CHAPTER III:
HOW I CAME TO KNOW THE SECRET CHIEFS.
by James Curcio
I. Descent:
He descended into the valley with a feeling of trepidation;
a mediocre master
and I
who have been known to make devils of us all
answering the rebirthing call--
His stride only showed confidence;
neither the arrow straight line of his back,
the steady gestapo rhythm of his leather boots moving through the leaves,
or frosty blasts of breath escaping his mouth
betrayed his actual feelings.
II. The Subconscious Unveiled, Episode III:
My view blurs at the edges. The smell of vegetation poking through the last snow of winter. Raw earth.
There's a deep pulse that reverberates all around me, a deep, earthy thrumming sound. The air is humid, yet I can see the cold of my breath in the air, the pale reflection of yesterday. And I'm still conscious.
And I'm thinking: tomorrow I should really push for something... the smell of fresh earth, the feeling, that feeling that always comes along with it... I always think for a moment, amidst a flash of memories-- was that me? and that sensation too? and the reaction? My head and heart swimming with the recollections, I'm thinking about yesterday too, those cold blasts of breath in the winter morning, how I had come a long way and thought "learning, really learning," and yet underneath that, too, I feel an uncertainty, like the difference between how I'm walking and how I feel, and I ask "am I, really?" The voice, deep and insane, rolling on and on, "learning and learning, you are really pushing on and soon, so soon your genius will explode out, your genius will explode out it's only a matter of taking something you really believe and something you want to believe and switching them learning really learning" I have nothing left to say, my skin is sunburnt and raw, there is no cause worth fighting for
learning really learning the insane voice continues on steadily, slowly, with the terrible ferocity and gravity of a freight train. Still, I feel a certain fondness for this train, even for the engineer. The insanity is in his eyes, the kind of plastic, neon-glowing Prozac grin I imagine Arnold Swarzenegger would have, standing there so straight-backed, gigantic, immense teeth shining in flourescent lights. "Learning, really learning," he would say in a deep Baritone, and I can hear trees creaking when his arms and legs move, giant sinews stretching under leather-tanned skin. He would lean down over me and-- his hands are so much larger than mine, I feel like a child, and still he's saying "learning, really learning," and the smile just keeps growing, the picture growing brighter, "learning, really learning," he says, I'm four years old and he's towering over me, and now his grin is a grimace, his handshake a convulsion. I can hear Beethoven screaming his last in the 9th Symphony and there's the same kind of overload, you just have to put your hands to your ears, look life in the eyes one last time, and scream: enough!...
Luckily I turn around at this point and think about what it's like to be awake, and realize that being 'awake' is merely a heavily anchored belief system and state. I am always awake when I'm aware, I am my will, and-- when you look back at your life, there are periods where you "just didn't know what you were thinking." You weren't awake. There's that thrumming sound still, growing deeper, flashing lights in the forest with every pulse, every pulse sending a shiver down my spine. My chest is on fire. With every breath I know I'm falling deeper into sleep, and it is with this knowledge that I cross the threshold, enter the tunnel, and the last remnant of consciousness drops away like the final, fleeting image of a dream upon awakening.
III. Ayrts: The Moon Bridges:
He had finally reached the bottom of the valley.
All around him stood metallic buildings;
(these buildings were the source of the thrumming noise, he told himself.)He looked into the sky where the pregnant, full moon hung low,
dripping silver in long strands like spider webs,
the silent shadow
to this wanderer
of
winding paths.
IV. Ground Zero:
Now he could hear it -- feel it -- in every bone of his body, pulsing, tingling, colliding with the raw intensity of a car crash. The moon, the trees, the buildings, all singing together, all of the songs the same, all of the voices, tempos, and articulations different. But still it was that one familiar song, echoing... the song you feel when you look her in the eyes and remember how it's going to be, so familiar and yet so achingly other. The gun in his hand was so heavy. So real.
V. Change of Perspective:
Scale, he realized, was not the same here as in the waking-world, the square-world. Here, where there are more dimensions, seeing is not so much a matter of simple first, second, or third person perception. Aware of himself as a he, the third person singular awareness of self, first person without ego. Being without I? The buildings laughed. They communicated with each other in pulses, with the dance and music of their existence, and he moved closer to investigate. He was at once walking down a street lined with cylindrical, self-illuminated desks. The birds-eye view approached the space-craft, and he could see metal bars and tubes cross about the vehicle. There are faceless people in other frames of time, moving quickly but in jumps--
Sometimes he feels them pass through him, and in those places he feels a particularly strong buzz or hum.
