your entire body with your attention by "feeling" the space an inch above the skin all around you. If you get wrapped up in thoughts, bring your attention back to the posture and the space around your body.
Repeat the experiment each day, adding one minute more to the timer each time.
On the first day you will maintain the pose for one minute, on the second day for two minutes, until on the 12th day you conduct the experiment for the duration of 12 minutes.

Ever Increasing Effort

The effort is endless and permanent. Don’t hope for the time when the effort will end.
It never will.

I play guitar. I first started playing guitar consistently when I was 16. When I first started to play, it seemed to be a straight curve up, a simple straightforward walk up a learning ladder. I would learn one thing, then the next, then the next and so on. Until I could "play guitar" (something which seemed like a permanent "steady" state). But the actual process was not quite so straight and never reached an end.
I am back with my guitar teacher for our first lesson ever. I learn something… let’s call it lick 1. (A "lick" is something like a simple little melody.) My teacher plays lick 1, I attempt to repeat it. I fail. I try again. I fail again. I try once more and it starts to sound right. Several more times, and it sounds sort of right. My teacher leaves. I spend the week repeating it over and over. I get it! Now I can play lick 1.
From there I can go on to something else… My teacher comes over and shows me lick 2. Again I have a lot of trouble with it. It’s not working right. I try it over and over. It’s not happening. It seems impossible. I simply can’t do this! After several attempts… it starts to sound sort of right. My teacher leaves and I practice the same lick for hours. Hours and hours. (Neighbors going insane.) I can finally play it. My teacher comes again and we go on to lick 3… but wait! He asks me to play lick 1. I just spent the last week playing lick 2. I can’t play lick 1 anymore! I realize I have to practice it again. Now I have 2 licks that I have to practice and I’m about to get a new one.
So I don’t have just one new lick to practice. I have three… and there’s another one around the corner!
I notice something else as well. At night I will practice lick 1 over and over. By the end of the night, I can play it very well. I go to sleep. The next morning I wake up and grab the guitar (the very first thing I do as soon as I wake up) and … I can sort of play lick 1. It sort of sounds right. I have to practice it some more. After a bit of practice I get it back. I have to remember that… tomorrow.
After many years of work and designing and redesigning my daily practice schedule, something else began to seep through into me. A basic truth that was embedded in the process itself. Even though you gain in momentum, and you can build on the learning you did before, you can’t stop to rest.

You are either moving forward or you are moving backwards.
There are no other options.

The moment that you stop and base your work on what came before ("Yesterday I reached such heights in my meditation. I am now a very awakened person.") you have already started to fall. And the higher up you have been able to climb, the more drastic and shocking the fall will be.
Many years after I had started to play guitar, my Shaman teacher said: "You have to pedal twice as hard just to stay in the same place!" No matter how much work you did yesterday to reach the awakened state… and maybe even a Work space… you will have to do even more today just to get there.
But how much "more" can there be? There’s only so much you can do in a day!
Your attention, as it increases in power, will become more and more solid and it will be able to focus on smaller segments of time. What before flowed by without being noticed will now be noticed. And now that you can notice it, you can use it. The more attention you have, the more time you have. And all that time is there for you to use in your work. As soon as you take it for granted, as soon as you start to ride the wave of "spiritual pleasure" that comes with being in a more subtle space… you will start to slide down… fast.

USE IT OR LOSE IT

Make an effort to focus your attention and reach an awakened state.
Right now.
Feel the space changing.
Redouble the effort.
Again.
And again.

Maze

The Labyrinth which began as a unicursal path developed into the Maze.
In a Maze you face the challenges of a multicursal design: paths divide, there are dead ends, trap doors, and illusions designed to deceive.
Many Mazes can be navigated by keeping the right hand to the right wall, and in this way a voyager may find the center. In some cases this rule is void.
What is the secret to finding ones way through a maze?
It is often true that the path which seems correct and most direct does not in fact lead to the heart, it is a deception. In some, there is no way to go back the way you came in, having entered you must proceed forward.
The Messara Labyrinth of Crete lies beneath the surface of the earth. It took two hours to navigate through its dark design if one knew the way. But what if one did not know the way through? It was of the kind of Maze that does not allow a voyager to retrace their steps. Once inside, retreat is impossible, as irrevocable as birth or death. In darkness, unsure of the way, tormented by the certainty that something both terrible and majestic lies in wait at its heart, what manner of man would be able to proceed?

At Messara the entrance to the Labyrinth is in one world, the exit opens into another. From the heart a second journey is launched. Having confronted what waits in the center, the voyager must find their way and emerge into a new land.

Unification in the Labyrinth

The name "Labyrinth" comes from the word "labrys" which means "double-ax".

