Welcome again to my teachings, if this is your first encounter with my work,you should start at the first post and then proceed at your own pace chronologically through the subsequent. Should you reach this point, you will be the first; accepting of course my acolyte who dutifully commits my thoughts to computer.
I am communicating the decades of wisdom I have acquired, through a recount of an investigation of a haunted house in the North of England, during the summer of 2010.
There is a tendency amongst those who enunciate upon spiritual matters, toward seemingly vacuous declarations; ‘all you need is love’ and that sort of thing. That statement may well be true enough on many different and apparently contradictory levels. Also, there is a tendency toward monism – the idea that one figure is the Absolute, or ushers the initiate toward it. As a consequence of such apparent simplifications, acolytes of such schools may be left with the impression that there are certain, exclusive persons, places and experiences which are sacred whilst all else is profane, heretical or unworthy of meditation.
What you, my dear followers, should now be apprehending, is that one should never exclude any experience, situation or person from the apprehension of the divine. Even if one is following a monotheistic religion, it is possible to accept the multi-faceted way in which one will approach one’s deity.
Existence, you see, is an initiation. If we approach our lives as a ongoing initiation, we shall encounter many expressions of the divine in the physical, intellectual and spiritual worlds. We will understand that there is never any period when our initiation has ceased, even in Samadhi perpetual; whilst my true self remains in Samadhi, from where my intellect and senses are yoked even as they persist with the world, revelations of the divine nature of the universe constantly unfold around me.
Such realisations were uncovered within my consciousness as I battled with the residual, egotistical feelings of fear, during the investigation in the haunted house on the sandstone ridge.
Any who doubts the practical benefits of yoga, should try navigating sunken tunnels beneath a cemetery; whilst treading the trail of the ghoul, I gave thanks for my practice over the years. There was a tense moment when my hips were pinched between two of the stones, heaped across the tunnel but a slight wiggle allowed me to heave myself up and out onto a rough sandstone floor.
I detected an abysmal atmosphere about this space even before I flashed the torch around. It was not the choking quality of the air which turned my limbs to lead and which drew bile into my mouth, nor was it what the light revealed in the room. It was an anxiety that gnawed into me from some as of yet, unseen source.
Again and again I called inwardly to the Goddess and with great effort I visualised her wasted skin, the scabbed blood washed anew from her tusked mouth and with Her aid, I opened myself to the dread atmosphere, welcoming it into my life; no reassuring detachment arose, instead I was cornered within myself, conscious of my body and infected with feelings of dread originating beyond my own consciousness.
It was with trembling hands that I scanned the torch from side-to-side, revealing a space carved some twenty by thirty feet into the stone. Assorted objects were revealed, the torch passing over before hastily focusing on a person sat upright in a chair. It was positioned to my right and as the beam picked out a gaping skeleton, clad in mildewing fragments of finery I felt an initial relief. As I examined the ornate chair, I began to sense that its occupant was somehow still alive and regarding this intruder from the realm of the sun. An ornate, gilt frame stood on a table beside the chair and strangely, there the withered remains of a sapling in a large pot was positioned just behind.
As I could not stand, I dragged the torch onto a table in the centre of the room. Here a smaller, incomplete skeleton, possibly that of a child, was surrounded by what appeared to be tools of dissection. As I looked upon this spectacle with burgeoning horror, I apprehended a spotted, distorted quality to the back wall of the space. It was when I directed the light specifically upon it that I realised it was composed of bones, all meshed together into a makeshift screen.
‘What can you see?’ Aquinas hissed from behind the stones.
I did not reply. Somewhere beyond that wall of dead, there was a slow dripping. It had been constant but I had only just attended to it. Despite the horrors displayed before, I was drawn to the bone screen. Since first setting foot on the hill, had I not imagined a space opening up beneath me? Did not the draughts pass, forward and back through the house, along the tunnel? (Was this effect really due to the natural play of air through multiple shafts peppering the hillside as Noz suggested?)
Although mounting dread threatened to overwhelm my physical form, my true self, prostrate before the image of the Terrible Goddess, offering myself to the service of nature, sensed that there was a presence behind that bone heap; a presence which drew the winds and the rains down the tunnel, which willed the corpses down from their rest...
A grating sound behind me caused my corporeal form to jump and whip around in time to see Aquinas forcing his way through the boulders. Thankfully the pile held as his broad frame twisted through and he kneeled alongside me, his face washed with sweat and wrinkled with disgust at the smell. He must have forced a larger gap through the stones for stronger wisps of air trailed passed us, setting a minute rattle ringing from the bones beyond us. We sat and the motion ceased and for a minute all was still and then the air returned in the opposite direction, bearing an odour of damp and decay as it passed.
‘It’s him, the Reverend,’ Aquinas said, ‘the one who went mad, this is where he ended up. This is the dark heart of the house.’
Remembering himself, Aquinas produced some sort of camera and began to film this space. There was a triumphant gleam in his eyes - clearly he did not feel the emotional pressure which weighed upon me.
Feeling an irritation weigh creep upon me with my young companion and his obsession with filming everything, I returned to the primary source of my mediumistic ability, that of psycho-audiencing! If sight fails, listen and listen to what speaks within! I focused my awareness on the dripping sound and the intermittent rattle of the bones in the breeze.
I imagined still the Dark Goddess, feasting on her young and the dripping tapped on, louder perhaps, as if summoning me toward its origins; the rattle swayed around me, as if it would smother me and take me into itself...with such impressions, the dread returned in the form of a terror of the sudden plummet into a chasm and a leaden dragging at my limbs.
I became conscious of my own pulse, its subtle crunch aligning with that outer rhythm; the twin beats lulled the terror and I could have sat, peacefully as the dark, chilly depths drank of my leaking blood.
This post started with the claim that an initiate’s work is never complete; no vision of divinity ever total or complete, there is always more to explore and so it happened that whilst I sat thus, indifferent to my physical death in that darkness, the Goddess did not abandon me.
The idea that the damp indifference of the engulfing stone and the vast, crushing sea that thundered onto the shore below, were horrifying was not in my own awareness, I understood it was another’s as easily as if they had spoken it aloud. I sensed an awareness of the indifference of the elements, the glee in the winter wind’s whistle around the flesh, or in fire’s ravenous gorge on all that is plump, soft and moist and whilst I welcomed such indifference, there was one unseen who was terrified by it.
With a savage grunt, the hideous form of devouring Nature burst into mind, her mouth gaping, spilling glistening shreds of man across her shrivelled skin...and I laughed as I willed myself unto her jaws... and as the rattle of the bones became a choked wheeze and the drip, the slap of wet flesh on stone, the one whose dread haunted this place manifested. His voice spat into my ear, and his slick form hauled itself from the deep dark...
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