VI. Sonar:
The space ship
our future
will bring visitors
the sound of our voices echoing
inevitably effecting
in the multifaceted cavern ahead
the planet leading
To this.
VI. A Higher Vibration:
An aspect at a higher frequency, the last remnants of the square-world, shoots an image of a beaming Arnold, his echoing voice drifting across the distance, "learning, really learning..." but the reaction is a belly laugh. He feels the laugh run up into his throat, and at the same time, there is the feeling of a heavy object in his hand. A silver, new .357 is solid in his left hand, a physical anchor point for the experience. Now he is totally on that street, surrounded by buildings, heading towards the middle of the circle with small but determined steps. His strides are strong and quick, he looks from side to side slyly, eyes dilating, pulse raising, muscles tensing. Lustmorde is hunting now, although he doesn't know what. The gun is heavy and comforting.
VII. The Song of the Sleeper Awakened:
These jumping people,
these jerky people,
existing in thousands of
frames at once,
thousands of eyes
thousands of where's
thousands of how's and who's and what's?
I thought
of them at first as aliens--
thousands of people
thousands of worries
time to sleep.
I mean,
we the square,
caught in the web of time and space,
live by its mandates so long as we believe,
really believe
in the weaver
that the sun will rise tomorrow,
molder of chaos
that there is such a thing as "gravity,"
creator and creation of our "logic"
we have faith
dreamer and dreaming of our cities
in God
Vishnu asleep in the cosmic ocean
we have faith in grammar.
upon the lotus of Brahman.
IIX. The Secret Chiefs and YOU!
They can work with matter,
energy,
as a tool,and time can be experienced in the same way we walk about in three dimensions-- They walk forward in it, backward in it, swim in it into alternative possibilities the sound of a car in your driveway.
They dive deep into the frigid time without a thought and surface wherever there is a ripple, an unbalance at the surface of the lake. Although they are still incarnate in some sense, (a complete dissociation from time and space means annihilation and no identity), they don't have any ego as we know it; thinking visually, our current state of evolution is a point, they are a plane. The feeling of getting up in the morning and feeling ready for the day.
They can move into any possible quantum state, and explore the outcomes and the threads. Over this city of metal, I can see a tremendous ebony spider, shiny like polished onyx, with long, slender legs, weaving its web over and over, dancing where each of its legs touch a strand, a thin strand, almost invisible to the eye, that supports the matrix of all that can and will be. This weaver, as she moves from one junction to the next, enters those places, those times as well. These aliens are spiders with thousands of eyes, each of those eyes a person in a particular time, a particular place. The weaver crawls along her web freely, and we, the eyes, wonder where last weeks paycheck went. The weaver spins on...
...White cinder blocks and a small room. The lattice-work of the grout is like the weaver's webs. Dense rock. Underground. He had looked at an intersection, where one strand crossed another, the space ship had launched into the pastfuture, and now: a square room. The lights are harsh and blinding. Suddenly he realizes that there's a tall, slender black man in a white lab coat speaking to him. The blood rushes to his face-- how long has he been daydreaming? He'd better pay attention. There are aliens in my pants. He'd better, he realizes-- the man's speech is very slow, grating smoothly where the consonants end words, sounding like gravel rubbing together, and there was a quality to it that he recognized. It reminded him of Richard Bandler's inflections: what is being said isn't as important as how it's being said. He could feel the vibrations in his skull. He talks in that trance-like way, and even thinking about what he's saying makes me go into a deep state of trance. I can see a stethoscope hanging on his neck and I stare at it. The solid sensation of the gun was still in his hand, he realized warmly. He realized he was talking with the doctor, he had been for some time.
"...I don't like how the Secret Chiefs are bending people into the same reality frame. How many of us know about the Secret Chiefs? How many of us are Secret Chiefs and don't even know it?"
The doctor nodded calmly. The stethoscope gleamed maliciously in the light. "The note A is 440 Hz. Is this inherent to the nature of the note A? Of course not. Some English orchestra's tuned to 445 Hz for a number of years." He chuckled for a moment heartily. Too 'heartily.' "We need to agree on a pitch to play a symphony, my friend. You have to understand this. These places that you've been telling me about, the spiders, the Secret Chiefs, the tunnel-- don't you see why you need to be locked up here?"
"You think I'm crazy," he said indignantly.