The dynasty of King Minos, the king immortalized in mythology as the keeper of the half man half bull minotaur, was referred to as the "House of the Double-Ax".

In the Hopi tradition, the void, an empty timeless shapeless space, is occupied by Taiowa, the creator who becomes Sotuknang, an active agent of the inactive Taiowa, to create the earth, and a creature called Spider Woman.
Spider Woman in turn creates the twins, Poqanghoya and Palongawhoya, the double axe. Poqanghoya, solidifies the earth, whilst, Palongawhoya, is to be the voice of the void vibrating throughout the manifested world.
The Hopi and the Cretan Labyrinth are of the same unicursal design; there is only one path that leads to the center and then back out, with no dead ends or split paths.
Like the serpent that swallows it’s own tail, it’s beginning is it’s end.
The serpent cult flourished in Crete, the lineage of the serpent and of the bull are the same, they share a common root. The bull is masculine and the serpent feminine. The serpent’s regenerative associations stem from more than what is obvious. The fire serpent, given the bulls horns, becomes the dragon, immortal, feared for that very reason: because it lives from generation to generation, an echo of the void etched into earthly form.

This too is the labyrinth.

THE UNIFICATION OF LIFE AND DEATH.

Not one followed by the other, but the SIMULTANEOUS INHABITATION OF BOTH STATES. The labyrinth that can be navigated by the three dimensional human apparatus is a representation of the multidimensional labyrinth, a reminder of the development necessary to begin its navigation.

Sacrifice in the Labyrinth

The Messara labyrinth is an underground cavern. The main entrance is a yawning cave mouth.
Asterion the Minotaur was the priest son of the king Minos. Within the earth’s womb, in the altar hall of Messara, he presided over the rituals of Crete, rituals that saw their true beginnings in the Neolithic era before recorded history, the dawn of the upright talking monkeys we call humans.
These rites have known many variations and distortions throughout the ages. It is well known that sacrifice has its place in this ancient and still living tradition, but the form that such a sacrifice takes varies. Where true knowledge is lost, or goes underground, as a result of a polarity shift, an outward expression of sacrifice will be practiced. Where it surfaces as a result of another shift, sacrifice becomes an inner work.
The Labyrinth is designed to separate the animal from the noble born. Animals will be lost within the Labyrinth’s tangled entrails. Only the perfected Being will emerge, that which is the completed fusion of the animal and the deity. The creature within the underground labyrinth, half man, half bull, demanding that humans be sent into the labyrinth as sacrifice, is eternal.
He waits to receive you.

Storytelling - Daedalus

Time and storytelling have made caricatures of Gods and their sons, noble priests and kings. Story telling shapes reality. The mythology that we encounter in this culture is being stripped of its richness, reduced to the basest, most humanly digestible bit of tell tale. The latent characteristics of such stories may be extracted by those for whom it is critical that their dormant message reach: the lost sons and daughters of Europa.
Their eyes and ears will be searching, and if they have not been too damaged by the surrounding culture, something may be activated in them. Histories, mythologies, are written by the victors. Good and Evil are subject to majority rule. The villains will one day be heroes, the heroes become villains. One day the ship will flip, and then it will flip again upon another.
Is there some way to live in neither one camp nor the other? A middle way perhaps?
Icarus illustrates for us the danger of straying from the middle way. His father Daedalus had been exiled from Athens as a murderer. In Crete he was received as a great artist, architect, and engineer. There he helped Pasiphae to conceive the Minotaur, Asterion, and built the Labyrinth in which this, the bull of Minos, resided.
But, eventually he was reduced to criminal status within Crete, an accomplice to the murder of Asterion. Locked in a tower with his son Icarus, he built them each a pair of wings of wax and bird feathers.
Daedalus attempted to pass his wisdom on to Icarus. The neophyte was warned: fly neither too near to the radiance of the sun, nor to the sea with its dark depths, but instead maintain a steady course in between. Against his father's advice, Icarus flew as near to the solar power as possible until his wings melted. Then he fell into the abyss and was no more. Daedalus himself was welcomed back to Athens, a great artist, architect, and engineer…

Asterion

Asterion, of the sea born.
Two fathered Asterion: one father a beast, a white bull sent from the sea, the other a King.
King Minos himself the son of two fathers; the first Asterion of the stars and Zeus king of Gods in the form of a bull.
Asterion of the sea born, guardian at the center of the labyrinth, a perfected being, monstrous to men for his fierce and noble lineage.
His father's father took the shape of the bull to impregnate, and his own mother with the help of Daedulus, who built the labyrinth , also takes the shape of a bull to conceive.
He is from the maternal line and the paternal line of the white bull.
For him seven and seven are sacrificed yearly, sent into his labyrinth to appease him.
Seven women and seven men.