"Heavens no," the doctor said, laughing, "they're crazy though. A sane person like you will get tangled in the webs. You have to learn, son, how to walk before you can fly." He made a strange gesture with his left hand, and intoned "I A O."
I'm thinking in relation to time now, and how the demarcation of time into a linear progression rather than an experiential one is absurd. (How long did it take me to experience all of this?) I suppose I'm just not satisfied that I'm confined in this concrete room when I already know the rules of the game at any level. He's taking me into a deeper state of trance with him, but I don't feel any problem with this on a subconscious level. (I feel uncomfortable speaking of 'conscious' and 'subconscious' as if there's some kind of clear distinction. One moment I'm asleep with one kind of awareness, the next I'm dreaming awake in another. By 'subconscious' I guess I generally mean that which is conscious but unaware of itself. By 'conscious,' I mean that which is conscious and aware of itself as conscious.) Back to the conversation with this man: there's a tension in our conversation now, but it's all on the surface. The tip of the iceberg. I can feel the water underneath, and it is immeasurably deep and ice cold. The kind of cold that invigorates and awakens. Underneath, I'm soaking it up like a sponge. Then he shows me how, by changing his beliefs, he can actually manipulate his appearance; he changes skin color, height, (and of course demeanor and vocal tonality.) Belief and emotional connotation are what anchor an experience, and time is merely the progression of memory. Not so much things learned as things remembered, I remember. So familiar. A nurse comes in that I recognize as Sarah, although at this point she doesn't look the same. It's funny how you already know what kind of impact you're going to have with people when you meet them. "It's funny how we met," they say, but they don't mean it. They knew all along. They willed it that way, even if they weren't conscious of it. And they can unwill it, too. She doesn't recognize me, but I kiss her and let her know that sometime in the future script, we'll be very close. We're still cast into roles by other people here, still confined into the boxes and cinder blocks of high schools, homework and recesses on various levels. Soon we will be cast into our own roles. By ourselves. I can feel a warmth spreading through my body when I remember our future together. Then I turn to regard the doctor again. His posture asks me to be all business. I don't remember what happens immediately after this, but pretty soon I have the Secret Chief -- I know now the doctor is also a Secret Chief -- up against a wall with my gun pointed at him. There's no anger in the action, although the weight of the gun still feels comforting. I know I'll never shoot it. I'll never have to. I have the force of my will here. The Chief is calm. His eyes are like glacier ice. It burns when you look at them. It is very clear to me now why I have a problem with their intentions in the reality war. There's a joke in this action, although I'm not sure yet if I can let myself find it funny; I'm explaining how easy it is to break out of programmed responses in times that our nervous system interprets as life-threatening danger. These are times of imprinting, not all that unlike the first sexual encounter. How much trouble that imprint can make on the unfortunate, I think in passing. I am explaining all of this to him, but I'm the one being tested. I feel frustration that most behavior is purely on the level of reaction, that the webs are binding and no one sees the freedom of becoming. I'm suddenly in twenty places at once, on all levels, some of them feel very deep under water, seeing movies of people behaving mechanically, fight or flight, do I look big or little? will to power in the most rudimentary sense, subverted sexuality and the revenge of the repressed, the doldrums and cages that spring up with every opportunity in thought and in action to keep us from really seeing eye to eye. Seeing past the mirror, under the appearance. It is very clear to me here that lying "under" the visual phenomenon, (this word doesn't quite explain what I really mean), is a being on all levels, apprehending all possible states--
...No time for this, though-- he's sitting in a hospital trying to explain the basic premises of quantum physics, cabbalah, and relativity to a board of doctors. They look at him from under bushy eyebrows and evaluate his behavior in terms of a theory their culture has created: the rule of 7. Those who do not illicit behavior synchronous with the code of 7 are subjected to a test of the laws of 4. Failing that, the patient is deemed unfit for society. The table is long, made of a well polished knobby wood that reflects the light cast from elaborate candelabra's hanging above.
"...yes, the A and B premise. The idea of one point: each reality is formulated from a single 'central point': for Freud, sexuality and repression, Adler, will and aggression, Nietzsche, the will to power, and so on. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The caduceus of Hermes, the 3 ½ turns of the kundalini serpent, what the dots in the A:.A:. really mean, studying the migratory patterns of birds to control your pineal gland..." he continues on, tying one idea to the next, waiting for the dawning of light in their eyes. He realizes that they're merely trying to decode his psychosis, and yet he continues on in the hopes that he can convince one of them into his own personal brand of 'insanity.' We're all just point-events! They all look for a certain behavior and find it. I'm stuck in the ivory-tower of scholasticism. I talk about these things because I'm exploring, and everyone wants to write it down in stone. Words should talk, they shouldn't be dead rocks. All of the doctors have heads like animals. Great and hairy, slender and covered in slick scales, their stares are ominous and thoroughly disorienting. They're all the tribal chieftains of a particular belief, the tribal belief pacts of nations, religions, icons and symbols. He recognizes the rat, crow, cat and bear lord before the scene fades, Jim Morrison rambling in his head "I am the lizard king..."
He's standing in a dirty subway train in New York city. The squealing of the wheels is deafening, the feel of tense metal, slick with oil, screaming. You can feel how hollowed out everyone is just from the dirt on the trains, the grey, muted blue and faded yellow tiles; like standing in line all day, watching television shows selling products you're indifferent to, living with people you're indifferent to, feeling emotions that you're indifferent to. This subway really shows the indifference that they feel. He looks up and sees buses moving on the street above through concrete and the sewage system. Then his attention is drawn back to the train, the tiles flying by, the hypnotic, lulling rock of the cabin. There's a strong feeling of being watched. A man leaning to the side, drool slowly collecting on his lower lip, was regarding him with glass eyes. He pulls in and wonders how he can get in touch with the Secret Chiefs.
Looking out one of the streaked windows, I can see one of them crawling on the outside of the train. Crawling on hands and feet that must connect to the smooth metal surface like the spider, the weaver. No one else appears to notice. His movement is bizarre and unnatural to me, and I feel that he's mocking me with each precise movement. It's the jerky and yet careful way he moves that makes him invisible to these indifferent people in the train, like he only moves when they aren't looking. His head rocks from side to side in an alien way, and I know he's mocking: "why can't you do this? Look, I can do this! This is how you do it! This is how you live in and out of space and time simultaneously!" I notice him by looking between the cracks, in the silences, the hollow spaces. There are kids on the train that begin to notice him, (maybe, I think, 'it' is more appropriate. They are beyond gender.) He continues to face/body shift -- there's a sudden feeling of revulsion and horror, although I can't remember what elicited this response, and then he melts and steps into a passing train headed the opposite direction.
My Thoughts Upon Awakening:
I woke up suddenly in a flash of thoughts traveling in multiple directions. I was in a room I didn't recognize, lying on a small couch. There was a thin indian blanket hung over my body. The air was chill, and my back ached. The dream made me think of an experience I had a few weeks ago. I was thinking of humanity as a singular organism, spreading not only across the planet (laterally), but also forward and backwards in time, (vertically.) I was thinking of it as a giant pond, and here you can see the depth as time (vertical dimension) and the width/height, (surface area) as any given generation. Any given individual is merely a single H2O molecule in the entire pond. We identify our self with that molecule, scurry about in our routines, and think that we're acting in "self-interest" when we're really doing what we're "meant" to do. (By "meant" I mean what the combination of experience, our reaction to that experience, and genetics have made us. It's perfectly and completely random and we unwillingly act as the hands, mouths and ears of the universal organism that feeds upon its own blood and body.) This reminded me of the Mother Hive Brain vision, where I saw tiny ants running about in seeming disorder. If I followed any one ant, it just walked in circles, bumbling about aimlessly. And yet the ant colony as a whole was doing its work incredibly efficiently. (This is also related to the Fool card in tarot.)
I wondered: what happens if you identify not with an individual molecule, but with the entire lake, all of the little people molecules floating around in their supposedly closed systems, each affecting and reflecting each other in a random (completely organized) dance. I sat down and tried to identify with the lake. I lost track of my body, then my environment; everything rushed outward at a high rate of speed. Suddenly, I got the urge to wash dishes. (This is a very rare urge for me.) As I was washing the dishes, I felt a strong sense of bliss wash over me. Suddenly I had an image of thousands of other people going about their tasks, humming along, identifying with the lake and not the molecule. The experience was strongly reminiscent of my explorations of Zen; this was blissful participation in the sorrows of the world. In the time since, however, I've learned that the hard part isn't realizing (and experiencing it), so much as keeping the experience every moment, keeping your self there... (Even harder: showing the possibility of this kind of experience to others without finding either contempt, confusion, or the "guru syndrome," where the teaching becomes something to hang on your mantle-piece in a glass jar. Anything learned that isn't eventually integrated and used is useless.)
-James Curcio 1999: "Question Everything."
